Your Weekly Dose of #5ThoughtsFriday: A description of what we think is important at BIAMD
  #5ThoughtsFriday
05/25/2018

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JUNE 23, 2018
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Here are the 5 things we thought were
worth sharing with you this week:
I n 1946, Life magazine published an exposé that declared most American mental hospitals “a shame and a disgrace.” The report, by Albert Q. Maisel, featured scathing anecdotes of routine abuse, starvation diets, overcrowded bathrooms and cynical charades of treatment that mocked the very word. “Through public neglect and legislative penny-pinching, state after state has allowed its institutions for the care and cure of the mentally sick to degenerate into little more than concentration camps,” Maisel wrote.

Some 70 years later, the journalist Alisa Roth has written a chilling book that argues that American jails and prisons have become de facto warehouses for the mentally ill, and that conditions inside have hardly improved from the horrors Maisel uncovered.

More than half the prisoners incarcerated in America suffer from some kind of mental illness, Roth writes. She cites a federal study that says 75 percent of women locked up are mentally ill. Yet the American prison system is woefully unprepared to offer treatment or provide even basic mental health care to its wards. The poor conditions inside are in fact making the sick even sicker.

“We’re not psychiatrists,” Alejandro Fernandez, a Los Angeles corrections official, tells Roth in one of the book’s many interviews with front-line observers. “We, as deputies, we know how to arrest people. We know how to put people in jail. We don’t know how to take care of people with mental illness.”

CLICK HERE for more on this important story.
The  US government issued an alert  Wednesday following reports that a government employee stationed in southern China experienced “subtle and vague, but abnormal, sensations of sound and pressure” and sustained a brain injury.

The case draws clear and eerie parallels to mysterious health problems that   affected US diplomats in Cuba , who also experienced unexplained episodes of unusual sounds and pressure followed by diagnoses of traumatic brain injury. Responding to an email from the New York Times, a spokesperson for the United States Embassy in Beijing said that the unnamed employee was working in the US consulate in the city of Guangzhou, just northwest of Hong Kong, and  experienced a variety of symptoms  from late 2017 until April of this year. In statements to the BBC, she noted that the employee  had been sent back to the US . Last Friday, the 18th of May, “the embassy was told that the clinical findings of [an] evaluation matched mild traumatic brain injury,” she wrote.
Symptoms of such an injury can include headaches, nausea, fatigue, dizziness, feeling dazed, and problems with speech.

CLICK HERE to see the latest development in this very odd this diplomatic mystery.
Becoming smarter is what a lot of people look for. While joining brain training programs is an option to increase your IQ, focus and creativity, it can be quite expensive. Luckily there are plenty of free brain training hacks you can learn to make your brain smarter.

In this article,get introduced to 10 free brain training hacks that will boost your brain performance and make you smarter.
Wanna Get Smarter? CLICK HERE
2) What We're "Reading" We Think You Might Enjoy
Hey! We're Giving This Book Away!

Send an email to info@biamd.org with the
Subject Line: I Like To Read! and we will enter your name into a drawing to receive a free copy of the book below.
For years Suzy Becker, author of the  New York Times  bestseller  All I Need to Know I Learned from My Cat  (1.7 million copies in print), literally lived by her wits. Then brain surgery left her temporarily unable to speak, read, or write.  I Had Brain Surgery, What's Your Excuse?  is a story that grapples with the question “What makes me me?” By turns philosophical and whimsical, rivetingly dramatic and unexpectedly light, it is illustrated with drawings, charts, pseudoserious graphs, real EEGs. The result is a book filled with insights into creativity, identity, love, relationships, family, and that intangible something that gives each of us our spark .

For more on this great book:
  (If you decide to buy anything mentioned in #5ThoughtsFriday, don't forget to use  Amazon Smile  and select the Brain Injury Association of Maryland as your donation beneficiary.) 
1) Quote We Are Contemplating...

Life is too short to wake up in the morning with regrets. So, love the people who treat you right, forgive the ones who don’t and believe that everything happens for a reason. If you get a chance, take it. If it changes your life, let it. Nobody said it’d be easy, they just promised it would be worth it.

HAVE A TERRIFIC
MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND. 
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 Got a story we need to follow or share? Send it to info@biamd.org .  

Want to find a story from a past #5ThoughtsFriday blog posts, visit the archive by clicking HERE .

  Please let us know your requests and suggestions by emailing us at info@biamd.org or contacting us on Twitter. 

  Which bullet above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Let us know! Just send a tweet to  @biamd1 and put #5ThoughtsFriday in there so we can find it.

  Thanks for reading! Have a wonderful weekend.