191–200 of 211 posts
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Not only that, but the trend is cemented by the fact that only Lawful people are allowed to diagnose in the first place, so there is no checks or balances. In D&D, a few rolls could take care of that, but in the real world you'll get some hefty jail time... and a diagnosis.
Real life would be a lot more fun if it had a better DM.
This is a great article. The linked article ("Anti-Authoritarians and Schizophrenia: Do Rebels Who Defy Treatment Do Better?") is also very interesting: "At the 2-year assessment there were no significant differences in severity of psychosis between schizophrenic patients (SZ) on antipsychotic medications and SZ not on any medications. However, starting at the 4.5-year follow-ups and continuing over the next 15 years…
Neuroleptics make schizophrenia patients more biologically vulnerable to psychosis. Standard antipsychotics block 70-90% of D2 receptors in the brain. To compensate, postsynaptic neurons increase the density of their D2 receptors by 30% or more. The brain is then supersensitive to dopamine. This leads to dyskinetic and psychotic symptoms.
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"when in the last, say, 100 years has the US government posed a threat to American citizens" I'll name one -- Japanese internment camps during WWII. Forcibly imprisoned over a hundred thousand citizens against their will, depriving them of their liberty and property. But I suppose in your world view the government has final say over your life and property, so being able to deter or resist attacks like this is unneces…
So in your mind, it would be better then if a hundred thousand armed Japanese would have started fighting back on mainland US? How about, instead of permanently distrusting the government, try to make it more democratic. There shouldn't have to be rebellions in a democratic country, then you talk it out and try to convince everybody else. If you can't, then touch luck, you're in the minority. That doesn't mean you ha…
Your attitude suggests that government can do no wrong, that the Japanese had no right to defend their liberty against unwarranted aggression.
"If you can't, then touch luck, you're in the minority." I don't agree with the tyranny of the majority. Perhaps that's why this country was actually founded a constitutional republic, not a democracy.
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Yeah, and probably an American kid in the UK - and for sure in Eastern Europe where I currently reside - would be diagnosed with autism ;-) Too quiet, has no views or opinion of his own, sits still all day. ;-) I love it. I remember my first days at the office in the US. I was like - am I in a mental institution with a band of cranky autistic adults now? And for them I was waaay too crazy. Asked too many questions, t…
I happen to know quite a few American kids who moved to countries around the world and unsurprisingly, none of them were diagnosed with anything. I have also known Poles who moved to America and other countries and have never considered them more intense than other people. Maybe your experience says more about you than the world in general.
You see for you it's already "something wrong with you" department. In Eastern Europe cynicism is just much more common.
The point is that American will feel as if everybody around them has ADHD when in Poland. And a Pole may (I did!) feel that people suffer from serious autism when visiting the USA ( office setting in particular). US office vs. Polish office is like autism vs. adhd to me at least and I have the right to express that opinion. I'm not saying everybody in the US is autistic and that everybody in Poland has ADHD. I'm saying people are closer to these psychological traits: in Poland ADHD, in the US autism.
Also Americans (and I'm one too!) are well known for over medicating their kids for trivial reasons. I think there are cultural reasons for that too.
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I'll get right on that and recommend that to my parents. :P It is interesting the recent research on psychotropics, though.
Meditation, which takes a longer route to the psychedelic states, can also help and has less stigma attached to it. Something to consider at least. By its very nature, the practice (such as Vipassana) involves not becoming attached to rising stimulus, on a moment-to-moment basis. I can tell you from personal experience, someone who is habituated to be sensitive like your brother, will have a difficult time with this.…
I had a teacher in High School who was a genius. He wanted us to think independently. One time he assigned a homework to the class where each of us had to study a mental illness of our choice. Mine was narcissism. And we had to go to a psychologist or psychiatrist, pretend that we have the disease and the task was to be convincing enough to get diagnosis. More than 80% of students passed. We were all officialy crazy…
> And we had to go to a psychologist or psychiatrist, pretend that we have the disease and the task was to be convincing enough to get diagnosis. That sounds like very interesting homework, and the results were certainly informative. Such experiments are not without risk though. IIRC there was a researcher that conducted a similar experiment -- got some volunteers with no history of mental illness go into some psychi…
Hare's commentary on the book is very enlightening: http://www.psychopathysociety.org/images/hare%20commentary%2...
