Noteworthy News Articles on Mental Health Topics, May 1-6, 2005

MIAMI, April 30 - With a bill on a broad new crackdown on sex offenders awaiting Gov. Jeb Bush's signature, Florida will soon begin the nation's most aggressive monitoring of child molesters at a time when dozens of states and localities are re-examining their policies.
      In sharpening their statutes, many jurisdictions are deciding that federal mandates, approved after highly publicized sex crimes against children in the 1990's, are not enough. Florida's renewed focus comes 12 years after Congress voted to require every state to establish a registry of sex offenders and nearly a decade after it passed Megan's Law, which orders law enforcement officials to notify communities about sex offenders in their midst.
     As lawmakers contemplate just how far they can go to close loopholes that present themselves as new crimes are committed, tough questions abound on money, privacy and practicality. As Roxanne Lieb, director of the Washington State Institute for Public Policy, which tracks sex offender laws around the country, put it: "The issue is, what can you do short of putting them all in prison for the rest of their lives?"
     States and counties are increasingly turning to electronic monitoring of freed sex offenders to try to make sure they stay away from schools, playgrounds and other places where children congregate. While the norm is to monitor only the most violent offenders, Florida's new law, which takes effect in September and will cost $13 million in the first year, will require those who molest children younger than 12 to wear satellite tracking devices for life once they leave prison.
     The law, which Governor Bush plans to sign Monday, will also force those offenders to stay in prison longer, establishing minimum sentences of 25 years for anyone convicted of "lewd and lascivious" acts against a child. That is roughly three times the average sentence currently imposed on child molesters in the state, according to the Florida Department of Corrections.
     Other states are also considering increased supervision of child sex offenders, including more frequent visits from parole officers and limits on where offenders can live and work. Legislation pending in Illinois would require lifetime supervision of some serious offenders instead of the current three years. Ohio now lets local prosecutors evict sex offenders who move within 1,000 feet of a school, and New Mexico requires sex offenders to submit DNA samples.
     Laura A. Ahearn, executive director of Parents for Megan's Law, a national organization based in New York, said the best measures, such as longer sentences and lifetime supervision, are often dismissed as too expensive. "It's a lot easier for lawmakers to say we're going to solve the problem by putting a bracelet on their ankle," Ms. Ahearn said. "They're stepping up to the mike and making political promises, but they want to get re-elected and they won't raise taxes." Ms. Ahearn praised Florida's move toward longer sentencing for child molesters, though, and said that even before the new crackdown, the state had some of the harshest policies against sex offenders. There are more registered offenders here, about 35,000, than in any state but California and Texas.
     The Legislature, which originally required sex offenders to remain on the registry for 10 years, increased it to 30 years under the new law. In New York, more than 3,000 offenders are scheduled to come off the registry next year, though Gov. George E. Pataki recently proposed keeping every offender on it for life. Florida also has a costly law, enacted after a 9-year-old boy was raped and killed in Homestead in 1995, authorizing the indefinite confinement of offenders after their sentences expire if they have been defined as "sexually violent predators."
     Though some 20 states have similar laws, Florida keeps the most offenders, about 475, in confinement. The offenders are supposed to be treated until they are deemed fit to rejoin society, but the law has been met with criticism because few of those detained accept treatment and few are ever released.
     Though every new sanction is meant to stop sex crimes against children, critics say many are largely symbolic efforts. Electronic monitoring, for example, is not failsafe because an offender can remove the device. Longer sentences are also no guarantee because children are often too young to testify accurately, allowing many offenders to plead guilty to lesser crimes. "If they think it's going to help that much, they're ripe for a fall," John Skye, an assistant public defender in Hillsborough County in Florida, said of the Legislature and the new law. "Instead of creating new laws, I think we should be focusing on how to prevent these people from becoming the way they are."
     The legislation was spurred by two recent cases in Florida. Because the men charged in the murders of Jessica Lunsford, 9, and Sarah Lunde, 13, were already registered as sex offenders, there is also renewed national interest in tightening registration compliance.
     Ms. Ahearn's group estimates that of more than 500,000 registered offenders nationwide, up to a quarter are missing. John E. Couey, the man charged with killing Jessica, did not inform the state when he moved to her neighborhood north of Tampa. Under Florida's new law, offenders will have to check in at their local county jail twice a year or face felony charges. Other places have begun requiring offenders to provide exact home addresses instead of proximate ones, as well as workplace addresses, Ms. Ahearn said.
     There is little consistency from state to state: some put photos and highly specific details about every offender on the Internet, while others provide information about only the most serious offenders or none at all. In Norfolk County, Mass., residents can sign up to receive e-mail messages alerting them when a sex offender moves nearby.
