The future of the US is fucked if people are this dumb...

[DrYouth]

Oh and not to mention the fact that she and/or the author left out the actual culprits behind (((psychiatry))) and (((pharmaceuticals))) being so fucking huge in this jewed country.

Big pharma is the quintessential special interest group.

It has coopted medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

It has coopted many university departments... (I recall vividly how it coopted my psychiatry training program at the University of Toronto when they dismissed a prominent psychiatrist who was speaking out about the covered up suicide risks for Prozac.)

It is accelerated by market forces and psychological forces wanting quick fixes and miracle cures... essentially the same forces that made fortunes for salesmen of snake-oil from time immemorial.

Practicing psychiatry with a full awareness of this has made my job frustrating... as I have to constantly swim upstream again the pressure to be primarily a drug prescriber.

That all being said, psychopharm has its place, there is a baby in the bathwater.... BUT it is one massive bathtub at this point, and the baby can be hard to find in there.

[Speaker to Animals]

Oh and not to mention the fact that she and/or the author left out the actual culprits behind (((psychiatry))) and (((pharmaceuticals))) being so fucking huge in this jewed country.

Big pharma is the quintessential special interest group.

It has coopted medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

It has coopted many university departments... (I recall vividly how it coopted my psychiatry training program at the University of Toronto when they dismissed a prominent psychiatrist who was speaking out about the covered up suicide risks for Prozac.)

It is accelerated by market forces and psychological forces wanting quick fixes and miracle cures... essentially the same forces that made fortunes for salesmen of snake-oil from time immemorial.

Practicing psychiatry with a full awareness of this has made my job frustrating... as I have to constantly swim upstream again the pressure to be primarily a drug prescriber.

That all being said, psychopharm has its place, there is a baby in the bathwater.... BUT it is one massive bathtub at this point, and the baby can be hard to find in there.

Did this transition between actual therapy (like psychoanalysis) to drug-dealing happen as a result of behaviorism?

[DrYouth]

Did this transition between actual therapy (like psychoanalysis) to drug-dealing happen as a result of behaviorism?

The answer is sort of.

Behaviorism was a move away from the cult of personality that psychoanalysis had become.
It was born from a desire to get away from the subjective world of psychoanalysis that had become overly dogmatic and based on case studies by charismatic personalities and towards objective observable behaviours that could be studied objectively.
This went to the extreme of essentially "denying" that any subjective mind existed at all.

We have been moving back from that extreme ever since... and to a large extent are now at a much more fruitful stage where there is a growing consensus on the nature of our unconscious mind and how therapy works... and can work better.

Behaviourism undermined Psychoanalysis and essentially Psychoanalysis collapsed in its inability to rebut Behaviourism adequately.
In the meantime pharmacology demonstrated powerful effects in palliating major mental illness, primarily schizophrenia and major mood disorder, allowing individuals who had previously been institutionalized to regain some level of independent functioning. The antidepressants then arrived allowing palliation of garden variety depression and anxiety and in this way Big Pharma moved into the void that was left behind by the collapse of the Psychoanalytic Paradigm.

That's a short tour of the situation.
Basically the heyday of Pharma paradigm is starting to show signs of fatigue, and is ripe for a new paradigm shift.
I'm working busily on that frontier. It's exciting days.

[Speaker to Animals]

Did this transition between actual therapy (like psychoanalysis) to drug-dealing happen as a result of behaviorism?

The answer is sort of.

Behaviorism was a move away from the cult of personality that psychoanalysis had become.
It was born from a desire to get away from the subjective world of psychoanalysis that had become overly dogmatic and based on case studies by charismatic personalities and towards objective observable behaviours that could be studied objectively.
This went to the extreme of essentially "denying" that any subjective mind existed at all.

We have been moving back from that extreme ever since... and to a large extent are now at a much more fruitful stage where there is a growing consensus on the nature of our unconscious mind and how therapy works... and can work better.

Behaviourism undermined Psychoanalysis and essentially Psychoanalysis collapsed in its inability to rebut Behaviourism adequately.
In the meantime pharmacology demonstrated powerful effects in palliating major mental illness, primarily schizophrenia and major mood disorder, allowing individuals who had previously been institutionalized to regain some level of independent functioning. The antidepressants then arrived allowing palliation of garden variety depression and anxiety and in this way Big Pharma moved into the void that was left behind by the collapse of the Psychoanalytic Paradigm.

That's a short tour of the situation.
Basically the heyday of Pharma paradigm is starting to show signs of fatigue, and is ripe for a new paradigm shift.
I'm working busily on that frontier. It's exciting days.

