Mar 5 2015

Depression: Panic Attacks and Focusing

Depression: Help for Young People is a story about a treatment that worked. Here is another courageous story that I hope will help those who suffer.

Connie courageously revealed what she experienced and pointed to the healing path she discovered.

“I had debilitating panic attacks since age six and depression as certain situations would make my personality disappear in a self-protection beyond my control.

“I had saved for years to take Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy when they opened a center in NYC but it didn’t reach the problem.

“One day at age 27, I decided I had enough and took the body sense that was so strong and presented possible scenarios and the second day, a cameo of a hateful face of my mother presented itself to me that connected to the body sense. It was a pre-verbal memory. When they connected, it released about 90% of the panic attacks.

“I was curious about what occurred and one day read in the NY Times book section a description of Eugene Gendlin’s book “Focusing”. It turned out that was the process I had stumbled on.

“Years later, I learned Focusing and became certified to teach it. It is a powerful bodily awareness to consciousness technique that can be used by itself or with other modalities. So powerful, I have even had body healings from some of the connections – one being a now normal back after 14 years of debilitating back pain.

“Focusing can be done by ones self or more easily with a partner, who “holds” the space as you go within, and can be done via partnering on the phone – it does not need to be done with your partner in person. It is a little known process, sadly.

“There is a Focusing community. Gene Gendlin was a contemporary of Carl Rogers at the University of Chicago. He discovered Focusing by listening to successful sessions of therapists to try to understand what they were doing in their session, but discovered instead it was a process the patient was doing!

“Focusing saved my life. I, too, did not see myself continuing my life if I had to go on with those panic attacks and depression from the inability to “be” in the presence of others.

“One can learn how to do Focusing from a certified trainer over the phone as one option.”

Focusing looks valuable for everyone, even those who have no depressive episodes at all!

The www.focusing.org website says: “Focusing shows how to … create a space for new possibilities … your body picks up more about another person than you consciously know. With a little training, you can get a bodily feel for the ‘more’ … From that bodily feel come small steps that lead toward resolution.”

Thank you so much, Connie, for your bravery and recommendation.

Mar 4 2015

Depression: Help for Young People

I was inspired by Professor Railton’s courage to join him in coming “Out of the Closet” to admit that I, too, have lived through debilitating depressive episodes.

Railton says: “We must call [depression] mental illness because that’s what it is, illness that takes up residence in the mind, but no more of the essence of a person than any other illness. And when we hear of mental illness, treatment should be the first thing that comes to mind.”

The Facebook link to my “confession” prompted an outpouring of moving stories, mutual support and help that I hope to make more accessible with this and other posts.

Teenagers are especially vulnerable to depression and are among the least well equipped to get help. Liz wrote: “The black dog” of depression and other mental illnesses are part of our common human experience. We need to be able to openly discuss our mental health, just like we do our physical health: there should be no shame in being in pain. I was recently gratified to read an article my high-school age daughter wrote for our local paper on this subject; I didn’t know she was that brave! Maybe it means things are actually changing?

Liz’ daughter, Katie, is indeed brave and her article “Teen Talk: YouTube can be a valuable resource” offers very practical help.

Katie begins by telling us: “Studies show that the number of teenagers who report feeling regularly anxious and/or depressed has doubled in the last 30 years or so, that children today have anxiety levels similar to those of the average psychiatric patient in the 1950s.”

When Katie experienced “a perfect storm of stress and unhappiness” she, like every teenager, needed more help than her parents could provide: “I am lucky enough to have supportive parents who could sympathize with what I was experiencing, but sometimes sympathy wasn’t enough. I wanted to feel understood; I wanted a sense of camaraderie with other people my age who were going through similar things.”

What she found is: “on YouTube of all places … a handful of younger people — younger women especially — who made videos on their experiences with anxiety, depression, body image and mental illnesses in general, to spread awareness and encourage recovery … People … offered authentic and beneficial suggestions on how to manage living with anxiety or depression on a day-to-day basis.”

This is so important because: “Teenagers who don’t feel comfortable telling anyone that they are dealing with mental illness now have somewhere they are able to get information.”