     In Florida, curiosity about the registry and community notification rules has grown markedly since the deaths of Jessica and Sarah, state officials said. People searched the online registry more than two million times this month, up from 450,000 times in February, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. In Miami Beach, officials want to ban sex offenders from living within 2,500 feet of schools or parks, instead of the 1,000 feet required by state law, making it nearly impossible for offenders to reside there.
     In some states, civil libertarians have tried to limit the posting of personal information on public registries and have fought the aggressive notification of communities about offenders. Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, said lifetime satellite tracking of every child molester was too much. "It ought to be decided on a case-by-case basis by a judge," Mr. Simon said.
     Though some experts say that safeguards like electronic monitoring are pointless without treatment, research on its effectiveness remains spotty. State Senator Gary Siplin, a Democrat from Orlando, said he would push for Florida to provide more treatment for convicted molesters. But now, he said, was not the time. "Their judgment is clouded right now," Mr. Siplin said of his colleagues, "which I understand, because it just doesn't make sense what happened to the little girls." Still, Mr. Siplin said, "If people are in jail for however many years and get out and still have those desires and urges, they are going to harm someone else."

It is nearly midnight when I get home from my waitress job. I've been out of college for two years and have moved back into my mother's home in Islip, N.Y., for the summer to save money for graduate school. When I walk in the back door, my mother is at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. "Jane called," she says. "She wants you to call her. I think she's in trouble."
      Jane is my father's second wife, the woman he began having an affair with a week after my mother moved out nine years ago with my three siblings and me. I wonder if my father is drunk and throwing things across the room as he did when I was a child. He could even be throwing Jane across the room.
     Immediately I start to worry about Michael, their son, my 5-year-old half brother. Where is he in the midst of this trouble? Under the covers holding very still? Or with Buck, his older brother? Maybe they're both on the roof where my sister Meegan and I used to go when hell broke loose. I dial Jane's number, and she picks up the phone on half a ring. She is drunk and whispering. She wants me to come get her at the end of the driveway as soon as I can. I hang up the phone, and my mother looks at me. I'm scared. I have not been in this type of hurricane for quite some time.
     In another 10 years my father will be dead from alcoholism, and Jane will be sober, and we'll all be survivors of some kind, but I don't know that now. All I know is he's capable of doing great damage. Maybe my mother should have said, "Don't go" or "Call the police." Or maybe she at least should have said, "I'll go with you," though her spending any time in the car with Jane, her replacement, would be hard to imagine. Yet the look on my mother's face is not bitterness but resignation and concern for this unlikely sort-of sister who knows all too well what it is like to live with my father.
     I drive the dark roads to his house. When I reach the driveway, there is Jane in bare feet, her nightgown blowing in the wind, a bottle of Scotch in her hand. She is only five feet tall and weighs maybe 90 pounds, and the bottle looks enormous in her grip. Jane must have been desperate to call me. She and I have never been close. I'm not sure I've ever seen her sober. The first time my siblings and I met her nine years before, she said, her voice slurred, "Your father loves you very much." What the hell do you know? I wanted to say. It was the middle of a winter afternoon. My father had told us that Jane lived in Mexico for several years, and I thought maybe her strange speech was due to a Spanish accent.
     Jane gets in the car, swigs what is left of the Scotch. As she talks in her drunken way, we drive to nowhere in particular, sometimes stopping at dead ends that overlook the Great South Bay. "Michael is my beautiful little boy," she tells me. "It doesn't make him a sissy to need to go to the hospital. He knocked his head on the coffee table and cut his eyelid, and there was so much blood, but your father wouldn't let him go to the hospital. He's hit his head so many times, and your father just says: 'He's not a sissy. He's not going to grow up to be a pretty boy like Buck. He's going to be a hockey player, and hockey players don't care about scars.' " I listen to this horror in silence.
     "But Kerry, am I wrong? Is it wrong to want to take him to be checked out? Now your father won't talk to me. Did he used to give your mother the silent treatment? Buck got home and saw Michael's eye and said: 'I don't care what Peter says. We're taking him to the hospital. He needs stitches, Mom.' So after your father went to sleep, we walked up the road to Tom's, and Tom drove us to the emergency room, and they stitched up Michael, and now your father won't talk to me. Tom said, 'Thank God you brought him in because if you hadn't he would have had a lazy eye for the rest of his life, and actually he still might.' "
     My father was a successful negligence lawyer, of all things. I don't know what his problems were besides alcoholism; no one ever will. My mother used to tell us his mother never held him when he was a child. I have a picture of my father as a 4- or 5-year-old boy. In the picture he looks shy; his face is gentle. He wears shorts with suspenders and leans against a fence. My half-brother Michael and I have his blond hair, fair skin, and knobby knees.
