andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2009-07-16 12:01 pm
andrewducker) wrote2009-07-16 12:01 pm
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Delicious LiveJournal Links for 7-16-2009
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Overall crime is down by 5% and violent crime has fallen by 6%, and gun crime has seen a 17% fall. Rape is up, as is burglary and mugging/picking pockets.
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Gah!
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From the people that brought you Pride And Prejudice and Zombies...
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Get them to read this...
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Dashed line indicates one of the parties is from an Alternate Universe
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Which tells me the figures on my poll are for people who are paid normal salaries - and doesn't include self-employed people (i.e. contractors and the like). Read the comments - and feel your brain melt!
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A team of Yale University researchers has discovered a repulsive light force that can be used to control components on silicon microchips, meaning future nanodevices could be controlled by light rather than electricity.
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A mental health expert talks about psychiatric drugs and what they really do. Hint - they don't fix you, they put you in an altered state that you may prefer to your natural one.
The myth of chemical cure.
I have to say the altered state thing grates a little, its reliant on the "diamond mind" metaphor - I.E. that the brain/personality/whatever is somehow rigid and has a baseline state of sorts. Not that it's subject to frequent change (on a biological level at least, although I would argue that conciousness possibly exists to create certain perceptual illusions that make us believe in a constant "us" - although I have nothing to back that up whatsoever so it's probably just be a random flight of fancy) at least in terms of emotional states.
To try and make the point I'm waffling around everytime we experience an emotion it's an "altered state", everytime we learn something new
it pushes something old out of our headsit's an "altered state". To make the arbitary point that drugs alter brain chemistry thus produce an altered state is to my mind, if not an example of, bordering on the naturalistic fallacy.Although that said I agree with the need for articles like this, despite quibbling over what probably appears to most people to be the minutae, if only to try and address the notion held by the public of mental illness.
Re: The myth of chemical cure.
If you think of the phase space of possible brain states as a nice simple circle for a moment, you might start off somewhere in the top right quadrant, and then, due to stress at work, you are currently somewhere in the bottom half of it, off to the left. By taking BrainBeWell pills you can move that state to the top half of it, off to the left.
You've been put into a different part of the phase space than you would have been without them, and possibly into a part of it that you would not enter without the aid of these drugs. Which isn't to say you _couldn't_ get there without drugs, just that it hasn't put you back into the area that you were before you started. It hasn't "fixed" the problem the stress caused, it's put you somewhere else in brain-space that you prefer to the place you'd ended up.
Some people might be happy with this. Others might want to work on the stress to the point where they can stop taking the drug and return to something like they were before it all started. They'll never be exactly the same person, but they will be someone they recognise more as themselves, and are happier being.
Re: The myth of chemical cure.