Addiction

            Substance abuse is a common phenomenon in my extended family and among some of my friends. It always starts out with recreational use that leads to more frequent use and eventually addiction. It alters and takes control of the person it addicts, causing them to behave differently. They have relationships with people who they otherwise would not and make an array of other unwise decisions. Drug addiction has the power to ruin a life, and frequently it does.

            The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines a person suffering from substance abuse as having one or more of the following symptoms in a 12-month period: recurrent use resulting in failure to fulfill major obligations, recurrent use in physically hazardous situations, recurrent substance related legal problems, continued use despite interpersonal problems caused or exacerbated by substance (DSM-IV). I know people residing in many different places with different backgrounds who have experimented with drug use. Through my observations I have determined that social class, social support, race, gender, and location play a significant role in is what types of drugs a person decides to experiment with, weather or not they become addicted, and how their addiction plays out.

            The majority of the people I know who have suffered from substance abuse problems are my family members who reside in Los Angeles, California. They are a tight-knit part of my family who make a point to spend time together and be supportive of one another. Social support is understood to help prevent mental illness (Turner, 2010), but in their case it has not. Three out of the seven adults have been through drug addiction and one of the others has fetal alcohol syndrome. Substance abuse has immensely impacted all of their lives.

            My cousin Samantha was smart, fun, and full of potential in her younger years. When she was in high school her parents went through some turbulence in their relationship. Her father worked long hours and her mother decided to go back to school, so Samantha’s older sister Katherine was delegated much of the task of raising her. The family was financially stable but not emotionally stable. Samantha began using drugs in her late teens and over time began using stronger drugs more and more frequently. She started dating Alan when she was 27, and within about a year of meeting they decided to get married despite the family’s negative feelings towards their relationship. Soon after having a child Samantha went off the deep end with her drug use and behavior. She was dealing crystal methamphetamine, crack cocaine, and may have been selling herself into prostitution. Her family was constantly worrying about her, but there was little they could do. Everything they tried ended up in failure because she was not receptive to their help. Sometimes Samantha would disappear for weeks and even months at a time, which left the family worried about her well being and at times even worried that she could be dead. The family sent her to rehabilitation twice, but she took the “Amy Winehouse approach” to the rehab.  She was eventually caught for selling drugs and sentenced to two years in prison, after which she was mandated to go to a state-run rehabilitation facility. In the meantime Katherine took care of her child, as Alan was not fit to be a single parent. Samantha finally got clean because of the jail and mandatory rehabilitation sentence and her family’s unconditional support. While mandatory rehabilitation is not right for everyone, it did work for Samantha. She has managed to remain clean since then, which is wonderful. Unfortunately the consequences of her drug use put an immense strain on the family and will follow her for the rest of her life.

            Since Samantha got out of jail she had to deal with the struggles of integrating into her new life. Her family welcomed her back with open arms, but did not give her complete trust for a long time. With all the destructive choices she made throughout the years, she had to prove to them that she really changed and that she would not make decisions that would hurt them. Samantha loves her daughter and wants to be her true mother, but remains too irresponsible to raise her by herself. She is there for her daughter, but more as a friend than a parent. Katherine is still the one that makes her complete her responsibilities and makes sure her needs are met. Samantha’s daughter, along with many others who have witnessed consequences of Samantha's drug abuse, has used her as an example of what not to do in her life. She is a bright girl that I think will excel throughout her life, despite the difficulties that she faced in her youth. Samantha has not been able to find a good job because of having a felony on her record, but has persevered with a handful of unfulfilling jobs. On the plus side, she found new things to fill her emotional void that for so long she had used drugs to fill. Integrating into a drug-free life full of social responsibility was not easy for Samantha and she still has much that she can improve on, but it is admirable that she has come as far as she has.

            Katherine's daughter Ashley went through addictions to crystal meth and crack as well. It is likely that this was partially caused by Samantha’s addiction. Samantha’s addiction partially eliminated the family’s taboo of drugs. Also, as an older female in the family, she was a sort of mentor figure to Ashley. Samantha had influence over Ashley, whether she intended to or not. Because Samantha’s situation normalized drug use in the family, Ashley thought that it would be acceptable to experiment with the drugs. When Katherine found out about Ashley’s addiction, she did everything she could to stop her from doing drugs and eventually was successful.

