NEWSWEEK Cover: Growing Up Bipolar

In the May 26 issue of Newsweek ( on newsstands Monday, May 19): "Growing up Bipolar." Newsweek reports on the high number of children who have been diagnosed as bipolar by telling one family's wrenching story about their struggles with their 10-year-old son who has the disorder. Plus: prosecutors who have quit their posts at Guantanamo; Obama's camp and courting Hillary voters; America's top public high schools; "Sex and the City" really was conventional and summer vacations on the cheap. (PRNewsFoto/NEWSWEEK) NEW YORK, NY UNITED STATES 05/18/2008

18 May 2008 16:34 Africa/Lagos


NEWSWEEK Cover: Growing Up Bipolar

Newsweek Examines Bipolar Disorder in Children Through Experience of One Family

Disease Hard to Pin Down; at Least 800,000 Children in U.S. Diagnosed

Unclear How Drugs Work; No Studies on Long-Term Effects in Children

NEW YORK, May 18 /PRNewswire/ -- As Newsweek General Editor Mary Carmichael reports in the May 26 cover, "Growing Up Bipolar" (on newsstands Monday, May 19), childhood bipolar disorder is hard to pin down. At least 800,000 children in the U.S. have been diagnosed as bipolar, no doubt some of them wrongly. There are many drugs, but it's unclear how they work. Often they don't work at all, and they may interfere with normal brain growth. There are no studies on their long-term effects in children. Yet untreated bipolar disorder can be disastrous; 10 percent of sufferers commit suicide.

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Parents must choose between two wrenching options: treat their children and risk a bad outcome, or don't treat and risk a worse one. No matter what they do, they are in for uncertainty and pain. Carmichael reports on the dilemma by telling the wrenching story of one family, Amy and Richie Blake and their 10-year-old son Max, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when he was two years old.


She reports that Max was seven the first time he tried to kill himself. He wrote a four-page will bequeathing his toys to his friends and jumped out his ground-floor bedroom window, falling six feet into his backyard, bruised but in one piece. Children don't really know what death is, as the last page of Max's will made clear: "If I'm still alive when I have grandchildren," it began. But they know what unhappiness is and what it means to suffer.


On a recent Monday afternoon, Max, now 10, was supposed to come home on the schoolbus, but a counselor summoned his mother at 2:15. When Amy Blake arrived at school, her son gave her the note that had prompted the call. "Dear Mommy & Daddy," it read, "I am really feeling sad and depressed and lousy about myself. I love you but I still feel like I want to kill myself. I am really sad but I just want help to feel happy again. The reason I feel so bad is because I can't sleep at night.


And dad yells at me to just sleep at night. But, I can't control it. It is not me that does control it. I don't know what controls it, but it is not me. I really really need some help, love Max!!!!! I Love you Mommy I Love you Daddy."


At 10, Max Blake has been on 38 different psychoactive drugs, Carmichael reports. The meds have serious side effects. They have made Max gain weight, and because he's still growing, they frequently need to be changed. The Blakes are aware that many people think their child -- any child -- should not be on so many drugs. They aren't always happy about it either. But to some degree, they have made their peace with medication.


"He's oppositional-defiant, he's dyslexic, he's ADHD, he's OCD," says Amy. "Give me an initial and he has it." Bipolar children, especially those diagnosed early, often have such a litany of disorders. The bipolar brain tries to compensate for its weak prefrontal cortex by roping in other areas to help; these areas may now become dysfunctional, too. Child psychiatrists thus face an enormous practical challenge: they often can't treat one disorder without affecting another one. "It's like a balloon where you push on one side and the other side pops out," says Janet Wozniak, the Massachusetts General Hospital psychiatrist who helped define childhood bipolar disorder. With kids like Max, she adds, parents often have to settle for "just having one part of the symptoms reduced."


