EUROPA PRESS

• En una zona del estado de San Luis Potosí.
• La balsa en la que viajaban volcó.
• Otros dos españoles que iban con ellos lograron nadar hasta la orilla.

Cuatro españoles han desaparecido en México al sufrir un accidente cuando trataban de cruzar un río en la zona de Aqismon, en San Luis de Potosí, a bordo de una balsa junto a otros dos compatriotas que lograron alcanzar la costa a nado, según fuentes del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores y de Cooperación.

Los hechos ocurrieron cuando seis españoles decidieron cruzar en balsa un río en la citada zona a pesar de que desde la Oficina de Turismo local les habían desaconsejado vivamente hacerlo debido a las fuertes corrientes.

Por causas que aún están siendo investigadas, la balsa en la que viajaban los seis españoles sufrió un accidente y volcó. Dos de sus ocupantes lograron alcanzar la orilla a nado pero sus otros cuatro compañeros desaparecieron en el agua.

Dispositivo de búsqueda

Los dos españoles que lograron alcanzar tierra alertaron de lo ocurrido a las autoridades de la zona de la desaparición de sus compañeros, por lo que inmediatamente se montó un dispositivo de búsqueda.

El caso está siendo seguido atentamente desde el Consulado de España en Guadalajara y el cónsul honorario de España en Tampico se ha desplazado al lugar para atender a los dos españoles accidentados, así como seguir con las autoridades mexicanas el dispositivo de búsqueda de los otros cuatro españoles.

AP - House investigators accused veteran New York Rep. Charles Rangel of 13 violations of congressional ethics standards on Thursday, throwing a cloud over his four-decade political career and raising worries for fellow Democrats about the fall elections.

AP - A criminal investigation into the leak of tens of thousands of secret Afghanistan war logs could go beyond the military, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday, and he did not rule out that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could be a target.

AP - A Canadian company whose pipeline leaked hundreds of thousands of oil into a Michigan river boasts on its website of being "an industry leader in pipeline safety and integrity."

Reuters - The whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks may have blood on its hands, the Pentagon said on Thursday, warning its unprecedented leak of secret U.S. military files could cost lives and damage trust of allies.

Your penis is connected to your heart, but unconscious processes are sometimes at work

I'm married to a wonderful woman but I'm also involved with a man (not my first male lover). At first the sex with him was incredibly exciting, while sex with my wife (although I love her dearly) was simply a chore. Eventually, my wife discovered my affair, and was surprisingly accepting. Since then things have changed ? I'm enjoying more satisfying sex with my wife than my lover. I don't want to end the affair because I love him too, but I'd like to understand why the situation has switched, and if you think I could ever equally enjoy sex with both.

Some people are capable of loving more than one person at the same time, and of having satisfying sex with both. Sex with a new partner tends to be more electric. The sneaking around that accompanies clandestine relationships serves to heighten eroticism, but you lost that. I suspect lovemaking with your wife improved because you felt more intimate with her when she showed she truly understood and appreciated who you are. Your diminished interest in your lover could simply be due to the passage of time. Or there may be unresolved relationship issues, or deep feelings (eg guilt) that are negatively influencing your desire. Examine all this; your penis is connected to your heart and expresses your conscious feelings, but it can also be undermined by unconscious processes such as an internalised homophobia that even gay and bisexual people can harbour. Your wife's unconditional support is a truly loving gift, but you may still have a way to go in fully accepting yourself as a bisexual person.

? Pamela Stephenson Connolly is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist who specialises in treating sexual disorders.

? Send your problem to private.lives@guardian.co.uk

Many are worried that the latest edition of the psychiatrist's 'bible' labels everyone as ill ? but this has an upside

Each edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has a massive impact on psychiatric practice and medical education around the world. The book lists mental disorders and explains how to diagnose them. Seen as a gold standard, it dictates diagnostic practice in mainstream medicine.

Every media mention of DSM calls it the "bible" of mental health, and, like the latter, it generates passionate controversy. Proposals for the next edition, due in 2013, have sparked international protest, as DSM-5 looks as if it will lower the threshold of what counts as mental disorder. Critics have argued that new categories like "psychosis risk syndrome", "temper dysregulation disorder", and "binge eating" threaten to pathologise the human condition, turning clinically insignificant behaviour into illness.

People with no signs of distress may be encouraged or coerced to have therapy or take medication, with diagnoses such as "psychosis risk syndrome" being made even if a psychosis has not appeared. With the ramification of diagnoses, stigmatisation and discrimination would snowball. After DSM-5, no one will be normal again.

These critiques are both enlightening and obfuscating. The new DSM follows the logic of its predecessors: disorder is defined in terms of behaviour, so that visible aspects of our lives are used to define clinical categories. If you're nervous and shy, rather than seeing this as the symptom of an underlying clinical category to be discovered, it becomes a clinical category in itself: social phobia.

Gone is the idea of complex psychical causality or even of an interior life. For DSM, only two kinds of causes exist: biological and stress-related. The new diagnoses are made on surface symptoms that can be swiftly classified rather than invisible structures that can only be diagnosed after considerable time. As one American psychiatrist put it, using the ever-expanding diagnostic system of DSM was like trying to carve the Thanksgiving turkey according to its feathers rather than its bone structure.