            Samantha’s experience is a good example of the typical path of substance abuse. She first started using drugs to deal with emotional struggles, finding that the drug’s negative effects were more tolerable than the emotions that she was hiding from. She drifted away from her family who did not approve of drug use and into a community in which it was normalized. Because the community she was engaged in held no stigma against drugs or the other self-destructive activities that she became involved in, she got wrapped into a downward spiral. Her mental illness of addiction became so strong that it took precedent over everything else in her life, causing her to lose everything she had, time and time again. When her family put her into rehabilitation she didn’t complete it because of the power the drugs had on her and the fear that she could not defeat the drugs or live without them. Preventing relapse is perhaps the most difficult part of addiction, as Mark Twin eloquently explained in 1876 “To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know because I’ve done it a thousand times” (Owen). It literally took the governments force along with unconditional support from her family for her to get clean, which was a tortuously difficult transition. Numerous people follow a similar path of addiction whether it is with drugs, alcohol, spending money, sex, gambling or something else.

            Because breaking addiction can be such a difficult process, many people give in to smaller addictions to help them cope with the transition. When a person quits an addiction they may continue to get cravings after they quit or feel like they have a void to fill, and replace their previous addiction with a new one. In general, addictive personalities find it difficult to steer clear of addiction, but justify that it’s okay if they believe that it is a milder or more socially acceptable addiction than their previous one. In Samantha’s case, she replaced drug use with several boyfriends. Some people find that obsessive exercise is helpful in steering clear of their larger addiction (Reynolds, 2012). Such coping mechanisms are commonly used. Almost every addiction is at least slightly self-destructive and should be steered clear of if possible.

            How a person defines the severity of an addiction is socially defined and varies across cultures. It is a combination of how debilitating the addiction is, its social acceptance, the person's experience with the addiction, and personal beliefs. Someone may believe that a sex addiction is worse than a drug addiction because of their religious beliefs, even if the drug addiction is more debilitating to their daily life. How people and cultures view certain addictions differently affects their chance of becoming addicts.

            Certain people are biologically predisposed to addiction all across the world, but addiction rates vary through regions because of cultural norms, stigmas, and acceptances. Addiction can have an immense impact on an individual and their communities, such as Samantha and her family. Substance addiction is a tragic mental illness that should be taken very seriously. If we were to change our cultural norms about drug use, maybe it would not be so prevalent in our society.

Bibliography

DSM-IV. Retrieved November 9^th, 2012 from

www.csam-asam.org/pdf/misc/dsm_criteria_for_diagnosis.doc

Turner, J. R., Brown, R. L. (2010). “Social Support and Mental Health” Pp. 200-212 of Scheid, T. L., & Brown, T. N. A handbook for the study of mental health: Social contexts, theories, and systems. (2 ed.). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Reynolds, G. How Exercise Can Prime the Brain for Addiction. April 11, 2012. Retrieved on November 27^th at http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/11/how-exercise-can-prime-the-brain-for-addiction/?smid=pl-share

Owen, W. E. Comparing and Contrasting Marlatt’s (1985) Model of Relapse Prevention with Gorski’s Early Warning Signs Approach and Reviewing the Evidence for their Effectiveness.

Replogle, E. The Sociological Importance of Stressors. 2012. Lecture.

Goffman, E. Stigma. 1987.

Article Review

It has been a theory for a long time that older women are more likely to give birth to children with mental illness and developmental issues than younger women are. The article Father’s Age Is Linked to Risk of Autism and Schizophrenia, was written by Benedict Carey and published by The New York Times on August 22, 2012. Carey’s article reveals that in the cases of complicated neurological disorders, it is not the mother’s age that is the risk factor, but the father’s age. This conclusion is a huge breakthrough in science, but it is based off a single research study and there still needs to more research done to confirm this new information.