Max's life has improved in some ways since his early childhood. The Manville School, part of the Judge Baker Children's Center in Boston, has given him a social life. Last year he won a "Welcome Wagon" award after teachers noticed he was always the first to show new students around. When his classmates have outbursts of their own, he talks them down. "He'll say that maybe they need to take some space, take a deep breath, leave the classroom," says his teacher, Julie Higgins.


He has not, however, figured out how to talk himself down, and for all he has progressed as a classmate, he struggles as a student. Technically, Max is in fourth grade -- Manville does not separate grade levels -- but he is behind in some subjects. He loves science and art, but he has a hard time reading, and although he is creative, he can't put his ideas in a coherent order. Even holding a pencil for more than a few minutes can be a challenge. "Sometimes you can look at him and you know his disorder has captured him," says the school's director, Jim Prince. "But we can't abandon him. We have to be able to hold on to him, sometimes literally, but also emotionally, to help him come out on the other side."


Read cover story at www.Newsweek.com.


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FACTS ON BIPOLAR

NEWSWEEK Cover: Splitsville and The Divorce Generation

The April 21, 2008 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, April 14), "Splitsville," provides an intimate look at the ways divorce evolved from something shocking to a fact of American life. Senior Editor David Jefferson interviews his high-school classmates who tell their sides of growing up as part of "Divorce Generation." Plus: how a recession may improve air travel; Barack Obama's bottom-up foreign-policy experience; what's really in your kids' videogames and Portishead on their long-awaited third album. (PRNewsFoto/NEWSWEEK) NEW YORK, NY UNITED STATES 04/13/2008

13 Apr 2008 16:31 Africa/Lagos


NEWSWEEK Cover: Splitsville

The 'Divorce Generation' Grows up and Reflects on the 'Ultimate Threat to Innocence'

Many From the Class of 1982 Still Deal With the Impact Their Parents' Decisions had on Them

NEW YORK, April 13 /PRNewswire/ --

During the 1950's marriage was the most powerful social force. After California Governor Ronald Reagan's 1969, "no- fault" divorce law allowed couples to end a marriage by declaring "irreconcilable differences," divorce became the most powerful social force. Divorce evolved from something shocking, even shameful, into a routine fact of American life. Its effects, however, are no less profound.


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In the April 21 Newsweek cover "Splitsville" (on newsstands Monday, April 14), Senior Editor David J. Jefferson and his classmates from Ulysses S. Grant High School class of '82 tell their sides of growing up in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley as part of "Divorce Generation." In a series of intimate interviews with former classmates, Jefferson examines how divorce changed the lives of the children who lived through the explosion of the myth of the nuclear family, the first for which divorce was just another part of growing up. These interviews show how living through divorce shaped their lives, influenced their relationships and changed their expectations of commitment.


"Although I grew up a few blocks from the 'Brady Bunch' house, the similarity between that TV-family's tract-rancher and the ones where my friends and I lived pretty much ended at the front door," Jefferson writes. "In the real Valley of the 1970s, families weren't coming together. They were coming apart. We were the 'Divorce Generation,' latchkey kids raised with after-school specials about broken families and 'Kramer vs. Kramer,' the 1979 best-picture winner that left kids worrying that their parents would be the next to divorce. Our parents couldn't seem to make marriage stick, and neither could our pop icons: Sonny and Cher, Farrah Fawcett and Lee Majors, the saccharine Swedes from Abba, all splitsville."


By the late '70s the women's rights movement had opened workplace doors to mothers-more than half of American women were employed, compared with just 38 percent in 1960-and that, in turn, made divorce a viable option for many wives who would have stayed in lousy marriages for economic reasons. By the time Jefferson and his friends entered their senior year of high school, divorce rates had soared to their highest level ever, with 5.3 per 1,000 people getting divorced each year, more than double the rate in the 1950s.