This expansion cannot be denied. The first edition of DSM in 1952 was a mere 129 pages, with a few basic diagnostic categories. By the 1980s it had grown to over 900 pages, and the 180 categories of mental disorder present in 1984 would more than double over the next decade. What could explain this exponential increase in the number of mental disorders we supposedly suffer from?

DSM followed a market-led vision of the psyche in which symptoms were isolated entities that could be locally targeted. A symptom was not seen as a general problem in a person's existence which, if unravelled, might lead to the unravelling of the self, but as a local disturbance that could be managed and put right. It reflected not only today's atomisation of the self but also the belief that we can change parts of ourselves without affecting other parts.

Changes in drug legislation also played a part. Each new product had to define its active ingredients, the outcomes sought and the delivery period for attaining them. This meant a new kind of surface precision. Drugs would have to prove through expensive trials that they were more effective than placebo and did better than other drugs. It was the drug industry that created the new diagnostic categories. With each new category came a new medication.

Exacerbating this problem is the fact that in many parts of the US, a clinician will only receive reimbursement if they make a prescription, which means making a diagnosis. Like drugs themselves, clinical categories become objects in the marketplace, wielding economic power. The result is that the patient's underlying problems may well be neglected in favour of surface diagnoses that are both unscientific and misleading.

Curiously, the uproar over the DSM-5 proposals does bring a key clinical issue into focus. Critics complain that no one will be normal, as the threshold for disorder will be so low. But shouldn't this make us question the usefulness of talk of normality or, indeed, of "mental health"? Have these terms ever really helped anyone, beyond reinforcing the prejudices of "us" and "them"?

It is true that many people diagnosed with a so-called "mental illness" find the label helpful, allowing them to see their difficulties on a par with a physical illness, to be recognised and treated. But who are the "normal" people we would set them up against? Clinically, normality and psychosis are often the same thing. Someone may complain that everything is the neighbour's fault, not theirs, or that a plot has been hatched against them. Old psychiatry recognised this innocence of some psychotic subjects. Clinicians also know that it is in the most serious cases that a childhood is described as happy or uneventful.

Realising that no one is healthy and normal does not have to mean pathologising or medicating them. On the contrary, it can introduce a more humane approach to so-called "mental illness". Even Eugen Bleuler, who popularised the term "schizophrenia", argued that the most common form of this condition was latent. Once we accept that we can have disorders that don't activate ? or to put it another way, that there is a difference between being mad and going mad ? we might study what allows one person to function and another not to.

This is what old psychiatry once explored with detail and passion: the lifestyle choices, activities, roles or other solutions that people found to avoid breakdown. Studying these restitution mechanisms can help us to work with those who have not been so fortunate, and who find their lives shattered by the outbreak of psychosis.

The imperative to make people normal ? rather than recognise the fault lines in all of us and strive to make them more bearable ? is a constant pressure for a mental health force already overburdened by a focus on categorisation rather than on humane interactions and the uniqueness of an individual's story. Multiplying labels will not reduce the distress of those suffering most in our society: it can only serve to mask the lack in what we provide.

Post your advice below. The best responses will be published in G2 next Friday

I have been with my boyfriend for four years. When we met he was doing drugs recreationally. I explained I did not want drugs in my life and he agreed to quit. Six months ago he started to act differently and one day money was missing from my bank account. He broke down and told me he was doing OxyContin. He said he was not addicted and was glad I had found out. I believed him and was determined to help him.

A month later more money went missing. A few more times he appeared to be high, but insisted he had just been drinking. Then I was doing the washing and discovered drugs in his pockets; he said they were months old. How do I know if he's lying? What do I do to get him to stop?

? If you would like to respond to this week's problem, please post your comment below.

When leaving a message on this page, please be sensitive to the fact that you are responding to a real person in the grip of a real-life dilemma, who wrote to Private Lives asking for help, and may well view your comments here. Please consider especially how your words or the tone of your message could be perceived by someone in this situation, and be aware that comments which appear to be disruptive or disrespectful to the individual concerned will not appear.

If you would like fellow readers to respond to a dilemma of yours, send us an outline of the situation of around 150 words. For advice from Pamela Stephenson Connolly on sexual matters, send us a brief description of your concerns.

All correspondence should reach us by Wednesday morning. Email: private.lives@guardian.co.uk (please don't send attachments).

LA PROVA
Sottile, brillante, multimediale iPhone 4 conquista il mondo
Da oggi in vendita anche in Italia l'ultima versione del telefonino Apple: sempre meno cellulare, sempre più post-computer. E l'antenna, sul modello che abbiamo testato, funziona senza problemi di ERNESTO ASSANTE

(00:01 30/07/2010)

LA PROTESTA
Legge bavaglio, deciso il rinvio a settembre
I problemi nella maggioranza, le parole del premier. E continuano le manifestazioni di protesta
di CARMINE SAVIANO

(19:04 29/07/2010)

Europa League
Delneri, buona la prima Amauri stende lo Shamrock
Esordio stagionale senza intoppi per i bianconeri che battono 2-0 gli irlandesi nella gara d'andata dei preliminari di Europa League. Decide una doppietta dell'italo-brasiliano che colpisce anche un palo
DI ANTONIO FARINOLA

(18:45 29/07/2010)

Arizona has appealed a federal judge's order that put most of the state's immigration law on hold.