Issues Press – Looking at the difficult issues in our society

Faces of Recovery

Eric Newhouse

Faces of Recovery continues the report on how millions of American soldiers have faced the ultimate dilemma: kill the enemy or risk being killed yourself. As documented in Eric Newhouse’s earlier book, Faces of Combat, PTSD & TBI, each choice traumatizes the brain. The trauma is cumulative — prolonged combat increases emotional and physical injury.

This book also introduces a newly discovered complication, moral injury. It occurs when soldiers are ordered into a conflict they cannot morally justify, yet are forced to kill others to stay alive themselves. It happens when soldiers feel their chain of command has betrayed or abandoned them. It can also occur when a soldier has violated their own moral code, for example by killing civilians to avenge the death of friends, or when they fail to protect the buddies who have been watching their backs.

Faces of Recovery looks at the personal steps each veteran must take to feel accepted again in society. These include forgiveness, making atonement, self-forgiveness, and physical exercise to help the brain reduce depression and anxiety.

Eric Newhouse has been a reporter, correspondent and bureau chief for The Associated Press, and the projects editor for the Great Falls, Montana, Tribune. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for a 12-part series of stories on alcoholism.

For more information about the ongoing crusade to get appropriate treatment for combat veterans see the website FacesOfCombat.US.

More information about Eric Newhouse is available on EricNewhouse.com.

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The Safe Approach: Controlling Risk for Workers in the Helping Professions

Charles Ennis and Janet Douglas

Violence against those who provide in-home care continues to be a risk for therapists, nurses, and social workers who visit their clients in the client’s home. Ennis and Douglas use their almost fifty years of combined experience in the fields of policing and child protection to show you how to be safer in your practice. They are not trying to convince you that violence toward workers in the helping professions is a problem; you probably know that already. What they do is to show you changes you can make to perform your job more safely.

In this book are ways to prevent and reduce violence toward home-care workers using readily available tools and skills. The authors walk you through the necessary steps to examine your behaviors and the risks in a situation. This will help you be safer when the client visits your office or when you go into the field. They examine safety awareness, discuss the use of collateral information, and show you the importance of file information. They stress the need for ongoing safety assessment in the ever-changing situation in a client’s home. Finally, they show you how to protect yourself should all else fail.

Charles Ennis and Janet Douglas have worked together for more than 10 years investigating high-risk child abuse complaints where there were concerns about the potential for violence. Until his retirement Ennis was a member of the Emergency Response Team Tactical Unit and a Gang Crime Unit for the Vancouver Police Department. Douglas
has been a frontline child protection social worker in Vancouver, B.C. for the past 21 years, working with families in crisis. The authors have trained numerous agencies and their staff on how to be safe when working in the field.

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Alcohol: Cradle to Grave

Eric Newhouse

Eric Newhouse, winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for the newspaper columns reprinted in this book, was a veteran newspaper reporter. As such, he’s seen what he refers to as the flotsam and jetsam of human life: the divorces, lost jobs, battered wives and children, crime, drunken drivers, car wrecks, and medical bills. And, he’s come to the conclusion that alcohol is behind much of it. Take away the alcohol, in other words, and much of the human tragedy that he chronicles would go away.

Alcohol: Cradle to Grave, offers a compelling, day-in-the-life look at how the disease of alcoholism affects Great Falls, Montana, in particular and the state of Montana general. It’s also what he terms “a microcosm of a national problem.” Here, Newhouse offers us a compelling and comprehensive understanding of the complexity, magnitude, and cost of alcohol abuse. It’s an unflinching look at the largely unnoticed river of booze that flows through our towns, our communities and our daily lives.

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Adults during a Crisis

Donald Trump pressured the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow plasma treatment for COVID-19. This may be a benefit. It will probably not be a disaster. It is not the miracle or “historic breakthrough” Trump is claiming. At best, it helps people who have COVID-19 recover faster.

Trump is desperate for a miracle that will save his presidency. He didn’t get the one that would have saved it because he was wrong when he said what is now a pandemic would miraculously go away. Other miracle drugs along the way have also not been successful.

This is classic magical thinking — it will happen because I want it to happen. According to Piaget’s stages of development, magical thinking occurs during the preoperational stage which ranges from ages 2-7. And that’s about where Donald Trump is in his development as a human being.

