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Stigma of Addiction and Mental Illness is Alive and Well, Even in Our Own Families.

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In five days, my brother Brett will be 50 years old.  It should be a huge party with love, laughter, family, and friends. But there will be no party.

I can still hear it ringing in my ears, “Your brother was a junkie who deserved to die.”

Anyone who loves or has lost someone addicted to drugs or alcohol has heard this very statement in some form or another. Many times. It can often be ignored. Tolerated. Accepted. Maybe someone hasn’t said it to you directly, in those exact words, but you hear them loud and clear. And so does our loved one.

I don’t typically react, it’s not my style; after all it is a waste of valuable energy for me to scream and challenge every person with whom I come into contact. I am confident not only in who I am and my belief that addiction and mental illness are diseases, but also in who my brother was.

Everyone can be pushed past their limits. To where they have had enough. They’re hurt. Frustrated. And they need to stand up for what they believe is right, when someone else can’t find the courage to have a voice of their own. Not because I’m fighting my brother’s battles; after all we are no longer two- and six-years-old playing in the neighborhood sand box. But rather because I have walked this painful road, witnessed the judgment and because of that I see the world in a more empathetic way.

I remember vividly my mother and I sitting for about an hour, waiting for my brother to be seen in emergency. His leg rattled with anxiety until he was taken into a private room. We explained to the nurse that Brett was severely intoxicated and needed help to safely withdraw off the alcohol, not that we needed to as his situation was very clear from his scruffy appearance and glassy eyes. And she began to take his vitals.

It wasn’t the nurse’s cold, disassociated approach while taking my brother’s blood pressure, pricking his arm with a needle, or asking him how much he had had to drink that made my blood boil. It was the fact that it was obvious she absolutely loathed him. For the first time ever, like a bolt of electricity running through my veins, I felt judgment—exactly what my brother must have felt. Pure unadulterated judgment. As she left the room, I scampered quickly behind her, catching up in front of the nurse’s station.

“Excuse me,” I said. She didn’t hear me so I repeated myself. She turned around to look at me.

“Hi. Listen, I don’t mean to be rude. I completely understand and appreciate how hard your job is and how many different things you must see. I even get that on some level maybe to you my brother isn’t sick in the same way as most of the people here, and that you believe this may be purely self-induced. What I need to remind you is that he is a human being.”

She didn’t blink.

I continued, “Now I don’t care what you did yesterday or how you are tomorrow. All I care about is that for right now, when you come into that room, you show a little compassion as that is a person in there. A person! That is someone’s brother, someone’s son. And despite what you very obviously perceive as completely disgusting, someone loves him. Do you think you can do that?”

I didn’t give her time to answer.

“’Cause if you can’t, then what I suggest is that for the next hour or so you FAKE IT!”

I walked away, so I didn’t have to look at her stony expression for another second. Before stepping through the door to sit quietly in the corner of my brother’s room, I caught my breath as I was so overwhelmingly pissed off.

I understand and appreciate how hard nurses work—after all, our mother is a nurse—and I can imagine that they see all sorts of things. But that’s their job, a job that they choose. To treat someone very obviously, whatever their circumstance, like they are below dirt, I cannot take. As I looked at my brother at his worst, just as I had done so many times before, all I thought was he is in there.

The doctor arrived a short time later. I knew the drill; it seemed like I had heard this a thousand times before. They couldn’t keep Brett overnight as all the beds were full, although I appreciate the doctor did give him a shot of Valium. At least I think it was Valium, which by then I knew belongs to the class of medications called benzodiazepines. It is used for the short-term relief of symptoms of mild to moderate anxiety and for alcohol withdrawal. Mom and I knew that at least it would help Brett get through the night and the suggestion the doctor offered was for us to head back to the detox center in the morning.

What most people don’t know is that people with severe addiction can actually die from the effects of withdrawal. Whether you want to challenge your mind with that truth or not, the choice debate doesn’t work here: they cannot just stop. My brother needed medical supervision and help as he came off the booze. Normally it would take four to six days in which he would be given things like Valium to ease his way through the excruciating pain and suffering of the withdrawal process. Alcohol is actually one of the most dangerous substances to come off. People addicted to alcohol can experience symptoms like nightmares, vomiting, diarrhea, shivering, sweating, racing heart, fever, shaking, tightness in the chest, and difficulty breathing.

That is if things go well.

If things go badly, our loved ones can have a stroke, a heart attack, or a grand mal seizure. During withdrawal, long-term alcohol users can suffer psychosis that manifests as hallucinations and delusions, which is why they need to be monitored by a health care professional. Delirium tremors (DT’s) can sometimes be associated with severe, uncontrollable tremors of the extremities and secondary symptoms such as anxietypanic attacks, and paranoia. All these realities. And yet we are once again being sent on our way as all the beds were full.

