Why Dont You Blog?

This brain is going to get called on to do some heavy duty work over the Bank Holiday weekend, so I thought I’d see if I could boost its capacity through science.

You can get brainwave generators online. A “brainwave generator” doesn’t claim to give you inspired ideas. Not that sort of brainwave, fool. It’s supposed to let you set your brainwaves to specific frequencies.

I downloaded a file from Noramaa Solutions and installed it. I’ve listened to some presets and so far I’d have to say it just seems to be a collection of mildly irritating sounds.

Then again, I can’t claim to have entered into the spirit of the thing yet. (I sort of fell at the first hurdle - finding where I’ve put my proper headphones. I don’t believe that frayed-cable mp3 headphones will do the trick -given that they make even music sound so bad that I’ve had to go back to reading to make the journey to work bearable.) So far, I’ve only listened through speakers.

So the jury’s still out on its effectiveness, but that is due to sloppy experimental technique, rather than to an inherent flaw in the (free) product. Will try again later, more systematically. With headphones.

The BBC h2g2 site waxes moderately lyrical about Brain States and How to Induce Them but it comes with a health warning, after listing a range of conditions that brain wave alteration is supposed to help with

.. it is this Researcher’s suggestion that you try to avoid those that try to tie in new-age things like ‘magic crystals’ and channelling because unlike those things, brainwave alteration does work, even if it is a bit ‘out there’.
Another, although a more untested3, function of brainwave patterns is mental programming, or brainwashing: this is thought to be possible since inducing states of hypnosis and accelerated learning have been proven possible.

In an old Bad Science post titled, Bring me a God helmet and bring it now Ben Goldacre got pretty enthused about the idea of making a God Helmet - a device that is supposed to generate “spiritual” experiences through magnetic coils around the skull, without the need to believe tosh. Goldacre acknowledged that the device developed by Dr Michael Persinger was a serious scientific project. He said:

You can order a commercial product online for just $220 (£119): it is basically eight magnetic coils that fit over the relevant parts of your skull; the signal is generated by your computer’s soundcard, and then played through these magnetic elements, instead of through the magnetic coils of your speakers.

More excitingly, you can go to the open source development forum Sourceforge and check out “Open-rTMS”, where designs for the necessary hardware and software are being developed collaboratively and openly, and by the same people who brought you “OpenEEG”, a surprisingly effective EEG system that you can also make at home

My electronics wizard skills wouldn’t get me into the first grade at an electronic Hogwarts, so my chances of making one are admittedly zero. But, the idea really appeals. Why should the religiously deluded get all the peak experiences?

This post was partly sparked by the news item about the PC-induced out of body experience which was the source of a blog post here two days ago. EvolutionaryMiddleman commented to say there’s a video of it on Livescience.com.

Popularity: 20% [?]

The BBC Trust has today rejected Opus Dei’s complaint that the BBC series Waking the Dead presented their organisation unfavourably.

Opus Dei has indeed taken a bit of flak from recent fiction, notably in the movie The Da Vinci Code. Its name has become a byword for secret conspiracies with a medieval flavour.

I see from the Opus Dei website that they failed to sue the Da Vinci Code, so I am a bit baffled as to why the BBC represented a legitimate lawsuit target to them.

The BBC series was watched by 5 people in Reading. Well, OK then, maybe a few thousand people. Blimey, 7.2 million according to the BBC. (They must be exaggerating.)

Their entire budget probably wouldn’t have paid for a day’s catering on the set of the Da Vinci code. Which has been seen by zillions of people worldwide, so has garnered a lot of cash.

Here’s a bit from an interview for a Polish newspaperFrom the Prelate - The true face of Opus Dei (I’ve cut some minor reportorial sycophancies out to make this blog snappier)

W. Redzioch: Many people were surprised that …… you did not initiate a lawsuit against him or seek any compensation. Why did the Prelature react in this way?

Bishop Javier Echevarría: I would like to point out the fact that the most unfortunate aspect of Brown’s book is not what he says about Opus Dei but the falsified image of Christ and his Church that he presents to his readers. Opus Dei, which is a part of the Church, is a young, vibrant and beautiful reality. A writer’s inventions can obscure this beauty, and this is sad.
However, we realise that the beauty of the Church, which includes Opus Dei, is revealed in its fullness when we show the love of Christ and do not yield to hurt feelings. In this perspective love is the best way to present the figure of Jesus Christ and the reality of the Church. This is why our reaction, which was decisive but also courteous, was a manifestation of our sense of responsibility. Let us not forget that love is Christ’s commandment and in fact his most important commandment.
I’ll repeat once again: what is most painful about The Da Vinci Code is the way in which the author attempts to trivialize the Person of Christ.

