Compulsive behaviour? It may make more sense than you think

There are endless motivations for human behaviour, from the basic drives for food and sex to more complicated ones, such as compassion, envy and anger. But none of these explain behaviours that we feel irresistibly, often inexplicably, driven to engage in – compulsions.

Compulsions come from a need that is desperate and tortured. They may bring relief, but they bring little enjoyment, and while one part of our brain desperately wishes to stop them, another is afraid of stopping.

We describe as “compulsive” someone who reads, tweets, steals, cleans, watches birds, lies, blogs, shops, checks Facebook, eats or Snapchats etc not only frequently but with the urgency of one who is not fully in control of their behaviour.

Compulsions, according to a growing body of scientific evidence, are a response to anxiety. We grab hold of any behaviour that offers relief by providing even an illusion of control. Against tectonic social and economic forces that feel as uncontrollable as King Canute’s tides, we seize on anything that might restore a sense of agency.

I used to view compulsions as foreign and almost frightening

I used to view life-altering compulsions as foreign and almost frightening. But in the course of my research, two things happened. First, when I got to know people who were compulsive, their behaviour didn’t seem unreasonable at all. It seemed like an understandable response to angst that would otherwise eat them alive. Second, I realised that although people with the most extreme compulsions seem like outliers, the anxiety that drives them to those extremes is universal – and underlies milder compulsions, too. Actively behaving to allay anxiety is a deep and ancient impulse.

Over any year, 1% of us suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Even more of us find ourselves in the grip of a compulsion that falls short of something that is disabling enough to qualify as a mental disorder – in fact, some compulsions are adaptive, helping us lead our lives or perform our jobs more effectively.

Like many people, maybe you feel compelled to reach for your smart phone as soon as you wake up in the morning. Fortunately a growing number of experts have begun to succeed in distinguishing addictions from poor impulse control from compulsions.

An addiction begins with a flash of pleasure overlaid by an itch for danger; it’s fun to gamble or to drink, and it also puts you at risk. Impulsive behaviours involve acting without planning or even thought, driven by an urge for immediate gratification.

Compulsions, in contrast, are all about avoiding unpleasant outcomes. They are repetitive behaviours we engage in to alleviate the angst brought on by the possibility of negative consequences. But the actual behaviour is often unpleasant – or at least not particularly rewarding, especially after umpteen rounds of it. At its simplest, the anxiety takes the form of the thought: “If I don’t do this, something terrible will happen.” If I do not check my fiancé’s web history, I will not know whether he is cheating. If I do not religiously organise my cupboards, my home will be engulfed in chaos.

Underlying every compulsion is the need to avoid what causes you pain or angst. Compulsive behaviour is not necessarily a mental disorder. Some forms of it can be, and people in its clutches deserve to be diagnosed and helped. But many are expressions of psychological needs we all feel: to be at peace and in control, to feel connected and to matter. And if those are mental illnesses, we’re all crazy.

Can’t. Just. Stop. An Investigation of Compulsions by Sharon Begley is published by Robinson Books at £14.99

Compulsive behaviour? It may make more sense than you think

Court cryonics ruling is just common sense | Letters

Honestly, these cryonics stories are driving me mad (Report, 18 November). As someone with terminal cancer (and ignoring the fact that I find the description in your articles of people like myself as “cancer victims” to be teeth-grindingly irritating) I feel everyone is ignoring the fact that a young woman looked into her future and saw the denial of everything she was promised. She was denied boyfriends, university, a job, marriage, children, life… and she was not ready to give up on those promises. She didn’t want to die. None of us does. I’m grateful that the judge had the good sense to realise this was not about whether cryonics worked, but her own hopes for the future. Reading some pieces lately it seems that while we’ll arrange bungee-jumping days out for the terminally ill, how one disposes of one’s own corpse is a step too far in giving the dying what they’re asking for.
Julia Frith
Lincoln

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Court cryonics ruling is just common sense | Letters

"All my life suddenly made sense": how it feels to be diagnosed with autism late in life

One day during his last year at primary school, Jon Adams drew a picture of a street in Portsmouth, the city where he still lives. The scene he drew had no people in it, but its representation of everything else suggested a talent beyond his years.

The headteacher happened to see the picture, and said he wanted to put it up in the school’s entrance hall. “And that was an honour,” Adams says, “particularly for someone who didn’t think they were any good, because they’d been told they weren’t any good, every day.”

Adams was asked to write his name on the back, an instruction that threw up a choice. He had difficulties with writing, and he knew his class teacher could be cruel. “If I asked for help, I knew what he would say: ‘Oh, he can’t even spell his own name, what rubbish is that?’ So I did it myself.”

The teacher called Adams to the front of the class. “I went up, gave it to him, he held it up in front of the class, and then he tore it up. He said, ‘He’s spelled his name wrong – he’ll never be anything.’”

This happened 45 years ago. In recent years, Adams has been treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, caused at least partly by that episode, and how long it lived on, not just in his memory, but in his understanding of the world and his place in it. The story says a lot about the inhumanity that was once rife in the British education system; but it also shines light on what it’s like spending a lot of your life being not just misunderstood, but routinely insulted. “Someone telling you you’re no good every day worms its way inside your head,” Adams says. “Inside, you know you’re all right, so there’s this conflict going on.”

Since April 2013, Adams has known that he has Asperger syndrome – or, to put it another way, that he is autistic. Ten minutes online will tell you that Adams’ condition comes down to a so-called “triad of impairments” to do with social interaction, communication and imagination, or what some people call “flexibility of thought” – although the fact that Adams is a prolific artist suggests that, in his case, that last criterion might be misplaced.

Since 2013, many diagnoses of autism have also included a range of sensory issues, among them aversions to certain textures, sounds, smells and tastes, as well as a deep dislike of sudden noise. In Adams’ case, these seem to blur into a complex kind of synaesthesia: he understands music as something he can touch, and experiences the colour yellow as a profoundly unpleasant taste, like mould.

Adams sometimes talks about his condition in front of an audience, and there is one question that always comes up. “It goes: ‘My son’s eight, he sits in his room all day, he does Lego, he does complicated drawings, he won’t talk to anyone else – how do I make him socialise?’ Well, you don’t. He’s made his world. One day, he’ll show it to you. Don’t let him grow up thinking that the way he’s thinking and what he’s doing are faulty.”

***

Jon Adams was formally diagnosed at the age of 52, at an NHS clinic run as an offshoot of Cambridge University’s Autism Research Centre, after he was referred there by his GP. The initial spark had been a meeting with the centre’s founder and director, Simon Baron-Cohen (the cousin, in case anyone was wondering, of Sacha), who had spoken with Adams at the Cheltenham literature festival.

Adams had begun to realise what sat under a lot of his experiences; at the time, the biography that accompanied his work as an artist included the words “probably autistic”. From May 2012 until June 2013, he worked as the research centre’s artist-in-residence; immediately afterwards, a specialist gave him his formal diagnosis, a process that involved an interview and something akin to a questionnaire. “I got the letter through, saying I scored 18 out of 18 autistic traits, and I had Asperger’s,” Adams says.

I meet Baron-Cohen in a crowded Starbucks near St Paul’s Cathedral in London, where he wryly comments on the mixture of chatter, clattering cups and muzak – “For a lot of autistic people, this would probably be hell” – and casts his mind back over the 35 years he has been thinking about and researching autism. He started working with six autistic children in a special unit in Barnet, north London, in 1982. Fifteen years later, he set up the Cambridge research centre; two years after that, in 1999, he opened a clinic dedicated to diagnosing autistic adults.

My son received a diagnosis aged three. He had fixations with particular music or places – traits I recognise in myself

“There was a growing awareness that autism wasn’t just about kids,” he tells me. “I was receiving more and more emails saying, ‘My son’s an adult, but he’s never fitted in. Might he have autism?’ An adult couldn’t go to a child and adolescent clinic, so where were they meant to go? If they went to a learning disability clinic, and they had an IQ above 70, they’d be turned away. So these people were like a lost generation. That was a phrase I used a lot.”

