A Panicked Child, a Worried Parent, a Controversial Pill
Harriet Brown, New York Times- 11/16/2004

We were at the county fair the night I realized my 8-year-old was having panic attacks. She and her 13-year-old sister had gone on a ride, the kind where a round room spins, the floor drops away and centrifugal force holds the riders to the walls. I stood outside and watched the ride start to spin and then, puzzlingly, slow down. The door opened and my 8-year-old stumbled out, in the midst of what I thought was yet another temper tantrum. She had been having them since the previous winter, when she'd been hospitalized for several days and then convalescent for months with a rare and potentially lethal disease. Thankfully, she had recovered. But she'd been, well, cranky ever since, subject to unpredictable bouts of rage far worse than any she'd had as a 2-year-old.
      That night at the fair, something clicked as I watched her body stiffen and her brows sweep together. "Are you scared?" I asked. "No!" she said through gritted teeth. "I feel like I'm going to throw up or pass out!" I got her to breathe deeply, and the tantrum eased. At home that night, I thought back over the last eight months. There had been more and more of these tantrums, and they had affected her life, I now saw, on just about every level. Her friendships were suffering, and so was her schoolwork. Always a picky eater, she was now eating only three or four acceptable foods. Born with an anxious temperament, she'd developed so many fears that we'd begun taking her to see a psychotherapist. A homebody by nature, she now never wanted to go out. Her world, I realized, was shrinking, just when it should have been exploding with new experiences, feelings, friendships and ideas.
      Our daughter's therapist asked if we had considered antidepressants. "There's only so much I can do with a child this age," she said candidly. My husband and I made an appointment with our pediatrician, Dr. C., who had been caring for our daughters for the last dozen years. We talked for more than an hour. "Hard science doesn't really back up the idea that helping a kid in the short term will change her life in the long term," he told us, "though anecdotal evidence suggests that, of course, if you make things better, it will help." He described the immature brain, how fragile and vulnerable it could be. And he confirmed what I'd learned on the Internet: some children not only get worse on antidepressants, they become suicidal. "But Prozac, the only one that's been studied for kids, is remarkably well tolerated," he added, "and the potential for really bad side effects is pretty much nonexistent." "Really bad side effects?" I asked. "Like death," he said. "Oh."
      At the end of our conversation, Dr. C. pulled out a pad and wrote a prescription for fluoxetine, the generic version of Prozac. "We see the best outcomes with a combination of medication and talk therapy," he said. "What would you do?" asked my husband. "If she were my kid, I'd treat her," Dr. C. said without hesitation.
      It took us a week to fill the prescription, a week of angst and what-ifs and soul-searching. One morning I told the 8-year-old that this medicine might help with the panic attacks. She put the tiny pill on her tongue and gulped it down with a glass of water, and I saw how trusting she was. What if the medicine made things worse? What if we were wrong?
      Dr. C. had said it could take weeks to see results. By the end of Day 3, our daughter's mood had lifted. She bounced around the house and through the neighborhood. At bedtime, she still recited a long list of worries and fears, but seemed more easily reassured. The only side effect was that her ears popped half a dozen times a day. By the end of the first week, neighbors were commenting on the change. Our daughter's dance teacher called us to say, "She seems like her old self again." I realized that my daughter hadn't been herself since she'd been sick. The change had been invidious, and we hadn't really taken it in.
      School started, always a difficult transition for our daughter. She made a new friend and said she looked forward to going every day. She regained her goofily amusing charm. The clincher came one afternoon when she was walking home from school and a thunderstorm -- one of her biggest panic triggers -- broke. A month earlier, she would have run home in a blind panic, screaming. "This time," she told me afterward, "I just sang loudly to myself and kept walking."
      It's been three months now. We watch her closely, knowing she could backslide, that it's hard to spot the moment a child (or an adult, for that matter) begins to lose her way. We are alert for any hint that her brain is being harmed by our efforts to heal it. So far, so good.

