SUMMARY:In Sarasota, Florida large scale artworks are being used to teach students about diversity, inclusion and mental health. This comes at a time when there is growing controversy in the state, and school districts across the country, over how and whether to teach about racism in America. Special correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault went to see how the exhibit encourages inclusion.
SUMMARY: This week marks a full year since the COVID-19 outbreak was declared a pandemic, and experts are increasingly concerned about the toll it is taking on the mental health of young people in the United States. With in-person classes closed for months for many students, there are also concerns the risks of youth suicide are being exacerbated. Stephanie Sy reports.
SUMMARY:With more Americans seeking treatment for mental health issues, lawmakers and the U.S. health care system are having trouble keeping up. People with severe mental illnesses who don't find adequate health care often end up on the streets or behind bars. And the options for residential long-term care are dwindling. Byrhonda Lyons of CalMatters, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization, reports.
SUMMARY:On average, 20 U.S. military veterans daily die by suicide, and suicides among active duty personnel are increasing. A number of treatments for veterans with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder exist, but they have drawbacks. Special correspondent Mike Cerre looks at treatment options and follows up on U.S. Marines with whom he was embedded during the war in Iraq.
SUMMARY:After a series of high-profile suicides last year, one restaurant owner in Sacramento, California, decided to confront a problem plaguing kitchens around the country. The fast-paced, high-pressure environment and often low wages can take its toll on workers' mental health. His peer-to-peer counseling and support program, “I Got Your Back,” is now starting to spread. John Yang reports.
SUMMARY: Now legal in eight states, there are unanswered questions about the impact of recreational marijuana on public health. To maximize potency, pot can be purified for maximum THC, its psychoactive ingredient. But a lack of research and restrictions on these very high concentrations is raising concerns. Special correspondent John Ferrugia of Rocky Mountain PBS reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): With recreational marijuana now legal in eight states, a serious health and safety question about the potency of the psychoactive drug in cannabis, known as THC, are emerging. In Colorado, some marijuana products contain 90 percent pure THC, with little research documenting the physical and mental effects on consumers.
This week, the state's health department announced more than $2 million in grants to study the impacts on driving and cognitive functioning.
As John Ferrugia of Rocky Mountain PBS in Denver reports, there are concerns that the effects on some users could be deadly.
MARC BULLARD (user): 2016 is a year of something new.
JOHN FERRUGIA, Rocky Mountain PBS: In December 2015, Marc Bullard felt on top of the world. He had landed a good job in Denver after graduating magna cum laude from Southern Methodist University.
MARC BULLARD: It's been a good year.
JOHN FERRUGIA: He made video diaries to keep his family and friends updated on his life, looking forward to the New Year.
MARC BULLARD: It's time to start planning projects.
JOHN FERRUGIA:But just four months later, in April 2016, Marc Bullard took his own life. His written diary shows severe depression seems to have taken a quick hold on him.
MIKE BULLARD, Marc Bullard's Father: You know, December, he's fine, he comes home for the Christmas holiday.
JOHN FERRUGIA: And Mike and Ginny Bullard say he spent time with family and friends and showed no sign of being down.
MIKE BULLARD:And what we saw in the in the diary later, was by January the 16th, I guess, he's talking about suicide.
JOHN FERRUGIA: It was only after his death that his parents began reading his written diaries.
When did you first see the first entry about dabbing?
MIKE BULLARD: That was in the March the 5th. And that's where he talks about you know, I think I've been dabbing too much.
SUMMARY: Most of the attention around the biomedical bill President Obama signed on Tuesday has focused on faster drug approval and new money for research. But included within the massive piece of legislation are measures for mental health care. William Brangham speaks with Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., about the state of mental health care in the U.S. and what this law attempts to accomplish.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Most of the attention around the big biomedical bill signed by President Obama today has focused on faster drug approval and new money for research, but it's a huge piece of legislation.
And one key part that's received less attention is the attempt to improve mental health care in the U.S.
William Brangham has a look.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour):Advocates say this part of the legislation is the most significant step forward for mental health care in nearly a decade.
