[lbo-talk] Americans: doped up for decades

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Sun Aug 28 13:33:14 PDT 2011


i'm guessing that's not new either. people used to feed booze to kids all the time.

yeah, the drugs are bad, but the desire to shut kids the help up by doping them is not new in history.

what is new is this, according to warwick: the self-definitions people come to hold of themselves under the medicalizing model.

funny thing is, he tells us that the moral model of treatment, created by quakers, and used for decades before thorazine was used to treat schizophrenia was 58% successfull in the late 1800s. People went into treatment at a home and would be sent home to live their lives after a year or two.

today, we don't usually think of schizophrenia as a mental disorder someone can have, get treatment for a year or so, and be sent home and no longer suffer from the problem. instead, we see it as a disease that people must take a drug for every day, and who will suffer residual effects due to the drug (loss of affect, for instance; loss of energy and enthusiasm, short-tempered, jittery, etc.)

Warwick's argument is that the drugs we're using have exacerbating effects that *cause* new mental disorders. In some case, people who were diagnosed with depression were treated with drugs which then caused them to become bipolar. Usually, their first manic episode happened after they were treated for depression. I don't know the evidence he marshalls for this argument yet because Ihaven't gotten that far in the book.


> Self-medication has gone on for the whole of human history: alcohool
> always; nicotine for five hundred years; assorted herbs and mushrooms,
> always.
>
> What is new is the mass medicalization of children (and adults) with
> really, really, really bad drugs.
>
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>

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