And What Science Can
Do About It
And What Science Can
Do About It
#28
“...is simple, and hence well calculated to attract the minds of those who like to think for themselves in the absence of facts.... that the patient, in his rough and ready manner, has essayed to diagnose.”—Dr. Morris Fishbein, Fads and Quackery in Healing, copyright 1932
hen if Dubya or someone like him should start spouting absolutisms about how bad and scary are those who claim “victimhood” we could know just how dangerous that’s been proven to be.
When you consider that, as the National Comorbidity Survey Replication Study says, “...we found that the majority of people with MDE [major depressive episodes] are severe cases and only a small minority are mild cases. The average person with MDE in the past year reported an average of 35 days when they were unable to work or carry out other normal activities because of their depression.” About these major depressive episodes, that Harvard webpage says, “The researchers found MDE affects 13 to 14 million American adults—roughly 6.6 percent—in a given year. In a lifetime, 16.2 percent of Americans—about 33 to 35 million—suffer from MDE.”
When you’ve seen ads and other guides that say things like this, you may have thought, “So how am I supposed to fit in with all this? Self-responsibility in such a society really is different from self-responsibility in a society with a normal rate of depression. All sorts of homilies about our personal response-ability to face whatever our problems are, would look very different in a society with rampant depression, than in a society with a natural rate of depression!”
Those around us would realize the differences:
- between wisdom and good tactics
- between balanced forgiveness and de rigueur amoralism
- between fairness or unfairness being just an idea, and the fact that if a de rigueur amoralism tells us to put away the idea of fairness or unfairness, we’re going to end up with some pretty unendurable physical problems
- between the short-term serenity and courage that would result from admonishing those who are undoubtedly inflicted with helplessness caused by others, “Things happen. It’s what we do when they happen that’s key,” “We are all victims of victims,” “To be wronged is nothing, unless you insist on remembering it,” etc., and the long-term effects of this de rigueur amoralism both on the victimizers who are thereby exempted from responsibility and on the victims who therefore absolutely have to take the response-ability since someone absolutely has to
- between genuine free-thinking liberty that allows for at least one non-desperate option, and what James called “the law of liberty” just before threatening hellfire to those who disagree
- between real self-determination and self-determination through fight or flight
- between optimism learned from personal experience which is how the rest of our impressions of life are learned, and optimism learned from Doctrine over Person which gets its power from pragmatic admonitions rather than from deprivation of food and sleep, milieu control, etc.
- between the reliability of relative problem-solving approaches that look at each situation’s particularities, and the reliability of problem-solving approaches that work like panaceas so are absolutist, all-or-nothing, overgeneralized, mentally filtered, and disqualifying of victims’ positives
- between personal responsibility and personal response-ability
- between what right-wingers call “victimology” simply because it’s aware of victims’ realities, and what really is victimology, which is logics like Dubya’s which obsess on how victims must act think and feel simply because they’re the ones who have the problems that must be dealt with
- between what right-wingers call “the victim role” and the role that victims really are supposed to play in our society, which is as diligent little problem-solvers who speak in a low voice if at all
- between what many in the New Left call the “freedom” of abusing intoxicating substances, promiscuous adultery, bohemianism, and flouting “the pigs” by committing crime, and the fact that by far most of those who are labeled “codependent,” who are to say in unison about themselves, “There are no victims, only volunteers,” etc., fall under this rubric only because their lives are turned upside-down by exactly this sort of behavior
- between the mysterium iniquitatis and the mysteries of how to best handle situations that don’t involve evil
- between a realism based on what’s real, and a realism based on what beliefs are most pragmatic
- between lacking a self-determined character and lacking self-determination because others have the power to determine some of the big factors of his life
- between a spirituality that’s based on what suits the spirit, and a spirituality that’s based on how we could best transcend whatever happened to us
- between our brains being as prone to disabling endogenous physical dysfunctions as are any other organs, and our brains having several strong unusual forms of self-destruction
- between truly knowing that someone has a penchant for asking for trouble, and assuming that this is true because such assumptions would push the person in the direction of more self-protection
- between the real helplessness of those on the mollycoddle side of the dichotomy, and the facile self-made helplessness of those on the redblood side such as, “He can’t help it that his sinful nature made him do that,” or “He’s now helpless to turn back the clock and undo what he did then.”
