> On 6/15/2011 10:38 PM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
>> Fascinating article about mental illness and psychoactive drugs.
>>
>> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/23/epidemic-mental-illness-why/?page=1
>
> Jan read parts of the article to me. I would agree with it. I don't know much about anti-psychotics (and I didn't ask Jan whether the article included lithium, but I've become convinced that SSRIs at least are pure poison.
>
> It may be a case of more or less unregulated capitalist firms simply not recognizing any limits.
It's pure market creation. Take a population of disoriented, stressed, over-worked individuals (raw material), and pass them through an increasingly refined industrial process of ever-proliferating diagnoses. Voila - turns out there are "diseases" and "syndromes" everywhere - because we're constantly refining our ability to "extract" them. Meanwhile, every new chemical compound wants to find a market - something to treat. It's a near-perfect analog of the old "pass a law, create a business" line.
Last time I was in the US, the parade of happy-smiley drug ads on TV with their horror-show, fast-talk disclaimers at the end seemed like something out of Bladerunner. Completely fucking surreal.