Letters are posted as we receive them during the week, and before they are printed in the paper, so check back frequently to see new letters. If you'd like to send a letter to the editor, use this postmarks submission form, or email your letter directly to [email protected]. Thanks for your patience.

Dear Editor,
    Regarding “Point Austin: Finding the Right Ratio,” [News, Aug. 23]: I take my kids to the local library and find out the library is closed on Fridays due to budget cuts. I take them to the neighborhood pool, and the pool is closed as well. Apparently the city can't afford to pay for the $7.50/hour, high school lifeguards. On many streets the potholes are winning the war against asphalt, and the bike lanes are always a mess. Yet the cost of almost all city services is going up, including, of course, property taxes. What gives? It's quite simple: The city spends a plurality of its revenue on police. We can't refer to them as doing nothing; last week an entire APD SWAT team descended upon a house in West Austin in order to arrest a 70-year-old man and a 60-year-old woman for smoking a joint. Why? A "concerned citizen" made a call about narcotics at the home. That's all it takes when you've got dozens of bored cops sitting around with nothing to do. Where on Earth did the myth start that there is any correlation between the number of police and crime rates, that more police means more crimes prevented? Crime rates have a lot more to do with the availability of living wage jobs and social services than they do with cops, and cops most certainly do not prevent crimes from happening. The only crime-prevention benefit of cops is having one living on your street. This is most certainly a crime deterrent for the immediate area. Unfortunately in Austin, we don't even get to enjoy that, as the majority of APD cops live in places like Leander and Kyle. They just come to town for a few hours a day to frequent the doughnut shops, and then head back out to their suburban homes for some rest and relaxation. Every so often, they shoot some unarmed black person. The result is that the cop gets to go on paid vacation for a few months while I get stuck paying for the ensuing multimillion dollar lawsuit. So, no, the city should not hire even one additional cop until the city services that residents depend on are fully restored.

Dear Editor,
    I appreciate Greg Harman's resistance to hopelessly giving up and his determination to keep doing things that might help with his depression ["The Egg & I,” News, Aug. 23]. I especially appreciate his recommendation of Robert Whitaker's 2010 book, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, perhaps the single best resource on the actual research data on psychiatric drugs and their dangers and lack of effectiveness. Harman is courageous to share his personal struggle as an example of Whitaker's main point, that psychiatric drug treatment appears to be the main cause of an epidemic of disability in this country; we are now approaching a 2% rate of people on social security disability for psychiatric reasons. That is an astounding tragedy!
    Harman did well to avoid electroshock, a procedure that causes brain damage. Many of us are trying to get that one abolished (see www.endofshock.com). However, it is sad to see that he thinks the wave of the psychiatric future is transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). While apparently more benign than electroshock, this approach still rests on the same failed assumptions of biopsychiatry that have led to rampant drug use and electroshock. As Harman mentions, regarding the drugs, people are more likely to recover without them. And as he personally demonstrates, many who go down the drug path end up disabled.
    Whitaker and others also show that the chemical imbalance theory has never been scientifically demonstrated. And just as Harman reveals that even a desired uplift from TMS is usually temporary, so does the history of physical psychiatric treatments (various drugs, lobotomy, cold wraps, spinning chairs, insulin coma shock, electroshock, etc.) show that the range of miraculous new treatments are soon revealed to be ineffective and harmful. Buyer beware.
    It is worth remembering that depression is a virtually universal human experience, and that it has many meanings and purposes. For most of us, this troubling descent responds to time, gentle self-care, human connection, and counseling.