Welcome to The New World DisOrders -- They Are Legion.

 

 
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carol-maric/welcome-to-the-new-world_b_101224.html

This piece might be restored. Please feel free to read all the reviews below. Thank You All !

Reviews

[Gareth Hopkins]

Wow! So this is coming from the heart, huh? I have to admit, this made me laugh, not because I was genuinely amused, but because I've kind of been saying exactly the same thing for absolutely years. To be quite honest, I thought I was the only one...
That said, I have to agree wth some of the other reviewers, and whilst I agree whole-heartedly with what you're saying, you do kind of take a shovel to this one and beat the reader round the head with it, you know? From my point of view, I didn't mind (did I mention I agree with you?) but some of the 'sheep' are obviously going to have problems. Thanks for making me smile, though.

[Skye Céibhfhionn]

If Man could be held as mellow; he would never think himself owning the Power to Thought, Power to Rise, Power to do for him what he feel is Right.
Own Thought is a scary composition for something held with control. It is a threatening stream to an overwhelming ocean, that it may run small and dry; and lose it's fierce appearance of 'greatness'.

If you speak of problems, you become a problem. If you speak without asked opinion; and move until granted movement and grow beyond your frames; then the threat to Social Order of Limitation will be handled. Pills; labels; violence; silence; institutions; isolation.. Death to own spirit.

It is ridiculous, TOO, in a Society as ours, Europe or The States; that people seek to be sick so violently; They want to be sick and defend it to the last drop. "I DO have bi polar!" "I AM INDEED depressed!" "I am sick!" - defending our "freedom to be sick and not take responsibility of it". For having all these conditions, it is then not your fault that you're behaving the way you do - it's the condition that grants you the behavior.
So then you cannot be blamed, things go on, and you're fed something for your troubles.

There ARE sick people indeed. I'm just putting the "trend" of it into it all.
I work as a nurse. I see it too often. Pleases desperate need for attention/victimization and Consumerisms will to silence you, making money upon it.

As if it is a sought after Right. Granted it is, but not in any way positive. The Solution can be perfect and positive; the disease built upon blocks of power, negativity, victimization, attention, and dependency.. never is.

There is no care in pills; but people reach for it as a fast solution, like everything else today has come to be fast. "Let the people be served with the absolut fastest Anything with absolute no effort. Let's all become a large group of Lazy!"

[smiles]

I soar happily outside of it; with every opportunity to change the tides.

Thank you for a great read!

Skye

[Dave "Doc" Rogers]

Interesting rant with many interesting points.Genius is typically looked down upon b/c it is out of the norm and it can't be controlled. The norm is easier to manage. Pharms have made mints off of multi-hued pills that do this, that, or the other... all with sides effects. Disease being an incurable malady is a misnomer. "Disease" is anything not causing ease. Illness, sickness, infection... these are maladies that may or may not be treatable medically.ADD/ADHD/autism are minds that are running a different track than most other people. Since the uneffected person cannot wrap their conscience or understanding around what is occurring to this "different" person, that person is labelled and recommended medication. Sometimes the A/A/A person does require individual care b/c they cannot or are unwilling to care for themselves. And, to those caregivers... my undying gratitude. TV is all about selling. Sell the show so people watch. People watch so sell the happy little pill with the nasty side-effects. If you are fed from TV or other media and allow them to think for you, enjoy your Orwellian experience b/c here it comes. Choose. Think. Do!Side note: CNN is jaundiced news reporting, too. They sell air so others can sell you stuff. And, it often seems to me the news according to Ted Turner. Watch them all. Watch and read, internationally. Then, weigh the truth of what is being said. Just becausie they are saying what you want to hear does not make it the truth.CM... your rant is thought provoking. I am sure if you do not fight back there is a happy little pill waiting for you. Rant on.Doc.