     I saw my father cry only once. I was in fifth grade, and I had been sitting at my desk, drawing a map of the United States for school. It was very late, but I had to finish my homework; everyone else was asleep. "The Great Lakes look like a palm tree," I said to my father as I shifted in my chair. "I never would have thought of that," he said. I heard something in his voice so I looked up and saw there were tears in his eyes.
     That's when he told me that he loved our family very much, but that he was going to be moving out for a while. He said he had been a bad boy. I had never liked the Scotch-and-Dial-soap smell of him and would hesitate even to hold his hand while we crossed the street. But he seemed to like my map, and he looked so sad, so I put my hand on his arm and said: "It's O.K., Dad. Really."
     But soon after, he was living at home again, backing me into the full dish rack while pounding my chest repeatedly with his fist. I don't remember what had set him off. Maybe he'd found a gum wrapper of mine on the lawn that I'd failed to put in the garbage can. The next day in gym class I changed in the bathroom stall because I was worried that the teacher would see the bruise. When my father got home from work that evening, my mother must have pulled him aside because he came right over to me, pulled down the neck of my T-shirt, stared at the bruise for a moment, and then walked away, looking sad about what he had done. Once again my impulse was to reassure him: It's O.K., I wanted to yell. It's O.K.
     But Meegan, who is three years older than I, saw things more clearly. One evening she had made clay ornaments for the Christmas tree. She had baked them and painted them in bright detail. And then my father came in and whacked the cookie sheets into the air, and the ornaments flew against the walls and floor, shattering. As my mother knelt to gather the pieces, Meegan bolted from the kitchen into the dark of the garage, where she ran straight into the yellow snowplow blade that was up on blocks, knocking it over with a loud crash. It gashed her leg open, but still she kept running. I took off after her down the dark road, my heart shaking. And when I caught up with her, we didn't take the road because we feared each set of headlights could be our father looking for us. Instead we walked behind hedges, through yards, for a mile to her friend Jillian's.
     Meegan was brave enough to tell Jillian's parents what had happened that night and other nights. I sat there hardly breathing, feeling there was something wrong about Meegan telling. It took me years to realize the wrong thing was that Jillian's parents did nothing. Just as our neighbors did nothing when we showed up at their place one evening after Dad had sucker punched Meegan in the head. Just as my friend Amanda's parents did nothing when we showed up late one night in our pajamas with similar tales. They listened intently, patiently, then drove us to the end of our driveway and watched as we walked up to our house and in the front door.
     Jane wants a cigarette, so I drive to the 7-Eleven. She gets out of the car in her nightgown. "Jane, I'll get them," I say, opening my door. "You're in your pajamas. They won't let you in there without shoes." "All right," she says. Back in the car she smokes cigarette after cigarette as I tell her that nothing has changed since I lived with my father. But I sense she doesn't want to hear this. Her guard is creeping up; she is slightly more sober, talking less freely. I half expect her to say, "Your father loves you very much." And maybe some stubborn part of me does believe it is impossible for a father not to love his children, even the ones with eyes he has left bloodied, even the ones who are bruised and limping, even the ones who have had to do mental gymnastics to try to understand themselves and him.
     "Don't pull in the driveway," Jane says to me. "I don't want Peter to hear the car." I stop in the road, and she gets out. I know it will not be O.K. for her to be back in that house with my father, yet I don't stop her. And she knows it will not be O.K., yet there she goes, up the driveway. In her sleeveless nightgown and bare feet Jane looks like a little girl walking into that unlit jack-o'-lantern of a house.

Anxieties Rampant Among Kids After 9/11
Chicago Tribune, 5/3/2005

Feds Sound New Warning About Marijuana Use
Kevin Freking, Associated Press- 5/3/2005

WASHINGTON -- Youngsters who use marijuana are more likely to develop serious mental health problems, the government said Tuesday. A private group said law enforcement increasingly is targeting people who smoke and deal the drug. Past medical studies have linked marijuana with a greater incidence of mental disorders such as depression or schizophrenia. But questions remain about whether people who smoke marijuana at a young age are already predisposed to mental disorders, or whether the drug caused those disorders.
      Government officials say recent research makes a stronger case that smoking marijuana is itself a causal agent in psychiatric symptoms, particularly schizophrenia. ''A growing body of evidence now demonstrates that smoking marijuana can increase the risk of serious mental health problems,'' said John P. Walters, director of the White House Office of Drug Control Policy.
