Answer Addiction

Tag: education

  • Virgin Islands Struggle With Mental Health Crisis After 2017 Hurricanes

    Virgin Islands Struggle With Mental Health Crisis After 2017 Hurricanes

    The children of the U.S. Virgin Islands were deeply affected by the trauma of surviving two massive hurricanes.

    The U.S. Virgin Islands are still struggling to recover from the two devastating hurricanes that hit them along with Puerto Rico and the Southeastern continental U.S. in 2017, according to a report by NPR.

    While they slowly rebuild their island’s infrastructure, schools, homes and businesses, the population is also dealing with a mental health crisis fueled by the stress of disrupted government services, lost jobs and severely damaged homes.

    Children appear to be having a particularly difficult time. The hurricanes damaged many of the island’s school buildings, forcing them to resort to two four-hour school sessions each school day in order to house and continue education for the kids with half the classrooms.

    This change appears to have severely disrupted the typical education process for the children of the Virgin Islands, resulting in behavioral problems and widespread mental health issues. The educational disruption comes on top of the initial trauma of surviving two Category 5 hurricanes.

    “We see… regression in behaviors, especially with our little ones who had been potty-trained, reverted to using diapers,” says mental health counselor Vincentia Paul-Constantin. “We see a lot of frustration, cognitive impairment, hopelessness and despair” among older children, she added.

    Researchers have found that 60 percent of adults on the island now suffer from depressive symptoms and/or PTSD, as well as 40 percent of children. According to the report, over 20 percent of students in grades 7-12 reported suicidal thoughts and 1 in 12 had attempted suicide.

    According to Virgin Islands educators, the past two years have seen a large spike in children acting up in the classroom and an increase in defiant behavior. This has continued even after the schools finally returned to their normal schedule in October 2018.

    “They show up in defiance, actual defiance to authority. We have children who are sleeping in the middle of the day,” said Cancryn Junior High School Principal Lisa Ford. “You try to wake them up, they become angry. And maybe that’s what we’re seeing — a lot of anger and defiance.”

    The culture on the U.S. Virgin Islands places a lot of shame on mental illness, making people reluctant to seek help. At the same time, there were already very few mental health professionals available. The local government only employed one full-time and one part-time psychiatrist for the entire island, and they and private mental health professionals have reportedly been overwhelmed by a new demand for care.

    To help combat this problem, Governor Albert Bryan recently declared a mental health state of emergency in order to expedite the recruitment of psychological experts.

    “This is a kind of ‘cry in the dark’ kind of community,” Bryan told NPR. “A lot of that is driven by the stigma. You wouldn’t ostracize somebody who had high blood pressure. Why would you ostracize somebody who has some kind of personality disorder?”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Bringing Harm Reduction to Haywood County

    Bringing Harm Reduction to Haywood County

    The man in the camouflage shirt who emerges from the cabin is drawn and thin with circles under his eyes. He tenses at my presence, especially once Jeremy tells him I am there to write an article.

    It is a cloudy evening and mosquitoes patrol in full force as Nancy Bauman and I pick our way gingerly over trash-strewn ground, searching for syringes. Under a creekside bridge splashed with graffiti, a pair of neatly folded jeans, a plastic bag of food items, and a pair of shoes offer evidence of a homeless encampment.

    As we search, Nancy opens up about her life as a former injection drug user. She recounts how her only brother died of a heroin overdose shortly after returning from Vietnam. Her own struggle with addiction began through recreational drug use with homecoming soldiers, and years ago she lost her husband to hepatitis C infection. Drugs ruled much of her youth, but Nancy has spunk. She entertains me with tales of how she used to run an illegal syringe exchange program with two Catholic nuns in Los Angeles. 

    As I listen to Nancy, I am not putting much effort into the search for syringes. Truth be told, I feel guilty about picking through someone’s home and also for the assumption that a homeless person must also be an injection drug user. Under the bridge, Nancy and I find nothing but an overturned shopping cart, bits of trash, and a spoon. When the time comes to return to the health department, I feel relieved.

