0. One very annoying guy on this was on NPR for awhile---i even complained---named frederick goodwin, who used to bring on these (what sounded like) very poor, eneducated black people (usually women) who were all doped up and saying they were cured. I actually come across people like this all the time (mostly young and male) ---often either homeless, or just about to be, and they are all medicated up and completely out of their minds in many ways. its really a form of genocide---you cant give anyone anything except dope. 'just to get by, just to get high' (hiphop). alot of them arer really just totally stressed and near a nervous breakdown, but they are being used to pad pharma's paychecks i guess via medicare, and the social workers who trat them actually are basically almost in the same position, and who believe they are doing the right thing. simiklarily with alcohol, you have social workers telling people drinking is genetic (and they
graduated highschool so they know) and then dropping people off back home, in front of the liquor stor. as Cass Sunnstein says--'nudge'.
goodwin was finally knocked off NPR (though not his GWU job) when it turned out he didnt disclose he was making 100's of thousand $ from big phar ma---giving speeches, etc. It was mostly just ads called 'the infinite mind', with occasional insight (mostly due to the fact he couldn't be 100% rush limbaugh on npr). he often had these very second rate musdicians onn there who said how legal dope made them succesful, especially in their prozac doped up crowd. for me, 'bird lives'. even MJ is better. 'never can say good bye'..
goodwin also got peter breggin on his ass when he said violence of the crack epidemic suggested that inner city black male youth were essentially doing what orangutans or something did---ritualized violence, genetically determined as a way of ecological resource allocation. 'those monkees'. and this person gets to be in polite company--- sure, he can say that, but the fact is he doesn't know his biology (he's even or much worse than Larry Summers on women). he may know his biochemical pathways, but thats like knowing what fruit flys do.
professors at harvard, emory and elsewhere have been disclosed as accepting lots of money to wrtie 'scholarly' articles on the genetics and biochemistry of alot of these things (eg how you tell whether a new born who comes out crying needs a dose of antipsychotics ).
1. you may want to look up anti-psychiatry on wikipedia, which is a field known by thomas szaz (a bit of a loon), peter breggin (limousine libertarian) , r d laing, among others. also the web site mindfreedom (google it) covers this stuff. i think its 'david oaks' who runs that. (he went to harvasrd, flipped out, and then kicked meds.) (unfortunately there seem to be alot of quack type cures which may be no better than prozac, etc.)
2. i once did research for a friend on ADHD; while you say your niece is 'ok', and i don't neccesarily dispute it, sometimes this reminds me of the person i once read who said, 'i used to be depressed, and wars and environmental destruction i was obsessed about, and barely functioning, but now i'm on meds and no longer depressed----not that i have changed my opinion of bad thigns; it just ain't bother me no more. also i now can do my job at blackwater satisfactorily. 'don't worry, be happy'. i am sure wuikipedia has this stuff. (be careful but wikip is the sh-t. shows what a little libertarianism on the chicago stock exchange can do--jimmy wales, not of course the popular wale (pronounced wall ay).)
what is called ADHD sometimes may simply be resistance of people to 'stay in the box' (eg school, make work, etc.). so defining somebody as 'ok' or not mentally ill may be 'culture-specific'. my pet raccoon may even have adhd because it flips out when i see it and runs right up the tree, almost falling down, and refuses to let me pet it, or maybe its just angry becuause i keep it oustide and force it to get its own food.
a cure from adhd mayb be you know, concentrate, get your a's, go to colig and grad school, work on wall street, be highly functioning... conform and we'll confirm your sanity--dont be no galileo or ramnujan and upset the set up.
I've known a bunch of people who have 'flipped out' to the point they are dangerous, so I am not knee jerk anti-meds (just as i am not knee jerk anti-prisons or police, as some people on the 'left' are---because i personally cannot deal with alot of behavior (even had some altercations here yesterday) so at present some of these things may be neccesary. i'm not sure how 'ok ' it is.