The science behind the conclusion that it the father’s age is a factor in the likelihood of a child developing neurological disorders is very logical. As men age, the number of sperm mutations steadily increases by about two every year, some of which cause complications and some of which do not. This is due to the frequent sperm cell splitting and the sperm’s susceptibility to environmental factors, which the female’s eggs to not undergo. The increasing number of autism and schizophrenia cases in the last few decades is partially a result of a larger population of aged fathers, and partially do to other contributing factors. The link between father’s age and risk of autism and schizophrenia is the first important and scientifically sound breakthrough in finding the causes of these complex mental illnesses.

There is still too little to known about the nervous system and human genetics, to fully understand the cause of complicated disorders. Even though the science makes sense, Father’s Age Is Linked to Risk of Autism and Schizophrenia is a news article and therefore should not be taken as absolute truth. News articles have been known to manipulate the truth in order to make more interesting stories. There is little known about genetics, and they often are wrongfully blamed as the cause of mental disorders. Genetic optimism can be seen in Father’s Age Is Linked to Risk of Autism and Schizophrenia, and therefore the article should be taken only as a gain of salt (Conrad 2001).

If the science in the article is factual and proven, then the next step for scientists is to find what the other contributing factors are. The risk factor of the father’s age only accounts for 20 or 30 percent of the cases. What accounts for the other 70-80 percent and why do the number of diagnoses continue to rise? Studies have proven that other popular theories, such as a mother’s age, and mercury in vaccinations, are not likely causes. Studies must continue to be done until a full understanding of the mental disorders has been achieved, if are ever going to determine the behavior or causes of complicated neurological disorders.

The information that a father’s age can cause complicated neurological dysfunctions may be a powerful tool to society. With this information we are more capable of understanding the complex mental diseases and disorders. It is a stepping-stone in which we can use to gain more information. With a better understanding we can take preventive measures, we may be able to design better treatment options, and hopefully integrate mentally ill people into society more proficiently.

~Lauren Berg

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/health/fathers-age-is-linked-to-risk-of-autism-and-schizophrenia.html?_r=1&ref=research

A Letter to Mother

A Letter to Mother

          The film A Letter to Mother illustrates the realistic story of a Jewish family in 1939. The mother struggled to take care of her family, as her husband could not maintain employment. The family had to face unfortunate event after unfortunate event. The first of which was the father’s decision to leave behind the family and move to America. He had good intentions of becoming successful and bring his family to live with him, but his plan did not go accordingly and caused much heartache with the family being torn apart. The oldest on went to war and died, but had a friend send a letter to his mother for him. The daughter got married and the youngest son was abandoned in America after his father died. The mother, who was horribly sad by being torn apart from all of her family, went to America to find her son and escape the harsh war conditions. This family illustrated many Jewish traditions. For one, I noticed that the men wore hats almost all of the time. This is common of Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish traditions. Another thing that I noticed was that Jews tended to only associate with each other, especially for business purposes. This is something that is described in Jews, Christian, and Muslims. The book also says that Jews were often not allowed to have many types jobs when the empire was under Christian rule. This is consistent with the movie, where not all could find employment and many of them had similar jobs. They also had much more hope of living a prosperous life in the United States, partly because Jews were not so criticized there as they were in Europe. There were many other interesting tidbits I noticed about the Jewish community in this era from the movie, but I lost my notes and do not remember all of them. Letter to Mother was a very interesting and educational movie. I enjoyed it very much and would recommend it to others. I think that this film should continue to be used to in religion classes in the future, as it is both intellectually stimulating and interesting.

Salmon Without Rivers: A History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis

Salmon Without Rivers: A History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis

Chapter 1: Hooknose

This chapter examines the evolutionary history of pacific salmon. The salmon contain life-history diversity that has been created by a series of geologic and habit changes over millions of years. Understanding of the salmon’s story is essential to the prevention of failing management of the fish, and to prevent their demise. There are seven species of salmon; five live in North America, two in Asia. The Pacific Northwest has undergone more habit and environmental transformation than any other region of the world. When trying to understand salmon, one of the first questions that may be asked is why they take on the enormous strain of going to the ocean and back to the river again. This is a difficult process for them, but has many benefits for salmon and for the river. It makes them strong enough to move up parts of the river that they otherwise could not, it allows them to produce larger quantities of offspring, and it brings nutrients into the streams and riverheads. During the ice age, salmon occupied rivers farther south, such as in California and Mexico. As North America’s climate got warmer it caused these areas to be less hospitable to the salmon, and the glaciers farther north began to melt. The salmon migrated northwards the rivers were not a good environment for them yet. Forests eventually flourished, and improver the habitat of rivers and streams of the Pacific Northwest.

