Re: Dog lovers: a city menace:

Dear Patrick, 

 

You sound like a fastidious, egocentric grouch.  My guess is you have never had kids and you hate babies  because they drool.

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Re: Dog lovers: a city menace:

Patty, 

You epitomize the loser, liberal self serving and weak editorial writers in the commie rag Sunpaper.  Your writing cracked me up and you are no doubt getting tons of hate mail and will for a long time.  You trash dogs, man's best friend?  You are in for a lot of ridicule.  Take your far left leaning tendencies elsewhere please.  And if you are ever on my property my dogs will know to attack as they can smell weakness :).  Have a nice day, loser.
 

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Re: A&E show destroys bodies for your viewing pleasure

Dear Professor Hahn,

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REALLY?  I can only weakly hope that the unmitigated vituperance you spewed onto the pages of the Sun is a failed attempt at sarcasm.  But I fear it is not so.  Have you ever heard of a book named “Fat is a Feminist Issue”?  Okay, it was a while back.  Perchance you were still a twinkle in your Mommy’s eye.  On a more contemporary note - seen a documentary film named “The Illusionists?” It was recently shown in the Baltimore area - at both the Sheppard Pratt Center for Eating Disorders and other venues.  Both would be instructive to you.

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In the meantime - you might want to stick to biology and leave the psychology to those who are trained in this discipline.  Your moralistic tirade on the evils of obesity does absolutely nothing to enlighten the general public to the facts of modern life, advertising nor science.  It doesn’t even drip sarcasm on the stupid TV mentality.  All it does is discredit the Science Department of a stellar Catholic University.  Shame on you!

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What next? Snatching ice cream cones out of the mouths of chubby co-eds?

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I haven’t seen Fit to Fat -though you’ve clearly sparked our interest in watching it.  Ever heard of “peer mentoring” - another discipline apparently out of your purview, the field of education - has touted its efficacy for a couple of decades.  If “fit to fat to fit” helped their targets accomplish permanent weight loss, they’ve trumped Oprah and a bunch of pill-pushers and saved, lengthened or improved the quality of lives.

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By the way, just curious, what’s YOUR BMI? Ectomorphic OCD runner, perchance?  See, body stereotyping cuts both ways, Dr. Hahn.

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Re: Note to Baltimoreans: That parking spot you shoveled out isn’t yours

Dear Dick Head,

After reading your steaming pile of a news article I feel like I should inform you are a terrible reporter and indeed full of shit.  Shoveling cars out after a historical blizzard does in fact take several hours without using a thimble for Christ sake.  The fact that you quoted the absolute worst sports writer in the city's history ( or any city's history) shows your your complete ineptitude at your profession.  Furthermore, I am sure that your Lilly ass never dug out a half of block "after a deep snow fall" because you can't dig your head out of your own ass.   So in conclusion I will doing my best to make sure that no one reads another terrible article from Patrick Hahn not that it will take much effort because your are pretty much irrelevant in a dying newspaper like the Baltimore Sun.

 

 

Re: Antidepressants: A deadly treatment?

I must grant that it takes a certain amount of guts to trumpet your ignorance on the editorial pages of a major newspaper, as you did in the Sun this past weekend, and for that sir, I tip my hat to you.

Your histrionic bit of raillery at Big Pharma manages to commit the same cherry-picking of studies you accuse others of doing in their defense of antidepressant use, and at the same time demonstrates a stunning lack of comprehension of the realities of clinical psychiatry. Had you chosen to write a balanced and thoughtful piece, you could have looked at the wealth of data that supports the use of antidepressants for the treatment of severe major depressive disorder, and that questions their causal association with violence. Indeed, you demonstrate profound ignorance of pharmacology when you conflate the therapeutic purposes and effects of antidepressants and sympathomimetic stimulants. The biochemical effects of fluoxetine (Prozac), cocaine, and methamphetamine are in no way similar, the side effects could not be more different, and the therapeutic effects of antidepressants have nothing in common with the acutely mind-altering effects of sympathomimetic agents, whether legal or illicit. 

Worst of all, you fall into the same fallacy that afflicts many psychiatric skeptics; to wit, neglecting to incorporate into your analysis the critical fact that people who take antidepressant and other prescription psychotropic agents receive these medications for a reason: they are either suffering, unable to function, or are in a dangerously unstable state of mind (or some combination) before they start taking meds. Attributing suicidal or violent behavior to someone prescribed an antidepressant is like attributing a fever to someone prescribed an antibiotic. It is far more logical—and in my experience closer to reality--to attribute the persistence or worsening of symptoms for which a medication is intended to the failure of the medication than to a side effect of the medication. 

One can only hope that your hit piece will fall as short of convincing any patient or practitioner with real-world antidepressant experience, as it has this practitioner. I was tempted to let it pass, but these are serious matters, mental illness is already stigmatized, and so I hate to see unchallenged any obstacle to a suffering person getting effective help. 

So please, before you exercise your rhetorical skills in another public piece about science, try to learn something about the topic and don’t go just spouting off based on a few scattered and questionable wafts of skepticism floating about. If you have any sincere interest in actually learning something about the topic, I’d be happy to steer you to more sober analyses of the state of antidepressant treatment.

And need I mention that I am in no way beholden to the pharmaceutical industry? I’d get paid just the same whether I practiced psychopharmacology or psychotherapy.