“. . . if the major media picks up on this story, they will have the chance to report on what arguably is the worst—and most harmful—scandal in American medical history”
Historically, there have always been some patients who report that any treatment for depression—including bloodletting—has worked for them, but science demands that for a treatment to be deemed truly effective, it must work better than a placebo or the passage of time without any treatment. This is especially important for antidepressant drugs—including Prozac, Zoloft, and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), as well as Effexor, Cymbalta, and other serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs)—because all of these drugs have uncontroversial troubling side effects.
At the beginning of 2023, the Chargé d’Affaires of the US Embassy in Havana, Benjamin Ziff, said in an interview with The Associated Press that “it was difficult to go back” in normalizing relation with Cuba.
WHO and UN are calling for significant shift away from the biomedical modelof mental health which encourages psychiatric diagnoses, medications, forced restraints, institutionalisation, imprisonment and other oppressive medical practices – towards a trauma-informed, social, human rights, person-centred approach to mental health
WHO and UN highlight the current ways the biomedical model of mental health harms, oppresses, controls, isolates, stigmatises and discriminates against those who have been told they have psychiatric disorders, and who have not been validated in their traumas, distress, poverty, environments, oppression, or experiences
WHO and UN recognise that women and girls, people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender are more likely to be labelled as mentally ill, and more likely to face forced sterilisations, coerced abortions, coerced contraception, and conversion therapies.
WHO and UN recognise that there are widespread human rights violations and harm being caused by current biomedical model approaches to mental health, which includes our psychiatric hospitals, services, treatments, and approaches
WHO and UN recognise that people who have been diagnosed with psychiatric disorders have been positioned as dangerous, unreliable and unstable, meaning that they are stigmatised and discriminated against in multiple systems of power (including health, criminal justice, family justice, education, employment, finances and their rights)
As Israel prepares to launch a likely ground invasion into Gaza, the Biden Administration and leading members of Congress are crafting an American aid package of roughly $2 billion in supplementary funding to support the nation’s war effort against Hamas, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell TIME.
The Venezuelan Foreign Minister says that the parliament recently passed a referendum protecting the sovereign territory from US encroachment, adding that the US is again trying to interfere in the 200-year-old dispute of Essequibo.
The Venezuelan leader added that his country would continue to back China’s Belt and Road Initiative as well as the internationalization of the yuan, and is also willing to cooperate with Beijing in multilateral forums such as the BRICS group and the United Nations (UN).
CHIUL, Guatemala − Life in Bartolo Báten’s village has been defined by corruption: A teacher who can’t get a job at the school until she pays a bribe. A water project that runs out of money before the pipes reached town. Sick residents who can’t afford the medicine that’s available elsewhere.
Arévalo and Semilla are centrists—but in a country where politics habitually skews right, they are often described as center-left. “Semilla has a social democratic element, but its program is centrist, and it also has some center-right followers,” said Lucas Perelló, a political scientist who has spent time studying the party’s formation. Arévalo says he wants to gradually universalize existing social assistance programs to include a greater share of poor Guatemalans, reduce the cost of medicines and healthcare, and link isolated parts of the country through new infrastructure—doable tasks, given Guatemala’s exceptionally low share of debt as GDP, and necessary ones, given the country’s soaring poverty and malnutrition rates.
On security issues, another major concern for Guatemalans, Arévalo promises to increase state presence in crime hotspots, reclaim jails from gangs, and use intelligence-gathering to dismantle mafias. He says Bukele’s anti-gang strategy is not applicable to Guatemala. He is also critical of human rights abuses in Venezuela and Nicaragua and Putin’s war on Ukraine and has no stated plans to recognize China over Taiwan. Asked for a leader he admires, he named the ex-president, José Pepe Mujica, of Uruguay, where he was born during his father’s exile.
The “humanitarian exemptions”, on Syrian sanctions, are conditional!
The U.S. Treasury announced a decision on February 9 claiming to allow an easing of sanctions imposed on Syria for the ensuing six months until August 8, as part of “earthquake relief efforts.” The decision allows for “third parties” to transfer aid to Syria without fear of U.S. sanctions, but should only be intended for aid to earthquake-effected areas. Nonetheless, the sanctions programs applied to Syria for many years, the most severe of which are the Caesar Act (2019) and Captagon Act (2022), provide for “humanitarian exceptions,” but are conditional on U.S. approval.
So any earthquake relief effort must take place away from the Syrian state. In other words, it must contribute to undermining the sovereignty of the Syrian state, or it will not take place.
UN experts said this week that US sanctions on Iran are causing more deaths of Iranians with thalassemia, a congenital blood disorder that requires specialized medicine.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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