The San Francisco Chronicle today had an article on bipolar disorder among youths (under 19) in america; apparently the rate of diagnosis is almost .5%, which doesn't make much sense, seeing that 800,000 youths are said to have been diagnosed, making this stat reveal 106,000,000 youths (a year, i believe) visit psychiatrists, etc, that seems like too many, but thats besides the two things i have to say about this:
one this is that it seems that the diagnosis of disorders like this is entirely useless, along with ADD and OCD, they are fairytail disorders, with no actual ground for diagnosis besides behavior, which as far as im concerned is controlled by the individual. there may be cases in which people do go fucking nuts, okay, well deal with that when the time comes, but when kids are sad a lot, its probably for reasons other than the chemicals in their head - i.e. complacency as a result of telling them that their country is perfect and their view of life as they've been told is perfect so all they need to worry about is themselves, so they do - which as i understand we don't know all that much about the workings of...
my second problem with this is americas obsession with absolute answers, just as i have embeded in me as i seek to disprove, or insult an propose better ideas to social norms as i do now: parents want to concrete answers why jimmy isnt 100% happy because he has the nice car and the pretty girlfriend and mommys done everything (with money) she ever could've done for him - when of course she hasn't really done much, but thats beside the point. people want absolute facts and absolute answers, in a universe that as of now we're under the empirical belief is entirely random, not to mention that metaphysicians and epistemologists are no farther along than plato and aristotle. what i mean is that people want "real" answers when we've yet to realize what reality is, they seek to, once again, transcend the ability of humanity to comprehend problems and know why it is that jimmy isnt happy, whereas all we can do now is overdiagnos in order to make the medical economy keep going and all that. this of course leads to the attitude among philosophers and politicians and individuals that we need answers rather than doing what we can where we can.
i've yet to figure this train of thought into how philosophy can be at all relevant, i probably never will, id just be seeking an answer anyway instead of doing something useful...
the only easy day was yesterday
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Tuesday, September 4, 2007
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6 comments:
just to emphasize- things can and will go wrong, and the supression of the mind when these things happen through the use of "legal" makes the taker a damn junkie. Does anyone really want their 8 year old becoming a junkie because he cannot properly pay attention while his teacher explains to him the marvelous, watered down and not wholly truthful tale of the indians?
Have you ever heard the pseudo consolation when you have a repeating nightmare, that if you let the nightmare go to its finish, it will stop-more literate and vivid: "This unfortunate view of "bad" dreams as things to avoid is precisely the reason for the above title and for this article. An avoidance or denial approach is much like putting a Band-Aid on a car's blinking oil light because the light seems annoying. "
(http://www.dreams.ca/nightmares.htm)
Well parallel to that, if you let your emotions play out, and let yourself contemplate your situation- and look for things in your life that you can find that don't need to be perscribed, it seems you will be a better person. Then you won't need to be dependent on the overbearing mommy or the humanity supressing drugs.
p.s.
some disorders are probably good. They are variations- some of them revolutionary, and may be able to make some change if they werent supressed. Whatever happened to evolution? Anyone read the Grand Inquisitor- where jesus comes back but is shunned because the church is already "set in stone". Sometimes we need expansion and evolution of though, just because someone does not fit into the school system, or speaks out and introduces new ideas (which is rare with the amount of people in this world, and the amount of competition to publish) does not make them crazy. Check out dispraxia- in my mind its pretty cool because there is no "mother language" and therefor language doesn't get lost in translation, since all language is a seperate entity.
i know this is random but im happy, i just had coffee and my mind is buzzing
another article i read after this was actually advocating against medicating for adhd by promoting routines, just to throw that out there; many of even the biggest idiots can see how stupid the child drug craze is...
