HIS | False Hope | Is God Dead? | Treaty Claims | 12/2013
HERS | Out Of Mind | Totalitaria |12/2013
current affairs and lifestyle for the discerning woman
IS GOD DEAD?
The battle over belief and some fascinating new evidence
OUT OF MIND
WHY ARE OUR MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES FAILING?
TOTALITARIA
THE UN’S LOOMING PLANS FOR GLOBAL GOVERNMENT Dec 2013/Jan2014
PLUS
BEAUTY, CUISINE, TRAVEL, FAMILY, MOVIES, HEALTH & MORE
CONTENTS Issue 141 | Dec 2013/Jan 2014 | www.investigatedaily.com HIS Selling False Hope The backlash against a controversial US cancer doctor who charges hundreds of thousands of dollars for treatments hits a New Zealand family seeking a cure for their young son. LIZ SZABO and IAN WISHART report on the strange case of Dr Stanislaw Burzynski and his battle with medical authorities
features Out Of Mind
Is New Zealand’s mental health system failing our youth? TALETA MCDONALD investigates dissatisfaction with the status quo page 10
Totalitaria Looms
The United Nations has been planning to set up a global government for decades, now they are just a few years away from pulling it off. IAN WISHART explains in this exclusive extract from his new book Totalitaria page 20
Dec 13/Jan 2014 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 1
CONTENTS Formalities
04 Miranda Devine 06 Arnaud de Borchgrave 08 Chloe Milne
Health
26 Conversion controversy 28 Remifemin for menopause
32
Cuisine & Travel 34 38 40
34
The Chef on eggs James Morrow on New York Visiting Roma
Books & Movies
42 The Testament of Mary,Almost English 44 The Book Thief, Aftermath
Home & Family
32 Get great lashes 46 Problem solving skills
30 44 40
HERS / DEVINE
No one believes the Chicken-Littles Miranda Devine
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hat a delicious decision of the Abbott gov ernment not to send a minister to the latest UN climate-change conference. Environment Minister Greg Hunt can’t go to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change talks in Poland. He’ll be too busy… repealing the carbon tax! Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at the other end of that RSVP. If ever you needed proof Australia is under new management, the prioritisation of parliament over UN climate gabfests is it. Not for Tony Abbott the excruciating spectacle Kevin Rudd made of himself – and by extension the whole nation – when he travelled to Copenhagen in 2009 with a retinue of 114 assistants, including seven media managers. With classic Ruddian hubris, he staked the nation’s entire prestige, and indeed alleged future survival, on the outcome of the global climate talks that he, singlehandedly, was going to guide, thanks to his Mandarin-speaking rapport with the Chinese. Lo and behold, he was treated as an irrelevant joke in Copenhagen, and the talks were the flop every sensible person had predicted. Rudd flew into a narcissistic rage: “Those Chinese f@# !ers are trying to rat-f@#! us,” the great diplomat said. The rest, as they say, is history, on the right side of which Abbott stood, almost alone among the political class. Australia has learned its lesson in more ways than one since then. It took humility for John Howard to come close to a mea culpa this month during a speech to Nigel Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation in London. He outlined the “perfect storm” of 2006-2007 that forced him to adopt a policy he didn’t really believe in – and go to the 2007 election promising an Emissions Trading Scheme. “Drought had lingered for several years in many parts of eastern Australia, leading to severe restrictions on the daily use of water; not for the first or last time the bushfire season started early; the report by Sir Nicholas Stern hit the shelves, with the author himself visiting Australia, and lastly the former US vice president Al Gore released his movie An Inconvenient Truth,” he said. “To put it bluntly, ‘doing something’ about global warming gathered strong political momentum in Australia.” 4 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Dec 13/Jan 2014
Laws “affecting our daily lives, including sensitive social issues, should never be made other than by politicians. It is their job and their speciality to reflect community attitudes and values on such matters” So Howard took a compromise ETS to the 2007 election, one that protected exports and would not fully be implemented until the rest of the world signed up. Labor won the election, anyway. Howard’s takeaway is that politicians should not allow themselves to be “browbeaten by the alleged views of experts… Laws “affecting our daily lives, including sensitive social issues, should never be made other than by politicians. It is their job and their speciality to reflect community attitudes and values on such matters.” But it’s a rare politician who stands firm against fashionable views at election time. In part that’s because they get no help from Australian business leaders, who are cowardly, effete and blindly wedded to some bleached-out concept of “bipartisanship”, regardless of ideas. There are, of course, honourable exceptions, such as the outgoing Future Fund chairman David Murray who last year described Labor’s carbon tax as “the worst piece of economic reform I have ever seen in my life”. He went further this month to say that the climate problem was overstated and suggesting there had been a “breakdown in the integrity of the science”. Various other business leaders
are coming out of the woodwork now to voice similar sentiments. But where were they when their country needed them? The danger remains that the political climate could turn again, as Howard described in 2006-07. Already climate alarmists are seizing on this year’s early bushfires to rev up another panic in the public mind, and will use a hot summer, or any unusual weather, to prosecute their case for a renewed jihad on cheap coal-fired electricity, which is, of
course, the source of Australia’s competitive advantage. They are not troubled by the appalling illogic of their position, in which, even if Australia retreated to the Stone Age and reduced carbon dioxide emissions to zero, there would be precisely zero effect on bushfire behaviour or summer temperatures or sea levels. devinemiranda@hotmail.com
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HERS / TALKING POINT
A perfect storm Arnaud de Borchgrave
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ordan’s young Queen Rania Abdullah, a Palestin ian, put her finger on the detonator of everything from local to national to regional to global frustrations. The constant contrast between the real world where today’s youth lives and the virtual world of the Internet where they spend most of their time, said Queen Rania, has broadened their horizons and led to the revolutions ... in the Arab world. “Today,” she said, “when our youth sit in front of the computer, they enter the virtual world where they develop a certain personality and identity for themselves. They communicate with others constantly; they express themselves freely and comfortably. They influence the opinion of others; they see how others live their lives and what choices are available to them. “And when they leave their computers, they return to the real world and they see nobody cares about what they have to say, that they enjoy no freedom, have no real choices and that their hands are tied. So they have a sense of sorrow and disappointment.” The queen was being as blunt as a royal is allowed to be. It isn’t sorrow but scorn for elders and leaders they blame for their predicament. Acute frustration inevitably leads to violence. The priority, opined Rania, should be to bridge the gap between the two worlds in order to make an easy transition between the two. If it were easy, it would have been done decades ago as the Western powers did after World War II with American knowhow and dollars. And the 2011 revolutions that swept the Arab world from Tunisia to Libya to Egypt to Syria to Iraq reflect the accelerated pace of change that leaders don’t know how to cope with, let alone channel into constructive endeavours. Youth want change and they want it now but now isn’t available short of bloody revolutions. And revolutionary upheavals, as the world witnessed via the Internet, triggered still more misery. Syria, plunged in a civil war for the past three years, sustained 150,000 killed and probably 300,000 wounded. And the anti-regime revolutionaries in Syria are increasingly influenced, if not dominated, by al-Qaida and its associated movements. Fearful that any aid could fall into the hands of anti-U.S. 6 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Dec 13/Jan 2014
How long will the U.S. Congress authorize the several billion dollars a year needed to keep the Afghan army fighting Taliban guerrillas? revolutionaries, the Obama administration is determined to stay out of Syria’s civil war. At this point the Assad regime, notwithstanding its close alliance with Iran and Russia, looks like the lesser of two evils for the Obama White House. The trillion-dollar U.S. geopolitical boondoggle in Iraq, where Iran’s theocracy now wields more influence than Washington, and where al-Qaida’s friends appear to control much of the eastern part on the Syrian border, strengthened a growing majority among both Republicans and Democrats to sit this one out. On top of the Iraq disaster, a similar outcome seems to be hovering over the end of next year, when U.S. troops will be going home, mission unaccomplished. The $6 billion-$10 billion a year the Afghan army will require from U.S. taxpayers after 2014 is reminiscent of what was pledged to the South Vietnamese army following the withdrawal of the last U.S. combat soldier. He was U.S. Army Master Sgt. Max Beilke who left March 29, 1973. The South Vietnamese army – ARVN – fought on bravely with its own army and air force, paid for by the U.S. taxpayer. That couldn’t last and the final collapse came after the U.S. Congress shut down the aid spigot and North Vietnamese tanks clattered into Saigon two years later, April 30, 1975. There is now a widening gap in available U.S. financial resources and the imperative need is to cut back on a conventional military establishment in favor of tomorrow’s
smaller, leaner, SEAL-type units that can operate globally coupled with pilotless bombers, drones and cyber warriors. How long will the U.S. Congress authorize the several billion dollars a year needed to keep the Afghan army fighting Taliban guerrillas? Probably as long as Congress votes the funds. And no one believes that will be very long after they get the drift of largely unreported U.S. aid scandals. Between now and then, these will keep growing. SIGAR – the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction – keeps uncovering scandals involving U.S.-funded civilian construction and reconstruction projects that are now cut off from further inspection as U.S. troops withdraw toward safer zones around the capital. In a strongly worded Oct. 10 letter to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Rajiv Shah, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, SIGAR chief John F. Sopko, expressed alarm over how his oversight mandate could no longer be carried out in Afghanistan’s changing security landscape. This followed growing difficulties in obtaining military escort to travel into contested areas. “U.S. military officials have told us that they will provide civilian access only to areas within a one-hour round trip
of an advanced medical facility ... We have been told that requests to visit a reconstruction site outside of these ‘oversight bubbles’ will probably be denied.” “Similarly, State Department officials have warned us,” Sopko’s letter continued, “that their ability to reach reconstruction sites will be extremely limited due to constraints on providing emergency medical support without assistance from the Defense Department.” Much of what Sopko’s agency is mandated to inspect is shoddy work by unscrupulous civilian contractors who knew their work wouldn’t be checked as U.S. troops were pulling out as part of a general withdrawal. As Sopko’s agents assessed the rate of the U.S. military withdrawal, Sopko’s report added, “it is likely that no more than 21 percent of Afghanistan will be accessible to U.S. civilian oversight personnel by the end of the transition, a 47 percent decrease since 2009. We have also been told by State Department officials that this projection may be optimistic, especially if the security situation does not improve.” Virtually no one expects an improvement between now and Dec. 31, 2014. And the unravelling scenario is eerily reminiscent of Vietnam for those who witnessed the end as this reporter did. Dec 13/Jan 2014 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 7
HERS / GEN-Y
Single and looking Chloe Milne
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ow that the winter season is nearing New York City and a high of 3 degrees feels like a mild day, it’s more important than ever to have someone to keep you warm during these very cold months. Unfortunately for those of us women living in this part of the world the chances of meeting a nice guy aren’t great. Not only do women greatly outnumber men, by around 10%, but all New York guys are ‘douchebags’ – according to every woman who lives here. Unlike the movies, there are not great numbers of attractive young men hanging out in laundromats, coffee shops or street corners looking for love. Just as well then that American women, and men, have embraced dating websites as an alternative way to start a new relationship. And embrace it they have, happily dating several potential mates in a week in order to meet Mr or Mrs Right. It’s a strange concept for a country of shy Kiwis who generally need a few (dozen) drinks to chat someone up. Internet dating is still something New Zealanders seem wary of, even embarrassed by, and while Tinder, a dating app that connects you with potential matches based on your GPS location, is said to have gained popularity in NZ, generally going online to find a match is seen as a last resort for ‘older’ people. We’re more than happy pursuing job opportunities, buying and selling, finding accommodation and networking with strangers virtually, but when it comes to falling in love, or even in like, online, the whole process seems contrived and desperate. Dating in New Zealand generally consists of getting drunk near someone, a notion I have struggled with. Even so, I never would have dreamt of creating some sort of online personal promotion to attract a potential mate, but in a bid to embrace American culture, and after realizing that meeting people in a city of 8 million is harder than I expected, I tried two dating sites that came recommended to me by my fellow New Yorkers, just to see what all the fuss was about. I met (virtually) plenty of eligible bachelors, numbers were exchanged, I played it cool, unfortunately they did too. Then there were the much more keen, but slightly less eligible bachelors, like Andrew who asked “Your place or mine?,”
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Unlike the movies, there are not great numbers of attractive young men hanging out in laundromats, coffee shops or street corners looking for love Aaron a supposed Masterchef contestant who simply commented “whang and a bang,” or 23 year old, straight, single, Brooklynite, Bowlofcereal6 whose opening line was “Do you like cereal?” What a ridiculous question, everyone likes cereal. After being fortunate enough (as the odds suggest) to meet a nice guy (in a bar) I decided to delete all of my online accounts. But while my brief foray into the internet dating world was more miss than hit, there is something to be said for dating from your living room. Not only can you date while wearing your pajamas watching Homeland and eating ice cream; there are no awkward “no I’d rather you didn’t want to buy me a drink” moments, unless of course you actually decide to go on a real date. www.chloemilne.com
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OUT of MIND
Is New Zealand’s Mental Health System Failing Our Youth?