How to Quit Smoking for Good
Patricia Anstett, Detroit Free Press- 11/16/2004

Debbie Foerster hated her smoking habit so much that she never smoked inside her Dearborn, MI home, even though she lives alone. She smoked on the back porch. "I was a closet smoker, and thought no one knew, but everybody does," said Foerster, 35, of Dearborn, a pack-a-day Virginia Slims smoker for 10 years. She washed out her ashtrays immediately and sprayed her car to rid it of smoke odors. "I'm quitting smoking because it's gross," Foerster says.
      An organizational development manager for Ford Motor Corp., Foerster has tried to quit smoking a dozen times, only to pick up cigarettes within a day or two. "I help people make changes at work, but this was a change I was unable to do for myself." She tried "everything, from gum to patches to you name it," she says.
      On Nov. 5, Foerster brought a firm will to quit to the New Beginnings Laser Institute in Huntington Woods. There, clinic owner Jayne Radford offers one-visit laser treatments for smoking cessation, for $295, and free booster treatments for life, if needed. Radford's son, a chiropractor, runs a clinic branch in Grand Rapids. The mother and son are among the first to bring laser treatments more common in Canada to Michigan. They decided to offer the treatments after Radford's husband, a three-pack-a-day smoker, got the treatments in Windsor. He has not smoked since Dec. 27, 2002, she says. The treatment is not federally approved. Patients sign forms to acknowledge they know they are part of a research study.
      Radford says the treatments work. Most of the 400 people who have received treatments at her office since April no longer smoke, she says. The center follows patients at one-, three- and six-month intervals. Foerster has gone nearly two weeks without a cigarette. "I'm actually doing good," she says. "I have not felt cravings like I did before" with other quit methods, she says. "This time, I know I really don't want to be a smoker. All I can say is, thank you, God." She's among the minority of people who succeed in stopping smoking when they try. Quit rates nationwide range from 10 percent to 30 percent. Many try many times to quit.
      There still are no good studies to help consumers know which approach assures their greatest chance of success. Most have not been compared to others. But there are more programs and choices than ever before to stop smoking, from telephone counseling to Internet message boards to medicines.
      Smoking cessation campaigns now are year-round, not just the single day campaign for the Great American Smoke-Out, which is Thursday. More people stop smoking that day than any other, including New Year's Day, according to the American Cancer Society, sponsor of the event. And expanded Michigan Department of Community Health programs provide free nicotine replacement patches and gum for uninsured people.
      Whatever approach you choose, the will to quit -- not quitting to make someone else happy -- is key, says Perry Bertolini, a respiratory therapist, and Dr. Safwan Badr, chief of pulmonary medicine at Harper University Hospital in Detroit. Badr tells smokers that their chance of developing heart disease, lung problems or lung cancer is inevitable with long-term smoking. "If you don't get one you get the other," he said. He and Bertolini also work on educating the next generation of adults about smoking by bringing a model of two pig lungs to local elementary schools. Fifth-grade students are their ideal target group.
      To succeed, a person needs to combine counseling with other nicotine replacement products or Zyban, an antidepressant that helps reduce cravings after quitting, most doctors advise. Quitting around the holidays is NOT a good idea, many experts say, because it's often harder to break the smoking habit if attending parties and holiday events. "The chances of going back to smoking are so high that it's far better to do it in January," says Dr. Arthur Weaver, a retired lung cancer surgeon who has taught smoking cessation approaches for 38 years. Do a little homework. Set a quit date. And pick the method that suits you best.
      For more information contact the American Lung Association, 800-586-4872; www.lungusa.org. or the American Cancer Society, 800-227-2345 or www.cancer.org.

'Mommy, Why Do You Have to Work?'
Sue Shellenbarger, Wall Street Journal- 11/16/2004

Ilya Welfeld faced a dilemma common among working parents: Leaving for work every day, how could she explain to her crying toddler why she was going away? "'Honey, we need to buy groceries' didn't really make a lot of sense" to a 2-year-old, says Welfeld, then a corporate vice president in communications.
     Parents play a dominant role in shaping children's lifelong attitudes about work Yet amid the emotions raised by leaving kids to do our jobs, many moms and dads fumble the ball, mumbling explanations that are a bad fit developmentally or just plain wrong. In fact, parents' influence on kids' work ethic plays out not only in words, but in emotions, behavior and attitudes, in different ways at different stages of a child's life -- and often not in the way we think
     Parents generally are failing to convey positive feelings about work to their kids. In a national survey of 605 parents, 69 percent of mothers say they like their work a lot. But in a comparable sample of 1,023 third- through 12th-graders, only 42 percent of the kids say their mothers like their jobs a lot, according to the study, reported in "Ask the Children" by Ellen Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute in New York The same gap existed with fathers; 60 percent of dads say they like their jobs a lot, but only 41 percent of children see that positive attitude in their fathers.