“That’s not to say,” Katie writes, “that informational YouTube videos are a replacement for cognitive behavioral therapy or any other form of treatment, but they are certainly a step in the right direction — a step that many people would not normally be able to take.”

I hope we can change what Katie points out: “There is still a stigma surrounding mental illness. Our culture teaches us that mental illness is something we must keep to ourselves, something that is too personal to share or discuss, something we should feel ashamed of.”

But people need help now. So, everyone who knows a teenager, here’s a way they or a friend can get help when they feel alone, too vulnerable to talk.

Thank you so much, Liz and Katie!

Mar 1 2015

Out of the Closet

I was never a good follower. But sometimes there’s no choice. Today, I must follow Professor Peter Railton who studies ethics and the philosophy of science.

I highly recommend the transcript of his entire Dewey Lecture but it is 16 pages long so I will be much more brief. Asked to weave his own life story and developments in neuroscience into a call for action, he spoke of three times of transformation in his life. I will mention only one, and here is the only bit of neuroscience: “Memory turns out to be tightly linked to our capacity to imagine alternatives to the ways things are and to meet new challenges—to face the future, where it is still possible to make a difference. For these purposes, it is better to have a living memory system capable of recombining, relating, correcting, and enriching stored information.”

Railton recreated in his speech “a series of moments from my remembered life,” each of them “a moment of making a transition.” His hope was “if I can make the experience of these moments real enough to you, even briefly, they might speak to you in ways that go beyond the little stories.”

He followed those three seminal memories with what he hoped would be a new one right there in the lecture hall. He introduced it this way: “The stunning reversal of age-old attitudes toward gay marriage came about [because] enough gay individuals courageously … came out publicly. Within two decades the rest of the population had learned … that among their friends, neighbors, coworkers, children, parents, teachers, students, and favorite movie stars were many gay individuals. Were these people to be denied the rights of life and love the rest of us enjoy?”

What those courageous gay individuals did was “insisted that privacy should be a choice … made visible … so that heterosexuals could see their gay brothers and sisters for what they are, not for what their incomprehension and apprehensions had made of them.”

Being gay is not a choice. What must be a choice for everyone who is gay is whether or not to keep it private.

We are still living in another “don’t ask, don’t tell” world, Railton continues “So there’s nothing for it. Those who have dwelt in the depths of depression need to come out as well.”

Our society sees depression as an inner weakness. We must learn to call it what it is, Railton tells us “We must call it mental illness because that’s what it is, illness that takes up residence in the mind, but no more of the essence of a person than any other illness. And when we hear of mental illness, treatment should be the first thing that comes to mind, not shame and withdrawal.”

So I, too, must come out because I, too, have lived through debilitating depressive episodes.

The first, when I was 16, is very luckily the only one where I wanted to kill myself. I walked along the river bank for so long, afraid to continue living, equally afraid of drowning. Finally I was tired out and continued to live by default. I went to the doctor the next day and explained my symptoms. “You’ll just have to get used to it,” he told me. “Learn to hide it as best you can.”

So I did. Alcohol was a mixed blessing in some especially severe episodes but I was luckier than my very close High School friend who killed himself. My experience manifested most often in second-guessing that slowed me down but left me enough strength to keep forcing myself onward.

Shortly before I retired from business, where I accomplished a lot but could have done more, Felicity got me to a doctor again. There are now plenty of antidepressants and although their effect is poorly understood and/or misunderstood, I have been symptom-free since that time.

If I had been open about my depressive episodes, the business challenges I enjoyed would not have been open to me. But if more of us reveal our mental illness along with what we accomplished despite it, I hope others will have the choice of openness that Professor Railton, I and so many others did not. And I hope they will promptly get treatment!

Feb 5 2015

Surprised by Jingoism

In 1971, the year Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal was born, my neighbor introduced me to a man he thought I would like to meet because “Gustaf was a U-boat captain.”

I experienced instant visceral dislike, which Gustaf seemed to share.

My parents did not hate Germans. They lived very much in their own world and neither of them hated anyone. But most English people did hate Germans when I was growing up. Propaganda instilled hatred in WW1 and WW2 then blaming continued because so much was destroyed.

