G. Frink's

Wikipedia up-to-the-moment Mumbia entry and an Annonated Map of the attacks.

There is also India Broadcasting Network live, streaming coverage (avoid this if you suffer from PTSD), or for less superheated up-to-date coverage, visit The Lede at the New York Times.

We will add to and update this list as we discover additional resources.

• A sortable list of the injured and dead.
• Mumbai Help has resources including several pages of lists of the dead and injured and rescued.
• Mumbai Contact Numbers has a collection of useful phone numbers.
• Mumbai Terror Helpline Blog: Terror In Bombay
• Mumbai Police contact numbers.
• JJ Hospital Requires Blood here are some numbers you can get in touch with JJ Hospital no. - 022 23735555 JJ Hospital Blood bank no. - 022 23739400?
• St. George Hospital requires blood, numbers (022) 22620242.
• Live Scrolling of Latest Updates from Twitter on Mumbai attacks
• Search twitter for additional resources at #mumbai help using twitter search.
• Search twitter and identi.ca for additional resources at #mumbai help using tweetscan.
• Search twitter for help finding loved ones using #mumbaifamilies at twitter search.

Vincent van Gogh: On the Threshold of Eternity

"Happy Thanksgiving," soon to be "Joy to the world," unless you have the holiday blues -- a sometimes debilitating and dangerous disease.

Almost anyone given to genuine, positive celebration of the holidays can help, since good fellowship and persistent friendly support help.

Thoughtful support is after all the reverse of the pervasive prejudice against mental illness which continuously afflicts the afflicted among us.

Created by ashley Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works

Army Maj. Gen. David Blackledge has defied the American military culture of silence about psychiatric injuries, and defied our society's crippling prejudice against the mentally ill, by seeking treatment for and speaking openly about his post-traumatic stress disorder.

The broad problem he has chosen to confront is acute and pervades not just U.S. society, but apparently all of English-speaking culture.

Fear of career damage was a principal reason.

For civilians, recent British study found that nine out of ten who suffer from mental illness face discrimination from almost every quarter.

Some of my social networking peers scoffed when Ronald Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, warned more than 3,000 staff to take careful cell phone radiation precautions, especially for children.

Typical of their skepticism was a Plurk friend who responded:

next drinking water will make the list!

That reaction was not unexpected. Nor is it to be sneered at.

More than a decade ago, when scientific data began to indicate brain cancer may be caused by microwave emissions from cellphones, the cellphone industry responded with claims of harmlessness to consumers, and attempts to suppress the research and control it.

Industry reaction to early work done by Henry Lai and Narendra "N.P." Singh at the University of Washington makes the case quite clear. In 2005 the University of Washington Alumni Magazine engineering writer Rob Harrill reported:

As Lai and Singh sought funding to conduct follow-up studies, word of the research began to get out.
According to internal documents that later came to light, Motorola started working behind the scenes to minimize any damage Lai's research might cause.
In a memo and a draft position paper dated Dec. 13, 1994, officials talked about how they had "war-gamed the Lai-Singh issue" and were in the process of lining up experts who would be willing to point out weaknesses in Lai's study and reassure the public.
This was before the study was published in 1995.

The cellphone industry subsequently took substantial control of the process of funding and carrying out studies.

The cellphone industry strategy of denial and control is a variant of one I saw burn through the lives of people around me after the first U.S. Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health was issued on Jan. 11, 1957, arriving in the mail as though it were another present honoring my tenth birthday.

I believed that's what it was.

So I opened and read the report with a mixture of astonishment and horror as I walked from the mailbox beside the Honeyhill Road to the farmhouse where I grew up. In the years that followed, an answering campaign of tobacco industry propaganda stalked through my world like a mind poison while lung cancer took away early to the grave one smoker and another whom I knew and loved.

Dr. Herberman is simply arguing that we take the kinds of precautions now that so many have died wishing had been adopted from the outset with tobacco:

Studies in humans do not indicate that cell phones are safe, nor do they yet clearly show that they are dangerous. But, growing evidence indicates that we should reduce exposures, while research continues on this important question.

He argues that the potential effects on children are of special concern, both because they are immediately vulnerable and because the effects spool out across their lives. The illustration below indicates how deeply at varying ages electromagnetic radiation form a cell phone can penetrate the brain:

He recommends ten reasonable measures:

1. Do not allow children to use a cell phone except for emergencies. The developing organs of a fetus or child are the most likely to be sensitive to any possible effects of exposure to electromagnetic fields.
2. While communicating using your cell phone, try to keep the cell phone away from the body as much as possible. The amplitude of the electromagnetic field is one fourth the strength at a distance of two inches and fifty times lower at three feet. Whenever possible, use the speaker-phone mode or a wireless Bluetooth headset, which has less than 1/100th of the electromagnetic emission of a normal cell phone. Use of a hands-free ear piece attachment may also reduce exposures.
3. Avoid using your cell phone in places, like a bus, where you can passively expose others to your phone’s electromagnetic fields.
4. Avoid carrying your cell phone on your body at all times. Do not keep it near your body at night such as under the pillow or on a bedside table, particularly if pregnant. You can also put it on “flight” or “off-line” mode, which stops electromagnetic emissions.
5. If you must carry your cell phone on you, make sure that the keypad is positioned toward your body and the back is positioned toward the outside so that the transmitted electromagnetic fields move away from your rather than through you.
6. Only use your cell phone to establish contact or for conversations lasting a few minutes as the biological effects are directly related to the duration of exposure. For longer conversations, use a land line with a corded phone, not a cordless phone, which uses electromagnetic emitting technology similar to that of cell phones.
7. Switch sides regularly while communicating on your cell phone to spread out your exposure. Before putting your cell phone to the ear, wait until your correspondent has picked up. This limits the power of the electromagnetic field emitted near your ear and the duration of your exposure.
8. Avoid using your cell phone when the signal is weak or when moving at high speed, such as in a car or train, as this automatically increases power to a maximum as the phone repeatedly attempts to connect to a new relay antenna.
9. When possible, communicate via text messaging rather than making a call, limiting the duration of exposure and the proximity to the body.
10. Choose a device with the lowest SAR possible (SAR = Specific Absorption Rate, which is a measure of the strength of the magnetic field absorbed by the body). SAR atings of contemporary phones by different for “sar ratings cell phones” on the internet.

One author has already called the cell phone industry strategy Big Tobacco 2.0? and her characterization has frightening merit. We know how this ends of it goes badly. It need not go badly. The death toll need not climb toward or past 5 million a year, as it has with smoking, before we conclude that action is merited.

We can and if we recover our collective sanity will take control of this issue back from the industry and see to it that the data required to support resonable decisions is accumulated and applied with all deliberate speed.

Mention of attending a bonkersfest frightens some of my friends into silence and flight.

FYI, I think their discomfort at the mention of attending a bonkersfest and being seen with real, live, celebrating mad pride advocates is as ignoble as failure to stand up against racial discrimination and as fundamentally irrational as a reluctance to advocate heart-healthy diets.

That's why you see my picture at right, with the "I am human" declaration.

Because I am, as are you.

We all are.

Everyone is.

Eliminating the kind of reflexive irrationality I see in some of my friends was made a national health priority by the First U.S. Surgeon General's Report on Mental Illness in 1999. That report and associated studies found that mad prejudice is a both persistent and profoundly destructive:

Stigmatization of people with mental disorders has persisted throughout history. It is manifested by bias, distrust, stereotyping, fear, embarrassment, anger, and/or avoidance. Stigma leads others to avoid living, socializing or working with, renting to, or employing people with mental disorders, especially severe disorders such as schizophrenia (Penn & Martin, 1998; Corrigan & Penn, 1999). It reduces patients? access to resources and opportunities (e.g., housing, jobs) and leads to low self-esteem, isolation, and hopelessness.

Neither this prejudiced insanity-of-the-so-called-sane nor its consequences have substantially abated in the years since 1999. Instead, public mental health care in North Carolina and other states had deteriorated. Discrimination and even shunning continues.

Thus the afflicted, if that is the right term, have been left with no worthwhile alternative but to confront the prejudice, very much as other groups confront the discrimination they face.

Although it originated in England, the mad pride movement in the United States is, then, a natural and healthy response to our collective national failure to put aside prejudice in favor of reason, humanity and sound public health policy.

The alternative was silence, concealment and being crushed when discovered.

As Molly Sprengelmeyer of the Asheville Radical Mental Health Collective put it to the New York Times:

It used to be you were labeled with your diagnosis and that was it; you were marginalized. If people found out, it was a death sentence, professionally and socially.
We are hoping to change all that by talking.

The "low self-esteem, isolation and hopelessness" which are the fruit or prejudice against mental illness are excruciatingly painful to the already besieged, and are exacerbated by self-enforced, societally encouraged silence. The combination can in fact make the "death sentence" Sprengelmeyer mention more than a metaphor. One such suicide was the genesis of Active Minds. Even absent recourse to other literature or experience, a close reading of the CDC suicide prevention materials shows that the combined effects of prejudice, kill.

It is no surprise then that there are 80 percent more suicides than homicides in this country each year, with more than 32,000 people taking their own lives annually. According to the "The Surgeon General's Call To Action
To Prevent Suicide," this makes suicide the 8th-leading cause of death (third for Americans 15-24).

Created by ashley

Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic

We can no more prevent every suicide than we can cure every disease, but we can through honorable action driven by the force of individual will mark the beginning of the end of the malevolent prejudice.

Let us all join mad pride and declare together that we are now or without further notice may soon be crazy, psycho, sicko, whacko, a nut case and that we will not tolerate anything less than unprejudiced acceptance of those who are given to such altered states.