"humanity supressing drugs" bring up that thing thats been bothering me for a while again. is something that we have made as human beings in order to help us operate better - or more optimally to keep myself away from "well drugs and alcohol make you feel better, so therefore youre operating better" shit - not human? we made it, and only in the interest of making our lives more 'optimally' human; if you deny this, you deny ever medicating a disease. so is coffe, or better yet, rydalin (in reasonable doses), not in the interest of a more efficiently operating human body?
we dont like evolution. for two reasons. the planets most powerful people fall under the christian umbrella, and humans are after the image of god, no life form can be more perfect than that. two; the people who arent christians are under the impression that we are an ultimately conscious species, and cannot believe the possibility of a more perceptive lifeform, even christians mostly think that god is just bigger and he can mess around with shit we cant, they probably think he sees and percieves the universe just as we do. i guess thridly, everything is going to be dead on this planet before the time it would take for any complex organism to undergo any sort of noticable macroevolution.
i didnt get that last sentence there about the languages, what were you trying to say.
unfortunatly for the sake of sustained thought, madeline, you are always random...
introduce some of your more open minded new buddies to this site, and better yet find something about the more close minded ones that i can tear them to shreds about and then they can read it and cry...
speaking of tearing to shreds my moral philosophy teacher told a story about how the leader of the kkk once was invited to city college to speak by a professor and everyone was pissed at the proffessor and he was like chill you think the kids are stupid. so the guy came and talked and the kids tore him limb from limb. a very satisfying tidbit.
OK- what i found cool about dispraxia (i still need to read up on it but... this is all coming from a brief case study on my friend izzy) is that people who have it do not have a mother tongue. Instead they think in abstract thoughts i.e. shapes, math, and visual ideas. It's hard for them to learn english and other languages but they know and understand abstract ideas. IT's cool that they do not need to understand these ideas in language- which is corruptable. My impression is that their minds could be a playground for plato's forms. The funny thing is this is a utopian idea resting on the fact that i think language is corruptible and not wholly satisfying... i don't know if this is the actual case with people with dispraxia but i hope it is.
"we made it, and only in the interest of making our lives more 'optimally' human if you deny this, you deny ever medicating a disease. "
it sounds like you're giving me an ultimatum; either i think medicine is a good thing and should be used by the human race, or a bad thing. Your question, and a bothersome one is: "Are things we created still human, are they righful extensions of our beings, or are they taking us somewhere "superhuman" that is essentially not where we should be?" This isn't my main intent, but it might become it:
So, for many drugs the objective is to make us more, "optimally' human". People who take these could be people uncomfortable with their lives (like the mother's little helper incident), people who do not function within the realms of society (kids with adhd, genius's, slackers...). The only thing is the drugs do not last. The "change"/ "evolution" that is brought around by the drug is only temporary. If people go off the medication, or if people procreate, then there is just more people who will eventually hold up the drug buisness. How can we be confident that our society is the "optimal" place for us to be human, when we need drugs to keep us in it "100%". If you perscribe to biology, or intuition, or really have just experienced living, you will be able to tell that some environments are "healthier" than others. If people live in a box their whole life, if they grow up constantly suspended in jello, if they can only eat rice, if they are constantly not asked to do things because it is too challenging, or there are ways of getting rid of the challenge, then these people will not fully develop.
I don't dissagree with the use of drugs as in treatment of sickness, there is nothing wrong with medecine and cures, but with the fear of death, and the promotion of medicine, it's hard to discern what is actually a disease. There is no reason for us in America especially right now to get a yellow fever shot. there is no yellow fever in america. There is no reason for us to get a flu shot. I admitt medicine is smart the theory of dumming down a virus so our body can battle it- but our bodies would probably battle it if we didn't have the shot in a way that would make us stronger or kill us.
This is a question i have- where is our use of these perscription drugs taking us? What is their purpose?
It seems to me that they are keeping us exactly where we are. People take it to fit into their lives- to be contented in the mold? so where are we going from there. and does that mean that the optimal person is someone who takes their medicine every day? More medicine means more people means more time in this world that we're living in until it expires. Worst of all it means less thought and less expression, as people are silenced by routine and drug and are convinced we are "an ultimately conscious species, and cannot believe the possibility of a more perceptive lifeform"
im fresh out of a really good philosophy lecture from a substitute professor im going to have for the next few weeks, and i gotta say the conjectural stuff we write here sometimes just wont do, and for actually logical reasons.
