Hand them a lirpa and let 'em go at it. It's the only cure.
Posted on 01/12/2010 9:08:19 PM PST by Steelfish
The Americanization of Mental Illness
Alex Trochut
By ETHAN WATTERS January 8, 2010
AMERICANS, particularly if they are of a certain leftward-leaning, college-educated type, worry about our country’s blunders into other cultures. In some circles, it is easy to make friends with a rousing rant about the McDonald’s near Tiananmen Square, the Nike factory in Malaysia or the latest blowback from our political or military interventions abroad.
For all our self-recrimination, however, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
"In some Southeast Asian cultures, men have been known to experience what is called amok, an episode of murderous rage followed by amnesia; men in the region also suffer from koro, which is characterized by the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their bodies."
At any rate, it's unlikely the pill to cure amok will be invented here.
Seems like that line is simply stating a fact, that in these places, there are certain illnesses recognized that aren’t recognized elsewhere.
I think this thing called “amok” where one’s genitals retract into one’s body might be a welcome mental illness to those seeking to become a transgender
Mental Illness? I thought the article was about liberalism..
Heaven knows insanity was disreputable enough, long ago;
but now that the lawyers have got to cutting every gallows
rope and picking every prison lock with it, it is become
a sneaking villainy that ought to hang and keep on hanging
its sudden possessors until evil-doers should conclude that
the safest plan was to never claim to have it until they
came by it legitimately.
The very calibre of the people the lawyers most frequently
try to save by the insanity subterfuge ought to laugh the
plea out of the courts, one would think.
MARK TWAIN
- “Unburlesquable Things,” The Galaxy Magazine, July 1870
“...that their genitals are retracting into their bodies.”
Tree of Life Sickness...??
Per Wiki...
“The transition from Breeder to Protector involves reconfiguration of the anatomy. Skin thickens becoming similar to leather armor, strong enough to turn a copper knife. Joints swell until the creature becomes “a parody of the human form done in cantaloupes and coconuts”. This increases leverage available to muscles by increasing the moment arm: the result being that a protector can lift 10 times its own weight.
Genitalia vanish, and a second two-chambered heart forms in the groin at the fusion of the femoral veins.
The arms lengthen. Fingernails turn into retractile claws. Teeth fall out, and the lips and gums fuse, the mouth forming a horny beak (flat in human protectors, non-flat in Pak protectors). All the breeder’s hair falls out and the head acquires a bony ridge to protect the newly-expanded cranium The expanded skull allows the brain to grow to an enormous size; the resulting mind, even starting from something as “unintelligent” as a chimp, becomes far more intelligent than a human mind. Pak Protectors also acquire an extended lifespan, and can live tens of thousands of earth years (a common element in Niven’s stories).”
Then again, he could be describing Harry Reid...
And that’s why they call it “da blooz.”
LOL! Good grief!
Science fiction (fortunately)
Bush Derangement Syndrome when global epidemic last decade and Hollywood was there to help spread it.
The press does a good job of keeping a certain level of ugliness and chaos in our lives.
While the items from the police blotter ARE matters of public record, they are seldom highlights in the “events of the day” yet when you turn on the local news report “fire, car crash, cantina shooting, and now here’s sports and weather with a 5-day forecast...”
Very little about what when on in city hall WHICH affects everyone in the community, unlike a car crash, high speed chase, or gloomy house fire.
And then there are the celebrities that the media likes to hold up so we can watch their life like a train wreck in slow motion.
I don’t want to see ANY carnage from ANY US bombing attack or terrorist incident since the damned agit prop media STILL refuses to show us footage of ANY of the 3,000 dead bodies at the scenes of the WTC and DC 9-11 attacks. If we can’t see our OWN dead “out of respect” then do NOT show me dead bodies of the enemy (or victims of foreign terrorist campaigns).
The media is fascinated with serial killers and makes them superstars even more than before. How many minutes of tv did Charles Manson get coverage in a day on tv in 1969? Certainly no network would spend even 3 hours on the story back then but now, it’ll be around the clock news coverage for 2 weeks with lurid descriptions of the activities. Except that the murderers that the media celebrates these days are even MORE sadistic than the Manson family were. And yet, the Al Qaeda Islamic snuff videos got swept under the rug and were called morally equivalent to what “we” were doing at Abu Ghrab and Gitmo.
Mental illness? The culture demands it. Dull the senses with a repetative shock campaign.
Pon farr!
You're right, the culture does demand it, but for a different reason than I think you were trying to get at:
"Some philosophers and psychiatrists have suggested that we are investing our great wealth in researching and treating mental illness — medicalizing ever larger swaths of human experience — because we have rather suddenly lost older belief systems that once gave meaning and context to mental suffering.
Or more simply and directly put - God and our connection with the spiritual are no longer central to many people. Our technology gives no comfort, and in fact may be the root of much mental illness. We were not designed for this terribly busy world.
What does the mind do with the constant influx of (often unwanted) information, sensations, and perceptions? It rebels, and increasingly this rebellion takes shape as depression, anxiety, PTSD, mayhem, etc. - i.e. mental illness.
"Offering the latest Western mental-health theories, treatments and categories in an attempt to ameliorate the psychological stress sparked by modernization and globalization is not a solution; it may be part of the problem. When we undermine local conceptions of the self and modes of healing, we may be speeding along the disorienting changes that are at the very heart of much of the world’s mental distress."
And I believe this is the origin of all radicalism, whether it be terrorism or liberalism. Clinging to extremist concepts could very well be an attempt by the individual to create some sort of personal mythos in order to deal with a world that our minds were not designed for.
These are the new religions - ones that their devotees pursue with a vigor equal to the bustling and ever changing world around them. Suicide bombers? Heck, what have they got to lose? Just a world gone mad with change - a world that they are neither prepared for, nor willing to deal with.
I didn’t find anything the least racist about this article.
The only objection I found was to language that the West was “insisting” on globalizing its concepts of mental illness. The fact that something is occurring, quite organically, does not mean it is being “insisted” upon. Much of what the article (with good reason) bemoans is simply occurring because that’s the way things work, not because the Wester ME field sets out to make the rest of the world capitulate to its approach.
I found this article excellent and thought-provoking. Thanks for posting.
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