Warning sign for depression in teen boys found The Times of India, February 19, 2014
LONDON: The world's first biological marker to single out teenagers suffering from acute depression has been found - a discovery scientists hope will enable better diagnosis and treatment. Teenage boys who show a combination of depressive symptoms and elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol have been found to be 14 times more likely to develop major depression than those who show neither trait. This has helped scientists from the University of Cambridge identify the first biomarker - a biological signpost - for major, or clinical, depression. They argue this could help identify those boys in particular at greatest risk of developing the illness and provide treatment at an earlier stage.
Until now there have been no biomarkers for major depression. ; this is believed to be, in part, because both the causes and the symptoms can be so varied.
The researchers now hope that having an easily measurable biomarker - in this case, elevated cortisol plus depressive symptoms - will enable primary care services to identify boys at high risk and consider new public mental health strategies for them in the community. Cambridge University professor Ian Goodyer, who led the study, said depression is a terrible illness that will affect as many as 10 million people in the UK at some point in their lives. "Through our research, we now have a very real way of identifying those teenage boys most likely to develop clinical depression," said Goodyer. "This will help us strategically target preventions and interventions at these individuals and hopefully help reduce their risk of serious episodes of depression and their consequences in adult life."The researchers measured levels of cortisol in saliva from two separate large cohorts of teenagers. The first cohort consisted of 660 teens, who provided four early-morning samples on schooldays within a week and then again twelve months later. The researchers were able to show within this cohort that cortisol levels were stable over one year in the population at large in both boys and girls in this group.
A second cohort, consisting of 1,198 teenagers, provided early-morning samples over three school days. Using self-reports about depression current symptoms collected longitudinally over the 12 months and combining these with the cortisol findings, the researchers were able to divide the teens in the first cohort into four distinct sub-groups, ranging from those with normal levels of morning cortisol and low symptoms of depression over time (Group 1) through to those teenagers with elevated levels of morning cortisol and high symptoms of depression over time (Group 4) - this latter group made up one in six (17%) of all subjects.
The subjects in Group 4 were on average seven times more likely than those in Group 1, and two to three times more likely than in the other two groups, to develop clinical depression.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
The Good Men Project: The Disposability of Boys by Cameron Conaway
The Disposability of boys
By Cameron Conaway, The Good Men Project, February 17, 2014
Some posit that this acceptance is a direct result of how cultures have been socially conditioned to see gender roles due to the way religious attitudes and/or patriarchal cultures have demarcated them. While this influence certainly can carry over into secular societies, it seems there’s a more pervasive form of social conditioning at work; one that views boys, regardless of age, as young men; one that views their more physical behavior as the seed of manhood—a time when, at least conceptually, they’ll no longer be seen as vulnerable and will instead be capable of preying on those who are truly vulnerable. The result? Boys who will be men are judged as though they are men. This is harmful both for boys and for the men who then live under the socially conditioned false narrative that believes they are invulnerable.
Nowhere was this more apparent to me than in the shipbreaking yards of Chittagong, Bangladesh. Security guards dressed in blue leaf camouflage pointed their semi-automatic machine guns directly at me (after making sure I didn’t have a camera, notebook or phone), and I watched in horror as one tiny boy after another dragged their feet through toxic shoreline sludge in order to lift with their bare hands the rusted anchor chains. The black plumed skies lit up red as other boys took turns using the blowtorch. I have no idea if there’s hell in the afterlife but that scene showed me for damn sure that there’s hell in this life.
By Cameron Conaway, The Good Men Project, February 17, 2014
The UN’s recent reports on the treatment of children in Syria and in the Roman Catholic Church revealed some of the despicable acts committed against boys that are part of a disturbing and hidden global trend.
They are the forgotten many. The afterthought. The tacked-on obligatory mention at the end of a sentence, if that. Some university classes on human trafficking fail to mention them alongside “girls and women” in their syllabi. But there they are being used as soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo and as slaves in the cotton fields of Uzbekistan, the shipbreaking yards of Bangladesh, the farmlands of Florida and the fishing villages of Ghana. And there they are, as detailed in recent reports from the UN, being used as human shields in Syria and as sex slaves in the Roman Catholic Church. Can we talk about this now? Is it okay to talk about this?
Preface: Addressing the disposability of boys is not ignoring or in any way minimizing the appalling situations many of our world’s girls and women are enduring right now. Addressing the disposability of boys is addressing the disposability of boys. There is often hostility when this topic is brought up because there’s the assumption that the speaker is choosing sides. This isn’t a game and there are no sides.