But my life in 1971 was terrific. I was so lucky! I’d moved to America, always my dream, and I was being well paid to develop a precursor to the Internet for an exciting young business that offered what we now call cloud computing. I never imagined there was jingoism in my mind.

Jingoism, ”the feelings and beliefs of people who think that their country is always right and who are in favor of aggressive acts against other countries.”

Centuries of propaganda about the glories of the British Empire had made jingoism a building block in the worldview of many Brits, but surely not mine! I was well educated and so very intelligent.

It turned out I was wrong. I’ve always been grateful to my neighbor, Rusty, who unintentionally made me aware of that dark force lurking in my mind.

Why tell you this? Because, as this Opinion Piece says, our media “on both left and right … present politics as a battle between the children of light and the children of darkness. Opponents become enemies. Democratic deliberation becomes difficult or impossible.” And many politicians join in.

Bobby Jindal, the focus of the article, is especially troubling. In a recent broadcast reported here he warns of “people that want to come and conquer us … change our fundamental culture and our values … set up their own culture and values … if we’re not serious about this we’re going to see more lone wolf actors … just like you’ve seen in other countries — the horrific shootings in Paris.”

That’s raw meat for the media. This piece on a Center for Immigration Studies report linked to from that article is headlined “Approximately 2.5 million immigrants from “predominantly Muslim countries” reside inside the U.S. right now.” The report’s numbers actually show a very different reality.

Why would Jindal say such things? A cynical appeal to those who believe all immigrants with dark skin are a threat and who fear ever-growing terrorist menace? Or does he also believe what he says?

Jindal is very smart, graduating when he was 20 with honors in biology and public policy, then going to New College, Oxford, England as a Rhodes Scholar. But, just as programming overrode my intellect when I met Gustaf the U-boat captain, Jindal is likely programmed, too.

Jindal’s Hindu parents came to the US 24 years after the British left India, the same amount of time as since our First Gulf War. Fourteen and a half million Indians were uprooted in 1947, Muslims fleeing to Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs to India. Anywhere from two hundred thousand to a million Indians, Hindu and Muslim, were slaughtered.

The terrifying experience when India was partitioned must have been present in Jindal’s Hindu household. It must have lodged in his mind in the same way Hitler’s war entered mine.

All of us are vulnerable to such ancient hatreds that we may not even suspect are in our mind. I wish we would all look for them. They cause such great harm.

Dec 21 2014

Beyond the Media Hype: Fear and Loathing

It is traditional to express a wish around this time of year. Mine is that all of us will come to feel this truth more — we are all the same.

It is also traditional to make a personal resolution. Mine is to continue diligently training myself to act on this truth. If all of us did, we would “save the world” — we would end suffering.

That’s what motivated all these posts I originally titled “Fear and Loathing of…” Someone I love said, “I wish you’d stop with the fear and loathing” and I knew it was a distressing title but it highlighted what is so dangerous, the fear and loathing our media stimulates. On reflection, I think it amplifies the emotion so now I’ve renamed them “Beyond the Media Hype…”

Progressives fume about Fox News. They’re right because 60% of Fox’s statements are mostly or completely false, less than 10% are true and less than 20% are even mostly true. But it’s not just Fox News.

Conservatives fulminate about MSNBC. They’re also right. Almost half (44%) of statements there are mostly or completely false, again less than 10% are true, and although the percentage is better than with Fox News, less than 30% are mostly true.

Fox News and MSNBC give us stories to feed our hatred. Better to watch CNN because fewer than 20% of their statements are mostly or completely false and 60% are true or mostly true.

But nonetheless, 18% of the statements on CNN are mostly or completely false. We must not believe everything there.

Democracy cannot work when 3 of every 5 statements on Fox News are mostly or completely false, more than 2 of 5 statements on MSNBC are mostly or completely false, and even on CNN, only 3 of 5 statements are true or mostly true.

This is not a theoretical issue. Falsehoods in the media persuade us that we have enemies, people who are fundamentally different from us, people we must destroy.

