Speaking of the ugly Calvinism / Jansenism curled at the shriveled core of too many American hearts, bravo for Kristen Johnston for her NYTimes articles on “Turning A Disease Into A Sideshow“:
“Kristen Johnston admits to being a total drug addict and alcoholic for years!”
After 20 years of being a famous person, I’m happy to say I have pretty thick skin when it comes to press. However, when I saw that headline, which ran recently on a major entertainment Web site, I stopped in my tracks. The entire article was based on two quotations from an interview I had given to a completely different publication to promote my TV Land series, “The Exes.“
At the end of the interview, I had been asked a few questions about a book I wrote, “Guts,” which is mostly about the time my guts blew up in response to my lengthy love affair with booze and pills; this part is what the Web site used. “Guts” was released a year and a half ago, and in that time I’ve been very open about my disease, discussing it on countless talk shows and in hundreds of articles, so it wasn’t exactly breaking news…
… Most people believe addicts are selfish, delusional jerks who have no qualms about destroying themselves and everyone who loves them. Even the reality shows focused on addiction, like “Intervention,” “Rehab With Dr. Drew” (thankfully canceled) or that show where people have bizarre addictions like eating chalk or scouring powder, have done almost nothing to educate Americans. All they’ve really achieved is keeping addiction an oddity, a sideshow. It’s entertainment for the “nonaddicted” who happily watch from the couch while cramming down two large pizzas and a case of light beer, thinking, “Thank the good Lord that’s not me.” …
This is an epidemic that now claims more lives per year than car accidents. It kills more people per year than guns. Drugs are now the No. 1 cause of deaths in emergency rooms. Yet there is zero government financing for research. There are no swanky benefits to raise funds to eradicate it. A minuscule percentage of those who suffer can afford to get help, because most insurers refuse to cover treatment. We imprison those whose only crime is being an addict, and I can’t even get the New York City schools to let my organization, SLAM, NYC, build a sober high school.
I’ve had it. We’re not a joke anymore. It’s time for addiction to stand up and demand some respect. Because every time someone is ostracized for being an addict, every time there’s a breathless, trumped-up, sensational headline, every time we giggle at a wasted celebrity, and every time addiction is televised as salacious entertainment, yet another addict is shamed into silence.
And before anyone says, “WTF, sober high schools?”… forty years ago, in my white working-class parochial school, there were plenty of kids started on their addiction journey by the time they were in the seventh grade. (And not just the Irish kids, either.) There’s more lip service today about how it’s a disease, but just as with fat-shaming, too many people want to believe that addiction is moral weakness made physically evident.
cathyx
I’m glad I never suffered from any real addiction.
Mjaum
If addiction had anything to do with willpower, I’d be an alcoholic as well as fat. But alcohol has never been a temptation. I can drink, and I can stop drinking. Eating? Not so much.
So addiction as a disease? I can get behind that.
Violet
It also falls under mental health as far as treatment goes, and mental health is woefully underfunded and there’s often less coverage of it with health insurance. It’s a separate category.
Svensker
One of my cousins’s daughters was an alcoholic by the time she was 15. She’s 19 now and just celebrating her first year sober. She was fortunately able to get help and had family that rallied around — but what about the kids (and adults) who can’t and don’t?
raven
I started drinking when I was 13. Went in the Army at 17 drank, and then quickly started smoking dope a foolin with uppers and downers. Got out and continued to go full blast until I hit the wall at 43. I stopped it all in one day 20 years ago. Are their addicts, is it a disease? Maybe so but it’s not my experience. Put the shit down and that’s that.
J.D. Rhoades
Good for Ms. Johnston. And I hope the show does well for her.
Rob Wolfe
@raven: Your experience is noted but there are an awful lot of other folks that have different experience.
raven
Take a look at Rational Recovery.
raven
@Rob Wolfe: Yea and the anonymous component of AA will keep anyone from ever know how well it works.