For toddlers
Some parents fear acting as if they like their jobs will-hurt their kids' feelings. Thus, they try to reassure them by acting as if they don't have a choice, saying, as I used to tell my toddler, "Honey, I'm sorry, I have to go to work" Other parents simply feel sad at separating from their children, and focus too much on those feelings.
     In fact, those emotions speak more loudly to babies and toddlers than any words a parent might utter. "You can explain to a 2- or 3-year-old until you're blue in the face that you need to pay the mortgage," says Jane Healy a Vail, Colo., educational psychologist and author. "What they're going to pick up is your emotional attitude toward work and what they see it doing to you." A child may feel, "If there's something making my mother miserable, there must be something to be frightened of." Before long, "work" becomes a four-letter word.
     A better route: Focus on the positive, such as, "I'm really glad I have interesting work to do. And you have interesting work to do, too, when the baby-sitter comes and you help her, put away the groceries," Healy suggests. Promise to do something together when you return; small children aren't very aware of the passage of time, and looking forward to, say, hearing stories from your workday will help them stay upbeat through the day.
     Welfeld saw the power of parental attitude when she quit corporate life last year to start a business in her Bergenfield, N.J., home. In the past, the stress of her corporate job seeped into home life, straining leave-takings from her two children, now 3 and 1. But now, "my attitude toward work is so positive" that she has seen a change in her son: He has relaxed and is more optimistic, and he loves preschool.

Elementary ages
The next stage, ages 5 through the elementary-school years, is perhaps most important of all in building a work ethic. Healy calls this the "age of industry," when children love to accomplish things. This is the time to foster the good feelings that can arise from accomplishment. Celebrate jobs completed, with words or perhaps an outing.
     Some parents mistakenly assume at this stage they need to take charge of their kids' work habits and direct them in an authoritative way. But studies show parents who support self-reliance -- who encourage kids to make their own choices, rather than applying pressure or controls -- are more likely to raise hard-working kids.
     In talking about work with kids of this age, draw positive parallels between your job and their play and school. When Michael Weinberger's 5-year-old daughter asks, "Why do you have to go to work today?" he replies, "I get to go to work today. It's the same way with you. You get to go to school." He emphasizes that he loves his work as a portfolio manager at a New York hedge fund.
Tell your kids about your own intrinsic motivation; Healy says. For example: "I feel good about what I did today because I helped some people," or "The products I sold today are going to make people comfortable."

Middle schoolers
By middle-school age, kids are ready to understand the values, moral reasoning and financial needs that underlie work choices -- why we work and how our job relates to household needs, to other people and to the world at large. At this point, you will begin to see in your kids the results of your teachings. Aaron Dobrinsky, CEO of RoomLinX, Hackensack, N.J., has long told his kids: "You will only excel at what you love. If you hate getting up to go to work every day, you're not going to excel at it." They seem to be listening; his 16-year-old daughter loves working with special-needs children and plans to make it a career; she has started job-shadowing special-ed professionals.

Mental Health Care Emergency Looms, N.Va. Officials Warn
Eric Weiss, Washington Post- 11/17/2004

Four psychiatric wards in Northern Virginia have closed recently or will be shut down soon, eliminating 100 beds and threatening to create a mental health care crisis, health officials say. The closures at four suburban hospitals are the result of national trends in health care economics, but the fallout could mean longer waits in emergency rooms, more mentally ill patients in jails and fewer options for very troubled -- and occasionally dangerous -- people, mental health advocates say.
      The closure of the psychiatric unit at Potomac Hospital, above, and at three other hospitals puts more pressure on the sole state-run hospital. "You have to practically die before you're able to get any help," said Dotti McKee, whose schizophrenic son has been shuttled from hospitals to homeless shelters to jail cells in Fairfax. The recent closure of the psychiatric units at Potomac Hospital in Woodbridge and Inova Alexandria Hospital and the planned closure of Dominion Hospital in Falls Church and Northern Virginia Community Hospital in Arlington will place more pressure on the sole state-run hospital in the area, which is already over capacity. "A drastic situation is going to get a lot worse," said George Barker, associate director of the Health Systems Agency of Northern Virginia, a regional health planning agency. "It raises major concerns about how all these people will be accommodated."
      The disappearance of psychiatric beds in Northern Virginia grows out of an ad hoc national mental health system in which resources and economic incentives do not match needs, advocates and planners say. There is desperate demand for short-term options for mentally ill people in their own communities -- acute-care hospital beds, halfway houses, outpatient support services and detoxification programs. But public and private insurance reimbursement rates, which cover a fraction of the cost of care, make mental health a financial loser. Also, more than one-fourth of mentally ill patients have no insurance, health officials say, meaning hospitals often swallow the cost of care.
      Potomac Hospital closed its 12-bed psychiatric unit three weeks ago after losing what it said was $4.7 million on mental health services since 1998. "Basically, it was a cost issue,'' hospital spokesman Leigh Dunlap said. A growing national nurse shortage means that even when there is an empty bed at a private or community hospital, a patient may be turned away because appropriate staff members are unavailable to provide care to a difficult or violent patient.




