Students + Mobile Phones + School = Negative Influence?

Many of us Singaporeans would remember Jack Neo’s controversial film, I Not Stupid Too. Let me bring to attention one part of the film, which was when the teacher forcibly confiscated some of the students’ mobile phones. It was stated in the film that mobile phones are banned from classes, and this rule had also integrate itself into the fabric of many school systems nowadays.

But is it justified to ban a student from bringing his mobile phone to school? My stand is strongly no.

Mobile phones have become increasingly available in the recent years, and it has found ownership in many of the teenagers today. For a typical student like myself, I have found a mobile phone to be not only useful, but also an essential part of my school life. It is used to call up teachers, to contact mentors and an emergency contact device in times of urgent needs.

The sheer dependency I have on my mobile phone is shared between many of my peers. And without this form of contact, it would be frustrating for both him and his friends around him.

I do not mean to say that phones are purely put into use for work; they can also a form of entertainment. Through the ease of use, we can fit light games and short chats into our already packed schedule.

However, I do not mean to say that this entertainment should be enjoyed during inconvenient times. This seems to be a major concern between parents and teachers. As quoted from an online commenter, “No, they should allow the mobile to school because it will put effect in their studies.” The commenter basically made an assumption that the child would be distracted by their mobile phones and deviate from his studies.

They condemned Short Message Service for its potential use for chats, thus the wastage of time. However, as working adults, they should understand the importance of SMS as a form of communication. Though light hearted exchanges could occur, we should not immediately deem them as a cardinal sin. I am sure all of us would like a humorous little chat in the midst of all the stress of the fast-paced life.

Though there may be occasional abuse of the phone’s function as a source of entertainment, we should not neglect a mobile phone’s huge benefits. As with all technologies to date, there is proper use and abuse. But do we ban this technology altogether for simple, over exaggerated fears of its potentially negative influences?

-Lin Sen

NOTE: Not English Project

The Depressing Truth

When was it when you got your first setback? Or your first debilitating bout of failures? When was the last time you felt depressed over your life?

Most of us do experience such emotional trauma throughout our lives, and all of us have our own special solution to deal with it, for example, exercising, meditating and many more.

This new century promised us another method. Anti-Depressants or happiness packed in a pill. Below is an article I quoted from Economist.com which discusses this new medicine.

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URL to Article

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This article basically introduces both the negative and positive implications of the antidepressant drug, SSRIs.

One of the major points brought up by the article is the usage of the drug in suicidal persons. On one side, it is stated that the drug serves as a cheap way to save lives; while on the other hand, it provokes suicides.

The mechanism of the drug is such that it introduces a chemical substance into a person’s body in order to jumpstart the body’s production of serotonin, the chemical responsible for your good mood.

I myself think that this is too crude a way to solve the problem. Taking this drug makes you happy, but most of the time, you don’t see why do you get caught in this blind, uncontrollable and baseless euphoria. When the drug’s effect eventually wears off, you are left with what you started with - nothing. This could eventually lead to various negative effects.

The sudden change in your mood as the drug wears off could leave you confused and frustrated. It is comparable to a wealthy person suddenly stripped of every single penny and left on the streets. We have heard many cases of failed businessmen committing suicide due to a heavy blow to their financial security, and I think it would only be right to say that these patients’ suicidal conditions would worsen after taking the drugs. However, there is still a slight difference between these two cases.

A businessman who failed could only find two ways, to give up or to start anew. But for the depressed, the rich euphoria does not need much work to get; you just had to stretch out your hands and pop another pill down your throat. It is potentially addictive to the extent that the user would suffer an emotional cold turkey the moment he cuts of his dosage, aggravating the situation. Simply put, anti-depressant pills are just like Ecstasy, put in lower dosages, with an equally depressing list of side effects in situations of overdose.

But the surprising aspect is the total world dosage of SSRIs. According to the article, over 10 billion dosages were taken in 2004, up from an overshadowed 3 billion in 1995, and 2004 was 4 years ago. In 2004, there were 6.4 billion people, so it works out that on an average, each person took 1.7 doses of SSRIs. That is assuming that the whole world was sad.

With the enormous string of side effects, the article also questions the integrity of research conducted on the drug. The misleading information we were provided with were all in the purpose of promoting the drug, and concealed information revealed a much uglier side, including disproving the drug’s advertised effectiveness. In my opinion, these shabby test statistics, once published, would have left the commercializing of the anti-depressant drug in a depressing state.

The article ends with a comment that “[if all therapies fail,] maybe all you need is a minor or mediocre effect in order to reduce suicides overall.” However, I beg to differ. Throwing pills at anyone who show up in hopeless blues does not seem to be a responsible behavior.