It seemed like a completely different nurse came into the room, yet it wasn’t. She was kind, compassionate, and caring, and as we left, she said to my brother, “Take care of yourself, Brett.”

I whispered, “Thank you” to her as we walked out the door, and I hope she knew how much I meant it.

My magnificent, smart, witty, handsome, kind, soft-spoken, and much-loved brother took that first sip of alcohol in high school, as most of our own young children will do some day. Sadly, he lost his battle with severe substance use and mental health issues on March 18, 2012 when he took his own life. I remember very vividly a few months after he passed away, someone in our close family circle was standing in my office and he said directly to me, “Your brother was a junkie who deserved to die. He had more than enough chances.”

I could be rattled, offended, shocked; I could have screamed, yelled, and told him to get the hell out of my office. But I didn’t. Instead, I calmly took a sip of my coffee, said a little “hmmm” to myself and changed the topic. I assure you it was not because I am quiet, scared, or I didn’t know what I wanted to say. But rather the opposite as I am confident, bold, outspoken, and unapologetically honest.

I have no interest in getting into a war of words. I have grown and learned so much since that hospital room visit more than fifteen years ago. I have learned that stigma is alive and well, not only in the healthcare profession. In society. In the media. And even in our own families and circle of friends.

I am not shocked nor surprised that we live in a world where some believe this statement about my brother and others battling addiction. It surprises me that we live in a world where it is acceptable to say it out loud. That somehow, it is all right to inflict intentional pain on someone who has lost someone who they love very much.

My approach is choosing to dedicate my time and energy into calmly and confidently sharing my journey and experience, every uncomfortable piece of it, without shame. The truth is I have been surrounded by alcoholism my whole life; it is on many branches of my family tree. But what I experienced with my brother; most could not fathom. I feel that if people hear the whole story, beginning with us as innocent children, it might open their hearts, change their perceptions, and perhaps give understanding and compassion for people with addiction and mental health challenges in society—our mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, friends, and neighbors.

For me, I am not going to spend my life arguing, debating, letting people break my spirit for what I know and believe with all my heart. What I remind myself when I share our story to enlighten others is that this way of thinking and speaking about Brett with hurtful, condemning statements is not at all about my brother’s character or who he was; it is about theirs.

Sending love, light and strength when you need it to everyone, on this Sat, September 10th, World Suicide Prevention Day.

Author of the powerful memoir The Sun is Gone: A Sister Lost in Secrets, Shame and Addiction and How I Broke Free. Outspoken advocate to help eliminate the shame + stigma surrounding Addiction + Mental Health. Visit www.jodeeprouse.ca or follow on instagram @jodeeprouse

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conflict

How the Biden-Harris admin pushed Russia into war with Ukraine

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From LifeSiteNews

By Bob Marshall

I was … bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe.… Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.

In September, Vice President Kamala Harris stated several points at the White House as to how she would handle the Ukraine-Russia war: “I will work to ensure Ukraine prevails in this war.… Putin started this war, and … Putin could set his sights on Poland, the Baltic states, and other NATO Allies.… [S]ome in my country … demand that Ukraine accept neutrality, and would require Ukraine to forego security relationships with other nations. These proposals are the same of those of Putin.”

But these are the same Biden-Harris tactics and policies that provoked war.

Harris blames Russian President Vladimir Putin for the war. But the proximate source of the Russia-Ukraine conflict goes back beyond Putin to the breakup of the Soviet Empire and even earlier.

End of the Cold War

In late October 1989, the famed Berlin Wall as a dividing line between Socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) and West Germany, called a “wall of mistrust” by then former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, was crumbling.

Obviously, Gorbachev, with almost 400,000 troops in East Germany could have stopped the reunification. But Western officials gave Russian leaders assurances there was nothing to worry about. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker told Gorbachev that NATO expansion would proceed, “not one inch eastward.” The next day, West German chancellor Helmut Kohl assured Gorbachev, “NATO should not expand the sphere of its activity.”

The Los Angeles Times noted, “Less than a week later, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to begin reunification talks. No formal deal was struck, but from all the evidence, the quid pro quo was clear: Gorbachev acceded to Germany’s western alignment and the U.S. would limit NATO’s expansion.… NATO’S widening umbrella doesn’t justify Putin’s … incursions in Ukraine or Georgia. Still, the evidence suggests that Russia’s protests have merit and that U.S. policy has contributed to current tensions in Europe.”

Documents at George Washington University testify to agreements made between Western leaders and Russian officials at this time – that western nations would not expand NATO to the East.

