Posted by Jazzed on July 20, 2005, at 21:27:25
In reply to Re: Bad (but expected) news about ADs » mworkman, posted by linkadge on July 20, 2005, at 17:49:39
>
> According to:
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> http://www.biopsychiatry.com/antidepskep.htm
>
>
> "Two of the largest and most reputable trials found only negligible differences between tricyclic antidepressants and placebo."
>This site appears to be pro pharmacological site, particularly the development of opiates and ecstatcy for "paradise engineering". Unfortunately, if this is true, then we will have to wait until the next century for this to occur. Also, if this is the case, then research and development of new pharmaceuticals for mental illness is vital.
From this site:
" This feeling of absolute well-being will surpass anything contemporary human neurochemistry can imagine, let alone sustain. The story gets better. Post-human states of magical joy will be biologically refined, multiplied and intensified indefinitely. Notions of what now passes for tolerably good mental health are likely to be superseded. They will be written off as mood-congruent pathologies of the primordial Darwinian psyche. Such ugly thoughts and feelings will be diagnosed as typical of the tragic lives of emotional primitives from the previous era. In time, the deliberate re-creation of today's state-spectrum of normal waking and dreaming consciousness may be outlawed as cruel and immoral. "
" Life-long happiness of an intensity now physiologically unimaginable can become the genetically-preprogrammed norm of mental health. "
Today's images of opiate-addled junkies, and the lever-pressing frenzies of intra-cranially self-stimulating rats, are deceptive. Such stereotypes stigmatise, and falsely discredit, the only remedy for the world's horrors and everyday discontents that is biologically realistic."
"States of "dopamine-overdrive" can actually enhance exploratory and goal-directed activity. Hyper-dopaminergic states can also increase the range and diversity of actions an organism finds rewarding. So our descendants may live in a civilisation of well-motivated "high-achievers", animated by gradients of bliss. Their productivity may far eclipse our own. "
"The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life."
"Yet the therapeutic implications of a recognition that dysfunctional endogenous opioid systems underlie a spectrum of anxiety-disorders and depression are too radical - at present - for the medical establishment to contemplate. In consequence, the use of opioid-based pharmacotherapies for "psychological" pain is officially taboo. The unique efficacy of opioids in banishing mental distress is neglected. Their unrivalled efficacy in treating "physical" nociceptive pain is grudgingly accepted. "" Within a few centuries, it will be technically if not ideologically feasible to abolish suffering of any kind. If we wish to do so, then genetic engineering and nanotechnology can be used to banish unpleasant modes of consciousness from the living world. "
"The ideological obstacles to a happy world, however, are more formidable still. For we've learned how to rationalise the need for mental pain - even though its nastier varieties blight innumerable lives, and even though its very existence will soon become optional. "
" Needless to say, subtleties and technical complexities abound here. The very meaning of being "nice" to anyone or anything, for instance, is changed if well-being becomes a generic property of mental life. Either way, once suffering becomes biologically optional, then only sustained and systematic malice towards others could allow us to perpetuate it for ever. "
"Next century and beyond, however, the development of highly selective, site-specific designer drugs and innovative gene-therapies may enhance our native opioid function and revolutionise mental health. Therapeutic intervention targeted on the opioid pathways will potentially enrich the quality of life of even the nominally "well", not least because - by the more enlightened health standards of posterity - we may all be reckoned mentally ill."
" Critically, such gradients of celestial bliss can also be lucid, serene, entactogenic and empathetic - i.e. MDMA-like and better, not manic or vulgarly hedonistic. The godlike powers of tomorrow's biotechnologists will allow the neurological substrates of empathy and self-insight to be permanently up-regulated. Aesthetically, the mundane ugliness of life in the present epoch can be replaced by gradations of (to us) unimaginable beauty. Potentially again, an E-like magic can imbue the texture of normal waking consciousness. If we so wish, our emotional palette can be genetically enriched, mixed and then pharmacologically refined in ways that transcend the crude primary colours of our Darwinian past. "
" Inevitably, talk of treating humans like organic robots, and then mooting a baseline of mental health many orders of magnitude richer than the Darwinian mind can contemplate, sounds fantastical today. In the context of our traditional conceptual framework, the idea of an analogue of Moore's law for successive generations of human mental health evokes cloud-cuckoo-land, not a global health-plan. Amid the messiness of our daily lives, the prospect of using biotechnology to abolish suffering, and a post-Darwinian transition to paradise-engineering, strikes most of us as fanciful, its liberatory potential just a mirage. At best, such heady words fall lifelessly off the page or screen. Yet a major discontinuity - a momentous evolutionary transition in the development of life on earth - is imminent as the biotechnology revolution unfolds. The advent of genomic medicine is set to challenge the old Darwinian regime of natural selection and the emotionally crippled minds it spawned. ""Today, of course, empathogens and entactogens are outlawed for any purpose. The states of consciousness they induce are criminalised. People who take such agents are stigmatised as "drug abusers". Yet some MDMA users feel, rightly or wrongly, they've been granted a tantalising glimpse of what true mental health may be like in centuries to come; and an insight into what the rest of us are missing."
" There is perhaps a single predictable time of life when taking crack-cocaine is sensible, harmless and both emotionally and intellectually satisfying. Indeed, for such an occasion it may be commended. Certain estimable English doctors were once in the habit of administering to terminally-ill cancer patients an elixir known as the "Brompton cocktail". This was a judiciously-blended mixture of cocaine, heroin and alcohol. The results were gratifying not just to the recipient. Relatives of the stricken patient were pleased, too, at the new-found look of spiritual peace and happiness suffusing the features of a loved one as (s)he prepared to meet his or her Maker."
Interesting reading if you have the time and if you are so inclined...
http://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/tabconhi.htm
Jazzy
poster:Jazzed
thread:530123
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20050718/msgs/530867.html