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WORDS BY TALETA MCDONALD
livia Smith’s parents watched in horror as their daughter was removed from the clinician’s room and returned demanding medication. “It was like a conspiracy had taken place” says Mrs Smith. Olivia, 14, was referred to the Kari Centre (Auckland Central Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service), by the family’s GP in July 2012 with suspected depression and anxiety after having an emotional breakdown caused by school bullying. Mrs Smith says they waited 3 months for their first visit and in the months leading up to Christmas her daughter attended regular sessions at the Kari Centre, however, she noticed there were no set goals or treatment plan in place. In a tragic turn of events, Mrs Smith says her daughter was admitted into The Child and Family Unit (child and adolescent mental health inpatient unit), in December 2012 after attempting suicide and it was here she was administered her first round of medication. Dec 13/Jan 2014 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 11
Is our mental health system failing our youth? It’s no secret New Zealand has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the developed world. Latest figures released by Chief Coroner Judge Neil MacLean show sixty-nine 10-19 year-olds took their own lives during 2012-2013 and the highest number of suicides was recorded for 20-24 year-olds.
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adly, it is young people within the 15-24 year-old age bracket who are most at risk of suicide, and research shows mental illness is the largest contributing factor. According to statistics from the Canterbury University Suicide Project, 90 percent of all youth suicide deaths can be linked to mental health conditions. In August this year, the Ministry of Health (MOH) released the Burden of Disease study which shows young people suffer an 11 percent health loss due to mental disorders. A staggering one in every five young people will experience a mental health
problem in this country and despite what we are being told the situation doesn’t appear to be improving. Researchers supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the world’s largest mental health research institute, have found that half of all lifetime cases of mental illness begin by age 14 and three quarters have begun by age 24. The study also reveals that an untreated mental disorder can lead to more severe, difficult to treat illness and to the development of co-occurring mental illnesses. The Smiths say their daughter became manic and more suicidal on medication so they took their concerns to the team of Kari Centre clinicians but they suggested they give her more time on it. From here on in, Mrs Smith describes being in a state of crisis with her daughter every day for a period of 9 months. “I felt the Kari Centre weren’t taking Olivia’s situation seriously. We tried ringing them for help when she
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continued to have violent flip outs but were told to either phone the police or the crisis number.” Mrs Smith said she waited 6 hours for a mental health professional to arrive after phoning the crisis number and soon realized that port of call was of no use. Why does New Zealand have such a high youth suicide rate and what is the nation doing to reduce it? Dr. David Codyre, Auckland Psychiatrist and Mental Health Lead at East Tamaki Healthcare, says there are many dimensions to what drives suicide rates. “Countries that have retained a strong element of religious faith have lower suicide rates, for example the strongly Catholic countries. We have very easy access to alcohol and drugs and yet we know that the earlier the onset of drug and alcohol use, the greater the risk of subsequent addiction and mental health issues and therefore the greater the suicide rate. Adding to this, Maori and Pacific are ethnic groups who are much more on
the receiving end of various kinds of socioeconomic and cultural adversity. “These risk factors are present at a relatively high level in New Zealand, where currently we are in economically difficult times, and on the other hand, I guess the question is to what degree have we been effective in doing the things that we know will help to reduce the suicide rate.” Dr. Codyre says these things include addressing economic disparity, good mental health promotion and early intervention through people in key gate keeping roles such as school counselors, GP’s and other people who are in position of having contact with young people who are struggling. “It is vital to get them into effective help and support and getting good treatments in place for people who have an actual mental health condition which puts them at risk of suicide.” 2013 saw the release of the NZ Suicide Action Plan, with $8 million going towards Maori and Pasifika communities, following the Prime Minister’s $62 million youth mental health package in 2012. Is throwing money at a system that appears to be failing, enough to improve it? Hugh Norriss, Director of Policy and Development at the Ministry of Health, says the funding in mental health services is currently over represented towards adults and there needs to be more even funding between adults and children. “DHBs have a very difficult time taking money off existing adult services and then putting it into children’s services so it was necessary to have something like the Prime Minister’s youth mental health initiative as a circuit breaker to start getting the money away from more and more adult services and getting the proportions right so that the services for young people have the same percentage of resources if not more going to them.” “Obviously if you look after the mental health of young people you get the benefits of that right through adulthood because if people don’t get good treatment as children then their problems get bigger and then when they become adults you’ve got
If evidence shows that early intervention in a range of mental health conditions in youth can result in better outcomes, why is there a disproportionate amount of funding between adult and child mental health services? to spend money looking after the problems in adulthood so it’s a much better investment of the health dollar to spend it early particularly in early intervention.” Latest figures from the Ministry of Health reveal the government spent 12 percent of the total mental health budget on child and youth mental health services during 2011-2012. If evidence shows that early intervention in a range of mental health conditions in youth can result in better outcomes, why is there a disproportionate amount of funding between adult and child mental health services?
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n desperation, and after feeling like their medication concerns fell on death ears the Smiths went back to their family GP, who became the family go-between with the Kari Centre. Mrs Smith says, “The Kari Centre were unhappy that we had sought alternative help outside of their system and things went downhill from there.” Kari Centre clinicians prescribed another medication but the Smiths say their daughter became like a drugged zombie so after raising their concerns again and receiving the same response they decided to stop the medication for a period of time. Mrs Smith explains, “I felt they weren’t listening and they wanted to continue her on the medication despite it having bad side effects and it not working. They would argue with us that it couldn’t possibly have those side effects as she was on such a low dose.” Mrs Smith says the Kari Centre clinicians were unhappy they had stopped Olivia’s medication so in fear of lack of support, she and her husband decided
to try it again, however, the same results bought even more despair and they became increasingly frustrated with the Kari Centre. “I felt like my parental rights were being taken away. I did not want my child on that medication.” The Smiths were eventually given a new team of clinicians, however, their experience was much the same. “We once again felt ganged up on over the medication issue and we were horrified when one of the clinicians told us; we work as a team of three and if you can’t trust our judgement and expertise then we can’t work with you.” “We were hoping for help, support, resolution, and answers. But we got heartache, disappointment and betrayal. We were made to feel judged and persecuted and they didn’t work with us to come up with resolutions within the home. We felt as though they were on a witch hunt.” Mrs Smith says the Kari Centre diagnosed Olivia with emotional dysregulation even after her daughter disclosed to clinicians she had been hearing voices in her head since February 2012. The Smiths say they received no explanation as to what emotional dysregulation was nor were they given any strategies to move forward. “It wasn’t until I did my own research that I started to understand what emotional dysregulation is,” explains Mrs Smith. “Olivia received no effective therapy sessions throughout her time at Kari Centre,” she says, and Mrs Smith describes the process to be a one way system. “It was either their way or the highway.” Mrs Smith says she would like to see Kari Centre clinicians allow parents to have more involvement
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around treatment and be given consent before coercing with the child around medication. Mr Smith is clearly still angry after his experience with the Kari Centre and expresses his opinions bluntly. “They need to be shut down because they have no accountability of service.” Mr Smith says they would never use the Kari Centre again, and thinks there needs to be a huge change in every area they operate. The Smiths say they are now seeking private help for their daughter and feel relieved to be no longer in the Kari Centre. So how do mental health professionals diagnose and treat mental disorders?
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he Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), is the handbook used worldwide to diagnose and treat mental disorders. Some say it is the holy bible in psychiatry, however, its latest version, published in May 2013, has caused widespread controversy amongst health professionals. The two main criticisms of DSM-5 are; an unhealthy influence of the pharmaceutical industry on the revision process and an increasing tendency to ‘medicalise’ patterns of behavior and mood that are not considered to be particularly extreme. Prior to its publication on April 29, 2013, the US National Institute of Mental Health withdrew its support of the DSM due to the manual’s perceived lack of validity. Director of NIMH Thomas Insel wrote, “while DSM has been described as a ‘bible’ for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The DSM
diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure.” Soon after, though, a press release issued on May 13, 2013, by the NIMH, jointly written by Insel and Jeffrey A. Lieberman, President of APA, said: “Today, the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), along with the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) represents the best information currently available for clinical diagnosis of mental disorders. Patients, families and insurers can be confident that effective treatments are available and that the DSM is the key resource for delivering the best available care. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has not changed its position on DSM-5.” Dr. Codyre describes the DSM as being a useful tool but controversial in the way that it is being applied in some settings. “Medical labeling can have detrimental effects but on the other hand accurate diagnosis is key to the right intervention and a good outcome.” Dr. Codyre explains, “A useful element of the DSM is that if it’s used properly between clinicians it allows communication that helps with predicting what the most helpful interventions are going to be. The unhelpful thing about it is when it is used very inflexibly or rigidly because really it is just an imperfect tool that at the moment is the best that we’ve got.” Dr. Codyre says the DSM’s set of diagnosis includes a whole chapter that is about conditions in childhood and adolescence and while it’s very difficult in childhood to diagnose mental health conditions there are established, quite serious or different diagnoses compared to those in adulthood. For example
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attention deficit disorder or the various kinds of learning or developmental conditions are easier to diagnose in young people, as opposed to mood disorders such as bipolar and depression. “What’s really challenging, particularly in children, is when they seem to be struggling with issues around mood state. There’s a lot of controversy around that and particularly in the U.S where there’s been quite a high level of diagnosis in children of bipolar disorder.” Dr. Codyre explains, “Compounding that, there can be different understandings about what symptoms mean. For example there is an overlap between symptoms of borderline personality disorder, attention deficit disorder and mild affective disorder (bipolar), so part of the imperfection of the DSM as a diagnostic tool is that because there is that overlap of symptoms, it can be seen as one thing when really it’s the other and that’s where you have problems.” Dr. Codyre says while there are a significant amount of people who have had good experiences with public mental health services and generally it is because it has worked for them, he is also aware there are significant subsets of people who have had bad experiences. “When you listen to them it is one of feeling unheard, and of a service system that is not responsive to their wishes and needs, and that is a real issue for mental health services in this country.” “The other thing that is concerning when you listen to families and consumers is they say that the system seems impervious to their feedback when things are not working for them.” “Youth mental health services have to take a very individualized approach and get the delicate balance right between effective diagnosis and access to effective intervention but also in helping to support a young person and their family to understand what’s going on in ways that are helpful to them.” Dr. Codyre says the main difference between a public and private mental health service is the element of choice. “If you see someone and they don’t work for you, you can choose someone else, whereas in public sectors that choice doesn’t exist, and when you combine the lack of choice with the lack
of capacity to listen and be responsive to the given individual and their family I think that’s where the problem lies.” Dr. Codyre reveals a real-time consumer feedback project, funded by the Health and Disability Commission, is currently underway, which will give families and consumers a voice about their experiences when accessing mental health services. “It is going to be implemented in four mental health service systems across the country over the next 12 months and the expectation is it will be rolled out over time across all mental health services. My hope is it will fundamentally change things because it will give people a voice around whether their experience of accessing services is working for them or not.” Dr. Codyre says, “Measuring feedback is important as evidence suggests there is a direct relationship between a person’s experience of mental health services and their outcome so if you experience a service that is hearing you and responding to you then that is going to predict a much better outcome.” “We’ve got a very defragmented system with all of the bits of a great system working in isolation as opposed to working as a coherent whole. A big part of the focus of the current national mental health policy is about better integrating and really moving from what we do, to actually how we can work together with patients and their families.” Dr. Codyre says mental health conditions are among the highest health related disability and research carried out internationally into the economic cost of health conditions says it’s a huge burden on society. “The peak incidence of mental health conditions is in youth and from there on it declines. New Zealand Work and Income data shows 40 percent of people on a long term sickness benefit are there by virtue of a mental health or addiction condition and yet most of those conditions are inherently treatable as long as people access the right help and get it early.” “There’s really clear evidence for most of the major mental health conditions that the earlier you effectively identify and intervene the better the outcomes. We know that the peak age
of both self-harm and suicide is in youth and young adulthood so I guess that’s the sharp end of the iceberg of consequence.”
