addiction
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SEE OPIOID
amplifying feedback? increase does to get same level of satisfaction
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AN 1 25
The highest rate of battery on a school employee from a child is occurring in West Virginia’s kindergarten classrooms — an alarming statistics that the state schools superintendent said is tied to the state’s multigenerational drug epidemic.
State Superintendent of Schools Michele Blatt told lawmakers that 19% of battery cases were in kindergarten classes, and the number drastically dropped off as children moved up in grade levels.
“I don’t believe that we have kindergartners who are doing this out of willful intent to harm someone,” said Blatt, who spoke with lawmakers Jan. 7 at the state Capitol. “As we are thinking about these students, we know that we’re dealing with either students who are born addicted to alcohol or drugs. We’re dealing with students who are being raised by parents who are addicted to one of those substances.”
Del. Joe Statler, R-Monongalia, said the number of violent incidents was likely much larger than the data reported.
“These numbers are alarming to say the least,” he said.
West Virginia’s overdose rate is declining since its spike during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the state continues to lead the nation in overdose death rates and has the highest number of babies born with neonatal abstinence syndrome. Fetal drug exposure is tied to a higher likelihood of mental disorders, adverse behavior problems and needing an Individualized Education Plan (IEP).
Lawmakers are grappling with how to help elementary teachers address an uptick in violent and disruptive student behavior.
Teachers told lawmakers that they need more staff to help these children, who sometimes spend their school day in the principal’s office because there’s nowhere to put them. Test scores won’t improve until it’s addressed, educators said.
Many counties don’t have alternative learning centers for young students, and Blatt said creating those spaces must be a priority.
“What are we going to do with those students when those supports aren’t enough? Where is that alternative education placement? … I do believe in most instances, if we can get the proper supports and treatments in place for those students, and the support for those teachers in the classroom, then for many of these children we can change their trajectory,” she said.
Senate Education Committee Chair Amy Grady, R-Mason, has proposed asking counties to use their opioid settlement funds to build alternative environments.
The second highest rate of battery on a teacher (13% of incidents) occurred in third grade classrooms.
Blatt said that many children had never been taught how to behave in a classroom.
“We are truly dealing with students where no one has ever taught them how to behave in school or how to behave in any situation. Many of them have physical issues from the addictions they were born with,” she said.
Lawmakers will try again on student discipline bill
Blatt updated lawmakers on the West Virginia Department of Education’s STRIVE Initiative, which is meant to bolster schools’ resources for addressing kids’ behavioral health, chronic absenteeism and more. It offers financial resources, alternative learning programs, behavioral support and more.
“The STRIVE model is to make sure that not only do have have a touch point with what’s going on in all of our counties and what their needs are, but also that they are aware of all the resources that are available to them to support, whether it’s academic, social, emotional or behavioral needs,” Blatt said.
Additionally, the WVDE will work with Marshall Behavior/Mental Health Technical Assistance Center to examine seven schools with an excessive amount of battery on a school employee.
“While there were 511 of these incidents, we’re looking at 131 students. If you look at the data … what we’re finding is there’s a lot of incidents of the same child repeatedly,” Blatt said. “Whatever’s being done with that student to address those concerns, their needs are not being met, and we need to find a different way to address those needs.”
Del. Buck Jennings, R-Preston, said that discipline was one of “our biggest issues.”
“I hope you can come up with an answer that’s more than having another group study,” he said.
Lawmakers last year failed to pass legislation that would have given elementary teachers greater authority to remove students for disruptive, aggressive or violent behaviors. It outlined steps for how schools should deal with students who needed to be removed from their classrooms. Critics of the bill worried that it didn’t do enough to help address children’s mental health needs, and they noted that it didn’t come with funding to hire additional staff or create alternative learning spaces.
Some version of the elementary discipline legislation is expected to be considered during the upcoming 60-day legislative session. It begins Feb. 12.
West Virginia Watch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.