"Researchers have churned out all sorts of depressing statistics about the impact of divorce. Each year, about 1 million children watch their parents split, triple the number in the 50s. These children are twice as likely as their peers to get divorced themselves and more likely to have mental-health problems, studies show," Jefferson writes. "When we were growing up, divorce loomed as the ultimate threat to innocence, but now it just seems like another part of adult life ... What I wanted to know was how divorce had affected our class president and Miss Congeniality, the stoners and the valedictorian. Did it leave them with emotional scars that never healed, or did they go on to lead 'normal' lives? Did they wind up in divorce court, or did they achieve the domestic bliss their parents had sought in suburbia? I decided to open my yearbook, pick up the phone, and find out."


After reuniting with his friends, Jefferson found that despite the dire predictions, a surprising number of Grant alums wound up in solid marriages. Jefferson's best friend, Chris Kohnhorst, who he had met in the fifth grade and the first kid he can remember encountering whose parents were divorced, got married 15 years ago and is still happily married. Chris's life since his parents' divorce, "has been shaped to a tremendous degree by the goal of avoiding divorce as an adult at all costs," says Kohnhorst. Jefferson also found that the urge to get and stay married is stronger in his classmates' generation than the urge to get divorced was in their parents'. "Every honest couple will tell you that it's hard sometimes," says classmate Josh Gruenberg, who now lives in San Diego with his wife and three kids. "You have to compromise, and it takes work," says Ruth Kreusch, who's been married for nearly 17 years and has three kids. David Selig says divorce isn't as prominent in his social circle now as it was when he was growing up -- though his circle is admittedly smaller, since he's become much less social than he was in high school. "My wife and I would rather spend time with each other and our five rescue dogs than just about anybody else," says David, who's been with his wife for 18 years.


Others, however, were not able to avoid divorce. One ugly side effect, according to research, is that divorce can be passed from generation to generation, like some kind of genetic defect, with children of divorce becoming divorces themselves. Tonju Francois married when she was 28 and got divorced six years later, in part, because her husband didn't want to have kids (he already had children from a prior marriage). "I loved being married, and it devastated me when it ended," she says. Elyse Oliver got married when she was 25 and divorced four years later. "I guess I just didn't know what to do in a relationship," she says.


Other classmates wound up marrying much later in life than their parents did (that's in line with the research, which shows that children of divorce tend to marry either later than their peers, or much earlier, in their teens). Lisa Cohen, waited until she was 35. "This generation grew up with such a massive culture of divorce that I think there was an effort to make better choices about who we married," says Cohen, whose parents wed in their 20s. "I was pretty clear on the fact that I didn't just want to marry someone for how good he looked on paper or how crazy in love we were."


Jefferson writes that "Despite the complications and the collateral damage, my friends from Grant High's class of '82 seem to agree that the divorces in their lives -- both their parents' and their own -- were probably for the best. Most don't think ill of their parents for having split up. "As a child I felt like I was a victim of my circumstances, a victim of the divorce," says Deborah Cronin. "But as an adult I learned that my parents were just two people who met each other, fell in love, had children, and it didn't work out. They were 18 and 19 years old when they met. They were young kids having kids." It seems that along with the crow's feet and expanding waistlines of middle age, my classmates and I have acquired an acceptance of our parents and their life choices. Some of us have even found healing. "My parents were good people," says Francois. "And good people get divorced, too."


(Read cover story at www.Newsweek.com)


URL: Complete coverage


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http://www.newsweek.com/id/131838


N.B:
For more inquiry on Divorce, contact me.
Please, note that I am anti-divorce, except in cases where life is in danger.

NEWSWEEK: Cover: Hillary Clinton: 'I Found My Own Voice.'

NEWSWEEK: Cover: Hillary Clinton: 'I Found my own Voice.'

"What I realized is that the reason I do this, why I get up every day, why I believe in our country and the importance of leadership, was not getting across the way that I wanted it to," Clinton tells Newsweek.

Editor Jon Meacham on Hillary, Race and Gender

NEW YORK, Jan. 13 /PRNewswire/ --

In the January 21 issue, "'I found my own voice.'" (on newsstands Monday, January 14) Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham examines Hillary Clinton's dramatic comeback win in New Hampshire and whether the battle for the Democratic nomination is one that will be determined by the historically complicated issues of race and gender.


