Lake County Ohio Weal

  Autism Rates By Allen Frances Dr. Frances is a psychiatrist. He led the American Psychiatric Association’s task force charged with creating the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of health and human services, is correct that reported autism rates have exploded in the last 30 years — they’ve increased roughly 60-fold — but he is dead wrong about the causes. I should know, because I am partly responsible for the explosion in rates. The rapid rise in autism cases is not because of vaccines or environmental toxins, but rather is the result of changes in the way that autism is defined and assessed — changes that I helped put into place. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was the chair of the task force charged with creating the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the D.S.M.-IV. Sometimes called the “bible of psychiatry,” the D.S.M. influences medical practice, insur...

  n March 2022, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) announced a revision to its widely influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The revised manual, known as DSM-5-TR, included a new diagnostic category: prolonged grief disorder (PGD). The announcement ignited a firestorm of controversy. “Pathologising grief is an insult to the dignity of loving relationships—it proclaims grievers as mentally ill and will too often result in the careless prescription of antidepressants or other drugs to treat enduring symptoms, without consideration of the context.” So wrote the authors of a short and scathing article in the medical journal The Lancet Psychiatry, published not long after the DSM-5-TR was released. The outrage and debate were not confined to psychiatrists and psychologists. The controversy over recognizing PGD as a mental disorder took many forms. Studies followed that questioned whether the empirical evidence justified introducing a new diagnostic ca...

  Childlessness and Therapy Culture I: They Mess You Up I turned 14 in 2010, right when self-harm rates for U.S. girls began ticking up. I was part of a generation of teenage girls who came of age with the internet — with Tumblr, blogs, Snapchat and YouTube. With smartphones. With the compelling urge to self-punish or annihilate. My teenage and young adult years were not bad, exactly, but they were tumultuous. I had been an emotional, moody child, and I became an emotional, moody teenager and then an emotional, moody young adult. I kept a handle on things, mostly, but there were intermittent crises: An eating disorder when I was 14, abetted by the angsty anorexics of Tumblr. A period of depression in my early 20s. There was nothing special about my suffering. Nine percent of Americans, at one point in their lives, suffer from an eating disorder. Nearly 30 percent of American adults experience a period of depression. And there was also nothing special about the way I came to underst...

Decline of Christianity in the US has slowed, may have leveled off.   The June Commonweal Magazine issue contains a symposium centered around Christian Smith's recent book, specifically the question of whether or not Christianity has become "obsolete" in the small fashion that technology becomes obsolete.  This review addresses the issue of whether the decline of Christianity in the US might be evidence of obsolescence.   Executive Summary At present: 62% of U.S. adults describe themselves as Christians: 40% are Protestant, 19% are Catholic, and 3% are other Christians. 29% are religiously unaffiliated: 5% are atheist, 6% are agnostic, and 19% identify religiously as “nothing in particular.” 7% belong to religions other than Christianity: 2% are Jewish, and 1% each are Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu (all figures are rounded) The 2023-24 RLS finds that: 44% of U.S. adults say they pray at least once a day. Though down significantly since 2007, this measure has held between...

  On the Persistence of Faith Amid Religious Decline Susan Bigelow Reynolds May 27, 2025 A sign at the counter of a vintage shop that I frequent reads: My grandmother owned it, my mother sold it, I just bought it back! Traditional religious faith, argues Christian Smith, has gone the way of something your grandparents owned, like, for example, a record player: a nostalgic artifact well-suited to the needs of another age but obsolete in our own. “When people can ask Alexa to play any song,” he explains by way of analogy, “they rarely think about vinyl records. And so obsolete items become decreasingly familiar to most people and, in time, associated with bygone eras.” Twenty years ago, Smith was right, at least about record players. I didn’t know anyone who still used one. My Millennial friends and I were content to download Death Cab for Cutie’s latest releases off iTunes for ninety-nine cents apiece and listen to them on our iPods. Today, however, a record player sits next to the ...

  Retreat & Resurgence Gerardo Martí May 27, 2025 There was a time when holding a BlackBerry felt like holding the future. Surgically precise thumb-typing, emails firing off at the speed of thought, the blinking red light—a heartbeat of connectivity—appealed to eager adopters of cutting-edge technology. Its reach exceeded 20 million users by around 2010. And then it was gone. The BlackBerry didn’t disappear because it was inferior. It disappeared because what we wanted from technology changed. As societal structures evolve, so do our tools, reflecting new desires and demands. German sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes obsolescence as a byproduct of social acceleration. I n a world ruled by speed, novelty, and optimization, institutions—even worldviews—lose their resonance not because they stop working, but because they no longer compete. What becomes obsolete is not what is old, but what no longer speaks to present experience. The importance of relevance was strikingly evident i...

  Christian Smith Suggests the American Religious Decline May be Irreversible Peter Steinfels May 27, 2025 Any all-star team of scholars of American religion would have to include Christian Smith. Smith’s extensive use of surveys and interviews in two books on young Americans and religion, Soul Searching (2005), with Melinda Lundquist Denton, and Souls in Transition (2009), with Patricia Snell, showed him a master of empirical research. At the same time, What Is a Person? (2010) placed him among the few sociologists ready and able to explore the philosophical underpinnings and ethical implications of their social-science methods. His twenty books over thirty-five years also tangle with topics like evangelical Biblicism, religious parenting, Church disaffiliation by young Catholics, and the New Atheism. He is a stalwart though subtle critic of “secularization theory”—that religious faith is inevitably destined to be dissolved, in Walter Lippmann’s phrase, by the “acids of modernity...

  Ask Better Questions Kaya Oakes June 2, 2025 My 2015 book The Nones Are Alright explored Americans’ shift away from organized religion. For a few years I did the circuit of conferences and church talks where people kept asking the same question: What can we do to bring people back? I never had an answer that made anyone happy, because I had no idea how to bring people back . The ship had already sailed, but people were still standing on the shoreline waiting for it to turn around.  A decade later, there have been more than a few books written on the same topic, from Tara Isabella Burton’s pop-culture history Strange Rites: New Religion for a Godless World to sociologist Ryan P. Burge’s charts-and-graphs-crammed The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going. They ask similar questions about the future of religious affiliation, and they come to similar conclusions. Religion is fading away, but faith and belief, somehow, are not. The problem is that ho...