    Nancy and I drive back to the health department to rejoin the rest of the newly formed Substance Use Task Force of Haywood County, North Carolina. The community syringe pick-up event is the inaugural event for this group, which is comprised of public health employees, harm reduction advocates, law enforcement personnel and impacted citizens who hope to address the growing incidence of drug use in Haywood County. The dozen or so members are an eager bunch, well-intentioned but so far lacking clear direction on how to tackle such a complex problem. The group finds only two discarded syringes that evening; still, enthusiasm reigns.

    We are debriefed by members of the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition (NCHRC), which in spring 2018 hired three staff members for the area under a grant funded by the Aetna Foundation. Haywood County, and western North Carolina in general, is relatively new territory for NCHRC, which has more established programs in eastern and central parts of the state. In one sense, this is an advantage since advocates can draw on the experience of harm reduction programs in other counties. In another sense, it is a disadvantage. Few people in Haywood County have even heard of the term “harm reduction.” Appalachian residents, often tough and resistant to change, are not easily convinced and stigma against drug users runs deep. For the three new staff members, Gariann Yochym, Virgil Hayes, and Jeremy Sharp, the task of introducing harm reduction to Haywood County is both challenge and an opportunity.

    After the task force disbands, I join Jeremy Sharp to deliver supplies to participants of the mobile syringe exchange program he has helped establish. The clouds have rolled away and the sun is just beginning to set behind the backdrop of the Blue Ridge mountains. We drive past picturesque fields of hay bales and grain silos. The town is so pretty it almost looks painted. We pull up to a log cabin with a single tire swing swaying in the breeze under a tree.

    But the beauty ends here. The man in the camouflage shirt who emerges from the cabin is drawn and thin with circles under his eyes. He tenses at my presence, especially once Jeremy tells him I am there to write an article. As a peace offering, I put away my notebook.

    Jeremy delivers syringes and naloxone to the man and his wife, who emerges from the house. The wife gives a sobering account of her recent arrest for drug possession and the agony of opioid withdrawal she endured while in jail. She asks Jeremy for help getting Suboxone treatment for opioid use and he offers to connect her to his co-worker, Gariann, who can arrange an appointment. Jeremy is quirky but likeable, and the couple’s affection for him is clear.

    When we are back in the car and I have use of my notebook again, Jeremy admits that the stories of death and despair that he encounters on a daily basis can get to him. “I walk into people’s lives for 20 minutes to do an exchange and it can be overwhelming to hear even just a description of all the things they are going through,” he says. 

    “But,” he adds, brightening. “There is nothing like that first naloxone reversal.”

    The struggle to find hope in a grim situation is one that plagues other advocates as well. NCHRC’s Gariann Yochym, who connects Haywood County program participants to social services, lives this fight every day.

    At first glance, Gariann gives off strong hippie vibes. She hails from Asheville, North Carolina’s most notoriously liberal city, but was born and raised in the hills of West Virginia. She glides easily between country twang and the Queen’s English, comfortable in both worlds but fully belonging to neither. In that way, she is well-suited to the work in Haywood County, which necessitates a level of mastery in both progressive public health policy and rural resistance to change.

    Since arriving in Haywood County, Yochym has been laying foundational work to connect drug users to services that can help them improve their health. Introducing harm reduction to an often hostile political environment is not easy. When I first ask Yochym what she thinks of her job, she offers a sunny response: She loves to help people and make a difference. But with prodding, she admits that the work can be difficult.

    “Trying to build relationships and respect, sometimes I don’t know when I should bite my tongue or hold my ground,” she says. “It can be challenging to build new partnerships, but I think we all recognize the importance of working together to address these complex problems.”

    Haywood County is a microcosm of the challenges that harm reduction faces in general. Though the harm reduction movement has existed for decades, in many ways it is still the new kid in town, pushing back against centuries of punitive and abstinence-only approaches to drug use. Long a stronghold in northern states, harm reduction has more recently begun laying foundation in southern states, where politics can be antagonistic. For advocates, the constant dilemma of when to compromise and when to hold firm is exhausting. Bringing opposite sides together often means that neither gets what it wants, and advocates are criticized both for pushing too hard and not pushing hard enough.

    Virgil Hayes, who supervises the Haywood County staff and programs, also lives under this constant pressure. “Not everyone is where you would like them to be in terms of support for harm reduction,” he says as we talk over lunch at a small diner. “We need to understand that change is inevitable, but people need time to part ways with what they have always known.”