[dead]

It’s a complex issue really, madness and psychopharmacology I mean. Of course you are right that a lot of it all boils down to economics. Pharmaceutical companies always have dominated the capitalist landscape and really what makes a drug popular is not its effect qua chemical composition, but the way it is marketed, the way it is economically manipulated; the way it can bypass the small print in the leaflet and become something as natural as bread and water. (Of course what does not have small print these days?) For some irony involving the Food and Drugs Administration, I recently bought some protein powder, it says: “helps support muscle mass”, at the bottom however it says: “this statement has not been evaluated by the FDA”. (And what an interesting linguism we have here, since it says ‘this statement’.) Yet all the big drugs with infinitely complex chemical compositions, their ‘statements’ have been evaluated and one can only wonder what does it mean for a pharmaceutical statement to be evaluated.
Lyotard mentioned in his “The Postmodern Condition” how capitalism interact with truth functions (though he does not use that word) truth is that which has the most financial backing, Lyotard really described validity of scientific theory and worldview, but transposed to the world of pharmaceutics, the drug which has the most capital behind it, will be the one the most successful, will posses a higher truth.
On the other hand I think psychopharmaceutical drugs can be very handy, because the can be beneficial; the problem in the ‘prescription’ of the drug is exactly the word ‘prescription’, because the doctor who prescribes the drug is ultimately the target of the successful marketing of pharmaceutical productivity. The company that offers the doctor, he who prescribes, the most, who manipulates him the best and most effective will have his drugs prescribed the most. What is also important in this act of ‘prescription’ is that unless there is a major fault with the drug (softenol for instance) the drug company is above law so to speak, because they are not the ones prescribing the drug, so anything negative reflect upon the doctor because he was wrong in diagnosis and prescription.

As for people being diagnoses with this or that illness, as you mention in the case of Einstein; I think that for the creative person, the mental illness comes from his genius and not the other way around; so if Einstein was autistic it was because he was a creative genius, he was not a creative genius because he was autistic. I always use to think that I was autistic ironically; as a kid I was never popular, was the outsider, but then things like that happen as a kid. I do tend to suffer from depression, but I know that I suffer from this because I am creative. Creativity often implies higher levels of serotonin in the brain; of course every so often this means that the brain cannot cope with the production of serotonin so the brain gets depressed. Same for Nietzsche (though he did suffer from syphilis of course) his ‘insanity’ was not what wrote his thinking; rather his thoughts wrote his ‘insanity’. I think some people just like to think that the artist, the creator, the genius, the intellectual etc. is mentally ill in order to deal with their own inferiority complex.

As for Prozac, the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, swears by Prozac and pornography; I think it works for some people, for others not, like I said’ it is a problem of ‘prescription’, different drugs will react differently with different neurological structures. I have Chronic Insomnia, I can just never stop thinking, always some story in my ehad, some philosophy, so without sleeping pills (diphenhydramine, very minor and over the counter, it is found in Tylenol pm, also used as anti-allergy since it is an antihistamine) but it does the trick for me since otherwise I cannot sleep and then suffer terrible adrenaline rushes the next day. Anyway, the irony is that the people who should be on drugs are not, lol, like crazy people on the bus! I once was on a bus, and there was this guy with a horsey-head-stick and he was talking away to it and the ‘horse’ would talk back to him saying that the end of the world was near, lol … guess he must have been one of the four horsemen!

Steven

[Annubis]

Eh, it's all a trap anyway. Most of it is marketing. You come up with an invention- to sell it, you must invent a need for your invention. The pharmaceutical industry is HUGE, and controlls a lot of US legislature via lobbyists (I'm certain you are aware of this, but in the event you are not, I'll mention it anyway). You can thank your lobbyists for making most natural drugs illegal, unless they can be turned into pills and sold with prescriptions, you can thank them for keeping drug prices exhorbitantly high, and you can thank them for our "war on drugs" in which many millions of tax dollars are spent each year, instead of going toward more useful things.
As far as creating a need is concerned... it is true that some people really do suffer from seriously debilitating mental illnesses... severe autism, etc, however, there are very few, if any, drugs that can actually help these diseases. You'll find more drugs for less severe mental illnesses- drugs that cannot be stopped cold-turkey, should one decide to stop taking them -which do have some pretty nasty side-effects (for which you must get 5 more prescriptions to avoid).
As far as our crazy geniuses are concerned-
Revolutionaries suffer from depression, or are religious zealots, and should be feared and turned in as terrorists or traitors.
I say this with obvious sarcasm.
I bet you, in time, we'll all be required to take a daily regimen of pills to keep us from having any illegal thoughts or emotions (i cite 1984 and the movie, "equilibrium").
Reading and writing will be strongly discouraged, and eventually also become illegal. Why write when you can be brainwashed by your TV? LOOK! FLASHY LIGHTS! BUY BUY BUY!!!