We are so easily led to imagine those who seem different from us in some way are our enemies. That’s why I originally titled these posts “Fear and Loathing Of/In …”

We fear being swept aside by immigrants, especially Muslims, we fear who knows what violence from Iran, Saudis are beset by conflict with each other that exacerbates our mutual suspicion, and so on and so on and so on.

I will continue to explore Middle Eastern nations and the ethnic, religious and other rivalries that transcend their arbitrarily imposed borders to set the context for a deeper exploration of what is really going on.

But please don’t wait. We really are all the same — we all want to be more happy. We all will be more happy if we become more kind, and we will grow more kind as we become more happy.

Nov 15 2014

America Infected by Dreadful Disease

Just a few weeks ago we Americans were infected by a dreadful disease. Not a plague of the body that escaped from Africa — one of the mind that was deliberately spread here.

Ebola was producing hysteria when I posted What to Do About Ebola following comments on my post about how politicians and the media were using Ebola to promote fear.

“Obama’s spectacular incompetence turns deadly” wrote Joseph Curl on October 15 in the Washington Times. The election was coming up…

Joni Ernst, subsequently elected to the Senate from Iowa with ads showing her castrating hogs and pulling a handgun from her purse, claimed that Obama simply didn’t care if we get Ebola.

Just before the election, Charles Krauthammer wrote in the Washington Post: “Ebola has crystallized the collapse of trust in state authorities.” Everything that’s wrong is Obama’s fault…

But the next day, October 31st, in the same paper, Paul Waldman wrote: “If you actually look at the facts, the disease has been completely prevented and contained here in the United States.”

Waldman continued: “Imagine that a year ago, I told you … west Africa would see the largest Ebola outbreak in history … that despite regular travel in and out of the affected countries … there would be a grand total of two … Americans who contracted the disease here … both of them would be treated, and would survive and be healthy … You’d say that sounds like a public health triumph.”

On November 11, Steve Benen reported: “The U.S. is now free of known Ebola cases. That’s not to say the threat is over … but Americans can nevertheless feel good about where things stand.”

Perhaps we will hear no more about Ebola now the election is over and it it is clear there never was a reason to panic. That would be unfortunate because there will continue to be outbreaks in West Africa.

We could afford to reduce and perhaps even end those outbreaks by spending less to protect ourselves against military threats that do not exist.

We could also make ourselves less vulnerable to such plagues by establishing a health care system that encouraged all those with symptoms to get promptly checked and, if necessary, treated.

But you and I as individuals can only think through whether we even want an affordable, equitable health care system. We can’t establish one by ourselves.

What we can do, though, is grow less vulnerable to fear, the disease with which we are deliberately and daily infected. As I write in Why I Write About Fear and Loathing, fear shuts down our reason. It makes fools of us.

No need to be fools. No need even to admit to others when we have been. No need to despise or hate politicians, media personalities or anyone whose ideas are different from ours. No need for unquestioning confidence or fear of our government.

All we need do is question what we are told, verify the facts, test the logic and above all be kind.

Not everything we are told makes sense or is healthy for us.

Nov 11 2014

Beyond Media Hype: Why Write about it?

Fear whipped up by the media stimulates our emotions, shuts down our reason, and excites “fight or flight.” That makes us selfish and violent.

We must understand what is being done to us. Selfishness and violence are not intrinsic to our nature. My original inflammatory “Fear and Loathing” title for these posts is because we’re on fire!

I didn’t share Hunter S. Thompson’s hatred of Nixon, who he said represented “that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character” and I don’t hate Obama or others now. But Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72” is a great title.

We are being brainwashed to feel fear and loathing. It’s time to be alarmed about that.

What fears? Immigrants stealing into our “homeland” taking our jobs and living on “welfare,” a disease from Africa sweeping through our land, Islamic terrorists slipping in from Mexico to do terrible things, fundamentalist Muslims overwhelming our Christian values, Iran nuking us, and on and on…

I began to explore these fears in Ebola and Homo Politicus. I showed how our expectation about the performance of government agencies is based not on facts but political bias. Now I’m exploring the implications.

In Fear and Loathing of Immigrants I surveyed history. Immigrants are often blamed for society’s troubles, but illegal immigration only became a big issue in the 1990s. Then, after 9/11 , we expanded our border forces enormously. That was when fear and loathing were very deliberately cranked up.

