Bernards Voices

Contact We Care will be having their gala event on 10/29. Right now we’re in the process of organizing and getting auction donations and ads for our print journal. If anyone is interested in learning more, please let me know. Our organization is a phone helpline for depression and suicide. We won the volunteer organization for the year last year.

Related article posted July 6, 2009, on NJ.com.

WESTFIELD — CONTACT We Care, the 24-hour caring and crisis hotline, will celebrate 34 years of providing hope and saving lives at its gala fundraising event on Thursday, Oct. 29 at the Primavera Regency in Stirling.  Honorees include Secretary of State Nina Mitchell Wells; NFL Star George Martin; Celgene CEO Dr. Sol Barer and Mrs. Meri Barer, and Dr. Katherine Feingold of Bartky Healthcare.

CONTACT We Care was also featured in this article in The Alternative Press.

CONTACT We Care, the award-winning volunteer-staffed 24-hour caring and crisis hotline based in Westfield reminds everyone that suicide is preventable.  The organization is marking National Suicide Prevention Week, September 6 through September 12, with an invitation to join the organization in soothing souls and saving lives by becoming a CONTACT Listener. The next Volunteer Training Class begins September 23.

 (Posted on behalf of Karen Yutsus.)

If you need to talk, call CONTACT We Care at 908/232-2880 or through the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-800-273-TALK. A trained volunteer is available to help. For information about volunteering for CONTACT We Care, call 908/301-1899 or visit the organization’s website at www.contactwecare.org.

The letter below was submitted to the Bernardsville News on August 12, 2009.

EDITOR:

I read with great interest the recent letter by Bill Allen, “We can turn quarry into a premier public park.” Then I reviewed his plan and map at www.BernardsVoices.org. I started to get excited about how wonderful it would be to have a lake to swim in right here in Bernards Township.

When my boys were growing up we spent many a lovely summer afternoon at Stirling Lake, which was a great place for them to learn to swim. It was also very inexpensive for residents to purchase badges, which was a huge plus for our family. Society Hill, where I now live, has a pool, but I love lakes. There is nothing like sitting in the shade of a tree, watching your kids play in the sand or in the shallow water a few yards away.

I was dreaming of swimming in a lake with sand under my feet instead of concrete, but then I started getting depressed. Twice in my life I have lived where a lovely lake existed and there was a proposal to develop it into a township park. One was in Wall Township, many years ago, and the other was Clover Hill in Millington (Long Hill Township.) In both cases, the plan failed to materialize, or was voted down, and each lake is now only accessible to the few owners of the lots surrounding it. We in Bernards Township can refuse to make the same mistakes that were made in Wall Township and Long Hill Township.

Readers, please look at the plan and map at www.BernardsVoices.org. And you will see what a great plan it is. Bill Allen seems to have thought of everything – not only aesthetics and engineering questions, but also management and fiscal issues. As Bill says, we can have this park if we want it. We need to let the Planning Board and members of the Township Committee know that we want it.

Carol Jones

On Slate’s DoubleX website, Dr. Peter Kramer posts an article joining the DSM V debate.

The APA’s attempt to keep the decision-making process secret is indefensible. The other matter, whether the diagnostic system needs and is ready for revision, is extraordinarily complex.

Kramer is writing a book on the way psychiatrists diagnose patients, and focuses the bulk of his post on this.

A fundamental change in the way that informed psychiatrists see the project of outlining and justifying diagnoses. Psychiatry has, by and large, dropped the illusion that its diagnoses are what philosophers call “natural kinds.” A natural kind is something that simply exists in nature.

This makes it hard.  There isn’t a specific test: the presence of a bacteria (or its antibodies), a virus, a gene, that identifies the mental illness. This is true in many areas of medicine.

Even for a near-universally accepted disorder like schizophrenia, a unifying cause will prove illusory.

High blood pressure and asthma are legitimate diagnoses even though their causes are diverse, and reasonable observers disagree on the conditions’ lower limits. And good diagnoses have “predictive validity”: they suggest how disorders will progress, which symptoms they will produce, and which remedies will ameliorate them.

The cause of the illness doesn’t have to be unifying or unique or single, but the illness itself  has to be consistently recognizable.  A lot of the controversy has to do with the conditions’ lower limits.  Take depression for example.  The lower limit from the point of view of time is two weeks … if your blues persists for two weeks then you have depression.

In the first year after my tragedy, when I was seeing both a psychiatrist and psychologist, they were constantly testing me (by interviewing me, watching my reaction … not by taking blood) to see if I was falling into depression.  Did I have good days between the bad days?  Did the amount of bad days slowly ebb over time?  What did I do on my bad days?  Did I play tennis?  Did I eat?  Did I talk to anyone?  This was a major, recurring theme in my grief therapy.

Yes the criteria seems a bit arbitrary: why 14 days instead of 10 days, 20 days, 5 days?  Just because professionals in the field may debate the time period strenuously doesn’t mean that ultimately they don’t agree that one has to exist.  You have to start somewhere.  Every individual is different, but there has to be yardstick.  In the DSM the APA has to take a position

For all its flaws we can’t do without diagnosis. Think of a patient who comes to a doctor after a series of panic attacks and is reassured: “You don’t have heart disease. You won’t die from these palpitations. We have ways to treat panic, with medication or psychotherapy.” Or think of a parent whose child has anorexia and learns that the condition is life threatening. We need to be able to name the thing—panic disorder, anorexia—and convey what we know about it. Similar requirements exist for research. Schizophrenia in Verona must be schizophrenia in Boston.

