Paul Haeder, Author

overused . . . traumatized . . . PTSD . . . C-PTSD . . . our children are dying!

Every child in the U$A needs two, three weeks, on the coast, in forest, with elders, with First Nations, with Salmon and Whale stories, with fires and talking circles and learning how to do beadwork and smoke salmon and boil mussels. Every child needs to see the world is way beyond the black mirror (phone), beyond the project the Jewish Masters of Software/Surveillance/Crypto Internet of Bodies/AI/VR/AR Hell they have in store for the masses. Way beyond the hell the Gentiles and Religious Ones have set upon the masses, too. School to prison pipeline? School to addiction pipeline.

Out here, in Siletz and Alsea Native land, we have this odd gesture: a former slave, from the south, bought his freedom for $1000 and ended up west, here, in Waldport, and he established the first school, the first everything, in a way, and now, more than a hundred years later, the park in town is dedicated to his name, Louis Southworth, and the play fields will have this bronze statue overlooking the play. See, “You Can’t Have Your Mule and Forty Acres, Too!”

This then dovetails back to the Wisconsin fun, my series on my short stay in Wisconsin, there as triage and first responder for my new friend, well, friend for more than 12 months, but first time having a face to face with KK in his home state.

Ten years total in prison and jails. $100,000 thrown away into the criminal injustice system, to the laywers, etc. Drinking and driving. And, I was his driver, since it will literally take thousands upon thousands of dollars to even try to get his driver’s license.

He’s on supervision, now the past three years. His arrest — the alleged crimes — just evidence of more shit storm predicated on a bad judge, conflation by cops, over-charging, small-town cop shop, DA, and judges. He made the front page of the newspaper in River Falls. He appeared like the worst iteration of a white ISIS. All wrong.

I have permission to ghost write his memoir, which thus far has been here in four parts, with a hell of a lot of me thrown in. His granddaughter is okay with her life pathway being put out here in WWW-Landia. It’s a tale of many traumas. Not unusual, but unique to her, and so emblematic of more decay in our systems for youth, for families, evidenced by all the crap of these realities of our lack of nuclear family — for many many reasons, including all that goes with Chlamydia Capitalism.**

**Chlamydia Capitalism is the process of oligarchs working with the Citizens United Koch-US Chamber of Commerce sorts to figure out how to rape the country, individuals, families, and entire regions. So, a place like Wisconsin, called the Arkansas of the North, has hundreds of dairy farms and corn and soy and hay operations to feed the milk producers (manure and urine producers, too) and on the surface, it seems as if some people are doing well, fulfilling the calorie rich American Dream/Nightmare. Literally, the list: pain when urinating, unusual vaginal discharge, pain in the tummy or pelvis, pain during sex, bleeding after sex, bleeding between periods.

Now scale this up to consumer and retail and merchants of war capitalism is about pain, in the ass and stomach. Bleeding after eviction, foreclosure, repossession. Unusual mental and physical discharge because of inflammatory capitalism. This Chlamydia Capitalism takes its toll on generation after generation. Sure, syphlitic capitalism is also another more dramatic form, where our brains and nervous system fails because of this predatory-casino-zombie-usury capitalism. The disease is a reminder of how pernicioius Shock Doctrine/Economic Hit Men capitalism is in the body politic and citizenry at large. **

Above, K and Ivy, grandfather and granddaughter, 65 and 19 respectively. Wisconsin born and bred.

He feels responsible for Ivy hanging on by a thread, spiritually. You know, heroin, cocaine and fentynal in solution and shot up in her precious delicate veins. You can read high end stuff all over the place, in libraries and on the Internet, on the why’s and what’s and how’s and where’s and how’s of this rural addiction: “Differential drug use patterns among sexually abused adolescent girls in treatment for chemical dependency” (source)

A sample of 444 girls admitted to adolescent chemical dependency treatment was divided into four groups based on sexual abuse experiences. Girls who reported intrafamilial abuse, extrafamilial abuse, or both, were compared with nonvictims in terms of alcohol and drug use histories. Prevalence and frequency of alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine did not differ significantly among the groups. However, all sexual abuse victims were significantly more likely to regularly use stimulants, sedatives, tranquilizers, and hallucinogens. Sexual abuse victims also reported earlier onset of alcohol and drug use, more self-medication, and more use to escape family problems.

Or, “Substance abuse among sexually abused adolescents and their families.”

The concurrence of substance abuse and history of sexual abuse among adolescents has prompted this study of substance abuse patterns among families of adolescents who report incest or extrafamilial sexual abuse. A total of 3,179 ninth-grade students in a rural midwestern state completed a survey that included questions about individual and family substance abuse. Adolescents who had been sexually abused were more likely to report substance abuse for themselves as well as for members of their immediate families. They were also more likely to report that they used substances because of family problems, school problems, and because they were sad, lonely, or angry. Adolescents reporting a parent with an alcohol or a drug problem were more likely to use cigarettes, marijuana, alcohol, or “speed.” Adolescents experiencing extrafamilial abuse reported more alcohol abuse and more alcohol-related problems than those who experienced incest. There were similar reports of parental and familial alcohol and drug problems among these experiencing incest and those experiencing extrafamilial abuse. Those with drug-abusing parents, however, were most likely to report some kind of sexual abuse history. (source)

I spent time with Ivy, and she was fighting her aunt’s from-the-right-place-in-her-heart attempt to take Ivy into her house and keep her there isolated andthen get her into a drug treatment program in River Falls. Ivy left a program two days before her “graduation” a few months ago. “I didn’t do it for myself,” she told us. “I know I will have to do any recovery for myself, at the right time.”