? Martin
The reputation a high school in my city has for student addition is direction proportional to the school’s ranking in standardized tests, it’s reputation for overbearing parents, it’s dropout rate, and it’s suicide rate. Yes, the highest achieving schools are the most drug and alcohol prone and most inclined for students to drop out or check out.
Chris
Contrast that into the billions that have been sunk into the war on drugs.
But that’s the America of the post-Reagan era for you. If it’s a problem, it can probably be defeated by going out and punching it in the face, and if it can’t be defeated like that, then it’s probably not a very big problem to begin with, or if it is, it’s certainly not the feds’ job to do anything about it.
Violet
@raven: One of my childhood friends used alcohol and drugs to deal with her schizophrenia. It’s a well known issue with schizophrenics, as is non-compliance with their medications. I think there is a lot we don’t know about the intersection of health issues, mental health and addiction.
raven
@Violet: I agree, I just have a great deal of trouble with a model that frames drinking or drug abuse as something that a person has no control over.
Villago Delenda Est
Yet, despite all this shaming of some addicts, the moral lepers who are the Mammon worshipers are revered by this twisted Ferengi society of ours. Being addicted to lucre is celebrated.
Jamie Dimon should die, painfully and slowly, for their sins.
NotMax
@J.D. Rhoades
Currently wrapping up the airing of its third season.
Nothing particularly commendable in the rather whiny excerpt, other than demonstrating that the sober are unhampered in ability to come across as “selfish, delusional jerks.”
raven
@NotMax: But with nothing to blame it on!
Mnemosyne
@raven:
There are people with drug/alcohol problems, and there are people who are prone to addiction, and the two groups are not necessarily the same. From knowing people in my life who are in recovery, true alcoholics tend to have a problem with obsessions that verges on OCD (assuming it’s not an actual type of OCD).
When my friend who is an alcoholic bought a bottle of vodka, she felt compelled to finish it all in one night. When she went off booze, she went vegan and then developed anorexia, because booze wasn’t the real problem. Her obsessiveness and compulsion to perfectionism was the real problem, and that’s what she needs meetings for. She needs to be very careful what hobbies and enthusiasms she picks up, because it’s very easy for her to take something otherwise healthy like running and turn it into an obsession that wrecks her health.
If you never experienced that, you are a very lucky man.
raven
@Mnemosyne: That is an understatement.
Anne Laurie
@raven:
Well, yeah, you stopped using and now you don’t use — not even at a cold-beer-with-friends level. There are plenty of addicts who say the problem isn’t the stopping, it’s the never-again-starting. And there can be a lot of pressure to “just this once, fit in”. I’ve never been a drinker, because there’s a long family history of alcoholism, and I can’t tell you how many “friends” gave me grief about “not keeping up”, from my first days in college well into my forties — and my social networks have always been among geeks, not stoners.
aimai
@raven: One person’s experience is just that, one person’s experience. This “rational recovery” thing you are touting is just as much as a psychological and moral fantasy as the AA model to which it opposes itself. It, too, is based on cultural assumptions about (in this case) the primacy of the autonomous individual and the purity of the motives of the autonomous individual as opposed to the (seemingly) weak or corrupted or corrupting influence of the group of addicts.
The argument that some substances are addicting, and that breaking addiction is difficult, is not some kind of weird fantasy peddled by AA. They may or may not have a handle on helping people break addictions–I’m not arguing that because I don’t know that. But addiction itself has been extensively studied in the laboratory and from a medical perspective and a lot is known about it. It does, in fact, change brain chemistry and alter people’s ability to handle desire, pleasure, pain, fear, stress, change. While some people may be able to simply break the habit and walk away from it through sheer willpower that says nothing about whether the average person will be able to do so.
Higgs Boson's Mate
I’m an alcoholic. It’s a disease. Period. And it’s genetic. Lucky me.
Anyone who believes that alcoholics lack willpower hasn’t thrown up blood and then forced down that first drink of the day, thrown up, forced that drink down again, thrown up, and kept on until the drink stays down. That’s will power.
