A New Marriage Test: 'Illness Compatibility'
Hilary Stout, Wall Street Journal- 1/12/2005

In the annals of marital discord, there are some pretty big issues: infidelity, God and money, to name a few. There is also a long-running but often overlooked source of grief: the common cold. Make that cold, flu, stomach bug or any other miserable but minor ailment that seems to strike with a vengeance this time of. year. As cold and flu season revs into high gear, spouses all over are finding themselves put to the challenge of living up, literally, to that vow about loving and cherishing. in both sickness and health.
      Illness compatibility probably isn't something that occurs to people when they search for a mate. But the truth is that many spouses tend to drive each other mad when they get sick -- the result of different attitudes about handling aches, pains or congestion. Like dirty dishes and socks on the floor, this can become frustrating and supremely irritating as you're living out your lives together.
     Steve and Angie Cody, of Lyncroft, N.J., have been married 22 years and are raising two teenagers. Yet they still haven't mastered the art of peaceful coexistence when one or another feels lousy. When Steve Cody, who is managing partner of a public relations firm, senses sniffles or worse coming on, he heads straight to the medicine cabinet for his stash of elixirs: Advil and Tylenol, Pepto-Bismol, Robitussin and Nyquil.
     Angie Cody, a personal trainer, wouldn't dream of taking anything. "I try to tough it out," she says. "You are your own worst enemy," he says. The differing approaches would be. OK, except that Steve Cody worries that all those germs his wife is doing nothing to fight will turn and strike him. "I'll say 'I better not catch this, I've got to travel, to Miami and Grand Rapids. Stay away from me,' " he says. "If she coughs in bed, I'll make her roll over." Usually he takes no chances and decamps to the spare bedroom.
     For her part, Angie Cody says it drives her crazy when her husband insists on working out when he's sick. "Even though he's a bad patient and feels sorry for himself, he'll still push himself to run and do the elliptical trainer. I always yell at him for that and say, 'You've got to give your body a rest.' "
     None of this is a marriage breaker. The Codys are pretty good-natured about it, though discussions get more heated if one of the kids is sick. He usually wants to take them to the doctor; she generally prefers to wait.
     But for some couples, warring attitudes about colds and minor ailments are unpleasant enough to warrant discussion in counseling sessions. "You get things like 'Oh, he is such a wimp,' and 'Oh, you can't live with her,"' says Tracy Todd, a licensed therapist who co-owns the Brief Therapy Institute of Denver. Then there is the I-feel-worse-than-you syndrome, which, seems to be particularly acute in households with small children. Message boards on UrbanBaby.com are filled with postings from exasperated wives slogging through housework and kid chores while their ill husbands take to their beds. "If I have a cold, he has flu," says one. "If I have flu, he has the bubonic plague."
     Todd counsels couples to stop using the "I" word (as in 'I am sicker than you') and remember they're in this together. "You may be thinking, 'Oh, what a weenie,' but this is your partner -- how are you going to help them?" he says. And, to the whiny sick person: "You may be sick, but it doesn't give you carte blanche" to make everyone else miserable.
     Loretta LaRoche of the Comfort Council, an online advisory board for stress management, suggests renting funny movies, both to lighten the mood at home and to release endorphins within the body, which can reduce the perception of pain and stress. She's also a believer in chicken soup.
Selective Search, a high-end matchmaking service, actually attempts to screen for illness compatibility. During a three-hour interview, prospective clients are asked questions such as: "Are you in the Eastern or Western medicine camp?" or "Would you date a guy who took antibiotics the second he got sick?" "We truly believe that just as age, religious preference and political viewpoints are important, a lot of people care about lifestyle and health," says the firm's president, Barbie Adler.
At the risk of gender stereotyping, there does seem to be a pattern: Men do not do sick well. They feel sorry for themselves and feel a need to let you know repeatedly just how sick they are. Women --whether they want to show diligence at the office or prevent chaos at home -- frequently feel they have no choice but to soldier on. Of course, this is a gross generalization. But a random survey of about a dozen men and women yielded no dissenting views.
     A couple weeks ago, Dan Dubno, a New York television producer, came home from work feeling ill and crawled into bed at 7 p.m., leaving his wife, Lisa Bernstein, who runs a foundation, to deal with homework, dinner and bedtime for their 8- and 9-year-old kids. "We could both be sick but I have two children when I'm sick," says Bernstein. "When he's sick, the world may end at any moment "
     One family story seems to say it all--Bernstein had just given birth to their first child -- no picnic in the pain and discomfort category. She was holding the new baby, ready to walk out of the hospital room and go home, when Dubno collapsed on the floor in agony and crawled to the nurse's station. Turns out he was passing a kidney stone. "You are so competitive," his wife said. Later, she says, he was pleased to tell her he met a woman who'd passed a kidney stone and said it hurt even more than childbirth.