The National Autistic Society estimates that there are currently around 700,000 people living with autism in the UK – more than one in every 100 of the population. Some of these people have learning disabilities. Some are what the medical vocabulary terms “non-verbal”, or unable to speak. Others are so-called “high-functioning”, a sub-group that includes those with Asperger syndrome, the condition named after the Austrian paediatrician who in the 1940s worked with a group of children he famously termed “little professors”. Asperger syndrome is distinguished by the fact that people who have it display no language delay as toddlers or small children. (Asperger died in 1980, long before the term “Asperger syndrome” entered popular usage. It has since been dropped from the relevant American diagnostic manual, but is still used in the UK.)

It is among this latter group that you will find many of the 20% of autistic people currently thought to have been diagnosed as adults. No national figures for adult autism diagnoses are available, but anecdotal evidence suggests numbers are rising: Baron-Cohen tells me that four years ago, 100 cases in Cambridgeshire were referred to his clinic; in the first four months of 2016 alone, it received 400 referrals.

Most of the terms used to describe autism don’t do justice to the nuanced, complicated traits bound up with it. Nonetheless, all its variants are covered by the catch-all term autism spectrum disorder, or ASD; people who dispute that autism is any kind of “disorder” prefer the term autism spectrum condition. The word “spectrum” was first used in this context by the pioneering British researcher Lorna Wing, who died in 2014. Baron-Cohen explains: “What she meant at the time, I think, was a spectrum within those who come to clinical attention. Where it’s gone since is that this spectrum runs right through society, out into the general population.”

My own interest in autism began when my son James received a diagnosis of ASD at the age of three. Back then, some things seemed strange: the social distance between him and his peers; his fixations with particular music (the Clash, the Beatles) or places; his pointed dislike of some foods or sounds (I still curse whoever invented the public toilet hand-dryer); his amazing facility with technology. Now, these things are simply part of the fabric of our shared life. I recognise echoes of myself in some of these traits (the music, the technology), and of plenty of other people: more than anything, his 10 years have brought me an ever-growing understanding of the complexities of human psychology, both among those diagnosed as “on the spectrum” and so-called “neurotypical” people.

Unfortunately, the everyday world has yet to catch up. Only 16% of adults diagnosed with autism in the UK are in full-time, paid employment. In 2014 Baron-Cohen’s team found that two-thirds of the patients in their clinic had either felt suicidal or planned to kill themselves, and that a third had attempted to do so. “To my mind, this is nothing to do with autism or Asperger syndrome,” he says. “These are secondary mental-health problems. You came into the world with autism, and the way the world reacted, or didn’t react, to you has led to a second problem, which is depression. And that’s preventable.”

***

A week after talking to Baron-Cohen, I take the train to the Lancashire town of Wigan, to meet 68-year-old Peter Street, who got his autism diagnosis only 10 months ago. He is an impish, funny presence, and says he loves conversation, perhaps a little too much. “I get this deep urge – it’s a pain, almost, to talk to people. When I’ve described it to the therapist, I’ve said I’m like a bucket of water and it’s full. And then all of it comes out, and it empties.”

Peter Street: ‘I get too much for people, and they get too much for me.’ Photograph: Rosie Barnes

After 20 minutes, it becomes clear that Street has the most astonishing life story of anyone I have ever interviewed. His mother, he says, became pregnant with him when she was raped. In his native Bolton, the two of them were taken in by a man much older than her, who employed her as his housekeeper, and then married her and adopted Street to give the arrangement a veneer of normality. He grew up, he says, with no extended family and very few friends. “I get too much for people, and they get too much for me. A lot of the time, I overpower people. When I was a kid, when I made a friend, I would go and sit on their doorstep, waiting for them. I’m a really early riser, and I can’t cope with being late anywhere. I used to go and sit on the doorstep, maybe six, seven in the morning. And people obviously didn’t like that.”

His daily routine, he says, often revolved around an outside toilet, and his home’s back wall, which he would use for solo games of football and marbles. “And that was wonderful, in some sense. It wouldn’t have been wonderful for some people, but it was for me.” He also made endless trips to the cinema, where he acquired a forensic knowledge of Greek mythology; he mentions Steve Reeves, the musclebound 1950s actor who played Hercules. “I can take certain things in – really odd things, sometimes,” he says. “But I can’t take in what most people take in every day.”

At school, he found it almost impossible to tune in to the teachers. “They were shit with me,” he says. “They knew how to abuse. They were good at it. They were bullies. They used to stand me in the corner, in the wastebasket, and hit me over the head with the board rubber, to knock some sense into me. I’ve always blamed my epilepsy on that.” He started having grand mal seizures when he was 15; it is now estimated that around a third of autistic people also experience epilepsy, though the relationship between the two is something that neuroscience has yet to fathom.

Street left school unable to read or write. He passed through a series of jobs – a bakery, a butcher’s shop – some of which came to an end because he found it difficult to process complex instructions, before settling into work as a gardener and gravedigger. Along the way, he married his wife, Sandra, with whom he has three grownup children. “She doesn’t like being with people,” he says. “She’s very quiet, very introverted. In a way, she’s a mirror.”

In 1984, after breaking his neck while trying to climb into a transit van that was pulling away, Street began three years in recovery. While he was in hospital, he met a fellow patient who was an English teacher, and started to work with him on his literacy; then, through adult education, he discovered a talent for poetry.

While we talk, he hands me an anthology of his work, published in 2009, that begins with a poem titled Not Being Me, a perfect glimpse into the autistic experience of not fitting in:

Childhood nights were dreams
of being a sheep
then up and out of a morning,
a quick check to see

if by any chance in the night
there had been a change
of being just like all my friends
and not the odd one out

In the late 1980s, Street began to teach poetry in schools and day centres; in the early 90s, he became a writer-in-residence at the BBC in Manchester, which led to a series of assignments. In 1993, he went to Croatia to write about the war that was then engulfing the Balkans. “People with autism, it’s often said that they have no emotion or empathy,” he says. “I have too much emotion, too much empathy. It broke my heart.” Three experiences preyed on him: a meeting with an 18-year-old abandoned in a refugee camp; an occasion when he gave his water ration to an emaciated woman with a newborn child; and the experience of eating a sumptuous meal in the town of Lipik, with “three or four kids at the window, looking in. And I didn’t have the balls to get up and go and give them my food.”

By 2014, his inability to put away these memories had become too much. “I went to a therapist. And she said, ‘I want you to go and see a friend of mine. She’s a specialist in diagnosing people with autism.’ I thought, ‘I’ll go along’, as you do. And she gave me these really strange games. They were like a jigsaw puzzle: four pieces. White. They were so simple, I thought I could do them – and I couldn’t.” He was handed five plastic figures and toys, and told to make a story with them. “And I couldn’t do that, either. I couldn’t connect them together into one story. She said I was highly intellectual, but on the autism spectrum.”

His response was one of enormous relief. “I cried. It was wonderful. Wonderful. Because all my life suddenly made sense. And none of it – the beatings, the abuse – none of it was my fault. Apart from my family and Sandra, I’d put it in the top five greatest things that have happened in my life. Absolutely, incredibly wonderful.”

***

Penny Andrews got her diagnosis of Asperger syndrome (though she is perfectly comfortable with the term “autistic”) when she was 30. Back then, she was a regular user of LiveJournal, the social networking site that was a forerunner of Myspace and Facebook, and one of her online contacts had begun to write about the process of finding out he was autistic. “He wrote about it quite openly: all the reasons he’d gone for diagnosis, what the procedure was like, seeing half a dozen different psychiatrists before he found one who would refer him for diagnosis,” she tells me. “And the more he wrote about it, the more I was like, ‘Oh, God, this is me.’”

Andrews is now 35. She also has mild cerebral palsy, which manifests itself in spasms in her ankles, knees and wrists. She is a para-athlete whose specialism is the 100m, and has a punishing training schedule. She wears a vintage Bowie T-shirt, has a wood-cut picture of the Yorkshire town of Whitby tattooed on her right arm, and is a prolific and waspish presence on Twitter. Andrews is currently awaiting a decision on the funding of her PhD, which is focused on the relationships between academic libraries and “data flows, digital labour, academic social networking services and governance in research support”.