Homeless, on the streets, couch surfing, missing in action. Typical stuff.

Scars, man. Rejection by her mother: “I wish you were never born.” And, after Kelly’s wife died, Ivy’s grandmother, the words, “I wish it was you instead of her who died.”

Ivy intimated that she was molested and was raped, young. Generational trauma, and school shit, the entire state of bad education, bad peer groups and a shit-load of ruined youth, you know, that Midwest glow.

It’s textbook, typical of “research” on what the state of this or that region is tied to youth and drug abuse:

Though often perceived to be a problem of the inner city, substance use and misuse have long been prevalent in rural areas. Rural adults have higher rates of use for tobacco and methamphetamines, while prescription drug misuse and heroin use has grown in towns of every size.

Substance use can be especially hard to combat in rural communities due to limited resources for prevention, treatment, and recovery. According to The 2014 Update of the Rural-Urban Chartbook, the substance use treatment admission rate for nonmetropolitan counties was highest for alcohol as the primary substance, followed by marijuana, stimulants, opiates, and cocaine.

Factors contributing to substance use in rural America include:

• Low educational attainment
• Poverty
• Unemployment
• Lack of access to mental healthcare
• Isolation (Rural Health Information Hub)

Some powerful shit: Just 2 milligrams of fentanyl, the small amount that fits on the tip of a pencil, can be lethal depending on a person’s body size, tolerance and past usage

There are no unicorns or rainbows in Wisconsin: However, there are rainbow-colored fentanyl tablets.

In Chlamydia Capitalism, we have stop gap measures, band-aids, those non-holistic and zero systems thinking “things” that are not solutions at the core: all those things that do employ people, are part of the Complex, that is, the profit-making operations sucking us blind; stuff that’s traded on some stock market or exchange. It is expensive being poor and it makes millionaires out of those exploiting the poor. Narcan. (Emergent, the maker of the opioid overdose antidote Narcan, said in a statement Thursday that it is aiming for an out-of-pocket price of less than $50 for its nasal spray product now that the US Food and Drug Administration allows for over-the-counter sales.)

The story behind a granddaughter goes to the mother, Kelly’s daughter. Whatever is tragic there, with Ivy’s mother, carries into the gene code, epigenetics.

It is still being studied:

My trauma research team quickly trained health professionals to evaluate and, if needed, treat the women. We monitored them through their pregnancies and beyond. When the babies were born, they were smaller than usual—the first sign that the trauma of the World Trade Center attack had reached the womb. Nine months later we examined 38 women and their infants when they came in for a wellness visit. Psychological evaluations revealed that many of the mothers had developed PTSD. And those with PTSD had unusually low levels of the stress-related hormone cortisol, a feature that researchers were coming to associate with the disorder.

Surprisingly and disturbingly, the saliva of the nine-month-old babies of the women with PTSD also showed low cortisol. The effect was most prominent in babies whose mothers had been in their third trimester on that fateful day. Just a year earlier a team I led had reported low cortisol levels in adult children of Holocaust survivors, but we’d assumed that it had something to do with being raised by parents who were suffering from the long-term emotional consequences of severe trauma. Now it looked like trauma could leave a trace in offspring even before they are born. (How Parents’ Trauma Leaves Biological Traces in Children: Adverse experiences can change future generations through epigenetic pathways”)

I’ve heard stories before going to Wisconsin (and Kelly told me his own tied to going to Kansas for a late term abortion). One tragedy after another in rural America. Drinking and fornicating. Late term abortions. Then, fathers having to drop thousands of dollars and go to another state to abide by a daughter’s eight month fetal abortion.

The story goes national, here, now:

After the Roe v. Wade decision made abortion legal in the U.S., George Tiller drew attention from anti-abortion advocates for being one of only a few physicians in the nation who provided late-term abortions.

“Shrewd and resourceful, Dr. Tiller made himself the nation’s pre-eminent abortion practitioner, advertising widely and drawing women to Wichita from all over with his willingness to perform late-term abortions, hundreds each year,” the New York Times wrote in an article published after his death.

“Trust Women” was the motto of the late Wichita physician and abortion provider, who kept performing late-term abortions even after one anti-abortion extremist fire bombed his clinic and another shot him five times.

Abortion opponents also blockaded Tiller’s clinic and threatened his life.

But Tiller kept providing abortions until an anti-abortion extremist tracked him down and assassinated him at age 67 in 2009 during a Sunday service at the church he attended. (source)

Tiller has been quoted by many that late term abortions are tragedies, serious, that this sort of unimaginable situation is so tragic that a woman should never get herself in this position again. That this was a new lease on a woman’s life. Tragic. Of course, the trauma of whatever enrages women carries on and certainly two or three abortions are normal for many in this situation, including those who visited Tiller’s clinic.