We need to be able to name the thing.

Please check out Leslie’s new blog, Making Change, on Psychology Today.

PS. Be a bit patient with the Psychology Today website. Seems a bit erratic today.

Dear Residents and Neighbors:

In our last communication, we advised that the Township and CCSMQ had responded to the DEP regarding the Quarry’s application for a voluntary investigation of soils the Quarry claims are fill materials imported since 2006 (designated by the Quarry as Fill Areas A, B and C).   The DEP responded to the Quarry’s proposal on July 14, deeming the application insufficient and requiring additional parameters. CCSMQ and the Township believe that even if amended as the DEP requires, the Quarry proposal falls far short of what is necessary to ensure the site is clean.  Primarily, groundwater and surface water should be tested now, and the entire site must be tested prior to development. 

CCSMQ Representatives and Sally Rubin, Executive Director of the Great Swamp Watershed Association, met with the DEP on July 30 to discuss their shared concerns.  The DEP provided some confidence in the process, advising that the Township’s engineer ICON will oversee the investigation on site and retest each sample tested by the Quarry.  Interestingly, Christopher Daggett–Bernards Township resident, Independent Candidate for Governor and former DEP Commissioner–is a principal in the firm J.M. Sorge hired by the Quarry to initiate this DEP application and conduct the investigation.  (The DEP advised that it does not conduct the investigation other than to make occasional site visits and review the test results.) 

The DEP also advised that this stage is a fill characterization of specific soils–a preliminary and not final step to testing the site prior to residential development.  After completing this process, if no remediation is necessary or if any necessary remediation is completed for these three piles of dirt, the Quarry could seek a “no further action” letter for these specified areas but not as to the entire site.

CCSMQ advised the DEP that the Quarry has existing monitoring wells, not revealed by the Quarry, which would allow groundwater testing now.   We are hopeful that the DEP will grant this important request made by the Township, CCSMQ, and GSWA to test groundwater and surface water at this time.

For more important information, read on.

DEP Response to Quarry Proposal:

See the DEP’s response to the Quarry’s proposal MQI Tilcon DEP response July 14.

The DEP requires:

1)  75 soil borings instead of the proposed 25.
 
2)  225 samples v. the Quarry’s proposed 78.  
 
3)  Analysis of all samples for base neutrals, metals, pesticides and PCBs.
Although the DEP did not formally respond to CCSMQ’s letter, they advised that they added our request to test for chromium.  Significantly missing is volatile organics associated with gasoline (and as we know many fill sources were gas stations), emphasizing the need for groundwater testing.

CCSMQ ADVISES DEP OF MISREPRESENTATIONS/MISDEEDS BY QUARRY DEMONSTRATING NEED FOR MORE COMPREHENSIVE TESTING

1) History of dumping:  Documents we shared with the DEP should dispel the Quarry’s longstanding contention that it only imported fill to satisfy the Planning Board’s 2006 requirement to pad the cliffs.  Quarry “dump price lists” date back to at least 2001 and a Sales Agreement between the owner of MQ and Tilcon for the profits derived from importing ”dirt, soils, fill, shale, rock and concrete rubble” (no mention of clean fill) date back to at least 2003.  Moreover, the Quarry admitted importing soils prior to 2006.  Theoretically, the Quarry attorneys may have objected to the PB requirement to pad the cliffs because it did not want its long running, profitable (an estimated 40.5 million since 2006) dumping business to be regulated by the Township and come to end (which is exactly what happened).  This is important because all soils, not just those imported since 2006, must be tested.

2) Quarry assertion that only clean fill has been imported:  Less than 1% of the fill has been tested; fewer than 100 truckloads out of @180,000; only self certifications of truck driver; fill from sites identified on the NJ and NY known contaminated sites lists; 17% failure rate of the small volume tested, etc., all demonstrate the need to test the entire site and the water as soon as possible.

3) Quarry’s assurance to residents that DEP tests water discharged into the Passaic River:  CCSMQ investigated and provided copies to the DEP of the NJDEPS permit which checks for only PHs and solids– further demonstrating the need to test the surface waters for contaminants. It is reasonable that the DEP assumed the permit may have been sufficient for a quarry operation, but certainly not for a landfill, which we believe the DEP, like residents, did not know about.

TOWNSHIP’S RESPONSE TO QUARRY PROPOSAL

For information on the Township’s response, see statements at Bernards Township Committee Press Release MQI Tilcon 09-05-13 and MQI Tilcon DEP response July 14 (following DEP letter).  We anticipate that the Township will continue to pursue more comprehensive testing through the DEP.  The Township must act quickly as testing may begin as early as mid-August.

WHAT IS THE STATUS OF THE LITIGATION AND MEDIATION?

Litigation is on hold while mediation is deemed “active.”  CCSMQ’s concern that the Quarry would not engage in good faith mediation but would use it as a tool to buy time to control testing appears to be true with its’ unilateral DEP application, thereby undermining the Township’s earnest efforts to reach a fair and adequate resolution at this time. 

–CCSMQ