At secondary school, boys pretend to fancy you. It kills you, because you take it seriously

Penny Andrews

She grew up in Nidderdale in the Yorkshire dales and now lives in Leeds. Throughout her childhood, Andrews says she had a deep sense of “everything being wrong, somehow. Being clever and being a supposedly interesting person, but never able to maintain friendships and always, inexplicably, saying something wrong.”

Autism among women and girls is only starting to be properly understood. The male to female ratio of autistic people currently stands at around 5:1, although Baron-Cohen says he and other autism specialists are currently in a “transition period” in their research: the actual figure may eventually turn out to be very different. “There’s a whole new topic researchers are latching on to, about camouflage: whether females – for whatever reason – might be better at hiding their autism,” he says, something that is borne out by Andrews’ recollection of her time at school.

“You’re not supposed to get on with people’s parents better than them when you go round to their houses. I didn’t really want to play with people – I just looked really aloof. I read the diary of Anne Frank when I was six, and I talked about the Holocaust. But I would try to copy other people, how they talked and acted. I’d watch TV programmes that other people watched so I’d have something to talk about. Neighbours and Home And Away.” She laughs. “I got a Tamagotchi when everyone else got them, but I had no interest in it.”

In the end, teenage etiquette and the nastiness that often comes with it proved too much. “Girls are cruel. They exclude each other, and pretend to be friends with each other, as a game. And I get sarcasm, but I don’t get insincerity. And then, at secondary school, boys pretend to fancy you, because that’s the most ludicrous idea they can think of. It kills you because you take it seriously. And they invite you to things, and then they don’t show up, or they’re round the corner laughing. All of that happened.”

Penny Andrews: ‘I would try to copy other people, how they talked and acted.’ Photograph: Rosie Barnes

She has been married to her husband, Emil, for 11 years. “Because he loves me the way I am, I’m completely myself with him.” How hard does she find it to read other people’s emotions? “It sort of depends. If somebody’s actually upset, I can probably feel it quicker than other people. I can feel it too much. But I can’t usually tell if people are trying to get out of a conversation: if people are trying to leave. You have to tell me: ‘We need to stop.’ I can’t tell whether people like me or not, which is hard.”

Plenty of non-autistic people have issues with that, I say, myself included. “But they seem at peace with it. Even with people I’ve known for a long time, I won’t know whether they like me or not unless we’ve had an explicit conversation: ‘Do you actually like me?’ Which turns people off.”

When it comes to understanding autism, how much does she think the world still needs to change? “Quite a lot. Because I think a lot of people still don’t believe it, or think it’s a really mild thing: ‘Well, it just makes it a bit harder for her to make friends, makes her a bit more anxious.’ A lot of the time, it’s stressful. Painful. When the sensory stuff is happening, it’s like you’re being Tasered.” Andrews mentions people flicking their train tickets, or jangling their coins, or whistling. “It’s not just, ‘That’s annoying.’ It’s, ‘That’s unbearable.’ I have said, ‘I’m really sorry, but can you stop doing that?’ But people don’t.”

I have one last question. Self-evidently, Andrews is what some people call “high-functioning”. When she meets autistic people who are, say, non-verbal, does she feel they are part of the same community? “Yes. And I think we have a duty, as people who can speak, to make sure that those people are looked after properly, and they’re not exploited, and they don’t have inappropriate people speaking for them, or saying things like, ‘He’s got a mental age of three.’ How would they know, if they can’t communicate with them? From what I can observe, they are experiencing the same thing as me. When I’ve seen a non-verbal person have a meltdown, it looks like my meltdowns, only more physical. It looks…” She thinks for a minute. “It looks like an unrestrained version of how I sometimes feel.”

***

In Portsmouth, Jon Adams talks about what many autistic people call “passing”: like Andrews’ pretend interest in Australian soaps and techno pets, it’s about managing to blend in, even if that means submerging whole chunks of your personality. In Adams’ case, passing took its toll and, in his late 30s, he hit an emotional wall. “Not being true to yourself has an effect on you,” he says. “I’d been married, and that had failed. I had a girlfriend at the time, and that was failing. I had a bit of a breakdown, and it took me a couple of years to get used to people.”

He started out on a new path as an artist. The work he does ranges across disciplines including sculpture and music, and regularly touches on his own story. Among his most affecting works is a piece called My School Pen: an old-school fountain pen covered in spikes that perfectly evokes his struggles as a child.

You might have imperfections, but the basics of the way you view the world are right for you

Jon Adams

In 2007, he was working on a project with a group of teenagers for a charity called the Foyer Federation. “The woman in charge said, ‘Have you ever considered you’re autistic?’” he recalls. “I said, ‘No, what’s that?’” She gave him a copy of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, now almost a set text for people interested in the condition. “And I went away and I read one page and I cried.”

He wells up now. “You might have faults and imperfections, but the basics of the way you view the world are right for you. When everybody tells you, ‘No, you’re thinking wrong’, you know you’re not. But if everyone tells you that, you think you’re faulty. That’s the root of the depression and the low self-confidence. So to read those things on a page was emotional. It was visual. I could see that someone understood. And I thought, ‘OK, maybe I am autistic.’” It would be another six years before he was formally diagnosed.

For most adults who receive a diagnosis, the formal recognition might make belated sense of their lives, but it tends to make little difference to their daily existence. According to the National Autistic Society, 70% of adults say they don’t get the help they need. People might just about recognise the condition’s more extreme manifestations, but as Penny Andrews puts it, “They’re probably not aware of the bulk of autistic adults: people who are sitting there, coping with a lot of stuff, and the fact that they’re dealing with all this noise and stress and uncertainty that they shouldn’t have to.”

Joblessness among autistic adults speaks for itself. Even such mundane things as the ubiquity of piped music, or inadequate signage in public spaces, attest to the same basic issue: a society averting its eyes from things that blight hundreds of thousands of lives and might easily be improved. We fetishise “awareness” of autism, but the point needs to be greater understanding – and then practical action.

Simon Baron-Cohen cites one big frustration: if autism comes down to an often profound difficulty navigating the world, only a tiny number of people currently receive the help they need to do that. “Whether it’s about how to go shopping, or how to go for a job interview, or how to reply to your girlfriend. To me, if we were a civilised society, we’d be paying for mentors. It doesn’t seem unreasonable.”

A government programme called Access To Work means that Adams does get help from a support worker called Donna, a calm and empathic woman who accompanies him to our interview. Donna is copied into all his emails, and in the course of Adams’ work as an artist and a researcher into disability and creativity at Portsmouth University, she regularly shadows him for a couple of hours a day. Among other things, her job is partly to assist him in the kind of reading between the lines that professional and social etiquette demands, but that a lot of autistic people find difficult. Very often, she explains, she is there to suggest that a particular request or instruction is put in a different way, or to remind people in authority that Adams has his own ways of working. “You might have a three-week time span to do a piece of work,” Adams explains, “and if your line manager is checking you each day to find out your progress – well, you might not do anything for two weeks: you might be mulling it over in your head.”

Adams talks a lot about “systemising”, the quintessentially autistic way in which he divines patterns in the world, often immersing himself in them. Music is a good example. He has an app called iMini, which he uses to programme sequences of electronic notes into an on-screen keyboard, which he can then use if a spurt of anxiety means he needs to readjust. He plays me a bit, which I say reminds me of the kind of experimental music that came out of Germany in the 1970s. That’s not a coincidence: “I got really into Tangerine Dream in about 1976 – the repeating sequences were heaven for me,” Adams says. He also likes the electronic pioneers Kraftwerk, which rings loud bells. My son is a Kraftwerk obsessive, and regularly zeroes in on particular segments of their songs and plays them over and over. Does that sound familiar?

“Yes,” Adams says, and his mind goes back to 1978. “I bought Mr Blue Sky by ELO. There was a track on the other side, and it had a very strange beginning. It was called Fire On High, and I’d play it over and over and over again.”