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uber1:
https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-6857
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https://medium.com/team-human/the-anti-human-religion-of-silicon-valley-ac37d5528683
The Anti-Human Religion of Silicon Valley
How an esoteric Russian religion still fuels the digital apocalypse
There is a Silicon Valley religion, and it’s one that doesn’t particularly care for people — at least not in our present form. Technologists may pretend to be led by a utilitarian, computational logic devoid of superstition, but make no mistake: There is a prophetic belief system embedded in the technologies and business plans coming out of Google, Uber, Facebook, and Amazon, among others.
It is a techno-utopian and deeply anti-human sensibility, born out of a little-known confluence of American and Soviet New Age philosophers, scientists, and spiritualists who met up in the 1980s hoping to prevent nuclear war — but who ended up hatching a worldview that’s arguably as dangerous to the human future as any atom bomb.
I tell the story in my new book, :{Team Human:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:, because it’s one I have yet to see documented anywhere else. I pieced it together through interviews with some of the people involved in the Esalen “track two diplomacy” program. The idea was to forge new lines of communication between the Cold War powers by bringing some of the USSR’s leading scientists and spiritualists to the Esalen Institute to mix with their counterparts in the United States. Maybe we all have common goals?
They set up a series of events at Esalen’s Big Sur campus, where everyone could hear about each other’s work and dreams at meetings during the day and hot tub sessions into the night. That’s how some of the folks from Stanford Research Institute and Silicon Valley, who would one day be responsible for funding and building our biggest technology firms, met up with Russia’s “cosmists.” They were espousing a form of science fiction gnosticism that grew out of the Russian Orthodox tradition’s emphasis on immortality. The cosmists were a big hit, and their promise of life extension technologies quickly overtook geopolitics as the primary goal of the conferences.
Self-actualization through technology meant leaving the body behind — but this was okay since, in keeping with the gnostic tradition, the body was the source of human sin and corruption.
The cosmists talked about reassembling human beings, atom by atom, after death, moving one’s consciousness into a robot and colonizing space. The cosmists pulled it all together for the fledgling American transhumanists: They believed human beings could not only transcend the limits of our mortal shell but also manifest physically through new machines. With a compellingly optimistic have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too gusto, the cosmists told America’s LSD-taking spiritualists that technology could give them a way to beat death.
Self-actualization through technology meant leaving the body behind — but this was okay since, in keeping with the gnostic tradition, the body was the source of human sin and corruption. The stuff robots and computers could reproduce was the best stuff about us, anyway.
The idea that lit up the turned-on technoculture was that technology would be our evolutionary partner and successor — that humans are essentially computational, and computers could do computation better. Any ideas that could be construed to support this contention were embraced. And so Stanford professor René Girard— whose work had much broader concerns — was appreciated almost solely for his assertion that human beings are not original or creative but purely imitative creatures. And, even more thrilling to future tech titans like **Peter Thiel**, that the apocalypse was indeed coming, but it was the humans’ own damn fault.
No less popular to this day are the “captology” classes of Stanford’s B.J. Fogg, who teaches how to design interfaces that manipulate human behavior as surely as a slot machine can. According to the department’s website, “The purpose of the Persuasive Technology Lab is to create insight into how computing products—from websites to mobile phone software—can be designed to change people’s beliefs and behaviors.” Toward what? Toward whatever behaviors technologies can induce — and away from those it can’t.
As a result, we have Facebook using algorithms to program people’s emotions and actions. We have Uber using machine learning to replace people’s employment. We have Google developing artificial intelligence to replace human consciousness. And we have Amazon extracting the life’s blood of the human marketplace to deliver returns to the abstracted economy of stocks and derivatives.
The anti-human agenda of technologists might not be so bad — or might never be fully realized — if it didn’t dovetail so neatly with the anti-human agenda of corporate capitalism. Each enables the other, reinforcing an abstract, growth-based scheme of infinite expansion — utterly incompatible with human life or the sustainability of our ecosystem. They both depend on a transcendent climax where the chrysalis of matter is left behind and humanity is reborn as pure consciousness or pure capital.
We are not being beaten by machines, but by a league of tech billionaires who have been taught to believe that human beings are the problem and technology is the solution. We must become aware of their agenda and fight it if we are going to survive.