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he Walkers arrived in NZ in January 2013 after living for a period of time in France. Mrs Walker, a NZ citizen, adopted her son Jack from an orphanage in Cambodia when he was just 3 weeks old. Jack, 15, lives with his aunt while the family work towards setting up a home. Mrs Walker says Jack had been receiving treatment in France for anxiety associated with attachment disorder and was referred to the Kari Centre by his private counsellor when he started recognizing serious psychiatric problems.
The Walkers had three visits in total with the Kari Centre and promptly pulled out after what they felt was a lack of support. Mrs Walker’s sister described feeling optimistic after her first visit with her nephew. “They told me they could help him but in order to get the medication he was currently on he had to try two others first.” Mrs Walker says she was hesitant to change her son’s medication because of the bad side effects he had previously experienced and it took 3 weeks for him to adjust to the medication he is currently on. On the second visit the Walkers were alarmed when Jack was separated from them and taken into a separate room for questioning.
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We went to the Kari Centre for help and had a frightening experience. There was no personalization and I felt like we were going through a factory, being a cog in a production line. It wasn’t very human. I would never use Kari Centre again Mrs Walker explains, “After 20 minutes the psychiatrist returned with Jack and they told us they don’t recognize attachment disorder and what he had was most likely post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and anger management issues but they don’t treat that here.” Mrs Walker says the clinicians spoke to her in a condescending way, “They advised me that I needed to be parenting differently and using consequences.” However, Mrs Walker adds, implementing consequences was virtually impossible. “They didn’t believe my son could go ballistic.”
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n the third visit Mrs Walker says she was shocked and outraged when she was told they wouldn’t treat her son until all family members were living in the same house. “I tried explaining to them that my son couldn’t live with his sister because of his behavioral issues and his aunt and extended family are his family.” Mrs Smith says she was then instructed to ring Child Youth and Family to get a file going with them. “That same week I found out from Jack’s counselor the Kari Centre had contacted him to inform him he should cease working with my son as he was now enrolled with the Kari Centre. They went behind my back and they had no right to do that, especially after they told us they couldn’t help.” After receiving mixed messages and feeling lied to, the Walkers decided to have no more involvement with the Kari Centre. “We went to the Kari Centre for help and had a frightening experience. There was no personalization and I felt like we were going through a factory,
being a cog in a production line. It wasn’t very human. I would never use Kari Centre again.” Mrs Walker says Jack’s counselor recommended a good psychologist who prescribed the medication he so desperately needed and since then things have improved. Arran Culver, Deputy Director of Mental Health at the Ministry of Health says ensuring people most in need receive quality care, especially in mental health, is a top priority. “We work closely with the Health Quality and Safety Commission to identify and address any adverse events or service concerns and aim to have sound processes in place to catch any problems quickly.” Culver says there are robust complaint pathways for families to follow if their needs or expectations are not met and encourages people to use these processes, both to ensure their own needs are met and also to highlight any instances of poor quality of service so it can be investigated by the appropriate authority. Culver suggests firstly addressing concerns with the provider itself and if that is unsatisfactory he encourages people to follow up with their local DHB or other agencies. According to a 2011 World Health Organization (WHO) report on NZ’s mental health care delivery, prescription regulations authorize GP’s and nurses to prescribe psychotherapeutic medicines (with restrictions), however, official policy does not permit nurses to independently diagnose or treat mental disorders within the primary care system. Additionally, it says, the majority of GP’s and nurses have not received
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official in-service training on mental health within the last 5 years, however, officially approved manuals on the management and treatment of mental disorders are available in the majority of primary health care clinics. Dr. Codyre says GP’s are currently getting a little bit of undergraduate training but are not receiving adequate access to mental health training. Culver says GP’s receive as much as 10 weeks of mental health training as part of their degree at Auckland and Otago Medical Schools and are required to undertake some training in mental health within clinical settings after graduation. “The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners (RNZCGP) requires all GP’s to undertake continuing professional development as part of its Maintenance of Professional Standards (MOPS) program, which often includes on-going education in aspects of mental health/psychiatry.” Says Culver. With a shift towards mental health care in primary settings, are these guidelines enough to qualify GP’s to diagnose and treat mental disorders? Dr. Codyre explains, “Mental health services have historically operated within total isolation so you’re either all in or all out and if you got in then mental health services took over your care and didn’t really communicate back to the GP or involve them in ongoing care so those people disappear from primary care, and if you didn’t get in, primary care was left dealing with it with no support.” “Over the last 10 years there has been a focus in NZ on developing a primary mental health care program so there has also been a focus on work force development for primary care clinicians. A lot of my role and my teams’ is in the ongoing, up-skilling and supporting of GP’s to lift their game in this area.” “The reality is, with access to better training and support we could be assisted to a point where most or all GP’s and practice nurses were at a good level of understanding, knowledge and skills around mental health care.” Interestingly, the same WHO report says NZ spends over 1.7 million U.S
dollars each year on psychotherapeutic medicines per 100,000 population. That’s a large number considering NZ has a population of over 4.4 million. The Ministry of Health’s Hugh Norriss says, “What we need to do as a country is to monitor carefully what we are using medications for and if they’re getting to the right people and what are the general statistics and patterns about who is getting what drugs. It would be good to have better information about that because we do know that there has been a big rise in the use of anti-depressants in New Zealand.”
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teve Taylor, social services researcher, condemns NZ’s mental health system and describes it as being a dysfunctional culture of collusion. “It’s a philosophical and ideological position that mental health services take. They think that community mental health care is the best care of all and it has a one size fits all approach.” Taylor says the biggest challenge for families is getting their child or young person into the bracket of acute presentation before mental health services will see them and once they are in the system their philosophy around intervention is brief and there is no continuity of care. “There is a grand charade going on in community based mental health services where simply showing up is seen to be sufficient in terms of service provision.” “There are clinicians who deliberately misinterpret or misrepresent what is occurring for the patient, for example, emotional dysregulation for adolescence is actually borderline personality traits. Taylor explains, “If they give a broad diagnosis, like emotional dysregulation, they can keep it within the realm of behavioral and if it’s behavioral they don’t have to get involved. They can then blame the parents and often the parents are blamed quite cruelly. “The director of a mental health board or service will often sing the party line ‘we stand by [x]’ regardless of what the clinicians do, which is astounding in its ignorance and arrogance. “Agencies defend to death their
models and how they do things. When all the evidence is saying to them it’s not working. “Until we get some transparency in terms of naming and shaming clinicians and for them to be meaningfully accountable or have to go through a meaningful consequence, people aren’t protected by their district health boards, professional associations, supervisors or the ministry of health, and we are condemning more people to die within mental health services.” Taylor thinks a big problem within mental health services is they are not measuring patient outcomes. “Funding is based on the assumption of service provision and throughput, not on success of outcomes.” “There has been enormous resistance to measurement of performance within
the industry and that is where the actually knowledge exists of how these services are doing. Social services are the only industry that I can think of that actively resist what could improve their services.” The challenge in measuring health outcomes, Taylor says, is if the patient doesn’t give truthful feedback in fear of what their key worker they are giving feedback on might say or do. “When a health professional takes a particular ideological position, for example, pro medication or anti medication, and places their idea above treating their patient holistically, it is a potentially dangerous situation as each person is different and their therapeutic needs will vary and may not necessarily match the clinician’s ideas.” Taylor says there are a number of
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people who work within mental health services who are incompetent. “Some clinicians think ‘this is my biased position now I get to adopt my neurosis and apply it to a clinical team’ and in the absence of supervision or transparency, some people in mental health treat it like a cult.” Taylor says there is a lot of suppression of information going on and if the information was released, mental health services will have to deal with shame, humiliation, embarrassment and the acknowledgement of gross incompetence. “Even if a health clinician belongs to a professional association, it makes no difference to achieving positive client outcomes,” says Taylor. “Humility needs to come into play. If we don’t know what to do then we are supposed to say so. Clinicians are responsible for helping the patient and their family find a solution and they should do that with them not over them. It’s about having power for, as opposed to power over.”
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aylor explains, “If the dominating paradigm within community mental health services is the issue is in family, then everything is built upon that platform. I’ve seen some families driven to absolute devastation because they’ve been blamed for stuff that’s not their fault by professionals’ who don’t actually have an answer.” Taylor says it takes professional humility and a fair degree of emotional resilience to admit when they don’t quite know what to do. “Unfortunately in mental health services there’s some very unwell people in very senior roles doing very unsafe things. These people are dangerous to vulnerable clients and families and the
tragedy is they don’t know it and even if they did it makes them potentially sociopathic.” Taylor says a disparity between public and private mental health care exists because there is a lack of accountability. “If a state funded mental health care provider does something wrong they may lose their contract after 3 or 4 years.” However, Taylor explains, private health care providers lose a lot more than a contract. Taylor encourages people to get bold and tell their stories. “It’s one way to bring about change within mental health services.” And he says the court of public opinion is the safest medium for people to talk. “Families need to summon the strength and not feel intimidated and get informed.” He says it’s important that people learn the language so they can recognize if their being lied to. “Revolutions often start with one person, we need some radical change and we need some radicals to push it.” “Often the word reform is used but the time for reform is long gone we are dealing with a fractured broken matrix which is not only unsustainable but unfixable in its current form. We need to clean house and we need to rebuild the service placing the clients’ voice at the centre of the phoenix like resurrection. Forget reform, if I was in the position I’d shut the whole thing down and rebuild from the ground up with a consumer advocacy committee. So therapists would have a minority voice because the evidence to date shows that what they are doing doesn’t work and the only thing that’s missing is the client’s voice. Place the client’s voice at the centre of the service and 7 years of outcome research shows that things will get better.” Hugh Norriss, a Ministry of Health
Often the word reform is used but the time for reform is long gone we are dealing with a fractured broken matrix which is not only unsustainable but unfixable in its current form 18 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Dec 13/Jan 2014
policy director, says change needs to happen on a community level. “In order to address mental health issues, we need to look at and address social issues.” Norriss explains, “The Mental Health Foundation’s role is to promote the idea, which is based on evidence, that we shouldn’t rely on doctors or mental health professionals at the end of the line, to be totally responsible for our own mental health. If we just rely on ambulances at the bottom of the cliff to pick something up, that’s not going to work and it’s not fair to expect clinicians to take the burden of all of the things that we’re doing wrong. We need to stop just thinking about people getting treatment we need to think about what we can do to have a more psychologically healthy society.” Norriss says, “There are things we need to do collectively as a community, and as individuals if we want to maintain good mental health. So much of mental health is affected by what happens to people early on before they get to mental health services so it can go back to quality of their attachments in the first few years, what the parenting was like, if they were taught how to manage emotions when in crisis and building up resilience. A lot of these things effects peoples’ mental health and when things go wrong for people often it’s quite complicated because you’ve got all of these past events and processes and the services have to try and untangle it.” Norriss points out, mental health is harder to measure than physical health but thinks it would be a good approach to take patient feedback surveys “It means you’re treating the people who are using the services with respect and that you want to listen to what they have to say.” Norriss acknowledges NZ’s youth suicide rate as being one of the highest, however, he says the measurement of suicide statistics is questionable as NZ measures more accurately compared to other countries. “It’s absolutely tragic that New Zealand has such a high youth suicide rate because we are such a great country where people can grow up.” However, Norriss doesn’t think youth
suicide statistics indicates poor performance within our mental health system but says services could be a part of it. “We have to ask; what is it about our society overall and what sorts of messages are our young people getting and why, when they get into emotional strife, do they think the answer is suicide rather than choosing life. “We want to acknowledge that adolescence is a hard time and how do we, as a whole community, give the message that life is the choice and suicide is not a solution at all which is often what young people think.” Norriss says, most people who commit suicide have been struggling with their mental health but if you turn it around most people who have a mental illness don’t commit suicide.