Why? “It aligned me. It made me feel that the world was right and everything was together. It felt like it was part of me. It’s like all the stars lining up.”

He smiles. “Things like that give me the feeling I’m meant to be here.”

"All my life suddenly made sense": how it feels to be diagnosed with autism late in life

Teaching pupils to make sense of pornography | Letters

Jenni Murray’s recent suggestion of analysing pornography in the classroom might raise some eyebrows, but with up to 60% of young people using porn to teach themselves about sex, she’s right that schools should not ignore it (Opinion, 17 October). The accessibility and lack of boundaries around pornography leave our children at risk of seeing confusing or upsetting images. Myths around dominance/submission, consent and sexual norms can skew ideas about relationships and gender, and unrealistic comparisons can damage body image.

A school working with parents to promote healthy relationships and internet safety should certainly support its pupils to make sense of porn, offering practical help to encourage positive choices online and offline.

Teaching about healthy relationships, consent and online safety begins in kindergarten, laying the foundations for the time when these topics become intertwined with pupils’ developing sexuality. As they mature, pupils benefit from a safe space in which to discuss broader questions. What pressures exist when considering a sexual relationship? What activities are you more likely to meet in a porn film than in real life? What are the different views found in society relating to pornography? What messages might porn give us and how might our relationships be affected?

Schools should be seeking to empower young people to navigate today’s challenges. That includes understanding what porn is not: a manual for meaningful relationships.
Sarah Griffiths
Head of wellbeing, Dulwich College

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Teaching pupils to make sense of pornography | Letters

Why Having A Supercharged Sense of Smell is Key to a Healthier Relationship with Food

Take a minute, close your eyes, and imagine you are in a grocery store.

You are walking over to the produce section, and you see a rainbow of colors. Wow, gorgeous pineapples, bananas, peaches, and mangoes are on the shelves. You pick up and squeeze an orange in your hands and take a celery stick and break it in half to hear it snap.

But wait a minute.

All these beautiful foods are here, but you wonder why you didn’t smell an overwhelming fragrance of fruits and veggies when you walked in?

Well, here’s the deal.

There are two unfortunate reasons why.

However, once you know them, there are several things you can start doing right now to overcome them.

The first reason is that most of the fruits and veggies in the grocery store are picked too early. And therefore, they aren’t ripe and haven’t started producing their fragrant aroma, yet. Some fruits are picked when unripe because they can continue to ripen off the plant. These include apples, mangoes, guavas, and bananas; however, how effectively are they maturing in a cold, dark (no sunlight) grocery store?

It’s a good idea to frequent your local farmer’s markets for ripe and in season produce. Farmers are constantly in tune with the foods they grow. They can tell you all about wholesome, fresh fruits and veggies. Take a few minutes and ask them about color, texture, smell, and taste of the produce before you buy. That way, you can get to know what’s real and ripe, and what’s not.

The other reason you might not smell all the aromas in the grocery store has to do with this little term called Organoleptic. “Or-gan-o-lep-tic” is the science of using our senses to assess the quality and nutritional value of foods. Consequently, we should be able to use this organoleptic ability to seek out foods that are high in nutritional value.

Yes, you have superpowers that are built in to keep you on the prowl for great tasting nutritious foods.

Artificial fragrances (as well as fake foods) dampen our ability to tell if food is high in certain necessary nutrients i.e. ripe and healthy. Cologne and synthetic fragrances used in the home (including scented candles, air fresheners, and cleaning products) all hinder our ability to smell. These artificial scents are harsh chemicals that cause slight damage to the delicate nerve endings in our nose. They work by masking the natural scent with an oily chemical coating on the nerve ending – tricking our bodies into thinking we’re smelling something nice.

Of our five senses, our sense of smell guides us the most in making choices about what we like to eat. Our sense of smell is so powerful that it also shapes our mood. It can bring up old memories that we forgot we even had. You remember that time when your grandmother baked her special apple pie just for you? You would if you smelled a sweet apple pie right now.

Furthermore, bitter tasting herbs can give you a jumpstart on digestion, and having a keen sense of smell can do the same. In a study by Yeomans [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16545846], we find that once an odor is experienced concerning food, our bodies react in a way that prepares us for digestion. This preparation allows us to digest food better and ultimately maintain a healthy balanced weight.

So here are five ways to limit your exposure to toxins that harm your mucous membranes. In the long run, you’ll increase your sense of smell so you can innately go after foods that are rich in vital nutrients. And maybe more importantly, so you can be naturally repelled by fake foods that aren’t good for you.

1. Using essential oils in place of perfume
   Use about three drops of pure essential oil on a cotton ball and dampen the ball with water or coconut oil. Dab the cotton ball on your skin. You’ll want to test out the oils to make sure they are not irritating to your skin. Lavender, Grapefruit or Geranium are lovely sweet oils to start.


2. Light incense or handmade candles (with essential oils) in your home.
   There are many recipes online to make your scented candles. Or you can try Nag Campa incense, which is a nice earthy blend to bring calming and a relaxing scent into your home.


3. Use soaps, shampoos, and lotions without artificial fragrances (Coconut oil is an excellent alternative)
   Raw, organic coconut oil is the perfect all in one moisturizer for your hair and skin.


4. Clean your home with white vinegar and water or lemon juice instead of harsh cleaners
   Although vinegar is not a strong antibacterial, it is a very safe and effective cleaner for your home.


5. Cut fresh flowers for your home or office
   Having live plants in your home can cleanse and purify the air. If you are having company over or need a pick me up, try cut flowers from your garden to freshen up your home.

All of these ideas make your home more natural, beautiful and safe for your senses.

With these five simple practices, you can start to enhance your natural sense of smell. Practice strengthening your sense of smell. You may just be able to choose healthy foods based on your attraction to them. Removing more toxins from your environment is a great place to start to live a little more holistic life.

Resources:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16545846

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20693276

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14513063

http://ucanr.edu/datastoreFiles/234-167.pdf

Why Having A Supercharged Sense of Smell is Key to a Healthier Relationship with Food

Hippie philosophy: Only sense gratification works

Before we can get into how the hippie movement turned America and the rest of the world into hedonists, we have to first take a look at the “hippie” culture.

The hippie movement began in America in the mid-60s, though its roots go back several years earlier. Within four or five years the movement had spread to all of Europe, the Scandinavian countries, Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, Japan, the Philippines, Africa and South America.

This movement was a unique cultural phenomenon and had far-reaching influence and impact not only on American society, but also in practically the entire world.

Understanding the attraction that the hippie movement had to a way of life that was so foreign to the one that they were raised in is not rocket science.

You’ve got to appreciate the social and economic climate of mid-60s America. One critical factor was that most of us had already experienced the American dream, were a bit frustrated by it and wanted something more out of life.

Our fathers and their fathers worked and slaved to improve their quality of life. They wanted nice houses, new cars, and other modern conveniences, which they originally didn’t have. This provided a great incentive for them.

So they worked very hard and struggled to get what they wanted, always thinking they would be happy when they got it.

By the time I was in my late 20s and early 30s I had already experienced these things and still wasn’t happy.

I had a nice house with white picket fence and a lovely wife, wore nice clothes, had money in my pocket, owned a nice car, and had a nice stereo, a big TV and two little “rug rats”. Despite living the “American dream”, I was miserable.

Not only was I miserable on one hand, while experiencing material happiness, but also on the other hand there was this gnawing feeling inside telling me “this was not enough, I needed something more”.

Besides the fact that I wasn’t completely satisfied with my material prosperity, there were other social factors that made me question whether the picture of life that my parents and teachers painted for me was really that good.

There was the Vietnam War, for example, which was, in my opinion, a senseless conflict that I could not understand. Young people were being drafted right left, but for what?

Our parents were raised under different circumstances and most of them had unflinching faith in America and anything America did. But, somehow, I couldn’t accept this and couldn’t blindly commit myself to a cause I felt was wrong.