I followed the logic of militarizing our border to its conclusion, that we should also deport every “alien” already here, and, observing that Christian Church leaders condemned the 2012 GPO budget for failing to help our “poor, hungry, homeless, jobless,” I pointed out it’s not just that we no longer want other nations’ “tired, poor, huddled masses.”

We are also being brainwashed to reject all those like them, even our fellow citizens. We’ve been told the poor are bleeding us dry ever since Reagan’s 1976 campaign anecdotes about a “welfare queen” who defrauded the government of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The woman Reagan spoke of appears to have been a murderer and kidnapper as well as a thief, but the stereotype of the “welfare queen” is an idle black woman. The label plays on racial fear.

Racial fear? Imagine how the media would have responded if Ebola appeared not in black Africa but Israel. Where would we have been told Ebola came from and how to respond? From Palestinian terrorists so it’s time to support an Israeli final solution? From Iran so it’s time for our nukes to finish what we helped Saddam Hussein attempt?

In Defying Hitler about the German equivalent of 9/11, the burning of the Reichstag, Sebastian Haffner writes: “I do not see that one can blame the majority of Germans who, in 1933, believed that the Reichstag fire was the work of the Communists. What one can blame them for, and what shows their terrible collective weakness of character … is that this settled the matter. With sheepish submissiveness, the German people accepted that, as a result of the fire, each one of them lost what little personal freedom and dignity was guaranteed by the constitution, as though it followed as a necessary consequence. If the Communists had burned down the Reichstag, it was perfectly in order that the government took ‘decisive measures.’ … from now on, one’s telephone would be tapped, one’s letters opened, and one’s desk might be broken into.”

We are living through, as Yogi Berra said: “Déjà vu all over again.” Substitute Americans for Germans, terrorists for Communists, September 11, 2001, for 1933.

We must learn from history. We must do better.

Nov 7 2014

Beyond the Media Hype: Immigrants

I wrote in Ignorance, Fear and Imaginary Facts that we imagine facts to support what we fear, and that one of the things we greatly exaggerate is the number of immigrants. I said that’s a problem because politicians tend to focus on what we believe, not the actual data.

So, what have they done based on our fear of immigrants? First, a reminder. We imagine that 32% of our population are immigrants while the actual number is 13%. This means we have 60 million imaginary immigrants in addition to the real 41 million.

Sixty million is a lot of imaginary people! It’s enough that we’d expect some big actions. And even though 60 million people are imaginary, we caught 1.6 million entering illegally in 2000 and we do not know how many are already here. There really is cause for concern.

But what do we mean by “immigrant”? Everyone was an immigrant when the Constitution was established in 1787.

Our first citizenship law was established in 1790. Any “free white person of good moral character” who lived here two years and in the same place for one could apply. The requirement was increased to five years in 1795 with a three year wait, and in 1798 to 14 years with five years notice of intent to apply.

All children born here have been considered citizens since 1868 and African Americans could become citizens since 1870. Asians could live here then, but not become citizens.

The first law restricting immigration was passed in 1875. It prohibited any Asian coming to be a forced laborer, any Asian woman who would be a prostitute, and anyone who was a convict. The labor provision was largely ignored but the ban on female Asians, especially Chinese, was heavily enforced.

Then the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers (it was only repealed at the end of 1943). Chinese immigration that started in the 1848-1855 California Gold Rush had continued for huge labor projects like the Transcontinental Railroad, but then came the 1870s post-Civil War economic slump. Chinese workers were blamed for depressed wage levels.

We began deporting those who entered the country illegally in 1891, a year after the Wounded Knee Massacre near the end of when our ancestor immigrants finished dispossessing the Native Americans.

Small-scale deportations began five years before we dedicated the Statue of Liberty with its poem, “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.” We did little to stop illegal immigration, however, until Congress established the Border Patrol in 1924.

Our main focus until the 1950s was Canada. The first large-scale deportation of illegal Mexican immigrants was Operation Wetback in 1954. It was not until the 1990s that illegal immigration became a big issue.