It ain’t easy and alcoholism is progressive. I’m now 65 and unless I’m very careful it eats me and I wind up on the floor of another drunk tank.
Not pretty, not nice, and not receiving a lot of sympathy or research. I console myself with the fact that I haven’t recently gone on a bender and sold my typewriter.
WereBear
I just got the book The Diet Cure by Julia Ross, who used OTC brain chemical supplements to “feed” the brain what it is missing from years of stress (depletes Vitamin C, for instance) and lots of processed foods (lowered B’s across the board) and
She noticed that she would treat alcoholics, who would become sugar monsters, and kick that by drinking expresso nonstop. She claims proper supplementation can knock this down in weeks or months.
Mr WereBear has some issues with his central nervous system illness that i think this book would be helpful for; and it sounds like her theory, if sound, would be a boon to a great many.
Baud
FWIW:
Mnemosyne
@aimai:
I think part of the problem explaining it is that there are addictive substances and there are addictive people (a personality type that is prone to addiction). From a medical standpoint, just about anyone can become addicted to something like morphine, because the substance itself is addictive.
On the other side, you have people who become addicted to shopping, or gambling, or sex, which medical doctors will tell you aren’t “true” addictions because the thing they’re addicted to isn’t addictive in and of itself. But the people who are addicted that way truly feel a compulsion to continue the behavior regardless of the consequences, and they can’t just stop the one problem area, because they will find a new thing to get “addicted” to.
People with addictive personalities like that are the ones who can be helped by AA and similar programs, but people without those personalities usually find those groups tedious and not helpful, because they don’t have the obsessive/compulsive problem that others in the group have. They really don’t see why you can’t just stop and not start again.
Pinkamena Panic
@raven: Welp, I think I’ve had my fill of your endless just-so moralizing and selfishness and I hope others have too. Go back to the righty sites, child, ain’t nothin’ for you here. Pied.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@WereBear:
That book is very good, but I think her other one, The Mood Cure, is even better. An invaluable approach to the issue that many of us are walking around with malnourished brains.
aimai
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
I’m very sorry for your situation and your experience.It sounds horrific.
I think the ethnotheory (also known as the cultural logic) behind the unwillingness of people to call addiction a “disease” lies in the very long history of moralizing about disease which was then supplanted by a medical model that removed morality from the equation. Before germ theory anything that degraded the indivdual’s physical being (appearance, ability) or their health could easily be thought of as the product of wrong action or wrong belief on their part or contamination by some spiritual or demonic cause. So to say that someone had a disease was also to indict them for impurity, pollution, or wrong action.
After germ theory we take a more distanced and less judgmental view of most diseases but addiction to drugs, drink, pleasure, and food remain outside this new dispensation. To my mind this is because (as Anne Laurie pointed out in the OP the shorthand is calvinism) the addicted individual is seen as consuming and therefore causing their own situation, and there is an element of choice in consumption no matter how compulsive it may be in reality. When a substance gives pleasure, the calvinist judgement comes down even harder. There are people with Pica for lots of things that are not generally considered pleasurable: ice, dirt, gravel, even glass. We know/recognize that those people have a compulsion amounting to an addiction and that they would change their behavior if they could because of its harm to them so we don’t have any problem calling that a disease.
aimai
@Mnemosyne: Sure, I agree with that.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@aimai:
Thanks,aimai. The horrific aspect comes from being two people in the same body. My non-alky self is a pretty good person. My alky self is a dangerous, trained, inhuman creature. The “trained” part is courtesy of a US gov that finds people who will do any goddamned thing occasionally useful
cathyx
@Mnemosyne: That’s my experience with people I call ‘addictive personality types’. I know a few of them, my father, his sister, and one of my sisters. They can’t do anything in moderation.