Also new was the racial prejudice issue – the oppression of blacks, Chicanos, and other minorities – not just in the South, but also in every major city in America. Because of material prosperity we had time to look at things going on around us, and we didn’t like a lot of what we could see.

In the beginning, there were young people who rejected the values of society and who dropped out of the rat race to try to live a more carefree existence. They left the comfort of their homes and families, left the luxuries, etc., and moved to the country or to the older, lower rent sections of the cities.

Hippies stood out like a sore thumb. They had long hair and wore outrageous clothing. The rejection of the clean-cut American image was symbolic of rejecting society and what it stood for. It was the same thing with paka (crazy) lolo (weed) and LSD. You have to understand that smoking dope every day and taking lots of acid wasn’t just a protest, it was the purpose. That being, trying to understand ourselves and see where we fit into a society we felt alienated from.

As I look back on it and reflect while writing this, the idealism of the early hippie movement was fairly superficial. In many cases that led to both escapism and hedonism. That’s a bit of a generalization because there actually were a lot of sincere people who were not trying to just escape, but who are actually very responsible and who worked very hard to try to make things better.

There were a lot of humanitarian minded young people working for the civil rights movement and trying to end the war. Their mutual desire to help others made them feel a strong sense of brotherhood among themselves. Of course, they used to get stoned together regularly, and this took on an almost ritualistic meaning because that activity helped reinforce their common bond. It came to be symbolic in the minds of the idealistic hippies of a concerned, liberal-minded mentality, as opposed to the beer drinking redneck with the “my country, right or wrong” attitude.

Then there came a time where there was an obvious split in what was happening. The superficial idealism went one of two ways: it either developed into real idealism or turned into hedonism. At that point, the hippie movement snowballed quickly. In a matter of a few years, tens of thousands of young people grew their hair out, dropped out of college, quit work, etc. They were attracted to the hippie lifestyle because it seemed different and exciting to them.

Although many of them were attracted at first by the struggle to end the war in Vietnam, etc., they just got swept away in the rising tide of hedonism.

There were protest songs against the war by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, etc., being played on the radio and they were very popular. So the youth identified themselves with this cause. But there was lots of dope around and it wasn’t just grass and acid anymore. People were using speed, smack, downers, sniffing glue – anything they could get their hands on. And drinking also became very widespread, which is a very significant turning point since the earlier, more idealistic hippies completely stayed away from alcohol. They equated alcohol with the mentality of a society they were trying to change.

Somehow or another the idealism got buried in the drug scene. As more and more of the youths got heavier into dope, they just lost sight of anything positive. They knew they couldn’t be perfectly satisfied with material luxuries, but instead of seeking out some higher purpose, they became like animals, just doing anything they wanted to.

Their philosophy was really just an outgrowth of the society they had supposedly rejected. In other words, they saw sense enjoyment and physical pleasure as the goal of life.

They were more or less saying, “If TVs, stereos, and cars can’t give it to us – what will”? So they got into trying anything and everything that felt good, regardless of the future consequences, either to themselves or others. Then, certain sayings became popular that perfectly reflected the absolute self-centeredness that hippie-ism was becoming. Sayings like, “if it feels good, do it” and “do your own thing (regardless of the consequences to others)”.

Rock music played a big part as well. There were different rock groups who had different “messages” and they had a tremendous influence over their audiences. On one hand, there were the Beatles who were singing about love, peace, and meditation, and who were personally involved, at that stage anyway, in the search for more meaning to life.

On the other hand, there were groups like the Rolling Stones and the Doors who sang about and glorified sex, drugs, anarchy, and absolute hedonism. Unfortunately, it was groups like the Rolling Stones and others who had the most influence. By this time, there was very little idealism left.

There is another angle by which the rock groups influenced the development of the hippie subculture as well. In the beginning, hippies used to get together at beaches and parks and sit in groups together, talking and playing music. These gatherings were called “Human Be-Ins”, and everyone who went was an active participant in making the event successful.

As the gatherings got bigger and bigger, rock groups started coming to play their music. This had the effect of cutting down on the creativity of the participants. Since rock music was completely overwhelming, it was impossible to sit around and talk or play music or exchange ideas with your friends anymore. You were not a “participant’, you were an “audience”.

You just sat there and got more stoned and listened to the band play, or you got up and danced to their music. The entire atmosphere was controlled by the bands and the kind of music they played.

Someone from the stage would say, “Take off your clothes”, and 500 or 1000 people, out in the audience, would do it!

The death knell for these gatherings came at a Rolling Stones concert in Altamont, California, where the Hells Angels (the notorious motorcycle gang) beat and stabbed a man to death right in front of the stage as the Rolling Stones sang their hit song, “Sympathy for the Devil”. After that, even the most optimistic of the hippies could see that the whole movement had turned into a horror show.

Those hippies who were really concerned about improving society and who weren’t just escapists, looking for cheap thrills, became a bit disillusioned with the concept of the hippie movement as a whole, or as a positive social force. They continued in their own ways either as individuals or as groups to try and implement positive changes. Many of them are still working from within society today for the betterment of society.

In many ways, the hippie movement affected the rest of society, although superficially. They affected clothing styles and hairstyles. They made long hair, ‘in”, and popularized bell-bottom pants and shoulder bags for men, etc. Probably the most obvious social change they brought about was public acceptance of drug use.

Before the hippies, only social misfits, hardened criminals, and the like, used drugs. Now, everyone in America was using drugs. Not every single person of course, but people from all walks of life. Drug use was now entirely socially acceptable and this hedonistic attitude spilled over to all parts of America and other parts of the world.

Toward the end of the hippie movement, the idealism and exuberance was gone and the emphasis was more and more on the individual.

This tendency to be more concerned about “my” own happiness, “my” pleasure, getting what “I” want, not doing anything “I” don’t want to do, influenced psychologists, psychiatrists, and other medical misfits.

They in turn used their influence to spread the “if it feels good, do it” philosophy of the hippies in a more respectable way than the hippies did. They got the “message” across to people in social positions and from certain walks of life that the hippies couldn’t reach.

Books like “Looking Out For Number One” and dozens of others like them appeared on the scene and became immediate bestsellers. These books emphasized getting what you want, and told the reader not to feel guilty in suppressing or exploiting others in search of “your” own happiness.

In short, the hippies laid the foundation for the “hedonization” of America, and then the “new-age” psychologists took over and turned hedonism into a refined art, making it socially acceptable.

The problem with hedonism is that not only is it temporary but leads to great frustration. Look at all the actors and the like that had “everything” that committed suicide out of frustration and misery.

The solution: take time to connect with God, meditate upon Him, dovetail your will with His, and you will experience true happiness and satisfaction. Take it from a former hippie that found that to be true.

Aloha!
To learn more about Hesh, listen to and read hundreds of health related radio shows and articles, and learn about how to stay healthy and reverse degenerative diseases through the use of organic sulfur crystals and other amazing superfoods, please visit www.healthtalkhawaii.com, or email me at heshgoldstein@gmail.com or call me at (808) 258-1177. Since going on the radio in 1981 these are the only products I began to sell because they work.
Oh yeah, going to www.asanediet.com will allow you to read various parts of my book – “A Sane Diet For An Insane World”, containing a wonderful comment by Mike Adams.
In Hawaii, the TV stations interview local authors about the books they write and the newspapers all do book reviews. Not one would touch “A Sane Diet For An Insane World”. Why? Because it goes against their advertising dollars.

Hippie philosophy: Only sense gratification works

Short-term sense gratification leads to crime

Violence in contemporary societies is increasingly linked with home crimes as men and women are inclined to resort to whatever means essential to secure desired goods.

A kid steals a candy bar due to the fact he would like to enjoy the taste a youthful guy breaks into a property to steal a new stereo because he wants to enjoy listening to the most recent tunes a drug addict sticks up a grocery retailer, shooting the proprietor, in order to get the money he needs to get “high” a bank executive embezzles a million bucks so he can run off with his girlfriend to take pleasure in daily life in the Bahamas a female murders her husband so that she can gather on his insurance policy. So what is the widespread motive behind these crimes? The response clearly is the need for sense gratification.