Because that is the truth.

It means, after all, that each of us has a living, neuroplastic, organic brain which changes with experience, which is prey to illnesses and which is given to the unexpected emergence of gifts. It means we understand the obvious -- that reflexive assignment of stigma to mental illness is illogical and inhumane.

Through your declaration, like mine here, you acknowledge that the emergence of illnesses or gifts does not reduce anyone's humanity and is no more a source of shame for them and those around them than diabetes or, for that matter, red hair.

We can all acknowledge that those who do experience altered states deserve to be treated with unreduced respect.

That they deserved to loved, not shunned.

That they deserve to be cared for, not abandoned.

Absent a real, well-demonstrated, public necessity of confinement or restraint, those given to altered mental states also have a right to freely pursue their lives, like everyone else. They have much to give and we are all deprived by the dark-ages mentality which proclaims them automatically defective and unable to contribute.

How we have treated them and how we treat them/you/us in the future is one, true measure of our individual and collective humanity.

Let us make right together that which has for so long been wrong.

This balladeer sings post-traumatic stress disorder and the associated politics with undeniable clarity:

Having heard the well-sung and ultimately gentle ballad, please listen to the crystal clear Congressional testimony of a Vietnam veteran's widow.

Her words inspired the music.

I believe that if you give them heed, you will understand why:

As Penny Coleman explains, PTSD is an injury, not a defect.

It is an injury in response to which we commonly fail to meet the standards of ordinary ethics and commonplace honor.

Warriors come home from war with that injury, while others among us are injured here at home, sometimes even at the hands of profoundly abusive domestic caregivers (like my mother and father).

What most thus injured have in common is the sweeping neglect of those around them, complicated by a generalized prejudice against the injured.

She goes on to explain that the neither PTSD nor the negligent reponse to it is new:

Our collective neglect to provide appropriate care, and frequent willingness to excuse ourselves from caring when caring becomes difficult, does not cleanse the hands of anyone who walks either path.

That stain on the hands of the negligent is the blood of those they neglected -- often the blood of those who loved and trusted them.

That stain is commonplace and by the very values we claim to espouse, an indictment.

Autism is briefly- and well-explained here by Joanne E. Gerenser, whose Ph.D is in Speech and Language Pathology.

She is the Executive Director of the Eden II Programs, whose mission is helping people with autism.

She is also Autism Expert at DrMDK.com.

This is National Autism Awareness Month.

In the Washington post today, Linda H. Davis writes of Autism Overlooked in this nation which fails to acknowledge that autistic children rarely grow up to be functional adults.

Ms. Davis, president of the nonprofit SAGE Crossing Foundation, reminds us that they typically grow up to be adults who require lifelong care.

As a nation, we are not adequately supporting that care.

The magnitude of our failure can be corrected, if we inform ourselves, and take appropriate action.

The parents of autistic children can rarely deal with this unassisted.

They need our help, and one measure of our humanity is and will be how much and how effectively we provide the needed help.

Growing numbers of autistic Children

Chart published under the GNU Free Documentation License | (C)Eubulides

Wikipedia's detail on how the chart was constructed:

Bar chart of the number (per 1,000 U.S. resident children ages 6-11) of children aged 6-11 who were served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) with a diagnosis of autism, from 1996 through 2005.
Counts of children diagnosed with autism for each year were taken from Table 1-9 of IDEA Part B Child Count (2005).
These were divided by census estimates for U.S. resident population aged 6-11 taken from US census estimates for 1990-1999 resident population by age and the similar estimates for 2000-2005; for all years, the September population estimates were used.

She was seventeen years old and to Cigna, a ledger entry, as are we all to our health insurance companies. Those of us who have health insurance.

Nataline Sarkisyan passed away Thursday (Dec. 20, 2007) after being made to wait too long for for Cigna to approve a liver transplant.

In keeping with the actual nature of the event, the family is pressing criminal charges.

Cigna approved Nataline's transplant several hours before she died as "California nurses, family of the patient, and others gathered Thursday outside Cigna's Glendale, Calif., office to demand that the company reverse" its earlier denial.

Karoli, aka DrumsNWhistles, observed that Cigna's profits were substantially higher for the third quarter.

Cunning of them, wasn't it, to give approval when they might grab a little credit without having to spend a dime?

Update: The California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee addressed one of the basic issues in this case on Friday. CNA/NNOC Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro said:

Having insurance is not the same as receiving needed care. We need a fundamental change in our healthcare system that takes control away from the insurance giants and places it where it belongs -- in the hands of the medical professionals, the patients, and their families.

Update II: Associated Press and other reports late Friday night do in fact indicate that Nataline's case was borderline.

Cigna may in fact have been right. Denial of transplant benefits may have been well-justified. Others who share my dark view of private American health care providers, have explored this in considerable detail.