One may argue that the person’s need was dire, and there were no conventional therapies to save the day. However, if there was so much effort spent in developing the drug, and even more effort spent on debating over its usage, why is there is no substantial effort made to develop newer therapies?

- Lin Sen

Economist Article : Anti-depressants, hope from a pill

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Antidepressants

Hope from a pill

Feb 28th 2008 NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition

Disagreements over whether drugs to combat depression are worth taking

ANTIDEPRESSANTS have long been the source of controversy. Amphetamines were widely used as an antidote to neurotic depression into the 1960s, until such “pep pills” came to be seen as doing more harm than good. Similar worries are now engulfing today's antidepressants, like Prozac and Paxil, which are among the most widely prescribed drugs in the world. Two new studies have stirred things up: one warning that antidepressants do not help most people very much, and the other gushing that they are a marvellously cheap way to save lives.

Most antidepression pills prescribed today are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), a type of drug that boosts the amount of serotonin hanging around in the brain. Serotonin is a brain chemical closely associated with mood. Boosting its level this way might therefore improve a person's mood. Earlier versions were less effective than modern pills, which have fewer side effects and are less toxic in overdose. The use of SSRIs worldwide has shot up from below 3 billion doses in 1995 to over 10 billion in 2004.

Is all the pill popping doing any good? There is recent evidence that it can lead young people to act on suicidal thoughts, prompting America's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to insist on warnings. SSRIs have generally been seen as a way to ease depression in adults without killing them. Derek Summerfield argued in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine that, although there is no epidemic of depression, “the case for an epidemic of antidepressant prescribing is now cast iron.”

A study published in this week's Public Library of Science (PLoS) Medicine, an open-access scientific journal, raises doubts about dispensing such drugs so freely. Irving Kirsch, of the University of Hull, and his colleagues scrutinised the clinical trials for several new antidepressants, taking care to include those never published (but which, by law, have to be reported to the FDA). They found that SSRIs did not help the vast majority of depressed people much more than placebos did. The net benefits over placebos did not usually reach the level considered big enough to be of clinical significance by Britain's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).

This study points to two factors that bedevil proponents of SSRIs: publication bias and the power of placebos. Dr Kirsch believes published data “give an exaggerated view of a drug's benefit.” People with very severe depression did see benefits above the NICE threshold, but even that was not a ringing endorsement. Dr Kirsch explains that this was not because SSRIs worked much better in the very seriously depressed, but rather that the effectiveness of placebos dropped off sharply in such people, making the drug look better.

There are two sorts of criticism of the idea that SSRIs are mostly a waste of money. One comes from those who say the study itself is rubbish. David Nutt, of the University of Bristol, says failed drug trials often remain unpublished because their design is shoddy or their results uninteresting. He criticises the PLoS paper as a “mishmash of quality trials and lousy trials leading to a false criticism of these drugs”, which he maintains do help those with depression even if their effectiveness falls below the NICE's “arbitrary” threshold. Dr Nutt thinks it is misleading to compare these drugs with placebos, since what matters is that they work when compared with some alternatives, such as “talk therapy”, for which he believes there is even less evidence of effectiveness.

Good-news potions

Yet there is reason to think that unpublished studies do reveal some important and rather unflattering details about antidepressants. A well-designed study published in January in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at a larger group of antidepressants and concluded there was indeed “a bias toward the publication of positive results”: 94% of the published trials were positive, whereas only about half of the unpublished ones were.

That bolsters the PLoS paper, but there is another sort of critique that challenges its conclusions. A recent study published by America's National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) analysed data from 26 countries over several decades to determine what effect SSRIs have had on suicides. Its authors argue that antidepressants are in fact “a very cost-effective means for saving lives”.

Countries with both high and low initial rates of antidepressant use saw similar trends in suicides until SSRIs were introduced. Jens Ludwig, of the University of Chicago, argues that countries that took to the new drugs saw a relative decline in suicides. After controlling for many variables, his NBER team reaches the cheerful conclusion that an increase in sales of one pill per person per year (about a 12% increase over the level in 2000) leads to a decline in suicide mortality of about 5%.

So are SSRIs to be shunned or saluted? The controversy will rage on, but Erick Turner, of the Portland VA Medical Centre in Oregon, suggests a third way. As one of the authors of the New England Journal of Medicine paper, he says the study confirms that most antidepressants do not work as well as published reports claim. That suggests many people, especially children, should be more careful about using them. But that does not mean they are pointless. He speculates that, if other therapies fail, “maybe all you need is a minor or mediocre effect in order to reduce suicides overall.” That may be particularly true for those who are closest to the edge of darkness.

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