***
On February 4, 2014 the UN released its first detailed findings on the treatment of children in Syria. The “Report of the Secretary-General on children and armed conflict in the Syrian Arab Republic” contained text perhaps even more damning due to its comprehensive details than the alleged torture photographs that were released weeks ago and that a team of war crimes prosecutors and forensic experts deemed “direct evidence” of the “systematic torture and killing” by the Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime. One excerpt on page 4 stated:“Boys aged 12 to 17 years were trained, armed and used as combatants or to man checkpoints.”This falls perfectly in line with why boys are often selected around the world for use as slave laborers. Comparatively, boys tend to be more physical, stronger, and more physically aggressive than girls and are therefore more preferred when it comes to the often backbreaking work of slave labor. While some communities have tried to eradicate this notion that boys are more physical and physically aggressive than girls, Dr. Michael Thompson, co-author of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, believes the difference is clear but admitted to PBS Parents that he isn’t precisely sure why:
“Why are some young boys more aggressive than girls? We don’t know for sure. We think that boys are predisposed to higher activity levels as a result of androgens (male hormones) inutero. However, it is not, as many people believe, a result of testosterone in the blood, because before puberty, boys and girls have the same level. What we know is that boys in all cultures around the world wrestle more, mock fight more, and are drawn to themes of power and domination, but that’s not the same as hurting someone, so it’s not necessarily a cause for worry.”Dr. Thompson’s statement about “boys in all cultures of the world” aligns with what I learned about human trafficking during my two and a half years living in and traveling throughout Asia. Whether it was Nepal or the Philippines, Sri Lanka or Myanmar, it was simply more acceptable for boys to perform the most grueling forms of physical labor, especially when it was the kind of labor that may lead to disease or permanent disfigurement.
Some posit that this acceptance is a direct result of how cultures have been socially conditioned to see gender roles due to the way religious attitudes and/or patriarchal cultures have demarcated them. While this influence certainly can carry over into secular societies, it seems there’s a more pervasive form of social conditioning at work; one that views boys, regardless of age, as young men; one that views their more physical behavior as the seed of manhood—a time when, at least conceptually, they’ll no longer be seen as vulnerable and will instead be capable of preying on those who are truly vulnerable. The result? Boys who will be men are judged as though they are men. This is harmful both for boys and for the men who then live under the socially conditioned false narrative that believes they are invulnerable.
Nowhere was this more apparent to me than in the shipbreaking yards of Chittagong, Bangladesh. Security guards dressed in blue leaf camouflage pointed their semi-automatic machine guns directly at me (after making sure I didn’t have a camera, notebook or phone), and I watched in horror as one tiny boy after another dragged their feet through toxic shoreline sludge in order to lift with their bare hands the rusted anchor chains. The black plumed skies lit up red as other boys took turns using the blowtorch. I have no idea if there’s hell in the afterlife but that scene showed me for damn sure that there’s hell in this life.
Saturday, February 1, 2014
From the UK....1/3 more girls seek university admission than boys this year!
Boys being left behind as university gender gap widens
The number of girls seeking a university place this year is more than a third larger than that of boys, who university chiefs say are becoming “a disadvantaged group”
By James Kirkup, The Telegraph, January 31, 2014
Young men are becoming “a disadvantaged group” as far more young women go to university, higher education chiefs have warned.
The number of girls seeking a university place this year is more than a third larger than that of boys.
The growing divide is becoming a more pressing issue than the number of applicants from poorer homes, said the chief executive of Ucas, the universities admissions service. “There remains a stubborn gap between male and female applicants which, on current trends, could eclipse the gap between rich and poor within a decade,” Mary Curnock Cook said.
“Young men are becoming a disadvantaged group in terms of going to university and this underperformance needs urgent focus across the education sector.”
Ucas said that 580,000 people have applied for places at British institutions this year. Around 333,700 of them were women, almost 58 per cent. Only 246,300 men applied, a difference of 87,000, which was up 7,000 on last year. In the 2010-11 academic year, women made up 55 per cent of applicants.
Politicians seem to be happy with policy approaches that focus on economics, poverty, some kind of numbers that have currency in the public discourse. We have, indeed, become collectively fixated on the money barometer as our window on political issues. And then, it seems too often we think that throwing money at the problem absolves the political class of responsibility.
This issue of female university applications outstripping male applications in Great Britain by one third trumps the issue of the numbers of applications from poorer homes. Perhaps, finally, some of the more complex reasons for this gap will finally merit some serious public, political and academic attention.
We have needed research on the question of what is happening to boys in most of the countries in the west for some time. It is not sexism to point out these trend lines and there is or must be no aspersions cast in the direction of female applicants. In fact, any public discussion of these numbers and their meaning must focus instead on the reasons behind the drop in male applications and not on blaming the female segment of the university-applicant population for the rise in their numbers.