At the start of the Clinton administration, Border Patrol had 4,000 agents. That more than doubled to 9,000 by the end of his administration. Border Patrol’s enormous growth followed 9/11. It doubled again to 18,000 agents by the end of the Bush administration and to 21,000 in Obama’s first term.

When the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was set up following 9/11, Border Patrol was reestablished as part of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with a $12.4 billion annual budget and a staff of 60,000 that includes 46,000 gun-carrying Customs officers and Border Patrol agents.

We have spent over $100B on border and immigration enforcement since 9/11.

CBP is by far our largest federal law enforcement agency. Its 250 planes, helicopters and drones make it the largest law enforcement air force in the world, as big as Brazil’s entire combat air force.

Border Patrol’s growth was far too rapid for quality hiring, and it has not been well led. Until March of this year, it went five years without a Senate-confirmed leader. An average of almost one CBP officer per day was arrested for misconduct between 2005 and 2012, and Border Patrol agents have shot and killed almost 50 people since 2004.

Not well led? In Obama’s first year, Border Patrol was ordered to change its definition of “corruption.” There would be “mission-compromising corruption,” e.g., bribery, narcotics- or human-smuggling, etc. and “non-mission-compromising corruption,” e.g., sexual or other assault of detainees or theft. Only “mission-compromising” incidents were to be reported to Congress. That did not cut corruption but it did cut the statistics by almost a third.

Border Patrol’s leader since March has his work cut out, and the October federal budget funds 2,000 more CBP officers, the largest single increase Congress has ever passed.

But no matter how successful BP’s new leader is, stopping people from entering illegally is only half the battle. We should also make it easy to identify illegal immigrants and promptly deport them.

The high likelihood of being promptly deported would be the greatest deterrent against attempting to enter illegally.

That would require some form of national ID, which advocates of civil liberties oppose. Because the Constitution grants all rights to the States that are not specifically granted to the Federal government, driver licenses and other identification cards are issued by each State separately.

The REAL ID Act of 2005 established standards for state-issued identification documents to make them acceptable for restricting entry to DHS headquarters, nuclear power plants, and other restricted federal facilities, and eventually to restrict boarding of federally regulated commercial aircraft. Only 21 States were compliant at the beginning of 2014.

The REAL ID Act is not aimed at identifying who is and is not eligible to live and work here. The State driver license and other such databases are neither uniform nor interoperable, and that is how State government officials and civil rights advocates want it to stay. The States want to retain their prerogatives. Civil rights advocates fear government abuse if we are all recorded in one big database.

There certainly is potential for abuse. Hoover’s FBI kept files on enormous numbers of people he considered suspect and all of us are now in the NSA’s database. Our emails, texts and phone calls are searched and stored. Our travels probably are, too, if we carry a smartphone. Our activities are captured by surveillance cameras and presumably searched with facial recognition software.

But civil rights advocates are misguided. We already have far less privacy than we imagine, and we are rapidly losing more. The protection we need is around the use of data. We need to protect ourselves directly against government abuse and corruption, not hobble its ability to protect us.

What we need is a dependable way for everyone who has the legal right to live and work here to prove that, and for the form of proof to be very hard to forge.

Our passport system may be a good starting point for the identification documents all legal residents should have. More than a third of Americans (35%) now have a passport. That is up from 6% twenty years ago and passports issued since 2007 contain chips that enable facial recognition.

We could establish a system for checking who has the document and deporting those who do not. We don’t consider it abusive that we must carry a driver license whenever we drive a car. It would be little more burdensome to carry an identification document at all times.

What have I left out? Stopping illegal immigration is not enough, we must also establish a just and effective way of deporting those who are here illegally… Oh, yes, we must also decide who we want to have immigrate and make it easier for them to do so.

We no longer want other nations’ “tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Actually, as well as not wanting them, we also want to get rid of those like them who are here legally.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops denounced Ryan’s proposed 2012 budget, which the GOP House passed, because it “fails to meet the moral criteria” of the Church, failing to help “the least of these as the Christian Bible requires: the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the jobless.”

Ryan is still chairman of the GOP’s House Budget Committee with more power now the GOP controls the Senate. We are not likely to get a more Christian budget or immigration policy any time soon.

