“This is a leaderless movement, so they can’t just come after one leader.”
Democracy Now! • Nov 23, 2022: The situation in Iran is “critical” as authorities tighten their crackdown on the continuing anti-government protests after the September death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of the so-called morality police. United Nations human rights officials report Iranian security forces in Kurdish cities killed dozens of protesters this week alone, with each funeral turning into a mass rally against the central government. “The defiance has been astounding,” says Middle East studies professor Nahid Siamdoust, who reported for years from Iran, including during the 2009 Green Movement, and calls the protests a “nationwide revolution.” Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs on over 1,500 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream at https://democracynow.org Mondays to Fridays 8-9 a.m. ET.
TED • Jan 25, 2013: Leslie Morgan Steiner was in “crazy love” — that is, madly in love with a man who routinely abused her and threatened her life. Steiner tells the dark story of her relationship, correcting misconceptions many people hold about victims of domestic violence, and explaining how we can all help break the silence. (Filmed at TEDxRainier.) TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design — plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more. Find closed captions and translated subtitles in many languages at http://www.ted.com/translate
The Sagittarius New Moon reminds us: if we reach for the sky, we can achieve whatever we wish. There’s the chance to aim high, to put ourselves out there — that we’ll generally recognize more available to us, than when we’re only focused close-up on the flat horizon.
The New Moon sits alongside Venus and Mercury, also in Sagittarius, emphasizing how these energies and ideas extend into a range of areas. Our relationships, our money, creative impulses, and areas of taste are all in the spotlight. The same is true for how we express ourselves, how we think, what we mull over, and who we brood about.
There may be prompts to reach out to a wider circle of friends and acquaintances, work colleagues, or other significant contacts. Whether single or hoping for greater connection in an ongoing relationship, a new phase in romance and fresh possibilities in love may arise. With Sagittarius illuminated, we move away from sameness and head towards more exploratory and exciting territory! This can cover quite a range, of course, but could include contact with someone from another culture or even just spicing up the romantic calendar through new activities. Whatever we focus on, the impetus is to expand and go beyond the known territory.
Since Mercury features in the mix, this could refer to braving a conversation we’ve never had before. Perhaps we bring up a particular subject now because the time feels right, or even just because something new has come into view, which prompts focus on a different subject matter. At the more mundane level, maybe it is literally feeling ready to join a drama group or opera society, or getting involved in comedy or photography! This may be a way of making new social connections, as well as enjoying a fresh agenda — or even providing a chance to share a new interest with someone whose company we enjoy.
An even closer aspect exists in the New Moon’s trine to Jupiter, close to Neptune in Pisces. Given that trines often involve the same elemental triplicity, this may not be obvious at first, since Jupiter is at a late degree of water sign Pisces and the Sun and Moon are in an early degree of fire sign Sagittarius. But in terms of orbs, it’s really quite close (less than three degrees) and maybe there’s something significant in the dissociate, out-of-sign connection.
In other words, whilst the Sagittarius Moon is fiery and forthright, the planets in Pisces emphasize a more fluid, wavy energy. Water can move in lots of ways, of course. But the double bodied nature of Pisces suggests two channels — literally, two fish swimming in opposite directions. So whilst we invest energy in some areas, we also withdraw it in others. Perhaps we don’t have to get stuck on a plan where we’re focused on going full speed ahead — if we get cold feet at the last minute, we can duck out! We can summon the courage to take a big step forward in our lives and the permission to change our minds in the early stages of progress, should things not feel quite right. Either way, with mutable signs emphasized, we do have choices open to us!
A sextile of the New Moon to Pluto is also a part of this lunation. Again, it’s one that could be easily missed since Pluto is in the neighboring sign of Capricorn but not in a similarly early degree to the Moon. It might be more easily recognizable if, for a moment, we imagine that the Moon was actually around 26° Scorpio! The separating aspect suggests that the Plutonic energy is fading away, hinting that our moment to terminate something is coming to pass, or that we have done enough and created an ending that needed to occur. With some deadwood out of the way, we can focus our sights on something new.
This article is from the Mountain Astrologer by Diana McMahon Collis
Our little book club was established in 2019 for lovers of books with an edge, a bit of notoriety or infamy …
The Banned Book Club celebrates books from all over the world that have, at one time or another, been back-listed, banned, burned or branded (I do love a bit of alliteration). It’s great to look at these books, some written over 100 years ago, with a more modern mindset and get an understanding of how much we, as a global national have changed, how societal norms have changed (or not) … how would we have coped living +in intolerant eras where freedoms and liberties were in short supply for many.