Ah ha. They are so unselfish that they reacted with an outburst of pure love in response to a movie that they saw as bad because it “trivialised Christ”
(Oddly not because it had a daft and confusing storyline and seemed to last for a week.)

Am I misunderstanding the priorities here then? The BBC programme only offended Opus Dei. It didn’t trivialise Christ. I assume that means the BBC insult constituted a lesser offence under the Opus Dei moral code?

(Assuming that, in the afore-imagined moral code, it doesn’t rank its own importance above its god)

If the BBC had actually offended Christ, they would be getting loved up by Opus Dei by now, if the Da Vinci Code example is anything to go by.

Wow, what selflessness. They could as the Polish reporter said, have started a lawsuit against the Da Vinci Code film and got huge sums in compensation. (I am thinking of a small action on behalf of Da Vinci, myself.)

Though, they don’t seem short of a few bob, so maybe they don’t need it…..

They didn’t sue, apparently because their religious beliefs told them not to yield to hurt feelings. They didn’t sue the BBC either but complained to the BBC Board. So how is it that the BBC earned a complaint to its bosses rather than got treated to a lovefest?

I had some possible explanations ready, but it would be so much more in keeping with the spirit of this post if I leave you to devise your own.

Popularity: 14% [?]

According to the BBC, Science reports that UCL researchers have given volunteers out of body experiences in the lab, by messing about with their visual cues.

The volunteers wore VR goggles that projected a view of their own backs. When the resarchers stroked their backs with a pen

The volunteers reported that the sensation seemed to be caused by the pen on their virtual back, rather than their real back, making them feel as if the virtual body was their own rather than a hologram.

I said, “according to the BBC”, because, rather disappointingly, neither UCL nor Science seem to actually have any report on their sites.

Which makes me suspect that I have been tricked into believing I’m following visual cues (well, alright then, hyperlinks) that I’ve linked to the UCL and Science websites whereas really I am sitting in the next room wearing VR glasses.

Popularity: 15% [?]

This sounds brilliant. A tv show based on exposing the mental influence of the tabloids Not just tabloids in general, with their z-list celebs and soap opera stars, but the most mind-sapping terror-inducing tabloid - the Daily Mail.

The film Supersize Me showed you are what you eat, but is it true that you are what you read?
New documentary The Daily Mail Diet aims to find out as it follows film maker Nick Angel giving up all TV, radio, print and online news sources for 28 days - except for the Daily Mail.

Mr Angel said: “It’s important to know what the Mail thinks, because it’s a lightning rod (or so it claims) to ‘Middle England’ - that ill-defined and slightly scary mass of people whose various incarnations include the ‘Moral Majority’ and ‘All Right Thinking People’.
“And in a sense, there’s a little bit of Daily Mail in all of us - who hasn’t felt their cheeks flush and blood boil when snapped by a speed camera or confronted with some maddening example of NHS bureaucracy?
“That’s what makes the Mail such a potent force - because while it’s loathsome, it’s also weirdly attuned to the dark heart of the British psyche.”

If you can get to see this programme, it sounds really worth watching.

By coincidence, it’s particularly relevant today. Following on from yesterday’s post here and Xanderg’s (of badnewsbible’s) excellent comments, the Daily Mail seems intent on lowering the bar below its even its own usual ant-limboing level.

The Tory leader is calling for the repeal of the Human Rights Act and the government is doing its best to pull the despotism rug from under the Tories by itself challenging the operation of the courts. Scenting success for its worldview, the Daily Mail has redoubled its attack, over the Chindamo case.

Here are three headlines from pages linking to today’s main Stephen Lawrence storyMail’s pages which carries the title ‘He’s no risk’: why jail boss backed Lawrence killer (I’m selflessly ploughing through this rubbish so you don’t have to. You can get the flavour of it from the headlines. But if you want to try an experimental diet of the Daily Mail, the link will take you to enough pages to undermine your will to live):
The quangocrats who let Chindamo stay (They are referring to the Immigration Appeals Tribunal, not previously known as liberal trailblazers.)
Chindamo’s Mafia gangster father awaiting trial for murder in Spain (Guilt by association, even though it seems the boy has barely seen his father since he was three.)
COMMENTARY: Has the law deprived Frances Lawrence of justice?