The evolutionary perspective is a new way of looking at salmon for me, and I think that it is an important way of understanding how our actions affect them. I thought the information on the ice age was very interesting. It is amazing to imagine the release of Lake Missoula, and that the Portland area was covered with 200 feet of water. The Pacific Northwest was a hostile environment with lots of sediment, unstable water flow, and few refuges for fish. Only the strongest and most adaptable fish could survive. The saber-tooth salmon is an important part of salmon’s history. The extinction of this species shows that salmon are vulnerable to their changing environment, and that we need to be careful when we do thing that changes it.  This book seems to be much more scholarly and detailed than Salmon Nation. I think that reading this book will give me a stronger knowledge base of salmon and their relations to the world.

                                                                                                                              

Chapter 2: The Five Houses of Salmon

        Indigenous people have always treated nature with great respect.  It was commonly believed that all living things, from rocks to humans, were equal parts of community and must be treated with respect. Rituals, taboos and traditions became important to their relationship with the salmon, as it increasingly became a part of their diet. One of the beliefs of a group of Native Americans is that salmon are “super natural beings” living under five houses. When they were underwater they transformed into their human form, but each year they would turn to their silver form and gift themselves to the Indian people. Unlike modern American culture, “death did not signify human dominance over nature. Rather, it was understood as a gift of food or fur, given by the animal to the man.” These beliefs and practices were essential to their development of sustainable reliance on salmon. They had the capability of depleting entire salmon runs, but did not because of these beliefs and practices.

I really enjoyed learning about how the Native American myths and culture, and how they were so important to the health of the salmon run. Many nonindigenous people see the myths and taboos as ridiculous, but they were actually created through generations of experiences, and prevented mistakes from being repeated in future salmon runs. The human-salmon relationship was so different and better then. The salmon were caught on a smaller scale, but were an important part of the diet of many people. I really liked learning about their gift-based economy. It would be a much different place if our modern economy functioned like that! I think that we should take lessons from how the Native Americans fished, and try to apply their ways to modern fishing regulations.

Chapter 3: The Values for the Land and Water

This chapter compared the differences between the Native American’s relationship with nature with that of the Euro-Americans. The Native Americans had lived off the land for over 3000 years. During this time, they developed sustainable practices that put them in harmony with the natural economy. They still altered it, but in better ways than the Euro-Americans. When the Euro-Americans came into the region, they restarted at zero years of practice maintaining the natural economy. The Euro-American’s money driven economy has a goal of maximizing profits. This is much less effective at maintaining the natural balances than the Native American’s gift based economy because they are seeking more than what they need for their personal use. In the market driven economy, the capitalist in charge were often distanced from the effects of their business; “The social costs-depleted salmon and unemployed fishermen-were left for the local communities to absorb”. If the money-based economy is to remain productive, it needs to find a balance with the natural economy.

This chapter explained a lot of the things that we have discussed in class. It was interesting to read another perspective about it. The most interesting point made in this chapter to me was that the Native Americans had over 3000 years of experience to learn how to live in harmony with the local habitat, where the Euro-Americans were starting from scratch. Salmon went from being a central part of culture that was respected, to simply being a source of economic wealth. This was an unfortunate transition and caused the salmon and the Native American’s who were dependent on them to be devastated, which was seen as a necessary expense for the capitalists who used the fish as wealth.

      Chapter 4: The Industrial Economy Enters the Northwest

When Euro-Americans reached the great Northwest, they implemented many changes that had negative consequences on salmon. It all started when Captain James Cook bought furs from Native Americans and sold them for an enormous profit abroad. This sparked the interest of entrepreneurs and brought them to the area. The exposure to the money economy changed the native’s attitudes towards trade and lead to the demise of their gift economy. When the entourages of explorers like Lewis and Clark came into the region it brought an unforeseeable amount of commerce and change to the landscape. People wanted to get ahold of the valuable natural resources before others. This “successive interests, with their lingering power over the land and water” have been called the Lords of Yesterday” and hold power to cause the delay of development of a balance between the Euro-American’s industrial economy. These Lords of Yesterday that damage salmon include the fur trade, mining, timber harvest, grazing, and dams.