To date, we have read such classics as:
Lolita
Lady Chatterly’s Lover
The Naked Lunch
A Clockwork Orange
Brave New World
Go tell it on the Mountain
The Catcher in the Rye
Animal Farm
Fahrenheit 451
Slaughterhouse Five
Master and Margarita
All Quiet on the Western Front
To Kill a Mocking Bird
Lord of the Flies
American Psycho
The Naked Lunch
Tropic of Cancer
Ulysses
The Bell Jar
The Well of Loneliness
The Ginger Man
Maus
King Lear
Speak
Letty Fox – Her Luck
With so many boundary pushing authors, we believe this list will continue for some time yet … jump on board and see where it takes you!
While its literary value has been questioned, and many of its values now appear outdated, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness still holds a place as a beacon for sexual self-discovery, writes Hephzibah Anderson in BBC Culture’s Banned Books series.
When a book has been banned on grounds of obscenity, a reader may be forgiven for coming to it with certain expectations. In the case of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, those expectations are decidedly misleading. For all the clasping of hands and flushing of cheeks that fill its nearly 500 pages, this is no Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Both were published in 1928 and subsequently banned, but whereas DH Lawrence described his protagonists’ trysts in vocabulary that would still necessitate asterisks here, Hall stops at the bedchamber door. Aside from a kiss that is “full on the lips, as a lover”, the coyly phrased “that night they were not divided” is as racy as The Well of Loneliness gets.
The controversy of course stemmed not from what was being done so much as who was doing it with whom. If Lady Chatterley caused a scandal by showing lust to be no respecter of class boundaries, Hall’s novel was still more shocking because its protagonist, despite being named Stephen Gordon, is a woman, and her supposedly masculine proclivities extend far beyond her name. She weightlifts and refuses to ride side saddle; she gets her clothes made by a tailor rather than a dressmaker and longs to cut her hair short; and from a young age she’s prone to unusually intense feelings for other women.
Hall dressed in men’s fashion, such as trousers, monocles and hats (Credit: Getty Images)
In early adulthood, those girlish crushes blossom into a torrid affair with a bored American housewife, Angela Crossby. After Stephen’s mother, Lady Anna, finds out and banishes her from the family home, Stephen becomes a writer and travels to Paris, where she’s taken under the wing of a lesbian salonnière. Later, she serves in the ambulance corps during World War One and falls for fellow servicewoman Mary Llewellyn – she from whom Stephen will be “not divided”.
The novel chronicles her nascent understanding of differences she’s sensed in herself for as long as she can remember – differences dubbed “queer” behind her back. However, what truly sealed its fate when it landed in the dock at Bow Street Magistrates Court mere months after publication is the case it dares to make for recognition and tolerance of Stephen’s sexuality. Hear her plea at the novel’s fevered end: “Rise up and defend us. Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!” Not only is this a novel that strives to humanise the experience of outcast lesbians, it also argues for equality.
For generations of women – and men – on their own difficult passages to sexual self-discovery, The Well of Loneliness became a beacon
In 2019, newly revealed papers from Hall’s archive at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center showed that thousands of readers had written to her to protest the novel’s ban. “It has made me want to live and to go on,” wrote one. Unlike male homosexuality, lesbianism wasn’t in fact illegal in the UK in 1928, though that position should not be mistaken for tolerance. In fact, Stephen’s prayer was destined to grow only more radical-seeming for some decades to come, and for generations of women – and men – on their own difficult passages to sexual self-discovery, The Well of Loneliness became a beacon.
Speaking in a recording for the Hall-Carpenter Oral History Archive, a reader named Rene Sawyer, who was a teenager when the book was finally republished in 1949, explained its importance: “To me it was my bible. To me: it had every aspect of tenderness, of love, of heartache, of anguish, of problems – physical and mental problems – it had everything in that book. Which for me was a lifeline at that time.”
If the book’s historical and cultural significance is unquestionable, its text inevitably feels dated almost a century on. There’s Hall’s language, for starters. The first edition carried an “appreciation” by her friend Havelock Ellis, the sexologist whose theory of “sexual inversion” she supported, and his word “invert” – until then restricted to scientific literature – appears throughout Stephen’s story.
Hall described herself as a “congenital invert” – a phrase taken from the writings of Havelock Ellis and turn-of-the-century sexologists (Credit: Getty Images)
Also jarring is the apologetic way in which Stephen’s sexuality is framed, and the sheer pessimism surrounding Hall’s depiction of gay life. As a devout Catholic, it was no coincidence that she named her protagonist after the first Christian martyr, and ultimately, she has Stephen embrace drastic self-sacrifice in her love life.