The law promotes a range of mental health initiatives, including more evidence-based early intervention for young people. It expands outpatient mental health care. And to coordinate it all, it creates a new assistant secretary position.
For more on this, I'm joined now by the lead author of the legislation, Congressman Tim Murphy, Republican of Pennsylvania. He's also a practicing psychologist.
Welcome.
REP. TIM MURPHY (R-Pa.): Great to be with you.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Before we get into the specifics of the legislation, I wonder if you could just give me an overview of what you see where we are failing in our treatment of mental health care in this country.
REP. TIM MURPHY:Well, in any given year, 60 million Americans are affected by some level of mental illness, from the very mild to the very serious, 10 million with very serious mental illness. Four million get no treatment at all.
States spend an enormous amount of money, in the federal government about $130 billion spread across 112 agencies, although most of that is just disability payments. And we're not doing a good job, because what has happened is, over the years, when we have seen a dropping of death rates for cancer, it's gone down, diabetes, infectious disease, lung disease, AIDS, all declined, increasing for suicide, increasing for substance abuse.
And when we closed all those big asylums, those big hospitals that were out there for a century or so — we needed to close them down — but we didn't provide outpatient care. So what do we do? We have filled our jails with them.
The majority of people in jails, the state and local jails, are people with a mental illness disorder, too. Eight out of 10 people in an emergency room have some related mental health disorder. Five percent of the people on Medicaid are responsible for 50 percent of all Medicaid spending.
And those are people with a concurrent mental illness. So, you see, in terms of costs, in terms of the costs of lives, 959 a day, 350,000 in this country last year, related to mental illness, primary, secondary, that's more deaths in one year than the entire combat deaths of World War I — of the United States in World War I, Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Desert Storm, Afghanistan, and Iraq, in one year. It's a serious problem.
REMINDERS: Today's Affordable Care Act is NOT what President Obama envisioned when it was proposed. It's what we got because of Congress. President Obama did not like it when he signed it into law, but it was much better than having no health care reform.
Also, remember that Health Insurance Industry is NOT in business to provide health care, they ARE in business to MAKE A PROFIT, don't confuse method with what they are about.
Note there ARE health organizations that do actually provide heal care, I call them 'True HMOs":
They own and operate their own hospitals and clinics
They have their own medical labs for tests (only farm out what is too expensive, no added cost)
The doctors are employees, therefore are not second guessed by a committee
They have their own pharmacies at their sites, but allow you to designate an outside pharmacy, and have prescriptions-by-mail
Co-pays are low because they do not have to answer to shareholders
Generally they are not-for-profit
I am now with Kaiser Permanente, and was with Sharp HMO in the past. Since I am retired, the Kaiser Advantage plan has NO co-pay for the plan (filly covered by Social Security); just co-pay for visits, tests, and prescriptions.
SUMMARY: It's the first day of enrollment season for the Affordable Care Act. But when it comes to mental health, even those with insurance struggle to get affordable care. Special correspondent April Dembosky and Sheraz Sadiq of KQED meets a mom who faces misinformation, long waitlists for therapists and prohibitively expensive care for her son with autism and herself.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Today is the first day of enrollment for 2017 under the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare.
But for some people who have health insurance, getting appropriate coverage can be a challenge. More than 43 million Americans suffer from depression, anxiety or other mental health issues, but more than half never get help, even people who have health insurance.
From PBS station KQED in San Francisco, reporter April Dembosky and producer Sheraz Sadiq bring us a story of a single mother struggling to use her benefits to get treatment for herself and her son with autism.
APRIL DEMBOSKY, KQED San Francisco: On a Sunday afternoon, Natalie Dunnege and her boyfriend, Russell Lifson, head to the park with Natalie's 13-year-old son, Strazh.
MAN: Let's go.
APRIL DEMBOSKY: He has autism, a developmental disorder that affects about one in 70 children in the U.S.
STRAZH: You have strengths on one side of your brain and weaknesses on your other side, like, you know, controlling your emotions or this and that, you know? Strengths could be like coding or, you know, focusing on one thing for hours.
