Contexts

“War is not healthy for children and other living things” was a popular slogan of the anti-war movements of the 1960s. But new research shows that it’s not just war that’s hazardous: excessive military spending also significantly increases children’s mortality rates.

Sociologist Steve Carlton-Ford, in a paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in Denver last year, suggested that when military spending per soldier substantially exceeds the average national income, child mortality rates jump dramatically.

While “moderate” military spending may not affect child mortality rates, spending on civil wars, the predominant form of war since WWII, destroys economies and leads to sudden increases in infant and child mortality rates.

Among the top 25 percent of countries in terms of military spending, child mortality rates are more than double those of lower spending countries, with an average of 117 child deaths per thousand, far exceeding average rates of between 30 and 50 child deaths.

The impact of military spending on child mortality rates holds even after considering the effects of civil war, basic levels of military spending, the size of armies, economic development, government corruption, and type of government.

It all goes to show that war isn’t healthy for children. And neither is military spending.

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We love caramelized onions, but do we have the time to cook them? Slate writer Tom Scocca recently ranted about recipe writers’ widespread fabrication about the time it takes to do the job properly—45 minutes, he insists, rather than the five minutes some recipes claim. Scocca believes that consumers’ demand for quick and easy dinners is pressuring writers to mislead their readers.

This push for quick and easy dinners is driven in part by the entrance of women into the labor force and the greater profit potential of processed foods, says professor Marion Nestle in her [2002] 2007 book Food Politics; How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health.

In response, activists suggest that “slow food” unites enjoyment of food with healthy lifestyles, community ties, and environmental stability. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), reconnecting people with farmers, has also grown in popularity over the last decade. Most Americans now work more than 40 hours a week, making faster food convenient, if not essential. Sociologist Marcia Ostrom’s 2008 chapter, Community Supported Agriculture as an Agent of Change; Is it Working? (Remaking the North American Food System: Strategies for Sustainability) describes CSA members’ “supermarket withdrawal”: their complaints about lack of variety, unfamiliar produce, or an excess of veggies. While eating local may sound appealing, it may entail eating Swiss chard or kale for dinner three times a week.

All of the demands placed on us daily can, at times, make the simple act of making dinner feel like a herculean task. Sometimes it’s just easier to pretend that caramelizing onions only takes five minutes. But the slow food movement forces us to think carefully about the way we eat.

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Apple’s application marketplace boasts over half a million apps, ranging from games to productivity tools. Now, the store also offers apps for autism.

In fact, there are currently over 200 apps for autism, according to speech pathologist Lois Brady. Some apps, like TOBY Playpad, help caregivers teach children early learning concepts. Others, like Proloquo2go and TapToTalk, help users overcome difficulties with speaking and communication. AutismXpress helps users identify emotions. And one app, called Look in My Eyes, helps individuals practice eye contact. Some suggest the technology has revolutionized autism treatment.

Technology has transformed how we diagnose disorders, understand illness, interact with medical authorities, and even relate to our own bodies. In a 2010 article in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, sociologists Monica Casper and Daniel Morrison argue that these transformative technologies include vaccines, ultrasound machines, artificial joints, genetic mapping, and even electronic medical records.

Some suggest that these technologies help drive medicalization, the process through which personal problems are defined as medical concerns. But sociologist Andrew Webster, writing in Current Sociology in 2002, argues that technology is not necessarily expanding medicine’s domain. By “open[ing] the medical black bag,” he writes, technology may in fact loosen doctors’ control over treatment.

While some therapists incorporate apps into their treatment, one doesn’t need to consult a doctor or obtain a prescription to benefit from them. Clearly, they allow consumers to take medical treatment into their own hands. But apps aren’t for everyone. Nor can everyone afford these technologies. And some people, in the end, prefer to interact with a good old-fashioned human being.

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Recent news reports about burger patties are making consumers see red—or at least pink.

Last year, Jamie Oliver, a British chef and TV show host, called into question the safety of ground beef. On his cooking show, Oliver demonstrated how U.S. beef producers centrifuged the fat from the low-priced meat, using ammonium hydroxide to kill E. coli and Salmonella, and transforming disposable trimmings into sellable lean beef.