The Commentary refers to an editorial piece which tugs at the reader’s sympathy and emotions but signally fails to make any logical connection between sympathy for Frances Lawrence and their case for overriding EC law to deport Chindamo.

Why does justice for Frances Lawrence require that her husband’s killer doesn’t live in Britain? I know that Great Britain is a small island (compared to the land mass of Canada, say) but there are still about 65 million of us living here. The chance of accidentally bumping into him in Tesco’s is statistically pretty slim.

Just in case you think we are all certifiably mad in the UK, there’s a reasoned piece by Katie Ghose in the Guardian. This human rights hysteria threatens every one of us.

Once again we are in the grip of human rights hysteria. Variously blamed for allowing prisoners access to porn and preventing police forces from publishing photographs of suspects, the latest attack on the Human Rights Act relates to the decision not to deport Learco Chindamo, who is serving a life sentence for the murder of head-teacher Philip Lawrence in 1995.
Human rights have never been a passport to porn - nor were they an obstacle to the conviction or sentence of Chindamo, who is serving a minimum of 12 years for his brutal attack. But the truth takes a back seat when there are juicy headlines to be made out of human rights “lunacy”.

Popularity: 32% [?]

The UK media is mightily concerned about a court ruling that the murderer of teacher Stephen Lawrence shouldn’t be deported after he’s served his sentence.

The dead man’s wife is reportedly angry about the ruling that he should stay in the UK. She blames the Human Rights Act for the fear in which she claims she will live. The tabloid press are doing their best to stir up all the crime hysteria they manage out of this story. Surprise, surprise, when the tabloids are such devoted supporters of the Human Rights Act… (not.)

The widow of murdered teacher Philip Lawrence has said she was “utterly devastated” by the decision not to deport her husband’s killer.
Frances Lawrence said she had been told Learco Chindamo would be deported to Italy, where his father was from.
The government said it would challenge “robustly” the decision to allow Chindamo, who stabbed Mr Lawrence in 1995 when he was 15, to stay in the UK. (From the BBC)

It’s a really sad story. However,it just reinforces the point in TW’s posts that victims and their families are not always the best judges of how an offender should be treated. That’s supposed to be the job of the law, although the combined efforts of the media and the government are doing their best to present the courts as pampering murderers.

A few facts about this case suggest the issue is rather more complex than the calls to deport him would allow.

The killer is indeed marginally more “Italian” than the average Italian-American but that’s about the extent of his supposed Italianess. His father was Italian. He lived in Italy until he was 3, came to the UK at the age of 6 and committed the crime when he was 15. It is a fair bet that he doesn’t speak Italian.

He didn’t deliberately come to the UK to commit murder. He was brought here by his mother and was raised in the UK, as an English person. Like a lot of English teenagers, he did badly at school, joined a gang and carried a weapon.

The crime appears to have been one of those senseless spur-of-the-moment adolescent-in-a-gang crimes that would be seen as a child’s cry for attention, if their outcome wasn’t so devastating.

He didn’t stalk Lawrence and deliberately choose him as a victim. There is absolutely no reason to believe that he represents any ongoing threat to Stephen Lawrence’s widow or their child.

Although you can usually take prisoners’ remorse with a kilogram packet of salt, he expresses remorse and tries to talk other youths out of throwing their lives away according to his lawyer.

You can certainly understand why Stephen Lawrence’s widow doesn’t want to think of him being free and alive. She has had a horrific experience that will always be with her. I’m sure that she wants to tear the killer limb from limb, as anyone in her position would. All the same, her views on what should now happen to the killer are no more relevant than anyone else’s.

The whole topic becomes murkier when you think about why it has become a bandwagon that the government chooses to jump on.

Extradition to another EC country is almost unheard of. Surely, under EC free movement laws, once dumped in Italy, Chindamo could just jump on a train and come straight back to the UK?

Extradition of someone, who committed a crime as a child, to a country in which he would be a complete stranger is just absurd.

There is pretty strong evidence of racism at work here. The killer looks “foreign” - half Phillipino, half-Italian. Ergo, the assumption is that he can get deported at the drop of a hat. Are we going to start shipping off all released murderers who can’t claim four British-born grandparents? Is there still room in Australia?

