Word: mentality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...many names: period, monthly, that time, my friend. But for many women the most apt description is the curse. For about half of all women of child-bearing age, menstruation is a monthly misery that causes intense physical and mental discomfort. In the U.S. alone, menstrual problems result in the loss of 140 million hours of work a year. Menstrual pain, says Pathologist Laurence Demers of the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pa., "probably is the most common cause for absence of women from the work force...
...mark of a first-rate intelligence, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, is the capacity to entertain two contradictory propositions in one's mind simultaneously without going crazy. The Viet Nam era had its psychotic moments. It may be a sign of American mental health, and intelligence, that the nation is ready to try to repay its complicated debt to the men and women who left their youth in Viet Nam, doing what their country asked them to do. Those who went to Viet Nam (whether they were volunteers, or draftees dragged there kicking and screaming) suffered through a violent complexity...
...Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition (DSM-III), an official publication of the American Psychiatric Association, is the definitive word on psychological disturbances. Viet Nam veterans (along with rape victims, among others) achieved some psychiatric status when DSM-III in 1980 officially defined their suffering as "posttraumatic stress disorder." In such distress, a person develops vivid symptoms after a psychologically traumatic event that is outside the range of usual human experience: he or she grows numb toward the external world, or else hyperalert, jumpy, insomniac; in nightmares the event that brought on the trauma is obsessively replayed...
...McNamara encouraged them to enlist with his "new standard" programs?mental and physical standards were lowered in 1966, supposedly to help blacks and other minorities get ahead. Alas, it merely coaxed them more quickly into the freshman class of cannon fodder. Fulton is a little off the point: the injustices of recruiting for Viet Nam involved class more than race. It was the lower-middle and lower classes, regardless of race, who went to shed blood, while their betters observed from society's good seats...
...system. (By contrast, narcotics tend to suppress these impulses.) As the signals multiply, they inundate the system's peripheral areas, which control such involuntary functions as the pulse and perspiration. They also flood at least three critical parts of the brain itself: the cerebral cortex, which governs higher mental activities like memory and reasoning; the hypothalamus (appetite, body temperature and sleep as well as such emotions as anger and fear); and the cerebellum (walking, balance and other motor activities...