Criminologists and social scientists have nearly totally overlooked the fact that materialism is the root lead to of crime. False identification of the physique as the self prospects folks to believe that sense enjoyment will make them content and content and most crimes are directly or indirectly linked with the attempt to locate fulfillment and sense enjoyment.

Day-to-day, the mass media — television, radio, motion pictures, magazines, newspapers, billboards, and so on. — saturates us with the message that the goal of life is sensual pleasure, and that accomplishment in daily life depends upon the acquisition of people objects that make this kind of sensual pleasure attainable. From a extremely youthful age we discover that we should strive to be the controllers and enjoyers of all we survey. We are promised that such “Lordship” is the way to satisfaction and happiness.

The criminal is just trying to adhere to this message the ideal way he is aware of how. He is just attempting to be the central enjoying agent — the Lord — that he has been taught he demands to be. So he needs gorgeous ladies. He needs a flashy vehicle, fine outfits, a big residence, all varieties of kitchen appliances, a big soft bed, a stereo, a VCR, a big flat display Tv, a gold watch, a yacht — he demands, he requirements, he requirements!

Considering that no sum of sense gratification is ever adequate to satisfy us, we often come to feel that we need to have “more”. From the poorest person to the richest man or woman, from the street particular person to the person who lives in a mansion, absolutely everyone needs far more sense gratification and a lot more materials wealth. If you are poor, you feel you need a bigger Television to be happy if you are rich, you truly feel you need a new yacht or a far more high-priced car. Ample is never sufficient.

So we have crooks from all revenue levels. The bad crooks commit crimes so they can get what they think they need the rich crooks commit crimes so that they can get what they feel they need to have. The street crook robs people so he can buy some nice outfits, a pc, and possessions of that variety the corporate crook robs organizations so that he can acquire 50,000 acres of land or a new Lear jet.

The truth that there are at least as several “wealthy” criminals as there are “poor” criminals properly destroys the materialists’ theory that the root cause of crime is poverty and the answer to the crime difficulty is to make everyone rich. Clearly, if poverty had been the cause of crime, then no wealthy individuals would commit crimes. Besides, the phrase “poverty” is relative. A poor American, for example, would be a wealthy Ethiopian.

In fact, criminals, no matter whether wealthy or poor, are criminals not due to the fact they are poor or wealthy, but because they are in the illusion that materials things — materials sense enjoyment — will satisfy them. And, of course, the reason they are in this illusion is due to the fact they erroneously identify their entire body as themselves.

And simply because our materialistic society considers the acquisition of wealth and electrical power to be the purpose of existence, the much more wealth and power you possess, the much more “successful” you are deemed to be. If you are materially bad, you are deemed a failure in existence, whereas if you are wealthy and potent (irrespective of how you acquired this kind of wealth and energy), you are regarded a fantastic achievement. So, obtaining material wealth is not only crucial for your direct sense gratification, but also for your emotions of self-really worth.

In other phrases, you really feel only as valuable as the issues that you possess and handle. Lacking appreciation of your genuine worth as an eternal, blissful spark of existence, a kid of God — falsely identifying the temporary physique as yourself — you try to obtain emotions of self worth by the acquisition and manage of materials items. To attain such financial development, you could finish up engaging in illegal activity — in other phrases, you may well become a crook.

Nonetheless, if you comprehend that you are not your physique, then you will comprehend that a existence of false Lordship and sense gratification will not satisfy you. Consequently, you will not see the gaining of material wealth and energy as the purpose of your daily life. You won’t really feel that you need items that in truth you do not really need to have. For that reason, you won’t be driven to consider to get some thing, “at any cost”– such as the price of your daily life, a person else’s existence, or imprisonment.

The most ironic point about a daily life of crime is that it is primarily based on a lie — the lie of materialism. The purpose little ones in bad neighborhoods idolize the regional hoods is due to the fact they think that such hoods are pleased. They see that by material standards the crooks are “successful”– they’ve received nice outfits, jewellery, flashy autos, the respect of others, pretty women, plenty of income, and so on. But if such youngsters knew that materials wealth and false Lordship were not synonymous with happiness, then they wouldn’t see crooks as successful. So it is this big lie — the materialistic notion of accomplishment — that leads to a lot of youngsters to stick to in the footsteps of the hoods.

Youngsters clearly would not be so eager to emulate these hoods if they knew that crooks are not genuinely content. So whether you are an educator, a producer of films, television demonstrates, popular music, or just a plain old mother, father, elder brother, elder sister, aunt, uncle, and so forth., you will actually support the children if you try to educate them that material wealth and energy are not synonymous with accomplishment.

Of program, no matter what you and I do, the huge lie will continue. The influential materialists are not going to inform the reality. As an alternative of telling the youngsters that the hoods are not satisfied even though they are wealthy, the materialist tells them that one day the hood will get caught and be sent to prison, and then he will endure. In prison, they say, the crook will be bad and powerless.

So in this way they are saying that the criminal is satisfied as prolonged as he is not in prison. Now, children know that criminals are seldom caught, and people who are caught are out of sight — no longer noticed by the children. Therefore, the criminals who are noticed regularly by those who are not in jail are the ones who are “happy”. So as far as the youngsters are concerned, crime does pay out.

Critical sociologists, criminologists, and psychologists sit all around doing million-dollar studies searching for the root trigger of crime. But they just can not seem to discover it, even even though it’s staring them right in the encounter.

Materialism is the root result in of the crime issue. But for the materialists to acknowledge materialism as the root lead to of crime would be a self-indictment — like pulling out the rug from underneath their very own feet.

Materialism is the foundation of their own personal lives it is also their avowed ideology. This whole consumerist,” success”-oriented society is based on materialism. To acknowledge materialism as the lead to of crime is to acknowledge that the root trigger of crime can not be destroyed without cutting out the quite heart of our contemporary, hedonistic “civilization”.

Unable to accept the bankruptcy of their “religion” of matter worship, they plead confusion and ignorance, and request for much more funds to do more studies. The reality is that the crime price will continue to remain higher as lengthy as folks are ignorant of their true identity and are bombarded with the message that far more sense gratification will equal much more satisfaction and happiness. As long as accomplishment in life is gauged by the quantity of materials items amassed, the crime problem can’t be solved.

The large fee of crime is a radical problem, one particular that requires a radical remedy. We, the masses of folks, need to fundamentally alter the way in which we see ourselves, the world, other individuals, and the purpose of existence. Such a re-schooling of the masses by way of the colleges and media would certainly take numerous decades at least. Nor is it likely that the effective economic forces controlling the mass media would cooperate in the work to produce such enlightenment. Following all, these forces have a vested curiosity in retaining us materialistic. These financial forces want us to be in a position the place we are always trying to take pleasure in our senses, but are never ever entirely satisfied. If we stay in such a “wanting” situation, we will continue to be consumerist zombies — straightforward to manipulate and to exploit.

We would stop being excellent “markets” if we stopped viewing sense gratification, and for that reason the acquisition of materials wealth, as the aim of lifestyle. In brief, we would be lousy slaves, no longer responsive to the promptings of advertisers promising satisfaction to whoever buys their product.

So it is unlikely that the powerful propagators of materialism and hedonism will do an about-encounter just to assist decrease the crime fee. As a result, we can anticipate the crime fee to carry on to climb.

This could quite well lead to the breakdown of our democratic society. During the United States, the cries for more law and order are acquiring louder. We are exhausted of being prisoners in our personal apartments. We want to be able stroll the streets once more with no fear of being raped, mugged, or murdered. We want the criminals behind bars.

This is only natural. External, socially administered laws, as effectively as prisons and jails, are meant for these person members of society who do not have, or do not abide by, internal laws. If you cannot or won’t handle your very own sensual wishes and actions, then society has to phase in and do it for you. The want to take pleasure in some sense object could pressure you to steal one thing, but you can say no to that wish. If you are effective at controlling your wishes and actions, then there is no want for society to handle your entire body for you. But if you cannot control your wishes and end up stealing, then the officers of an external control enter the picture.