There is a clear bias in what crimes become causes celebres. Stephen Lawrence was a headmaster so people paid much more attention, thanks to the media. Murdered manual workers don’t make high profile cases, otherwise the government would be shipping off released murders every week.

All the same, the murderer was sentenced for his crime by a court of law. It wasn’t a particularly light sentence. A judge weighed up the circumstances and applied the appropriate penalty. If anyone felt that the sentence was wrong, that was the time to appeal. The court saw no reason to call for his deportation when he was sentenced. What has changed?

(Even the lawyers opposing his staying in this country argued that media attention was the “threat” that could result from his staying in the UK. No one has suggested that he is likely to kill another person, although rehabilitation seems to be the last of anyone’s concerns.)

There is constant media and political pressure - fitting so well into an increasingly authoritarian general climate - to present any human rights legislation as tying the hands of the police and giving free rein to criminals and terrorists.

The more we treat any constitutional guarantees of fair treatment by the law as an unnecessary luxury, the more we throw aside liberal democracy’s claim to the moral high ground.

This case has become a test of the British government’s capacity to do silly things in defiance of European Human Rights law. Oh, these burdensome 20th century international standards.

Wasn’t the lack of non-oppressive systems of justice and law why the EC started to get sniffy about some Eastern European countries joining? Or keeps foiling Turkey’s attempts to join the EC?

Popularity: 21% [?]

Dawkins latest programme elegantly put lots of the same points that I ineptly failed to make in any comprehensible manner, in a previous post on holistic medicine. That includes paying for other people’s gullibility; alternative therapies meeting a need for attention; the placebo effect and alternative therapies referring to scientific sounding concepts; and so on. (You know who you are, Deepak Chopra)

This blog is clearly channelling Dawkins. If you need any chakra realignment, you can probably get it here from now on.

Today’s episode of the Enemies of Reason series has people promoting such odd theories that Dawkins only has to smile politely and give them enough rope…. Indeed, some express such utterly strange beliefs that the only charitable explanation is that they are joking

Atlantean DNA? A woman barefacedly told the world’s best known evolutionary biologist that bits of his DNA were missing. She then waved her hands about - in a surprisingly graceless manner, given the magical ritual context - to realign the missing parts of Dawkins Atlantean DNA. I guess it worked but he didn’t grow any visible gills, sadly.

However, the therapist who seemed to be using a pricing gun to stamp the back of Dawkins neck may have accidentally amputated them, so don’t take that as a certainty.

I’ve made sense of this bit now. I was half-hoping to see Dawkins turn into an extra from that ten - or so- years old sci-fi series that was like old-style Battlestar Galactica but underwater. Without Silons. But with gills. It wasn’t good enough for me to remember its name. Stargate Atlantis - exponentially better. Why didn’t I think of that?

Well, it doesn’t really have people with gills. Anyway, the new even-more-gentlemanly-and-mellow Dawkins couldn’t even begin to qualify for the “arrogant genius” part in Atlantis, despite there being an Internet’s worth of creationists and others who think Dawkins is arrogant.

But maybe that’s what the magical Atlantean DNA lady meant. Dawkins is lacking the extra strain of arrogance that Stargate Atlantis’s Canadian genius has. So she put it back. And there are no gills to see, so there.

(See, it does all make perfect sense when you cleanse your DNA and start channelling……)

You have to worry a bit about the state of current medical education, when you see how many qualified doctors-turned-alternative practitioners Dawkins has managed to find.

One doctor detects chakras as “black holes” in the human body (or vice versa or something like that.) Another doctor - rheumatologist turned alternative practitioner - gives out water in the Royal Homeopathic Hospital, which has had a fair bit of public cash, to Dawkins’ justified annoyance.

If you live outside the UK, you can probably watch the new series on YouTube until it comes to a cable channel near you. Black Sun Journal has a link to the last episode.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Alun’s comment on a post about Moebius strips has a link to a site selling Klein bottles. which are attempts to create a Moebius strip in a bottle format.

( I don’t know whether they are Mobius or Moebius strips or whether the o should have dots above it, or even whether the word needs capitals. It’s hard enough typing the rather than teh on a regular basis, let alone being consistent with old Dutch/German surnames.)

Zeolite commented to say that she’s accidentally crocheted a Moebius coffee-cup holder.

You can also find a Moebius dress on yankodesign It’s made out of felt, so it doesn’t need seams.

This would be more impressive if normal clothes didnt behave as if they had become Moebius strips when you have to put them on in a hurry. Surely Moebius strip topology is built into the design of every quilt cover.