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ref
http://captology.stanford.edu/go/welcome?from=
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/beginners-luck-how-one-video-gambling-company-worked-the-odds-and-took-over-a-state/
an 320
Beginner’s luck: How one video gambling company worked the odds and took over a stateProPub
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The machine always wins / Why we are addicted to social media
guk 819
https://yyy.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/23/social-media-addiction-gambling
https://medium.com/positive-returns/a-mental-health-pandemic-is-the-world-getting-more-addicted-anxious-and-lonely-4e45bf533ae5
no lnx, some text?
By Erica Orange & Jared Weiner, The Future Hunters, and Eshanthi Ranasinghe, Exploration & Future Sensing, Omidyar Network
Mental health issues today have almost become pandemic. Depression and anxiety in particular are increasing rapidly, with much still clinically under- and undiagnosed. This pattern is persistent around the world. The World Economic Forum estimated that direct and indirect costs of mental health amount to over 4 percent of global GDP, more than the cost of cancer, diabetes, and chronic respiratory disease combined. This could cost the global economy up to $16 trillion between 2010 and 2030, and more than $6 trillion annually after that, if a collective failure to respond is not addressed.
Some of this global rise could be attributed to spreading norms around treatment; but hypotheses persist that mental health of global populations is increasingly at risk, in part due to a confluence of societal factors, such as: the stress of migration and cultural integration (including among refugee populations); an increasingly polarized world fueled by “us versus them” narratives;lack of available economic and employment opportunities; persistent gender- and race/ethnicity-based inequality, discrimination, and violence; shifting cultural norms and a feeling of “culture under threat”; and the role of tech and social media, fueling everything from tech addiction to loneliness to body image issues. Furthering this trend is the opioid crisis, with signs of it being exported from the US to the rest of the world.
It was estimated by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2015 that more than 322 million people have depression?—?about 4 percent of the world’s population, an increase of 18.4 percent between 2005 and 2015. Loneliness is also on the rise. A recent study found that over 9 percent of adults in Japan, 22 percent in the US, and 23 percent in the UK always or often feel lonely or isolated.
While this is more pervasive and rising more quickly among the young, demographic shifts, particularly aging populations in more developed markets, are leading to an increase in social isolation. From 1980 to 2015, the number of seniors in Japan living alone increased more than six-fold, to almost 6 million, resulting in some unusual actions, including lonely seniors, typically women, shoplifting in search of the community and stability of jail. More than half of seniors caught shoplifting live alone; 40 percent either don’t have family or rarely speak with relatives. These people often say they have no one to turn to when they need help.
We know the “usual suspects”, mental health issues resulting directly from technology—addiction, as social media platforms use the same techniques as gambling firms to create psychological dependencies and real imbalance of brain chemicals among teens that resembles depression and anxiety; and smartphone anxiety, including “low-battery anxiety,” “nomophobia”, the fear people can feel when they are out of mobile contact, even FOMO (fear of missing out), which has nearly 23 percent of students in India logging more than eight hours on their smartphones daily. The dependency is strong, and globally pervasive, with nearly all of the 60 percent of Kenyans who own smartphones saying they find it hard to put them down.In China and South Korea, tech rehab camps are now common, and the World Health Organization officially recognizes video game addiction as a mental health disorder.
But there is evidence to suggest that we are just hitting the tip of the iceberg of tech-enabled mental health issues. Twenty four/seven access to information can cause a kind of collective anxiety and helplessness. Researchers using health-monitoring devices found that entire populations’ sleeping habits, heart rates, and distances walked can swing out of sync after large societal events (e.g., Brexit)?—?and much of this is heightened by a constant cycle of social media and digital news.
We also see this manifesting socio-culturally. Smartphones have disintermediated many in-person conversations. We are talking to each other less and having fewer meaningful conversations which can increase feelings of loneliness and anxiety. Not only are more people, particularly digital natives, craving “IRL” (in real life) connection, but studies have shown that people felt better and more connected during times when they only socialized face-to-face.