Adults would have used their intellect or emotional connections with others to realize something needed to be done. They would work on the problem. Many world leaders succeeded in doing this, but not all. Those who succeeded put lock-downs in place, required social distancing and masks, and started contact tracing. Those countries have much lower rates of infection, so a miracle is not required. Careful scientific research is enough.

Here in the US Trump needs a miracle to stay in power. Plasma treatment is not that miracle. It won’t reduce the number of new cases a day, and it won’t convince anyone new to act in a socially responsible way. In other news today, China’s life is starting to look normal again. New Zealand and several other countries have been there for a while. The adults in those countries, whether we agree with their politics or not, found ways to lead their countries through the pandemic. Perhaps we can elect some adults to lead us through ours.

Adults solve problems during a crisis. Little children hope for a miracle.

Raven Book Store Writes to Jeff Bezos at Amazon

Yesterday, on Twitter, Raven Book Store, Lawrence, Kan., posted this letter to @JeffBezos “from a small independent bookstore in the middle of the country”:

Last Wednesday a customer bought a stack of books from us. Right before he left, he asked me, “what parts of your business are affected by Amazon?” I blurted out, “every part.” I had never articulated this before, but it’s true. I know I’m not alone in saying this, and not just among bookstores, either. Your business has an unfair impact on every retail small business in America. I’m writing you to try to illustrate just how many people your business affects in a negative way.

Let’s start with books, because that’s where we overlap and books are my bread and butter. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it certainly seems like the book part of your business is modeled like this: sell books at a loss to hook people into Prime subscriptions, Kindles, Alexas, and other higher-margin products. While this strategy has worked really well for you, it’s totally disrupted everything about the book business, making a low-margins business even tighter. Most dismayingly to us, your book business has devalued the book itself. People expect hardcovers to be 15 bucks and paperbacks to be under 10. Those margins are a nightmare for our bottom line, of course, but they also cheapen the idea of the capital-B Book. There’s already enough happening to cheapen the idea of truth, research, and careful storytelling. We’re dismayed to see the world’s biggest book retailer reflecting that frightening cultural shift by de-valuing books.

This isn’t just about business competition to us. We wish it was! We like business competition, we think it’s healthy. But the way you’ve set things up makes it impossible to compete with you. Often the tech and e-commerce world brags about “disrupting” old ways of doing things with new, sleeker, more efficient tricks. But we refuse to be a quaint old way of doing things, and we are not ripe for disruption. We’re not relics; we’re community engines. We create free programming. We donate gift certificates to charity silent auctions. We partner with libraries and arts organizations. That stuff might seem small to someone aiming to colonize outer space, but to us and our community it’s huge. Our booksellers are farmers, authors, activists, artists, board members, city council representatives. For so many places, the loss of an indie bookstore would mean the loss of a community force. If your retail experiment disrupts us into extinction you’re not threatening quaint old ways of doing things. You’re threatening communities.

When I taught high school English, we did a business letter unit. Part of what I taught was to make sure every business letter has some kind of request so it’s not a waste of time or paper. So, what to request from you? Some of my peers want to break your company up. Some of them want to nationalize it. Some of them want it wiped off the earth. I see where they’re all coming from, but I don’t think that’s what I’m after today. I could also request you stop profiting off ICE’s violence, stop enabling counterfeit merchandise, stop fostering a last-mile shipping system that causes injury and death, stop gentrifying our cities, stop contributing to the police state with your doorbell cameras, stop driving your warehouse workers to exhaustion or injury, or so many other things. Perhaps I could just request an explanation of why this chaos and violence is apparently so essential to your strategy.

Or maybe I could request a leveling of the playing field. Small business owners are led to believe that if their idea is good enough, they can grow their business and create more jobs. Yet your company is so big, so disruptive, so dominant, that it’s severely skewed the ability for us to do that. I think a big part of leveling the playing field would mean fair pricing on your part. For our part, we try to level things by being really good at what we do, and being really loud. So we use our platform to try to teach people what’s at stake as your company increases its influence and market share. I think it’s starting to work. I get the feeling that we’re seeing chips in Amazon’s armor. Whenever we share stuff like this, it seems to resonate with our audience. Maybe someday you’ll hear what we have to say. Maybe we can talk about it over pie and coffee at Ladybird Diner across the street, my treat. I’d love to show you around a vibrant community anchored by small businesses, here in Kansas, here on earth. Maybe it’ll help you realize that some things don’t need to be disrupted.