Yates' Jurors Speak Out About Flawed Testimony
Ruth Rendon, Houston Chronicle- 1/13/2005

A juror in Andrea Yates' capital murder trial said he relied on the false testimony of California psychiatrist Park Dietz to convict the Clear Lake-area woman who drowned her five children in the family's bathtub. Ron Jones, juror No. 7 on the panel that decided Yates' fate, told state District Judge Belinda Hill in a letter that the controversial testimony from Dietz about a Law & Order television episode convinced him to change his mind from finding Yates to be insane to voting to convict her. The episode never aired. During the three-week trial in March 2002, Dietz, the state's expert witness, testified that he was a consultant for the television series and had consulted on an episode in which a woman suffering from postpartum depression drowned her children, was tried and found not guilty by reason of insanity. Yates suffered from severe postpartum depression and her attorneys argued she was insane when she drowned her children the morning of June 20, 2001. After jurors found Yates guilty, it was learned that the Law & Order episode that Dietz mentioned didn't exist.
     The 1st Texas Court of Appeals overturned Yates' capital murder conviction on Jan. 6 because of Dietz's testimony and because Judge Hill, who presided over the trial, denied a defense request to declare a mistrial after it was learned that Dietz's testimony was false. Prosecutors also used Dietz's testimony in closing arguments. Jones' comment came in a letter to Hill after the trial. Jones could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
      In a letter to Hill dated April 5, 2002, Jones said he was the only juror not convinced about finding Yates guilty during jury deliberations. At one point, he said, he went to the bathroom for a few minutes to pray "and the understanding came to me." Jones said he summarized that Yates watched the Law & Order program two weeks before her children's death. At the same time, Yates also had been taken off the antipsychotic drug Haldol. "I figured if she watched the program, only been off of Haldol that day. Her mind should have been sane," Jones wrote in his letter. "An easy way out of her horrible situation, I thought. This I told everyone of why I changed my mind from insane to guilty. That was the preponderance of the evidence that sealed her guilt to me." Jones' letter was not made a part of the trial record.
      Yates' attorneys filed a motion last year to make the letter a part of the record but the appellate court denied the request in March. "We hold that because the letter in question was not admitted into evidence in any of the proceedings in appellant's cases and because it is not part of the trial court's records, it was not 'omitted' from the appellate record in these appeals," the court said in denying a defense motion.
      Another juror wrote to the Houston Chronicle this week, saying Dietz's testimony played no role in determining Yates' fate. In a letter to the editor, juror No. 5, Kenneth L. Blanchard, said he was disappointed in the appellate court's decision. "I cannot speak for the other jury members, but I can say definitely that the inaccurate portion of Dr. Park Dietz testimony had no impact on my decision," Blanchard said. "I also recall an informal poll in the jury room prior to our release in which we were asked if the controversial portion of Dr. Dietz's testimony factored into our decision. The opinion of the other jurors appeared consistent with mine that it had no bearing."
      Blanchard said despite the rhetoric about the nobleness of jury duty, the appellate court decided to set aside the jury's verdict based on a few statements made during three weeks of testimony. "I appreciate the opinions and perspectives on both sides of this tragedy and the earnest support of those around Ms. Yates," Blanchard wrote. "Another thing we agreed on was that Andrea Yates was a sick woman. However, the question was simply did she know right from wrong at the time she drowned her children. In our opinion, the evidence independent of Dr. Dietz's misstatements overwhelmingly supported that she did know right from wrong."
     Juror Robert Buxton agrees with Blanchard, saying Dietz's testimony did not influence the jury's decision. Buxton said the crime was so horrendous that Yates will "never be sane again." "It's just another way for her to get another trial the way other people do to use the system," Buxton said. "I'd sure hate to see it."

WHO Fears Psychological Tsunami Damage
Associated Press, 1/14/2005

HELSINKI, Finland -- Fearful the southern Asian tsunami may leave millions traumatized, especially children, European health ministers urged governments to be mindful of the psychological scars of the disaster. Meeting in Helsinki on Friday, representatives of the European Union and the World Health Organization pledged more aid for the region, but said the task of helping the injured and traumatized was ``extremely demanding.'' ``The trauma for so many millions of children is a first. After World War II there has not been such a trauma,'' Marc Danzon, European regional director of the U.N. health body, said of the tsunamis that killed more than 157,000 people. ``We are confronted by something that is extremely demanding, and I'm not sure that at this moment we are equipped to face the problem,'' he told the AP. ``But we will do our best.'' The disaster also subjected people worldwide to horrific photos and TV images of destruction, something never seen before on such a scale, Danzon said. ``We are witnessing for the first time a globalization of such images and I am sure that they will mark the mentality of people everywhere,'' he said.
      The three-day ministerial conference that ends Saturday released a 12-page mental health plan of action that also urges ensuring ``professional help and assurances'' for people in crises, including natural disasters. The document, signed Friday by 52 countries, said that almost 20 percent of the disease burden in Europe is caused by mental disorders, and not enough attention is paid to the mental state of those who survive crises or natural disasters. ``We get fixed on how many are missing, or wounded or injured, but of course those who experience this shock -- children not the least -- coming back to their surroundings ... some 20 percent of them will experience post-traumatic stress syndrome and stress disorders,'' said Gudjon Magnusson, a WHO spokesman.
      Officials from the Asian disaster areas reported that up to three-quarters of local health personnel could not work because of depression. ``Hospitals close to disaster had a problem with staff. Some of them were dead or wounded but a majority of the 75 percent of staff had mental difficulty to come back to work because of depression,'' Danzon said. EU Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou said the European Union was sending more teams to the region, but conceded that a greater global aid effort was needed.
      On the Net- http://www.euro.who.int