Drug that Battles Obesity Could Inhibit Addictions
Malcom Ritter, Associated Press- 11/17/2004

NEW YORK - A pill that helps you lose weight and quit smoking? That was amazing enough to capture headlines last week. But scientists say the experimental drug might be even more versatile, providing a new tool to help people stop abusing drugs and alcohol, too. It's called rimonabant, or Acomplia, and last week researchers reported it could help people not only lose weight but keep it off for two years.
      That burnished the drug's reputation after two studies in March, which suggested it could fight obesity and smoking, two of today's biggest killers. The French pharmaceutical firm Sanofi-Aventis plans to seek federal approval for rimonabant next year.
      But the drug may help more than smokers and obese people, researchers say. "I think it's going to have a big impact on the treatment of addiction," said Dr. Charles O'Brien, an addiction expert at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
      Animal studies suggest rimonabant can block the effects of marijuana and fight relapse in alcohol and cocaine abuse, he said. Once it is approved for treating obesity or smoking, "we'll be free to study it in these other areas and I'll try to get my hands on it as quickly as possible," O'Brien said.
      He's not alone in his enthusiasm. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism is interested in seeing whether rimonabant can help treat heavy drinkers, said Dr. George Kunos of the institute. No human test results for rimonabant in alcohol abuse have yet been published, he said. But researchers at the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported in 2001 that a single dose of the drug could block the effects of smoked marijuana in people, not just animals. That suggests the drug could be useful in treating marijuana dependence, said Marilyn Huestis, principal investigator of the study. The institute is now pursuing follow-up research, said Huestis, acting chief for chemistry and drug metabolism research at NIDA.
      Rimonabant's versatility is tied to its effects on the brain's reward system, circuitry that tells you to keep on doing something. Basically, it appears to help break the connection between an activity such as smoking and the rewarding feeling it causes in the brain. The body has its own marijuana-like substances called endocannabinoids, and they activate certain brain cells that in turn can lead to stimulation of the brain's reward system. Pleasurable things like drinking alcohol are thought to activate a feeling of reward by acting through the system. Rimonabant blocks the effect of the natural endocannabinoids by keeping them from latching onto the brain cells they normally stimulate, he said. In smokers, for example, that seems to restore the natural balance of the brain reward circuitry, he said.

