LGBT people are prone to mental illness. It’s a truth we shouldn’t shy away from | Alexander Leon

I almost didn’t write this. It wasn’t from not wanting to. I cradled my head in my hands, desperate to contribute to the reams of social media positivity I had seen surrounding Mental Health Awareness Week.

I almost didn’t – couldn’t – because I was depressed.

There came a certain point in my experience of being LGBT where I accepted that I had to be strong and uncompromising in the face of disapproving glances and withering remarks. I made a pact to throw myself into my community with zeal, no matter how exhausting, and to make full use of the privileges I was afforded in the tolerant metropolis I’d landed in.

And yet, for some reason, I find this an incredibly difficult attitude to transfer over to my struggle with depression. I will share with my co-workers that I am going on a date with a man or going to an LGBT-themed event with an almost belligerent pride, but am overwhelmed with fear in having to admit to those same people that I’m leaving slightly early to see my therapist or that I need to take some time off due to another episode.

Indeed, the word “depression” still has a bite to it, in the way that the word “gay” did when I first dared to say it to someone else in reference to myself. The tone of my voice takes on an odd quality as I approach it in a sentence, to the point where I sound intolerably meek by the time “depression” tumbles out.

The thing is, in many cases, mental illness and being queer go hand in hand. It’s an uncomfortable but important reality that LGBT youth are four times more likely to kill themselves than their heterosexual counterparts. More than half of individuals who identify as transgender experience depression or anxiety. Even among Stonewall’s own staff, people who dedicate themselves to the betterment and improved health of our community, 86% have experienced mental health issues first-hand. It’s a morbid point to make, but it makes perfect sense that we, as a community, struggle disproportionately.

At a recent event I attended, set up to train LGBT role models to visit schools and teach children about homophobia, no one explicitly mentioned their struggles with mental illness. We told one another stories of how we had come to accept ourselves in the face of adversity, talking in riddles about “dark times” or “feeling down” or being a “bit too much of a party animal”. But these problems have other names – depression, anxiety, addiction – that we consistently avoid, despite being in a community in which a large percentage of us will have undergone similar experiences.

And this phenomenon replays itself over and over. Despite there being a common understanding between me and my queer friends that we’ve probably all been vilified in the same way and made to feel a similar flavour of inadequate, we will rarely acknowledge, even within the safe boundaries of friendship, that this has had a lasting impact on our ability to maintain a healthy self-image.

But part of being proud of who we are as LGBT people is being able to be open about the struggles we’ve faced. It’s in naming and wearing the uncomfortable badges of anxiety, depression and addiction that we take the first step towards fully accepting mental illness as an important part of our collective identity. After all, how can we be true role models to the next generation if we refuse to tell the whole story?

And so, this Mental Health Awareness Week, I’m issuing a challenge to my community. If you are LGBT and suffer from a mental illness, be defiant in your acceptance of it in the same way that you would about your sexuality or gender identity. Bring it up, speak it out and feel sure that your voice, however seemingly small or insignificant, is a valid one. After all, we have been, and will always be, a community of fighters – it’s about time we dared to show our battle scars.

LGBT people are prone to mental illness. It’s a truth we shouldn’t shy away from | Alexander Leon

Penicillin mould created by Alexander Fleming sells for over $14,000

The international auction house Bonham’s has sold a small, patchy disc of mould for $ 14,597 (£11,863).

The off-white, nearly 90-year-old swatch of microbes was first created by Alexander Fleming to make penicillin, a revolutionary discovery that brought the world its first antibiotic. Bonham’s sold the mould on Wednesday during an auction in London.

The germs are preserved in a glass case and feature an inscription by Fleming on the back, identifying it as “the mould that first made penicillin”.

That, however, may be stretching the truth; Fleming likely made dozens of the mould mementos.

Matthew Haley, director of books and manuscripts at Bonham’s, said Fleming often sent the samples out to dignitaries including the Pope and Marlene Dietrich as “a kind of holy relic.”.

