Sunday, 16 October 2011
On corporate drugs
As biological organisms, we humans can learn a great deal from what we respond to and what we react to and that there are great sources of wisdom to be tapped by going through life un-medicated. My view is that all sorts of emotions and experiences are very, very real — they’re much more real than almost anybody wants to admit and certainly they are more real than much of the establishment and its authorities would like you to recognize. The immediate inclination to medicate pain because the pain is “real” is not at all helpful to psychological development or to mature intellectual perceptiveness. No doubt what I say will be misconstrued as advocating “tough love”, when in fact that is the exact opposite of what I am saying. I’m sure that an implicit binary construct lurks behind the false cultural choices that are represented as either taking the pain relief that is offered to you or going through your pain the old fashioned way. I do not subscribe to either of these perspectives and consider them equally as noxious as each other. Rather, I believe the body is a great source of wisdom and often it is telling us that our systems of social organisation are sick. One does well to heed what the body is trying to tell us, because otherwise we leave a horrible legacy to the next generation to try to adapt to something that is hostile to our humanity.
The Last Psychiatrist: Recent Trends in Stimulant Medication Use Among U.S. Children
The Last Psychiatrist: Recent Trends in Stimulant Medication Use Among U.S. Children
Reading this article Clarissa linked to, concerning stimulant medication prescriptions for US children. I have an absolute horror and contempt at people turning to authorities to help them with emotional problems. I’m almost inclined to draw the line at people getting any sort of medical “help” from the psychiatric profession at all. In fact, my PhD thesis, concerning DAMBUDZO MARECHERA, was also around and about this topic. He was considered mad by almost everyone, but his self-awareness enabled him to produce very beautiful poems and prose. And the colonial authorities were almost certainly trying to use psychiatry to tame his radical leftist dissent.
Here is more from the article:
Reading this article Clarissa linked to, concerning stimulant medication prescriptions for US children. I have an absolute horror and contempt at people turning to authorities to help them with emotional problems. I’m almost inclined to draw the line at people getting any sort of medical “help” from the psychiatric profession at all. In fact, my PhD thesis, concerning DAMBUDZO MARECHERA, was also around and about this topic. He was considered mad by almost everyone, but his self-awareness enabled him to produce very beautiful poems and prose. And the colonial authorities were almost certainly trying to use psychiatry to tame his radical leftist dissent.
Here is more from the article:
The conventional wisdom is backwards. The black patient isn't resistant to admitting he has depression, he is resistant to the white doctor's attempt at labeling him depressed, and consequently marginalizing him, diverting attention away from the social factors over which the doctor is nervous to discuss and powerless to change. "You have depression" is the nimble dance around the question of whether a white doctor can understand a black patient's life. It is a delicate thing to say to a black woman that perhaps her man isn't worth a damn, as she just said out loud to you but you're not sure if you're allowed to echo back, maybe these kind of relationships are culturally appropriate? It's tough to know when most of your information about black people comes from Martin Luther King quotes and The New Yorker.
Lacking any common language to bridge racial, economic, or sexual divides, clinicians hide behind the invented terminology of psychiatry. Medications become the physical manifestation, the proof, that the language is real.
Born and bred
A lot of people like to use the rhetoric that whatever women say or do has only a subjective point of reference. This is a dangerous line to take with me, because I generally can and do accept it as a challenge to ignore whatever the other party is saying that isn’t wholly objective. My early conditioning, up to the age of 15, was very, very devoid of emotional expression. I came from the British stiff upper lip tradition in an extreme sense to the point of not knowing even what my own emotions were like. Learning to acknowledge and experience them has been an ongoing project. So if somebody wants to play gender by implying that my views are somehow more “subjective” than theirs, I can turn off the tap of interpersonal feeling faster than it takes to switch a light off. I’m particularly inured to the playful spirit of Brer Rabbit : “Whatever you do, don’t throw me into the briar patch!” It’s where I was born and bred.
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