APRIL DEMBOSKY: Each week, an applied behavioral analysis, or ABA, therapist comes to the house.
WOMAN: Are you ready?
APRIL DEMBOSKY: ABA therapy helps kids with autism learn life skills and how to control their temper. Strazh and his therapist, Gabby Raders, create a schedule of carefully timed activities, so he can get better at transitions.
STRAZH: This is the I.D., right, the identification with the enemy. This is the width, height, speed X and speed Y.
APRIL DEMBOSKY: Ending a favorite activity can trigger a meltdown.
STRAZH: I can't do it. No, I can't.
NATALIE DUNNEGE, Mother:ABA therapy has helped my relationship with Strazh tremendously. It's taught me how to communicate with him, when to back away, when to come in and help.
APRIL DEMBOSKY: As a single mom working full-time, money is tight for Natalie. She can only afford a few hours of ABA therapy a week.
NATALIE DUNNEGE:I want my son to be as successful as possible, so every time I get a raise, I just increase ABA hours.
APRIL DEMBOSKY: She has insurance through Blue Shield. But getting mental health treatment has been really tough.
NATALIE DUNNEGE: So, I went on the site. And then you can see it says, like, doctors, facilities, dentists, nothing about where to find a therapist. I called them, and they e-mailed me a list of providers.
APRIL DEMBOSKY: Oh, so this is the list?
NATALIE DUNNEGE: Mm-hmm. Yes. They all have a three-month waiting list. And then, after the three-month waiting list, you have, like, two to eight weeks of intake. And then hopefully you get approved.
SUMMARY: Before Josh, 36, arrived at First Place Transition Academy, he had never taken public transportation on his own, much less held down a paying job. But a new pilot program is empowering adults with autism to overcome hurdles to independence. Special correspondent John Donvan, co-author with Caren Zucker of “In a Different Key: The Story of Autism,” reports from Phoenix.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Tonight, we begin an occasional series about people living with autism and other spectrum disorders, A Place in the World.
While reporting the history of autism for their book, “In a Different Key: The Story of Autism,” co-authors John Donvan and Caren Zucker found a program in Phoenix, Arizona, that expands options for people living with autism.
This is the first of two reports.
JOHN DONVAN, Co-Author, “In a Different Key: The Story of Autism”: Why is it a big deal that Josh Kluger gets up every morning and makes his own breakfast and straightens up the place a little, and then remembers, belatedly to go back and grab his lunch before he heads off to work, which takes a quarter-mile hike, texting all the way, before he reaches the bus stop, and then a 45-minute trip with one transfer along the way?
And when I comes on board and Josh shows me how to swipe my ticket, why is that a big deal? Because, until last year, Josh had experienced none of this. No apartment. No paying job. No bus pass even. Actually, he'd never ridden a bus on his own before last year.
How old are you now?
JOSH KLUGER, Student, First Place: I'm 36.
JOHN DONVAN: You only really began being able to ride the bus when you were already over 30?
JOSH KLUGER: I think so, yes.
JOHN DONVAN: What did you have to learn?
JOSH KLUGER: I know learned how — streets.
JOHN DONVAN: And though Josh is not the chattiest person around, except perhaps when he's texting, you can tell from his stride and from his air of confidence about where he's heading that Josh really likes the life he has right now.
SUMMARY: Matt Resnik has helped changed the face of autism in his hometown. When he was diagnosed as a child, his parents poured their hearts into getting him therapy, even launching an organization, in hopes he would outgrow his challenges and find his place as an independent adult in the world. Instead, they’ve helped shape the world around him. Special correspondent John Donvan reports.
SUMMARY: His story is a staple in psychology classes, but his identity wasn't known for years: Henry Molaison, the man who lost his ability to form new memories after a lobotomy. In “Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets,” Luke Dittrich paints a picture of the life of the scientific legend. Dittrich discusses his book and personal connection to Molaison in a conversation with Jeffrey Brown.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): In recent decades, scientists have made great advances in understanding how and where the human brain makes and stores memories, a key part of forming our identities.