- between statements of fact about one’s victimization, and mollycoddle attempts to make excuses or manipulate others, and
- between warranted and unwarranted: judgments, lack of steadfastness in the face of various trials, lack of forgiveness, hatred, awareness of injury, doubt, despair and sadness.
At the very least, those who’d say that we’d have to accept a certain amount of depression and other devastation because the economy has to play by its own rules, would have to realize the price we’re paying. It could possibly be that our society figures that we’re just going to have to accept both such things as unemployment, and the devastation and self-blame that results from them and their consequences. Yet even such an acceptance would have to be limited to the devastation that could be called “achievement-oriented,” “goal-oriented.” If a good deal of people must suffer devastation because a good deal of people must be unemployed, lose business competitions, etc., then we certainly can’t afford the luxury of non-goal-oriented devastation, such as that caused by codependents’ spouses.
At the Michael Peterson murder trial in North Carolina in 2003, workers at the Nortel company said that when they were downsizing, the list of those to be laid off, was called the list of those who’d be “optimized.” In the same sense, one could say that when immutable economic laws cause depression, anxiety disorder, etc., in those unlucky enough to be hurt by them, were “optimized,” in that allowing that to happen to them is supposed to be the most optimal for the economy. When pigheaded spouses cause some people to go into depression, chronic anxiety, etc., this devastation wouldn’t have been “optimized.” Even when the victims suffer depression or the like from some business dealings, such as when businesspeople recklessly or maliciously abuse others’ trust, or workers overdo aggressive office politics, this devastation wouldn’t have been “optimized,” since this wouldn’t be the optimal of all possible outcomes. Before we treat anything this costly, as sacrosanct, we’d better be sure that it is sacrosanct. Depression caused by homophobia certainly isn’t “optimized.”
If one really believes in The System, really believes that a good deal of depression is simply the price that we must pay for allowing the economy to determine such things as how many of us are unemployed at any given time, then he must regard it as his duty not to cause more depression that we can afford, i.e. any more than is necessary to achieve something in the economic sphere. It would also make sense to have a holiday like Memorial Day, to give credit to those who suffered depression because they were “optimized,” since these people, also, would be heroes and martyrs. They’d have paid a big price that supporters of The System would say is necessary for us to let our economy play by its own rules. These supporters certainly should have an attitude of gratitude toward the price that they paid.
Some forms of “business as usual,” we don’t feel obligated to accept, and this includes the tactics of the pharmaceutical industry regarding antidepressants. The problems that modern Westerners are supposed to accept along the lines of the cognitive distortions of depression, probably would tend to fall under two slogans, “Boys will be boys,” and “business as usual.” Most of the time that we encounter the power dynamics that would fall under either of these two slogans, for the person who has the problem to absolutely minimize others’ moral responsibility and magnify his own response-ability for his own welfare, would mean that he’d feel and act more confident and goal-oriented.
Yet when you look at pharmaceutical company’s tactics, which have recently been seen regarding both arthritis medications and antidepressants, and was described in detail in Dr. Joseph Glenmullen’s book Prozac Backlash (which is about all brands of SSRI antidepressants), isn’t the sort of thing that would be pragmatic to go along with. This book tells of scientific studies showing that other drugs that produce the same effects in the brain produce brain damage, that the unusual suicidality from SSRIs comes with an agitation that other popular antidepressants don’t cause, that pharmaceutical companies not only have been proven to hide truths illegitimately but have other ways of hiding truths legitimately, that Prozac probably wouldn’t cause so many problems if the prescribing doctors started out at a lower dosage as other antidepressants were but at first it wasn’t manufactured in the lower dosage and otherwise was marketed as something that general practitioners could easily handle, that HMOs do their best to give their medication rather than therapy to their patients with mental illnesses, etc.
