Dr. Abram Hoffer died May 27, 2009. His son posted an obituary. As far as I know, my interview with Dr. Hoffer in 2006 may have been his last public interview.
Journalism, Commentary, Satire
Dr. Abram Hoffer died May 27, 2009. His son posted an obituary. As far as I know, my interview with Dr. Hoffer in 2006 may have been his last public interview.
More stories pour in about the crisis in our residential care homes. No article I’ve written for Focus has provoked so many impassioned calls, emails, posts to my website, and interceptions in the street than my feature about long term care of the elderly (“Who has the Right to Control Your Life?“, January). Many relatives [...]
Caught between archaic, paternalistic laws and deteriorating conditions in care homes, more and more BC seniors and their families are discovering how easy it is to lose basic civil rights that we often take for granted.
When pseudo-scientific nonsense starts becoming law, be very afraid. * I was supposed to find the picture that didn’t fit. Studying three men walking, I circled one with an errant blotch on one shoe. Wrong: one of the men wore a hat. In retrospect, I’d likely spotted a smudge from the school’s old carbon copier. [...]
and the Laurel House saga continues… Laurel House is safe. It seems. For now. Six months of closed-door negotiations between the Capital Mental Health Association, Vancouver Island Health Authority, and Laurel House users who staged a sit-in last September ended with a verbal commitment from VIHA that, “Laurel house will not be closed in the [...]
Victoria’s 40-person Mayor’s Task Force on mental illness, addictions and homelessness didn’t include anyone identifying as a mental health system user, a substance user, or homeless. Though the Task Force conducted focus groups with street people and service users, none were around when the final action plan was being formed. That’s too bad because, if [...]
The decision to close Laurel House by October is, simply, bizarre. Victoria’s last remaining drop-in, education and training centre for people diagnosed with mental illnesses is a rare success story (see June’s Focus) in a beleaguered system. While the Eric Martin psychiatric hospital and Archie Courtnall Centre endure psychiatrist resignations, and while police-backed psychiatric emergency [...]
Beware the spoon-feeders of anti-conspiracy pap. You know who I mean. Like several local Victoria writers who suggested that if you suspect corporations may influence U.S. policy in Iraq, Princess Diana’s accident was not accidental, or certain leaders may have been complicit in 9/11, then you “forgot [your] medication” and evidently need far-fetched conspiracy theories [...]
I’m having an email discussion here, which some might find interesting, with Patricia Lefave, a writer, social-psychological theorist and psych-survivor. The discussion revolves around an essay Lefave wrote about the self-justifying, tautological mental operations in many psychiatrists doing diagnoses, and some questions I posed to her about often seeing similar psychological blinders in some repeat [...]
In the course of research for articles in Adbusters and Focus magazines, I found these documents. They are internal memos, emails and studies from Eli Lilly and Company, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. There are a lot of relatively uninteresting pages mixed into this large file (269 MB), but overall some of the [...]
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