A man who unwittingly helped them do it, Henry Molaison, who underwent a lobotomy in 1953 intended to relieve his epileptic seizures. A large part of his hippocampus was removed.
LUKE DITTRICH, Author, “Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets”:As soon as he came out of the operating room, it became clear that he was no longer able to create new memories.
And so this gave scientists for the first time really a clear sense of how important these structures were to the creation of new memories. And that was sort of the first and in many ways most fundamental thing that he taught us about how memory works.
JEFFREY BROWN: In his new book, Luke Dittrich tells the story of the man known for decades as Patient H.M., considered the most important research subject in the history of brain science.
And there's more. The lobotomy was performed by Dittrich's grandfather, Dr. William Scoville, a prominent brain surgeon at a time when such procedures were done by the thousands. I spoke to Luke Dittrich at Washington's Lincoln Theatre.
LUKE DITTRICH: I personally found it to be a very shocking story during the course of my reporting.
This came to be during an era when the lines between medical practice and medical research were fairly blurry, and, you know, people crossed some lines that they most likely shouldn't have crossed.
And one of the things that my research led me deep into was the history of the lobotomy and of this whole field known as psychosurgeries that came out of desperate times, the mentally ill at the time, in the sort of 1930s and 1940s. There were no — there were no real good, effective treatments for a lot of the things that they suffered from, and the lobotomy rose up as a sort of — a quick fix.
SUMMARY: According to Lufthansa, the co-pilot who crashed a Germanwings flight into the French Alps had informed the company of severe depression in 2009. Judy Woodruff talks to Dr. Warren Silberman, a former FAA medical certification manager, and Dr. William Hurt Sledge of Yale University about the current psychological screening process and standards for U.S. pilots.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): There are even more questions today about how pilots are screened.
Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings, reported the co-pilot of the plane that crashed in the French Alps last week informed the company back in 2009 that he had suffered from severe depression. Andreas Lubitz told the flight training school of the problem after a months-long absence.
The incident raises concerns about mental health and standards for flying.
We speak with two now who know about these issues. Dr. Warren Silberman is a physician and former manager of aerospace medical certification for the Federal Aviation Administration. He is now in private practice. And Dr. William Sledge is a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. He’s evaluated pilots throughout his career, including for the Air Force, for major airlines, for the pilots union and the FAA.
And we welcome you both.
Dr. Silberman, to you first.
We know the information we have on Andreas Lubitz is incomplete, but, based on what we know, would he have been certified to fly a passenger plane in the United States?
DR. WARREN SILBERMAN, Former FAA Medical Certification Manager: With — if he would have revealed that he was depressed or showed manifestations of depression, absolutely not. He would be disqualified.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Dr. Sledge, would you agree?
DR. WILLIAM SLEDGE, Yale University: I would agree, particularly with the designation that he was suicidal.
And Dr. Silberman knows better than I, but the FAA occasionally would — if someone was treated successfully for depression, would allow them to return to the cockpit, but, for the most part, the presence of suicidality really rules it out.
SUMMARY: More Americans than ever before are spending time in jail despite a drop in the crime rate in the past two decades. That's according to a new report that also found that a disproportionate number of people in jail suffer from mental illness. Judy Woodruff discusses the findings with Nicholas Turner of the Vera Institute of Justice and Margo Schlanger of the University of Michigan.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):A new report finds that more Americans than ever are spending time in jail. The Vera Institute of Justice showed that, in the past two decades, despite a drop in the crime rate, the number of people going to jail has increased dramatically.
In addition, those behind bars are staying longer. Some 62 percent of them have not yet been convicted of a crime, and three-quarters of those jailed now are brought in for nonviolent offenses. The report also finds that a disproportionate number of those in jail suffer from mental illness.
Joining us are Nicholas Turner. He’s president and director of the Vera Institute. And Margo Schlanger of the University of Michigan.
Nick Turner, to you first.
Why are the jails and prisons of the United States so full today?
