All diseases or disorders, follow a central pattern. They are objective, to the point, carry a no nonsense attitude, and usually mean business. They either prevail or perish. All… save some glorious exceptions. Depression, with its towering presence is easily the queen of all exceptions.
Overdiagnosed, misdiagnosed, underdiagnosed...this is one diagnosis that troubles both the physician and the patient. Whimsical as an English weather, this disorder comes in various nuances, various moods and at various times. It's infinite range and subtlety of presentation makes it a hard animal to hold and harness. The hushed presence beguiles the stormy intensity inside…a reluctant demeanor that can easily lead astray an un-mindful mind. Let us deal with its vagaries.
Some of depressions' mannerisms are easily detectable. Conceptually we group them into three major baskets. The first is all about emotions (depressed mood, loss of interests or pleasure). The second dabbles with Ideation (worthlessness or guilt, death or suicide). And the third involves neurovegetative or somatic symptoms (disturbed sleep, appetite or weight, lack of energy and concentration). They usually don't come as a blast. These symptoms tip toe in; pass through fleeting phases before settling inside with utter determination.
We physicians are unanimous in our verdicts. If anyone has one or more of these symptoms, don't flirt, don't waste time. Seek medical help.
The challenge however is not in these presentations. It's the offbeat, beyond what the eye meets manifestations that pose real challenge. To put it simply, some of us may not be able to communicate intense sadness or melancholy. Wrapped in an inward contemplation, what comes out is a vacant obedience that may not and does not come out as a depressed mood. It's the inability to bring out emotions that makes a diagnosis of depression slippery and elusive. Emotional numbness, or what we fashionably call as "blahs" gets manifested as a 'flattened affect' on examination, that is misunderstood and hence missed.
Reverse signs are the other manholes we easily fall prey to. Instead of weight loss, there may be weight gain. Instead of loss of appetite there is hyperphagia (increased appetite). Ditto for sleep pattern. In lieu of the traditional insomnia, we can have increased sleep ( hypersomnia). And again, instead of the expected depressed mood, anxiety or irascibility could be the primary emotions…and still be termed as depression.
Thus the need for education and awareness. Awareness that one should not have to wait for the hair tear events, or the inconsolable crying spells, to be recognized as depression. It's the early silent presence and the hushed hints that need to be realized and taken control of. Let us remind ourselves that if detected appropriately depression is a highly manageable entity. Be it through counseling or prescription medications. Every type of help is offered…cognitive therapy, behavioral therapy, and interpersonal therapy. And a promise that there's light at the end of every tunnel.
As an anti-corruption crusader unburdened by the varying agendas of Parti Keadilan Rakyat strategic director Mohd Rafizi Ramli under section 97(1) of the Banks and Financial Institutions Act (Bafia), which carries a maximum jail sentence of three years and a fine of up to RM3m.
Rafizi Ramli – Photograph: Keadilan Daily
Very much known for his recent expose of the award of the Ampang LRT extension project to water-meter and tank-maker George Kent, Rafizi’s arrest today was associated with his disclosure of three financial accounts related to the controversial National Feedlot Corporation (NFC) and its chairperson Mohd Salleh Ismail.
Rafizi was charged for having allegedly breached the secrecy provisions of the banking law “by producing, divulging, revealing, publishing or otherwise disclosing, of any information or document whatsoever relating to the affairs or account of a banking customer”.
For all intents and purposes, the arrest is tantamount to criminalising a conscientious whistleblower whose primary objective is to reveal information for the benefit of the general public and taxpayers.
Worse, this arrest can also be interpreted as a warning to future whistleblowers who intend to unravel financial scandals involving individuals close to the powers-that-be. This is certainly a foolish way to convince the Malaysian public that the Najib administration is serious about waging war against corruption.
The arrest and charge mounted against Rafizi in the wake of the George Kent controversy only lends credence to the suspicion that the PKR strategic director’s latest move has made the ruling Umno-BN so jittery that it responded with a knee-jerk reaction.