'im ok, you're ok, just like the kkk'.
its interesting to compare incideinces of mental diseases crtoss culturally; as you pointed out, DSM-iV has a tendency to find new problems all the time. (Also, some of these overlap---for example i knew one person who was diagosed bipolar, then schizo, and so on----in other words it dont make no sense actually, quite often. But DSM-IV is a 'one size fits all' kind of book. sortuh like a dollar store---'we got it'. )
3. depression is commonly called 'genetic' though now they are moving off that since it doesn't work scientifically. most recently they were unable to confirm a very well known paper in science that said you needed a 'gene' and a 'trauma'; that didn't hold either. That made the NYT's. If you google 'bipolar' or look at wikipedia (also called the bible) it'll be there. (i liked the other one that said to be a violent youthful offender you needed a gene and not to eat breakfast with mom and dad. so watch out for the ones who refuse to eat their oatmeal; you may want to give them a genetic test and then have the product recalled.)
the one thing most psychiatrists often minimize with is environment---like whether anyone can ever be depressed for some reason---e.g. some 'downer' type person enters your space and disrupts your life. your kid gets killed in iraq...---nahh, there is no mechanism for that. And that's because that can't be cured with a pill. (I once pretty long ago was more or less required to go to family counseling, and they told me maybe i should try some pills (and i told them maybe you should either support me or get out of my face) and later once that was done the person who suggested that saw me on the street looking a bit ragged and forlorn, and then suggested maybe he could take me to his home, to see if that instead might make me feel better. i told him have a nice day (pronounced knife).
in sum, while depression no dought exists, some of this may be culture specific again. I guess some might prescribe socialism, or anarchism, or anarcho-capitalism... CVS dont sell it. I've heard the one thing that really works, and which is essentially a form of cognitive behavioral therapy, is excercize. This is what i do. Get tired enough and you will forget being depressed. i do this as essentially commmuting (eg the hip hop band pharicide were wrong that
''you can't keep running away"---you have to.).
som,ething like 1/3 of us people are omn medications of some sort. (not counting starbucks, etc.) all cultures do something it appears. (i wonder about eskimos---i guess in siberia they got shrooms, but what about the inuit? they aint got sh-t?)
there is so much money in it. If only every american gave me just one penny a day, that would be almost 4$ /year times 300 million or $1.2 billion/ yr which would cover my high gravity and caffeine habits (i'm called a 'tea totaler' since i combine the 2 into a kind of legal speedball. ) i'd still have to cover rent, maybe some new shoes, carrots...so maybe 50 cent. ('i get money...')
infinity. i actually thought this was old news.
--- On Wed, 8/26/09, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> From: shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com>
> Subject: [lbo-talk] let's argue about the cause of mental illness
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Wednesday, August 26, 2009, 8:21 PM
> in keeping with the theme... Reading
> Petersen's book, Our Daily Meds, she argues that the idea
> that mental illnesses such as depressions, ADD, ADHD,
> oppositional defiance disorder (diagnosed in children when
> they argue, get angry, or disobey) is an "oversimplified"
> theory "that scientists have been unable to prove despite
> decades of work."
>
> To back up her claim, she cites "Dr. David
> Burns at Standford and Dr. Elliot S. Valenstein at the
> University of Michigan who wrote _Blaming the Brain_ (1998)
>
> Burns, who spent many years doing research on brain
> serotonin metabolism, says he's never seen convincing
> evidence that psychiatric disorders are the result of
> deficient brain seratonin. He goes on to say, "In fact, we
> cannot measure brain serotonin levels in living human beings
> os there is no way to test this theory. some neoroscientists
> would question whether the theory is even viable, since the
> brain does not function ... as a hydraulic system."
>
> what say the brain trust at LBO?
>
> I don't suffer from any of these things and only one person
> in our family has been diagnosed with a disorder, a niece
> who has ADHD. My sister, who was in community college at the
> time, getting a degree to teach pre-school, was really leary
> of the diagnosis. She spent a lot of time carefully
> considering the issue, reading research, etc. This was
> because, when she interned for the school system and
> headstart, she learned that the schools in NY were using the
> diagnosis to help weed out poor performing students from the
> test scores. IIRC, she said that once diagnosed the scores
> of these kids would be removed from the results, raising the
> test score average and making the school look better. I
> think I have that right.
>
> Anyway, my sister was not really keen on simply swallowing
> what a phsyician told her, but after careful consideration,
> she put my neice on medication for ADHD. Things have turned
> out OK and she doesn't regret it.
>
> but other than that, since I've never personally
> experienced clinical depression (though Google knows that by
> all rights I should have been declared depressed at some
> point!), I've always just read what people had to say and
> assumed they knew best. If they feel they were depressed and
> it was a chemical imbalance, then that was the way it was.
> What did I know! But now I'm reading this book and wondering
> about the degree to which the pharmaceutical industry and
> physicians have pushed certain diagnoses on people,
> regardless as to any evidence supporting the diagnosis --
> and to an unfortunate result as some folks have taken
> medicines that are useless or, worse, cause more symptoms
> that are then treated with more drugs. Or even worse, given
> drugs that injure or kill them.
>
> so, what is the state of the debate folks who know better
> than I?
>
> shag
>
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