NICHOLAS TURNER, President and Director, Vera Institute of Justice: Well, you have to go back, really, almost four decades. We have, since the early 1970s, been on what some people describe as a binge in this country, a reliance on incarceration and on confinement as the primary strategy to keep people safe. That’s been the argument.
And so, for the past 40 years, the number of people in jail and in prison in this country has gone up almost 400 percent. When you look at jails now, there are additional other reasons as to why we have so many people in jail. In the past few decades, we have increasingly arrested more and more people, not only for felonies or serious charges, but also for misdemeanors.
And we are also seeing more people who are being arrested being put in jail, so there is a general reflex within the criminal justice system still to rely on confinement.
HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour): It’s estimated that nearly a thousand additional Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are being diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder every week. A report out Thursday by the Institute of Medicine said that despite dozens of programs by the military to help treat the mental illnesses that veterans suffer, few of them are proving effective. For more we’re joined by Gregg Zoroya of USA Today who has been covering this story. So the Department of Defense asked for this review, what did it find?
GREGG ZOROYA, USA Today: Well it really was a review that was, the request was really built on something that happened last year. The Institute of Medicine had completed a four-year review of just how prevalent the problem was and they found that the numbers of folks that were ill were really kind of getting so large that both the Pentagon and the V.A. were having trouble staying ahead of it. So the Pentagon asked for this report. They wanted to know — we’ve got prevention programs out there, why aren’t they working? And essentially what this panel, from the Institute of Medicine, found was that while some of these ideas in theory made sense when they were introduced earlier in the war, that there really hadn’t been a strong enough effort by the Pentagon and by some of the branches to try to understand whether through some real strong scientific research whether the programs worked. And they found that in fact, they hadn’t.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): This weekend, the crossword puzzle marks its hundredth birthday. First published in a New York newspaper, it's become a daily ritual for many and even been rumored to help stave off dementia. But there isn't much evidence to back up that claim.
On the other hand, special correspondent Jake Schoneker reports on new research using video games to sharpen an aging mind.
JAKE SCHONEKER: Fifty-seven-year-old Ashley Wolff has been a self-employed children's author and illustrator for 25 years, working out of her small home studio in San Francisco. She says she loves being her own boss, but that working from home can be a challenge.
ASHLEY WOLFF, author and illustrator: Working from home allows me really to just let my attention deficit problem fly.
JAKE SCHONEKER: Like many people her age, she's recently found herself forgetting things more often, and getting easily distracted from work. She was worried about these problems getting worse as she got older, especially because her mother, at age 85, was beginning to exhibit signs of Alzheimer's disease.
ASHLEY WOLFF: My sister and I are watching our mother kind of lose her memory. And we thought, gee, wow, she always did the New York times crossword puzzle, and always seemed so sharp, and here she is, none of that helped her. And we thought, we should try something.
JAKE SCHONEKER: So she decided so try cognitive training, a new breed of video game designed to exercise the brain. She now gets a daily reminder to log on to her laptop for a 15-minute mental workout.
Better mental health cannot curb gun violence alone, you need to also curb the ACCESS to guns by people with mental problems. That requires better gun control laws.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): Now to a debate that never seems to end. Every time a shooter goes on the rampage in a public place, the discussion turns to guns, mental health and even to violent video games.
The FBI today said it helped disrupt or prevent nearly 150 shootings and other violent attacks in the past year, in part by directing potential attackers to mental health services. So there has been some progress, but there always seem to be new headlines.
Friday's shooting at a suburban Denver high school was the latest violent jolt. Well-wishers left flowers today at a growing tribute to student Claire Davis. She was shot at point-blank range by a fellow student, 18-year-old Karl Pierson. Davis remains in a coma in critical, but stable condition at a local hospital.
The latest shooting came as the nation was marking the first anniversary of the shocking attack in Newtown, Conn., that killed 20 schoolchildren and six educators. The massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School revived the long-running debate over the causes and solutions for a mass shootings like it.
It also prompted President Obama to say he would push for gun control legislation that wasn't a top priority during his first term.
The Obama administration on Friday will complete a generation-long effort to require insurers to cover care for mental health and addiction just like physical illnesses when it issues long-awaited regulations defining parity in benefits and treatment.