We call upon the federal government to stop criminalising conscientious citizens such as Rafizi — and instead to seriously go after the crooked.
Meanwhile, now that his anti-corruption campaign will affect both principal parties. But the impact of his crusade might hurt the incumbent UMNO more.
The variable factor is a derivative of the number of pre-poll alliance partners, their relative regional strengths, their geographical dispersion and divisive constituency-wise contests between candidates.
For strategists in the two principal parties, the lessons are:
a) Widen your electoral base. While not a clincher, voteshare still has the greatest weightage in the final seat tally;
b) Build as many coalition partners as possible but remember that quality matters more than quantity;
c) Pick your fights carefully – don’t let dissidents divide votes within constituencies.
UMNO has three major problems. First, the lack of a natural Prime Ministerial candidate. Second, strong anti-incumbency after years of misgovernance. Third, corruption and inflation.
But at the end of the day, in the cold light of reason, the rising tide of public anger will be difficult to quell. While Modi himself will have to learn to be more of a team man, taking others with him and not for granted, there comes a time when the rising political tide sweeps all before it.
That time, like 1977 and 1989, may once again now be upon us.
As Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar:
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
The police must investigate Tan Sri Abdul Gani Patail for power abuse in light of a new book accusing the Attorney-General of being a fraud, a cheat and a criminal, and show the same diligence with which they probed a sensational 1998 book on why Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim could not be prime minister, a former senior policeman said today.
Retired criminal investigation chief Datuk Mat Zain Ibrahim told Inspector-General of Police (IGP) Tan Sri Ismail Omar that the men in blue must probe the government’s top lawyer due to the increasing public pressure and scrutiny, which he suggested could irrevocably damage public trust in government institutions.
“We have seen and are fed up of trickery and Gani Patail’s lies in handling the RCI’s on the black-eye incident, VK Lingam, and most clearly in the Teoh Beng Hock RCI,” he said in an open letter to the IGP.
Abdul Gani, who has extensive authority over the country’s legal affairs, has been repeatedly accused of fabricating evidence in the 1999 sodomy and corruption trial of Anwar, a deputy prime minister-turned-opposition leader, by Mat Zain whose open letters to the authorities were among the sources of Zainal Abidin Ahmad’s book.
Mat Zain had written to the IGP following the recent publication of a book titled “Tan Sri Abdul Gani Patail: Pemalsu, Penipu, Penjenayah? (Tan Sri Abdul Gani Patail: Fraud, Cheat, Criminal?)” written by Zainal.
He noted that a leading public figure, businessman Tan Sri Robert Phang who was also a former advisor to the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, had filed a police report against Abdul Gani two days ago, based on the contents of the book.
“I got to know that several people who have scrutinised Zainal’s book on Gani Patail, hope the police will investigate the contents as the police diligently investigated the book ‘50 Dalil’ related to Anwar Ibrahim,”
The ex-police officer was referring to a controversial 1998 book, “50 Reasons Why Anwar Cannot Become Prime Minister” written by Khalid Jafri, an ex-editor of the Umno-owned newspaper Utusan Malaysia, which alleged that the then-deputy PM was gay in a Muslim-dominated country that criminalises sodomy.
Today, Mat Zain said Abdul Gani’s high-ranking position as the public prosecutor did not indemnify his past actions or make him immune to prosecution as all citizens are equal before the law.
He highlighted as an example minister Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz’s reply to Parliament on March 30 last year that the A-G does not have the power to “indemnify” anyone from crime based on political considerations.
Mat Zain added that the author could not prove his allegations about Abdul Gani’s wrongdoings on his own.
“However, I can, I am willing and ready to prove the allegations against Gani Patail and Musa Hassan, especially related to the forgery and cheating in the black eye incident that is still being debated to today,” the ex-CID chief said in the letter.