     Administration officials pointed to a handful of studies to make their case. One, from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, found adult marijuana smokers who first began using the drug before age 12 were twice as likely to have suffered a serious mental illness in the past year as those who began smoking after 18. The ratio was 21 percent to 10.5 percent. Those who first started as teens also were at significantly higher risk.
     Also Tuesday, The Sentencing Project released a report that found the government's ''war on drugs'' has become the ''war on drug'' as police agencies increasingly target marijuana. Begun in the 1980s, the war on drugs was aimed at stopping large-scale narcotics traffickers, particularly those selling cocaine. But since 1990 more of the focus has been on catching users and low-level dealers. And more often than ever, the drug targeted is marijuana, according to the group, a national nonprofit organization that works on judicial reform and favors alternatives to jail. Of some 700,000 marijuana arrests in 2002, 88 percent were for possession, it said. And only one of every 18 of those arrests ended in a felony conviction. ''Arresting record numbers of low-level marijuana offenders represents a poor investment in public safety'' and diverts resources from ''more serious crime problems,'' said Ryan King, co-author of the report. King found that in 1992 arrests for heroin and cocaine comprised 55 percent of all drug arrests and marijuana 28 percent. A decade later heroin and cocaine arrests accounted for less than 30 percent of all arrests, while marijuana's share had risen to 45 percent.
     Jennifer deVallance, spokeswoman for the White House drug office, said there are many reasons for the greater focus on marijuana. Among them: Marijuana is the single largest drug of abuse in the nation, the strains are more potent than ever and more is known about health dangers. ''For the first time, more kids are seeking treatment for marijuana use than alcohol,'' she said.
     The Sentencing Project called for renewed national discussion of the war on drugs, an idea echoed by the conservative American Enterprise Institute. The group reported last month that despite spending at about $40 billion a year now and toughening drug sentencing laws, ''America continues to experience the Western world's worst drug problems.'' An epidemic of heroin use more than three decades ago, followed by a 1980s epidemic of cocaine and crack, prompted a massive intensification in drug enforcement while giving short shrift to prevention and treatment, the institute reported. It decried budgeting that spends two-thirds of drug control funds on enforcement, 25 percent on treatment and just 12 percent on prevention.
     On the Net:
The Sentencing Project: http://www.sentencingproject.org
Office of National Drug Control Policy: http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov

Castrated and fitted with an ankle monitoring device, child molester Larry Don McQuay was released from prison with little fanfare this morning and escorted to San Antonio, where he'll remain under supervision in a work-release program. His Houston-based lawyer, Paul C. Looney, said McQuay underwent surgical castration within the last year. "He desperately does not want to re-offend and believes that surgical castration will be one of the tools that will help him from re-offending,'' Looney said today. "There's a lot of medical evidence that proves that it helps with impulse control, not necessarily sexual control, but he believes this will help.''
      McQuay -- whose pleas for castration prompted the Legislature to make Texas the only state to permit the procedure -- walked out of a side door of the Huntsville Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice at 7:15 a.m. Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokeswoman Michelle Lyons said that to protect his safety, prison officials arranged for a two-vehicle caravan to transport the high-profile offender to Bexar County, where he drove a school bus and worked at Sea World before he went to prison. Turned down for parole four times since beginning his sentence in 1996, McQuay left prison today after serving just eight years of his 20-year sentence. He's free because his time served and "good behavior" met state requirements for release under mandatory supervision, said Mike Viesca of the Department of Criminal Justice. 
     McQuay will remain under prison supervision until July 31, 2016. He is to be monitored around the clock under the state's Super Intensive Supervision Program, the highest level of offender accountability. McQuay will wear a global positioning system ankle bracelet and will not be allowed to leave the Bexar County Work Release Facility without the supervision of a parole officer. 
     In 1995, McQuay told Houston-based victims rights group Justice For All that he would kill his next victim if he wasn't castrated, group president Dianne Clements said. At the time, the group entered into a contract with McQuay to find a surgeon willing to perform the operation. Clements said the group lost touch with McQuay, but when they attempted to learn last month whether he was castrated, he refused to release his medical records. That worries Clements, despite his lawyer's statement that McQuay had been castrated.  "Maybe he was. Maybe he wasn't. That's not confirmation. Confirmation is visual inspection of medical records," she said.
     Clements said she remains uneasy either way. "Regardless of the procedure having been done or not, Larry Don McQuay should be considered the same dangerous pedophile he was before," she said. "Is this a cure? I don't know. Will it somehow reduce fantasies McQuay is experiencing that cause him to molest children? Maybe. Maybe not." "Unless he's behind bars, I don't think children are safe. Bottom line."