The want for external manage exists when there is no inner handle. The cry for improved law and purchase is a petition for improved external manage. And it has come about since of the alarming boost in the number of men and women who have no internal handle — i.e., the boost in the number of hedonists.

The get in touch with for a crackdown on criminals has justifiably frightened several civil libertarians. They see it as a move towards totalitarianism and fascism. They, like most of us, feel that a police state is at least as undesirable as a society teeming with criminals. They properly worry that in our attempt to fix a single issue, we may end up producing an even larger difficulty. Unfortunately, however, although most civil libertarians are conscious of the dangers of America’s turning out to be a police state, they can not keep it from occurring. This is simply because they have no answer to the crime issue.

The much more society becomes like a wild jungle, the louder globe the cry for law and buy turn into. The demand for purchase is just a organic and inevitable reaction to the chaos. There was no way to preserve totalitarianism at bay unless the degree of crime is brought under management.

A totally free, democratic society can exist only as prolonged as most of the people within that society have at least a pretty very good grip on their senses. If we have been all entirely satisfied internally and if we could all handle our minds and bodies, then there would be no need whatsoever for laws or external forces of management, such as police. Of program, such a excellent society is not possible and practical terms. But, the a lot more internal handle more of us have, the less want there is for external controls over us. Conversely, the significantly less internal handle we have, the a lot more external forces are necessary to management us. So our freedom and democracy depends upon our ability to restrain and handle our wishes and actions.

The all-pervasive message of hedonism continually eats away at our potential, and even our want, to handle our senses. The mass media has successfully manipulated men and women into feeling that anybody who tries to control his senses is a weirdo or an outcast.

The homosexual isn’t odd — the celibate is. The promiscuous 17-12 months-outdated who has had 3 abortions fits in, but the 17-12 months-outdated virgin does not.

We have been taught that “free” people are people who do no matter what they feel like anytime they feel like it. In traditional Orwellian doublespeak, the media has labeled the enslaved “free” and has even produced these “free” souls really feel pity for people of us who are “enslaved” by so-known as “inhibitions”, “hang-ups”, and the “outdated belief” that we need to management our senses instead of currently being controlled by our senses. In this way, hedonism erodes the really foundation upon which our democratic society stands.

Men and women think that poor folks commit a lot more crimes because they really do not have as much as they require and this is why there is a whole lot far more poor folks in our prisons.

All this demonstrates is that poor criminals cannot afford lawyers to keep them out of jail. In addition, the varieties of crimes that bad crooks engage in are quite different from people carried out by the “‘ rich” crooks.

Each middle and upper class person who cheats on his tax return is stealing as considerably or much more than a burglar. And the IRS estimates that there are literally hundreds of thousands of this kind of tax cheaters. They bilk the government out of more than $ one hundred billion a yr, yet these men and women just aren’t caught, that’s all.

There are also millions of middle and upper class white-collar criminals, who are also never caught. The emphasis in law enforcement just isn’t on such crimes. The poor criminal has to do his point on the street level, in which there is a greater chance of confrontation with these who would stop him.

For that reason, there is not only a higher possibility of his acquiring caught, but also a better potential for violence. And it is the violence that law enforcement agencies have a tendency to focus on. So just simply because there are much more “poor” criminals in prison doesn’t suggest that there are more bad criminals.

The pondering that most “poor” criminals steal out of a genuine physical need is nonsense. Do you genuinely feel that the guy who robs a liquor keep requires that income and buys a loaf of bread for his starving mom? That’s pure naïveté.

Such petty thieves invest the cash on flashy clothes, cars, jewelry, and, a lot more than something else, drugs like cigarettes, alcohol, pot, heroin, and crack.

Studies have shown that most crimes are committed by a fairly tiny amount of thieves, every of whom commits hundreds of crimes a 12 months. These guys are mugging and robbing mainly for dope money. Otherwise they would be wealthy, right?

If a guy commits an typical of one particular of two robberies the day and averages say $ a hundred a hit, you’re searching at among $ 40,000 and $ 80,000 of tax-totally free dollars a 12 months. In other words, the so-known as “poor criminal” who commits most of the street crimes isn’t poor at all – unless of course you call someone with a $ 40,000 – $ 80,000 yearly cash flow, bad.

You may possibly feel that it is their addiction to the drugs that leads them to commit the crimes, and if their use of medicines is due to getting bad and annoyed, then poverty is the root lead to of crime.

But the reality is that the frustration due to becoming poor might be an fast result in of their turning to drugs and hence to crime – but it’s not the root trigger. If poverty have been the root trigger, then individuals who are not poor to commence with would not be frustrated and would not be turning to drugs. But men and women who have been wealthy their complete lives are also annoyed and also into medication.

A bad individual may possibly be annoyed due to the fact he sees all the ads for the goodies, but he doesn’t have the cash to purchase them – so he requires medicines to overlook his disappointment. The rich individual, on the other hand, has the goodies that are supposed to satisfy him, but they do not. So he’s also annoyed and he turns to drugs to forget his misery.

By the way, the “rich” man or woman may also turn to crime in order to assist shell out for his drug habit. But, due to his place in society, his crimes are less noticeable, so he’s significantly less most likely to be caught.

In any situation, it’s clear that the root cause of crime – at least in the West – is not the lack of the fundamental necessities of survival but the lack of wisdom and inner spiritual fulfillment.

Aloha!

To learn far more about Hesh, pay attention to and read through hundreds of health relevant radio shows and content articles, and understand about how to keep wholesome and reverse degenerative ailments through the use of natural sulfur crystals and other amazing superfoods, please pay a visit to www.healthtalkhawaii.com, or electronic mail me at heshgoldstein@gmail.com or call me at (808) 258-1177. Considering that going on the radio in 1981 these are the only goods I began to promote because they perform.
Oh yeah, going to www.asanediet.com will enable you to read through various parts of my guide – “A Sane Diet For An Insane World”, containing a superb comment by Mike Adams.

Short-term sense gratification leads to crime

It no longer makes sense to ask who"s in charge of public solutions

Men and women in diverse organisations act like starlings, each and every doing work to influence and react to neighbours and the flock as a complete. Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA

When I was pretty junior leader, most of the time I could get my arms close to my function. Choices have been not complex – they may possibly have been challenging, but if I manufactured a selection I probably had the electrical power to put into action it. Occasionally, I miss the relative simplicity of individuals days.

Like a lot of doing work in the public sector, I now have a work where the correct response is no far more than a judgment get in touch with based on imperfect information even identifying the appropriate question is an art in itself. Added to that, producing and implementing any selection calls for input not just from me and my organisation, but the energetic involvement of other leaders in their organisations with their own priorities, teams and budgets.

And it is even a lot more complicated than that. Every organisation is total of people rubbing shoulders with every other, often rubbing each and every other up the wrong way. Organisations doing work to deliver substantial-top quality solutions across the public, third, and without a doubt private sectors are disparate communities of colleagues sharing at the least some frequent support end users and, at greatest, a typical objective and a shared dream.

And then there’s the added aspect of quick and continuous alter – the strategic landscape moving like a fluid system exactly where organisations are permanently responding to the ebbs and flows of the wider planet. We can influence this adjust, but neither wholly style nor hierarchically management it. People in diverse organisations act like a flock of starlings, every single, at times purposefully, sometimes unconsciously, operating as agents to influence and react to both their neighbours and to the flock as a whole. Asking “Who’s in charge?” really makes no sense.

This is the dilemma numerous leaders operating to deliver public services face. Given the enormity of demographic and fiscal issues they need to conquer, taking a systemic view of leadership is the only way to make genuine progress. Working across and beyond boundaries, being adaptable and super-conscious, employing intuition and innovation, relying on trial and error over charts and arranging, and solving truly hard troubles with clumsy solutions.

At the NHS Leadership Academy, we recognise these as the skills of the systems leader and we believe we have an important part in creating methods leadership across all sectors tasked with delivering public providers. That is why we have worked with our partners across social care, public wellness and regional government through the Leadership for Change partnership to create Intersect, a new programme that aims to recruit and create the up coming cadre of senior methods leaders.