He was referring to the 13-year-long scandal alleging both the A-G and then-IGP Tan Sri Musa Hassan, of fabricating evidence to cover up Anwar’s bruised face after being beaten up while under police custody.
Mat Zain said there were many outstanding questions that Abdul Gani and the authorities have yet to answer.
He said Nazri, a minister in the Prime Minister’s Department and the de facto law minister, has pledged to look into the mystery of RM40 million worth of assets belonging to former Malacca chief minister Tan Sri Rahim Thamby Chik (RTC), that had been acknowledged previously by Abdul Gani and anti-graft officials.
“If it has been returned to RTC, what is the Attorney-General’s power to do so when the assets were confirmed obtained by corruption and power abuse?” Mat Zain asked.
The ex-policeman appeared to suggest that the A-G’s alleged power abuses may continue unless checked now.
He warned that the government’s move to hold royal panels to investigate national issues ― such as the ongoing controversy illegal immigrants being fast-tracked for citizenship in Sabah and the oil royalties for Kelantan, which has been deprived of income for decades, which have both been turned into electoral fodder in the run up to national polls ― would not benefit the public with Abdul Gani in the A-G’s chair.
“Wherever there are elements of Gani Patail’s involvement in any panel, committee or Royal Commission of Inquiry, there will be fraud, deception and cheating,” Mat Zain said.
To Uwumarogie's point, Stanford-based anthropologist and linguist H. Samy Alim said, "When somebody says 'you talk white,' it may be far more than a linguistic judgment. It may also be a political one." But he went on to explain that the reasons are as complex as our country's own troubled racial history.
According to Alim, who tackles the racial politics of language in his forthcoming book,Articulate while Black with co-author Dr. Geneva Smitherman, as far back as the 1700's there were documents categorizing American slaves based on their mastery of grammatically correct English.
As our country evolved there became a seemingly never-ending tug of war within the black community between establishing, celebrating and protecting our own cultural identity and willfully assimilating into the dominant culture, established and dictated by white people, specifically educated, upper class white people. "The problem in the U.S. is that powerful language ideologies link 'standard' English with Whiteness," he explains. Since speech tends to be one of the primary indicators of who someone is, where they come from and what they stand for, some black people may be suspicious of someone who seems too eager to embrace the cultural norms of the predominant culture. To his point, Alim notes how black Americans respond positively when President Obama inflects his speeches with a little soul, or other linguistic nods to the community.
In other words, these nods provide a sort of cultural signal that say, "I'm educated. I'm now part of the dominant power structure but you can still trust me." (The book Articulate While Black specifically analyzes the impact of President Obama on language.)
But it's hard to believe that those kids who are tossing the term "you talk white" around like an emotional grenade at schools are doing it for political reasons. More likely they are doing it for the same reason that other kids bully: to hurt someone. What is particularly disturbing about this is that the message is being sent that speaking grammatically correct English, is a teasing offense and that telling someone they sound intelligent should be hurtful.Many have asked me why we cannot do without race-based politics in Malaysia.
The short answer is that we all want to remember and be recognised according to our racial origins, the countries of our ancestors came from, the languages we speak, the cultures we belong to.
We really don’t want to say we are just Malaysians and nothing else.
Selective comparison, Dr M style!
But are we so different from them. There are actually a lot of people of foreign origins in Malaysia who seem to have forgotten their origins. These are the people of Indian, Arab, Indonesian and even Turkish and European origins who are accepted as indigenous people by all of us.
They have been so accepted because they identified themselves fully with the indigenous people. They speak the language of the indigenous people habitually, practice the customs and traditions of the people they have been assimilated into and incidentally they are Muslim.
According to the Federal Constitution these people are Malays and are therefore indigenous and not foreign in origin.
Row in Sabah
But most of these people qualify to be citizens. They have been staying in Malaysia (Sabah) for decades. They and their children speak Malay, the national language.