Company Recalls Attention Deficit Drug
Associated Press, 1/14/2005

WASHINGTON -- A pharmaceutical company issued a nationwide recall Friday of about 500 bottles of a drug used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and narcolepsy. One lot of Methylin Chewable Tablets in 5-milligram strength may contain as much as three times the active ingredient, Alliant Pharmaceuticals said in a statement Friday evening.
      The Alpharetta, Ga.-based company voluntarily recalled the drug after testing and evaluation. The company said that medication from the lot could pose serious health risk for some patients. "We are committed to taking whatever steps are necessary to ensure the safety of all patients who use any one of our products," Alliant President Mark Pugh said in the statement. "We are confident that this matter will be resolved quickly." No one had complained or reported adverse effects from the lot as of Friday night, the company said. Alliant estimated that fewer than 500 of the 2,820 bottles in the lot are in distribution. The company said it is sending letters about the recall to doctors and pharmacists and is asking pharmacists to notify patients who bought the recalled drug.
      The lot number is AMT50402A and has an expiration date of April 2006. The company asked distributors and pharmacies to check lot numbers and quarantine any medicine that matches. A spokesman for the Food and Drug Administration, Brad Stone, said the agency had been informed of the situation and was working to ensure the proper implementation of the recall.
      Alliant Pharmaceuticals: http://www.alliantpharma.com

On Two Fronts, Sarajevo and Depression
William Grimes, New York Times- 1/14/2005

John Falk hit the ground running when he landed in Sarajevo in August 1993. Dressed in body armor and helmet, he carried a single duffel bag packed with the bare necessities: a few clothes, some recording equipment, a 35-millimeter camera and, most important, a year's supply of Zoloft stuffed into a tube sock. Mr. Falk had no qualifications whatever as a journalist, but in a way he was the right man in the right place. Who better to report from the most depressing city on earth than one of the most depressed human beings in the Western world?
     Mr. Falk had been struggling with crippling depression for more than a decade. It descended suddenly when he was 12, a seemingly happy child in a happy middle-class family on Long Island. One morning, he woke up and the world no longer looked the same. Life seemed meaningless. His thoughts raced in endless, pointless circles. He felt isolated and emotionally disconnected. In time, he learned how to go through the motions of living. He graduated from college. But one evening, living in the attic of his parents' house, he found himself fondling a shotgun and feeling a deep sense of peace, knowing that he had a way out. At 23, he was just about ready to give up.
      Zoloft and Sarajevo saved him. In his darkest hours, Mr. Falk had fixated on the idea that foreign travel, preferably to a danger zone, would lead to self-knowledge. Buoyed by his new medication, he settled on Sarajevo as a form of therapy. "I decided that maybe with Zoloft I could do something," he writes. "I could have an adventure that would bring me back to life and return me to the world." That's pretty much what happened, as Mr. Falk tells it in alternating chapters that describe his life-or-death struggle with depression and his harrowing experiences in Sarajevo.
      Mr. Falk may have been the most unlikely war correspondent since John Boot, the hapless hero of Evelyn Waugh's "Scoop." Although Mr. Falk entered Sarajevo as an accredited radio journalist, he had never reported, written or recorded a news story in his life. He had no place to stay and no news outlet to report to. Worst of all, the war seemed to be eluding him. "All day there were sounds of shooting and explosions, just never around where I was," he writes. "When I hiked over to where the action seemed to be, it inevitably seemed to move back to where I had just been. It was frustrating. I was a war reporter in the middle of a war, and for the life of me I couldn't find it."
      Mr. Falk is hopeless. A kindly Bosnian landlady gently suggests that he might want to check out the daily United Nations news conferences attended by every journalist in Sarajevo. Mr. Falk did not even know they existed. A kindly family, the Nonoviches, accept him as a tenant despite warnings from the local militia that he might be a spy. They decide that this is probably not true after Mr. Falk sets his pants on fire while sitting in their living room.
      Gradually Mr. Falk finds his footing. Radio stations all over the world hunger for dispatches with a sign-off from Sarajevo, so he learns how to condense the day's news into a 30-second spot. Before long, he's a real foreign correspondent, selling his reports far and wide. "At one point," he writes, "I even became the Balkan correspondent for a country I had never heard of before, Bophuthatswana."
      Thanks to the Nonoviches, Mr. Falk lands a really big story. He is fascinated by rumors of Bosnian countersnipers who take up positions at night and pick off the Serbian snipers who have turned Sarajevo's streets into killing fields. Nino Nonovich knows one, and leads Mr. Falk to him. His name is Vlado. He is 38, a former businessman with a wife and child who once drove a BMW and wore Pierre Cardin suits. Now he picks up a rifle every night and hunts human prey, some of them his former neighbors. Mr. Falk is fascinated, and not just for the obvious reasons. "In the darkness of his existence he had found a reason to keep on going," Mr. Falk writes. "Life had not lost its meaning to him, and I wanted to know how it was he kept going."
      Mr. Falk takes a risk in putting his own problems side by side with Sarajevo's. Who suffers more, a depressed Westerner, prosperous and blessed with a stable home and community, or the formerly happy, well-adjusted Vlado, whose world has been annihilated? It's impossible to say. The different forms of human misery cannot be converted, like currency. But it's easy to lose patience with Mr. Falk, and to see his grand adventure as an extended exercise in narcissism. Still, he redeems himself.
      The hero of this book just might be Mr. Falk's mother, who makes him promise, before he leaves, to perform just one selfless act to help another person while he's in Sarajevo. Mr. Falk agrees, without understanding why. And then he makes good on his pledge. In a wild sequence of events that put his formidable skills at bluffing and finagling to their sternest test, he manages to get three members of the Nonovich family out of Sarajevo and into the United States. After years of unspeakable suffering, they get their shot at happiness, and so does Mr. Falk. He's earned it.