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orriss is critical of the western model of health “It’s not really a health system it’s more of an illness management system, you don’t find your good health by going to mental health services, you find it with what you do in your life, through your relationships, with how you manage your emotions, your ability to have resilience and so forth. Those are the healthy strategies that young people need so when they do have a crisis in their life they’ve got some emotional strength and resilience to draw on.” “Early intervention is important but we also advocate for the stage before early intervention, as in, what can we do to keep people mentally healthy.” Norriss suggests investing money into the community through mental health promotion programmes, targeting key areas such as emotional literacy, positive role models, anti-bullying, family violence and zero tolerance towards people with different sexual identities, would be a good start. “Some of the new youth initiatives touch on some of these but we need more.” “There needs to be more of a preventative approach to mental health care and it shouldn’t be seen at just the services level.” Statistics show mentally unwell young people are tragically taking their own lives and NZ’s high youth suicide rate is a problem. We have a seemingly
robust national suicide plan and a significantly large amount of money is being spent on mental health however gaps in the mental health system remain and youth suicide numbers are not significantly decreasing. The shift towards mental health in primary care signifies the urgent need to address the lack of mental health training available to GP’s and nurses, considering it’s legal for them to be administering medication and treating mental disorders. Figures show a large amount of money is being spent each year in NZ on psychotherapeutic medications and anti-depressants are on the rise, however, there are no signs that the mental health of young people is improving. Families are speaking out about their horrific experiences within public mental health services and are asking for change. The hope is, a patient feed-back system will be implemented across the country to give a voice to families who feel unheard, but will it be enough to generate change and is the diagnostic tool used in clinical practice fundamentally flawed, considering it is linked to generating profits for the pharmaceutical industry. Insights from key industry professionals reveal an agreement towards change within our mental health system however the road to change varies somewhat in opinion. As author Criss Jami said, “Seemingly minor yet persistent things penetrate the mind over time making it difficult to ever realize the impact; hence, though quite unfortunate, the most dangerous forms of corruption are those that are subtle and below the radar.” “Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around us in awareness.” James Thurber. The Auckland District Health Board were invited to comment but declined. The names of the families have been changed to protect their identity. Helpline Numbers: Youthline 0800 376 633 Lifeline 0800 543 354 Depression helpline 0800 111 757 What’s Up 0800 942 8787 (noon-midnight)
Quick Facts There are numerous government funded child and adolescent mental health services throughout NZ, each run by its own district health board (DHB). Accessing these services is usually done by referral from a GP or school counselor. The free service is made up of a range of clinicians including psychiatrists, psychologists, occupational therapists, social workers and cultural advisors who diagnose and treat vulnerable young people with mental disorders. Arran Culver, Deputy Director of Mental Health at the Ministry of Health, says the government is introducing wait time targets for child and adolescent mental health services, where 80 per cent of young people will be seen within 3 weeks and 95 percent within 8 weeks of their referral.
Case Study Kelsey Mason (not her real name), 15, was referred to Whirinaki, (South Auckland community child and adolescent mental health service) in late 2011. Her first visit at Whirinaki was 8 months after the referral. Mason describes feeling uncomfortable with one of her clinicians, however she was not given the option of a different one. Whirinaki discharged Mason in February 2013 after receiving family work and one on one counseling. Mason describes feeling like they had given up on her, which added to her emotional distress. Mason’s mother recognised her daughter’s distress and tried to get her referred back. In August 2013, Mason was admitted into hospital after attempting suicide. A hospital psychologist diagnosed her with depression. Mason’s GP prescribed her with an anti-depressant. Mason, now on medication, awaits further sessions with Whirinaki with the hope they will help her.
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Totalitaria
LOOMS HOW THE UN HAS BEEN PLANNING A GLOBAL GOVERNMENT FOR DECADES
UN documents leaked to Fox News last month reveal the United Nations is gearing up for a ‘planetary announcement’ in 2015 that will usher in a 15 year programme that the UN boasts will be “the most transformative in human history”. In this exclusive extract from his new book Totalitaria, IAN WISHART gives you a glimpse at what’s driving the new regime
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orld War One, with its origins in the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, and the ambitions of a united Germany, had a massive impact on the civilised world. Millions had died in the war, millions more from the global Spanish flu epidemic that followed as the troops came home in overcrowded and disease-ridden transport ships. The histories of the twentieth century’s two great confrontations have been extensively covered by others, and need no detailed repetition here. Weary of battle, world leaders established the 20 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Dec 13/Jan 2014
League of Nations – with the notable absence of the USA – in the hope of settling future disputes without bloodshed. The United States came on board in a different way a decade later when it signed the Kellogg-Briand Treaty for the Renunciation of War in 1929:1 “I congratulate this assembly,” said US President Herbert Hoover, “the states it represents, and indeed, the entire world upon the coming into force of this additional instrument of humane endeavour to do away with war as an instrument of national policy and to obtain by pacific means alone the settlement of international disputes… an act so auspicious for the future happiness of
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mankind has now been consummated. I dare predict that the influence of the Treaty for the Renunciation of War will be felt in a large proportion of all future international acts.”
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ey signatories to the Treaty, apart from the US, included Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Italy and Germany. Within ten years, despite a “binding” declaration of peace, a war the size of which the world had never seen was breaking out as the planet went through a military version of groundhog day. From 1939 to 1945, virtually the entire globe was involved in conflict at some level. In the ashes of World War 2, world leaders again looked for ways to end such horrors. Clearly, ill-fated treaties like the Kellogg-Briand Renunciation of War were not going to cut the mustard any longer. The mantle of world policeman had passed from Great Britain to the United States, whose late entry into WW2 had proved decisive. The League Of Nations, established after WW1, had obviously proven ineffective at preventing the rise of Adolf Hitler and the re-armament of the German state; something stronger was needed. The global conflict of 1939-1945 had left virtually no corner of the world untouched. Of necessity, almost every sovereign power on the planet had been forced to choose sides and work
within international treaties and agreements to fight in cooperation with other like-minded countries. The doors of international cooperation opened by the war on the Nazis could not be closed again. The Allies had demonstrated that international alliances could be truly effective in policing the globe. One of the first symbols of the new hope to arise was the United Nations. Leaders and diplomats met in San Francisco late 1945 to thrash out the fine print for the new organisation. As President Obama recently described it: “After the Yalta Conference, shortly before the United Nations was founded, President Roosevelt spoke of what it would take to achieve a lasting and durable peace. ‘The structure of world peace,’ he said, ‘cannot be the work of one man or one party or one nation. It cannot be an American peace or a British, a Russian, a French, or a Chinese peace. It cannot be a peace of large nations or of small nations. It must be a peace which rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world’. “These words,” said Obama, “are more true today than ever, whether it’s preventing the spread of deadly weapons, promoting democratic governance, or fighting daily battles against poverty and hunger and deprivation. International peace, development, and security will not be achieved by one nation or one group of nations. It must be the work of all of us.”2 Roosevelt, the first person to use the phrase “United Nations” to describe the Allies during WW2, died on the eve of the establishment of the UN with a sudden brain haemorrhage – it was early April 1945. By the time the diplomats and leaders signed off on the UN Charter in October that year, the war had ended.
In the decades since, there has been huge support internationally for the United Nations concept, and what it may lead to. French leader Charles de Gaulle, for example, ominously remarked, “Nations must unite in a world government or perish.”3 “It seems to many of us that if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophic world conflict, we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward world government,” opined US newsman Walter Kronkite, “and [empower] police to enforce its international laws and keep the peace...To do that, of course, we Americans will have to yield... It would take a lot of courage, a lot of faith in the new order.”4 You can see, there, why the news media are so sycophantic to the UN agenda, it’s in their blood. The UN might have been born as a political organisation, but few will know that one of its driving forces was a New Age lawyer, Robert Muller. Born in Belgium, March 11, 1923, Muller had known the horrors of the Nazis as a resistance fighter. His experiences led him to write an essay on how to govern the world, and that essay secured him an internship at the UN in 1948. The topic had been chosen by the UN itself, so its agenda has been reasonably plain from its inception. Muller quickly rose through the ranks as one of the UN’s top bureaucrats. In a 40 year career he was at the centre of forming most of the UN’s big-ticket policies, as UN SecretaryGeneral Ban Ki-moon noted in a 2011 eulogy:5 “His creativity and influence were instrumental in the conception of scores of multilateral bodies, including the UN Development Programme, the World Food Programme, the UN
Muller quickly rose through the ranks as one of the UN’s top bureaucrats. In a 40 year career he was at the centre of forming most of the UN’s big-ticket policies, as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted in a 2011 eulogy 22 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Dec 13/Jan 2014
Population Fund, and the World Youth Assembly – some of the key endeavours that define the United Nations and our global work. He knew that these could not be impersonal institutional structures but, rather, had to be alive with vision, compassion and a powerful sense of human unity. “Dr. Muller brought precisely that spirit to whatever task he undertook. For him, the entire human family was his family. He also helped orchestrate the first-ever UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, and was deeply involved in many other global gatherings. His career
spanned the decades, the issues, and even almost all the professional ranks of the Secretariat – starting from the P1 level and rising steadily to AssistantSecretary-General, directly serving three of my predecessors. He also had a tremendous imprint on global education, including through the University of Peace, and richly earned the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education in 1989.” It was Muller who gave us the climate change bandwagon and whose philosophies infused the global “peace” movement. He was the man who pushed to enlist the world’s youth in
UN affairs (for reasons which will shortly become clear). But who, exactly, was this Rasputin? He didn’t see himself as a diplomat, he saw himself as an evangelist for the New Age, and was directing the United Nations to a position of global supremacy so it could usher in a new spiritual power to govern the planet. I kid you not. Here is Muller endorsing the words of his spiritual advisor Sri Chinmoy:6 “No human force will ever be able to destroy the United Nations, for the United Nations is not a mere building or a mere idea; it is not a man-made creation.”