In 1928 Fleming was working on cultures of staphylococcus, a bacterium which causes blood-poisoning. A mould spore accidentally fell on one of these cultures, and began to grow. Fleming noticed that the bacteria around the expanding culture began to disappear. Instead of throwing the dirty Petri dish away, he decided to look at what it was that was killing the bacteria, and it turned out to be penicillium chrysogenum.

He found that the broth in which he had cultivated it was very active against certain types of bacteria, and that it owed this property to a substance secreted by the mould. He suggested that it might be used as an antiseptic in wounds, and published an account of this work in 1929.

However, he couldn’t find a way of extracting enough of the penicillin to be of therapeutic use without it becoming ineffective. It took two Oxford University scientists, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, to realise its full potential almost a decade later. The three men shared the Nobel prize for medicine in 1945.

Penicillin mould created by Alexander Fleming sells for over $14,000

Planned Parenthood is 100 years old, but the fight for reproductive rights goes on | Alexander Sanger

My grandmother served a month in jail 100 years ago. Her crime? Opening the first birth control clinic in the US. Her name was Margaret Sanger, and she was the founder of Planned Parenthood. That first clinic was open for just 10 days in 1916 before the police shut it down; its very existence was considered a “public nuisance”. Today, Planned Parenthood is the single-largest provider of reproductive healthcare services in the country.

At 81, when she was very ill, I saw her give her last speech. “The law was wrong,” she said, standing in front of a crowd in the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City, “and I broke it.” She recounted her early struggles and the multiple arrests she endured, all to bring reproductive healthcare to women. I have never forgotten that day. Even into her 80s, my grandmother was always on the move. No sooner would she come to visit us in the suburbs than she would hop on a train to New York, an hour away, to attend a meeting, give a speech or lobby her supporters. She was indefatigable.

Her example led me to join her unfinished fight. As chair of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) council for the past 15 years and president of Planned Parenthood of New York City for a decade before that, I have helped continue my grandmother’s legacy. However, she would be appalled that, a century after the founding of Planned Parenthood in Brownsville, Brooklyn, the fight for reproductive rights is far from over.
When you live to be 100, you have either good genes or are doing something very right. For an organisation, it is both. Three million women a year, every year, need Planned Parenthood in the US. We have no national health service. Women are forced to rely on charities to fill the gaps that our federal, state, county and municipal clinics don’t cover. Its mission, to get birth control information to the poor and needy, should have been taken over by government health services, much like countries in western Europe. In the rare US cities where municipal clinics do offer birth control, like New York City, women still come to Planned Parenthood because they know they will get unbiased advice and full options.

It shouldn’t be this way. But Planned Parenthood is doing something right and the US government is doing something, if not exactly wrong, then certainly inadequately. This is made all the more plain by a recent report showing that Texas, a state in the richest country on Earth, has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world.

Let all women decide for themselves: that is Planned Parenthood’s mantra

Of course, the severe stigma surrounding women’s reproductive rights and health isn’t limited to the US. At least 47,000 women die every year from unsafe abortion, many in countries where it is legal. US political posturing around reproductive rights negatively impacts countless women beyond US borders.

The Helms amendment, passed in 1973, prohibits US foreign aid from going to organisations that provide safe abortion among their reproductive healthcare services – even if abortion is legal in the recipient country. The exportation of a policy inconsistent with US law means women suffer, whether in Syria, where rape is a weapon of war, or in Latin America, where the Zika virus threatens the health of women and babies. The US should prioritise policies that help to reduce, not exacerbate, the severe health challenges and unnecessary deaths caused by limited access to reproductive healthcare services – including safe abortions – in all countries.

My grandmother insisted that women could not call themselves free until they could decide whether or not to be a mother. That was her mantra. Born poor, Irish, Catholic, tubercular, with an 11th-grade education, my grandmother was a tough and determined woman. She witnessed injustice and was determined to fix it. As a nurse, she saw women having children they didn’t want or, all too often, dying from illegal abortions. “Enough,” she said. Her eye was on women and their babies.

When Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger opened a family planning clinic in Brooklyn in 1916, it was promptly shut down. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

Let all women decide for themselves: that is Planned Parenthood’s mantra, and it transcends national borders. My grandmother was also one of the founders of International Planned Parenthood, launched in 1952. Just last week, I visited IPPF’s member association in Morocco, called the Association Marocaine de Planification Familiale. The association not only operates a reproductive health clinic, but also runs a community school for orphans and offers training facilities in hairdressing, dressmaking and cooking, providing career paths for underprivileged boys and girls. The Moroccan people trust and respect our organisation, as do people in 172 countries where IPPF operates.

To the poor and underserved, to the young and marginalised, to the minorities and immigrants that the US government doesn’t reach, my grandmother said: “We are here for you, all of you, no questions asked.”

A century ago, she was persecuted for this by the government, the churches, and many of her fellow citizens. She went to jail. When she got out, she continued the fight. At Planned Parenthood, we have fought the government, politicians, protestors and many anti-choice institutions, including churches and corporations. We have plenty more to do, nor least repealing the Hyde amendment, which prohibits Medicaid – social healthcare for US citizens of limited resources – from including abortion services, thereby depriving poor women of the right and means to decide on whether and when to have children.

Our international movement has never backed away from the fight to give women a choice. And we aren’t tired, even at 100 years old.

Planned Parenthood is 100 years old, but the fight for reproductive rights goes on | Alexander Sanger

The Alexander Method: Educate Your self Effectively

A small volume of stress is advantageous to your well being as it prevents you from receiving complacent or lazy, but if you continue to stress your self out more than long intervals of time, without having respite, it can have lasting unfavorable effects on your well being. The Alexander Method is a method created by Frederick Matthias Alexander whereby you train your muscle tissues to naturally relax, so that it reduces tension in your entire body. This can have lasting overall health benefits, like a reduction in tension relevant headaches, much less muscle stress and a lower opportunity of injuring yourself in an accident as tense, taught muscles will tear a lot more easily than relaxed muscle.

It has been stressed as an educational procedure as opposed to a rest method or as a form of physical exercise, as it is efficiently educating the muscle groups in the entire body a better way to deal with the stresses of day to day residing. This is so that your muscle tissue can carry on to supply your body with the maximum assistance it wants to maintain everything working smoothly. Generally sessions are accomplished on a 1 on a single basis, with every single session lasting 30 – 45 minutes.

Studies have found that the Alexander Strategy is helpful if you endure from repetitive strain damage or have backache or a stiff neck and shoulders. It can also assist if you are a musician, actor, dancer or athlete and you don’t truly feel as if you are attaining your full potential, as the Alexander Method teaches you to have far better muscle manage, and far better control of the vocal tract which increases air movement, which is certainly beneficial when it comes to the previously described job selections.

Your teacher will normally perform with you by way of each session, offering calm and clear guidelines to support you hold your self in a much more comfortable position and to move with much more poise that causes less strain on the physique. No heavy lifting or intense exercise routines are needed, but it is essential to be ready to actively participate in every single session in order to feel the positive aspects of the Alexander Approach. Depending on your individual goals you might consider between twenty – 40 sessions just before you truly feel at one particular with the Alexander Approach, but every single pupil is distinct and the professional teachers assisting you will consider this into account.

The Alexander Method has been established to increase the problems of individuals who suffer from chronic pain, and it has also been identified to significantly boost the living situations of people with Parkinson illness.  A entirely qualified instructor of the Alexander Strategy will have been required to complete at least 1,600 hrs of supervised teacher instruction, a training program that lasts in excess of three many years. The outcome of this training have to appear satisfactory to qualified peers in order for the instructor in instruction to get started teaching other individuals of the approach.

No matter whether you endure from muscle spasms, you believe you could have a dilemma with posture or you suffer from Parkinson or arthritis, contact your neighborhood physician or therapy centre these days to discover out regardless of whether or not the Alexander Technique might aid you in the prolonged term.

James Nelson is an advocate of normal health and believes in treating a person’s ailments right at the supply. He is also a health researcher and author and writes about natural wellness concerns for The Physio Treatment Centre.   

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The Alexander Method: Educate Your self Effectively