The novel has been slated, too, for its limited depiction of lesbianism as being so determinedly butch, it might almost seem a form of heterosexuality. And it’s been called bi-phobic for the way it depicts Mary Llewellyn, who has relationships with men as well as with Stephen, and misogynistic for the way in which it denies her any say in her own future. Its descriptions of gay men, meanwhile, read like crass caricature. There’s also its racism and classism, which can be shocking to encounter in a text that’s gone down in literary history as being so radically progressive.
Pulp fiction
Nor is there any getting away from the fact that this is simply not great literature. The book is long-winded and full of stilted dialogue. Change a few pronouns and in some ways, it resembles the pulp romances of its era. Writing in The Times in 2008, Jeanette Winterson didn’t mince her words, declaring that “The Well of Loneliness is one of the worst books yet written”.
As with other banned books, this is a novel whose status is intrinsically linked to its having been censored. As Professor Laura Doan, who co-edited Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, tells BBC Culture, “In a way, the function of The Well of Loneliness is to convince you that lesbianism matters – lesbianism matters so much that the government can ban us and silence us, and that works very well to put you on the cultural map.”
In recent years, however, discussion of the novel has been turbocharged by fresh debate. This time, the controversy stems less from its content than from the extent to which we choose to view it through the lens of 21st-Century gender identity politics. A woman who dresses like a man, goes by a man’s name, and is described as being “midway between the sexes”: could it be that one of the world’s most famous lesbian novels has all along been a trans novel? Whatever you conclude, there’s no denying that this book continues to challenge received beliefs and to polarise readers, sometimes in ways that not even its author could have anticipated.
Hall was with her partner Una Troubridge for many years; the two collected Dachshunds (Credit: Getty Images)
Born in Bournemouth on 12 August 1880, Marguerite Radclyffe Hall did not have an easy childhood. Her wealthy, philandering father left the family when she was a baby; her mother, an American who’d already been divorced once before and was prone to violent outbursts, rejected her daughter’s boyish ways. She later remarried an Italian singing master, and there are hints that he abused Hall.
At the age of 21, Hall came into a substantial sum of money from her father, giving her the security and freedom to leave home. She’s said to have written poems and songs from the age of three, and in her twenties, published some books of poetry. She was encouraged by her first long-term lover, amateur singer Mabel Batten, to try her hand at short stories, and was then persuaded by a publisher to write a novel. Her first, The Unlit Lamp, was published in 1924. Two years later, her fourth, Adam’s Breed, won a clutch of prizes and sold 27,000 copies in its first three weeks.
Its success emboldened her to risk writing The Well of Loneliness. By then, Batten had died and Hall was in a relationship with Batten’s cousin, Una Troubridge. The pair were as “out” as it was possible to be in 1920s England – a life made easier, undoubtedly, by the privileges of wealth and class, but there were furtive elements to their existence all the same. Troubridge supported Hall’s decision to publish The Well, and in the spring of 1928, Hall wrote to her publisher, Jonathan Cape, to warn him: “I have put my pen at the service of some of the most persecuted and misunderstood people in the world”. She added: “So far as I know nothing of the kind has ever been attempted before in fiction”.
The Well of Loneliness was eventually published in 1949 (Credit: Alamy)
Is it autobiographical? Despite very different childhoods, there are certainly physical similarities to be spotted between Stephen and her creator: both are tall and “handsome in a flat, broad-shouldered and slim-flanked fashion”. Stephen is her protagonist’s given name – having been convinced she’d be born a boy, her father decides “Stephen” will work equally well for a girl – but from her mid-twenties, Hall was known to her intimates as “John”, a nickname given her by Batten. Like Stephen, she wore men’s clothes.
The novel garnered positive reviews in The Times Literary Supplement and Time and Tide but no critic was as convinced of its potency as James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express. Certain that it would contaminate and corrupt English fiction (his words), he wrote an article damning it as “unutterable putrefaction”, notoriously declaring: “I would rather give a healthy boy or girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel”. The book should be withdrawn, he thundered, or else the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, must act to suppress it.
On trial
It was sensationalist journalism but Joynson-Hicks was a man who had even found cause to object to a revised version of The Book of Common Prayer. He threatened Cape with criminal proceedings if the book wasn’t withdrawn. Cape complied, though not without first licensing the rights to Pegasus Press, an English language publisher in France. Inevitably, copies found their way back into Britain and a trial ensued – with the Home Secretary claiming the novel “supports a depraved practice and that its tendency is to corrupt, and that it is gravely detrimental to the public interest”.