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down rumours and gossip and look instead for hard facts. What follows has come directly from United Nations or other primary source documents (Muller’s archives for instance). What you are about to read is the story of how an obscure pagan religious group seized an opportunity to influence the influencers, to evangelise to the power brokers, in their own attempt to control the world. In the Prologue to this book we examined convergence of opportunity, that times arise when different groups see an opportunity to cooperate towards a common purpose. Some in this story are motivated by something spiritual, while for others it is money and power. What you are about to read is the story of the totalitarians motivated by their own brand of spiritual fundamentalism, and you will be able to judge for yourself just how successful they’ve been. Let’s begin. Extracted from Totalitaria: What If The Enemy Is The State? By Ian Wishart, Howling At The Moon Publishing Ltd, $38.99, 352 pages, illus. Available at Whitcoulls, PaperPlus, Take Note, The Warehouse and all good bookstores, or from 0800 747 007
Really? According to Muller and Chinmoy, the United Nations is supernaturally-driven, so if you think of it as an independent, secular institution you are in for a shock: “The United Nations is the visionlight of the Absolute Supreme, which is slowly, steadily and unerringly illuminating the ignorance, the night of our human life. “The divine success and supreme progress of the United Nations is bound to become a reality. At his choice hour, the Absolute Supreme will ring His own victory-bell here on Earth through the loving and serving heart of the United Nations.” Who knew the UN was “divine” in nature, ordained by “the Absolute Supreme”? In case you are wondering who the coy phrase “Absolute Supreme” might
refer to, don’t get distracted, we will get to that shortly. Muller and Sri Chinmoy are not the only senior UN figures to have invoked the concept of “the Divine” in regard to the mission of the United Nations. You’ll recall at the start of this book we talked about a “convergence of opportunities”, and different groups having different motives whilst sharing a similar goal. What you are about to read will stun you. You might have heard about parts of it on some conspiracy site on the web somewhere, or read about it in some rabid, faded tome from the 1970s written by some guy claiming the end of the world was coming. Let’s face it, we’ve all heard conspiracy theories about the United Nations. So here’s the thing. As an investigative journalist, it’s my job to chase
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References: 1. Herbert Hoover: Remarks Upon Proclaiming the Treaty for the Renunciation of War (KelloggBriand Pact). http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ ws/index.php?pid=21873 2. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-pressoffice/2013/09/24/remarks-president-obamaluncheon-hosted-un-secretary-general-ban-kimoon 3. “Peace Through World Government”, George W. Blount, Moore Publishing Company, 1974, p.30 4. “Neo Gnostics at the End of the Age” by Mary Jo Anderson, Catholic Culture, http:// www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view. cfm?recnum=4635 5. “New York, 11 March 2011 - SecretaryGeneral’s remarks at Memorial Service for Robert Muller”, http://www.un.org/sg/ statements/?nid=5132 6. “My Testament To The UN” by Robert Muller, World Happiness and Cooperation, USA, 1994, p172
Available at Whitcoulls, The Warehouse, Paper Plus, Take Note and all good bookstores, or online at
www.ianwishart.com Dec 13/Jan 2014 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 25
HERS | HEALTH
Gay conversion therapy court battle WORDS BY SOUMYA KARLAMANGLA
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couple who want to send t heir 15-year-old son to counselling to curb his attraction to other males is suing New Jersey over the state’s ban on so-called gay conversion therapies for minors. In August, Gov. Chris Christie signed into law a bill in that outlaws the therapies, making New Jersey the second state to do so after California. The New Jersey law prevents any licensed therapist, psychologist, social worker or counsellor from using the therapies on children under 18, citing health risks, such as depression and suicide, linked to the practice. The new law was upheld in court Nov. 8 by U.S. District Judge Freda Wolfson after two therapists who wanted to provide the treatments sued. Now, the same judge, and the same attorneys on each side, are headed to court again. In this case, which also names Christie, a 15-year-old – referred to in court
documents as John Doe for privacy reasons – and his parents want the teenager to undergo the therapies. They say the law is unfairly preventing him from getting the treatment he wants, according to court documents. In the court complaint, the family alleges that the law violates their freedom of speech and free exercise of religion, as well as the parents’ fundamental rights. The court complaint details the teenager’s history of expressing stereotypically feminine and homosexual behavior, which the family says led him to have suicidal thoughts starting around age 10. His “unwanted samesex attraction” was confusing and conflicted with his Roman Catholic religious beliefs, the complaint said. He tried to kill himself multiple times, the court documents say, and eventually asked to go to counselling for help. After he began therapy to change his sexual orientation in 2011 in New York, the strength of his same-sex attractions dropped, according to court documents. On a scale of 1 to 10, the level of attraction dropped from an 8 to 3 and “every day would get a little better,” according to the documents. Now, the 15-year-old wants to go to a licensed psychologist in New Jersey for further therapy – referred to in court documents as Sexual Orientation Change Efforts – but can’t because of the state’s ban. “Because no licensed mental health professional in New Jersey can provide him with SOCE counseling, John Doe will substantially regress in the significant progress he has made with his current counselor,” the court complaint states. In the earlier New Jersey case before Wolfson, she wrote in her opinion that
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the plaintiffs’ allegation that the ban infringes on First Amendment rights “runs counter to the long-standing principle that a state generally may enact laws rationally regulating professionals,” including those providing mental health services. Wolfson ruled that the law did not violate the plaintiff’s free speech because nothing in the law “prevents licensed professionals from voicing their opinions on the appropriateness or efficacy of Sexual Orientation Change Efforts, either in public or private settings.” Demetrios Stratis, the plaintiffs’ attorney in both cases, said that the new case deals with the family’s ability to exercise freedom of religion and the fundamental rights of parents. “It’s a different analysis that needs to be applied, and that’s why we think Doe needs to be adjudicated on its own,” Stratis said. Investigate footnote:
While the US media continue to spin the line of hard-wired sexual orientation – either “gay” or “straight” – studies by gay sociologists suggest the media spin simply isn’t true. They argue human sexuality is fluid and can change, and in one important study by gay psychology professor John de Cecco, Director of the Center for Research and Education in Sexuality at San Francisco State University, researchers proved they could turn a straight man gay through therapy. If therapy can change a heterosexual man’s sexual preferences, it is equally capable of changing same sex preferences as well. The full research was published in If You Seduce A Straight Person Can You Make Them Gay?, ed. By Dr. John De Cecco; New York: Harrington Park Press, 1993
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HERS | AltHEALTH
Hot news on‘The Change’
Ian Wishart examines the latest clinical studies on Remifemin
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enopause. The very word strikes fear and trembling into the hearts of women approaching fifty – roughly the average age of commencement of menopause. For many, the hormonal changes as the body shuts down fertility bring with them their own set of problems and tortures, ranging from a drop in sexual libido to hot flashes, sweating, anxiety, depression, insomnia, headaches, poor concentration and palpitations – to name a few. Big pharmaceuticals offer Hormone Replacement Therapy as a treatment, but that carries a higher risk of breast cancer, stroke and heart disease – hardly a confidence-inducing state of affairs. Stuck with a choice of rock or hardplace, many women choose to tough it out without the HRT. But now, new scientific studies suggest natural alternative remedies may be stepping up to the benchmarks set by the pharmaceutical giants. For centuries the plant Black Cohosh has been an old wives remedy for “the change”, but as regular readers of this column will already know, there are herbs, and then there are concentrated and purified herbal extracts. They are not the same thing. Like the old TV ad that showed you had to eat eight kilos of spinach to get the same iron dose
as a 250gm steak, there is good reason to choose specialised concentrates of herbal extracts rather than the cheaper, less processed varieties that offer less bang for buck. In the case of Black Cohosh, the go-to product is called Remifemin, produced by a German pharmaceutical company. Black Cohosh has enjoyed mixed reviews in its natural forms in medical studies precisely because there’s a wide variation in concentrations and manufacturing quality. The Germans figured they would aspire to the best grade of Black Cohosh extract, which is where Remifemin and a tiny handful of similar grade Cohosh extracts have managed to buck the lacklustre review trend. A major review of clinical studies on Remifemin between 2002-2012 has given the product a clinical 1A grading for safety and effectiveness in treating menopausal symptoms, “It is by far the most tested herbal for the relief of menopausal symptoms and has a long safety record,” remarked Associate Professor John Eden, a University of New South Wales endocrinologist and Director of the Women’s Health and Research Institute of Australia, in comments to the Australian news media. “It is not oestrogenic and I often recommend it especially for those women who shouldn’t take HRT; such as women who have been treated for breast cancer suffering from sweats and flushes.” But the good news doesn’t stop there. A 2013 study by doctors and researchers at Iran’s Tabriz University carried out a randomised controlled double-blind clinical trial on the medical
28 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Dec 13/Jan 2014
grade Black Cohosh extract. Eighty four women experiencing symptoms were treated daily and followed for eight weeks, and the results showed a big improvement for women taking the extract compared with those taking the placebo in the trial. Researchers found those on the extract experienced “significantly lower” symptoms across the board. How much? A 77% reduction in symptoms overall. In some areas, like depression and mental health, the reduction was close to or above 80%.1 There was also an improvement in libido for women in the trial. Women and even men may experience other benefits from the extract, however. An Austrian study this year found the Black Cohosh extract “significantly inhibited” the growth of prostate cancer cells in men, and that it made anti-cancer drugs like gemcitabine and fludarabine significantly more effective in treating prostate cancer.2 That possible anti-cancer effect could explain why some studies are tantalisingly showing a 47% reduction in the risk of breast cancer in women taking the extract, although more studies are needed to firm up these initial anti-cancer findings.3 References: 1. “Efficacy of Black Cohosh (Cimicifuga racemosa L.) in treating early symptoms of menopause: a randomised clinical trial”, Mohammad-Alizadeh-Charandabi et al, doi: 10.1186/1749-8546-8-20 2. “Attenuation of nucleoside and anti-cancer nucleoside analog drug uptake in prostate cancer cells by Cimicifuga racemosa extract BNO-1055”, Dueregger et al, Phytomedicine, 2013, 20,(14):1306-1314, doi: 10.1016/j. phymed.2013.07.009 3. “Black Cohosh and Breast Cancer: A Systematic Review”, Heidi Fritz et al, Journal of Integrative Cancer Therapies, doi: 10.1177/1534735413477191 February 25, 2013
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| Out Of Mind | Totalitaria |12/2013
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HERS | BOUTIQUE
RIGHT: Perfectly Pure is a personal care collection that’ll help you discover a new, more radiant you. We bring the beauty of nature to all of our products, which are carefully made using the best possible ingredients to nourish, replenish, moisturize and protect. Featuring a revolutionary collection of products that indulge your body and entice your senses, the Perfectly Pure line features wholesome ingredients you can trust and beautiful results you’ll love. www.perfectlypure.com
LEFT: Stunning aluminum. Sleek, thin and light. The all-new ClamCase Pro iPad Air keyboard case transforms your iPad. Years of iteration and thoughtful design. A perfect balance of style and productivity. And at 25% thinner and 45% lighter, it’s the slimmest ClamCase yet. The well spaced keys are elevated to provide a crisp and responsive experience your hands will appreciate. And take back over 50% of your iPad’s display real estate consumed by the on-screen keyboard with the all new ClamCase Pro. Now the only thing you see on screen is everything. www.clamcase.com
RIGHT: The GT-1000 packs performance, fit and cushioning into a sleek package. Mild to moderate overpronators will enjoy the stable ride provided by the DuoMax Support System. www.asics.co.nz
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ABOVE: 42mm stainless steel Swiss made with Rose PVD/stainless steel bezel, double curved sapphire crystal and white sunburst dial with rose Roman markers, 0.04 total carat weight Diamonds (8 stones) on a grey (outside 2 row 2.5mm) and rose (inside 8 row 2.0mm) cable bracelet. Water resistant to 5ATM. www.alor.com
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ABOVE: With its clean design, expressive lines and distinct structures, the IMPRESSA F7 has a personality all of its own while still remaining discreet. This design embodies the strength, sophistication and capabilities of the machine, which is a high-quality Swiss product. The IMPRESSA F7 is built around a self-explanatory operating concept. This means that coffee lovers can get the exact speciality they want directly, using an intuitive system. Naturally, you can ask the machine to prepare just one cup or two cups at once. www.us.jura.com
RIGHT: Foonf is Clek’s nocompromise convertible child seat, introducing revolutionary safety technology, innovative convenience features, and recyclable. Foonf was designed to international best practices for extended rear-facing use, which is to accommodate children in a rear-facing installation until their 4th birthday. Foam layers on both the inside and outside of the frame protect your child by absorbing energy in a side-impact collision, resulting in less force directly upon your child. In RearFacing mode, Foonf’s Anti-Rebound bar improves stability by limiting rotation of the child seat, helping protect your child’s head from impact in the case of a collision. www.clekinc.com
RIGHT: So like most things, the right time and temperature are critical for a great cuppa. As well as being a kettle, Sage Tea Maker makes tea perfectly and automatically. You can even programme it to start before you wake up and watching the basket move up and down is just brilliant! Whether you prefer green, white, oolong, herbal or black tea this ‘kettle’ knows the precise temperature for it. You can also control the strength of the tea (from mild to strong). Once the water has reached the optimal temperature, the stainless steel tea basket silently lowers itself into the water for auto steeping. The automatic lifting and lowering of the basket allows the tea leaves to circulate for maximum infusion. Once complete, the chime sounds to let you know your tea is ready to enjoy. But just in case you’re not ready, there’s a 60 minute ‘keep warm’ button. www.sageappliances.co.uk Dec 13/Jan 2014 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 31
HERS | BEAUTY
Get great lashes WORDS BY BROOKE WILSON
E
ven if you don’t wear a lot of makeup, many women like myself don’t head out the door without at least a sweep of mascara over their lashes. To make your lashes look long, full and healthy, follow these tips from Linda Hicks, beauty manager of Sephora. “First of all, most women want a great mascara that gives them both length and volume without clumping. Nobody likes clumpy mascara,” she says. “The second thing they look for is something that stays all day without giving them that raccoon look.” When choosing a mascara, decide on what specific look you want your lashes to have. If your lashes are already long, look for a volumizing formula. If they are short and thick, look for something
that lengthens the lashes. Hicks notes that while mascara formulas vary in quality, the real difference often is in the brush. “The application really is what makes a lot of difference. ... The brush is key,” she says. Carefully read the descriptions of each brush shape and size before purchasing mascara so you know you’re getting something that will achieve the results you want. Also, avoid pumping the brush in and out of the tube before applying; it’s better to use gentle circular motions to apply the formula to the brush and avoid breaking down the mascara inside the tube. If you still don’t think your lashes are long or full enough, try serums that give them a boost. Temporary applica-
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tions add fibres to the ends of lashes that help mascara stick better, creating the illusion of longer lashes. Permanent solutions actually help grow longer lashes; but be warned that these serums are quite pricey, and once you stop using them, the lash growth will stop as well. Lash health is just as important as lash appearance. Hicks says to invest in a good-quality eye makeup remover to avoid rubbing your eyes too much, which can damage lashes. Also remember that old makeup harbours bacteria, which is especially damaging to the eyes. “Mascara is probably the one product that has the shortest shelf life. You should really get a new one about every three months,” she says.
