tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1248067175990111873.post1155205991732088123..comments2023-05-24T03:29:21.076-04:00Comments on The Marginal Virtues: An Unquiet MindJAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09246790134191833213noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1248067175990111873.post-41291242781673298892013-07-23T11:08:09.103-04:002013-07-23T11:08:09.103-04:00When I became ill, my sister was adamant that I sh...<i>When I became ill, my sister was adamant that I should not take lithium and was disgusted that I did. In an odd reversion to the Puritan upbringing she had raged against, she made it clear that she thought I should "weather it through" my depressions and manias, and that my soul would wither if I chose to dampen the intensity and pain of my experiences using medication. The combination of her worsening moods with mine, along with the dangerous seductiveness of her views about medication, made it very difficult for me to maintain a relationship with her. One evening, now many years ago, <b>she tore into me for "capitulating to Organized Medicine" by "lithiumizing away my feelings."</b> My personality, she said, had dried up, the fire was going out, and I was but a shell of my former self.</i><br /><br />(From the quoted segment of the book, emphasis mine.)<br /><br />Here we see laid bare the pernicious influence of, on the one hand, the stigma against/social denial of the notion of mental illness as a medical/physiological condition (and thus a "real" illness), and, on the other, the longstanding, unwarranted suspicion of modern medicine (that is to say, of the medical science itself, and not merely of its fallible human practicioners such as doctors, nurses, administrators, pharmaceutical companies, and so on) that afflicts large segments of society.<br /><br />Dr Jamison's sister's idealization of Dr Jamison's personality combines both:<br />- she rails against the supposed dulling of personality that Dr Jamison must surely display or experience as a result of taking medication, apparently not caring (for she must at least know) that maintaining her "former self", so to speak, entailed being subject to a continual, and likely escalating, cycle of manic episodes (perhaps with an increased frequency of psychotic breaks) and depressions, which would almost certainly end in disaster.<br />- she dismisses, with what I dare say is a distressingly casual flippancy, the painstaking, laborious effort by psychiatry and psychology to wrest knowledge from the great mystery of the workings of the human brain and use that knowledge to guide both policy-making and medical practice.<br /><br />(Also, I couldn't put the section of text into a blockquote tag. I haz a sad.)Composer99https://www.blogger.com/profile/03842730402697257316noreply@blogger.com