And, while it is not a competition between males and females in a direct sense, the culture needs to sustain a healthy proportion of male university graduates in order to sustain healthy employment rates, and all that accompanies that gradient for families, and for social services and for balance and good health culturally.
Men must be present with articulate voices at all the "tables" where decisions are taken in all fields including education, economics, technology, science, health and in private corporations. And in order to accomplish that legitimate and long-term objective, we need to pay attention when deficits, like the one being reported in the Telegraph today, appear.
It is, of course, much more glib and simplistic to focus on some benchmarks like a country's GDP, for too long the measure of the economic success of a nation. The value of good produced is both easily calculated and easily translated into a simple version of "good government" in order to provide fodder for politicians seeking re-election. It is the public, in the widest meaning of that word, who needs to be more focused on the many issues that comprise any legitimate yard stick for how healthy a society is, and will be in the foreseeable future.
And one of those benchmarks has to become the ratio of male to female university applications.
Men must not be either encouraged or permitted to withdraw simply because women are "appearing" to outstrip them in some kind of faux competition. And men must not be encouraged or permitted to perceive these numbers as a competition. In fact, removing competition from the equation may be one of the best ways to address the issue.
Schools, from a very early age, need to become sensitized to the issues facing male learners and to address those issues, as legitimate, and not as "deviant" simply because they are different from the issues facing female learners. And that begins in the faculties of education where the archetype of the good student profiles all the natural attributes of female students: compliant, disciplined, polite, enthusiastic, responsible and coachable.
Male students, on the other hand, fail to measure up to the female "standards" on all of these attributes, in many cases, and the approaches to their learning needs have to take those needs into consideration. Perhaps it is time to segregate male and female students in the classroom, in order to achieve a learning environment that generates a better balance of interested, talented and ambitious male and female applications to universities, so that we do not face a society and culture in which men revert to a secondary role, while women dominate. We need both genders playing their full part for the sake of their children and grandchildren and we will not see that balance if these trends continue without being both formally and informally addressed.
Politicians seem to be happy with policy approaches that focus on economics, poverty, some kind of numbers that have currency in the public discourse. We have, indeed, become collectively fixated on the money barometer as our window on political issues. And then, it seems too often we think that throwing money at the problem absolves the political class of responsibility.
This issue of female university applications outstripping male applications in Great Britain by one third trumps the issue of the numbers of applications from poorer homes. Perhaps, finally, some of the more complex reasons for this gap will finally merit some serious public, political and academic attention.
We have needed research on the question of what is happening to boys in most of the countries in the west for some time. It is not sexism to point out these trend lines and there is or must be no aspersions cast in the direction of female applicants. In fact, any public discussion of these numbers and their meaning must focus instead on the reasons behind the drop in male applications and not on blaming the female segment of the university-applicant population for the rise in their numbers.
And, while it is not a competition between males and females in a direct sense, the culture needs to sustain a healthy proportion of male university graduates in order to sustain healthy employment rates, and all that accompanies that gradient for families, and for social services and for balance and good health culturally.
Men must be present with articulate voices at all the "tables" where decisions are taken in all fields including education, economics, technology, science, health and in private corporations. And in order to accomplish that legitimate and long-term objective, we need to pay attention when deficits, like the one being reported in the Telegraph today, appear.
It is, of course, much more glib and simplistic to focus on some benchmarks like a country's GDP, for too long the measure of the economic success of a nation. The value of good produced is both easily calculated and easily translated into a simple version of "good government" in order to provide fodder for politicians seeking re-election. It is the public, in the widest meaning of that word, who needs to be more focused on the many issues that comprise any legitimate yard stick for how healthy a society is, and will be in the foreseeable future.
And one of those benchmarks has to become the ratio of male to female university applications.
Men must not be either encouraged or permitted to withdraw simply because women are "appearing" to outstrip them in some kind of faux competition. And men must not be encouraged or permitted to perceive these numbers as a competition. In fact, removing competition from the equation may be one of the best ways to address the issue.
Schools, from a very early age, need to become sensitized to the issues facing male learners and to address those issues, as legitimate, and not as "deviant" simply because they are different from the issues facing female learners. And that begins in the faculties of education where the archetype of the good student profiles all the natural attributes of female students: compliant, disciplined, polite, enthusiastic, responsible and coachable.
Male students, on the other hand, fail to measure up to the female "standards" on all of these attributes, in many cases, and the approaches to their learning needs have to take those needs into consideration. Perhaps it is time to segregate male and female students in the classroom, in order to achieve a learning environment that generates a better balance of interested, talented and ambitious male and female applications to universities, so that we do not face a society and culture in which men revert to a secondary role, while women dominate. We need both genders playing their full part for the sake of their children and grandchildren and we will not see that balance if these trends continue without being both formally and informally addressed.
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