Yes, I cracked and read Todd S. Purdum’s It Came from Wasilla in Vanity Fair. And something about it kept gnawing at the back of my mind, outside of the actual content about former VP candidate and now-former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. It was this:
Some top aides worried about her mental state: was it possible that she was experiencing postpartum depression? (Palin’s youngest son was less than six months old.)
This line is nestled between comments that Palin did what she wanted to, wasn’t sure who to trust, and didn’t maintain “civil discourse” with one adviser. No, it wasn’t a snippet from a discussion about Palin’s actual health, it was part of speculation as to why she couldn’t be predictable and play nice.
I’m no fan of Palin. I’m also, however, not a fan of speculation and assumption that a woman might have a mental health problem because she didn’t turn out to be easily handled. I am likewise not a fan of idle speculation about what can be a very serious condition, with no indication that there was any support or outreach being offered if this was truly suspected.
Katherine Stone at Postpartum Progress – which focuses on postpartum depression – has a very nice post on this as well, and expands on the frequent references to mental health in Purdum’s article:
I might actually have been able to shrug this article off to media ignorance about perinatal mood and anxiety disorders, were it not for continued references throughout the article to mental illness. Purdum uses words, either his own or those of whom he chose to quote for this article, to describe Gov. Palin like “erratic” and “whack job.”
One of the subheadings of his article: “Polar Disorder.”
She asks: “Does Purdum think his constant references to mental illnesses will help to convince us all of what an awful person Sarah Palin is?”
.
Palin’s politics aside (I mean it, we’re not debating them here), I’m troubled by this idea that a candidate who could not be appropriately managed and molded must therefore have been herself mentally ill, and that perhaps that mental illness had to do with her ladyparts. You know, without any actual evidence or apparent support, or acknowledgment that people can both have mental health issues and be competent and manage to play well with others. In addition to the creepy sexism and ableism of it, let’s not forget that the people telling these stories have an incentive to blame all campaign missteps on some inherent and unaddressable “crazy” of Palin’s, and not any on their own shortcomings as vetters, handlers, campaigners, and staff members.
Renee of Womanist Musings, has a great post, “The Convenience of ‘Super Crip,’” in which she describes how people treat her like she’s helpless and touch her without invitation when she’s out in her scooter. She also has her weekly links round-up, Drop it Like it’s Hot.
Yet another reason why I don’t trust police. Police raided a gay bar in Fort Worth. On the Stonewall anniversary. Somebody left with head injuries, which the cops explain as “fell down, hit head.” They also tried to blame it on those dirty gays and their unwelcome touching (sarcasm, naturally). Dan Savage explains the improbability of the police explanation and vileness of what went down.
Via Guerilla Mama Medicine, I read this post at Vegans of Color, “Survival Foods.” It talks in part about women who are vegan who feel during pregnancy that they need meat, the availability of suitable foods, and the like, and notes the money, health and time resources often needed to inform and sustain a vegan diet. If you’re going to wade into the comments, you’re going to need your Self-Righteousness Shield +10 and a high tolerance for people telling pregnant women what they have to do with their bodies.
C notes that Sarah Palin resigned, and that one of Palin’s last acts as Governor may have been forcing out a public health official who wanted to cite the actual evidence in hearings on parental consent for underage abortion.
Sweet Machine at Shapely Prose with “Fried eggs, boulders, and spaghetti straps,” on Christa D’Souza’s breast implant writing – “This is not an article about the size of her breasts. This is an article about self-hatred, only D’Souza doesn’t know it.”
Racialicious is doing a workshop series on race topics, called the Racialicious Experience. An application and registration fee are required, but it looks interesting – this is a somewhat intriguing model for supporting blog-related work, to provide paid access to the blogger’s expertise in a more in-depth, personal setting.
Dispatches from Libraryland: NCBI ROFL – funny/weird PubMed citations. Medlibs, submit your findings for potential posts. I sent one about fecal transplant via NG for c. diff, but that may be more completely disgusting than funny.
Perhaps my fellow medical librarians recall this differently, but it seems to me that when I do a Google search for a drug, I used to get MedlinePlus drug information as one of my top results. This suited me well, given that MedlinePlus is a National Library of Medicine resource, isn’t trying to sell me anything, and can be relied upon generally for quality information. FDA news and alerts and other expected resources also used to rank fairly high (in my recollection).
