Posted by pandey_m on January 7, 2001, at 15:18:34
In reply to reply, posted by name on December 30, 2000, at 23:24:54
response to two important points made by "name":
>This site seems slanted to attract support and education that favors a pharmacological approach to mental distress.
Yes, and it seems slanted towards disorders that current conventional wisdom classifies as depression-related. (You don't find too many people diagnosed with process schizophrenia, posting here.) I find both these facts distressing. But how is the moderator responsible for this state of affairs?
I am an avid fan of Ronald Laing; also I hear that the present slant [in the psychiatry world, not just this site] towards the taxonomical-pharmacological approach to mental distress is being increasingly challenged from within.
Please, all, try to start non-pharmacological threads in babble! Please ask whether the pharmacological approach makes (more than palliative) sense for a person who is depressed because they are victims of economic restructuring; sorry no job, take this pill instead - if you have insurance cover or savings, that is.
I somehow don't see Dr Hsuing blocking threads like that; and *that* statement is readily Popper-falsifiable. So prove me wrong!
You forgot one more slant; this site is heavily US-centered. Go ahead, blame the moderator! (And he allows third-world trash like me [writing from south asia] purely for image reasons !?)
> The moderator is employed, for now, at a
>university that is heavily funded by the same
>kind of transnational capitalist interests as
>those that fund Discover and other for-profit
>and non-profit educational formats. Most notable
>of the University of Chicago's benefactors, (the
>university having until two weeks ago sponsored
>this site with server space) is the late John >Rockefeller who, early in the last century, >endowed a sectarian (Baptist) university with >money he made by monopolizing the world >petroleum market.True, but I repeat: universities are still the lesser evil. And this, in spite of the disappearance of automatic tenure, etc. In spite of the reality that university faculty is increasingly forced to take notice of the fact that qua employees they are, like any other worker, selling their labor power [mental] and are therefore subject to classical marxist exploitation. [Which in turn is independent of the question whether the USSR, China (PRC) etc. were ever socialist states.]
I am afraid that ten years from now, there might be nothing to choose freedom-wise between working as a University teacher and working in industry. But futurism is slippery ground ...
poster:pandey_m
thread:3628
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20010105/msgs/3761.html