(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080113/NYSA004 )


To say it is late in the game for a major politician to have found one's voice is too glib, Meacham writes. Many public figures are works in progress, and they are all certainly human. Clinton's primary victory is a new chance for voters to get to know her beyond the caricatures, positive and negative, that have so long defined her. "Everyone forgets she went to law school when women were not 50 percent of each law-school class, and certainly not seen as litigators," says Maria Echaveste, a senior adviser to Clinton's campaign. "When you were breaking down walls, it wasn't enough to be equally tough. You had to build a shell to protect yourself. That's what she did."


That shell cracked a bit in New Hampshire, Meacham writes, and Clinton now believes it has to stay cracked. "What I realized is that the reason I do this, why I get up every day, why I believe in our country and the importance of leadership, was not getting across the way that I wanted it to," Clinton told Newsweek about Iowa.


She continued, "I get so focused on what I want to do as president that I get a little wonky. I get a little out there, with details, with five-point plans for this and 10-point plans for that, and I think that what I'm proposing really is both achievable and important, but it's not what gets me up, so why should it get voters excited?" she says. "But in the presidential campaign I think I sort of pocketed too much of that. I thought, well, I've been in the public eye for so long now ... I don't think that was a smart assumption for me to make, or for my campaign to make, very honestly."


This is not the year for making any assumptions. Meacham reports that many Democrats have been waiting a lifetime for a viable female presidential candidate or a viable black one -- and now they have one of each, and in the aftermath of Iowa and New Hampshire, the two camps are fighting over a great deal more than just endorsements. "I understand that," Clinton tells Meacham in an interview last Friday. "What a good problem to have. Two leading candidates for president, a woman and an African-American ... I wish it didn't have to be a choice. I think a lot of people who are torn between us feel that way," she says.


"Torn is a tough word," Meacham writes. "But it aptly captures how many Americans, and not just Democrats, already feel about 2008 ... And these are early days: we are only just beginning to grapple with the questions of race and gender that the campaign will raise again and again through November." The campaign now moving out of the largely white states of Iowa and New Hampshire to the rest of the country will soon mean that the politically engaged across America will be presented with the likelihood that a woman or an African- American will be the Democratic nominee and perhaps the president. And, as Clinton says, it's a good "problem" for America to have, he reports.


"But this is a contest," Clinton says, "and the contrasts have to be drawn and the questions have to be asked because, obviously, I wouldn't be in this race and working as hard as I am unless I thought I am uniquely qualified at this moment in our history to be the president we need starting in 2009. And I think it is informed by my deep experience over the last 35 years, my firsthand knowledge of what goes on inside a White House."


Also in the interview, Clinton discussed issues that ranged from her childhood in suburban Park Ridge, Ill., to John Wesley, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King Jr. and, of course, Barack Obama. When asked if Senator Obama is right enough or experienced enough to be vice president, Clinton tells Meacham, "Well, I'm going to stay focused on where I am right now. I'm an admirer of his; I campaigned for him; I raised money for him... I am a very big admirer of his, and I think the sky is the limit for him -- in the future. [Laughs.]"


Also in the cover package:
-- Senior White House Correspondent Richard Wolffe and Chicago
Correspondent Karen Springen report on the reality of Barack Obama's
central claim as a candidate -- that he is a change agent, a lifelong
reformer who will heal Washington by bringing together feuding
politicians of both parties -- examining his voting record in the U.S.
Senate and in the Illinois Senate.

-- Senior Editor and Columnist Daniel Gross reports that America's
faltering economy may be the deciding factor in the 2008 election.
-- Investigative Correspondents Michael Isikoff, Mark Hosenball and
Editor-at-Large Evan Thomas report that 2008 promises to be a banner
year for gutter politics, and technology serves as a force multiplier
for crude partisan passion. A Newsweek investigation suggests that
political hit jobs are already rampant and likely to get worse.
-- White House Correspondent Holly Bailey talks with John McCain on the
campaign trail, two days after his New Hampshire primary win, about how
he found his footing, the war in Iraq -- and his lucky nickel.

