I'm going to try to write more short posts rather than work on a big paper for months before I post.

There is a lot of hype about Facebook causing depression citing research. Actually, if you look, you will find the research had nothing to do with Facebook.

It all started with this article writing on this research article where the author rather loosely used the term "Facebook depression". There is of course no such thing as Facebook depression. The author submits her disclaimer here.

All the more reason to read about research in the media with considerable skepticism. Here is a past article I wrote on the topic.

There is reason to be concerned about spending long hours doing anything, including Facebook and the Internet, that could contribute to the development of depression. The causes are much more complex.

Reference 

Sandra Bullock makes some very solid points about the continued double moral standard between men and women in our society. It is only by repeated public statements will the culture begin to shift.

However, she missed the universal point. I don't think a young boy would escape the slash of verbal harassment about having a lisp. While there is a natural push for social culture to demand a certain level of conformity, children do not understand the limits of this wisdom or can reason through the paradox of conformity for the sake of conformity. [Soap box time] Children need the leadership of adults in social settings, primarily schools, to learn tolerance and the dangers of scapegoating. Adults continue to abdicate this role, parents pointing at schools, schools pointing at parents. During the critical times of elementary school, teachers have the major role, there can be no doubt. Parents seldom see their kids in a group, and currently other parents do not reliably tolerate their friends parents intervening with their own children. That too needs to change, but it won't until neighbors can actually recognize each other and learn how far they can trust each other.

Our natural process of social education has broken down. We now know enough to create a scientifically based social/emotional education curriculum. It's time to act.

FOXNews.com

"Why is that young boys and men are unique and eccentric and mavericks when they're different but women are 'odd' when we are eccentric or different? Would I have wished someone would have said to me when I was 12 or eight when I had my speech impediment? Uniqueness is something my mother pounded it into me," Bullock recently told Tarts. "She said be unique and I didn't understand it then, now I look at it and I go I wouldn't want to be like anyone else and I know I'm off. I had a lisp as a child, it's all these things that made me different and I tried to squelch and then once I realized I had squelched them I didn't feel like myself anymore."

Bullock is so upset with the unwritten rules and regulations in today's world she wants to spread a strong message to young girls.

"Don't change, be who you are. Society is really strong in their opinions so I made peace with the fact that the things I thought were weaknesses or flaws were just me," she added. "Why are we forcing people to follow another person's path in life taking away their real happiness? What is about us that is a culture that tries to get rid of what we consider the runt? Sometimes the runt turns out to be the best of the litter.""

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Many of the boomer adults were raised with a lot of TV. It would appear things have gotten worse. We know a lot more about what TV does to children, but it doesn't appear to have had much effect. Simple logic will tell us that the experience of TV will decrease a child's ability to tolerate a delay in gratification of desires. Certainly, the TV ads are designed to create the desire for things we didn't know we needed, a certain frustration that we can't have it all, now. But it's much worse than that.

John M Grohol PsyD owner of PsychCentral.com is usually a man who politely understates things. But, he pulls no punches in a recent article.

"Most child psychologists and child development experts recommend no TV whatsoever for a child before the age of 2 or 3. None. Yet a whopping 43 percent of parents plop their toddler down in front of the television set, apparently blind to the consequence of their actions.

[..]There are also the studies that show that teens who watch more sexual content on TV are twice as likely to be involved in a pregnancy over the next three years than their peers.

[From the Boston Globe]

Countless studies have documented the inverse link between devotion to the boob tube and achievement in school. Researchers at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons concluded in 2007, for example, that 14-year-olds who watched one or more hours of television daily "were at elevated risk for poor homework completion, negative attitudes toward school, poor grades, and long-term academic failure.'' Those who watched three or more hours a day were at even greater risk for "subsequent attention and learning difficulties,'' and were the least likely to go to college.