There is a mobius strip bag on Makezine. This is designed to exploit the properties of the Moebius strip by the fact that you can split it down the middle to make a shoulder bag.

This page also shows a couple of deeply unflattering, but mathematically pleasing, clothes with edges made using mathematical sequences. There’s a jacket fringe edge based on a Fibonacci sequence. Hmm, I don’t really get that. Surely lace and crocheting are always based on mathematical sequences.

If you want a fractal garment - well, VISIBLY fractal, since creating a non-fractal fabric would be a real challenge for mathematics - it looks like you still will just have to make do with Mandelbrot sets printed on t-shirts, sadly.

Popularity: 23% [?]

People who feel they need more attention and who express this feeling through medical symptoms will usually feel better after getting some attention.

(This is a theory based on anecdotal evidence but it could easily be tested)

Does this mean that denying the reality and giving them what they want is a good thing? Maybe adding to the world’s sum of myths that people forget are metaphors doesn’t matter. Except for the danger of suckering in the ill?

The mind is involved in many diseases, so you can’t rule out the effectiveness of the placebo effect, whether it’s sparked by consuming a well-marketed drug or by a set of rituals. The more incomprehensible the ritual, the better it seems to work. White coats and a prescription pad reassure some of us. A claim to focus mystical energies work on others. However, just because a fair bit of modern medicine is woo doesn’t make complete tosh is a reasonable alternative.

Here’s one of the most comprehensible bits of a thread from a homeopathy forum:

Scientific Validity of Homeopathy:- Dynamic effects from higher potencies are well observed and experianced by homeopathic community but not by scientific community, consitently in DBPC studies. Furthur science of homeopathic effects and presence of raw remedies substances in higher potencies remained unmeasurable, a truth, miss or weakness as per their current measurable technology of science. As such, homeopathic effects are interpreted as placebo effect by them and its legal and moral validity/existance may be based on “posing no harm”. But still ,some basis of “time lapse” in giving the needed treatments can pop up anytime in view of inconsistency in outcome, non-presence of raw remedy substance, placebo effects, least side effects etc.

Can’t make head nor tail of that? Homeopathy is at the almost-credible end of the alternative therapy chain. Go down the ladder a bit and homeopathy seems almost to make sense, in comparison.

Kinesiology? Sounds impressively scientific. What is it then? Buggared if I know after looking at a few websites. For instance, the Health Kinesiology definitions page says that:

Common forms of treatment include the use of magnets, homeopathic remedies, flower essences, or even a particular thought. ….In a single session, the therapist may identify allergies, rectify nutritional imbalances, deal with phobias and psychological stress, rebalance chakras and start the process of detoxifying the body from heavy metals, vaccinations, drugs etc.

So, it can treat everything by doing whatever the “therapist” feels like, then?

Crystal healing? (Do crystals really get sick?)

.. not part of standard medical theory, but it is included in a broader view of crystal power that says crystals, which are minerals with a periodic atomic structure, possess metaphysical abilities.
Crystal healers say that it works because everything is energy and vibrates at various frequencies and that crystals work via these vibrations. Every living thing has a vibrational energy system, which includes chakras, subtle bodies and meridians. By using the appropriate crystals one can allegedly retune an energy system or rebalance a body’s energies, thus improving well-being.

Reiki? (In the absence of a pseudoscientific name, an implied reference to the inscrutable powers of the east will have to serve the purpose.)

There is no need to remove any clothing as Reiki will pass through anything, even plaster casts. The practitioner gently places their hands non-intrusively in a sequence of positions which cover the whole body. The whole person is treated rather than specific symptoms. …..
It is possible to heal at any level of being: physical, mental, emotional or spiritual. Acute injuries can be helped to heal very quickly but more chronic illness takes longer. In some cases such as terminal illness, there is not enough time for the progress of the disease to be reversed….. The practitioner is a channel which the energy is drawn through by the need or imbalance in the recipient.

Sorry, I know this is getting boring. Treating the whole patient, rebalancing energies .. But, I am going somewhere with this. As it seems, incredibly, that your tax pounds are.

A website called NHS Directory of Complementary and Alternative Practitioners says that it is

compiled and managed only for use by NHS healthcare professionals by the NHS Trusts Association, the leading professional association for primary care in the UK

It purports to be a guide for NHS Trust staff so they can find alternative practitioners when they want to refer patients to them.