The epigenetic pathway discussion is rarified and genuine, but in WIsconsin, where does it go when the family is immolated with pain, with dysfunction (terrible term), community standards that call for drinking and drowning? A smart young woman like Ivy is working at Walmart, and she is still deep in her addiction, and when I asked her if she enjoys life, she said she does. She said she has not harmed anyone in this life of shooting up, addiction. She said she hasn’t stolen for this addiction. Nor has she prostituted herself.

Her story is a story of many quilts in America. And, knowing her and her aunts and her uncles and her grandfather, and knowing what childhood trauma does, and the peer pressure, and the zoning out and checking out many youth in USA fall into, we have a recipe of over-incarceration, under-treating, so many prognastications on what to do or what the causes are, and then broken social services, underfunded treatment and lack of school counselors, and then an entire society that is so superficial and uncaring and mean and sarcastic and snarky, we have entire regions of the country where we have one lost generation after another, one family at a time!

I took this shot in Hanoi years ago, and I wonder what is up with the child now, as he is now a young adult. What of the epigenetics of Vietnam bombed and brutalized by the Best and the Brightest Generation? Intergenerational trauma. I didn’t see many homeless and drugged out youth in my months there.

I know in America — holding these Americans with puffed up chests going around thinking this is the center of the universe, and that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and if you fail, and if you self-destruct, then let the dog-eat-dog Chlamydia Capitalism take hold — crumbling is part of the big picture.

Part One: Here. Part Two: Through the Looking Glass — Meth, Fentynal, Unbelievable Dread of Living in Wisconsin. 3rd Part: Dual Diagnosis: The ‘Other’ America Failing; Part Four, Would You Leave Your Pet Monkey Alone with this Guy? And, an interview with “Haeder Infusion” (Fifth Part) : Q & A Wisconsin: Inside the Eye of the Storm.

Kelly’s story is one of a kid being sexually assaulted young and then falling into self medication: booze. He never went into the Meth hell of rural Wisconsin, or urban Minn. Never did cocaine or heroin or pills to kill his pain.

He did have a psychiatrist, who worked in a prison, Stillwater, Minn., a man who helped Kelly with his generational trauma, the rape he experienced in Merrill at age 13. His name was Ivan W. Sletten, and Kelly is honorific toward the man, who got Kelly on various medications to stave off the suicidal thoughts, depression, fear, anxiety. Kelly tried maybe thirty different drugs in an attempt to carve out new thinking and feeling process for broke Kelly.

“The DEA shut him down, got his license revoked. He died six months after that. He was doing innovative things with medications, and that was what was controversial int he eyes of the rotten DEA. I saw his clinic, in Stillwater, Minn. The lobby was filled with the dregs of society . . . hurting people . . . broken people. They were not drug seekers, but rather looking for help as they all were dealing with this and that mental pain. Trauma. Hell holes of not their own making.”

That was then, and here, from a 1962 newsletter:

Intersections, man:

Psychiatrist and Champion of Social Responsibility. Dr. Ivan Wayne Sletten died on January 30, 2014 of complications from pneumonia and related health issues. He was 84 years old and was born on March 9, 1929.

Back in the 1960s, Ivan Sletten was part of pioneering work with electronic data processing for psychiatric disorders at the Missouri Institute of Psychiatry in St. Louis, Missouri. He would go on in private practice for two decades, serving with compassion many patients in St. Louis, Missouri and Stillwater, Minnesota.

He practiced in Stillwater, Minnesota until his retirement in 2013 at age 83. Dr. Sletten was a champion of the less fortunate in this world. For decades he supported those who worked for social justice. In the last 15 years in Minnesota he focused on injustices in the criminal justice system, especially on drug law reform. He also provided financial support for research on multiple sclerosis.

“With malice toward none, and charity for all…..”, from Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, were the words he lived by every day of his life. He is survived by four children, Ingrid, Paul, Karen and Mark, his sister Loretta Wittig and eight fabulous grandchildren: Nick, Kate, Arthur, Lucas, Lilly, Gwen, Morgan and Evan. His beloved wife Grace Lorraine Sletten (Zastrow) preceded him in death in 2005.

His children wish to acknowledge their love and appreciation for his cherished companion, Marie Buttrey, who made the last years of his life full of joy and fun.

Dr. Sletten graduated from the University of Wisconsin medical school in 1955. He took his training in psychiatry at the University of Minnesota. He published more than 100 articles in his lifetime, and was a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Dr. Sletten received many awards in his lifetime for social causes. These organizations include NAMI, American Psychiatric Association, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Multiple Sclerosis Society.

Kelly talks much about the kindness of the man, how he came all the way up to a prison Kelly was locked up in to see how he was doing. The Correctional Officers gave him hell, and he took off his feeding tube in order to get through the security gate.

The family has been hollowed out, bombed to smithereens. Self-imploding, genetic lineage, the entire systems of oppression and atomization. Kelly’s family is like millions: hanging on by a thread!