Weren't there sustained therapeutic successes before the transition to drug therapy alone, though? I was under the impression that psychoanalysis sort of worked, depending upon who was doing it.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned a theory from the 1970s that I thought you would be interested in:

viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2977

I just started listening the audiobook that Julian Jaynes wrote to argue the hypothesis. As an aside, this is probably the most well-written nonfiction book I have ever read or listened to. This guy could have been a novelist or playwright. The book is beautiful. Anyway, in the beginning, he goes a little into the trouble with behaviorism in an interesting take-down. You might actually be interested in this book. The podcast episodes I listed above give a decent synopsis, but the book really is something worth reading on its own.

[DrYouth]

Weren't there sustained therapeutic successes before the transition to drug therapy alone, though? I was under the impression that psychoanalysis sort of worked, depending upon who was doing it.

It did and does. There is good evidence for the success of psychotherapy. The specific subtypes of psychotherapy seem to differ very little. The qualities of the therapist and the alliance with the patient are of key importance.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned a theory from the 1970s that I thought you would be interested in:

viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2977

I just started listening the audiobook that Julian Jaynes wrote to argue the hypothesis. As an aside, this is probably the most well-written nonfiction book I have ever read or listened to. This guy could have been a novelist or playwright. The book is beautiful. Anyway, in the beginning, he goes a little into the trouble with behaviorism in an interesting take-down. You might actually be interested in this book. The podcast episodes I listed above give a decent synopsis, but the book really is something worth reading on its own.

I've heard of this theory before.

Consciousness has definitely been evolving. I very much enjoy the work of Jeremy Rifkin here who explores the evolution of human consciousness over the course of human civilization and sees it as coevolving with technologies of communication such as writing, the printing press and modern telecommunication and information technology. He refers to the author you mention as well.

The mind is certainly bicameral - the differences between the right and left hemisphere are being understood in much greater detail - the work of Iain McGilchrist is definitely worth looking at if you are interested. But this is also an oversimplification....
Under situations of great stress any of us can experience communication with what seem to be other entities - "The Third Man Factor" by John Geiger explores these experiences in ship wreck survivors and adventurers who get isolated... this is the same process that gets elaborated in Dissociative Identity disorder and certain forms of Schizophrenia. We all have aspects of the self that come into conflict with one another, which is why we say things like "I'm torn" and "I was beside myself".

[Speaker to Animals]

Weren't there sustained therapeutic successes before the transition to drug therapy alone, though? I was under the impression that psychoanalysis sort of worked, depending upon who was doing it.

It did and does. There is good evidence for the success of psychotherapy. The specific subtypes of psychotherapy seem to differ very little. The qualities of the therapist and the alliance with the patient are of key importance.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned a theory from the 1970s that I thought you would be interested in:

viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2977

I just started listening the audiobook that Julian Jaynes wrote to argue the hypothesis. As an aside, this is probably the most well-written nonfiction book I have ever read or listened to. This guy could have been a novelist or playwright. The book is beautiful. Anyway, in the beginning, he goes a little into the trouble with behaviorism in an interesting take-down. You might actually be interested in this book. The podcast episodes I listed above give a decent synopsis, but the book really is something worth reading on its own.

I've heard of this theory before.

Consciousness has definitely been evolving. I very much enjoy the work of Jeremy Rifkin here who explores the evolution of human consciousness over the course of human civilization and sees it as coevolving with technologies of communication such as writing, the printing press and modern telecommunication and information technology. He refers to the author you mention as well.

The mind is certainly bicameral - the differences between the right and left hemisphere are being understood in much greater detail - the work of Iain McGilchrist is definitely worth looking at if you are interested. But this is also an oversimplification....
Under situations of great stress any of us can experience communication with what seem to be other entities - "The Third Man Factor" by John Geiger explores these experiences in ship wreck survivors and adventurers who get isolated... this is the same process that gets elaborated in Dissociative Identity disorder and certain forms of Schizophrenia. We all have aspects of the self that come into conflict with one another, which is why we say things like "I'm torn" and "I was beside myself".

What blew my mind was the realization that, in the Illiad, there is no description of a conscious person. It speaks of arms and legs as if the human body is an automaton. The characters have a sense of a "me" but not an "I". On the other hand, you can see a depiction of a conscious being, presumably from the perspective of the unconsciousness of a bicameral poet, in Odysseus. If there is truth to this hypothesis, conscious humans' ability to deceive must have appeared uncanny to bicameral humans.

[DrYouth]

What blew my mind was the realization that, in the Illiad, there is no description of a conscious person. It speaks of arms and legs as if the human body is an automaton. The characters have a sense of a "me" but not an "I". On the other hand, you can see a depiction of a conscious being, presumably from the perspective of the unconsciousness of a bicameral poet, in Odysseus. If there is truth to this hypothesis, conscious humans' ability to deceive must have appeared uncanny to bicameral humans.