Among the writers who rallied to the novel’s defence were EM Forster, Vita Sackville-West and George Bernard Shaw, though not all were convinced of its artistic merits. Virginia Woolf, for instance, thought it a “pale tepid vapid book” and dreaded having to take the stand for it. She needn’t have worried: the magistrate, Sir Chartres Biron, ruled that authors could not testify as literary merit was irrelevant. On 16 November 1928, he found the novel to be obscene on the basis that it had the ability to corrupt, ordering its immediate removal from circulation. An appeal the following month similarly failed, with judge Sir Robert Wallace labelling The Well as “more subtle, demoralising, corrosive, corruptive, than anything that was ever written”.
The judgements did nothing to dent support for Hall, who appeared in the courtroom wearing a leather driving coat and Spanish riding hat. She was described by the Daily Herald as “well-chiselled”, and at the conclusion of the obscenity trial, according to the Daily Express, two women approached her from the crowd, took her hand and kissed it.
Hall’s legacy endured – her photo appeared in a 1982 Pride Parade in New York City (Credit: Getty Images)
Suppression would be the making of both the novel and its author’s reputation and yet in the decades since, this supposed Sapphic survival guide has continued to attract plenty of criticism from diverse quarters. In the 1970s, for instance, it became the focus of a backlash from Second Wave feminist critics for its patriarchal worldview. And by 2017, Winterson still hadn’t warmed to it – although she chose it as the book that helped her come out, and argued that “A book can be bad and still have a place in history”. Writing this time in The Guardian, she asserted: “The Well reads like a misery memoir long before they were invented. It’s the fictional story of Stephen Gordon and her struggles with the fact that she thinks like, acts like, loves like and wants to be a man. Radclyffe Hall had no idea that sexuality is a spectrum, not a binary”.
Hall’s beliefs definitely complicate the book’s legacy. Contrary to what might be expected of a pioneering lesbian author, her politics were reactionary at best. As an expat living in Italy in the lead-up to World War Two, she not only supported Mussolini’s Fascist government, she also supported its censorship – of books. And if Victorian womanhood wasn’t for her, she fully supported it for others, believing that a woman’s place was in the home.
For Professor Doan, much has changed in terms of how the novel is discussed. “When you read it today you do feel that there’s a lot in it that makes you feel pretty embarrassed by it,” she says, noting that its racism, for instance, was scarcely talked about even a couple of decades ago.
These days, she prefers to direct anyone interested in learning more about Hall to Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself, a short story written in 1926 in preparation for The Well. This story holds the key to the novel’s real meaning, Doan believes. “To me, that story is about a human who is trapped in the wrong body, has been designated as a female and doesn’t feel like a female and has a fantasy of becoming a male. There’s no desire or love or romance in that story, and it made me realise that The Well of Loneliness isn’t about love between women either.”
Doan says she was never really convinced that The Well was a lesbian novel. As she explains, “It would be a better text to think of in the context of trans history. The publishers would be missing a commercial opportunity right now if they didn’t try to push its cultural meaning to the trans community. If they want to identify a text that is at the start of the awareness in culture of the possibility of a trans existence, it’s got to be The Well of Loneliness.”
So should we be using a different set of pronouns for Hall and Stephen? Some scholars, including Jana Funke, associate professor of English and Sexuality Studies at the University of Exeter and editor of The World and Other Unpublished Works by Radclyffe Hall, now use gender-neutral pronouns for both author and protagonist.
Maureen Duffy takes a different view, seeing Stephen’s gender nonconformity as a function of Hall’s discomfort with her own lesbianism. Writing in her introduction to the most recent Penguin Modern Classics edition, Duffy uses a pivotal scene from the novel to make her point: defending herself to her mother, Stephen justifies her sexual intimacy with Angela Crossby by explaining that she’s “never felt like a woman”. It’s an argument Hall insists upon, Duffy suggests, “in order to justify her own very active homosexuality, which she embraced in spite of her espousal of Roman Catholicism”.
It’s worth noting that even readers for whom Hall clearly had a desire, however latent, to transition, The Well of Loneliness is by no means a straightforward text. Oliver Radclyffe, the trans author of a forthcoming monograph, Adult Human Male, changed his surname in homage to Hall. He’s written on the website Electric Literature about how his feelings for the book changed as he undertook his own journey from Englishwoman raising four children in the Connecticut suburbs, to femme lesbian, to trans man. As he puts it, “it looked like Radclyffe Hall had not only been a gay rights activist but also a patriarchal misogynist with consensually-ambiguous domination issues”.