     McQuay had been forthcoming with reporters over the years about his long history of molestation. As a school bus driver for the Northeast Independent School District, he fondled dozens of young children but eventually lost his job when an older youth reported his advances, he told the Chronicle in a 1998 interview.   When the other school bus drivers found out, he said, one told a woman he'd dated, and she questioned her own children. She learned her 7-year-old son had been molested and her 9-year-old daughter sexually exploited, and charges stemming from those incidents brought McQuay an eight-year prison sentence for molesting the boy.
     He asked to be castrated but was nonetheless paroled in 1996, leading Bexar County authorities to resurrect the original case and prosecute him for what he had done to the boy's older sister. Quickly convicted and sentenced 20 more years, he again asked to be castrated. He claimed he had molested children more than 240 times and promised to resume his attacks if released and kill his victims to keep them from identifying him. He later expressed regret over his statements, saying he was only trying to bring attention to his plea for castration. The Legislature in 1997 passed a bill that would allow the state to offer surgical castration on a volunteer basis to incarcerated pedophiles.

TORONTO -- Infants who make little eye contact, have trouble smiling and aren't very active may be showing signs of autism, Canadian researchers report in a small study that suggests autism could be spotted earlier than it is. If autistic behavior can be spotted as early as 12 months, as the research indicates, it would enable doctors and parents to start effective therapy sooner. Parents currently have to wait until a child is typically 2 to 3 years old to find out if the toddler has the mysterious developmental disability.
      The study involved 150 infants who already were at high risk of developing autism based on family history. The researchers were from various Canadian hospitals and universities, including the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, York University and the University of Toronto. Families with an autistic child have a 5 percent to 10 percent higher risk of having another child with the condition, a rate of recurrence about 50 times higher than the general population. The research, published in the April-May edition of the International Journal of Developmental Neuroscience, was carried out for two years.
     The team identified a list of common behavioral traits found in the 19 infants who actually went on to develop autism. They found the infants had a lack of eye contact with parents, problems visually following an object and had trouble expressing themselves through facial expressions, such as smiling. They also had problems recognizing their names and lower activity levels than their healthy counterparts when they were as young as 6 months.
     Dr. Wendy Roberts, a pediatrician at the Hospital for Sick Children and a team leader, said other pediatricians already were contacting her about possible early autism warnings among their own infant patients. Roberts said there were few programs for potentially autistic children younger than 3, the age at which most cases are typically diagnosed. ''It puts pressure on the scientific community to come up with treatments for children under 3,'' she said.
     Dr. Catherine Lord, an autism researcher at the University of Michigan, cautioned that while the study is promising, more research involving a larger number of infants needs to be done before doctors could make a firm diagnosis at such a young age. She said the Canadian research should only be used to consider potential risks of autism, and not firm diagnoses.
     Roberts said that the 19 infants who had all the traits outlined in the study did go on to have autism, a complex developmental disorder best known for impairing a child's ability to communicate or interact with others. Recent data suggest a tenfold increase in autism rates over the last decade, although it's unclear how much of the apparent surge reflects better diagnosis and how much is a true rise. Roberts said infants in the study who had only some of the traits ended up in a ''gray area.'' ''They may have autism or it could be a speech-language or other type of disorder,'' she said.
     On the Web:
International Journal of Developmental Neuroscience: www.developmental-neuroscience.org

Mysterious Skin
Directed and edited by Gregg Araki; written by Mr. Araki, based on the novel of the same title by Scott Heim; director of photography, Steve Gainer; music by Harold Budd and Robin Guthrie; production designer, Devorah Herbert; produced by Mary Jane Skalski, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and Mr. Araki; released by Tartan Films and TLA Releasing. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Sixth Avenue, South Village. Running time: 99 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Brady Corbet (Brian Lackey), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Neil McCormick), Michelle Trachtenberg (Wendy Peterson), Jeff Licon (Eric Preston), Bill Sage (Coach), Mary Lynn Rajskub (Avalyn Friesen), Elisabeth Shue (Ellen McCormick), Lisa Long (Mrs. Lackey), Chris Mulkey (Mr. Lackey), George Webster (Brian as a child) and Chase Ellison (Neil as a child).

Therapy is a slow, uncertain method for dealing with the mind's demons, but Double FineProduction's action-adventure game Psychonauts has a more effective treatment: psychic explorers enter our minds and give those demons a few good punches, beating our childhood fears and traumas into cowering submission.
      The White Chamber video game takes place in a deserted spaceship. Psychonauts takes place at a summer camp for psychically gifted children where a new recruit, Raz, eagerly learns the art of navigating brains. Camp instructors suck him into their minds; he learns to punch and climb in a drill sergeant's mental battlefield, and to jump and glide in the discothèquelike brain of the levitation instructor.
