From the Independent
One in 20 suffers from personality disorder
By Thair Shaikh
Published: 02 May 2006
Almost one in 20 people in the UK has a personality disorder, according to a study. The research also found that men were more likely to suffer from disorders than women and that the most common condition was obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

Sufferers of OCD, of which there are an estimated two million, include David Beckham, who has admitted he has an addiction to tidiness.

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Gus suffers badly from hating morons like George Bush who have a stupid form of OCD — a compulsion to declare war and sending kids to get killed, while lying about the reasons for it.

Me too Gus.

But I also have an obsessive dislike of people who seem to feel the need to have an "excuse" for the state of their lives & adopt a disease as a "badge of convenience".

It's been suggested that Australia suffered from an outbreak of this disorder post-Whitlam, after many people had accepted the notion that if they had a problem, it must be some-else's fault, but the government would take care of it anyway. Individual responsibility & accountability, including the notion of doing something yourself to change your circumstances, went out the window. 

I am young enough to remember when we didn't have any social workers & there was a surprising lack of social problems. Enter a generation of social workers & we are awash in problems.

I'm particularly concerned at the propensity of incompetent parents to dope their kids on medication, in order to solve their "ADD" problem. In my view, the whole ADD issue is a scam of gigantic proportions, perpetrated by the pharmaceutical companies on gullible parents.

But who cares Gus? Most people who suffer from the scourge of obesity / diabetes will argue that it's not because they live under the golden arches.  

As for David Beckham, surely he'd have to suffer from something .... don't all today's celebrities & politicians feel the need to publicly suffer from "something", so as to identify with the common man?

l'll give my black dog a pat & settle for just being a grumpy old man. 

Yes John
I have been a grumpy "young" man for a long time... on that very subject... and plenty of others. Keeps me fit and slim.
Fighting the moronic,
We've all suffered trauma at some stage of our life but the industry in whatever has been booming not so much for the benefit of those who suffer, but to contain the damage. Useful to a point, until the media gets hold of it, as if it was the solution for ingrown toenails...

One never forgets, (one should not forget) but one can cope.. In the past this was provided by churches where the preaching was to let us know our lot was to suffer anyway... But in an affluent society, suffering does not make sense, so we manage it under "experts" advice ... When to some extent we should be able to manage our trauma because no matter how cluey other people are, we know our own body better than anybody else... (Mind you, we can make a mince meal of that if we're not careful...)

But our society does not really like normal people... It wants consumers. big consumers.

So the affluent system, deliberately or not, is making us fat in order that we can then become thin... cyclically. On one hand, we get the "junk food" and "soft drink" industries that feed us with zillion calories and on the other side there is the "slimming" industry that "tries" to redress the problem (usually when it's too late and with the catch of free membership to a club with costly meals we could cook ourselves but are too lazy to do so). It also make television fascinating for couch potatoes... As those on the little box solve their "problem" more fat coming up on the couch in front of the flickering lamp...

We have thus a system which "benefits' from these massive amounts of transactions through desperation of some sort for people to reach a "balance". But balance is really just an expensive word for the cyclical process.

Being normal, only normal food supply is needed... Minimal transactions, if we're normal... Just a walking trip (exercise) to the fruit shop and the fishmongers... A few eggs, a bit of meat, all that in a week when the fat people eat twice as much for breakfast... Normality is bad for business. Business demands that we pay through the nose for excess in extremities of being fat or thin. Despite appearances of cheapness, we pay for over consumption (fat food) and then pay heaps for trying to consume less (slimming)... People selling diet programs or books become wealthy beyond belief... People owning junk food outlet, not the kids behind the counter, make a mint.

Thus the market brims with activity from our dysfunction... But wait there's more... the GM food people want to copyright the food we eat so we cannot buy anything else and be "normal". They control this through the farmer (or grower) who's caught in a web of inescapable cycles in which his/her land become super laden with herbicides and pesticide that only GM crop can survive in...

The rough ride is on... the rich get richer on more useless transactions and we live in hope of being normal but the supplies and the ADVERTISING make sure we can never be.

From the Washington Post

Going the Behavior Route
Drug Safety Fears Are Fueling New Interest in Behavioral Therapy for Kids With ADHD. The Rewards Are Real -- So Are the Demands on Parents' Time and Energy
By Sandra G. Boodman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 2, 2006; Page HE01

What non-drug treatments work to combat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)?

It's a question more parents are asking doctors, prompted by new concerns about the safety of medicines used to treat a problem that affects an estimated 4.4 million American children.

In the past three months, two advisory committees of the Food and Drug Administration have recommended that warning labels on ADHD drugs, most of them stimulants such as Ritalin, be strengthened because of their possible links to rare cardiac problems and vivid hallucinations often involving snakes or bugs
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Gus thinks that solving tantrums with drugs is a way to create a drug dependent society... Not good for the people but very profitable for the drug companies... Mind you, ADHD can sometimes be solved with the old kick to the backside... Remember... That gave you a real reason to cry... But then we were raised during the Neanderthal period by parents raised during the Monolithic... These days, in the Pamperaffluenic era, money talks...

So, are we using drugs that will stop these young kids become grumpy old men in the future? Bugger... That's a real worry... A bit of an old grumpy gripe is the stuff of good active health for a long life... as long as no one gets hurt.

From the New Yorrk Times

Older Americans Sicker Than the English, Study Says
By ALAN COWELL
Published: May 2, 2006
LONDON, May 2 — The United States spends more than twice as much per person on health care as Britain and yet, according to new data released today, older Americans are "much sicker" than their English counterparts.

The conclusion, in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, surprised some in Britain, where American private health care is widely perceived as highly effective, if expensive. It also seemed to confirm mutual stereotypes, tossed across the Atlantic, that Americans are prone to obesity while Britons drink too much.

read more at the New York Times