In 2005, a study published in the American Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine found that the harm caused by TV watching shows up even after correcting the data to account for students' intelligence, family conditions, and prior behavioral problems. The bottom line: "Increased time spent watching television during childhood and adolescence was associated with a lower level of educational attainment by early adulthood.''

The baleful effects of TV aren't limited to education. The University of Michigan Health System notes on its extensive website that kids who watch TV are more likely to smoke, to be overweight, to suffer from sleep difficulties, and to have high cholesterol.

"

From Research Digest Blog, here is an excerpt from an article commenting on the effects of TV on in the background while a young child plays.

"Schmidt's team described the disruptive effects of the background TV as "real but small". While the current study doesn't say anything about the possible developmental consequences of TV-disrupted play, previous research has shown that shorter play episodes and less focused attention tend to be associated with poorer developmental outcomes. Moreover, a previous unpublished study by the present team of researchers showed that background TV reduces how often parents interact with their children. "Taken together," the researchers said, the new and previous findings lead us to "hypothesise that background television, as a chronic influence, is by itself an environmental risk factor in children's development."
"

According to these articles, Visual voodoo: the biological impact of watching TVandThe Psychologist, TV is a cause for attention deficits in children.

"Sigman's review in fact only cites two published studies that show direct associations between TV viewing in this age group and negative consequences. The first, a 2004 longitudinal study by Dimitri Christakis and colleagues of 1200 children, found that for every extra hour of average daily TV viewing between birth and three years, the children were 10 per cent more likely to have attentional problems at age seven. The second, a cross-sectional study by Dimitri Christakis and Darcy Thomson, found that among 2068 infants aged between four months and three years, those who watched more television also tended to have less regular afternoon and nighttime sleeping schedules. The research base becomes more substantial when the focus is broadened to include TV viewing in older childhood and adolescence. For example, two studies by Robert Hancox and colleagues reported detrimental associations between TV viewing between the ages of five and 15, and educational attainment and several health measures at 26 years. Sigman's review, which also discusses harmful associations between adult TV viewing and mental and physical health, concludes these 'findings are set to re-cast the role of the television screen as the greatest unacknowledged public health issue of our time'. However, not all experts are sympathetic to Sigman's view. Dr Brian Young at the University of Exeter told us children are active in the way they use TV - they don't just sit on the receiving end of a stream of audiovisual input. 'There certainly are benefits for children interacting with TV,' he said. 'They learn stuff - it's as simple as that. But the best learning environment is where the mother or the family collectively consume television and discuss what's being seen. In that sense it's a 'window on the world'. However, he added: 'Any medium has a downside and unsupervised viewing by very young children - the "TV as a babysitter" - is not helpful.' "

Now consider the effects of violence in TV and video games. Are we training our children to tolerate routine violence? I think so. It fact, it would appear that TV is an experiment on our children increasing obesity, tobacco and alcohol use, risky sexual behaviors, violence and social isolation.

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We've all heard about viruses and websites that steal our sensitive private information. Cyberstalking has also become a problem on social media sites. Blogs, Twitter, MySpace and Facebook, in particular, are prone to this sort of abuse.

But even cellphone texting can be a problem since you can forward others details where ever you want. Although there are mixed reviews of just how much of a risk there is, there is agreement there is a risk. Parents should certainly provide supervision for their kids with the youngest getting the most.

John Dvorak, a columnist at MarketWatch.com recently posted an interesting article.

"If I were a professional thief, the first thing I would do is get a computer, find the folks out there who document everything they do on social-networking sites and go rob them."

There are a couple of risk that make this particular crime possible. If you tell the world what you are doing and where you are going, you are telling any criminal that might be listening when you've vacated your house. You may have already listed items in your house that might be particularly desirable by the thief, like the computer, PS3, perhaps even the type of car you have in the driveway.

Here are some rules for social media everyone should know about and practice regularly.