     In spite of its original premise, Psychonauts is a conventional, though well done, mix of platform jumping and light battle. It follows a familiar action-adventure path as you purchase new gadgets and achieve new powers that let you jump higher and fight harder. At first, Psychonauts is more notable for its goofy sense of humor and quirky visual design than its gameplay. There is a tremendous amount of funny dialogue spread out among the odd cast of characters, who say something new almost every time you meet them. I especially liked Dogen, a strange boy who can blow people up with his mind and believes the camp's squirrels are encouraging him to do so. The plot is also interesting: students' brains are being stolen, after which they wander back to camp muttering, "TV, TV."
     Psychonauts comes into its own as it descends into madness. Raz's search for the missing brains leads him to an asylum watched over by a babbling guard who insists the gate key is in the hands of "the milkman." When Raz enters the guard's mind in search of the milkman he discovers a surreal suburbia in which gravity follows its own rules and sidewalks curve up and over like carrot curls. This world is populated by undercover G-men also seeking the milkman. Those thinly disguised as road workers hold stop signs and intone, "being on the road crew is arduous but rewarding" and "I cannot wait until the next payday"; others, disguised as flower-wielding widows, drone, "I wish my loved one was not dead, but alive" and "the dead people are underground, and I have brought flowers." Once Psychonauts loses its mind, it never gets it back. The brain of an addled actress is a theater in which you must stage happy and tragic versions of the same plays under the withering gaze of a hostile critic. An artist's brain is a living velvet painting jeopardized by a rampaging bull.
     Insanity is what makes Psychonauts entertaining and unusual, so it is a shame you have to spend several hours in the mildly eccentric minds of instructors before getting to the cool part of the game. This isn't a problem with the White Chamber, a homemade adventure game that is utterly mad from beginning to end. With its two-dimensional graphics and text-only dialogue, Chamber feels like a game from the mid-1990's. It's very short: it can be completed in about an hour, but it is a great hour.
     Chamber begins as a young woman awakens in a coffin on a deserted spaceship. She must solve a series of puzzles to open doors to new areas of the ship as she searches for clues. Solving puzzles twists reality, so you might leave a room, solve a puzzle, then re-enter the room to find it is now made of pulsating flesh. The game has a creepy sensibility similar to the Silent Hill series, accentuated by eerie ambient noises. Grisly and intriguing, with logical puzzles and surprising plot twists, Chamber is a first-rate garage game.
PSYCHONAUTS
Developed by Double Fine Productions. Published by Majesco Sales for Xbox and Windows SE/2000/XP. (A Playstation ver§ion will be released in June.) $49.99; for ages 13 and older.
THE WHITE CHAMBER
Developed and published by Studio Trophis for Windows 95 and up. Free download at www.studiotrophis.com. No Entertainment Software Rating Board category; I suggest for ages 17 and up.




Half of All Drug Arrests Are For Pot
Dan Eggen, Washington Post- 5/6/2005

WASHINGTON - The focus of the drug war in the United States has shifted significantly over the past decade from hard drugs to marijuana, which now accounts for nearly half of all drug arrests nationwide, according to an analysis of federal crime statistics released this week The study of FBI data by a Washington-based think tank, the Sentencing Project, found that the proportion of heroin and cocaine cases plummeted from 55 percent of all drug arrests in 1992 to less than 30 percent 10 years later. During the same period, marijuana arrests rose from 28 percent of the total to 45 percent
     Coming after the focus on crack cocaine in the late 1980s, the increasing emphasis on marijuana enforcement was accompanied by a dramatic rise in overall drug arrests, from fewer than 1.1 million in 1990 to more than 1.5 million a decade later. Eighty percent of that increase came from marijuana arrests, the study found.
     The rapid increase has not had a significant impact on prisons, however, because just 6 percent of the arrests resulted in felony convictions, the study found: The most widely quoted household survey on the topic has shown relatively little change in the overall rate of marijuana use over the same time period, experts said. "In reality, the war on drugs as pursued in the 1990s was to a large degree a war on marijuana," said Ryan King, the study's co-author and a research associate at the Sentencing Project. "Marijuana is the most widely used illegal substance, but that doesn't explain this level of growth over time.... The question is, is this really where we want to be spending all our money?"  The think tank is a a left-leaning group that advocates alternatives to traditional imprisonment. Criminologists and government officials confirmed the trend, which in some ways marks a return to a previous era. In 1982, marijuana arrests accounted for 72 percent of all drug arrests, according to the study.