The Kinsey Effect
Rosie Mestel, Los Angeles Times- 11/17/2004

On a January day in 1948, a hefty book filled with turgid scientific prose, and scores of tables and charts, landed amid an unsuspecting American public. The tome reported, matter-of-factly and without judgment, that American men were up to all manner of sexual exploits behind closed doors, and that the minds of huge numbers of them were churning with taboo desires. The book, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," by biologist Alfred Kinsey of Indiana University, was an utter revelation for a populace living in a time when masturbation was frowned upon, oral sex (even between husband and wife) was illegal in some states, and homosexuality was considered an extremely rare, criminal deviance.
      Kinsey's work set off "a true media explosion," says writer-director Bill Condon, whose movie, "Kinsey," on the pioneering sex researcher's life, premiered in Los Angeles and New York last Friday. Publications such as Collier's, Time and the New York Times ran cover articles about Kinsey's book. Church leaders, among others, denounced it.
      Overnight, millions of American men realized that they were not lone freaks for doing what they did. Based on thousands of exhaustive, confidential interviews with churchgoers, college students, prison inmates and more, Kinsey reported, for example, that 92% of men had masturbated and half of married men had had extramarital affairs. A full 37% of men said they had had some form of homosexual experience at some point in their lives.
      Five years later, Kinsey's second volume — "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" — came through with more revelations. A full 62% of women, for instance, reported they had masturbated, about half of the women said that they had engaged in premarital sex, and two-thirds of participants said that they had experienced overtly sexual dreams. The book was widely attacked as an affront to the dignity of womanhood. Americans flocked to buy both volumes, turning them into bestsellers.
      Those dry books are now gathering dust on academic bookshelves but Kinsey's legacy lives on. By bringing the sexual lives of regular American men and women out of the shadows — by cataloging their actions and proclivities more completely than anyone before him or since — he opened the doors on a public discussion of sex and set a foundation for the scholarly investigation of this most intimate arena of human life. Social scientists and sex researchers describe his contribution as one of the most significant achievements in the annals of sex research. "His influence was tremendous — it opened up the field," says Vern Bullough, founder of the Center for Sex Research at Cal State Northridge, and author of "Science in the Bedroom: A History of Sex Research."
      Nobody since the controversial Kinsey has interviewed as many people, in such painstaking detail about so many aspects of their sexual lives and thoughts. Over the course of years, 18,000 men and women across the country were asked to bare their souls on such matters as the frequencies of their climaxes, their experiences with premarital sex and even whether they had ever had sexual encounters with animals. Kinsey's work did more than reassure people they were not alone: It highlighted a disconnect between certain laws of the land and actual sexual practice. "Everybody's sin is nobody's sin," Kinsey once said.
      Perhaps above all, researchers say Kinsey's work and the later studies it inspired showed social scientists, public health workers, therapists and geneticists just how much there was and still remains for them to study. "His No. 1 contribution was simply recognizing that sexual behavior is diverse and that people do very different things … that there was a marvelous and very substantial diversity of sexual behavior in all segments of the population," says Dean Hamer, author and molecular biologist at the National Institutes of Health, who has studied sexuality and genetics.
      Being lauded as the father of sex research may seem an odd fate for a man with Kinsey's start in life. He was born in 1894 in Hoboken, N.J.; his father was an engineer and a Sunday school preacher who spoke out passionately against the sins of masturbation. Kinsey obtained an assistant professorship in zoology at Indiana University in 1920, and gained prominence in his field for the detailed study of the thousands of gall wasps he collected — enthralled, in his studies, by the rich variation he uncovered.
      But in 1938, he took a new tack and began teaching a university course on marriage in which he discussed sexual matters quite frankly. Soon after, he devised his questionnaire and embarked on a brand-new taxonomy — of human sex. "He brought the same perspective — the same interest in diversity of species that he'd done with his little gall wasps," says Stephanie Sanders, associate director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University, the institute Kinsey once directed. "He really believed that science could provide answers."
      In 1943, Kinsey and his team secured private funding to amass information on sexual habits. Kinsey and his carefully trained interview team traveled throughout the country, interviewing people one-on-one whenever they could: every member of a fraternity, a church congregation, a residential building. They ventured into gay bars. They talked to prison inmates.
      Proper interview technique was deemed crucial by Kinsey. The questioner was not to exude a trace of judgment. Questions were delivered at a rapid pace, and the answers recorded in an elaborate code that took many months of training to master. "Kinsey also knew that people might lie; he had all sorts of questions to find out if they were telling the truth," says Bullough. "It was a very comprehensive questionnaire that I don't think that most people would sit through today if somebody knocked on your door and said 'I want to do this survey' and your supper was on the stove and it kept going on and on."
      Sex researchers say Kinsey's biggest contribution was the sheer cataloging of variation. But his most-famous findings revolve around the issue of homosexuality. He devised the famous Kinsey scale — a numerical gradation of levels of homosexual orientation, with 0 representing those who were exclusively heterosexual and 6 being exclusively homosexual. The scale is still used by researchers.
      Kinsey also reported that 10% of the men he interviewed said they engaged in predominantly homosexual activity between the ages of 16 and 55. "That changed the thinking about homosexuality," says Dr. Jack Drescher, a New York psychoanalyst. "If it was more common than people thought it to be, then perhaps it was what we would call a normal variation of sexuality rather than a form of mental illness."
      The 10% figure became a political slogan during the gay liberation movement of the 1980s. But the finding was influential far earlier than that. In the 1940s and 1950s, homosexuality was deemed highly deviant behavior for which a person could be imprisoned, institutionalized and subject to forced "cures."
      Kinsey's work inspired others to investigate the matter of homosexuality, including psychologist Evelyn Hooker, who in the 1950s administered the famous Rorschach inkblot test to groups of seemingly well-adjusted gay and heterosexual men. (Only data on disturbed or imprisoned homosexuals had been available up to that time, which presented the likely possibility of bias.) Experts were asked to rate all the blots (without knowing which came from whom) and found no evidence that the homosexual group was any more disturbed than the heterosexual group. Based on work such as Kinsey's and Hooker's, the American Psychiatric Association voted in 1973, after intense debate, to drop homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