It was really interesting to read about the explicit examples of how each of these Lords of Yesterday damaged a salmon population. The part I found to be the most unacceptable was the irrigation that poured fish onto fields were they were left to dry up. Thank god that laws were enacted and enforced to put an end to that! It is crazy how government has done so little to prevent these things from having devastating consequences on the aqueous ecosystems. If the salmon did not have such astounding diversity, they would not be around today. As hatcheries continue to ruin this very survival mechanism that is keeping them around, I’m afraid that they will not continue to survive.

Chapter 5: Free Wealth

During their initial time of settlement, Euro-Americans bought salmon from Native Americans for consumption purposes only. After it was theorized that salmon could bring in more wealth than agriculture could in America, fisheries became more abundant. With the rise of industrial fishing, salmon had to undergo pressure from both fishing and destruction of their habitat from a variety of sources. Some planed on using Indians to catch fish for their canneries, but Hudson’s Bay Company did otherwise. The poor taste, among other reasons such as shortages of salt and barrels, caused the salmon industry to not flourish for many years. After the invention of canning, that changed. Canned salmon tasted much better and the demand for salmon increased. The regulation of fishing and canneries became more difficult. Canneries took advantage of the cheap price that they could get salmon for, as it was better for them to have too much than too little. There was too much salmon for the canneries to process and much of it was wasted. Some rotten salmon with maggots was actually canned. There was a need for regulation to prevent the waste of, and the eventual demise of salmon. It was left up the states to regulate it for a very long time, and they did not do well.

This chapter sparked up some questions for me. It said that there were many petitions and laws were passed in Oregon to regulate the fishing of salmon, but that they weren’t very effective. I signed a petition to stop gill netting the other day, and I want to know if that petition will actually do any good if it is passed. I also thought that it was interesting that the federal government did little more than threaten to intervene on the poor fishing practices. If the states have been doing such a horrible job at regulating the fishing, then why not just make federal legislation about it? The chapter does not really explain this. The poor salmon should mean more too people than to be treated as only a commodity. The creation of hatcheries with no scientific evidence of what it would do was an absurd decision of history. The worst part of history that this chapter brought to light again for me, is the creation of Indian reservations.

Chapter 6: Cultivate the Waters

The chapter Cultivate the Waters made it clear how ignorant and foolish humans have been regarding nature. Fish have been propagated by humans for about 230 years. Salmon have been around much longer than that. No one imagined that the management of salmon would end up the way it did, but through a series of ignorant decisions it became this way. Humans thought that they could control nature, and they were wrong. The establishment of hatcheries was an exciting time for many, with hopes of replenishing the diminishing salmon populations, introducing Pacific salmon to other regions, and feeding more people. They soon found out however, they can’t do as good of a job as nature does. With hatcheries becoming more common businesses, it made the transition to regarding all salmon as commodities easy. Hatcheries, which have never been started to begin with, are larger and more common now, even though we know their devastating effects.

It aggravates me how our country is run my money, and that money is more important than anything else. If they had taken the time and studied the salmon before they went and did all those thing to them, it would have changed a lot of things for the better. Also, we had listened to the wise suggestions people had to save one river as a salmon/nature preserve, we would be in a much better place. The cultivation of water has a lot of great purposes and made some people really rich, but it is not okay to do such things without scientific inquiries. Nature holds a delicate balance, and it is important to recognize that when we do things that have strong impacts on it. When constructing a dam for instance, it should be built where it has the least impact on salmon, weather it be farther up stream or there is a way to bypass it. I think that in some ways humans have become less ignorant throughout the years, as we have become more educated and have learned from past mistakes.