Yeltsin said to Clinton, “I want to get a clear understanding of your idea of NATO expansion, because now I see nothing but humiliation for Russia if you proceed. How do you think it looks to us if one bloc continues to exist while the Warsaw Pact has been abolished? It’s a new form of encirclement if the one surviving Cold War bloc expands right up to the borders of Russia. Many Russians have a sense of fear. What do you want to achieve with this if Russia is your partner, they ask. I ask it too. Why do you want to do this?”

When Clinton spoke to Yeltsin in 1995, there were 15 NATO member countries. When Clinton left office, there were 18.

Russia’s opposition to NATO expansion

In 2016, President Clinton’s former Defense Secretary Bill Perry said, “In the last few years, most of the blame can be pointed at the actions that Putin has taken. But in the early years … the United States deserves much of the blame.… Our first action … in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand, bringing in eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia.”

Former CIA Director Robert Gates, who also served as Secretary of Defense for President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, opposed the policy of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.”

In June 1997, 50 former senators, retired military officers, diplomats, and foreign policy academics wrote to President Clinton about the problems and ill consequences of NATO expansion:

[T]he current U.S. led effort to expand NATO … is a policy error of historic proportions.… NATO expansion will decrease allied security and unsettle European stability …

In Russia, NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition … [and] bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement.

In 1998, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman asked George Kennan, who devised the successful “containment” policy to prevent the Soviet Union from achieving its goal of world domination through open warfare, what he thought of the U.S. Senate ratifying NATO expansion even up to Russia’s border. Kennan replied:

[I]t is the beginning of a new Cold War.… There was no reason for this.… No one was threatening anybody else.… We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so.

I was … bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe.… Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.

In 2007, Putin noted, “NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders … and what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact … NATO General Secretary Mr. Woerner in Brussels on May 17, 1990 … said … ‘The fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee.’ Where are these guarantees?”

Fiona Hill points to 2007 when Putin “put the world, and certainly Europe, on notice that Moscow would not accept the further expansion of NATO.… In 2008 NATO gave an open door to Georgia and Ukraine.… Four months after NATO’s Bucharest Summit, there was the [Russian] invasion of Georgia. There wasn’t an invasion of Ukraine then because the Ukrainian government pulled back from seeking NATO membership.”

William Burns, now President Biden’s Central Intelligence director and former U.S. ambassador to Russia, wrote to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2008:

Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players … I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.

Putin told Burns in 2008: “No Russian leader could stand idly by in the face of steps toward NATO membership for Ukraine. That would be a hostile act toward Russia. We would do all in our power to prevent it.”

In 2015, the German Der Speigel magazine interviewed Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter, regarding the status of Ukraine in response to the abrupt change in the presidential leadership and Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Brzezinski suggested that “Ukraine should be free to choose its political identity.… But … Russia should be assured credibly that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO.”

More recently in 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Pope Francis said that the ‘barking of NATO at the door of Russia’ might have led to the invasion of Ukraine.… The pope … deplored the brutality of the war.… Pope Francis … described Russia’s attitude to Ukraine as ‘an anger that I don’t know whether it was provoked but was perhaps facilitated’ by the presence in nearby countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.… ‘In Ukraine, it was other states that created the conflict.’”

The caution of these experienced statesmen and world leaders is lost on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Family Research Council, publishers of The Washington Stand at washingtonstand.com.

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How Biden-Harris blocked a Russia-Ukraine peace deal

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From LifeSiteNews

By Bob Marshall

While a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine seemed likely weeks into the war, we must remember when U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin admitted in April 2022 that America’s goal wasn’t peace, but weakening Russia.

Western media sources documented Ukraine and Russia peace proposals during the first weeks of the conflict in February 2022. Reuters noted, “Ukraine wants peace and is ready for talks with Russia, including on neutral status regarding NATO, Ukrainian presidential advisor Mykhailo Podolyak told Reuters. … ‘If talks are possible, they should be held. If Moscow … want[s] to hold talks, including on neutral status, we are not afraid of this. … Our readiness for dialogue is part of our persistent pursuit of peace.’”

Reuters printed a follow-up 14 hours later: “The Russian and Ukrainian governments … signaled an openness to negotiations even as authorities in Kyiv urged citizens to help defend the capital from advancing Russian forces. … Ukraine and Russia will consult in the coming hours on a time and place for talks.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s spokesman said, “Ukraine was and remains ready to talk about a ceasefire and peace. … We agreed to the proposal of the President of the Russian Federation.” But as Reuters went on to note, “U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price said Russia’s offer was an attempt to conduct diplomacy ‘at the barrel of a gun,’ and that President Vladimir Putin’s military must stop bombing Ukraine if it was serious about negotiations.”

