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Locked In, Left Out: Mental Health in Prison
Locked In, Left Out: Mental Health in Prison

Medscape

time18 hours ago

  • Health
  • Medscape

Locked In, Left Out: Mental Health in Prison

This international series examines the mental health crises unfolding behind bars, from the solitary cells of Canadian detention centers to Spain's overstretched prison clinics, Germany's under-resourced psychiatric care, and Finland's efforts to balance punishment with rehabilitation. Many doctors working in prisons speak of the deep rewards of providing care in this setting. But structural change is needed. This series reveals not only how we treat mental illness in prison, but what that says about the values of our health systems — and our societies.

I'm glad we have rules. I just don't expect people to follow them
I'm glad we have rules. I just don't expect people to follow them

The Guardian

time19 hours ago

  • Politics
  • The Guardian

I'm glad we have rules. I just don't expect people to follow them

Rules are great. I think most of us over the age of five will agree that having them is preferable to not. Perhaps there are a few stragglers out there reading this who would love to cosplay a lesser sequel of The Purge, swinging baseball bats at strangers and urinating in the street, but I would imagine you are in the minority on that. Rules are the backbone of what we have left of society. I'm not happy about where we are, but I don't make the rules. At least not yet. I just need to host a popular reality show – then my political career can really take off. A recent interaction has me reflecting on this. I was wandering over to my local coffee shop one morning, off a wide boulevard where motorists scream through intersections like the car from Ghostbusters late for a particularly aggressive haunting. A crosswalk, with accompanying yellow yield light, was recently installed to combat the minor issue of pedestrians being flattened by drivers on their way to the hair salon or texting about being late to the hair salon. The light has been mostly successful in preventing the human waffle-ironing, but it requires walkers to actually press the button to activate it. This is a step that people often dismiss, hoping and praying that the drivers out there are lucid enough to acknowledge the existence of others. Without the yellow light, we're all operating on the honor system for not killing each other. That morning, someone confidently strolled into the intersection, and was mortified that the car screaming down the road didn't immediately stop for him. The pedestrian hollered and moaned as the vehicle screeched to a halt. Once he was done cursing and spitting on the street, the man crossed and the befuddled driver carried on. Besides my relief at not witnessing a homicide, I was left wondering why the man was so upset. Was he expecting the driver to follow the rules? How naive. Let's pray this guy never ends up involved in global foreign policy. I couldn't help but think of this beautifully trusting pedestrian during the last week of nail-biting brinkmanship between the United States and Iran. A few bombs here, a couple of missiles there. Some erratic social media posts later, and we have something akin to a ceasefire for the time being. Donald Trump claimed the Iranian nuclear capability had been 'obliterated', though experts say the country's program was only set back by a few months. It all comes back to the rules we make. We had an Obama-era deal to cap Iran's atomic ambitions – but Trump pulled the US out of it back in 2018, drastically curtailing the west's ability to hold the ayatollah to his promises. It's like if Los Angeles decided to take the crosswalk out of my neighborhood and instead ask people nicely not to run each other over with giant piles of metal going over 40mph – and if someone got hit, to blow up the area with a bunker buster. We need rules, even if we assume people will break them early and often. Because the vast majority of us won't. Most of us are too timid, too square or, in my case, too lazy. The alternative to rules is anarchy: a fistfight in the supermarket or a bachelor party in Atlantic City. Still, it's time to expect that the arc of the universe will not bend in our direction, that our fellows might not be considering whether or not to slow down through the intersection of life. I don't want to wade too deeply into the finer points of foreign policy, because, as I mentioned above, I have never hosted a reality television program. But I am highly qualified to complain about things, which I will continue doing in this space for the foreseeable future. Assume the worst, as I do, and your life will be much simpler. Expect those around you to fail and flout the rules that govern our world. Does this sound cynical? Of course it does. Does that mean it's wrong? Absolutely not. Look around. Not just at the inside of your living room, the bathroom stall or wherever it is you're reading this. I mean, look around metaphorically. Our institutions are wobbly, our trust in order is at an all-time low, and Vanderpump Rules might never come back for new episodes. Where is the justice? The Democratic primary victory of the New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has been the talk of the entire US, acting as a lighthouse of hope in the choppy pea-soup shit fog of 2025. But in order for Mamdani to win that primary, people had to show up. They had to vote for him and not assume someone else would. Better to assume everyone around you had a nasty fall on the head and can't stop saying 'Cuomo' over and over again. Expect the worst, then enjoy the surprise of being wrong. If I did host a reality show, and therefore became eligible for the presidency, this would be the primary tenet of my foreign policy. 'If we bomb Iran, people will be upset. And upset people do nasty things' – sure, that won't fit on a campaign button, but I'm sure I could hire someone to workshop it into something catchier. I'm obviously thrilled we all haven't been vaporized, but decisions made today do have this pesky way of leading to calamities of the future. You only need to think back to the 1953 CIA coup that led to the overthrow of the Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Cleverer people than me (with a higher word-count maximum) could explain the connection between that regime change and Iran's persistent conflict with the United States. What will be the long-term effects of the US-Israeli bombing campaign? Unfortunately, I'm stuck in the present and can't give you a definitive answer. That is one of the many drawbacks of corporeal existence, another of which is getting hit by a car. Whatever happens next, don't expect it to be fun. But if it is, and we're all drinking champagne in Tehran in a decade, you can come back here and tell me I'm stupid. What a lovely surprise that would be. Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