On Campuses, Studying How to Prevent Student Suicides
Susan Kinzie, Washington Post- 1/15/2005

A cluster of sudden deaths over a few months last winter and spring, including two suicides, prompted a George Washington University commission to ask some tough questions in an internal report that has already changed life on campus. The university doubled the student health service psychiatry hours to 20 a week. It launched a peer education program, in which students can earn credits for talking about warning signs. It pushed harder to promote counseling, with ads and online links, and encouraged faculty and staff to watch for signs of trouble. The commission also asked the university for more funding for the counseling center, and the university is seeking money from private sources for other projects. The university does not provide long-term psychiatric care on campus, and some have complained that there are not enough counseling staff members for the 20,000 or so students. Then in September, another student killed herself. "Suicide has hit GW pretty hard in the last year or two," said student Lisa Cahan. "People are really coming up and talking about it more and more."
      At many campuses, there is a growing urgency to find ways large and small to prevent suicide -- to help students long before they skid into psychiatric hospitalization or worse. That means more emphasis in dorms and classrooms on watching for warning signs, and everything from hiring more counselors to bringing dogs onto campus during exam week, as the College of William and Mary has done, for stressed-out students to pat. There's a wave of interest now, said James Welsh, assistant vice president of student health services at Georgetown University, who has been talking with staff about improving training for faculty. A Georgetown student committed suicide last spring, and a student died the previous winter; before that, years had gone by without a suicide there.
      Suicides are rare on campus -- in the past five years, GW had just one other suicide -- and college students are far less likely to kill themselves than other people their age. But a cluster of deaths at New York University recently reminded administrators across the country that suicide is still the second-most-common cause of death for college students. Suicides have led to lawsuits against schools by angry parents, pushed questions about privacy and responsibility to the forefront, and underscored just how overwhelming academic life can be.
      Increasing numbers of students are seeking counseling, with increasingly serious problems, at colleges across the country. There are lots of reasons for that, said Michael Mond, director of the Johns Hopkins University Counseling Center, including students who wouldn't have been able to handle college years ago who have gotten medication and treatment in high school. Now there's less stigma attached to getting counseling, more efforts by colleges to promote services and, he said, higher stress.
      And more money could become available to help. Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) sponsored legislation, signed into law last fall, which he said will provide $11.5 million this year for youth suicide prevention. "We just watched our son really deteriorate physically and emotionally," Smith said. "It's a very helpless and hopeless feeling that a parent has when you see a child suffer that way." Garrett Lee Smith killed himself in fall 2003 at a college in Utah. "Many of my colleagues in Congress came forward for the first time to talk about suicide in their own families," Smith said. "We touched a raw nerve."
      And more research is underway. The parents of a 20-year-old college student who killed himself formed a national nonprofit group, the Jed Foundation, in 2000. Jed has helped fund studies on prevention at universities and gotten an anonymous online screening form onto hundreds of college Web sites.
      Across the region, schools have been emphasizing prevention in different ways. Johns Hopkins tracks students who have indicated suicidal risk on a questionnaire -- last year, 39 of about 7,000 students were considered at serious risk -- and a group meets every week to talk about the students they're most worried about. Catholic University prefers to treat the most serious cases on campus, seeing the potential for coordination among housing, faculty and counseling as a powerful safety net. At the University of Maryland, efforts include a crisis hotline with students trained to take the calls so that getting help is less intimidating.
      Sociologist Donna Holland Barnes at Howard University said she is working on a grant proposal to screen students entering historically black colleges. Her son Marc Jamal Barnes died in 1990 while away at college in Massachusetts. He told his roommate that he was going to kill himself, she said, and by the time the other student came back with help, her son was gone. He drove his car into a river. "Most of these kids don't want to end their lives," said David Jobes of Catholic University, a clinical psychologist and past president of the American Association of Suicidology. They're feeling overwhelmed, he said, but by and large they're smart, motivated young people who do very well with treatment. "The vast majority of kids can be helped."
      But experts don't agree yet on exactly how to provide that help. An Air Force program had become a national model -- a study found it had reduced the risk of suicide by a third over six years -- but last year the rate climbed back up with more deaths. "It's exasperating," said Jobes, who is a consultant to the Air Force program. "We're trying to see what's going on with that. It's not uncommon in the field of prevention: You develop a gold-standard program, it works really well . . . then you start to see the thing you're trying to prevent creep back up." Jobes said he hopes that 10 years from now, counselors will have solid data on the most effective means of suicide prevention for college students.
      Meanwhile, at GW, things are changing. Cahan, a senior, started a student group in 2003 that has offered yoga or a movie along with information about counseling. Students will be more aware of the help that's out there, Cahan said. "They've made it less intimidating," said Jessie Wood, a senior who helps run GW-SPAN, a chapter of the Suicide Prevention Action Network USA, with Cahan. And online resources will help, Cahan said, because many students steer clear of the counseling center out of concern over confidentiality and what their friends, parents or future employers might think. Cahan said one of the most important things she and others in her group do is just watch for problems -- if someone's not sleeping or is freaking out about classes. "We all have our own friends, and we look out for them," she said.