There are a few things in its list of therapies that don’t seem exceptionable (like counselling) but most of them are complete and utter nonsense.

Despite my fervent hope that this is just a phishing site, i am afraid that it’s real.

Popularity: 31% [?]

Internet search engines tend to be perfect examples of the proverb “To them that have shall be given.” (I guess this is a Biblical quote. The “hath” suggests it anyway.)

Get a top ranking on Google and you can guarantee your site will get loads of hits. Which will up your ranking. Which will get you more hits. And so ad infinitum.

Which must be great if you are the website equivalent of Coca Cola. But is a bit of an obstacle when you are Joe Nobody’s Homemade Dandelion and Burdock Drink.

So it’s good that an open source Wikia Search project is slowly being brought into existence. The idea is that an open source search algorithm will inspire more confidence in the results. At the least, it will let website owners know what the goalposts are.

New Scientist of 12th June 2007 (Yes, I know, it obviously takes me a while to process information) described the Wikia search project as the project of a “rebellious group of software engineers” determined to topple Google.

Apparently, one of the biggest problems is the shortage of mountains of cash to set up global data centres to match those of Google and Microsoft. According to New Scientist, one possible solution is to use a grid computing model, along the lines of SETI, with the search processing distributed around the world on volunteer’s PCs.

Most of the stuff on the Wikia site at the moment is concerned with the project itself. There is an about page . It looks as if development has stalled a bit since the initial start push in 2004, though. (Which suggests that New Scientist is even slower than me at processing information.)

Here’s an extract from Wikia Search on some of the ranking problems they intend to address:

Several other strategies to cheat or game the search engines are based on the fact that many search engines consider a hyperlink to a site to be a ‘vote’ for that site or measure of popularity. The use of hyperlinks as an indicator of website ‘quality’ led to link exchanges, link farms, bulletin board spam and other strategies to boost sites. Search engines responded by attempting to algorithmically evaluate the quality of each page, and discount links on sites or pages of little real value. While these algorithms to assess quality have neutralized millions of web pages, they have not (and cannot?) objectively determine the value and context of all the links on the web. The number of links to a page remains one of the biggest factors in how a page ranks in conventional search engines, and remains a prime area of interest for black-hat and grey-hat SEO.

Anything that can cut down the number of pointless spam sites that can clutter up the first few dozen pages of search results from standard search engines will be a big step forward.

I hope they solve the problems and this idea takes off. I’d volunteer my puny computing power and some of my bandwidth. Persuading ISPs not to do the choking-at-peak-times thing that they have started sneaking in through “Fair use” policies might be an obstacle though.

Popularity: 26% [?]

It’s mildly uplifting to find a senior psychiatrist who agrees that a lot of diagnosed depression is just unhappiness. Putting forward this view on this blog tends to spark some angry responses, so I guess Gordon Parker will get a bit of flak for this.
He carried out a a 15 year study of 242 teachers. He found that everyone had periods of unhappiness.

Professor Gordon Parker claims the threshold for clinical depression is too low and risks treating normal emotional states as illness.
Writing in the British Medical Journal, he calls depression a “catch-all” diagnosis driven by clever marketing.

The number of prescriptions for antidepressants in England hit a record high of more than 31 million prescriptions earlier this year - a 6% rise in two years.

A BBC report from July implied that the happy-go-lucky response to prescribing also affects children,

The number of prescriptions handed out to children under 16 for depression and mental health disorders has quadrupled in a decade, official figures indicate.
GPs in England wrote more than 631,000 such prescriptions for children in the last financial year, compared to just 146,000 in the mid-1990s.
But at the same time, figures suggest the rate of mental health problems in the young has not changed markedly.

And, going back into the mists of time, here’s a 2004 news item.

European drug regulators are concerned that Prozac, like its sister antidepressants, is unsafe for children, contrary to UK advice. The Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) reviewed all of the available data.
It said there was an increased risk of suicidal behaviour and thoughts with all antidepressants known as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs). UK regulators say the benefits of Prozac in under 18s outweigh any risk.

Hang on. Greater risk of suicide? Isn’t that why these things are prescribed - to prevent suicides in the severely depressed? Confuses the hell out of me.

Now, that is what I’d call really good marketing to doctors and the public. Are children in the rest of Europe happier than the UK and the USA - two countries where there increasingly large take-ups of anti-depressants and ritalin? Well, yes, actually, according to the UN report last year. So the drugs don’t work, then?

Popularity: 22% [?]