Luch Machiavelli's List: Health

• After all, they are in the alienation business. It is entirely in the profession’s best interests that it treat us as if our lives are lived in a vacuum, our loneliness and despair are entirely our own,

• Most drug-policy-reform advocates know the name of Judge Francis Young and many can quote a line from his 1988 recommendation that the DEA remove marijuana from Schedule One: "Marijuana is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man." 

• Neurontin
• Neurontin
• Avoid alcohol.¹
  
• magnesium supplements and other antacid products within two hours of the medication
• Evening Primrose Oil,
• Sage.
• ginseng Siberian, goldenseal, gotu kola
• St. John's wort,
• valerian
• Neurontin

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• Gary Greenberg’s “Manufacturing Depression” (Simon & Schuster; $27)
• “The Emperor’s New Drugs”
• . It’s a sane response to a crazy world.
• that our unhappiness is a chemical problem, not an existential one
• even more critical of cognitive-behavioral therapy,
• indoctrination into the pieties of American optimism, an ideology as much as a medical treatment.
• about getting people to accept current arrangements.
• They just see, in the world’s unhappiness, a chance to make money
• only one exception to a diagnosis of depression: bereavement
• existential-humanistic talk therapy
• then that something becomes a disorder to be treated (social anxiety)
• Kirsch’s conclusion is that antidepressants are just fancy placebos
• So how can Kirsch claim that the drugs have zero medicinal value?
• is answer is that the statistical edge, when it turns up, is a placebo effect.
• But antidepressants have side effects, and sugar pills don’t.
• This means that a patient who experiences minor side effects can conclude that he is taking the drug,
• and start to feel better, and a patient who doesn’t experience side effects can conclude that she’s taking the placebo, and feel worse
• the placebo effect—you believe that you are taking a pill that will make you feel better; therefore, you feel better—wipes out the statistical difference.
• Kirsch suggests that the result in STAR*D may be one big placebo effect.
• . By the sixth switch, a hundred per cent of the subjects reported that they no longer felt nauseous—even though every one of the anti-nausea drugs was a placebo.
• Is psychopharmacology evil, or is it useless
• , accuse it of turning deviance into a disorder
• and of confusing health with conformity.
• diagnostic categories psychiatrists use don’t match up with the conditions patients have
• All the psychiatrists reached the same diagnosis only twenty per cent of the time,
• and two were in agreement less than half the time.
• The more psychotherapy, the smaller the recovery rate
• which focusses on the way patients reason,
• no difference in effectiveness between C.B.T.,
• which focusses on their relations with other people
• and interpersonal therapy
• do no better than patients who meet with sympathetic professors with no psychiatric training
• care works for some of the people some of the time,
• and it doesn’t much matter what sort of care it is
• Patients believe that they are being cared for by someone who will make them feel better; therefore, they feel better
• e inability of hospital psychiatrists to distinguish mentally ill patients from impostors.
• inserted the category “ego-dystonic homosexuality”—distress because of the presence of homosexual arousal or the absence of heterosexual arousal.
• while self-defeating personality disorder was lobbied against by women’s groups, and was deleted.
• —neurotic, anal, Oedipal—was wiped out of the discipline
• he antidepressant business looks like a demolition derby
• a collision of negative research results,
• may soon turn into something bigger, something more like a train wreck
• skepticism about the state of psychiatry is that it’s not really science.
• Cultural, political, and economic factors, not scientific progress, underlie the triumph of diagnostic psychiatry and the current ‘scientific’ classification of mental illness entities,
• oal of biological psychiatry is to identify the organic conditions underlying the symptoms
• to establish psychiatry firmly on the disease model of medical practice
• disorders
• Is depression—insomnia, irritability, lack of energy, loss of libido, and so on—like a fever or like a disease?
• It was the depression talking, she told him, not her
• Kramer thinks that the notion that depression affords us, as Greenberg puts it, “some glimpse of the way things are” is a myth standing in the way of treating a potentially dangerous disease of the brain
• The tests, not the fever, identify the disease.
• n the case of mood disorders, it is difficult to find a test to distinguish mental illness from normal mood changes
• end up with a lot of false positives.

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• psychiatry

• d you are expecting that, right?
• advice for consumers?
• o not keep the phone on your body,"
• Men should not keep it in their front pocket or in their breast pocket.
• Use an ear piece.
• Use a speaker phone.
• Never hold a cell phone next to your head

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