Murder and Suicide Reviving Claims of Child Abuse in Cult
Laurie Goodstein, New York Times- 1/15/2005

Growing up in the 1970's in a religious cult known around the world as the Children of God, Ricky Rodriguez was revered as "the prince." The group's leaders were his mother and stepfather, and they taught that their son would guide them all when the End Times came. He was so special that his unconventional upbringing -- by a collection of often-topless young nannies -- was chronicled in "The Davidito Book," which was distributed to cult members as a how-to guide for rearing children. And children the cult had in multitudes.
     Last Saturday in Tucson, Mr. Rodriguez, now 29, invited a former nanny, Angela Smith, to go to dinner. He took Ms. Smith to his apartment, stabbed her to death, went to his Chevrolet, drove west across the California border to a small desert town, Blythe, and called his wife on his cellphone to explain why he had killed Ms. Smith, the police in both states and Mr. Rodriguez's wife said. Then with one shot from a semiautomatic handgun, the police said, he ended his life.
      The group lives on. What was known as a 60's cult that attracted members like the parents of the actor River Phoenix and Jeremy Spencer, the Fleetwood Mac guitarist, is now called the Family International. A spokesman in Washington, Claire Borowik, described the organization as a Christian fellowship with 4,000 children and 4,000 adult members who lived in 718 communal houses in 100 countries. The group sends aid workers and missionaries to disasters like the recent tsunami. Its musical troupe, the Family Singers, have at various times sung in the White House.
      But Mr. Rodriguez's murder-suicide is reviving accusations by former members about routine physical, emotional and sexual abuse that they say they experienced as children. There is evidence of the practices in documents that the cult's leaders consider so damaging that they acknowledge they twice sent out "purge notices" to their followers with explicit directions about which pages to burn, which photographs to white-out and which to excise with Exacto knives.
      Mr. Rodriguez recorded a videotape the night before he killed Ms. Smith and committed suicide. The video, which was provided to The New York Times by Mr. Rodriguez's wife, was taped in his apartment in Tucson and shows him loading a gun and showing off other weapons. He said he saw himself as a vigilante avenging children like him and his sisters who had been subject to rapes and beatings. "There's this need that I have," he said. "It's not a want. It's a need for revenge. It's a need for justice, because I can't go on like this."
      Mr. Rodriguez is not the only suicide among people reared in the Children of God. Some former members who keep in touch with one another through a Web site, movingon.org, say that in the last 13 years at least 25 young people reared in the cult have committed suicide. In response to questions, the Family strongly insisted in an e-mail message from Ms. Borowik that the formers members were intentionally inflating the count by including accidents, overdoses and people who are alive.
      For the Family International, the latest murder-suicide threatens to revive a past that Ms. Borowik said she thought the organization had put behind it. The Family announced in 1986 that it had changed its guidelines and would excommunicate anyone who had sexual contact with children, she said. The group survived investigations into child abuse in Argentina, Australia, France and Spain in the 90's. Although some members were briefly jailed, there were no convictions of top leaders. Ms. Borowik attributed Mr. Rodriguez's crime not to his past, but to his current "peers." She said that when he left the group in 2000, he came in contact with former members who are "virulent vitriolic apostates, which we have a small circle of, who want to do damage to our movement." They failed to point him in "positive directions," she said.
      Mr. Rodriguez's mother, Karen Zerby, known as the Queen or Mama Maria, still leads the Family. Her whereabouts and travel schedule are kept secret, even from most group members, Ms. Borowik said, "because of her spiritual ministry to so many people." Ms. Zerby refused an interview request submitted to Ms. Borowik.
      Mr. Rodriguez's wife, Elixcia Munumel, from whom he had recently separated, said he had spent the last few years trying to find his mother and his half-sister, Techi. He wanted to see his mother prosecuted for child abuse, and to free Techi from the group, Ms. Munumel said. She said that Mr. Rodriguez had moved to Tucson because he had heard that his mother and half-sister had stopped through there on Christmas 2003 to see his grandparents, who run an old-age home there and that he hoped they might visit again. "He always wanted to do something to make right his mother's wrong," said Ms. Munumel, who left the Family with Mr. Rodriguez and is studying for a nursing degree. "He felt he owed it to all of those who never got justice. "I'm not justifying what he did and I'm not saying it was right, because it was a life that was taken. But I want people to understand that what he did was out of pain and hurt and years of that pain building up and not being able to have that weight lifted."
      The founder of the Children of God was David Brandt Berg, a son of Pentecostal evangelists. In the late 60's, he attracted a group of hippie followers who styled themselves as revolutionary Jesus freaks. Ms. Zerby was his second wife. Promoting a gospel of free love, Mr. Berg urged his female followers to go out and offer sex to lure converts, according to histories of the organization. He called it "flirty fishing." The group hopscotched the globe, and its history has been well documented by scholars. Internal documents that former members provided this last week also fill in details. In the Canary Islands, Ms. Zerby gave birth to Ricky, whom the group called Davidito. Church documents show that the father was a handsome hotel clerk in Tenerife. Mr. Berg adopted the baby, but he was cared for day to day by a coterie of young female members, including Ms. Smith, the nanny who was killed.
      "The Davidito Book" was written by a nanny known as Sara, and it was among the documents that the leaders ordered purged. But some former members saved their copies and sent e-mail excerpts to one another this week in an effort to fathom Mr. Rodriguez's violence. In several pages of the book that former members sent to The Times, the toddler Ricky is described or else pictured as watching intercourse and orgies, fondling his nanny's breasts and having his genitals fondled. All that is recounted in a tone of amusement and delight. Ms. Borowik, the spokeswoman, said in a lengthy telephone interview that Mr. Rodriguez had been reared in an atmosphere similar to "a nudist colony," where sexual freedoms were taken for granted. She cited scholars who said the sexual practices appeared to cause no harm to the children and a psychologist who evaluated Ricky as a teenager and found him well adjusted. "He was never taken advantage of," she said. "Rather he was allowed to explore his sexuality freely. He was allowed to explore as a young boy what comes naturally, and usually in our society, we do not allow such exploration."
      In interviews this last week, more than a dozen people who grew up in the cult gave detailed accusations about experiencing or witnessing sex abuse of minors. "At the time, I didn't think of it as abuse," Peter Frouman, 29, of Austin, Tex., who left in 1987, said in a sentiment echoed by many others. "I had no concept that normal people didn't do this sort of thing. I thought it was perfectly normal for parents to have sex with their children, and children to have sex with each other and with adults. "When I was 11, I had sex with a 28-year-old woman, and it was with the approval of everyone in the room. I found out later that my mom was watching."
      In 2002, Mr. Rodriguez posted a memoir on the movingon Web site saying Mr. Berg, who died in 1994, had sexually abused his granddaughter and daughters. In Mr. Rodriguez's account, the group's founding father came off as a debauched pedophile and his mother as cold and violent toward the children. Mr. Rodriguez, like others, gravitated to other former members who seemed the only others who could understand the strange world that they had inhabited. Some discussed whether they could work through the legal system to lock up their former abusers. But many said they despaired. Tracking down people was difficult. Pseudonyms were the standard in the Family, and members often changed their names. They live in isolated, often clandestine, communes all over the globe. "It happened everywhere -- in the Philippines, Japan, Greece," said Celeste Jones, a former member in England. "So where do you go for legal redress?"
      Mr. Rodriguez called Ms. Jones in the 24 hours before the killing, saying he could not go on. "I was telling him, "Things will be taken seriously,' but he didn't believe it," Ms. Jones said. The police said the last telephone call that Mr. Rodriguez made was to his wife, Ms. Munumel. She said he told her he that had done something very wrong, to avenge not himself, but his sisters. He then asked her to call the police in Tucson because he had killed a former nanny. Ms. Munumel said, "He said the hardest thing for him had been that as she was dying, she didn't understand what she had done wrong."