Dec 13/Jan 2014 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 33
HERS | THE CHEF
The trick to mastering eggs WORDS BY MATT WISHART
O
ne of the most frequent questions that I have been asked since becoming a chef is, “How do you cook eggs perfectly?” It seems that the ways of the egg are a dark art lost somewhere on a tablet buried deep within the Arabian Desert. Though all is not lost, there are a few tips and tricks I can share with you so that you can get those perfect poached eggs at home every time.
Now, I’m not sure who was the first person to decide to eat the next thing that came out of their chicken’s rear, but I’m glad that they did because eggs have become a rather versatile food. Indeed, they are used in sauces, baking, by themselves and as a thickener for various dishes. Eggs have even been used in the influenza vaccine. One of the most important factors when cooking eggs is the freshness of
34 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Dec 13/Jan 2014
the egg itself, the fresher the egg the better as it tends to hold its shape a lot more as well as retaining more of the nutrients when cooking. You can check by placing them into a bowl of water and looking to see which end of the egg is slightly raised, if the egg is more or less flat then it is probably as fresh as you can get it, if one of the ends are starting to rise in the water, then that is a sign that the air pocket in the egg
is getting slightly larger and decreasing in quality. POACHING EGGS The poached egg may well be the most elusive method of cooking eggs. Many of you may struggle with the egg separating in the water as soon as you drop it in, leaving you with a slightly gooey mess throughout the pot, whereas some of you may achieve a solid shaped egg, though you yearn to get the teardrop shape that is synonymous with the fancy cafes that line the city streets. Fresh eggs work best for poaching as they hold their shape a lot better in the water; older eggs tend to spread out a lot more. The key step in making the perfect poacher though lies in the use of vinegar to help set the egg as soon as it goes into the water. You don’t want too much though as you will get a vinegar taste to your eggs and it’s rather unpleasant. It is surprisingly easy once you get the hang of it, and after a while, it becomes second nature. To start off you will want a decent size pot, because like pasta, eggs cook better in an abundance of water. Get some white vinegar and pour in enough to cover the bottom of the pot by 1-2 millilitres, fill with hot water and place onto a high flame. You can add some salt to season the water so that the eggs absorb the salt as they cook and give an overall better flavour. If you aren’t comfortable with cracking eggs into a boiling pot of water, you can crack the eggs into a cup beforehand and then pour them in if you want. Once the water has reached boiling point, you are ready to go, hold the egg just above the surface of the water and crack it open gently. Make sure you hold the shell over the same spot for a few moments as it drops so as not to disturb the egg as it descends. Repeat for the rest of the eggs and then turn the heat down to a gentle simmer and wait for around 2 1/2 to 3 minutes for the eggs to cook. To check the eggs, use a slotted spoon to gently lift an egg up to the surface of the water, give it a little shake and it should, if properly cooked, jiggle around a moderate amount but it shouldn’t slosh around like a jelly either. You can also press down upon the
egg with a finger (softly!) and see how squishy it is, if it feels solid around the outside and soft in the centre then they are ready to come out. FRIED EGGS This is probably one of the easiest ways to cook an egg, you really want a non stick pan for it to give you the best result. Put a dash of Canola oil into the pan along with a small knob of butter. If you add butter to the pan by itself, it has a tendency to burn as soon as the pan gets hot. When you add it with oil, the butter is stopped from burning so you
don’t get that burnt taste in your eggs. You want the pan to get quite hot but not so much that it is smoking to the high heavens, if you get it to that point it’s best to start over before a fire starts and you end up with a hell of a mess to clean up. Crack the eggs gently into the pan and give the pan a small swish around so that the eggs don’t stick to the base. Add a little salt and pepper and cook on a low heat until the whites are set. If you like your yolks hard, flip the eggs over near the end of cooking and finish off on the other side.
Fresh eggs work best for poaching as they hold their shape a lot better in the water; older eggs tend to spread out a lot more
Dec 13/Jan 2014 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 35
second to rest and give it a little whisk whilst it’s off the heat. Place it back on until it is cooked to your liking and then season with salt and pepper.
SCRAMBLED EGGS To get perfect scrambled eggs, you require a little finesse in the preparation and cooking of the eggs. Crack three eggs into a small bowl along with a dash of cream and whisk it with a fork until it is all broken up. Heat up a non-stick pan with some oil and butter then once the butter has melted and started to bubble you can put your eggs in there. As soon as they go in you want to start shaking the pan back and forth to stop the eggs from cooking in one spot for too long. Turn the heat down to medium or low and whisk your eggs constantly as they start to cook. Once you are about half way there, take them off the heat for a
THE MIGHTY OMELETTE I have often heard that omelettes never go as planned, usually turning into scrambled eggs with a flurry of ingredients dotted throughout. It is surprisingly easy to make a good omelette once you know how. You want to start off with a scrambled egg mix, eggs and a dash of cream whisked to a smooth consistency. Ingredients wise you can add anything you want really, onions, capsicums, mushroom, cheese and bacon or you can experiment with other ingredients if you so choose. Get a small non-stick pan and heat it up with a dash of oil and a knob of butter, you can either cook off your ingredients first or add them to the omelette after which is what I do. Once the pan is hot then you can add your egg mix to it, don’t disturb it for around ten seconds. The next step is
Sundried tomato and feta omelette You’ll need: 3 free range eggs Dash of cream Small handful of sundried tomatoes 50g feta cheese, crumbled 1/4 of a red onion, sliced 1/4 of an avocado 2 slices of streaky bacon (optional) Method: 1. Slice up the onion and avocado and put to the side 2. Chop up the tomatoes into thin slices and add to onion and avocado 3. Chop up your bacon and fry it off if you are using that 4. Mix the eggs and cream together in a bowl 5. Heat up a non-stick pan with oil and butter and add the egg mix. Once that is cooked you can add the rest of your ingredients and fold the omelette over Serve and enjoy
36 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Dec 13/Jan 2014
to use a small spatula to pull the four sides of it into the middle of the pan. The four points that you want to touch are the top, both sides and the bottom of the pan. Pull each side into the centre and as it cooks you can tilt the pan gently so that the egg mix moves into the open spaces and fills it back out again. If you want to finish it off in the oven under the grill you can add your ingredients to the omelette and then slide under the grill until the egg and ingredients are cooked or you can cook the egg in the pan, add the ingredients and then fold over the omelette. To do that you want to slide the spatula underneath the egg by jiggling the pan as you slide it under until it is around half way through. With a quick twitch of the hand you want to flick the egg over to the other side completing the omelette or you can move it over gently, it’s up to you. That’s all you really need to know to achieve a great omelette at home but I find it the most fun by adding different ingredients to the omelette to make for a more interesting meal.
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Dec 13/Jan 2014 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 37
HERS | CUISINE
New York, New York James Morrow has the meal of his life
R
emember that iconic scene in Paddy Chayefsky’s classic film, Network, when a deranged Peter Finch urges everyone to stand up wherever you are, go to your window, and yell, I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore? Well, my friend, I have not received any prophetic visions, nor am I suffering from any level of delusion that would prevent me from holding a job or a driver’s license. But if you love your food, I do want you to get up, go to your computer, and
book yourself some plane tickets to New York. Do it now, while the American dollar is still weak and the air fares are still relatively low. Because I have just returned from two weeks in Manhattan. And you know what? It should no longer be called the Big Apple. Instead, it should be called the big 12-hour sous vide confit of apple with mille feuille of truffle and foie gras. Despite all you may have heard about recessions and layoffs and the decline of American greatness, the New York
38 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Dec 13/Jan 2014
food scene is probably the most vibrant of any city anywhere on this planet. Whether it is street corner pizza, the wave of wine bars that are sweeping the city, or the very top-end dining rooms such as those which populate the revitalised Time-Warner Centre at Columbus Circle, New York has a culinary energy about it I have not felt since the end of the last decade. But here is the best part: because there have been cutbacks in certain sectors, most notably banking and finance, if one is willing to eat a bit late
– say, 9:00 or 9:30 – some of the hottest tables in town are there for the taking. Over the course of a fortnight we ate at everything from Scarpetta, New York’s “it” Italian, to the classic Gramercy Tavern, to Tom Colicchio’s (think “Top Chef”) CraftSteak. And because New York is really a 24-hour town, it is possible to have a full meal, drinks with friends, and then a second course of dinner – as we did one night when we wound up with a bunch of wine and cheese distributors at Jody William’s delightful Il Gottino, eating terrines and salume at one in the morning. Perhaps – no, scratch that. By far the best meal we had was the eleven course degustation at Eleven Madison Park, downtown at 11 Madison Avenue. And when I say eleven courses, I really mean about 15 or 16, because by the time Chef Daniel Humm is done, from the first little amuse-bouches (including a surprisingly great bite of fried veal sweetbreads delivered and eaten before one’s brain really registers what they really are), to the last petit-fours (which are, delightfully, left at the table with a bottle of self-serve cognac to help you digest), the menu grows to far more than the sum of its advertised parts. And what parts! After a number of treats from the kitchen, the batting officially opened with a Californian caviar, served with the traditional accompaniments on a bed of pannacotta and lobster gelee. An insalata caprese comprised two globules of spherified liquid: one buffalo mozzarella, the next tomato and basil, each one exploding in a mist in the mouth. A gorgeous piece of halibut, the best I have ever tasted. A glass dome that is lifted at the table to reveal a cloud of smoke and then a perfect square of smoked pork belly. An egg shell containing a creamy sabayon and frog’s legs. Perhaps the greatest dish, however, was a porcelain cup – molded off an actual sea urchin’s shell – containing a “cappuccino” of sea urchin, cauliflower and crab, which was foamy, creamy, salty, briny, rich and yet ethereally light at the same time. Everything that a seafood dish should be.