Since the 1990s, this scientifically processed beef has been distributed throughout the United States, comprising 70 percent of the ground beef market, and showing up in fast-food restaurants, supermarket frozen food aisles, and kids’ school lunches — without warning labels. USDA microbiologist Gerald Zirnstein calls it “pink slime,” and doesn’t consider it to be ground beef at all.

After the controversy, Burger King and McDonald’s quietly removed a major beef supplier. Yet the distribution of so-called “pink slime” continues due to what sociologist George Ritzer describes as the “vertical McDonaldization” of the beef industry. Ritzer shows how the demands of the fast-food industry have “McDonaldized” cattle raising, as well as beef slaughtering and distribution, to make the process efficient, calculable, predictable, and controllable.

Cattle are raised in limited space. Cheap grain, subsidized by the government, has replaced grass, and become cows’ staple. But because their digestive system is incompatible with grain, cows have greater incidence of disease, which leads to greater use of antibiotics. This enters the bodies of consumers, whose demand for low-priced and speedily-served beef perpetuate the process.

Addressing the problem, sociologists Leslie Hossfeld and Mac Legerton worked with students in North Carolina to fortify local food systems. In their recent article (Public Sociology: Research, Action, and Change, 2012), they describe how they helped to create a sustainable local food system. They began by identifying the needs of farmers and buyers, and created a program that encouraged farmers to supply local institutional buyers — hospitals, schools, and universities — with local fresh food. In the process, they helped create jobs, expand markets, and encourage consumers to buy healthy foods at affordable prices.

Sociologists Wynne Wright and Gread Middendorf, editors of the 2007 book The Fight over Food, encourage us to think of ourselves not simply as consumers, but as citizens who are also “mindful eaters” who are aware of where their food comes from.

At the very least, we should have second thoughts before eating pink slime.

The neurodiversity movement emerged as an extension of the disability rights movement to include the those individuals with neurological differences. Micki McGee posits that neurodiversity is also a response to the neoliberalism of the past three decades that has (1) shifted responsibility for individuals with neurological and cognitive challenges back to the family, and (2) fostered a crippling speed-up in our workplaces while simultaneously requiring new levels of sociability and flexibility that render more people debilitated or disabled. The article concludes that demands for the rights of neurologically diverse populations may challenge the very framework of liberal personhood.

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Author's Note

My thinking in this article was inspired, in part, by the pathbreaking work of Lennard J. Davis in his keynote address, The end of normal: disability, diversity, and neoliberalism, at the CUNY Graduate Center English Student Association Conference, “Cripples, Idiots, Lepers, and Freaks: Extraordinary Bodies / Extraordinary Minds,” Thursday, March 22, 2012. Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York City.

Further Reading

• GRASP (The Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership)
• neurodiversity.com
• The Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism
• NeuroTribes
• Left Brain Right Brain
• The Autism Hub

“When does a broken heart become a diagnosis?” asked the New York Times in a front-page article in January, reporting on a controversy over a proposed change to the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, to be published next year.

A prominent psychiatrist had argued that the categorization of depressive disorders should include symptoms of sadness after the loss of a loved one even after just a few weeks. While the DSM taskforce rejected the proposal, controversies such these are becoming more common as diagnostic categories have come to encompass less severe symptoms and normal “problems in living.”

Likely to appear in DSM-5 is a new depression diagnosis called “Mixed Anxiety/Depression,” combining symptoms of anxiety and depression, and “Pre-menstrual Dysphoric Disorder” (PMDD), which includes the monthly symptoms like fatigue, sadness, and bloating that most women experience.

Who really benefits from these expanded diagnostic criteria? In their 2007 book The Loss of Sadness, sociologist Allan Horwitz of Rutgers University and co-author Jerry Wakefield suggested that depressive disorder increasingly encompasses “normal sadness.” Horwitz warns that the trend of expanding diagnostic criteria is “creating a massive amount of pathology without [offering] corresponding benefits to those who truly need treatment.”

Though patients who could not afford, or would not have been offered, treatment may receive it, as less severe problems become part of disorder categories and are potentially covered by health insurance, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals will be able to treat more people than ever before.

Psychiatry will reap the rewards as the field claims more authority over everyday problems. As those with less severe symptoms will be targeted for new and existing medications, pharmaceutical companies will certainly gain. Antidepressants are already the most prescribed drugs in the US; their use may expand even more.