      Today, experts believe that Kinsey's precise numbers were inflated, partly because the people he interviewed to draw his conclusions — especially in the book on males — were not nationally representative. A posthumous reanalysis of his massive dataset found that when interviews from prisoners and other sources likely to over-sample the number of homosexual participants were removed, the percentage of those with exclusively homosexual experiences fell to 3%; another 3% reporting that such experiences were extensive but not exclusive. Those figures are in line with more recent studies.
      Even at the time of its publication, Kinsey's statistical methodology was challenged. He knew he could not obtain a totally random sample, but tried to correct for this by making his sample as large as possible and employing the "cluster" method that he had used handily in his studies of wasps — gathering, wherever he went, as complete a sample as possible. He originally intended to collect 100,000 interviews to further lower the chance of bias. But he died in 1956, at age 62, before he could complete his work. After his first book on males was published, an independent board of scientists from the American Statistical Association carefully reviewed his methodology — and by and large exonerated him, acknowledging that a random, door-to-door approach would have been formidably difficult given the sensitive nature of the habits he was trying to catalog.
      Kinsey also incorrectly concluded that the sexual habits of women were more biologically rooted — less likely to change in step with the evolving sexual standards of society. "If anything, it's the other way round," says John Bancroft, recently retired director of the Kinsey Institute.
      Kinsey has also been faulted for his chronicling of pedophilia and the sexual habits of young children. An analysis by Bancroft revealed he relied heavily on data from one man — a pedophile who reported sexual encounters with hundreds of children, all of which he chronicled in a journal. Reliance so much on one person was not a reliable way to gather facts. More than that, however, was a moral issue: Why didn't Kinsey report the man to the police? In defense of Kinsey, the institute's website states that "many sexual behaviors, even those between married adults, were illegal in the 1940s and 1950s. Without confidentiality, it would have been impossible to investigate the very private lives of Americans then, and even now."
      In recent decades, some critics have gone further in their attacks against Kinsey. One independent researcher has charged that Kinsey did more than passively take notes on the habits of a sex criminal, but that he was involved in such crimes. Such claims have gained widespread attention, but sex researchers and historians say there is no evidence to support them. "People are extremely uptight when it comes to the academic study of sex," says the NIH's Hamer. "As soon as you study sex, people accuse you of being a pervert, an activist, a cheater and a liar — all of which Kinsey was accused of."
      Kinsey was certainly a complex man. As portrayed in the movie, he engaged in homosexual relations with one of his associates and once attempted to circumcise himself. But he was also a married man and a devoted father whom scholars describe as compassionate and ethical, if arrogant.
      Even in his time, Kinsey was charged with importing pornography after customs officials seized art erotica he was mailed from overseas. Under pressure from congressional investigators, the Rockefeller Foundation — which funded Kinsey's work — dropped his funding after the publication of Kinsey's "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female." Sex researchers say they have experienced similar attacks. For instance Bullough, of Cal State Northridge, says that he was accused of being a pedophile for organizing a workshop in which child pornography was to be discussed. State funding for Cal State Northridge was held up while he was investigated.
      In the early 1990s, federal funding for a large survey on sexual habits, to be coordinated by the University of Chicago, was withdrawn after then-U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms intervened. The research was eventually conducted on a smaller scale with grants from private sources. Last year, U.S. Rep. Patrick Toomey (R.-Pa.) proposed an amendment that would have cut off $1.5 million in federal funding that had already been awarded for studies on such topics as the sexual habits of older men, sexual risk-taking, arousal and the activities of San Francisco massage workers. The amendment was narrowly defeated. Conservative family groups have repeatedly called for closure of the Kinsey Institute.
      Kinsey may have explained what people did yet he never attempted to explain why. But by cataloging so completely the variability that exists in human sexual behavior, he paved the way for a multidisciplinary field that is trying to answer such questions from multiple orientations: genetics, hormones, medicine, social science and psychology. Each year, hundreds of sex researchers convene at the meeting of their flagship organization (one that Kinsey, as it happened, refused to join): the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality.
      The researchers say they experience perennial worries about funding, and have learned to carefully couch the titles of their projects (using words such as "attitudes" instead of more overtly sexual terms) to avoid attracting controversy. Some study sex from the point of view of public health or sociology — ways to improve condom use or trends in attitudes toward premarital sex — while others tackle still poorly understood psychological arenas such as the factors dictating arousal. Others, in this age of the human genome, are attempting to understand the biological and genetic causes of homosexuality or gender orientation.
      More and more scientists are studying sex from a medical perspective, seeking physiological causes and pharmaceutical answers to problems such as impotence or loss of sexual desire: Increasingly, funding for sex research comes from pharmaceutical companies. This trend is the cause of no small tension in the field, for some sex researchers feel that such "medicalization" is inappropriate.
      Kinsey, meanwhile, has been accused of, or credited with — depending on one's point of view — doing more than laying the groundwork for a new field. He radically altered the way society thinks of sex, and ushered in far greater sexual freedom. That may be too much to lay at his door. He did receive letters from people around the world thanking him for letting them know they were not abnormal. Some of those writers (such as a woman featured in the "Kinsey" movie who decided late in life to follow her lesbian urgings) said his work encouraged them to make alterations in their lives.
      But many other developments were taking place in the world at the time Kinsey was collecting and writing. Antibiotics that could cure venereal disease. Birth control pills. Movements of people caused by war and the Depression. Women entering the workplace, and ultimately the gender equality movement. "It's that kind of thing that makes a revolution — not the Kinsey volumes," says Ira Reiss, professor emeritus of the department of sociology at the University of Minnesota. Kinsey brought the subject out into the open — but, says Bancroft, "he was basically reporting on what people were already doing."