    Hayes seems to embrace the opportunity that Haywood County presents. “It’s been an adventure,” he says, smiling and shaking his head. I sense this is an understatement.

    Hayes sees his most important task as working to create a seat at the decision-making table for active drug users. Even in other parts of the state where harm reduction is more accepted, there is still a tendency for non-impacted professionals to speak on behalf of people who use drugs. However, while in other counties stakeholders may have already marked their territory and become resistant to new voices, Haywood County has the opportunity to invite those voices from the beginning. Hayes and his co-workers are actively working to do just that.

    Ultimately, the small team is game for the challenge of bringing harm reduction to Haywood County.

    “I am inspired by the way this community has come together and opened themselves up to our program,” says Yochym. “We have been welcomed with an incredible amount of hospitality and support from unlikely partners.”

    Hayes thinks that education will be key to getting people on board with harm reduction. “People’s hearts change when they realize everything is not what it seems,” he says. He hopes to draw attention and resources to rural counties, where the effects of drug use are often swept under the rug.

    “I want to show how this problem impacts all areas across race, gender, class and geography,” he says. “I want to pull the covers back and show the issue is just as bad here [as in cities] and to present solutions for what we are going to do to change it.”

    It is not easy being dropped into a geographically isolated area and launching a harm reduction program without much precedent or guidance, relying on intuition and experience to know when to compromise and when to stand your ground. It’s an even bigger challenge to fight centuries of stigma to bring active drug users to the decision-making table. But if anyone can do it, I think Haywood County can.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Academics and Alcoholism

    Academics and Alcoholism

    Academics too often share a simultaneous denial and pride in their alcoholism, and the profession does little to dissuade such a sentiment, even with all the attendant problems it brings, preferring to interpret self-medication as mere collegiality.

    I’ve heard it repeated as a recovery truism that nobody is too dumb to stop drinking, but plenty of people are too smart. One supposes that’s the sort of thing intended to be helpful. I’ve no idea on the particular veracity of the claim, though I’ll say that people who are smarter (or think they’re smarter) can certainly generate some novel justifications for their alcoholism. 

    When I was deep in my cups, after stopping for one drink after class that turned into a blackout which had me checking the soles of my shoes for evidence of which way I stumbled home, I could structure an argument with recourse to French philosopher Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic about how “alcoholism” was a construction of the medical-industrial complex.

    After I woke up another countless time cringing as I recalled how I’d embarrassed myself yet again, it was only a short period until I was crafting a rationalization that drinking expressed an idyllic, pre-capitalist, medieval past that was based in revelry and joy.

    While noticing that my hangovers seemed to go on a bit too long, or that my hands were a little bit too unsteady, or that I seemed less and less able to stop that second drink from sliding into that twelfth, I could wax philosophical about how intoxication evoked the Dionysian rites, for after all it was Plato in The Symposium (a booze-soaked party) who claimed that “For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet,” and when I was getting my PhD in English what I loved was pints of lager, gin and tonic, and Jameson on the rocks, and sometimes if I was drunk enough and squinting with one eye, I could convince myself that I was a poet.

    If I was smart, it certainly manifested itself in the same tired old story as any other alcoholic, even if my justifications seemed clever to me. Because whether or not it’s true that some people are too smart to quit drinking, many academics might enthusiastically agree that’s the case, the better to avoid church basements. Psychologists call this “rationalization”…

    Lots of discussion is rightly had about the problems generated by substance abuse among undergraduates, but much less is had about alcoholism on the other side of the podium. Something is surprising about this – the cocktail hour is valorized in academe, especially in the humanities where with cracked pride there is a certain amount of cosplaying Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?, where the past tweedy imagined pleasures of sherry fueled conviviality run strong. Rebecca Schuman (who is not an alcoholic) writes in Slate about how this “campus alcohol epidemic, one largely ignored,” is often “heralded as an inextricable virtue of the Life of the Mind.”