Our fears will be used to legitimize more violence.

Oct 30 2014

Ignorance, Fear and Imaginary Facts

We imagine facts to support what we believe. That’s a problem because politicians tend to focus on what we believe, not the actual data.

It’s the same in every country. This global survey by Ipsos MORI, key findings of which are summarized here, highlights how wrong we are in 14 countries about the make-up of our population.

Emotional innumeracy is the root of the problem, a term from a research paper by Daniel Herda (UC Davis) who studied immigration innumeracy, the inability to reason about immigration.

Herda found that emotional factors create innumeracy: “Among the emotional predictors, perceived threat has a strong positive association with innumeracy. It does so net of social distance and political conservatism, which have their own significant positive and negative associations, respectively.”

So, if we believe immigrants pose a threat, we overestimate the immigrant population. Fear drives our overestimate; the overestimate increases our fear.

US respondents imagine that immigrants make up almost a third (32%) of our population, two and a half times the actual number, 13%.

Immigrants are perceived to be a threat in all nations surveyed, and the smaller the actual percentage of immigrants, the greater the overestimate. The miniscule 0.4% of Poland’s population who are immigrants are overestimated at 35 times that number, Hungary’s 8 times, Japan’s 4 times and so on. Australians with by far the highest percentage of immigrants (28%) overestimate by only a quarter.

The percentage of Muslims is also universally overestimated.

The overestimate of our Muslim population by US respondents is 15 times the 1% small reality. That is consistent with the overestimation in other countries with small (2% or less) Muslim populations – Hungary 18 times, South Korea and Poland 13 times, Canada and Japan 10 times, Australia 9 times, Spain 8 times. But even in countries with a more noticeable 4% – 8% Muslim population the overestimates are at least 3 times reality.

The percentage of Christians is correspondingly underestimated in most countries. Four of every five (78%) Americans report themselves to be Christian while we estimate it is less than three in five (56%). Even in Italy where 83% of the population is Christian, the estimate is only 69%. These underestimates result from perceived threat to that heritage.

The percentage of Christians in South Korea and Japan is hugely overestimated. These overestimates also result from perceived threat to their traditional culture.

Overestimates of immigrants and Muslims and underestimates of Christians all stem from the perception that traditional values, culture and identity are under threat.

We might question the “actual” count of Christians in the following chart because many who do not go to church consider themselves Christian, but the feeling of threat is to whatever respondents consider themselves to be.

Herda’s research result: “perceived threat has a strong positive association with innumeracy” suggests that the overall inaccuracy of a people’s knowledge of their society’s makeup is a measure of how threatened they feel. Ipsis Mori presents that metric as an “index of ignorance.”

Sadly, we in the US are almost the most ignorant and/or fearful of all nations. Only in Italy is there greater ignorance and/or fear of change.

Eighty years ago in his first inaugural address, our President spoke of his “firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” That, too, was a time to get real. “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment,” he went on.

But we can’t get real if we keep imagining the facts and getting confirmation of our fears from media whose interests are so different from ours.

So let’s stop deluding ourselves. Let’s question what we imagine to be facts.

Oct 28 2014

What to Do about Ebola

“Are you not in favor of quarantine?” I was asked in response to: http://martinsidwell.com/ebola-and-homo-politicus/ about how the media promotes fear.

I am in favor of helping us know when to quarantine ourselves and making it less difficult to do. I am against handing over more of our rights and responsibilities to our government.

What we have done so far to avert the risk of an Ebola epidemic is misguided. A few States have established mandatory quarantine of travelers from countries affected by Ebola in West Africa. Travelers from West Africa arriving at five US airports have their temperatures taken and are questioned about their possible exposure to Ebola. A 21-day quarantine was initially imposed on all travelers returning from West Africa whether or not they showed symptoms of the disease.

If the best approach were to quarantine all travelers from West Africa, it should be done at every international airport throughout the US.

But why only travelers from West Africa, and why not for other deadly diseases, too? If Ebola warrants such measures, shouldn’t we also close our borders to more deadly diseases? Those diseases are everywhere, so presumably we should quarantine all travelers from everywhere.