Sex in a century
Over the decades, American attitudes toward sex have changed greatly. At the beginning of the 20th century, most people simply didn't discuss the topic. Today, sex is freely talked about even on TV and radio shows. Here are some milestones.
1905: In his work "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality," Austrian scientist Sigmund Freud writes that our sexual drive is responsible for what we do, why we do it and even who we are. Differences in personalities originate in childhood sexual experiences, he theorizes.
1916: Margaret Sanger opens the first U.S. birth control clinic. She also underwrites research that leads to the development of the birth control pill.
1940s and '50s: Alfred Kinsey surveys men and women about sexual behavior. The resulting books become bestsellers, beginning a national discussion of behavior previously discussed only in private.
1957: Evelyn Hooker releases a study contending that well-adjusted gay people have no more psychopathology than heterosexual people.
1960: The Food and Drug Administration approves the birth control pill.
1966: Building on Kinsey's work, William Masters, a gynecologist, and Virginia Johnson, a psychology researcher, publish their findings of sexual activity observed in a laboratory in the book "Human Sexual Response." Their work leads to a new field: sex therapy.
1969: Dr. David Reuben publishes his bestselling sex manual, "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)"; the book inspires a 1972 Woody Allen movie of the same name.
1972: "The Joy of Sex" by Dr. Alex Comfort is the first explicit book about sex. Less clinical than Masters and Johnson's work, it includes information on oral sex, sexual positions, bondage and swinging.
1973: Homosexuality is removed as a sexual deviation from the American Psychiatric Association's manual of mental health disorders.
1976: Sex researcher Sherry Hite publishes "The Hite Report: A Nationwide Survey of Female Sexuality," which argued that many women were not sexually satisfied.
1980: Sex educator Ruth Westheimer, or "Dr. Ruth," launches the radio show "Sexually Speaking," which emphasizes sex education. It opens the door to other sex-related TV and radio programs.
1998: Food and Drug Administration approves Viagra for impotence in men.
2004: "Kinsey" movie is released, with actor Liam Neeson playing Kinsey.