None of this was let down by the service, either. Though we did not sit down until 9:30, the restaurant happily served us until well after 2, and standards never fell down once. Each course came with an entourage, two servers carrying plates, another to carry accompaniments, the head waiter who explained each course, and the sommelier who was in charge of the wine pairings: everything from a Japanese sake with the caviar to a 1996 Burgundy to a Merseault to an Austrian
number I had never heard of to a special dessert wine made by a mad Italian in California who makes a few hundred cases in years when he feels like it. This is serious food, but also seriously fun. It was an edible performance. Earlier this year, a study by researchers at San Francisco State University suggested that when it comes to buying happiness, experiences provide much more bang for the buck than mere things. Having sat through five hours of this sort of sustained genius, I can see why.
Daniel Humm’s Sea Urchin Cappuccino With Crab And Cauliflower Yield: 10 Servings You’ll need:
For Sea Urchin Foam: Sweat shallots in butter. Add sea-urchin roe
Cauliflower Puree:
and flambé with cognac. Add lime juice and
500 grams pureed cauliflower florets
reduce by half. Add lobster stock and reduce
250 grams whipping cream
by half again. Add cream and bring it up to
3 gelatin sheets
boil. Add crème fraiche. Season to taste. Cool mixture slightly and then pour into a nitrous
Crab Salad: 100 grams Dungeness crab meat (cleaned and cooked) 20 grams creme fraiche
oxide whipped cream charger and charge with one charger.
To Serve:
Chopped tarragon, to taste
Fill the cauliflower puree into the bottom
Salt and pepper, to taste
of small bowls or martini glasses. Add crab
Sea Urchin (Kina) Foam:
salad and finish with foam.
30 grams butter 40 grams chopped shallots 50 grams sea urchin roe 20 grams cognac 6 limes, juiced 200 grams reduced lobster stock 600 grams cream 100 grams creme fraiche Salt and cayenne, to taste
To make: For Cauliflower Puree: Cook the tops of cauliflower in salt water until very soft. Strain and blend until very smooth in a blender. Cool down. Heat a little of the puree with the bloomed gelatin sheets and add back to the puree. Add whipping cream. Season to taste. For Crab Salad: Combine all ingredients and season to taste.
Dec 13/Jan 2014 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 39
HERS | TRAVEL
When in Rome, stroll like Romans do WORDS BY GARY A. WARNER
T
he hazy, damp air of the hottest April in 40 years finally cooled around our rental apartment near the Pantheon in Rome, enough that it was comfortable for me to put on a long-sleeve collared shirt and my sport-coat above my slacks and black shoes for the first time in five days. I announced to my wife and two children that it was time to take a family stroll. “Where are we going?” asked my son, then 18.
“I don’t know – that’s the whole point,” I said. “It’s called la passeggiata. Families dress up a bit and take a long evening stroll. It’s a tradition.” “But where are we going?” he asked again. My daughter, 11, didn’t look up from her book. To get this Italy tradition going, I was going to have to overcome Warner family tradition from back home – evenings are a time to chill out, often in our separate corners, with books,
40 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Dec 13/Jan 2014
games or computer screens of our choosing. But we weren’t home, as I repeatedly reminded my flock during a nine-day passage from Rome to Florence to Venice. We were in Rome, and we were going to do as Romans do. And Florentines. And Venetians. I understood why family didn’t want to add yet another foray at the end of long, stifling days. Traveling stresses even the best-tempered of families, a description few friends and rela-
tives would apply to our unit. To save money, we had packed into a series of “family rooms” that felt more like a can for that famous Italian fish – the sardine. The march of daytime sightseeing – the walk from the Pantheon to the Colosseum in Rome, through the churches of Florence, and from Piazza San Marco to Piazza Santa Margherita in Venice – exhausted the clan by the time I was agitating for an evening stroll. Every time I would insist on my paternal right of la passeggiata, my three Garibaldi-esque family revolutionaries denounced the tyranny of a walk with no direction, meaning or end. So there would be only one classic family stroll, a lovely evening walk through the quiet Oltrarno district in Florence after a long day on the train. Another night, my daughter and I meandered over to the Trevi Fountain for the hoary but sweet tradition of throwing a coin in the fountain to ensure a return trip to Rome. By our last stop, Venice – just when the 24-hour togetherness was wearing its thinnest – we had the closest sleeping quarters of the trip: a bedroom with a double bed and two singles, our bags stacked high in the corners to allow a narrow passage to the bathroom door. In Venice, la passeggiata turned into my solitary strolls that would usually end up at the Caffe Florian on the Piazza San Marco. I’d sit in the arcade and sip on a $12 double espresso. The caffe’s orchestra dueled sweetly with the musicians at Caffe Quadri on the opposite side of the square as tourists trooped through what Napoleon is said to have called “the drawing room of Europe.” By the final night of our Italian trip, I had given up on la passeggiata. We spent the evening packing for our flight home. It was 10 p.m. My daughter said in a quiet voice, “Dad, I’m really hungry.” We had snacked at a canal-side dessert shop in midafternoon, but never really had a full dinner. I wasn’t hungry. Neither was my wife. “I’m kind of hungry, too,” my son offered. In other trips to other cities, I would
phone for pizza delivery or drive off to get takeout. But this was Venice. The kitchen at our small hotel was long closed. I wasn’t driving anywhere. “We’ll have to walk and see what we find,” I said. Venice is a ghostly place at night. There are just 35,000 residents in the city. The population triples during the day on the high tide of tourists. By late night, most visitors are gone or in their hotel rooms, giving those remaining the feeling of being shut into a museum after hours. We started zigzagging through the streets and small piazzas, all empty and dimly lit. Finally, after about 20 minutes, we saw a golden light and a few people sitting at tables across from the Palazzo Zorzi. We sat. Bread and olive oil appeared. The kids ordered spaghetti carbonara – a creamy Roman pasta dish they had fallen in love with earlier on the trip. We ate and drank and told stories. My son and daughter took turns trying to replicate the sound made by an inept garbage truck driver in Florence who scraped a trash dumpster repeatedly against the cobblestones under our hotel window at 5 a.m. When it was time to leave, I had only the vaguest idea where we were. We had left the hotel so quickly I had forgotten to take a map. Being in the land of papal infallibility, I invoked my right as a father to be our compass and set off. After 10 min-
In Venice, la passeggiata turned into my solitary strolls that would usually end up at the Caffe Florian on the Piazza San Marco. I’d sit in the arcade and sip on a $12 double espresso utes of twists and turns, we rounded a corner to find ourselves at the restaurant we had just left. I tried again, this time attempting to hew a path toward the moon, that I recalled was in the direction of the Lagoon (and our hotel). After a half hour, we popped out on the esplanade near the San Zaccaria water taxi stop, about 200 yards from our hotel. A low, three-quarter moon reflected a rippled ray of light across the Lagoon to our eyes. Empty gondolas made a low wooden “clunk” noise as they bobbed against their pilings. Along the broad walkway, we linked arms as we walked from patch of lamplight to lamplight. Lightning flashed far out in the Adriatic – so distant we heard no thunder “I wish we weren’t going home,” my daughter said. La passeggiata had worked its magic.
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HERS | READIT
In search of meaning WORDS BY MICHAEL MORRISSEY THE TESTAMENT OF MARY
it is frequently bent on casting doubt on belief. Over the last two hundred years there have many novels and document of this type. They re-write the Gospels for us. But of course they do not need to be written. Re-read to be sure, but not re-written. For those who seek ambiguity and doubt they will find it. For those who seek affirmation of the faith, they too may find it but they will need to remind themselves of the original Gospels.
By Colm Toibin Picador, $25.00
As Lloyd Jones would know, (and as it has turned out, Eleanor Catton wouldn’t), it can be a great career boost just to get in the short list for the Man Booker. Toibin, a highly experienced and well thought-of Irish writer, had this barely over 100-page novella short-listed for the famous award but as we now know, the prize went to Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. There is a notion floating about that the winner of the Man Booker should be a BIG book, teaming with colourful characters, rather than a novella, so it may be that The Testament of Mary never really stood a chance. We’ll never know for sure. Toibin’s book has confrontational ambiguity. Toibin has Mary thinking that her son gathered around him misfits, “men who could not look a woman in the eye” though she adds he (ie Jesus) was not a misfit. Further on, she writes he was “grateful, good-mannered, intelligent.” A few pages further on she says “his voice was “all false” and his tone “all stilted” and then she writes, “that she loved “watching my husband and son walking together to the Temple.” The Testament of Mary is a roller coaster ride between her seeming disapproval of her son and her obvious affection for him. From a Christian point of view, this ambiguity is not acceptable, for by tradition Mary would know her son was the Son of God and not a speaker with a “false tone”. There is an impassioned plea on p 33 by Martha to the effect that Jesus is God’s son; that he was not mortal and had special powers and Mary had been blessed enough to recognise him. It is Martha who insists that Jesus can raise
ALMOST ENGLISH By Charlotte Mendelson Mantle, $37.99
Lazarus from the dead. Which sure enough, he does. The description by Toibin is poignant and poetic: “He had been unchanged by death. Once his eyes opened, he stared at the sun with a deep unearthly puzzlement and then at the sky around the sun. He seemed not to see the crowd; some sounds came from him, not words exactly, something closer to whispered cries, or whimpers, and then the crowd stood back as Lazarus moved through them…” The bringing back to life of Lazarus seems the only miracle that Mary believes or is witness to, though later in the text it refers to Miriam telling Mary the story so once again ambiguity has overtaken the text. The same narrative distancing happens with the changing of water into wine and Jesus walking on water. The incidents are related to her. It’s all done with sleight of hand so we are thrown back on our beliefs. Toibin’s style exhibits a constant virtuosity and beauty but it seems
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Novelist Mendelsohn is the descendent of TransCarpathian-Ruthenians who were former subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, born in the Ukraine, spoke Hungarian yet considered themselves Czech. Surprisingly, there’s not a vampire among them. But let’s start with a feast – cold-sour cherry soup, chicken paprika, buttered noodles, stuffed cabbage, sweet and sour cucumber salad, cold krumplisalata, and hot paprika krumpli with sausage. There’s pages more, much of it prepared by the heroine Marina’s trio of great aunts who address everyone as “Darlink!” and burst into tears if asked about their earlier lives. Marina is sixteen years old and doesn’t know what she wants, which as I recall (from distant memory) is not unusual with those in the grip of adolescence. Initially, Marina wants to be at home, then she wants to attend the prestigious boarding school of Combe Abbey and presumably become more sophisticated – know how to dress, how to approach sex and fit in generally. However, no sooner does she arrive in Combe than she is smitten with nostalgic yearnings for
home. Mendelson renders this emotional turmoil with great skill. Equally confused is Laura, Marina’s mother, who is carrying on a risqué affair with Dr Alistair Sudgeon, “her aging paramour”. The periodic reappearance of her former husband Peter Farkas doesn’t help matters. Marina has a crush on a thin reedy fellow called Simon Flowers. But he is destined not to play any real part in her emotional life. When, surprisingly, he invites her to join a quiz team, she perversely says no, even though it was her only real chance to spend time with him in person instead of yearning for him at a distance. Such are the perplexities of a young woman’s heart! Instead of engaging with Simon Flowers, Marina has a highly ambiguous relationship with Guy Viney, a boy younger than her. As with all but the most mature relationships, one of the main stresses is meeting and relating to the parents. Will they approve or disapprove? How odd will they be? How normal? Mrs Viney (mother of Guy
Viney) proves very odd indeed. Marina is disconcerted by the casual wealth and eccentricities of her boyfriend’s mother but charmed, after a fashion. Mr Viney proves a different kettle of fish. A famous and distinguished historian, he talks Marina into dropping chemistry and medicine for history. Gradually, it becomes apparent his attention towards Marina are not entirely proper. His attempted seduction of the young Marina is both awkward and sordid and – and dare one say it? – there is something a bit English about it. While I found myself more engaged by Marina’s travails than those of her mother, both engage attention. The descriptions and unusual even weird poetic metaphors are a constant delight – “Marina’s bedroom is essentially a corridor, off which the bedroom and the toilet lead like a boa constrictor digesting a sheep”. Almost English teems with images of this surreal calibre. And though the content of the novel is slender, the superb language and the sense of European exoticism
together with Marina’s high confusion make this a challengeable and enjoyable read. And don’t forget the constant stream of Hungarian food.