This level of social disconnection can also endanger health. Loneliness has been alleged to have the same impact on life expectancy as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, with a risk factor that rivals excessive drinking or obesity. A lack of social contact can also speed up cognitive decline, heart disease, depression, and suicide. And, smartphones are methodically killing off boredom, which has a very important role in creativity. The seeds of ideas that may come from idle reflection are being replaced by constant distraction. And constant distraction?—?which causes dopamine to spike when confronted with newness and novelty, addictive but inherently unfulfilling–does not lead to a healthier mental state. Being creative, however, can.
...
Emerging Mental Health Epidemics: The US Opioid Crisis
It’s difficult to talk about mental health without mentioning the US opioid crisis. The US faces a mental health epidemic; nearly 1 in 5 American adults suffering from a form of mental illness. Suicide rates are at an all-time high, 115 people die daily from opioid abuse, and 1 in 8 Americans over 12 years old take an antidepressant every day.The economic burden of depression alone is estimated to be at least $210 billion annually. People abusing opioids also often face the additional burden of depression. And while the opioid crisis is most pronounced in the US, the problem has begun migrating to Europe?—?which could portend an even greater, eventual global concern. The relationship between opioid abuse and depression is bi-directional, meaning that suffering from one increases the risk of the other. Many prescription opioid abusers may turn to using heroin. This addiction can lead to the feelings of hopelessness, despair, and guilt, and researchers estimate that 48 percent of people dependent on the drug will also experience depression.
Entrepreneurs, philanthropists, companies, and individuals have risen to the challenge, creating a range of tools and treatment options that go beyond traditional Western medicine. This includes the rise of “anti-tech tech,” appsand mobile phone-based tools that help users reduce phone use (like this app recently launched in the UK that allows users to earn rewards for not going on their phones; and the MP02, designed for people who want to unplug from the world of apps and constant notifications and use a simple, stripped-down phone). In addition, other types of innovations?—?“technology Rx” and unusual applications of natural medicine–are being applied to mental health.
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How Illinois is failing people addicted to ‘the crack cocaine of gambling’
Since video gambling went live in 2012, more than 30,000 video slot and poker machines have been installed in the state and gamblers have lost more than $5 billion. Yet Illinois has failed to address the issue of gambling addiction in any meaningful way.
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sf summer 18 talk? (fundraise show)
https://kpfa.org/episode/talkies-september-19-2018/
addiction, gambling, pioneer micro-target
see addiction by design book
magical thinking, crisis _
megachurch also has target for recruits, sever you from family
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guard uk uber gamification
...n addition to offering meaningless badges and meagre savings at the pump, ride-hailing companies have also adopted some of the same design elements used by gambling firms to promote addictive behaviour among slot-machine users. One of things the anthropologist and NYU media studies professor Natasha Dow Schüll found during a decade-long study of machine gamblersin Las Vegas is that casinos use networked slot machines that allow them to surveil, track and analyse the behaviour of individual gamblers in real time – just as ride-hailing apps do. This means that casinos can “triangulate any given gambler’s player data with her demographic data, piecing together a profile that can be used to customise game offerings and marketing appeals specifically for her”. Like these customised game offerings, Lyft tells me that my weekly ride challenge has been “personalised just for you!”
Former Google “design ethicist” Tristan Harris has also described how the “pull-to-refresh” mechanism used in most social media feeds mimics the clever architecture of a slot machine: users never know when they are going to experience gratification – a dozen new likes or retweets – but they know that gratification will eventually come. This unpredictability is addictive: behavioural psychologists have long understood that gambling uses variable reinforcement schedules – unpredictable intervals of uncertainty, anticipation and feedback – to condition players into playing just one more round.
....
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new bk
// four organs?
https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-july-27-2018/
same?https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-september-19-2018/
fundraiser show)
makes primary distinction between pleasure and happiness
Dr. Robert Lustig is Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics, Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He specializes in the field of neuroendocrinology, childhood obesity and diabetes. His latest book is Hacking the American Mind: The Science of the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains.
- $135 for Hacking the American Mind: The Science of the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brainsby Robert Lustig
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