    But for alcoholic academics there are also often darker particulars for returning time and time again to the bottle. The unnaturalness of living in one’s head all of the time, the stress and intermingling of life and work so that it almost always feels like you’re stuck in the latter (and people think we get summers off!), the often incapacitating imposter syndrome. Professors aren’t the only alcoholics of course; there are plenty of alcoholic plumbers, alcoholic nurses, alcoholic accountants, alcoholic cops, alcoholic lawyers, alcoholic janitors. Yet academics too often share a simultaneous denial and pride in that alcoholism, and the profession does little to dissuade such a sentiment, even with all the attendant problems it brings, preferring to interpret self-medication as mere collegiality.

    University of Notre Dame history professor Jon T. Coleman writes movingly of his own struggles with alcoholism in academe, explaining in an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education that one of the “most sinister aspects of alcoholism was the intramural loathing it encouraged,” describing how he drank to “mute the feelings of guilt, failure, and panic that came from not being able to control my drinking,” despite having “graduated from college, earned a Ph.D., secured a job, won book awards, and received tenure from a top-tier university while engaging in a habitual behavior that rendered me a dumbass.”

    In her remarkable new book The Recovering, Leslie Jamison similarly sees the appeal of annihilation and escape as central to the professorial preoccupation with self-destruction, explaining that drinking “plunged me into a darkness that seemed like honesty,” misinterpreting that “desperate drunk space underground” as “where the truth lived.” As a way of proffered hypothesis, that’s some of what fuels the alcohol problem among humanities scholars, a misapplied radical skepticism that’s suspicious of recovery-speak (which allows for convenient rationalizations). Combine this with the accumulated boozy romance of past generations, and one sees part of what motivates the problem.

    Even now I’m hesitant to use the word “alcoholic” in describing myself, chaffing at the “One Day at a Time” folk-wisdom of 12-step philosophy, historicizing and critiquing recovery in a manner that at its worst could easily justify relapse (though it hasn’t yet). But a certain saving grace also is gifted from my vocation, for as an English professor nothing is more paramount than the sanctity of words, and if I’m not an alcoholic, then the word itself has no meaning. One of the bits of hard-earned wisdom I’ve been gifted through the haze is the understanding that if my disease isn’t my fault, it’s surely my responsibility. I believe that had I not been an academic with a drinking problem, I’d have had some other job and identity – with a similar drinking problem.

    Even as a personal responsibility, the wider academy, because of its particular culture and history, must also do more to provide support for graduate students and faculty with substance abuse disorders. Graduate student Karen Kelsky in a guest blog for “The Professor is In” writes that the “stigma associated with addiction may be stronger than stigmas for mental illness,” in part because alcoholism is so often perceived as a “choice,” and not a complicated issue of heredity, acculturation, and brain chemistry. Even moderate drinkers face opprobrium in the wet groves of academe, with Shuman writing about how after she decided to quit excessive social drinking, she was “cut off socially” and that as she “drank less and less,” she was “accepted less and less by my peers.”

    There needs to be a shift in how academe grapples with alcoholism, and with alcoholics. In the short term, a small start would be to provide alternative possibilities at conferences and symposia that are so often permeated by alcohol. Jeffrey J. Cohen, a scholar of medieval literature at Arizona State University (who is not an alcoholic himself) argues in The Chronicle of Higher Education that those “who arrange conference social events were alcohol is served must ensure that they are not the sole access provided to conference conviviality.”

    In the long term, academics need to become more sensitive to and aware of the definitions of alcoholism and addiction. Kelsky writes of how a “common misconception… is that once someone has gone through treatment, they are ‘cured.’” Consequently, non-drinking graduate students and faculty are often shut out of professional opportunities, their self-care interpreted as being the behavior of a scold or a Puritan. With an important awareness of how difference is manifested for various marginalized groups in our culture, too often academics don’t extend the same consideration to those in recovery, or provide assistance for our colleagues in need.

    Of course even if mental health and substance abuse care are woefully lacking in professional contexts, most fellow individual academics can and do respond to those in recovery with care and empathy. I first read Coleman’s essay after it was sent to me by a concerned colleague and I was able to recognize the malady, so eloquently described, as my own. I drank for two more years.

    My thirst was unquenchable, simply confirming Coleman’s observation about being “Caught in a trap… [with] an inability to break loose.”