'Blink': Hunch Power
David Brooks, New York Times Book Review- 1/16/2005

Malcolm Gladwell has written a book about the power of first impressions, and every review, including this one, is going to begin with the reviewer's first impression of the book. Mine was: Boffo. Gladwell opens ''Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking'' with the story of a kouros, an ancient Greek statue of a youth that came on the art market and was about to be purchased by the Getty Museum in California. It was a magnificently preserved work, close to seven feet tall, and the asking price was just under $10 million.
     The Getty did all the normal background checks to establish the authenticity of the piece. A geologist determined that the marble came from the ancient Cape Vathy quarry on the island of Thasos. It was covered with a thin layer of calcite, a substance that accumulates on statues over hundreds or perhaps thousands of years. After 14 months of investigation, the Getty staff concluded the thing was genuine, and went ahead with the purchase.
      But an art historian named Federico Zeri was taken to see the statue, and in an instant he decided it was fake. Another art historian took a glimpse and sensed that while it had the form of a proper classical statue, it somehow lacked the spirit. A third felt a wave of ''intuitive repulsion'' when he first laid eyes on it. Further investigations were made, and finally the whole scheme unraveled. It transpired that the statue had been sculptured by forgers in Rome in the early 1980's. The teams of analysts who did 14 months of research turned out to be wrong. The historians who relied on their initial hunches were right.
      There is in all of our brains, Gladwell argues, a mighty backstage process, which works its will subconsciously. Through this process we have the capacity to sift huge amounts of information, blend data, isolate telling details and come to astonishingly rapid conclusions, even in the first two seconds of seeing something. '' 'Blink' is a book about those first two seconds,'' Gladwell writes.|
      Well, I'm impressed. Here we have a guy who has already written one of the best and most successful nonfiction books of the past few years, the ubiquitous ''Tipping Point.'' He's the author of dozens of unfailingly fascinating articles in The New Yorker. And he's opened his new book with a crisp anecdote that suggests each of us possesses a hidden power, which we could use to improve our lives if only we knew how to tap it more fully. That's the essential formula for self-help-book greatness. I'm ready to be sucked in.
      And indeed, ''Blink'' moves quickly through a series of delightful stories, all about the backstage mental process we call intuition. There is the story of the psychologist John Gottman, who since the 1980's has worked with more than 3,000 married couples in a small room, his ''love lab,'' near the University of Washington. He videotapes them having a conversation. Reviewing just an hour's worth of each tape, Gottman has been able to predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will be married 15 years later. If he watches only 15 minutes of tape, his success rate is about 90 percent. Scientists in his lab have determined they can usually predict whether a marriage will work after watching just three minutes of newlywed conversation. Gottman believes that each relationship has a DNA, or an essential nature. It's possible to take a very thin slice of that relationship, grasp its fundamental pattern and make a decent prediction of its destiny.
      Gladwell says we are thin-slicing all the time -- when we go on a date, meet a prospective employee, judge any situation. We take a small portion of a person or problem and extrapolate amazingly well about the whole. A psychologist named Nalini Ambady gave students three 10-second soundless videotapes of a teacher lecturing. Then she asked the students to rate the teacher. Their ratings matched the ratings from students who had taken the teacher's course for an entire semester. Then she cut the videotape back to two seconds and showed it to a new group. The ratings still matched those of the students who'd sat through the entire term. ''We are innately suspicious of this kind of rapid cognition,'' Gladwell observes. We assume that long, methodical investigation yields more reliable conclusions than a snap judgment. But in fact, ''decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.''
      This book is only 277 pages long, but there are dozens of stories about thin-slicing. There's one about a Pentagon war game. There's one about New Coke, which seemed to test so well, but flopped in the marketplace. Gladwell shows how the New York City police officers who killed Amadou Diallo made a series of horrendous snap judgments.
      Gladwell has us flying around the world and across disciplines at hectic speed, and he's always dazzling us with fascinating information and phenomena. Take priming, for example. Two Dutch scientists asked their subjects to play a demanding game of Trivial Pursuit. They asked one group to think beforehand about what it would be like to be a professor and the other group to think about what it would be like to be a soccer hooligan. The people who were in a professorial frame of mind did much better than the ''hooligans.''
      One group of African-Americans was asked to take a test without identifying their race on the pretest questionnaire. Another group was asked their race and ''that simple act,'' Gladwell writes, ''was sufficient to prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African-Americans and academic achievement.'' The African-Americans who identified their race did much worse than the people who didn't. The number of questions they got right was cut in half.