Ultimately, it isn’t possible to know whether or not Hall would have identified as transgender – a term not coined until much later – and labelling this long-dead queer person as such is innately problematic. What is certain is that more than 90 years after it was banned, this decidedly flawed piece of literature continues to make readers think anew. As Doan says, “We’re confronting its complexity, and that can only be a good thing.”
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Sarah JohnsonTue 22 Nov 2022 02.45 EST (TheGuardian.com)
In the village in Kenya where Swiry Nyar Kano (not her real name) grew up, sex and diversity weren’t talked about much.
The topics didn’t come up in conversation with her parents, and at school she was taught about human anatomy and “sexual immorality”, and told that homosexuality was a sin.
“I grew up in society where sex was about having babies and that was about it,” says the social media influencer. “Sexuality was never mentioned. Nobody ever talked about it so I started seeking answers for myself.”
Swiry Nyar Kano, writer and social media influencer. Photograph: Ayimba Rogers/Courtesy of Swiry Nyar Kano
She read books, and researched sexual traditions in Africa, and then made three TikTok videos about what she had learned for her 1m followers, as well as an Instagram post. Together, these have been viewed more than 130,000 times and generated hundreds of comments.
Swiry’s work was part of a wider campaign to introduce the concept of pleasure into sexual and reproductive health and rights in Africa, run by the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), one of the biggest providers of sex education globally.
Its digital campaign Treasure Your Pleasure was aimed at young adults and ran in three languages (French, Portuguese and English) from March to November over TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. It featured videos from influencers from all over Africa, Twitter chats, and pop art-style graphics with sex-positive messaging posted on its Instagram page.
The campaign reached 9 million people and added 40,000 new followers to IPPF Africa digital platforms. It drove 330,000 people to the campaign’s landing page on the IPPF website, which features a quiz, downloadable stickers for use on social media and evidence-based research. The IPPF regional office in Asia now hopes to run a similar campaign.
It was a marked departure from the usual narratives deployed in sexual health programmes. Mahmoud Garga, who led the campaign, says: “We talk about sexually transmitted infections, mortality, morbidity. We talk about HIV and unwanted pregnancies. It’s always fear-based.”
He adds: “People are always left with guilt and shame and feeling [sex] is something bad they shouldn’t be doing. It’s a taboo. We wanted to shift the narrative and do a sex positive campaign.”
Including pleasure in sexual health teaching has a positive effect on condom use. Photograph: Courtesy of IPPF
IPPF is one of a wave of organisations introducing the concept of pleasure to sexual and reproductive health and rights. It collaborated with the Pleasure Project, a group of activists who, on Valentine’s Day published, with the World Health Organization, a review about the added value of incorporating pleasure into sexual health interventions. The review showed there was a significant positive effect on condom use and more people were encouraged to access health services.
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Now 19 organisations around the world are using their “pleasure principles”, designed to help people embark on the journey towards a sex-positive, pleasure-based approach to sexual health; 12 are based in the global south.
As well as the Treasure Your Pleasure campaign, the Pleasure Project has worked with AmplifyChange, a fund that supports civil society organisations that advocate for improved sexual and reproductive health and rights in their communities.
Among them is Young and Alive in Tanzania, which in April started hosting two-hour group sessions with 18- to 24-year-olds, encouraging them to talk about pleasure and sex in a positive way.
“For years, we’ve been taught about sex in a negative way,” says Innocent Grant, the programme director for Young and Alive. “When you think about sex, you think about teenage pregnancy, HIV and Aids, and STIs. This approach didn’t work for so long in Tanzania. We still have high rates of teenage pregnancy, we have high rates of HIV rates among young people, and gender-based violence as well. Maybe we need to change the way we do sex education.”
While it’s too early to see any real impact, Grant says so far the discussions have been lively and encourage participants to understand and speak openly about diversity, sexual preference and consent.
The International Family Planning conference 2022 took place 14-17 November in Pattaya City, Thailand. Photograph: Courtesy of IPPF
The Pleasure Project has also recruited 20 fellows – people around the world, from Chile to the Philippines, working on different projects around pleasure-inclusive sexual health.
This year’s is the first time that pleasure has featured in the programme of the International Family Planning conference, which took place in Thailand last week. Overall, pleasure has been featured in fewer than 1% of summaries of papers at international Aids conferences, according to an analysis by the Pleasure Project.