Now, when I do drug name searches, I’m getting drug homepages (which I expect), along with things like rxlist, drugs.com, Wikipedia (not bad, generally, but not my last stop if I want to be sure to know about potential interactions, side effects, new warnings, etc.), YouTube, and even about.com (which I’d rather go without information than look at) in the first page of results, but no MedlinePlus. No FDA, either. Obviously this varies by drug – a search for ciprofloxacin did get me MedlinePlus and CDC near the bottom of the first page of results. Similarly in a search for clavulanic acid, MedlinePlus did appear in the first page, and so I wondered if I’m getting the junkier results just for the more common drugs/less technical names. In other cases I clicked through several pages of results without ever seeing a MedlinePlus, FDA, CDC or other semi-reputable source of health information.
Now, I know that Google’s search results technically aren’t returned in order of quality or by lack of omnipresent drug company advertising enticing you to try the latest wonderdrug. I was surprised, though, to do a quick drug search and not find MedlinePlus, FDA, and the like high among the results. It seems to me that the top results in Google drug searches used to generally be for more high quality, reliable, less commercial sites, but that this is not so much the case as present. Anybody else noticed this? Am I imagining things? What’s changed?
Yesterday at Our Bodies Our Blog, I posted about the list of priorities for comparative effectiveness research compiled in an Institute of Medicine report as part of the process for allocating funds for this research from the stimulus package. It’s really more interesting than that sentence makes it sound. Several women’s health and childbirth-related topics made the list. Check it out.
“Nineteen House members sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stating that they will not vote for health care reform legislation ‘unless it explicitly excludes abortion funding from the scope of any government-defined or subsidized health insurance plan.’
The FDA has a transparency blog up at http://fdatransparencyblog.fda.gov/ where the agency is asking the public for comments on how they can do better at being transparent. For example, question 3 is “What tools, techniques, processes, or other mechanisms should FDA use to be more effective in providing useful and understandable information?” There are very few comments thus far, so go on over and share your thoughts.
FDA Confirms E. Coli O157:H7 in Prepackaged Nestlé Toll House Refrigerated Cookie Dough. Do not want. I’d be interested in knowing how many of the infected ate the raw dough vs. prepared cookies, because I know I never make cookies without scarfing up a bit of the raw dough. Don’t eat ‘em either way for now (raw or baked), because they’ve been recalled.
I’m a little bummed that with all the news coverage today of the FDA and acetaminophen dosage and liver damage, that information about this isn’t somewhere obvious on the FDA homepage.
Just a reminder that several bloggers over at ScienceBlogs are donating their blog revenue from June to Doctors Without Borders as part of their Silence is the Enemy campaign “to draw more attention to the sexually abused around the globe and to encourage everyone to talk about it and act.” As I mentioned at the beginning of the month, the campaign has a particular focus on mass rape as a weapon.
Right now, a bunch of the participating bloggers are highlighted at the stop of the ScienceBlogs site. Because their revenue (and donation amount from each blogger) is affected by their blog traffic, go on over and click a bunch of them (not just the ScienceBlogs homepage) before the end of today. You might even stay and read some of the posts while you’re at it.
You may have heard radio bits from StoryCorps, the public radio project that travels the country collecting stories from folks. There is a new related project, StoryCorps OutLoud, “project to record and preserve the voices of LGBTQ individuals across the nation.”
“A hundred and fifty years ago women viewed birth on a pretty regular basis — they saw their sisters or neighbors giving birth,” he said, adding that it wasn’t until the late 19th century that birthing moved out of living rooms and bedrooms and into hospitals. “But now, with YouTube, we’ve come back around and women have this opportunity to view births again.”
Note, of course, that
“The majority of childbirth videos on YouTube are home births, recorded inside living rooms, bedrooms or bathtubs. In the United States, many hospitals and doctors forbid patients to record births because of liability concerns, so few American hospital birth videos appear on YouTube.”
Huge pet peeve of mine. And, yeah, it’s in the Fashion & Style section. (found via Unnecesarean.com)
Today at Our Bodies Our Blog, I have a post about the actions to be taken by two prominent Boston hospitals to increase access to care for people with disabilities, including correction of some serious deficiencies that interfered with care such as medication dosing and mammography. There are also links to some more resources on this topic.