In Foreign Affairs, Fiona Hill and Angela Stent wrote: “According to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and … Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”

The British Financial Times reported in March 2022: “Israel’s Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has been the primary international mediator. … Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Zelensky told the Financial Times that any deal would involve: ‘the troops of the Russian Federation … leaving the territory of Ukraine’ captured since the invasion began on February 24. … Ukraine would maintain its armed forces but would be obliged to stay outside military alliances such as NATO and refrain from hosting foreign military bases on its territory.”

The Times report continued, “Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov told reporters … that neutrality for Ukraine based on the status of Austria or Sweden was a possibility. ‘This option is really being discussed now, and is one that can be considered neutral.’ … Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said that ‘absolutely specific wordings’ were ‘close to being agreed’ in the negotiations. … The putative deal also included … rights for the Russian language in Ukraine, where it is widely spoken though Ukrainian is the only official language. … The biggest sticking point remains Russia’s demand that Ukraine recognize its 2014 annexation of Crimea and the independence of two separatist statelets in the eastern Donbas border region. Ukraine … was willing to compartmentalise the issue.”

Ukrainska Pravda reported: “[T]he Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson, who appeared in the capital almost without warning, brought two simple messages. The first is that Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not. Johnson’s position was that the collective West … now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that here was a chance to ‘press him.’ Three days after Johnson left for Britain, Putin went public and said talks with Ukraine ‘had turned into a dead end.’”

U.S. changes war aims

But logically, weakening Russia was significantly less likely to happen if the Ukraine war ended in April 2022. Pentagon officials met in mid-April in a classified meeting with eight large defense contractors including Raytheon Company and Lockheed Martin Corporation for discussion on resupplying weapons to Ukraine to prepare for a longer war with Russia.

Charles Freeman, past U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, noted that “from the very beginning the solution has been obvious, which is some variant of the Austrian State Treaty of 1955, meaning a guaranteed independence in return for … decent treatment of minorities inside the guaranteed state; and … neutrality for the guaranteed state.”

Prolonging the war for whatever reason is not a criteria for conducting a “just war.” Extending the war would mean many more grandchildren, children, husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, cousins, and civilians would be killed, wounded, or maimed among both Ukrainian and Russian casualties. Surely, the Russian and Ukrainian families and friends of those killed, wounded, or injured as well as owners of businesses destroyed in the war, when reflecting on their losses, would have thought that accepting the initial agreements were much better than what has happened since.

American columnist Pat Buchanan pointed out that “President Joe Biden almost hourly promises, ‘We are not going to war in Ukraine.’ Why would he then not readily rule out NATO membership for Ukraine, which would require us to do something Biden himself says we Americans, for our own survival, should never do: go to war with Russia?”

Russia-Ukraine accidental nuclear war

Putin warned that if the U.S. or NATO gave permission for Ukraine to use western missiles to strike deeply into Russia, that would radically change the current war because while choosing targets inside Russia can be done by Ukraine military personnel, getting the missiles to hit the long range Russian targets depends directly on western control guiding and directing the missiles. Putin said, “[I]t will mean nothing less than the direct participation of NATO countries, the United States, and European countries, in the war in Ukraine.”

Dmitry Peskov, Russia’s press representative, said that Putin’s statement was, “extremely clear, unambiguous and does not allow for any double readings. We have no doubt that it has reached its intended recipients.” Biden-Harris have backed away for now.

America was founded on the belief in Providence, which consists of the Creator acting within the sphere of human history. Similarly, many citizens of Austria, a Catholic country, placed their trust in Divine Providence by engaging in a multi-year prayer crusade to free Austria from the Soviet military occupation that occurred after World War II. It included the Catholic Rosary organized by the Austrian Franciscan priest, Fr. Petrus Pavlicek, who believed that, “Peace is a gift of God, not the work of politicians.”

The effort to secure Austrian neutrality succeeded on May 15, 1955 with representatives of the Soviet Union, Great Britain, the United States, and France signing a treaty under which all military occupation forces from WWII would withdraw from Austria if it would maintain neutrality. Austria has not joined NATO and has remained neutral to this day.

Unlike Biden-Harris, President Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance do not have to reverse themselves on the prosecution of the Russia-Ukraine war. Barron’s reported in October that Donald Trump told Ukraine President Zelenskyy that the war never needed to happen, and that The Wall Street Journal reported that about one million have been killed or wounded on both sides.

Our late President John F. Kennedy told the 1963 graduates at American University that nuclear powers must avoid confrontations where the choice is between, “either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy — or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

Rolling the dice on nuclear war especially when the United States has no defensive shield to stop ICBMs and no defense whatsoever against Russia’s 6,000mph hypersonic nuclear missiles is completely lacking in prudence.

When Americans voted on November 5, perhaps they considered which ticket had promised to “quickly” end the Russia-Ukraine war.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Family Research Council, publishers of The Washington Stand at washingtonstand.com.

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