"This depiction of events ... and my reported reactions to them ... are complete fabrications. The same can be said of many of his other reports of our conversations. I can’t help but wonder if some of Ronson’s accounts of his experiences with others in his book are equally fictionalized."
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> And we had to go to a psychologist or psychiatrist, pretend that we have the disease and the task was to be convincing enough to get diagnosis. That sounds like very interesting homework, and the results were certainly informative. Such experiments are not without risk though. IIRC there was a researcher that conducted a similar experiment -- got some volunteers with no history of mental illness go into some psychi…
"The Psychopath Test" doesn't represent psychology. Hare's commentary on the book is very enlightening: http://www.psychopathysociety.org/images/hare%20commentary%2... "This depiction of events ... and my reported reactions to them ... are complete fabrications. The same can be said of many of his other reports of our conversations. I can’t help but wonder if some of Ronson’s accounts of his experiences with others i…
I'm not claiming that it does. I only mentioned it because that's where I first read about the Rosenhan experiment. That experiment is not fictionalized (see the Wikipedia link), regardless of whether or not the rest of the book is.
EDIT: Thanks for the link to Hare's commentary; I haven't read that before.
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It is sad that the sort of bigoted opinions you're espousing here are what us firearms enthusiasts have to endure. It has nothing to do with machismo, nothing to do with Obama, and nothing to do with birther garbage. The right to bear arms is a right of last resort. Its the right that protects all others and, as such, it is the _most_ essential right. As for naming incidents in the last 100 years where armed resistan…
I'm curious how you suppose armed conflict would have helped Americans of Japanese descent during World War 2. Even in Los Angeles and San Francisco they were a minority, and were viewed with suspicion by much of the rest of society (Americans of German descent mostly gave up speaking and writing in German, despite being a plurality). It would have been almost trivial for the government to eliminate sympathetic feeli…
> Japanese American internment was the World War II internment in "War Relocation Camps" of about 110,000 people of Japanese heritage who lived on the Pacific coast of the United States.
I had a teacher in High School who was a genius. He wanted us to think independently. One time he assigned a homework to the class where each of us had to study a mental illness of our choice. Mine was narcissism. And we had to go to a psychologist or psychiatrist, pretend that we have the disease and the task was to be convincing enough to get diagnosis. More than 80% of students passed. We were all officialy crazy…
A friend of mine spent two weeks in a hospital psych ward (in Sydney), and requested his records after he was discharged. It was surprising how much detail the doctors noted in the records, and how often they (correctly) picked up on avoidance and lying (yet they didn't give this impression in person). Based on this experience, it's possible the psychs your class visited gave you the diagnosis you wanted, but privately noted something very different you weren't aware of.
There has been a lot of progress in objective diagnostic tools recently - e.g there's a clinic in Sydney that diagnoses ADHD using EEGs, and selects medication based on response to the med (also measured using an EEG). And I read a paper last year that described a machine learning model trained on MRI images that could diagnose some of the organic psych diseases (bipolar, schizophrenia, depression etc.) with very high accuracy (70s/80s from memory), and distinguish between the diseases in borderline cases.
Psychiatry won't rely on symptoms alone forever, and don't think psychiatrists aren't already aware of the problems. But every psychiatrist who looked after my friend used whatever tools they had at the time to try and help. It's far from perfect, but they did their best and they really did help. And I'm really glad they did because he's finally a genuinely happy person.
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It is sad that the sort of bigoted opinions you're espousing here are what us firearms enthusiasts have to endure. It has nothing to do with machismo, nothing to do with Obama, and nothing to do with birther garbage. The right to bear arms is a right of last resort. Its the right that protects all others and, as such, it is the _most_ essential right. As for naming incidents in the last 100 years where armed resistan…
Just a little reality check: the entire rest of the world thinks that Americans are utterly, raving insane on this issue.
> The vast majority of men between the ages of 20 and 30 are conscripted into the militia and undergo military training, including weapons training. The personal weapons of the militia are kept at home as part of the military obligations; Switzerland thus has one of the highest militia gun ownership rates in the world