before i get into anything else, i propose to you the idea that dispraxians (i made that up i think) could not be exposed to the linguistic identity of a triangle without from then on identifying it as such; they had an a priori perception of a 3 sided enclosed figure that could be called a triangle, but once they are introduced to the ideas around triangles from a linguistic standpoint, they cease to keep this a priori vision. two things about that: one, platos forms, propose, to my understanding, that certain things take part in certain forms (these forms being in the heavens with god) - or in aristotles case his universals are ideas of which each thing is modeled after, which he refers to as its forms, but arent the same thing: plato says there is one idea of right trianglr and that every right triangle partakes in that idea, but that the real idea is in the heavens in its true form, aristotle says that every right triangle has its own idea of right triangle, even though they may be seemingly identical (i dont get it or agree, it seems silly, although it applies much better given more modern philosophy). what im leading to here is the inability of a mind to perceive the ultimate perfection of an abstract thought, such as a right triangle, because even with your beloved dispraxites they see one particular triangle, as opposed to the ultimate idea of triangularity. the second thing is that this prof said that next week when we discuss kant that this will make sense and that this is what kant is all about: when you see a shadow in your room at night and you cant make it out and its sort of muddled, then you turn the light on and see its a guitar, when you turn the light back off, you wont be able to see it as whatever it was that you saw before. hence, if you have some sort of a priori knowledge, experiencing life can only be detremental because you will be exposed to the linguistic idea of right triangle and youll never be able to see it as it was a priori.
"How can we be confident that our society is the "optimal" place for us to be human, when we need drugs to keep us in it "100%"."
im gonna treat this sequentially or else ill get overwhelmed...
first of all, we cant be confident that our society is a good place for people to be as it is. in fact im pretty sure its shit right now, but barring some incredible change of consciousness, its gonna be like this for a while until smart people slowly change it; so if we have the resources, why not keep people ship-shape? this is not to say that it is permissible to use medication for people too lazy for their own lives and mental health, but for the ones for whom its neccessary i see no problem as of now. teh other thing here i think is that the natural evolution of humanity may lie here. it is clear that weve moved from need for survival and have now entered the age where need for emotional comfort and convenience has taken center stage, which seems to me to be part of human evolution. this may seem a little determinalist, but its safe to say that things will happen and often this will be the result of things that happened before them; whos to say that the use of all these drugs on children who dont need it isnt part of evolution. whos to say that you and i debating it and even if we one day stopped it altogether isnt part of evoltution. whos to say us killing each other and destroying the planet isnt part of evolution. my point is that were all human and theres no reckognizable outside force moving us around. what we do is human simply by the nature of the fact that we do it, whether it is in the best interest of the human being and its social and cultural concerns or not.
im going to leave medicine to the experts. weve talked about this before they are doctors of philosophy in their own thing, i respect that doctors have a very legitimate reason for why medicine is ethical and legit and all that good stuff, but for now i think the above argument will suffice on that.
i can only be optimistic about drug use, because im not going to change it anyway; if we were all able to function better, not have to eat, not have to get sick and suffer, not have to go to the bathroom, etc, we would have more time and more energy and more mental gearing towards important things like philosophy and the human community; an adhd child whos really suffering may be a fucking genious, kid might put kant, einstein, and mother theresa to shame in the sam lifetime, but if this kid isnt educated cuz he cant pay attention and hes too hyper, its safe to say humanity lost something very, very valuble.
anyway ive got a lot to think about with this new shit this guy is feeding us its really good, i hope anyone reading is taking an intro to philosophy class (meta & epist), or has, and if not you should, because its a whole different beast.
"if we were all able to function better, not have to eat, not have to get sick and suffer, not have to go to the bathroom, etc"
Do you remember in the beginning of the Republic when Socrates is talking to this older dude and asking him how hes liking old age. He responds by saying something along the lines of how hes less sexually active now, and thus has to spend less time chasing women and more time with philosophy?
Your comment reminded me of that...
But in that case old people today are poping viagra and cialis so much that 10 hour erections are the newest ailment facing old men in America...
thats funny. im not sure i want to emulate socrates, though, when i say things like that; sex, namely, is a huge part of being alive on our planet, and i wouldn't dream of suggesting anything against it, but when people are sick, or starving, or supressed, they kill each other because they dont know what else to do, and we all waste our time arguing about that instead of real shit. so im just saying that it can be seen as helping us to get to a point where we dont waste as much time being sick and dying - any maybe killing each other- as use more time living and thinking and all that stuff without worry of that; which seems to be where humanity is heading: we are aimed towards making ourselves a lifeform which is independent of what any other life form is here to do, like survive, reproduce, if these things are handed to us, we start to transcend typical life on earth and possibly become somthing different. im not goin descartes on you though, dont worry.
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