     Bush administration officials attribute the rise in marijuana arrests to a variety of factors: increased use among teenagers during parts of the 1990s; efforts by local police departments to focus more on street-level offenses; and growing concerns over the danger posed by modern, more potent versions of marijuana. The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy released a study Tuesday showing that youth who use marijuana are more likely to develop serious mental health problems, including depression and schizophrenia. "This is not Cheech and Chong marijuana," said David Murray, a policy analyst for the drug control office. "It's a qualitatively different drug, and that's reflected in the numbers."
     The new statistics come amid signs of a renewed debate in political circles over the efficacy of U.S. drug policies, which have received less attention recently amid historically low crime rates and a focus on terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; for example, has formed a national committee to oversee prosecution of violent drug gangs and has vowed to focus more resources on the fight against methamphetamine manufacturers and other drug traffickers.
     But increasingly, some experts have begun to argue that the U.S. drug war, which costs an estimated $35 billion .a year, has had a minimal impact on consumption of illicit substances. The conservative American Enterprise Institute published a report in March, "Are We Losing the War
on Drugs?" whose authors argue that, among other things, "criminal punishment of marijuana use does not appear to be justified."



Shy Children Need Extra Time
Barbara Meltz, Boston Globe- 5/6/2005

For a shy child, middle school is likely to be the start of the hardest time of his life. "That's when there's all, this, pressure to fit in socially," says psychologist Bernardo J. Carducci, director of the Shyness Research Institute at Indiana University Southeast "For a child whose shyness gets in the way, it's like turning up the volume, intensifying the experience of feeling seff-conscious and inadequate."
     Hold on. Worse. than all those times as a 3- or 4-year-old standing on the side of the playground watching instead, of joining in? Worse than the birthday parties he went to at where he only left your side to play as everyone else was how? Worse than when she attended gymnastics class but hardly ever talked-to anyone but the teacher? Exactly. Those kinds of moments tend to make a parent crazy. They don't necessarily mean a child is unhappy. "God, no," says pre-eminent research psychologist Jerome Kagan of Harvard.
     Nonetheless, it's hard not to worry. "We live in a society that values being outgoing and competitive. In China, shy, quiet kids are the most popular In our country, that just isn't true," says Missouri psychologist Barbara G.. Markway, co-author of "Nurturing the Shy Child" (St Martin's).
Shyness covers a range of feelings that describe "some kind of discomfort or inhibition in social or performance situations;" Markway says. At one extreme is social anxiety disorder, where children become sick with fear and need professional help. At the other is the child who has one or two best friends, isn't in the social thick of things and thinks that's just fine. In the middle are children Markway and others call "slow to warm up." ("'Shy' is a label," she says. "Avoid it.")
     A month after starting school or a new activity, "a slow-to-warm-up child is still tentative, taking her time, not fully joining in, until, little by little, she does," says developmental psychologist Myrna B. Shure of Drexel University in 'Philadelphia. After three months, this child looks like any other. The truly shy child, on the other hand, is still on the periphery three months later, perhaps experiencing stomach aches or other physical symptoms of anxiety Shur is author of "Thinking Parent, Thinking Child" (McGraw Hill), which has a section on shy children.
     The slow-to-warm-up child feels cautious or uncomfortable in some unfamiliar situations. The period of discomfort can last two weeks, 20 minutes, or 2 minutes. "The point is, at some point, it vanishes," says Kagan, who was the first researcher to identify traits in infancy that predict shyness. His newest book, with Nancy Snidman, is "The Long Shadow of Temperament" (Harvard Press).
Kagan goes so far as to say that the degree to which parents intervene to help a child overcome shyness is an "ethical decision: Do I want my child to be maximally sociable or is this not a bad trait to have, assuming it's not debilitating?"
     So here's the first question to answer. Who's unhappy? You or your child? "If you were shy as a child and now you recognize the traits in your own child, you want to spare her what you went through, so maybe you worry excessively or push her more than she needs or wants, says educational consultant and psychologist Marilyn Buckler. "If you were a cheerleading, outgoing type, you may be puzzled by your cbild. You can't relate." This parent may unknowingly be hypercritical of a child or constantly disappointed in him. Either way, lt can fuel feelings of inadequacy and incompetence: 'I'm not OK the way I am." Shure says, "It's not that a social, gregarious parent creates a shy child. But an overly gregarious parent can make a child afraid to speak up"
     Buckler, formerly a psychologist in the Carlisle, Mass., schools and now a consultant with the Open Circle social competency program at Wellesley College, says parents who attack shyness head-on ("You're too shy!") can make a slow-to-warm-up child so selfconscious he turns shy.