Finding Hope After a Suicide
Gina Kim, Chicago Tribune- 11/19/2004

For more than three years, Stan Lewy has begun his days at Chicago's Montrose Beach. With black-and-tan Welsh terriers, Marco and Miles, in tow, Lewy walks along the waterfront and thinks of his son, David. He reminisces on how the triathlete loved the water. He wonders if the organic chemist might have helped cure AIDS with his HIV research. And he reflects on how life has changed since a phone call on May 22, 2001, telling him David had slit his wrists. "For the first year and a half, I just couldn't stop crying. I'd just go out there and wail. And it was someplace where I could just scream and feel comfortable in doing that," said Lewy, 64. "I don't scream anymore. But I still cry every day."
      While the morning ritual is helping Lewy heal, he credits his life to support groups and other suicide survivors' organizations. He's still alive, he said, simply because he learned he was far from alone. "I had no reason to live. I had no desire to live," Lewy recalled believing after David, who suffered from bipolar disorder, died. "By talking to others, I saw I wasn't alone in the way I felt, that there were people who were going through the same thing and were able to get beyond this incredible pain."
      In 2002, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 31,655 people died by suicide in the United States according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "There's an enormous amount of stigma surrounding suicide," said Robert Gebbia, executive director of the New York-based American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. "When somebody dies of another illness--cancer or heart disease--it's tragic, and people feel that loss. But they're not ashamed of it. In our society, there's still shame involved with someone who dies by suicide."
      To help pull back that cloak, the foundation has sponsored 25 community walks and fundraisers around the nation. Titled "Out of the Darkness," the last one this year will be held Saturday in the Cook County Forest Preserves' Bemis Woods. It will be followed by a national teleconference of speakers on the subject, seen in more than 90 communities, for the sixth annual National Survivors of Suicide Day. Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), whose father shot himself to death in 1972 after suffering from depression, started the day in 1999.
      After Lewy's son's death, Lewy dedicated his life to helping other survivors of suicide. He founded the Midwest chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and is chairman-elect for the Illinois Suicide Prevention Planning Committee. While Lewy's life is now about sharing his experience with other suicide survivors, his morning walks are always about David. "I just think about him," Lewy said. "Sometimes I think of things he did. Sometimes I think about things he won't do. It's been rough lately, because my daughter got married, and he wasn't there."
      For more information, go to www.afsp.org.

In Online Setting, a Cult of Anorexia Finds Affirmation
Dan Whitcomb, Reuters News Service- 11/21/2004

LOS ANGELES -- An underground subculture of teenage girls who bond over their eating disorders and glorify bone-thin celebrities has surfaced on the Internet, in a growing trend that specialists say frustrates treatment. The girls share near-starvation diets in Web journals and offer tips for denying hunger pangs or dodging the suspicions of family members. They discuss extreme calorie restriction or weight loss through laxatives, diet pills, or induced vomiting. And they post ''thinspiration" pictures of their idols, such as supermodel Kate Moss and the 18-year-old Olsen twins.
      In fact, Mary-Kate Olsen, who with her sister Ashley is the face of a multimillion-dollar American brand catering to young girls, has become a top icon in the Web communities since spending six weeks in a Utah clinic for an eating disorder earlier this year. ''I found little pictures of Mary-Kate and I'm posting them all over my room and in my backpack and my purse and my car and everywhere, so I am always reminded of her strength. Hopefully, it will keep me in check," a college sophomore named Emma writes in her Web journal while considering a three-week fast broken only by soup on every third day. A spokesman for Mary-Kate Olsen said the actress has focused on her recovery, not Web chatter. She has not spoken publicly about her disorder and has returned to college. ''She's not trolling these sites, so I'm not sure how aware she is of how she's being presented," Michael Pagnotta said. ''There's a lot of controversy over some of these sites, but when you're a public person you can't be responsible" for them.
      Specialists on eating disorders say the sites are particularly dangerous for anorexics, who strongly resist admitting a problem and cling to their illness to avoid dealing with its psychological underpinnings. ''These sites really promote the idea that eating disorders are a good thing and thrive off the denial part of the disorder," said Edi Cook, an eating disorder specialist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills. She said the websites are changing the culture surrounding eating disorders, making them more acceptable to girls. The Harvard Eating Disorders Center estimates that 3 percent of adolescent women and girls have anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating disorders. Specialists say with eating disorders focus on their bodies in a misguided bid to resolve deeper psychological issues, thinking they can fix their inner troubles by achieving a ''perfect" outside. They equate nearly skeletal thinness with perfection.
      Kate, a 19-year-old student who is anorexic, contributes to a Web journal for college-age women with eating disorders. She weighs 98 pounds, up from a low of 90. ''It's a lonely disorder, really," she said. ''None of my friends have it, and they wouldn't understand the thought processes behind it. I think I could definitely become very depressed if I didn't have these girls talk to. It's a big part of my life." Kate uses a photograph of Mary-Kate Olsen as her Web icon and keeps a calendar of the twins on her dorm wall. She identifies with Mary-Kate, has followed her eating disorder struggle, and acknowledges envy over the images that found their way onto the Internet.