I love my readers because their level of brilliance never ceases to impress me. They keep coming up with really striking insights. See, for instance, blogger Z’s contribution to our recent discussion of the marketing strategies employed to dupe people into endless consumption of psychotropic drugs:

The narrative of revelation, how after the drug they had their first normal day ever, is taught. It fits the Christian conservative “I have been saved” narrative very well and it kind of sticks.

You don’t have to be actively religious to respond to this message. All you need is to have grown in an environment where the narrative of salvation is wide-spread. I didn’t recognize this message because I didn’t grow up in such an environment but Z saw it for what it is. And as we all know, nothing is more convincing than the familiar.

So the pharmaceutical companies have managed to create marketing campaigns that tap into the following major narratives:

1. The Christian narrative of revelation and salvation;

2. The essentialist narrative of being wired a certain way and having an inescapable biological way of existence that conditions one’s every action;

3. The progressive narrative of tolerance and inclusion where any identity (including the badly wired one) has to be celebrated unquestioningly.

Remember that good marketing campaigns do not try to manufacture needs. They identify the existing ones and tap into them. Anti-depressants do not cure depression but consumers don’t care because it isn’t the relief from depression they are trying to buy. It’s one (or two, or three) of the identity-building narratives listed above that they are purchasing. This is why they get so distraught and angry when you suggest that the pills are useless and even dangerous: they feel like you want  to undermine one (or two, or three) pillars of their identity.

The ridiculous drama of the bored: “Sometimes simply surviving is work. It’s hard work. And it really does make a difference in the world. Even if the world for that moment is small and no one else seems to notice.” And now imagine the horror of being the child of this hysteric who sees her problem-free, infantilized existence as a struggle for survival. Imagine having no escape from this posing. Imagine being forced to be the only source of food for her.

The smoking age in New York might go up to 21. Probably because the drinking age limit works so well. Old enough to drive but not old enough to smoke. Makes total sense. The reasoning behind this piece of arrant idiocy is the old belief held by the especially stupid and ignorant that people who start smoking early are more likely to get addicted. It is fascinating how it never occurs to people that correlation does not need to equal causation.

“Let us hope that the current Yale faculty is a dying breed, to be eviscerated by the free-flowing ideas that pulse across the Internet and cannot so easily be shut down.” Oh yes. Let’s hope for that, indeed. It could have been a great university but for the sad current state of affairs where tenured faculty members (who only teach a tiny minority of courses) are so preoccupied with preserving their status of living geniuses that they never say anything other than the most boring trivialities ever in the classroom. On the subject of the linked post, why would anybody have anything against a course on the Western Civilization?

“Jim Geddes, a member of the University of Colorado Board of Regents, is calling on liberal arts departments at the flagship campus at Boulder to hire more professors who are conservatives.” So this prick is advocating ideological discrimination in the hiring process? Will he be creating a list of approved opinions the successful candidates must possess to get hired? And more importantly, are the faculty members of this stupid pretense at a university rising in outrage and calling for this Stalinist to be ejected from campus? Or are they sitting impotently by?

The complete sentence game.

The worst way to start an academic essay in literature.

An interesting discussion on the completely ridiculous concept of “flipping lectures.” I’m beyond annoyed by people who know nothing about how a classroom is run but still create idiotic suggestions aimed at sneaking in MOOC strategies. Bleh.

And an intelligent albeit short response to the previous discussion.

And the post of the week: the relationship phrases that need to be thrown away.

1. The difference between a Doctor of Education and a PhD holder is that the former believes it is appropriate to quote Sandberg’s Lean In at a graduation ceremony while the latter disagrees and rolls his or her eyes.

2. One should never lose faith in humanity. When the President started sharing what sounded like a soppy ultra-patriotic story, I got scared. I needent have worried, though. The President is not an idiot and had not spent the last 20 years defending public education in state legislature for nothing. The story was neither soppy nor patriotic.

3. I can’t count in any language other than Russian. For some reason, the mathematical and the linguistic part of my brain do not connect. I also can’t count silently. So I had to count students in loud Russian, scaring them out of their wits.

4. Apparently, there is now a new tradition to wear the most outrageous shoes under the graduation robes. The part of the ceremony where students walk up for their diplomas looked like a shoe fashion show.

5. I’m now very tired and will spend the next 2 days in bed with a strawberry yoghurt mask and a book by Paul Ricoeur.

I’m a lead marshal in today’s graduation ceremony and I’m sitting at the gym, waiting for the students to don their regalia.
A student sitting next to me got his regalia a while ago and looks bored. He takes a book out of the recesses of his huge pants and begins to read it.

I lean in to sneak a look at what interests him enough to be read during graduation. He is reading Foucault.

If we produce at least one person per year who reads philosophy for fun, that’s already a lot.