GUESTS ON EARTH By Lee Smith A Shannon Ravenel Book, $25.95 It’s the spring of 1937 when Evalina Toussaint, the narrator of Guests On Earth, first catches sight of Zelda Fitzgerald, wearing black tights and ballet slippers and smoking a cigarette, on the grounds of Highland Hospital in Asheville, N.C. By then, Zelda had been married for 16 years to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was so infatuated with the Montgomery belle when they first met that he wrote the same line to her over and over: “I used to wonder why they kept Princesses in towers.” Never having been imprisoned, Zelda found Scott’s fantasy annoying, never dreaming that she was soon to embark on a life so decadent and reckless it would leave her permanently unhinged, shut away for the rest of her life in clinics and mental institutions throughout Europe and the United States. Highland was to be her final stop. In 1948, a fire ripped through the top floor of the hospital’s central building while firefighters, alerted too late, watched the building burn to the ground. Zelda was one of the nine women who perished in that locked ward. Smith weaves the story around Evalina Toussaint, a piano prodigy and daughter of a New Orleans courtesan whose affair with a local married man turns tragic. After her mother commits suicide, the shattered child is shipped off to Highland as a ward of Dr. Carroll, the director and chief psychiatrist, and his wife, a former concert pianist. Thirteen-year-old Evalina quickly recovers and adapts to life at the hospital, reading Nancy Drew novels, and warming to the piano lessons she takes with the doctor’s wife.
Though Zelda makes many vivid appearances, I’m happy to say that Guests on Earth steers clear of fictionalized biography. Instead, Smith uses Evalina and her fellow patients as a hall of mirrors reflecting Zelda’s tumultuous, frustrated life, as well as to examine the nature of mental illness, especially the views of the day on women and madness. Evalina’s story most closely parallels Zelda’s. A talented teenager, she leaves the safety of Highland to pursue her music studies, and eventually becomes a skilled accompanist. But her brilliant career is cut short when she falls for a charismatic opera singer and follows him around the world, finally ending up in her hometown, New Orleans. There, her husband’s infidelity and drinking (shades of F. Scott) eventually take their toll, and Evalina returns to Highlands. Smith’s portrait of the hospital smoothly incorporates a history of the era’s “progressive” treatments for mental disorders: healthy diet, exercise, insulin shock treatments, a horse serum procedure in which equine blood was injected directly into a schizophrenic’s cerebrospinal fluid, and the newly trending lobotomies, some administered with an icepick by a doctor in a Lobotomobile. Most of the high-spirited, rebellious, outspoken women who populate Guests on Earth would not now be considered insane at all. Reviewed by Gina Webb
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HERS | SEEIT
Treacly and strangely dull WORDS BY CLAUDIA PUIG & KENNETH TURAN
F
or a movie set in Germany during the Holocaust, The Book Thief is strikingly glossy, with images that look like a holiday greeting card. While the performances can’t be faulted, the film lacks the emotional resonance of the best-selling novel by Marcus Zusak. With superficial sleekness, it flattens the intricate story to excessive simplicity. A World War II drama as seen through the eyes of a child, Thief feels mannered when it should be lyrical, and stodgy when it should be grave. The film’s narrator (Roger Allam) is Death itself, a device that works better on the page than on the screen. Anchoring the story is nine-yearold Liesel Meminger (Sophie Nelisse), whose first scenes are riveting. The year is 1938 and her younger brother has just died. Her Communist mother flees Nazi Germany and gives up Liesel to a foster family. Liesel is a spirited and precocious girl who goes to live with the kindly, accordion-playing Hans Hubermann (Geoffrey Rush) and his scowling wife,
Rosa (Emily Watson), in their box-like home in a picturesque village. Having grabbed a book dropped by a grave digger when her brother was buried, Liesel is entranced by the slim volume. But she can’t read the words within. With the help of Hans, Liesel learns not only to read, but to love words. To show this, the pair scrawl vocabulary all over the basement walls in chalk. This is juxtaposed with Hans’ daily work as a house-painter, in which he must paint over words like “Goldstein” on a storefront. The film struggles with fusing the redemptive power of words and the magic of books with the brutal realities of Nazism. Instead of offering honest storytelling, Thief feels Hollywoodized for our protection. When the
Instead of offering honest storytelling, Thief feels Hollywoodized for our protection
town is bombed, dead bodies look as untouched and peaceful as if they’re napping. Liesel forges a friendship with a golden-haired boy named Rudy (Nico Liersch) and their playtime looks idyllic as they cavort over cobblestone streets. Even when they protest the social order, it seems tame. Rudy’s chosen for elite military service, prompting him and Liesel to hide and chant: “I hate Hitler!” Later, scenes of Kristallnacht are juxtaposed with the innocent voices of children (wearing uniforms bedecked with swastikas) sweetly singing Teutonic anthems. The dramatic device is similar to those employed in a plethora of WWII movies. A friendship that develops between Liesel and Max (Ben Schnetzer), a young Jewish man whom the Hubermanns hide at great personal risk, is one of the film’s more touching aspects. And Rush infuses his fatherly character with goodness and weary humanity. Director Brian Percival (who has helmed several Downton Abbey episodes) has fashioned a film that looks pretty but seems short on substance, with onedimensional storybook characters. The theme is that the power of words can triumph over evil. Certainly they can outlast evil, as with The Diary of Anne Frank, a film with a similar message that was far more convincing. The Book Thief is a sleek production that is often treacly and strangely dull the antithesis of what a wartime drama should be. The Book Thief Cast: Roger Allam, Sophie Nélisse, Geoffrey Rush, Emily Watson Directed by: Brian Percival Running time: 131 min Rating: PG 13 GG
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A
ftermath is a bombshell disguised as a thriller. Its devastating story involves Jews and the Holocaust, yet not a single Jewish character appears on-screen. Instead there are only Poles, grappling to different degrees with a history that is as difficult as it is complex. It was the excellent notion of writerdirector Wladyslaw Pasikowski to use the true story of what happened in the Polish town of Jedwabne, an incident revealed in historian Jan Gross’ equally controversial 2000 book Neighbors, as the inspiration for a fictional drama. If you don’t know what happened in Jedwabne, don’t look it up, for one of the pleasures of this brooding, disturbing film is the how adroitly and carefully it reveals its secrets. Aftermath opens with the return to Poland after a 20-year absence of Franek Kalina (Ireneusz Czop). He’s not happy being back, but as it turns out Franek isn’t happy about much of anything. A dour, contentious individual, he’s been living in Chicago all this time but instead of delivering encomiums about the land of the free, he tells the airport taxi driver “they sure don’t let a Pole make an honest buck over there.” The “they” turns out to refer to the Jews, and Franek, in addition to everything else, is a reflexive anti-Semite, casually referring to Jews as “Yids” and grumbling about how difficult they make his economic life. Franek has returned to an unnamed rural town to visit his brother, Jozek (Maciej Stuhr), because Jozek’s wife and children have abruptly moved to Chicago and refused to tell anyone why they have abandoned Jozek and their homeland. Franek has shown up to find out what scared them off. Jozek, however, is not the forthcoming type. As surly as his brother, he has angry gripes of his own, like the way Franek abandoned their parents to emigrate to the U.S. and didn’t even return for their funerals. Though he won’t say why, Jozek is also noticeably on edge: He keeps an ax near for protection and is not surprised when a rock gets thrown through his window late at night. It doesn’t take long, however, for Franek to find out what seems to be
behind this. His brother has made it his mission to collect the town’s Jewish gravestones. They were uprooted when the Nazis destroyed the Jewish cemetery during the war and, as was not uncommon across Eastern Europe, repurposed as paving stones around town. This work has made Jozek persona non grata in his town, but even he cannot explain to his brother why he is doing it. “They were human beings,” is the best he can do. “There is no one left to look after them.” In a less complex work, this discovery might be the film’s dramatic climax, but in Aftermath it is just the beginning of the story. Gradually, and much against their will, the brothers find out more and more about their town’s history, revealing secret after unthinkable secret. One of the most effective of Aftermath’s notions is to make the investigators not the classic righteous Gentiles of so many Holocaust movies but angry, dissatisfied, anti-social, even borderline anti-Semitic individuals drawn into a quest for the truth almost against their will. Strongly acted by Stuhr, Czop and a capable supporting cast, Aftermath succeeds, as films like this rarely do, on its plot (Pasikowski’s earlier thriller, Psy, was a major hit in Poland) and in its ability to be sensitive to the issues involved. Though its sensibility is different, Aftermath shares with 12 Years a
That this film could be made in Poland with a Polish cast and crew has turned Aftermath into a significant milestone in that country’s ongoing process of wrestling with its demons Slave a willingness to be unblinking in the face of great evil. That this film could be made in Poland with a Polish cast and crew has turned Aftermath into a significant milestone in that country’s ongoing process of wrestling with its demons. It’s almost as if the truth has a will of its own, refusing to stay buried. What Jozek told his brother about the tombstones – “there is no one left to look after them” – connects to the awful truth behind this film as well. AFTERMATH Cast: Maciej Stuhr, Ireneusz Czop, Zbigniew Zamachowski, Danuta Szaflarska Directed by: Wladyslaw Pasikowski Running time: 104 min Rating: TBA GGGG
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HERS | FAMILY
Problem solving skills WORDS BY ROBERT NICKELL
P
roblem solving is a skill we all utilize day to day within our lives, but how did we learn it? It’s not the easiest thing to teach; however, there are many ways in which we, as parents, can help our children become excellent problem solvers. With seven kids of my own I’ve learned that there are lots of ways to help teach problem solving to children. Here are my top four tips:
1
LET THEM TRY IT One was to help teach kids to solve problems is to let them figure out certain age appropriate things on their own such as zipping up
a coat, buttoning a button, tying their shoes, etc. This will instill a sense of confidence in your children as well as encourage them to solve problems as they arise. It can be quite rewarding for a child to discover something on their own; it will boost their confidence and build their problem solving skills.
2
DISCUSS PROBLEM SOLVING Talking out loud and discussing problems with your child is a great way to teach them problem solving skills. By doing this you can better understand where they’re coming from and the path they’re taking to understand and solve the problem at hand.
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The discussion of the problem will allow you, the parent, to help without you directly solving your child’s problem for them. Ask your child questions that might guide them closer to the answer, and listen to their ideas in order to better steer them in the right direction.
3
BE A ROLE MODEL – ALWAYS Your children are watching and learning from your every move, so make sure your actions send the right message. When you encounter a problem don’t get frustrated, but instead calmly solve it. Encourage your child to keep trying when problems are tough
and help them when they really need it. You probably don’t think about the many problems you solve every day in your work life or at home, but watching how you handle those problems or situations can be a great learning experience for your child, and will give them a better idea of how to solve their own problems properly in the future.
4
START YOUNG Teaching kids to solve problems should begin at a young age. Beginning as infants, children learn, change and grow every week. So you should help teach them problem solving skills beginning at a young age. Let
them work some things out on their own, and they’ll be better problem solvers in the long run. Of course it’s important to start small with babies and expand upon the problems you let your children solve alone (with your supervision) as they grow. I hope these tips will work for you as I’ve found them successful in the past within my own home. Teaching skills you know your child will utilize and expand upon throughout their entire life can be quite rewarding – it’s definitely worth the extra effort. Happy parenting! Sincerely, Daddy Nickell
Ask your child questions that might guide them closer to the answer, and listen to their ideas in order to better steer them in the right direction
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