These specialists urge parents to put aside expectations of what you thought your child would be like and accept him for who he is. Pushing him too far ("Of course you'll sing in the choir!") can make him feel exposed, violated, and ultimately angry with you. Rescuing him too often ("I'll tell the. teacher you can't give a book report.") means he's less likely to develop coping strategies.
     That's key. Carducci says the child who reaches middle school without any coping strategies is the one most likely to get hit by the double whammy of needing to fit in and having no way to do so. This plays out differently for boys and girls. "Boys who are shy tend to take more social risks as a to get the girls'' attention. They act out by drinking, for instance, he says. "Shy tend to fall under the social influence of someone, girl or boy, in order to be accepted," he says. While that can sometimes be protective, it more likely leads them to risky behaviors. Think of it this way, Cardueci says: "If you're an adult and you go to a dinner party and there are 13 forks at your setting and you don't know what to do, you follow the lead of someone who looks like they know what they are doing. If you're a shy kid who is socially uncertain, you follow the lead of kids who look like they know what they are doing. That makes you more vulnerable to peer influences." Carducci is author of "The Shyness Breakthrough, A No-Stress Plan to Help Your Shy Child Warm Up, Open Up and Join the Fun" (Rodale).
     The goal is to empower a child to figure out how to help himself. As toddlers and preschoolers, slow-to-warm-up children tend to tantrum more than others. This often gets labeled as oppositional behavior or stubbornness. "Really" says Markway, "they're just scared inside." Look for small ways to expand a comfort zone:. "I notice at our play group that you like to play just with me. Next time, do you want to play next to Mary?"
     By second or third grade, gently put observations into words: "I notice you're a person who likes to watch how kids are playing before you join in. I was like that at your age, too." If she says, "Megan just runs right up," then you can begin to brainstorm: "People are different, aren't they?" Anticipate difficult situations with her. Rehearse going to a birthday party. Role-play show and tell.
With 9- to 12- year-olds, there's a new level of self-awareness; now you can be more direct: "I notice you're a person who takes time to warm up to new situations. That's an OK way to be. But if you ever want strategies, to try something new, I might have some ideas." Carducci recommends "wait & hover," where a child pays attention to someone she thinks might be a friend in order to figure out what she can bring to the interaction: "Have you seen this fashion magazine?" "Want to listen to this song on my iPod?"
     For teens, "Stay involved in your child's life," Carducci says. "Be persistent and patient. Talk about how you handle social situations. Bring stories home from work. Talk about your adolescence. The ideal is for them to see they are not suffering alone." If he doesn't respond or shuts you out, he adds, "Know that getting through to a teen takes time.
     Shure urges parents not to overreact. If a 5-year-old lingers at the slide waiting for someone to offer him a turn, is he troubled that his turn never comes, or are you? "These are kids who need to check things out before they are comfortable," not just with the socialization itself but with the very idea of it, says Shure. What looks like stubbornness or procrastination is part of the process for them.
     She describes watching 4-year-old Tanya hover at a preschool's pretend play area as children played house. She was too timid to,enter the play on her own or to ask to be included. The teacher intervened: `Tanya would like to help." "Tanya literally shrank," says Shure. "She wasn't ready. It was the teacher's idea, not hers." The teacher backed off, and for weeks Tanya was an observer, not unhappy, just watchful. One day, she piped up: "If you need a fireman, I'm a fireman."
"Quick!" said one of the girls. "The house is on fire." Tanya was a player, and she'd made it happen all by herself.

Helping your child overcome shyness
• Shy preschoolers may be able to express themselves through puppets. Start by having your puppet ask a question. Keep it in the third person, so it doesn't feel threatening to your child, and ease your way in: "Allie the alligator, can I tell you what makes me really happy?... Now, how about you?"
• Use family games to help a child overcome shyness. Give a 7-yearold the beginning and end of a story; his job is to fill in the middle: "Joe is 8. He moves to town and doesn't know anyone. He ends up with lots of friends." This gives a window into your child's feelings and helps him build a range of coping skills that you could even refer to in the future.
• Sharing your feelings ("Something happened today that really disappointed me.") models to your child that it's safe to talk about uncomfortable feelings.
• Before she starts a new activity, try to connect your slow-to-warm-up daughter with one other child in the group so there will be a familiar face. Before going to some place new, drive by or visit it.
• Shy children want attention just as much as any other does, but they can only handle it in quiet, personal ways, not in big, public displays. A slow-to-warm-up child will do better in individual sports than in groups.
• Strategize with an & to 11-year-old how to take things in steps: What will you do first? Then what? What if something happens and you can't do that? What else could you do?
• Shy children often feel misunderstood. They don't mean to be manipulative even though it can look that way.