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Fat stigma and size discrimination are big issues in a culture that’s more and more overweight, but less and less tolerant of obesity. The authors consider how the legal system has regarded these discrimination claims and how they might evolve in the future.

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My family visited West Virginia this Thanksgiving.

While there, I spoke to some community audiences about the Affordable Care Act, building on the book Lawrence Jacobs and I recently published, Health Care Reform and American Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know.

While I enjoy talking to non-academic audiences, I was nervous. Health reform has been pilloried, nonstop, as a “government takeover” that would harm the economy and destroy individual freedom for patients and doctors. Would audiences be unfriendly? Would the Medicare recipients at an old folks’ home believe in “death panels” and denounce reform? Would the crowd at the Charleston library include Tea Partiers convinced the law is socialist?

None of these fears came to pass. People were polite, engaged, and asked a lot of questions. I came to know an earlier hunch with more certainty: Americans are anxious about health reform. They know the law matters, but Affordable Care seems huge, complex, and mysterious. When people learn more about the specifics, they feel better, becoming more interested in how to carry through the law’s implementation effectively.

How can a nation spend more than a year debating, and yet have people essentially knowing less about a major piece of legislation than ever before? We should ask which features of our media and national politics produce this outcome. Intensely partisan efforts to caricature reforms that threaten windfall profits explain a lot, but the law’s supporters bear responsibility, too. They have been timid and tongue-tied.

So, in my talk, I outlined the “guts” of Affordable Care. They’re three big, very popular things:

1. expansions of public programs (Medicaid and Medicare) and public subsidies (credits) to enable those who haven’t been able to afford health insurance to get it in the future;
2. the creation of state-level “exchanges” or markets where people can shop for health plans, finding out what they cost and provide;
3. and the establishment of rules preventing private insurance companies from denying, limiting, or rescinding coverage to people with illnesses or problematic health conditions.

These are the biggies—common sense moves to make health insurance affordable and available and to prod insurance companies to behave better. No socialism. No death panels. No threat to freedom or the market. There are a lot of other provisions (including additional subsidies for Medicare prescription drugs and rules to let young adults stay on parents’ insurance plans until age 26), but much of what is debated endlessly on TV and on blogs simply isn’t central to this law.

Moreover, the core provisions will mostly be fleshed out over time by each state. There’s no one-size-fits-all “ObamaCare.” Citizen groups, health care providers, and businesses will have room to help shape Affordable Care to fit their needs. Some states may set up very market-oriented systems, with government playing a mild referee role. Others may choose strong “public option” or single-payer systems, with government doing more to offer choices.

When I explained these basics, audiences were pleasantly surprised, wondering why they hadn’t heard this from the media or politicians before. Even the controversial “individual mandate” (that everyone needs to buy some kind of insurance) doesn’t sound so awful, once they learn the details. This rule, I explained, is like car insurance, preventing people from shifting the costs of their illnesses to others. Further, it doesn’t go into effect until after new credits are in place to help people afford a plan.

Academics are interested in the big picture, of course. From that point of view, Affordable Care, if it can be implemented between now and 2014, is one of the most equality-promoting pieces of social legislation ever enacted in the U.S. It promises to extend subsidized health coverage to lower-income Americans. It should encourage experiments in health care delivery to control costs and enhance quality. Faithfully implemented, it’ll reduce the federal deficit. It’s paid for with taxes on the very wealthy and on businesses in the health care marketplace.

Affordable Care, in short, is highly redistributive—and that’s why there’s a furious, ongoing political campaign against it. Conservatives, Tea Partiers, the Republican Party, and major business lobbies are all trying to disrupt the law. They know that its concrete provisions—which, despite resistance, Jacobs and I fully believe will be carried through—will be embraced by average Americans.

Still, public ignorance helps those who would undo this law before it becomes a full reality. Health reform supporters must inform themselves, explain the basics to every audience they can reach, and work with fellow citizens to push forward implementation in each state. The more Americans learn about Affordable Care’s specifics, the better the reforms will do.

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Sleep on this: sleep is a highly social endeavor, posing a puzzle and a prism through which to view life in the wired era.

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