Archive for September 2025

Fridays this fall, 82-year-old Marion Gommerman will be sitting in a Toronto classroom alongside fellow university students young enough to be her grandkids…. Dr. Raza Mirza (above) has taught the health and aging course Gommerman is taking for about a decade, and made adjustments over time. He began inviting seniors to in-class visits, which everyone enjoyed, according to the assistant professor of social work at the University of Toronto. While the elders weren’t taking the course at that time, they often stayed to listen in, for example, to lectures “about risk factors for dementia or social isolation or retirement planning.”

The Geese model combines drama and theatrical performance of complex social work situations with keynote speakers who are experts in their fields, such as Professor Harry Ferguson (home visits), Michael Sheath (child sexual abuse imagery) and Ciaran, in relation to substance misuse. Each performance has been designed and developed in collaboration with experts by experience, to ensure not only the integration of theory with theatre, but also to enable social work professionals and students to explore their responses to practice-relevant scenarios in real time. Performances also provide space to pause, reflect, and revisit decisions, all without real-world consequences.

Medicinal cannabis was legalised in Australia in 2016. But use really took off in 2021, when the TGA changed how people could access the unapproved products. Use in young men has been increasing the fastest. Generally, about one-third of use is for anxiety. This is despite TGA guidance stating medicinal cannabis containing THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) is generally not appropriate for patients who “have a previous psychotic or concurrent active mood or anxiety disorder”.

Although there is an entire treatment industry devoted to “sex and love addiction,” as well as numerous 12-step groups, there is no such diagnosis in psychiatry or psychology. The current version of the D.S.M., the diagnostic manual used by mental health professionals, leaves out sexual compulsions in the chapter on addiction, citing limited scientific evidence. Sexual compulsion would fall under what the manual calls “unspecified sexual dysfunction.” “There is an enormous controversy about the term,” said Anna Randall, a sex therapist and clinical social worker who leads The Alternative Sexualities Health Research Alliance.

For Michael Kleinman, U.S. policy director at the Future of Life Institute, the lawsuits underscore a pointAI safety researchers have been making for years: AI companies can’t be trusted to police themselves…. He told Fortune the current moment echoes the rise of social media, where he said tech companies were effectively allowed to “experiment on kids” with little oversight. “We’ve spent the last 10 to 15 years trying to catch up to the harms social media caused. Now we’re letting tech companies experiment on kids again with chatbots, without understanding the long-term consequences,” he said.

Atlantic City is one of the epicenters for food insecurity in New Jersey. A 2022 study by the New Jersey Economic and Development Authority listed city residents living in the second-worst “food desert” region in the state…. A quantitative study on Atlantic City’s food insecurity crisis by the regional think tank South Jersey Forward found that the overall satisfaction with the quality of food and produce in Atlantic City was “poor.” The study also found that residents had never heard of alternatives such as mobile food trucks, and most had to rely on public transportation to reach supermarkets outside of the city to find quality food products.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that drugs, both illicit and prescription, saved my life. They helped me when nothing else would. It’s hard to see through the haze of propaganda, the false divide that’s been placed between medications and illegal substances. But, to me, that divide is much less clear. People use illicit drugs for the same reason they use prescription ones—to quell pain, to help them focus or get through the day, to ease their depression and anxiety. What differentiates these drugs is less a matter of their purpose, and more a matter of how our laws and media treat these drugs. They’ve associated them with the ravages of poverty, they’ve criminalized them so that users of these drugs end up in a constant cycle of violence. We’ve been led to believe that drugs cause the breakdown, when in truth they are part and parcel of it. If our minds are constantly burdened, constantly being reshaped by the trauma of capitalism, of course we’re going to need ameliorants. Of course we’re going to need a break.