-- Senior Editor and Columnist Jonathan Alter profiles the chief
strategists for the Clinton and Obama campaigns. "Hillary's man Penn is
a pollster by profession and the quintessential Beltway guy. Obama's
'Axe,' is a hardheaded reformer," Alter writes. "Penn's weapon is his
brain; Axelrod's is his gut."

-- Senior Political Correspondent Howard Fineman writes that, "Rudy
Giuliani sees Florida as his Cape Canaveral: the launching pad for his
better-later-than-never campaign ... Of the three groups that compose
the modern GOP ... Rudy has yet to find a home in one."

(Read entire cover package at www.Newsweek.com)


http://www.newsweek.com/id/91795 - Letting Hillary Be Hillary Cover Story by Jon Meacham


http://www.newsweek.com/id/91756 - Meacham Interviews Hillary Clinton


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CONTACT: LaVenia LaVelle of Newsweek, +1-212-445-4859


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Read an excerpt from "A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton"

NEWSWEEK: Paris Hilton Wants a Makeover to Go from Party Girl to Serious Actress and Philanthropist

15 Oct 2007 00:45 Africa/Lagos


NEWSWEEK: Paris Hilton Wants a Makeover to Go from Party Girl to Serious Actress and Philanthropist

TRIP TO RWANDA WILL BE FILMED 'FOR THE GOOD OF HUMANITY' AND A POTENTIAL REALITY TV SHOW

NEW YORK, Oct. 14 /PRNewswire/ --

In her first interview since announcing her upcoming trip to Africa, Paris Hilton, known for her party girl hijinks and reality television show, "The Simple Life," reveals details about the trip, her plans to take her life in a different direction and perhaps another reality TV show.


(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20071014/NYSU007 )


"Before, my life was about having fun, going to parties-it was a fantasy. But when I had time to reflect, I felt empty inside. I want to leave a mark on the world," she told Associate Editor Ramin Setoodeh in the October 22 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, October 15).


One of her first steps in shedding her old persona, aside from cutting her hair and scaling down her time partying, will be to take a five-day-long trip to Rwanda. She will be visiting schools and health-care clinics and even staying in decidedly un-Hilton-like accommodations. "I'm scared, yeah. I've heard it's really dangerous," she says. "I've never been on a trip like this before." She says she'll resort to eating candy bars if that's what it takes to get her through any foreign-cuisine issues. She'll be traveling with a little-known children's charity called "Playing for Good." One familiar aspect of the trip will be the camera chronicling it all. "She's using her celebrity and the cameras that follow her for the good of humanity," says Scott Lazerson, the organization's founder. Let's not forget the good of Lazerson, and Hilton. Turns out that he's filming the trip in hopes of selling it as a reality show called "The Philanthropist," featuring various selfless celebrities who rescue the world's poor.


Unlike other celebrities her age that have run into trouble with the law, Hilton has been smart about how she handled the situation, Setoodeh reports. When she wasn't crying during her stint in jail this summer, she spent her time studying the script for "Repo!" "I was auditioning and practicing in my cell," she says. "I had nothing else to do."


In "Repo! The Genetic Opera!" Hilton plays an heiress with an addiction to plastic surgery. Perhaps in an attempt to distance herself from her character, she plays the role in a black wig and prosthetic, Nicole Kidman-like nose. "You should have seen me yesterday," she told Setoodeh, who was on the set. "I had a melted face all cut up with scars. I looked horrible. It was so embarrassing." "Repo!" director Darren Lynn Bousman says he wouldn't have it any other way. "I don't want her to look like Paris Hilton, because I want people to know she got this role because she can act."


(Read story at www.Newsweek.com)


Read the story on Newsweek.com


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