There are previously examples of efficient techniques leadership in action. The Oxleas superior dementia support in south-east London is one particular – a collaboration among the NHS, social care and regional government which supports folks with dementia to keep away from admission to hospital and stay at property.

Nonetheless, we require to see much more of this. Leaders want to invest time to develop the self-awareness and self-assurance to perform at a entire methods degree, and organisations delivering public companies should invest in systems leadership instruction. This will support us meet the tremendous issues that the public sector faces.

Chris Lake is head of skilled advancement at the NHS Leadership Academy

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It no longer makes sense to ask who"s in charge of public solutions

Trust your pregnant gut: Appreciate calories with a dollop of typical sense

These days, with all the engineering and science behind us, it can look even more hard, even more fraught, than it was before all this know-how existed, to try and give birth to a wholesome youngster.

We are in danger of turning into paranoid, obsessed, neurotic mothers before we’ve even created a little one bump. And I can’t help but consider that this worry, anxiety and fretting will only hinder the baby’s odds of a healthy upbringing, after all.

Time to panic!

The minute I informed my GP I believed I was pregnant, I was bombarded with leaflets and printouts about what I could and couldn’t eat, the exercising I should and should not be performing and the vitamins I ought to and shouldn’t be taking.

My mind went into panic mode about what to do and what not to do, when actually all I essential was a bit of frequent sense.

This latest study is no exception. We are now advised that eating too significantly, or as well minor, during pregnancy could generate an unhealthy infant. Well, duh.

But – panic mode setting in – how do you know what the right about of meals to consume is? How do you know if a little bit of weight gain throughout pregnancy is healthier, standard, abnormal or unhealthy?

^{She seems to be healthy.Butis she?!}

I’ve just passed the 6-months pregnancy mark. Have I acquired too a lot? Too tiny? Oh god, how do I know? The review says that even staying slim – apparently healthier – during pregnancy ‘risks obese children’.

I have put on a bit of weight – I can inform by seeking at myself in the mirror. But I haven’t nevertheless ‘blown up’ as several mums have warned me about. I am thankful about that. But perhaps I need to be worrying about the truth I have not? What if that means my child is not wholesome? If I do or will not place on plenty of fat in the ultimate trimester, must I be worrying about it?

Apparently, yes I ought to be, according to this new review from the US research from the Kaiser Permanante Division of Analysis in Oakland, California.

“Gaining either as well minor or too significantly excess weight in pregnancy may possibly completely affect mechanisms that manage power balance and metabolic process in the offspring, such as appetite control and power expenditure. This could potentially have lengthy-phrase effects on the child’s subsequent growth and weight,” says Dr Monique Hedderson, a researcher on the study, in accordance to reviews.

So how do you know what the appropriate sum of fat to obtain is?

‘The rules’

Thankfully, the US’ Institute of Medication has produced guidelines for the level of fat obtain deemed ‘healthy’ during pregnancy, dependent on your excess weight in the initial place.

If you measure a healthier BMI at 12 weeks, then you need to be gaining about 25 to 35lbs in the course of pregnancy. If you have a BMI of thirty or much more, then you should seem to put on only 11 to 20lbs.

^{Source: Institute of Medication, Excess weight Achieve For the duration of Pregnancy, 2009}

This table is a helpful manual. And alleviates my worries (the worries that I did not have this time yesterday ahead of studying about this new examine). The UK’s overall health physique, Nice, mentions it inside of its own documentation on bodyweight acquire during pregnancy, although there is no equivalent guide for the Uk and as this kind of, it is not ‘official’.

At the minute in the Uk, pregnant women’s BMI is measured at the 12 week stage. If you are deemed normal, you’re not measured once again.

Tam Fry, honorary chairman of the Child Growth Foundation, thinks this is incorrect and desires to see BMI measured every trimester, to verify things are progressing as they must be.

He factors out that the NHS is not obliged to pass the US manual information onto sufferers, so largely, they are kept in the dark about acceptable fat gain.

People that were placing on bodyweight prior to they became pregnant, and who measured healthful at twelve weeks, are most at danger – as they could nonetheless be gaining excess weight and but no person is bothering to monitor it, he says.

“The issue is that making it possible for men and women to put on extra excess weight during their pregnancy is that they finish up contemplating they can eat for two. This indicates they’ll become heavy and the chances of them obtaining a c-part are elevated as it’s the only way they can squeeze the kid out.

“Dieting in pregnancy is not a great thought both, as it can endanger the unborn infant. The only way all around this is that medical doctors, midwives and dietitians should be giving you tips and monitoring you throughout your pregnancy to check all is on track.”

It truly is really worth pointing out that the degree of proper excess weight gain will fluctuate massively based on the patient their pre-pregnancy excess weight, their household background, any medication they are on, and so on. There is no ‘one size fits all’ method that dictates you need to consume X quantity of calories far more a day, when pregnant.

A pal of mine, for illustration, was advised by her GP to consume around 300 calories extra a day, on best of the 2,000 that ladies are typically suggested. But this figure will have been distinct to her situations and health-related background. It is not a blanket rule.

A lot more monitoring?

Mr Fry would like to see mothers-to-be monitored more than weight achieve throughout each and every trimester. This wouldn’t expense anything, let us encounter it.

Even so, Uk professionals do not, as a matter of course, give females information about the risks of weight problems and significance of fat management ahead of or following pregnancy.

I can confirm this is correct: I measured ‘normal’ at 12 weeks and I have not been weighed by my NHS midwife because.

Mr Fry thinks I need to be demanding that they measure my BMI following time I go in. “It is difficult to tell visually if you are putting on the proper quantity of excess weight or not,” he says.

And the NHS pays much less consideration if you remain slim all the target appears to be on whether or not you happen to be placing too considerably excess weight on, not regardless of whether you’re placing on as well little.

Crikey. So is this really but an additional issue to worry about then?

And but, and however. Offered that in the ‘normal’ assortment over, the prime most acquire of 35lbs is the equivalent of 2.5 stone, that is fairly a great deal of bodyweight, isn’t it? Certainly, I would be able to inform no matter whether I’d put on much more than two.five stone? In that case, once more, does not this just come down to typical sense? Do I truly want to demand they measure my BMI?

^{Maternity units have had to order particular operating tables, wheelchairs and other tools to deal with the rising number of obese mothers}

Equally, the smallest obtain in the ‘normal’ variety, at 25lbs, is one.seven stone. That appears about appropriate, such as infant excess weight.

Dr Geeta Nargund, of the Create fertility clinic in London, agrees with Mr Fry and thinks pregnant girls need to be far more active about managing their fat. They must actively seek advice from the NHS site, she says.

“Some girls may eat too minor simply because they are concerned about their figure and as well considerably weight gain. Some may possibly consume as well much since they believe they have to eat for two men and women. It is important to get tips before and during pregnancy from their GP about this,” she says.

Aren’t we forgetting some thing?

Her words make sense. But provided that I am really pregnant, I cannot support but feel we’re missing the apparent here. I feel alright. I am eating well adequate. I’m not taking or obtaining any tips from my GP about consuming. And that is Ok, isn’t it?

She laughs. “Nicely yes, it does come down to common sense. But seek out suggestions if you are concerned about it,” she says.

Ah ha! Lastly! A overall health skilled is allowing me to trust my gut (excuse the pun). Use my widespread sense. If anything isn’t going to come to feel proper, I will look for assist.

Till then, I’m *not* going to get caught up in the ‘science’ of it all and worry about factors unnecessarily.

There are far far better items to do with your time throughout pregnancy. (1 of which, includes the capacity to appreciate consuming. Heaven understands you can not take pleasure in a excellent drink, so foods is the only issue you truly can indulge in. And don’t consider that away from me!)

Are you worried about your bodyweight in the course of pregnancy? Are you ‘eating for two’ or consciously dieting? How do you know you’re consuming the proper volume? Join the debate on Twitter and send us your ideas @TeleWonderWomen

Trust your pregnant gut: Appreciate calories with a dollop of typical sense