Does anybody know what the opposite of gentrification is? I ask because I think this is what my town is experiencing. When I first moved here in 2009, there was a number of elegant, high-quality restaurants and stores that have been disappearing ever since.

There was a really chic restaurant run by an award-winning chef right next to my house. It closed down and a nasty buffalo wing joint opened in its place. A formerly elegant place with a great selection of wines and interesting food now serves pizza. A family run mansion restaurant closed down. A popular store selling original ornaments and hand-made jewelry from all over the world closed down, too.

The reasons for this transformation are neither demographic nor economic. We are a college town, and the people who live here are the same as 4 years ago. The demand for pizza parlors and buffalo wing joints is lower than that for elegant places. The only remaining stylish restaurant that serves things like foie-gras desserts and $200 wines is bursting at the seams. You have to wait for up to an hour in order to get seated on any Tuesday or Thursday, let alone on a weekend. So it isn’t the law of supply and demand that squeezes chic places out of our town.

The reason why all those elegant places closed down is not that they stopped being profitable. As the owner of the jewelry store explained, business was better then ever in the year before she closed her doors for good. The owners of these places simply reached a certain age and decided to retire on the money they’d made.

The young generation, however, only knows how to open buffalo wing places and has no idea how to run elegant establishments. The foie-gras place was opened last year by a couple that moved to the area from California. The local young people have no idea how to offer what the young Californians are offering even when there is a huge demand.

The Midwest desperately needs an influx of people with interesting new ideas and modern lifestyles. It isn’t the economy that brings us down. The real problem is cultural.

Suicide rates among middle-aged Americans have risen sharply in the past decade,

reports The NY Times.

From 1999 to 2010, the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent, to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people, up from 13.7. Although suicide rates are growing among both middle-aged men and women, far more men take their own lives. The suicide rate for middle-aged men was 27.3 deaths per 100,000, while for women it was 8.1 deaths per 100,000.

And these tragic numbers may actually be much higher:

While reporting of suicides is not always consistent around the country, the current numbers are, if anything, too low.

“It’s vastly underreported,” said Julie Phillips, an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University who has published research on rising suicide rates. “We know we’re not counting all suicides.”

This is not a purely American phenomenon, and the article’s author makes a mistake when she tries to analyze it in terms of the US history. Just yesterday I posted an article that explains this as an international phenomenon. In all cultures where the consumption of anti-depressants is on the rise, the suicide rates soar. The reason is very simple: suicide is one of the side effects of anti-depressants. Contrary to the lies pharmaceutical companies tell us, suicide as a result of anti-depressant addiction is not rare. These statistics from a number of countries show that suicide as a result of anti-depressants is an incredibly frequent phenomenon.

People who spend their entire lives listening to the lies spread by pharmaceutical companies all day and every day end up believing this ridiculous idea that anti-depressants “help” one get over a difficult moment and find energy to solve his or her problems. Of course, nothing can be further from the truth, since it’s kind of hard to solve one’s problem after one has killed oneself of suffered permanent damage to one’s health as a result of consuming these drugs.

What are the alternatives to anti-depressants? you will ask. Well, thank the pharmaceutical companies for squeezing almost all treatments that actually help and have no side effects out of the country. Every time I write on the subject, a reader goes into literal fits of hysteria at the idea that somebody has dared to speak a word against his or her magic pills that have now become the foundation of many people’s identity. This is precisely what happens among scholars who try to look behind the idea that everybody needs to be medicated to the gills. I can afford to say whatever I like on my blog, but imagine what happens when one’s career is at stake. Scholars who dare to make the tiniest little sound against psychotropic medication suffer greatly as a result.

This is why we are all sitting here, pretending that this scourge is not destroying countless lives. This is why a journalist writes about the soaring suicide rates and pretends that the most obvious cause behind them does not exist. This is why even very intelligent people repeat like in robotic voices, “Anti-depressants save lives”, contrary to every shred of evidence in existence.

I will write about the alternatives to drugs later but I know it will be useless because the TV commercials are too strong and the identity-building potential of these meds is too seductive.

A group of academics is training to be lead marshals in tomorrow’s graduation ceremony. John the marketing specialist explains what the procedure is (did you know this is what marketing specialists did in universities? I didn’t either.)
The procedure is long and complicated.

“Will I have to talk to anybody during the ceremony?” an academic from the School of Engineering asks in a haunted voice.

“What do you mean?” the marketing specialist asks.

“As long as I don’t have to talk to anybody, I can do it,” the academic explains.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“Oh well, then I’m fine,” the academic beams.

You have to be one of us to realize how often we ask ourselves this very question.

My sister suggested I published this riddle based on a completely real story. N. guessed the answer before I finished telling it.

“Oh, I’ve had the most horrible day,” my sister says. “One of my employees quit her job today. And the problem is not that she quit as much as why she quit and what she is planning to do after quitting. I would have preferred she left the company for any other reason than this. ANY other reason.”