By ignoring pleasure, we’ve made our programmes a lot less effective. Fewer lives have been saved, fewer condoms used
Anne Philpott, Pleasure Project
The tide is beginning to turn but it has been a struggle, says Anne Philpott, public health professional and founder of the Pleasure Project. She created the Pleasure Project in 2004 because of a “bubbling worry in my mind that pleasure was not being addressed in international policy forums or, in general, in sex education”.
Not talking about arguably the key reason people have sex is making sexual and reproductive health programmes weaker and less empowering, she says. “By ignoring pleasure, we’ve made our programmes a lot less effective. Fewer lives have been saved, fewer condoms have been used.”
Philpott has had a range of reactions to her work since she started the Pleasure Project. Some people were scared, others made assumptions about her own sexuality, and some thought the programme would harm her career.
“I think people are scared that, if pleasure – particularly female pleasure – is unleashed, it will be uncontrollable. It’s like it won’t go back in the box,” she says. “There is a lot of fear around female pleasure.”
Stephan: As we all listen, read, and watch the latest mass murder in the U.S. are you noticing that almost no politicians are talking about serious gun control? We have had 601 mass murders since 1 January 2022 that have killed almost 40,000 people so far, all involving guns, yet nothing serious is happening about military-style weapons like AR-15s. It has gotten to a point that one faces a measure of risk going anywhere to anything where a group of people are gathering, and the risk goes up significantly if it is a non-Christian religious gathering, an LGBTQ gathering, or something attracting non-Whites.
Andrew Huberman Jun 6, 2022: My guest this episode is Dr. Paul Conti, M.D., a psychiatrist and expert in treating trauma, personality disorders and psychiatric illnesses and challenges of various kinds. Dr. Conti earned his MD at Stanford and did his residency at Harvard Medical School. He now runs the Pacific Premiere Group—a clinical practice helping people heal and grow from trauma and other life challenges. We discuss trauma: what it is and its far-reaching effects on the mind and body, as well as the best treatment approaches for trauma. We also explore how to choose a therapist and how to get the most out of therapy, as well as how to do self-directed therapy. We discuss the positive and negative effects of antidepressants, ADHD medications, alcohol, cannabis, and the therapeutic potential of psychedelics (e.g., psilocybin and LSD), ketamine and MDMA. This episode is must listen for anyone seeking or already doing therapy, processing trauma, and/or considering psychoactive medication. Both patients and practitioners ought to benefit from the information.
(Contributed by Larry Lawhorn)
Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic: How Trauma Works and How We Can Heal From It
A Journey Toward Understanding, Active Treatment, and Societal Prevention of Trauma
Imagine, if you will, a disease—one that has only subtle outward symptoms but can hijack your entire body without notice, one that transfers easily between parent and child, one that can last a lifetime if untreated. According to Dr. Paul Conti, this is exactly how society should conceptualize trauma: as an out-of-control epidemic with a potentially fatal prognosis.
In Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic, Dr. Conti examines the most recent research, clinical best practices, and dozens of real-life stories to present a deeper and more urgent view of trauma. Not only does Dr. Conti explain how trauma affects the body and mind, he also demonstrates that trauma is transmissible among close family and friends, as well as across generations and within vast demographic groups.
With all this in mind, Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic proposes a course of treatment for the seemingly untreatable. Here, Dr. Conti traces a step-by-step series of concrete changes that we can make both as individuals and as a society to alleviate trauma’s effects and prevent further traumatization in the future.
You will discover:
• The different post-trauma syndromes, how they are classified, and their common symptoms • An examination of how for-profit health care systems can inhibit diagnosis and treatment of trauma • How social crises and political turmoil encourage the spread of group trauma • Methods for confronting and managing your fears as they arise in the moment • How trauma disrupts mental processes such as memory, emotional regulation, and logical decision-making • The argument for a renewed humanist social commitment to mental health and wellness
It’s only when we understand how a disease spreads and is sustained that we are able to create its ultimate cure. With Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic, Dr. Conti reveals that what we once considered a lifelong, unbeatable mental illness is both treatable and preventable.
This group deals with conflict transformation, peacebuilding and security and related issues at local, regional and international level. A leading network on peacebuilding and conflict transformation, counting more than 60k members. Share and retrieve the newest info on peacebuilding and conflict transformation: https://www.copese.org
(Contributed by Larry Lawhorn)
Consciousness, spirituality, biography, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more