The rules, which will apply to almost all forms of insurance, will have far-reaching consequences for many Americans. In the White House, the regulations are also seen as critical to President Obama’s program for curbing gun violence by addressing an issue on which there is bipartisan agreement: Making treatment more available to those with mental illness could reduce killings, including mass murders.
In issuing the regulations, senior officials said, the administration will have acted on all 23 executive actions that the president and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced early this year to reduce gun crimes after the Newtown, Conn., school massacre. In planning those actions, the administration anticipated that gun control legislation would fail in Congress as pressure from the gun lobby proved longer-lasting than the national trauma over the killings of first graders and their caretakers last Dec. 14.
“We feel actually like we’ve made a lot of progress on mental health as a result in this year, and this is kind of the big one,” said a senior administration official, one of several who described the outlines of the regulations that Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, will announce at a mental health conference on Friday in Atlanta with the former first lady Rosalynn Carter.
While laws and regulations dating to 1996 took initial steps in requiring insurance parity for medical and mental health, “here we’re doing full parity, and we’ve also taken steps to extend it to the people covered in the Affordable Care Act,” the senior official said. “This is kind of the final word on parity.”
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): Now, ask yourself, does having more money make us happy?
NewsHour economics correspondent Paul Solman went in search of answers. It's part of his ongoing reporting “Making Sen$e of Financial News.”
PAUL SOLMAN (Newshour): The University of California at Berkeley, a key location for one of the hot new subfields in economics, happiness studies. But, despite living in the wealthiest economy in the history of the world, Americans are a surprisingly unhappy lot.
Christine Carter is a sociologist at Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center.
CHRISTINE CARTER, University of California, Berkeley: Usually, what we see across countries is that, as GDP goes up, happiness goes up or subjective well-being tends to go up.
And the U.S. is kind of a notable case, in the sense that in the last 35 years as GDP has grown, we actually haven't seen our average happiness level go up.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): And now the rising toll from dementia economically, medically, and emotionally.
A study by the RAND Corporation published in this week's New England Journal of Medicine estimates the cost of caring for Americans with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia between $157 billion and $215 billion dollars a year. On a per-person basis, that translates into $41,000 to $56,000 dollars annually.
The costs include direct medical spending, informal family care, lost productivity and long-term care. The latter accounted for 84 percent of total costs. And the problem is growing fast. The costs and number of people with dementia are expected to more than double within 30 years.
We explore the findings and implications with two experts, Dr. Ronald Petersen, the director of the Alzheimer's Research Center at the Mayo Clinic, and Dr. Richard Hodes, director of the National Institute on Aging, which is part of NIH. His institute financed the new study.
MARGARET WARNER (Newshour): We turn to the difficulties of getting mental health care to those who need it. It's a subject getting more attention in the wake of the several recent shootings.
It's not known if the gunman in Newtown, Conn., suffered from mental illness. But the man who shot four firefighters in Webster, New York, this week, killing two of them, who were remembered at a procession yesterday, left a disturbing note in which he pledged to burn down the neighborhood and -- quote -- "do what I like doing best, killing people."
Politicians and commentators have used these and prior attacks to call for improved mental health screening and treatment.
But one such program in California has proven hard to implement, as NewsHour correspondent Spencer Michels reports.
AMANDA WILCOX, Mother of murder victim: I wanted the world to know what a wonderful, incredible person she was.
SPENCER MICHELS: For more than a decade, Nick and Amanda Wilcox have been advocating timely treatment and early intervention for the severely mentally ill, in the hopes they won't become violent. Twelve years ago, their 19-year old-daughter, Laura Wilcox, a college sophomore, was murdered while she was working over Christmas break at a mental health clinic in Nevada County, Calif.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
* Any attempt to suppress human or Constitutional rights.
* Any law or policy that supports discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, race/color, gender, sexual orientation, or any law that does NOT support Equal Treatment under the law.
*Any law or policy that attempts to suppress Freedom of the Press or Free Speech.
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