Posted by raaven on December 1, 2004, at 11:48:57
In reply to Re: The artificial nature of psychiatric diagnosis, posted by ed_uk on December 1, 2004, at 11:05:15
An old friend of mine has an axiom: "You can't take apart the pliers with the pliers." but when the pliers become too complex for the pliers repair people to understand, and/or when the system is too cumbersome for the pliers repair people to devote the proper time and patience to getting to know your particular pair of pliers, well, then it's time to start building your own set of specialized pliers repair tools. In my opinion, all the meds can do is help supply you with energy for this arduous and time-consuming task.
In ages past people were handed simplistic answers that depended upon the abandonment of self-knowledge (personal myth-making) in favor of canned myths that purported to explain you - without, of course, ever actually encountering you. This naturally led to a personal condition that could be called totalitarian, except for the fact that once programmed a person no longer needed policing from above; he/she policed herself/himself. See Orwell, "1984."
The evolution to psychiatry was a step away from this abdication of existential responsibilities, but, unfortunately, the clinical environment inevitably became bureaucratized and dumbed-down as it tried to apply itself to more and more people. This brief shining moment of humanistic hope was crushed by the twin realities that (1) only the elite could afford in-depth psychoanalysis, and (2) that the Overlords of Society realized very quickly that psychiatry could be used as a medium of mind control - assuming, of course, that it was not intended to be this from the very beginning.
We are now entering an age when people will have to start taking responsibility for their own construction and ownership or become part of the ever-growing mass of hypnotized, televisionized Pod People, who choose to live in a world of absurd illusions rather than grow up. This is really no different from the condition described above, except that the programming now comes from the corporate-controlled state, via the Idiot Box and the newspapers, rather than from the church-controlled state, via the pulpit and the bible.
A person who is well schooled in the array of psychoactive drugs now easily available to virtually anyone, can make informed decisions about their own chemical energy aids. Then it is only a (usually simple) matter of obtaining these drugs - either via the Internet or, if it is more viable, from a doctor savvy enough to understand that he/she has been reduced to a pill-dispensing machine, and who decides to take advantage of that fact for personal gain. It's a win-win situation. Or win-win-win-win when you include the drug and insurance companies in the equation.
poster:raaven
thread:422741
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20041201/msgs/422842.html