Sincerely,
Danny Caine, Owner
Raven Book Store
Lawrence, Kan.

Faces of Combat, PTSD & TBI

Eric Newhouse

In Faces of Combat, PTSD & TBI: One Journalist’s Crusade to Improve Treatment for Our Veterans Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eric Newhouse issues a call to help America’s returning warriors. His concern is that one-third to one-half of the 1.6 million men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan can be expected to return home with one or all three emotional disorders – post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury (TBI), or major depression. But the Veterans Administration is already overloaded in treating soldiers from previous conflicts, primarily Vietnam vets who never received the help they needed and deserved.

For more information about the ongoing crusade to get appropriate treatment for combat veterans see the websiteFacesOfCombat.US.

More information about Eric Newhouse is available on EricNewhouse.com.

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Female Sex Offenders

Julia Hislop

Female Sex Offenders describes how female sex offenders have victimized an estimated three million people in the United States. Dr Julia Hislop provides therapists educators, and law enforcement personnel with the information that is currently known about these offenders including the life events that lead to offending, the types of offenses committed, and strategies for treatment of offenders.

If you think you don’t need this book, please think again. The offenders and victims may be found in any group that you work with. After reading this book, we have had both therapists and educators say that they will never look at issues of abuse the same way again.

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Lies In Silence

SJ Hart

Lies In Silence advocates for improved diagnosis and treatment for bipolar and co-occurring disorders by describing the devastating toll the disorders took on three generations of the author’s family. An insightful and compelling look that gives the reader an understanding of the depth of pain and suffering experienced by people who have these genetically transmitted diseases.

SJ Hart speaks about issues related to the growing epidemic of bipolar and related disorders. You can send us an e-mail to hear how you can have her speak to your organization.

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Sex and Love Addiction

Jay Parker

A powerful book about how sex and love addiction destroyed Jay Parker’s life and his successful struggle to “get it all back.” A meaningful book for anyone dealing with sex and love addiction issues, either their own or a loved one’s.

Parker proposes some real-life actions that sex and love addicts can take to get their lives back under control and offers suggestions about how our society can be more successful in dealing with sex offenders.

Jay Parker is a licensed addictions counselor and one of the first specializing in Internet addiction and related sex and love addiction issues. He has appeared on national television ranging from The Leeza Gibbons Show to PBS. Discussions of his work on Internet addictions have appeared in US News and World Report and other national and regional publications.

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Situational Mediation

Oliver Ross

The Book Situational Mediation teaches the best ways to resolve personal and business conflicts. It describes how to use the best features of evaluative, collaborative, transformative, and humanistic mediation to work through issues quickly, inexpensively, and with the least possible stress.

Using extensive examples and detailed commentary, Oliver Ross shows how to reach agreements in a wide variety of mediations. He offers a sensible, real-life approach for resolving disputes and teaches effective methods of conflict resolution that lead participants to solutions while fostering opportunities for growth and transformation.

The Audience
Lawyers, psychologists, clergy, counselors (marriage, family, labor relations), human resource personnel, and other professionals who want to add mediation to the services they offer.

Professionals currently providing mediation services who want to improve their mediation skills.

Other people who are wondering if mediation might be appropriate for resolving marriage/divorce issues, resolving family problems, or solving labor, contract and other disputes.

The Author
Oliver Ross earned a Doctor of Law degree from the University of San Diego in 1968, a Master’s degree in clinical psychology from Antioch University in 1992, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in human behavior psychology from Ryokan College in 1994. He has received training in advanced mediation skills at The Mediation Center in Eugene, Oregon, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Phoenix, Arizona.

Since 1994, Dr. Ross has successfully mediated over 500 conflicts involving divorcing couples, family members, executives, professionals, business owners, and parties to commercial and real estate contracts.

Oliver Ross is an “Advanced Practitioner” Member of the Association for Conflict Resolution, and an approved Mediator for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Arizona Association of Realtors.

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