When she told me the reason, I agreed with her assessment completely.

Question: why did my sister’s employee quit?

DSM-5 continues to cater to lazy consumerists in thrall to pharmaceutical companies and now pathologizes every emotional state and every aspect of being human:

It is a peculiar and reductive logic about the nature of being human, this idea that grief – or stress, or bingeing on pie – merits medical intervention. And it is a logic that pervades the DSM revisions, which is why the manual is proving wildly controversial on the eve of its unveiling.

Feel anything? There is a pill for that!

I can’t stop laughing at the naive folks who keep blabbing earnestly about the “stigma” against psychotropic medication. What stigma? It is now hugely fashionable to carry a bunch of completely invented “disorders” that need constant medication:

This is the overriding concern of mental health professionals who oppose the DSM-5. As the manual grows (the original had 95 mental disorders; the last edition, 283), they argue that it lowers so many thresholds for being diagnosed with minor mental illnesses that life, itself, becomes treatable as disease.

Which is, of course, what the pharmaceutical companies have been praying for. As the Chair of McGill University’s Department of Psychiatry says,

“The problem lies not with this particular edition [of the DSM] but with the ideology behind it, which is that mental illness is neurobiological, and that psychosocial factors are not that important. This is the position that has taken over academic and clinical psychiatry over recent decades, and it has led to a serious overprescription of medications.”

The really hilarious thing about this is how deftly the pharmaceutical companies have managed to weave this consumerist obsession with psychotropic drugs into the Liberal discourse. Crowds of people seriously believe that they are being progressive when they defend the pharma companies’ right to stuff their junk down everybody’s throats.

At its margins, which is where many of us – the bereaved, the heartbroken, the flat-broke – reside, this is about what story we want to tell ourselves about who we are. Our narratives, as we live and ascribe meaning to them, are richer and more nuanced than what is laid out in a set of behavioural criteria, or a shrinking number of physical symptoms.

Ultimately, irrespective of what any whored-out psychiatrist or any stupid DSM will tell you, the choice is always yours. Will the narrative of your life be defined by you or by a marketing representative of a pill-pushing conglomerate? Remember, though, contrary to all the lies you have been told, the pills are not helping you. Just the opposite:

“To cite just one of many possible examples, between 2000 and 2009, the consumption of antidepressants in the OECD countries increased by an average of 60 per cent. No study has shown a decline in the prevalence of depression. Quite the contrary: The suicide rate in Iceland, a country that consumes the highest amount of antidepressants per capita, has been constant for the past 10 years.”

Anti-depressants and other psychotropic drugs are making you sicker and your drug lords richer.

Hazel Catkins asked me a series of very interesting questions that I know many people are willing to see answered (I know because people have been asking). So I will answer them here:

Clarissa, could you write a post on the languages you plan/hope to raise your child among? You say you speak Russian at home, so I suppose the plan will be for your son to be bilingual at a minimum.

N. and I speak Russian at home, and we will continue to do so. A relationship is not translatable to a different language, and ours can’t be moved into English. Psychologists say it is common for children of immigrants to form their identity through a rejection of the parents’ language, while the grandchildren begin to show interest in it. So there is a high probability he will be a monolingual English speaker.

Is it particularly important to you or N, though, that he speak Russian?

No, absolutely not. A language is such a foundational, basic ingredient of the human psyche that it allows no interference. Whatever ends up being his first language is perfectly fine with me. The trauma that can be inflicted by messing with it is really not worth any linguistic competence. Languages can be mastered perfectly in adulthood (as I know from personal experience), so he will have the rest of his life to figure out what to speak. So if he comes home one day and says he doesn’t want us to speak Russian to him, I will definitely switch. With N., of course, we will continue to speak Russian.

If he resists once he learns English (at school or elsewhere), will you try to force it or feel any disappointment?

No, never. Such a resistance is absolutely normal. It’s his life, his identity. He should pick the language that expresses him and makes him comfortable.

Will you try to teach him Spanish? Would it be important to you to hire a multilingual nanny or send him to a bilingual school?

I am planning to try “Spanish days” when we will have a day each week when we speak only Spanish. I want to do it as a game of sorts. But the moment I see he doesn’t like it, I’ll stop immediately. I would prefer a Hispanic nanny but purely for selfish reasons. For me, few things are harder than having a stranger around in my house (autism). It would be easier for me if the stranger were a Spanish-speaker. We don’t have any bilingual schools around but if we did, I’d just ask him where he wants to go. Usually, kids want to go where their friends are. 

So basically, I’m the most laid back person ever on this particular subject. As a language teacher, I know that the moment any negative feeling or experience attaches to a language, your chances of learning it drop off a cliff. So forcing things in this area is a very counter-productive strategy.

I like such intelligent, interesting questions. Thank you, Hazel!