Top Gun the Musical

Step for Mental Health Care?

So FINALLY, according to the New York Times the House has passed a bill that requires insurance companies to provide mental health insurance parity, meaning that mental illness must be treated on par with physical illness. And the insurance companies, obviously, are PISSED!
This, in my opinion, represents a huge step in US mental health rights. Even with good insurance (which I lack, but whatever) being less than totally sane is extremely expensive in this country. So, good going!

The bill would ban insurance companies from setting lower limits on treatment for mental health problems than on treatment for physical problems, including doctor visits and hospital stays. It would also disallow higher co-payments.

I mean, obviously, I am still waiting until there is national health care but till then, I am pleased with this in principle.

I guess the Senate passed a more limited version of this sort of bill last fall, which Mr. Bush prefers because he thinks the new one includes too broad a list of disorders.

The House bill would require insurance companies that offer mental health benefits to cover treatment for the hundreds of diagnoses included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, from paranoid schizophrenia to stuttering to insomnia to chronic melancholy, or dysthymia.

The Bush administration and other opponents say the list of disorders is far too broad. That leads from parity to another, parallel morass in the fields of psychiatry and pharmacology. Both fields are accused of over-diagnosis and of seizing on fashionable diagnoses — bipolar disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder, for example — for financial gain or through highly subjective assessments.

Mental illnesses are over diagnosed. Old fucking news. This does not mean that people who ACTUALLY live with these diseases do not deserve care.

Feministing's Samhita has a great post about the prison industrial complex at The Nation. Check it out.

"Girls Rock" Looks Super Bad Ass!!!

Oh my goodness. I wish I could have gone to this camp when I was 11. To think of the years of therapy I could have been spared...

No, seriously though. this documentary looks amazing. Basically, a rock camp for girls (of a pretty large age range) that seems to focus on bringing their self esteem up instead of pushing it down and encourages individuality instead if conformity and general mundaneness.

Furthermore, it seems to be pushing for music that is actually cool, based on the soundtrack and samples from the girls' music.

I am so excited. I can't wait. When I have daughters, they are definitely going to this camp.

This trailer totally made me tear up. I think I am going to watch it five more times now.

I was always under the impression that stupid, idiot, offensive people were usually under the impression that they are actually smarter than everyone else.

Not Charlotte Allen.

In her article, published in the Washington Post last Sunday, Allen writes about how maybe we should just give up on this who feminism thing and relinquish the brains to the men. She also says that she neither add two and two nor count the shoes in her closet.

"I can't help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women -- I should say, "we women," of course -- aren't the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women "are only children of a larger growth," wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?"

Oh, and here is another gem.

The theory that women are the dumber sex -- or at least the sex that gets into more car accidents -- is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence. Men's and women's brains not only look different, but men's brains are bigger than women's (even adjusting for men's generally bigger body size). The important difference is in the parietal cortex, which is associated with space perception. Visuospatial skills, the capacity to rotate three-dimensional objects in the mind, at which men tend to excel over women, are in turn related to a capacity for abstract thinking and reasoning, the grounding for mathematics, science and philosophy. While the two sexes seem to have the same IQ on average (although even here, at least one recent study gives males a slight edge), there are proportionally more men than women at the extremes of very, very smart and very, very stupid.

She later said the article was tongue in cheek.

Hella Cuteness!

I wish this was my kid

Thanks Feministing