      My first impression of ''Blink'' -- in blurb-speak -- was ''Fascinating! Eye-Opening! Important!'' Unfortunately, my brain, like yours, has more than just a thin-slicing side. It also has that thick-slicing side. The thick-slicing side wants more than a series of remarkable anecdotes. It wants a comprehensive theory of the whole. It wants to know how all the different bits of information fit together. That thick-slicing part of my brain wasn't as happy with ''Blink,'' especially the second time through. Gladwell never tells us how the brain performs these amazing cognitive feats; we just get the scattered byproducts of the mysterious backstage process. (There have been books by people like Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner that go deeper into the brain chemistry of it.)
      The thick-slicing side isn't even sure what this book is about. Is it about first impressions, or intuition, or that amorphous blending of ''what is'' with ''what could be'' that we call imagination? In some of his stories, it's regular people who are making snap judgments; in others, it's experts who have been through decades of formal training. In some experiments, the environment matters a great deal; in others, the setting is a psychologist's lab. In some, the snap judgments are based on methodical reasoning -- as with a scientist who has broken facial expressions into discrete parts; in others, the snap-judgment process is formless and instinctive. In some, priming is all-important; in others, priming is disregarded.
      Moreover, the thick-slicing part of my brain is telling me that while it would be pleasing if we all had these supercomputers in our heads, Gladwell is overselling his case. Most of his heartwarming stories involve the lone intuitive rebel who ends up besting the formal, bureaucratic decision-making procedure. Though Gladwell describes several ways intuition can lead people astray, he doesn't really dwell on how often that happens. But I've learned from other books, notably David G. Myers's more methodical but less entertaining ''Intuition,'' that there is a great body of data suggesting that formal statistical analysis is a much, much better way of predicting everything from the outcome of a football game to the course of liver disease than the intuition even of experts.
      The thick-slicing part of the brain reminds me that not long ago I read Michael Lewis's great book, ''Moneyball,'' about a baseball executive who used rigorous statistical analysis to clobber fuzzy-minded old pros who relied on their gut impressions. Now I'm reading ''Blink'' on how impressions can be as reliable as data. This part of my brain wants to know how I should reconcile Lewis with Gladwell. What is the relationship between self-conscious reason and backstage intuition? Which one is right more often?
      For example, if I have to cast my vote for either George ''I go with my gut'' Bush or John ''I deliberate until the cows come home'' Kerry, how should I evaluate their rival cognitive styles? Most important, that thick-slicing part of my brain, which is blessed and burdened by self-consciousness, wants to know the meaning of what Gladwell is telling it. When he is talking about the cognitive powers of the brain, he's not just reviewing a cool piece of software. He's talking about us, the thinking process that is the essence of who you and I are.
      I am perfectly willing to accept that the brain processes huge amounts of information on a subconscious level, thus freeing up conscious neurons for major tasks, like writing, gossiping or remembering humiliating moments from the distant past. I am willing to accept that we are all to some large extent strangers to ourselves, unaware of how we make the decisions that shape our lives. But I am not willing to assume, as Gladwell sometimes seems to be doing, that our brains are like computers -- uniform pieces of hardware that can be tested and reverse-engineered by scientists or psychologists in a lab. Isn't it as possible that the backstage part of the brain might be more like a personality, some unique and nontechnological essence that cannot be adequately generalized about by scientists in white coats with clipboards?
      ''Blink'' is part of a wave of books on brain function that are sweeping over us as we learn more about the action inside our own heads. This literature is going to have a powerful effect on our culture, maybe as powerful as the effect Freudianism had on our grandparents' time (the last time somebody tried to explain the brain's backstage process). We should be a little wary of surrendering this field to the scientists. Philosophers ranging from Vico to Michael Oakeshott to Isaiah Berlin were writing about thin-slicing (which they called ''wisdom'') long before the scientists started picking apart our neurons, and long before psychologists started showing people snippets of videotape. And much of what they observe is more profound than anything you can capture with some ginned-up control group test in a psychology lab.
      I'm sure Gladwell knows all this. Perhaps it's unfair to expect him to write a book that encompasses Isaiah Berlin and the ''love lab.'' It's just that in the general culture the psychiatrists and neuroscientists are eclipsing the philosophers, and that's horrible. If you want to trust my snap judgment, buy this book: you'll be delighted. If you want to trust my more reflective second judgment, buy it: you'll be delighted but frustrated, troubled and left wanting more. Or just go to the bookstore, look at the cover and let your neurons make up their own damn mind.