1. There is really only one reason to use your real name on the internet: to promote yourself or your business. Do a regular thorough search using Google of your full name, your address, and other identifying data and make sure all that you find is removed. Make sure your phone number and address are unlisted and there is no other way to find where you live. If you do promote yourself, use an email address as your contact point. To prevent misuse, change the @ sign to (at) or -at- to keep the robots from snapping up your email for spam lists. Or, better yet, use a virtual business card that has a contact form like card.ly. Then no one gets your email address until you decide.

2, Be careful about what you put on your site, like where you are, who is home, and when you go to work or go on vacation. Acquaintances who know your nick name on the internet might decide to break into your house while you are gone or share with others who you really are. Remember, personal information becomes permanently available to whomever wants it once you post it. Employers and college admission officers are regularly searching the internet for applicant's antics. Remember if you are protecting your identity in Twitter and refer to your Facebook site that identifies you, you've only delayed someone who might want to hurt you. If you post your picture on the internet, that could identify you to someone you don't want to know or could be used in a faked porn picture.

3. If you say something cruel to someone, remember that it's recorded forever for anyone who looks. Not only have you hurt another person, you have hurt yourself and your reputation forever. Your repeated insults on the internet could be turned against you and used as evidence to charge you with cyberstalking or cyberbullying and turned into civil or criminal charges.

4. Never give out personal information that could identify you. This includes:
* full name
* home address
* phone number
* Social Security number
* passwords
* names of family members
* credit card numbers

5. Keep online friendships in the virtual world. Meeting online friends carries more risks than other types of friendships because it's easy for people to pretend to be something they're not when you can't see them or talk in person. Even if you "feel" you know someone, you really can't know them as well as if you had known them face to face. Some people think they have fallen in "love" with an online friend. The only thing you can fall in love with online is your fantasy of who the other person might be. The non-verbal and contextual clues about another person is sometimes the only thing that can keep us safe in a face to face relationship. Our intuitions about trust are truly potential lifesavers. What we know about another persons history from our own and others experiences fill in the picture. These aids to judgment either don't exist online or are clouded by an 'unseen' or undocumented history. If you must meet someone you know from on line, do so as if you are meeting someone for the first time, because you are. Meet only in public preferably with someone else. And don't give out personal information like you would with someone you just met.

Let me know if I missed anything. I'll update as needed.

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With 75% of all prisoners in state and federal prisons showing significant symptoms of mental illness, it's not surprising that youths are not immune. The sad part is that the younger the prisoner, the more damaging will be the experience of prison, the more likely they will re-offend on release, and the more likely they'll be back in prison.

At least some states are beginning to emphasize rehabilitation rather than the self-defeating plan to punish the guilty.

Psychiatric News

"Prisons must be prepared to provide culturally competent psychiatric care to juvenile offenders sentenced to adult prisons. Mental disorder prevalence rates are high among these young people.

Nearly 70 percent of adolescents from a Chicago detention center charged with a crime and transferred to adult criminal courts have at least one psychiatric disorder.

Furthermore, teenagers from the detention center sentenced to prison had more than twice the odds of having a psychiatric disorder as those not sentenced to a prison term, according to a study published in the September Psychiatric Services.

The findings point to a crisis in the juvenile-justice system, in which a substantial number of adolescents are remanded to adult courts for trial, according to Jason Washburn, Ph.D., lead author of the study and a research assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.

"Psychiatric treatment needs to be an integral part of any rehabilitation program for these," Washburn told Psychiatric News."

Deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill was considered the most humane solution to the long-term hospitalization and poor conditions of state hospitals. However, the money did not follow the released into the community. As a result, the mentally ill make up most people who are homeless and in prison. Given the high cost of housing the mentally ill and chemically dependent in prison, and the likelihood the problem will be make worse before release, we need real reform for community treatment.

Hennepin County in Minnesota has begun to take on the problem. Britain has come under withering criticism about their juvenile system.

California has reform in mind, but will also realize cost savings. The public supports reform for juvenile offenders, I have to wonder if public attitudes are moving for adult rehabilitation as well.