On the basis of length of stay and mastering of the national language, they qualify to be citizens of this country. And so the acquired citizenship.
By comparison we have many citizens who cannot speak the national language who were accepted as citizens. And we are still giving citizenship to foreigners who wish to be Malaysians on condition they have been living in this country for 10 out of the last 12 years, speak the national language and take the oath of allegiance to the country.
Political, and hence racial: But does it have to be so?
And so the racial factor crops up again. There was a time in the distant past when parties based on ideology contested in elections. They were all rejected in favour of race-based parties.
If we don’t want our politics to be race-based, then we must forget our racial origins, speak the national language as our mother tongue and swear allegiance only to this country. We can retain our religion however.
Maybe one day this will happen. But for the present our politics will be race-based despite our protestations that we are not. We must not even say we are multi-racial as this implies consciousness of our racial differences
The domino effect of this thought process is proving disastrous for our community. As speaking well and performing well academically are increasingly denigrated as so-called white behaviors, more black children set themselves up to fail linguistically and academically in an effort to fit in with their black peers who don't "act white." According to Dr. Janet Taylor, an instructor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, who has served as Board Chair of the National Black Women's Health Imperative, "Some black kids who are subject to hearing that they 'talk white' are at risk to stop talking or to pick up slang to fit in."
When Logan West, the newly crowned Miss Teen USA, announced that she wanted to use her crown and platform to help end bullying, that wasn't much of a surprise. Some cynics might argue that bullying has replaced environmental activism as the cause du jour among celebrities and politicians alike. What was somewhat surprising was that Logan -- who at 17 is already more beautiful and poised than most professional models -- has admitted to being a victim of bullying herself. Even more surprising, or shocking, than that, is the reason why.
Logan was targeted in part for being biracial, but more specifically for acting and talking white. The reason I found this so shocking is because I didn't realize "white" was an official language, like Spanish or Swahili.
I also found it shocking because I heard the same thing when I was growing up and being more than a decade older than Logan I had assumed that this sort of ignorance on the playground and in hallways had gone the way of VCRs and bulky cell phones. But according to others I've spoken with, the "you talk like a white girl" taunt is still very much alive and well, destroying self-esteem and intellectualism in the black community one taunt at a time. Even more discouraging is the fact that this type of taunting remains alive, well and effective in the age of a black president, whose own critics consider one of the most eloquent men to hold the office.
Recently I met a brilliant and beautiful young student at the phenomenal "Black Girls Rock" camp who shared how this same taunt has been wearing her down. After hearing this student's story, as well as Logan's, I set about asking other black friends how many of them heard it growing up and watched and listened as the stories poured in.
Farai Chideya, the award-winning author, journalist and former host of NPR's "News and Notes," recalled hearing the accusation growing up, as did tennis player MaliVai Washington. Victoria Uwumarogie, an editor at Madame Noire, said she heard it constantly in high school. "When you're older, you just take it as that individual being ignorant, because there's nothing wrong with enunciating and talking proper, or as I like to call it, talking like you have some sense," but she admitted that when you're younger, and trying to fit in, it's not quite so easy to see that the issue is with the other person and not with you. Instead, she said, "you take it as someone questioning your blackness, and trying to make you different during a time when you really want to fit in."
Is it any wonder then that some states have a less than 50% graduation rate among black males?
I'd love to ask some of the kids who teased Logan West if they think she "talks white" in all of the TV interviews she has participated in since winning her title. I'd also like to ask them if they think she'd be better off talking like them, and therefore getting to sit at home watching the winner on TV, just like they are now. I'd also like to ask them if they think First Lady Michelle Obama talks white. After all, every speech or interview I have ever heard her give has been grammatically flawless.
Then I'd like to ask them if they think President Obama "talks white," and if so, if they'd rather he talk the way they think he should, from his private home, as a private citizen. Because he surely wouldn't have become a United States senator, let alone president, if he talked like them.
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