A Sleeping Pill You Can Take Long-Term
Sandra G. Boodman, Washington Post- 1/17/2005

It sounds like an insomniac's dream: a sleeping pill that can be taken for weeks or even months at a time, without the risk of addiction or morning-after grogginess. In the next several weeks consumers will see splashy print and television ads touting the lyrically named Lunesta, which was approved last month by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Unlike other sleeping pills, including market leader Ambien, which are not supposed to be taken for longer than 10 days at a time, Lunesta has no FDA recommended time limit.
      Since the drug's official launch last week, Sepracor, its Massachusetts-based manufacturer, has deployed 1,250 salespeople to the offices of primary care physicians -- the doctors most patients consult for sleep problems -- as well as psychiatrists and hospitals. The aim, said David P. Southwell, Sepracor's chief financial officer, is to persuade them of Lunesta's superiority in treating insomnia, an extremely common problem that regularly affects more than half of American adults and that, in Southwell's view, is "under-recognized and under-treated."
      Some sleep specialists question the wisdom of using a sleeping pill for weeks or months on end, particularly when it is a new drug approved after six months of testing in 2,700 patients. They cite the fresh examples of the increased risk of heart attack and stroke from arthritis pain relievers Vioxx, Celebrex and Bextra, the dangers of which emerged after millions of patients started taking them.
      Because insomnia is so common -- Ambien is the nation's 12th-best-selling prescription medication, according to IMS Health -- and because Lunesta will be aggressively marketed, some sleep specialists emphasize the importance of non-drug remedies. "The best thing to do is to avoid getting into a situation where you need a medication long-term," said Northern Virginia neurologist John W. Cochran. For a small group of patients who have been adequately screened to rule out underlying physical or psychiatric problems -- such as depression or anxiety -- that might cause insomnia, long-term use of a sleeping medication may be indicated, he said. To treat insomnia many sleep specialists, including Cochran, recommend behavioral strategies that fall under the schoolmarmish rubric "sleep hygiene." They include relaxation techniques as well as avoidance of caffeine, alcohol and large meals before bedtime. Sleeping pills are often used short-term, to break the cycle of sleeplessness and the anxiety it causes.
      Cochran said he worries that many consumers, eager for a speedy and easy remedy, will get a prescription for Lunesta from a primary care doctor who has neither the time nor the training to suggest behavioral techniques or conduct a comprehensive evaluation. "That means some doctors will give it to patients who will stay on it forever," he said.
     Symptoms of insomnia -- difficulty falling or staying asleep -- are extremely common. A 2002 poll by the National Sleep Foundation found that 58 percent of adults experience them a few times each week and one-third have nightly symptoms. The problem is more common among frequent travelers, shift workers, women and the elderly. Another study found that about half of people with insomnia suffer from an underlying medical problem, such as depression, anxiety or chronic pain. In about 15 percent of cases, sleep specialists say, chronic insomnia has no apparent underlying cause.
     Gregg D. Jacobs, a sleep specialist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, said that long-term use of a sleeping pill is inappropriate for most patients because cognitive behavioral therapy works better than drugs in overcoming insomnia. Sleeping pills, Jacobs said, are typically prescribed for brief periods. Some medicines used for sleep are habit-forming, such as a class of drugs known as benzodiazepines, which include Valium and Xanax. Doctors worry that long-term use of non-narcotic medications such as Lunesta can create psychological dependence that results when patients fear they can't fall asleep or stay asleep without them.
      The other problem, said Jacobs, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is that the long-term effects of Lunesta are unknown. "Lunesta is like every drug approved by the FDA," said Jacobs. "We don't know what the long-term side effects are" or all the negative side effects seen during the clinical trials. "The message is: Buyer beware."
      Sepracor's Southwell said that the drug, known generically as eszopiclone, is closely related to zopiclone, a sleep drug widely used in Europe and Canada for 20 years. Zopiclone, he said, has a good safety record. "If there were a safety defect, one would think they would have seen it by now," he said. But Southwell acknowledged that oversight of prescription drugs varies from country to country in Western Europe. And some sleep specialists say that the potential market for Lunesta may be larger in the United States because of the aggressive marketing of drugs to consumers.
      In the clinical trials of Lunesta, the most common side effects reported to the FDA were headache, an unpleasant taste and dizziness. When they first start taking the drug users are advised to "use extreme care when doing anything that requires complete alertness" such as driving, piloting an airplane or using heavy machinery.
      Terri Bagley said she has been counting the days until Lunesta hit the market so she could call her doctor for a prescription. Bagley, 43, who operates a housecleaning business in Pelham, N.C., said she has battled chronic insomnia for more than 20 years. She said it routinely takes her two hours to fall asleep at night, and she usually awakens four or five times each night, snagging a total of about four hours sleep and feeling perpetually exhausted during the day. None of the host of prescription or nonprescription drugs she tried made much difference, she said, and doctors ruled out underlying psychiatric or medical problems that might be causing her insomnia. Then Bagley said, she enrolled in the clinical trial of Lunesta conducted at the Duke University Sleep Disorders Center. She said she is certain she got the drug rather than a placebo. "I've never in my life slept that well or felt that good," Bagley said, adding that during the three months she took the drug she slept about seven hours per night with fewer and shorter awakenings.
      Andrew D. Krystal, director of Duke's sleep center and one of the principal investigators of Lunesta, said that another advantage of the drug is that patients did not build up a tolerance to it. That is a common side effect of benzodiazepines, which typically require progressively larger doses to achieve the same effect. Krystal, who has worked as a consultant for Sepracor, said while behavioral treatments are effective for some people, others have more intractable insomnia and need medication "which should be taken at the lowest possible dose for the shortest duration."
      Whether Lunesta works better than its competitors remains to be seen. Chevy Chase sleep specialist Helene Emsellem said no large studies have compared Lunesta with other drugs. "I think Lunesta clearly fills a needed niche in selected patients," said Emsellem, an associate clinical professor of neurology at George Washington University School of Medicine, who was involved in the clinical trials of the drug but said she has no other financial relationship with Sepracor. "But it's important for people to realize that insomnia is often a symptom and not a disease, and to sort out the problems.