Finally, they are catching on but not before many people were needlessly drugged up with God knows what side effects. Of course, this can be said about all sorts of other COVID vaccines drugs.
Catching On
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
Finally, they are catching on but not before many people were needlessly drugged up with God knows what side effects. Of course, this can be said about all sorts of other COVID vaccines drugs.
Clarissa's Blog 
This is one of the things Jordan Peterson has been saying for years. He’s the first person I heard articulate it, and I really appreciated that, because when I looked at all the people around me who were, or had been, on meds for depression… yeah, it really is because their lives suck and terrible things have happened to them, and they have really poor coping skills. Is it really some kind of inborn chemical imbalance if it happened after your career got torpedoed and you were forced to sell your house, move back to your hometown, and accept financial help from your parents? Is it just easier to tell people that they have a chemical imbalance than to tell them that if they want friends, they have to try being nice to other people, and at least feign interest in their lives? Or that they need to grow a spine and ditch the abuser in their lives? Maybe do something to help someone else once in a while?
Nah, it’s a chemical imbalance. Let’s medicate that.
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Peterson does a good job of relating it to social hierarchies and serotonin levels. Thus the whole lobster thing. But what he’s saying is: it does have something to do with serotonin, but serotonin changes are downstream of your life circumstances, and can be changed by recognizing that we all live in multiple hierarchies, and very, very few of us are at the bottom of all of them. There are social hierarchies and competence hierarchies and virtue hierarchies, employment hierarchies, etc. etc. and odds are good there’s at least one of those in your life that you can focus on, and not be at the bottom. And this will raise your serotonin levels. We can’t all be smarter, but we can all be nicer or more helpful, and we can all get better at something. And that raises our serotonin levels and makes us less depressed.
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This is really just one dissident, Joanna Moncrieff at UCL. Years ago she critiqued antipsychotics; I’m not aware that it made any difference.
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Of course, it’s not going to make a difference until people decide to lose the consumerist attitude to life and treat themselves better than they do faulty microwaves.
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There’s one therapist on Twitter who said something along the lines of “Therapy helps, but what most people really need is money.” A lot of people simply have living conditions that are deeply stressful and bring about a natural feeling of hopelessness. I don’t understand how we have allowed ourselves to be convinced that such large swaths of us are so broken that we need medicating. It’s impossible that the ridiculously high percentage of people who get medicated are truly that fucked up; for most, it is the triple whammy of skewed expectations (who the hell said humans are always supposed to be upbeat), systemic stressors from the economic system rooted in unabashed exploitation, and poor coping mechanisms (this includes the erosion of support networks that humans normally rely on, like family or long-term friends). I believe there are people who need meds, but they should be a tiny, tiny minority. Just like I believe there are people who are truly gender dysphoric, but they are and have always been a tiny minority. That we as a society don’t take the time to critically assess the proliferation of expensive medication that ridiculously vast swaths of the society are supposed to be on is baffling.
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Absolutely. People don’t seem to understand that pain and discomfort are a part of any human life. There’s no need to medicate away every uncomfortable sensation.
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