Jane Austen's Boldest Novel Is Also Her Least Understood
Jane Austen's Boldest Novel Is Also Her Least Understood

New York Times

timea day ago

  • Entertainment
  • New York Times

Jane Austen's Boldest Novel Is Also Her Least Understood

'Mansfield Park' is, by far, the strangest of Jane Austen's novels. In juxtaposition to the merry and major key orchestrations of her four better-known novels, 'Pride and Prejudice,' 'Sense and Sensibility,' 'Persuasion' and 'Emma,' Austen's third published book sings in a decidedly minor key. The other novels are not the romances that film studios so often mistake them for — they are, instead, clever and cogent satires on societal mores — but since they are written in the major key, they can seem 'too light & bright & sparkling,' as Austen herself once said jokingly in a letter about 'Pride and Prejudice.' Compared with the others, it's true that 'Mansfield Park' can appear too dark & dim & lugubrious. Perhaps this is why, for most of my life as a reader, I resisted it and thought of it as the one flaw in her otherwise four-carat, marquise-cut oeuvre. In time, however, I've come to see 'Mansfield Park' as her boldest, riskiest, most subversive and most artistically mature work of all. A big assertion! True; 'Mansfield Park' is a big book. For one thing, it's the only one of Austen's novels that takes place on a large canvas, over the course of a decade or so, while the others flash by in from one to three years. For another, while all of Austen's books are deeply invested in moral questions, her third book is entirely built around the ideal of deep, serious moral purpose, which drives the plot; serious moral purpose is what lends the novel its solemn, melancholy flavor; serious moral purpose happens to be the primary, and perhaps sole, heroic attribute of our protagonist, Fanny Price. Poor Fanny. Unlike so many of Austen's young women, she is neither a great beauty, nor a wealthy heiress, nor witty, nor charming; her cousin Tom calls her a 'creepmouse' and she does tend to twitch and scuttle, physically feeble and gray, around the corners of the room. To onlookers who, unlike the reader, are not privy to her interior life, she has only one really compelling quality: an aunt who had the astonishing luck 30 years earlier to have married a wealthy baronet, Lord Bertram. Another aunt, a parsimonious busybody, married a Reverend Norris, and Fanny's own mother rather too hastily married one Price, a lieutenant of marines, who has become an out-of-work heavy drinker by the time we meet him. To her great misfortune, soon after her marriage, Mrs. Price has nine children in 11 years, with not nearly enough money to support them, and in desperation she agitates for a rapprochement among the sisters, and the rich Bertram family at last deigns to help. Thus, the oldest Price girl, Fanny, is plucked from her pack of siblings and, at 10 years old, largely unlettered, hypersensitive and extremely timid, the girl is thrust into the life of Mansfield Park, a great estate in the country. Out of nowhere, this child raised in roughness is elevated to a class so far from her own that she feels terrified all the time, and is told in every possible way that she is worthless by her nasty, domineering Aunt Norris. Next to Emma Woodhouse, Elizabeth Bennet or even Anne Elliot from 'Persuasion' (who is perhaps the most sophisticated and complex of Austen's heroines), Fanny Price indeed looks a little wan and thin, a bit of a party-pooper, mulishly unwilling to join in the fun when the superego of the estate, Lord Bertram, is away on his property in Antigua and the young people of the household decide to put on a play. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

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