Anyway.... I liked this bit of work, keep it coming!
-your neighborhood misanthropic cynic

[Touché Armada]

"Ah, genius is another word for someone who needs serious therapy but refuses to go."I'm afraid I cant agree with that,, the serious therapy requirement only comes after the genius refuses to switch of,, or simply cant,, and even if you can,, absolutely everything becomes utterly boring, family friends, everything... Its during that 4 to 6 months one either has a very happy breakdown,, or takes drugs... Its rather a shame that a good old break down is frowned upon these days... They can be quite a journey.Stuff conformity, I wanna be able to break down as messy as hell if a need to, the messier the better.

[Deep in the Woodline...]

OK then, you just reaffirmed something that I have known for the longest time. I won't take most medications, even those prescribed by a physician, because they treat the symptom and not the malady. I don't want to be tricked into thinking all is well when in fact it is as screwed up as a soup sandwich. I use this as my credo for medical care: "If you were supposed to take those pills, you would have come out of the womb with a little baggie of them attached to the unbilical cord."

[Crap!]

Ah, genius is another word for someone who needs serious therapy but refuses to go. But I will interject a quote here,"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil for every ONE who is chopping at the root." Henry David Thoreau

[Jarvis]

well thought of and nicely written. i'm wondering how far into the future before all those freakin' doctors will decide that we'll need a new drug to cure 'medicine' addictions. soon they'll be saying that it's our fault that we got messed up and that we need to try 'natural' stuff. yet what is natural, what they say is natural or what we think that is. the bottom line is that i think that too much time and money is being spent on people who are at the end of their rope of life. not being mean here, trust me, just saying that a new generation is coming up each year, an old one is dying. i think we should put our resources into the new one, not try to become the immortals that we dream of. fantasy is fantasy, but our mortality will never reach that stage. whether people want to here this or not, i don't care. one day, they're gonna die. accept it, a new age has come and they're not meant for it...

[Kurt J. Christenson]

We'll always be the minority. The masochistic sufferers who love their pain because we see how it makes us stronger. Most will never see suffering as a good thing. They want a flatline of predictability, and we can not judge them for this. If they want pills, they should be able to get them, take them, and stumble numb through their days. Knowing so many that are on or have been on medication I have seen every end of the spectrum of success and failure of living with a personal madness. If they want it let them have it. As for me, I prefer to make it without. For now.

K

[Greg B]

Ever wonder how/why ADHD came into being and why it got labeled with such a heaping negative name as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder? It wasn't enough to brand it with one negative label, consumers needed a triple negative. Big pharma had to make sure we understood this was something that needed immediate chemical remedy. You could just as easily have called it Creativity Surplus Energy Abundance, or C-SEA. But who would feel a need to treat or "cure" something that sounds like a gift? With all the chemicals aligning our minds along an industry defined standard I wonder if science and the arts will suffer. As chemically diluted as we'll all be it will be a difficult thing to quantify.

If curious to see how the War on Cancer (officially declared during the Nixon administration) was farmed out to big pharma and its accompanying profit motives and patents, etc., see my Salon series. Look in the clips section upper righthand corner of http://dantesn.spaces.live.com

Like everything else, Wall Street and K Street rule. Until U.S. voters wake up to this fact and retake Washington we Americans will continue to reside in a badly distorted democracy. My opinion anyway.