    The kindness in being sent that essay had an effect, though, part of that arsenal in my spirit that I was able to drudge up after numerous shaky mornings haunted by fear, a little indication in which I knew that the center could not hold, and in which I could sometimes glimpse the awful grace of that thing called hope, which we alcoholics know as a “moment of clarity.” Coleman did break loose, and so have I for the time being, while always remembering that “There but for the grace of God go I.”

    Three years after my bottom I still work on that first step sometimes, but I find that the organ which made those old rationalizations so evocative can be helpful in actual not drinking. I wake up sober in the morning, and I can reflect on the ways in which recovery bares the mark of the conversion narrative, I can trace the historical antecedents of 12-step groups, I can examine how important issues of race and gender affect how we discuss addiction and recovery. More than enough intellectualism in sobriety; actually, more than there ever was in the tantalizing hum of drunkenness. There can be, as it turns out, as much hope in the classrooms as there is in the rooms, occluded though it may seem, but for that I am grateful.

    Ed S. is a widely published writer and an academic.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • "I Wish Daddy Didn't Drink So Much": Judith Vigna’s Misguided Bibliotherapy

    "I Wish Daddy Didn't Drink So Much": Judith Vigna’s Misguided Bibliotherapy

    Vigna seems convinced that a few watercolor washes can make the world a better place, but her idealism is misguided; stories of the horrible undercurrent of the real world are more likely to scare children.

    Although the following review is not positive, I empathize with what Judith Vigna tried to accomplish. In the late 1980’s, she took on a topic that few writers of children’s books would choose to address: how to explain family difficulties brought on by alcoholism and addiction. Beyond the intimate connection of a parent or trusted family member talking directly to a child, raising this issue on a public platform is like walking through a minefield. It’s so easy to make a single misstep that blows the project straight to heck. Not to hell, mind you, we’re talking about children’s books.

    I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much (1988) and My Big Sister Takes Drugs (1990) were published by Albert Whitman & Company as fictional self-help stories to educate kids about alcoholism and substance use disorder. With these books, Vigna invents a kind of misguided bibliotherapy designed for children in preschool to grade 3. The books do a belly flop, and it’s hard to imagine that either would successfully educate or console a young child, although that is their goal. Moreover, both books are culturally biased since they focus on white characters in either suburban America or a strange rural environment where isolated houses exist in the middle of nowhere for no good reason.

    Is such grim reality needed in children’s picture books? In the context of both of these efforts, there is a sense that something precious has been hijacked to accomplish a worthy educational goal. Children’s storybooks and picture books are a beloved part of childhood, combining the visual imagination with language. The innocence of the genre is a key element to the lasting success of so many outstanding children’s books from Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are and Dr. Seuss’s The Cat In The Hat to Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree and Margaret Wise’s Goodnight Moon.

    Although each of these stories teaches a life lesson about good behavior and decency, they don’t cross the line by subverting the fantasy to morality. Indeed, the fantasy bolsters the moral message, taking it to the next level by presenting the ideas in an artistic context that provides access for a child. When I recall first reading books as a little boy, I remember the fun I experienced and the thrill of turning the pages. In Judith Vigna’s stories, the fun is replaced by a dull melancholy ruptured here and there by a disturbing undercurrent of anxiety and fear. Even when hope is presented in the end and partial solutions proffered, the ugliness remains, like the father’s undeterred alcoholism in I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much.

    The best example of this replacement happens in I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much, aimed at kids in pre-school to grade 2. The night before Christmas is disturbed when young Lisa’s drunken father stumbles into her bedroom dressed as Santa Claus. On the very first page of text in the book, Lisa explains that the costume did not fool her for a second. She says, “I knew it was only Daddy in a Santa Claus suit because he bumped into my bed twice and spilled beer on the rug. I didn’t like that. When Daddy drinks a lot of beer, he acts funny.”

    In other words, even a child knows that Santa Claus doesn’t show up drunk. Still, Lisa is excited because her father is going to take her sledding the next day. Santa even leaves a note taped to her new sled that says her daddy promised him that they would go sledding and try out the present after breakfast. Unfortunately, Daddy is too hungover to go sledding. Lisa asks later in the day if they can go, but Dad is drinking beer while watching television, focused solely on the hair of the dog that bit him the night before.

    Lisa’s father ignores her request, and she gets mad, telling him that he promised. The face of the little girl is drawn with such sadness and disappointment. Reacting to her feelings, her father lashes out and yells at Lisa. She ends up playing with her sled in the house, imagining that she’s in the clouds but feeling sad and scared.