For a great literary treatment for the evolution of consciousness I have to recommend "15 dogs" by Andre Alexis...
The premise is that the gods have a wager and grant consciousness to 15 dogs who they proceed to release from a dog pound. It's a brilliant depiction of what the emergence of consciousness might have been like in our ancestors.

Here's the review I posted to goodreads.

A brilliant modern fable that explores the tensions between human nature and animal nature in this absolutely ingenius tale of 15 dogs given human intelligence in a bet between Apollo and Hermes cooked up while the two gods drink Sleemans at the Wheat Sheaf. Alexis reveals a sly humour and an intimate knowledge of the world of dogs, the gritty textures of Toronto and the tensions within our human capacities for language, love, deceit, submission and rebellion. The dogs play intricate roles as they recreate our own creation myths, recreating the biblical crises of self realization in utterly believable ways as these dogs wrestle with self knowledge, self doubt, human idealism, animal yearnings and the realization that there is no way back to the naive animal world. Nothing less than genius.

[The Conservative]

Someone came in with the book Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche and decided to tell us that we as Americans need to stop spreading our "Americanism" all over the world. I asked them what they meant, and they started to go on about the book, etc... and how that people around the world see doctors in the US or visa versa and they are told that they don't like themselves because of "x" and are prescribed medication for it or another way of life...

Saying how male privilege is the reason for anorexia, etc... I asked them to explain. They told me that men want women to look a specific way and women think they need to live up to those ideals...

Read a couple of reviews and an excerpt of the book on Amazon. Doesn't mention "male privilege" at all, and if you are accurately repeating her recap of the book, she also seems to have misunderstood what the book's about.

Not that it reads as particularly groundbreaking or intelligent. It's only valid point I can gleam from excerpts and reviews, is that culture has a significant effect on understanding mental health disorders (I suppose for example a Japanese national might get, and deal with, a depression for other reasons than an American), but aside from that, it reads like another guide for needless American cultural self-loathing. It is observable and true that Americanisation isn't just commercial, but also occurs culturally - that's not new to the US, after all. But these parts of the excerpt:

We promise people in other cultures that mental health (and a modern style of self-awareness) can be found by throwing off traditional social roles and engaging in individualistic quests of introspection. These Western ideas of the mind are proving as seductive to the rest of the world as fast food and rap music, and we are spreading them with speed and vigor.

What motivates us in this global effort to convince the world to think like us? There are several answers to this question, but one of them is quite simple: drug company profits. These multibillion-dollar conglomerates have an incentive to promote universal disease categories because they can make fortunes selling the drugs that purport to cure those illnesses.

Well, despite the author going on and on about the evils of America spreading its cultural weight around, he apparantly thinks Americanization only happens to non-Western countries. Indeed, he doesn't seem to understand that "throwing off traditional social roles and engaging in individualistic quests of introspection" is less universally Western, and more specifically American.

Mostly, though, the problem is this premise (and I suspect conclusions), again from the amazon page:

"Traveling from Hong Kong to Sri Lanka to Zanzibar to Japan, acclaimed journalist Ethan Watters witnesses firsthand how Western healers often steamroll indigenous expressions of mental health and madness and replace them with our own. In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been homogenizing the way the world goes mad".

So, what he does here is essentially paint anyone who is not American - or "Western" - as being passive recipients of aggressive and active American culturalisation. Which, as coming from someone who has been observing Americanization firsthand for all my life, is not just factually bullshit. It's also bullshit thinking. It is an idea that only America can be responsible for its own choices, and everyone else therefore must be a victim of you, being unable to make their own decisions.

Iow, it's a book advocating itself as an attack on an American-centric patronzing of foreign cultures, by assuming that foreign cultures must be unable to make decisions for themselves, by and about themselves. The only possible decision-maker in the process of Americanisation, the only center imaginable in the eyes of this author (and most of the people complimenting it), seems to be the US.

So...

I suspect the woman at your work interpreted the book in her own, "special" way. But the book itself isn't really advertising itself as all that clever, either. To the "We Americans are the root of all that is evil in the world!" -crowd, I'm sure it's all very groundbreaking, though.

She's and SJW... Of course she is anti-male and anti-America.

[The Conservative]

I know.
My view is colored by my location.
The shit you read about in the media that sets your hair on end has often been my daily life for at least a year or two.

Could be worse.
I could be in California.

My work takes me out there occasionally and I think I'm ready for it, but every trip something surprises me. People can talk about Berkeley or Minnesota being Liberal, but all pale compared to Portland and Olympia.

I'd take that challenge. Cambridge and "Berkeley" are pretty much where the California left get educated.

[SuburbanFarmer]

That all being said, psychopharm has its place, there is a baby in the bathwater.... BUT it is one massive bathtub at this point, and the baby can be hard to find in there.

That’s a beautiful analogy. Well done.