If we are willing to abandon more individual rights and responsibilities, we should temperature test all travelers, quarantine everyone returning from anywhere whose temperature is elevated and refuse entry to all non-natives with high temperatures.

Every passenger had their temperature taken and anyone with an elevated temperature was denied entry the last time I flew into China’s Tibet. We could do the same.

But Ebola is not in fact such a great risk for us in the USA. It has been contracted in this outbreak so far by around 10,000 people in West Africa since March and by around 400 health care workers from overseas, about 20 of whom have been treated in Europe and the US. That’s not many compared to other deadly diseases, but how contagious is Ebola?

Ebola spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids of someone who has symptoms of the disease. It can survive for a few hours on dry surfaces like doorknobs and counter-tops and several days in puddles of body fluid. Bleach solutions can kill it.

“Direct contact with bodily fluids of someone with symptoms of Ebola” means there is no risk of transmission from people who have been exposed to Ebola if they are not showing symptoms. No risk.

And the Ebola death rate is tiny so far compared to other contagious fatal diseases: fewer than 5,000 thousand Ebola deaths this year, hundreds of times more for other diseases. 1.6 million died from HIV/AIDS in 2012, 1.3 million from tuberculosis, 1.1 million from pneumonia, 760,000 from infectious diarrhea, and more than 600,000 from malaria.

The death rate from Ebola could greatly increase, but if closing our borders to it is wise, it is even more urgent to close them to HIV/AIDS and other diseases whose death rate is astronomically higher.

How much liberty and privacy are we willing to sacrifice, though?

Sacrificing our individual rights to our government is a slippery slope. Our fear of terrorists after 9/11 enabled passage of the Patriot Act, which severely restricted our traditional rights and made possible massive expansion of the NSA’s data gathering. Our fear after Pearl Harbor led us to incarcerate innocent people of Japanese heritage, which we eventually admitted was the result of “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”

Will we eventually reverse the excesses of the Patriot Act? Or will we abandon more of our liberty? Will we authorize the NSA to record everywhere we go using GPS data from our cellphones? They could then know who is at risk from contact with people who develop deadly diseases.

How much of our liberty and privacy are we willing to abandon in order to feel safer?

What have our politicians done so far? What they are always tempted to do, take more power. Is there a more effective possibility?

Yes. The risk of catching infectious diseases and their death rate is far greater in low- and middle-income countries where limited if any medical care is available. People travel, so disease travels with them. This means that by far the most effective way to cut our risk of contracting and dying from Ebola or other deadly diseases would be a universal health care system.

Everyone in the USA who contracts a contagious disease could then receive medical treatment and not infect others.

That is the best approach for our people, but what about those in West Africa? Should we do anything for them?

That’s a moral question. Facts and analysis cannot provide the answer, although there are practical aspects we can consider.

We currently feel obligated to act as the world’s policemen. We give our government several trillion dollars each year to destabilize cruel regimes. But those who survive the bombing fail to establish better government. That results in us being hated, despised and/or laughed at for our foolishness.

Killling and destruction do not make life in this world better. We could, however, build a happier world by instead acting as its humanitarian leader. We could, for example, do more than send 3,000 troops to Liberia to build 17 Ebola treatment facilities.

But we seem to have no compelling self-interest in West Africa as we do in the Middle East without whose oil our economy would collapse. If Ebola arrives in India’s slums, however, and sparks a widespread epidemic, our cancer, HIV-infected and other patients will not get their medicines because 40% of generic drugs in the US come from India.

We do have interests throughout the world, and our behavior is noticed. If we stop killing people to make their lives better and instead help them heal themselves, we will be more loved, less hated and therefore much safer.

It is hard to imagine us overcoming out feeling that we must rule the world, however, and almost impossible even to imagine our government building a better situation for our own people in our current political climate.

What does seem somewhat realistic is to avoid Ebola hysteria. Let’s instead of foolishly sacrificing more of our rights, require our government to educate us about Ebola and make it less difficult for anyone with symptoms to quarantine themselves and get treatment.

martinsidwell.com

Exploring with an Open Mind and an Opening Heart

Category Archives: Psychology