Even Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, whom those who are afraid of laws to commit the dangerously mentally ill tend to associate with these laws, told the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, which has the same reputation, “What gets put out is not necessarily the truth. You’d be surprised at how much money many of my colleagues are regularly taking from the pharmaceutical industry. Ten thousand dollars is not an uncommon amount to be given for giving a talk.” This isn’t the sort of thing that people have to simply adjust to, in order to be well-adjusted.
For example, the book says that some HMOs advertise that they’d provide up to 20 weekly sessions of psychotherapy, but in the small print say that this is contingent on the therapy being “medically necessary,” and requiring a good deal of paperwork to justify each five sessions. This goes on to say, “Privately, some managed care administrators acknowledge their false advertising and deceptive practices, justifying them as necessary to ‘compete in the marketplace.’ At the same time, they disparage people who want more than five sessions, saying they have to ‘educate’ patients out of this ‘health care entitlement.’ Never mind that the patients are innocently trying to use the twenty visits advertised as part of their insurance plan.” Most average Americans wouldn’t regard these people as having an entitlement complex. Yet those who are faced with “boys will be boys” or “business as usual,” and the only way that they could change the situation would be through moral appeals, this would seem the sense of entitlement condemned by, “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it; Trusting that You will make all things right if I surrender to Your will; So that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with You forever in the next—Amen”
The same would go for their hiding the truth. Business as usual means doing whatever the decision-makers think will lead to the greatest amount of profits. If this means using tactics that in the long term could discredit them, then that’s what this means. This might not discredit them in the sense that we’d know that they played dirty tricks, since naturally they’d assume that a danger doesn’t exist unless it can be scientifically proven to exist, and naturally the public would be expected to assume them innocent of fraudulent intent, until proven guilty. Yet speaking from personal experience, when it comes to whether street-savvy should tell you whether or not to trust someone, if you have an attitude of, “But I don’t want to treat him as untrustworthy, unless I have something that comes close to proof of his untrustworthiness,” you might seem to be too insistent on scientific limitations on what dangers you take seriously. One can and must treat such companies as untrustworthy, without seeming to violate such sacred precepts as “They’re presumed innocent,” or “‘Knowledge’ of something requires scientific provability.” When one says, “You should have known that he’d do that,” or “I knew that was going to happen!”, that wouldn’t mean that you could have scientifically proven that he was going to do that, or that he could have scientifically proven that that was going to happen, and these are the sorts of criteria by which self-help holds victims personally responsible for “letting themselves in for” what they supposedly knew would happen.
When one is at least allowed to reject this “business as usual” without seeming maladjusted, he could accept the more general ways in which it’s affected our culture. For example, Prozac Backlash says, “One ad shows a playful, laughing mother and young daughter running up the stairs. Beneath the rheumy photograph is a note written in crayon, ‘I got my mommy back.’” And that Johns Hopkins study “Depression Common in Single Mothers Receiving Welfare”, which found, “Forty percent of the women reported symptom levels that would likely indicate a diagnosis of clinical depression,” had the goals both of “The study looks at the factors in these women’s lives that contribute to depressive symptoms, and examines whether these symptoms may prevent the women from gaining employment and becoming independent from welfare,” and making them better mothers, that treating the depression would be “for the benefit of the women and their children.” This study was done by Johns Hopkins’ school of public health, and William Ryan’s Blaming the Victim gave the field of public health as one in which social problems are unapologetically treated as such, but since treating 40% of welfare mothers as if they simply suffer from a deficiency of Vitamin P, corrects them rather than blames them, this could still seem compatible with the field of public health. Once the long-term effects of the SSRI antidepressants become known, both commercials and social endeavors which attempt to make depressed women into better mothers by giving them this medication, will look just as bad. We may still try to make them better mothers by giving them the older antidepressants, though, the tri-cyclics (with annoying side effects such as dry mouth and lightheadedness) and MAO inhibitors (which don’t allow people to eat some pretty basic foods).
Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary (Page 1)