    Although there is no direct physical violence in the book, beyond loud fights between the mother and father, the threat looms. The bad times continue and culminate with an intoxicated failed attempt to go sledding. Later, Lisa mopes outside as her mother and father have a big screaming match inside the house with sounds of breaking glass.

    The story ends when Lisa and her mother escape her father’s drunken anger by going over to Mrs. Field’s house. They have a nice Christmas dinner with this old lady, and Lisa opens up about how her father’s drinking destroyed Christmas. Mrs. Field tells Lisa that she used to drink too much before she got help. One day, her father might be ready to get help as well. Until then, she advises this little girl, “you can learn to be happier. You can try to do one of your favorite things every day.”

    And that’s about it. There’s a closing bit where Lisa returns home and her father promises to take her sledding on Sunday. But nothing changes, and Lisa remains in a crappy situation with little learned and less relieved. Telling a child to do one of her favorite things every day as a response to alcoholism in the family is like telling a cancer patient to go to Disneyland every weekend. It profoundly fails to address the primary problem.

    Vigna seems convinced that a few watercolor washes can make the world a better place, but her idealism is misguided; stories of the horrible undercurrent of the real world are more likely to scare children. Story time is not when the dark issues of humanity should be raised with children. Going out and doing a favorite thing is not an effective approach to dealing with an alcoholic parent.

    In complex.com’s list of The 25 Most Ridiculous Holiday Children’s Books, Vigna’s book comes in at number one. It’s an impressive accomplishment because the competition is stiff, ranging from How Santa Lost His Pants and How Santa Lost His Job to Santa Cow Island and The Flying Canoe: A Christmas Story.

    My Big Sister Takes Drugs is Judith Vigna’s second attempt at the bibliotherapy children’s picture book genre. Designed for Grades 2 through 3, a slightly older crowd from seven to nine years old, the book tells the story of little Paul who is dealing with the fact that his teenage sister, Tina, is using drugs. The drugs profoundly change Tina in a negative way. Rather than play games with Paul, she offers him prescription pills. Later, after being busted by the cops for smoking crack in the park with her delinquent friends, Tina is shipped off to rehab. Tina’s drug use causes Paul to lose friends because other parents don’t want their kids around his older sister. Also, once Tina goes to rehab, there is no money left to send him to soccer camp.

    As part of a Vigna’s desperate drug education and awareness program, this dank children’s picture book only succeeds in stigmatizing substance use disorder. Okay, Tina has become a mean big sister and hangs out with mean kids. Paul feels threatened in his own home. However, these scare tactics of losing friends and opportunities because of drug usage are counterproductive to any real understanding of addiction as a disease in general and a family disease in particular.

    The story is poorly told and not believable. For example, there is a weird section where Tina tries to get her brother high on New Year’s Eve, offering him prescription medication while she reclines on her bed. Paul declines and Tina calls him a chicken. When Paul inevitably tells his parents about the incident, Tina is grounded for a week.

    Such a sequence makes little or no sense. Why would a teenage sister want to give her little brother drugs? Why would she be home on New Year’s Eve with her little brother and not out with her friends? Does Vigna understand drug culture and teens at all? Tina is way too open about what she is doing with both her parents and Paul. The generally secretive nature of adolescent drug use is replaced with typical adolescent rebellion, a replacement which does not do justice to the truly insidious nature of drug abuse and addiction. I wondered why Judith Vigna did not do more first-hand research before writing a book designed to educate children on such a crucial issue.

    At the same time, at this very moment, I feel a bit guilty about being so hard on Judith Vigna. Although her idealism might be misdirected, it comes from a loving instinct to do good in the world and help other people. At the end of I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much, she includes A Note to Grown-ups. In this note, Vigna writes about the challenge of alcoholism as a family disease: “The children tend to blame themselves, and without adequate support, may feel ashamed, confused, and alone… Parents and other caring adults can help by reassuring children that they are not responsible for the drinking.”

    But despite such good intentions, Vigna’s attempt to offer such reassurance and educate children about substance use disorder, a worthy and necessary goal, falls flat. 

    View the original article at thefix.com