Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children

Government and Corporations have been leading to a lot of these health issues for decades, including diabetes and obesity in children, ADHD from being locked in a prison-like school environment, and more. Incidentally, diabetes and obesity are major factors for morbidity in coronavirus infections.

But also the for-profit industry finds it a lot more attractive to medicate kids downstream (eg prescribing Amphetamines for ADHD) and overdiagnose everything from Autism to ADHD to Gender Dysphoria. This is a band-aid approach, because it’s harder and less profitable to change society than it is to medicate everyone.

Hollywood definitely played a role in changing culture and people’s behaviors (including Westerns glamorizing gunfighters, PR campaigns getting women to smoke, product placements, etc)

But the industries actually start earlier than that. Merchandising selling stuff to kids. Broadcasting ideas — kids love to pick up on what their peers are watching, not their parents.

This PBS documentary goes intk detail:

https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-merchants-cool/

There are record levels of depression, sadness and suicidal ideation among teens, especially teen girls. Whether it’s Hip-Hop or Tik-Tok, the negative externalities from the centralized, for-profit industries disseminating youth culture pile up and our communities should at least request the CDC to investigate further:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-girls-experiencing-record-...

They do this with adults too — one in five middle aged women is on antidepressants. And let’s not even get started on the opioid crisis. More people than ever are angry at “the other party” in many countries, it is not an accident.

But they don’t focus on culture and society and for-profit industries. They only focus on diffuse causes like a virus that’s going around, or “random infections”.

State and Federal governments collude with industry to keep us distracted. Whether it’s the fructose sugar they genetically engineer into the fruits, or the high-fructose corn syrup they put into everything, or water use, or the non-biodegradeable plastics, or the factory farms and overuse of antibiotics — in nearly every case the government sides with the corporations — eg governments in agricultural US states criminalizing the filming and exposing of animal cruelty, since their tax revenue comes from these corporations — or enforcing patents for Monsanto and Big Pharma etc. etc. and letting the lobbyists write Medicare Part D to make sure Medicare won’t negotiate drug prices etc.

What they do is they always tell us that we can do something as individuals (recycle, diet and exercise, go vegan etc) or lead to polarized narratives like Women (feminism) vs Men (redpill) White vs Black, so we’d be too divided and blaming each other instead of demanding systemic reforms to impose a cost on our corporations getting away with the negative externalities:

https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362

I strongly believe that if we had a UBI in this country, funded by these pigovian taxes imposing costs, we’d have a population that organically would start to push industry towards healthier practices for everyone and the planet. Because the public would directly get the windfall of these tax revenues.

You're probably contagious before symptom onset.

Ancient religion and philosophy taught that habits influence desires far more strongly than desires influence habits.

It is possible to want different desires (if you disagree, ask any recovering drug addict). So even conflicting desires can exist simultaneously on multiple planes of consciousness.

A powerful way to change your desires to be what you want them to be is to change your habits.

> You cannot control what you feel, but you can control your actions.

I'll respond in a way that I hope is clear and relatively objective. This will take the form of an "if-then" claim nested within another "if-then" claim.

IF a person

  (1) accepts philosophical materialism, but
  (2) remains agnostic as to quantum effects at macro scale

THEN then the following response follows logically:

It depends what you mean by "you". If you (a) mean that "you" consists of the body, including the brain; and (b) you recognize there is a physiological difference between _non-volitional_ and _volitional_ choices; then (c) yes, loosely speaking, "you" can control your volitional actions.

If you think carefully, you will recognize the above assumptions also mean:

- a person's surrounding context plays an essential role in shaping the kinds of actions that are available.

- there are no causes other than material ones (such as a soul)

You may notice I didn't use the phrase "free will" above. That is very much intentional. Even if you are a philosopher, that word is nearly impossible to use in a way with a definition that a group of people can agree on.

See also: "Volition and Action in the Human Brain: Processes, Pathologies, and Reasons" by Itzhak Fried, Patrick Haggard, ... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5678016/

I realized I didn’t finish the story on this comment.

5 years later, our son’s recovery is a daily miracle. He’s a happy, healthy 13 year old with only a shadow of his former symptoms.

We were able to achieve symptom reduction through long course antibiotics, inflammation reduction supplements and medications (Tylenol and steroid bursts), and eventually having his tonsil’s out. After that we would have done IVIG if needed.

We maintain some inflammation reduction supplements but he’s off the rest of the meds and doing really remarkably, knock on wood. If you’re going through this with your kid, I send you all the love in the world, and hope that you’re able to relieve their symptoms as well.