Chelsea
ID: 96JVSLET
Member 1428
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Contributor to projects:
Emergence and Navigating...
Branding the Species
Immortal since Jan 8, 2008
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    Branding the Species
    Background: Voyager’s Interstellar record is a disk with encoded information that was attached to two space probes currently making their...

    Emergence and Navigating...
    Develop a generative, emergent process to fill space (2D or 3D) using only black lines. Modify a known process or invent your own. Implement your...
    Now playing SpaceCollective
    Where forward thinking terrestrials share ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction. Introduction
    Featuring Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames, based on an idea by Kees Boeke.
    From Chelsea's personal cargo

    human nature as pathology
    Project: Branding the Species





    Thu, May 29, 2008  Permanent link

    Sent to project: Branding the Species
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    lateral     Thu, May 29, 2008  Permanent link
    Deviation from social norms are tolerated until a point. What I am curious about is the motivation behind 'correcting' behaviour through medication. Is it a natural process akin to gravity, which pulls most individuals towards the center of the mass/average behaviour? Are we trying to feel better by feeling alike? Too bad this makes everobody feel worse.
    3LSZVJA9     Thu, May 29, 2008  Permanent link
    Bussiness, as usual.

    In "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness"
    (Yale University Press, October 2007),
    Northwestern's Christopher Lane chronicles the "highly unscientific and often arbitrary way" in which widespread revisions were made to "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM), a publication known as the bible of psychiatry that is consulted daily by insurance companies, courts, prisons and schools as well as by physicians and mental health workers.

    "The number of mental disorders the general population might exhibit leaped from 180 in 1968 to more than 350 in 1994," notes Lane, Northwestern's Herman and Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professor. In a book that calls into doubt the facade of objective research behind psychiatry's revolution, Lane questions the rationale for the changes, and whether all of them were necessary and suitably precise.

    By labeling shyness and other human traits as disorders with biological causes, the doors were opened wide to a pharmaceutical industry ready to provide a pill for every alleged chemical imbalance or biological problem, the author says.

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    End:

    In examining the American Psychiatric Association archives, Lane — who argues that psychiatry is using drugs with poor track records to treat growing numbers of normal human emotions — even came across a proposal to establish "chronic complaint disorder," in which people moan about the weather, taxes or the previous night's racetrack results.

    "It might be funny," he says, save for the fact that the DSM's next edition, due to be completed in 2012, is likely to establish new categories for apathy, compulsive buying, Internet addiction, binge-eating and compulsive sexual behavior. Don't look for road rage, however. It's already in the DSM, under intermittent explosive disorder.
     
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