Chapter 7: The Winds of Change

The same main point is made in this chapter as the last: humans made ignorant decisions, money was more important than nature, and that the science was there but it was ignored. For quite awhile fisheries were managed without any trained fish biologists of scientific studies. When people did start to get degrees in fish sciences, management agencies did not hire. This is because the management agencies were so caught up and invested in the idea the cultivating fish was a good idea, and the people who actually studied the fish questioned that. A lot of people who actually knew what they were talking about made appearances throughout history, but the management agencies and government did not listen to them. Many myths and fallacies were still believed long after they were proved incorrect by science. Also, many of the recommendations that were made, were not implemented until many decades later.

It does not surprise me that the fish management agencies were so ignorant and ignored all the scientific information that they had. If there is one-thing humans have proved themselves to be good at, it is just that. The part of this chapter that I found to be the most interesting is that “The government saw the Pacific Northwest and the hydroelectric potential of its rivers as the solutions to the nations economic problems” during the great depression (pg. 169). This was a new piece of information to me that I really found interesting. I knew that there were a lot of dams that were built during that time period, but I did not realize that they were build out of economic desperation. I am sure that there was an alternative that they could have taken that would have been less destructive to the rivers, but I can understand the logic behind why they were build.

Chapter 8: A Story of Two Rivers

Different restoration strategies have been implemented throughout the years on a variety of different rivers. The two most important salmon rivers in the Northwest, the Columbia and Fraser River, are prime examples of these differences. Overfishing was a problem on both of the rivers, as well as issues related to logging. Fishermen on the lower Fraser River caught a lot of fish and left few for the Canadian fishermen and spawning. For a long time there were may attempts to create treaties between the Washington and Canadian fisheries, but were not passed for many years. After many diminishing salmon runs, Washington had a particularly bad run as the Canadians had their all-time high run on the Fraser. After this bad season, Washington finally gave in and signed a treaty with Canada to share the fish and restore the run. The Fraser River fishery management based their regulations more scientifically than the Columbia River management did. They were careful about dams, saving the salmon populations. The Columbia had several dams that were poorly built, which contributed in the loss of the coho population and the decline of the Chinook population. Their cultivist attitude towards salmon management was ignorant and destructive.

Particularly interesting to me was that these two rivers that are so close had such contrasting management methodology. It was true in both cases that money was more important than the salmon runs. It is quite ironic that in their attempts to make more money, they actually lost many millions of dollars in the destruction of salmon. The Canadians took a much better approach than the Oregonians, but just as the Americans did, they still logged and overfished. However, I appreciated that they based their decisions on science. The saying “ignorance is bliss” came to mind while reading this chapter. Americans were so sure that their tactics were working, they did not even try to evaluate their progress. I am glad that this has finally changed, and that we have qualified scientists contributing to the mission of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Chapter 9: The Road to Extinction

When the Endangered Species Act was created, it saved many salmon populations from becoming extinct. People were not surprised that the Sockeye and Chinook of the Snake River were put onto the ESA, but they were surprised that the Coho were. There was not a full understanding of why different populations of salmon were becoming extinct, but it was realized that it was related to human impact and development. When hatcheries were started, cultivists thought they could be self-sustaining and last forever. When the populations collapsed they released more fish, but numbers dwindled smaller each year. One year they had a giant run for reasons they did not understand. Many saw this as a success, including British Columbia, and more hatcheries were made and modeled after this “successful” hatchery. Hatcheries, which have been around since 1872, have been known to be detrimental to wild salmon for a very long time, but they continue anyway. Hatcheries were started in Newport to help bring sport fishermen into the area, but were not economically sustainable and had to shut down. The fish from these hatcheries were estimated to cost $5000 each.

The most interesting part to me was the reasoning why biologists continued to let fishermen to catch both wild and hatchery salmon. They did this because they did not realize that many wild salmon casualties happen before they make it to the ocean, and of the salmon that make it to the ocean a much higher proportion return to their spawning grounds than hatchery fish. Salmon Without Rivers was an excellent and very informative book. I learned a lot from it and found it to be of great value. Salmon hatcheries were thought to be the key to restoring fisheries for far too long. Some changes have been made towards the good, but still not enough has been done. At least it has become common knowledge that hatcheries are not an acceptable replacement for the stresses humans put on the salmon and ecosystems. It is essential that the remaining biodiversity of salmon be protected, if salmon are to survive.