An American Horror Story.

To be fair this is the American chapter of a world wide horror story, viz. the treatment of mental illness for the past century or so. It does show the danger in relying on the ‘experts’ and this applies to many other enterprises but particularly the lefty politicians who arrogantly think they know better than the people what they need and how it should be provided.

From ‘The Brain: A Mindless Obsession by Charles Barber’ in The Wilson Quarterly. It’s a long article but worth reading and keeping if only as a warning.

All of the evidence points to the conclusion that today’s full embrace of biological psychiatry is terribly premature, especially since we have available an increasing number of nondrug therapies of proven effectiveness. We are only in the very early stages of understanding how the brain works and what alters its functioning. Somewhere along the way we seem to have misplaced the notion that, at this stage of our scientific evolution at least, the brain’s capacity to understand itself is minimal. The task is endlessly daunting. There are, for example, more than 100 billion neurons in the human brain. Each neuron is connected to hundreds of thousands of other neurons, and each can fire electrical and neurochemical messages hundreds of times a second to other neurons across synapses. Altogether, there are 100 trillion synapses through which these signals flow. All of this activity happens within the confines of a three-to-­four-­pound object. And the brain is not even mainly composed of neurons. Ninety percent of the cells in the brain are not neurons but glial cells, which provide nutrition and protection to the ­neurons.

The brain is the most complicated object in the universe. Nobel ­Prize–­winning psychiatrist Eric Kandel has written, “In fact, we are only beginning to understand the simplest mental functions in biological terms; we are far from having a realistic neurobiology of clinical syndromes.” Neuroscientist Torsten Wiesel, another Nobelist, scoffed at the hubris of calling the 1990s “The Decade of the Brain.” “We need at least a century, maybe even a millennium,” he said, to comprehend the ­brain.

This is what they mess with with their drugs. Though not as barbaric as some of the earlier treatments, the harm it might do is as unknown. Richard Feynman the physicist when asked in an interview if he’d ever done drugs replied, ‘My brain is my most treasured possession, I wouldn’t want to risk any damage to it, so no I haven’t’. By the way, if you’ve never read the two autobiographical books of Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Other People Think, then get them right away, great sadness and great humor lie therein.

While on the subject of mental well being, this article in The Telegraph on Happiness and Wealth is worth a read.

To mention satisfaction and achievement is to suggest activity of some kind – doing and making, helping, learning, changing – which might seem obvious to most, but is chosen by surprisingly few.

Ruskin tellingly remarked ”a man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel”, and this, alas, characterises too many people. The limited surface area of such parcels does not attract much of the golden dust of satisfaction.

Sphere: Related Content