After I gave up sugar and cleaned out the candidae buildup in my system, I didn’t crave sugar anymore. That’s the closest I know of an addiction that is very difficult to control. As much as I tried to stay away from sweets, it was near impossible, and I like to think I usually have very strong willpower to resist things. It was completely like a brain control thing. I never realized it until I did the cleanse and no longer craved it. I had free will again.
raven
@aimai: I’m not “touting” anything.
AHH onna Droid
@Mnemosyne: its sort of controversial what to call opioids and I’m not sure addiction is correct as opposed to calling it dependency. High alcohol use can cause a degree of dependency, but alcoholism is genetic. Tuff nuggets.
As for ocd and ocpd they have a lot to do with family/childhood dynamics. Not clear how much of it is genetic.
Self-medicating with alcohol because you have major problems, and being the person for whom alcohol is the problem in your life are also two different matters, coincident in some unfortunate persons.
raven
@Pinkamena Panic: I’ll be here long after you are gone.
realbtl
I’m going to stay mostly out of this except to say that just as people are different so are the paths to recovery. Whatever works for a particular individual is good.
JWL
“Not just the Irish kids”?
I’ll drink to that.
Though some might consider it a slur on a noble race.
Mnemosyne
@AHH onna Droid:
NIH says a good chunk of it is genetic, but they haven’t found the specific gene yet. As far as I can tell, it’s a little like people who stutter — most of them have an inborn tendency to stutter, but life experiences (like being treated badly when they stutter, or being put into stressful situations) can make their stutter worse. Most psychiatric problems (such as OCD) are similar — you’re born with the tendency, but life experiences can make that tendency better or worse.
Litlebritdifrnt
I just spent 45 minutes on the phone with the very nice Time Warner customer service person who was walking me through trying to fix my internet connection, she had to reset my modem half a dozen times so kept having to call me back once my phone was up and running again and it was not until we were at about 30 minutes into the phone call that I realized that one of the dogs (do not know which) had completely chewed the cable from the modem to the router into pieces. Once I switched the modem cable over to the router cable problem was fixed, but damn I was too embarrassed to tell the lady that the dogs had done it, and just agreed with her that “the cable has gone bad” (as in had been eaten the piss out of). She was so patient with me, I must have been driving the poor woman mad every time I told her “no that didn’t work”.
Anne Laurie
@JWL: There’s epidemiological evidence that “mood disorders” like ADD, OCD, depression, bipolar disease, autism and schizophrenia are genetically linked… along with substance abuse issues, colitis & Crohn’s disease (also serotonin-uptake disorders, believe it or not). Different cultures have different tolerances for “out of the ordinary”, non-neurotypical behavior… and our Celtic ancestors, for reasons good & bad, were among those most tolerant-to-the-point-of-encouragement of “creative, free-spirited” addiction.
aimai
@raven: I’m sorry, why did you post the rational recovery advertisement if you weren’t, in some sense, touting it? I get that you’ve got a lot of ego wrapped up in your history of addiction (from age 13 to 43) and then your ability to drop it but really, its just one person’s story. Alcoholism and drug addiction and addiction to other destructive behaviors are all around us. Even if it were merely a matter of force of will you might have noticed that not everyone always has the same level of force of will available to them to stop a bad habit or addiction.
Higgs Boson's Mate
Well, I don’t know, but I’ve been told
You never slow down, you never grow old
I’m tired of screwin’ up, tired of going down
Tired of myself, tired of this town
-Tom Petty, “Mary Jane’s Last Dance.”
SiubhanDuinne
@Litlebritdifrnt: LOL, that’s very funny! And you know what, the T-W lady sounds as though she would have understood, and sympathised, and laughed heartily.
raven
@aimai: I thought it might be interesting to people who were engaging in the conversation. I read “A Drinking Life” by Pete Hamill early in my sobriety and found it very helpful to read about someone that looked down the bar at Breslin and Mailer and said to himself “I have to stop this” and did. No AA, no running around apologizing to people, he quit. Their were aspects of rational recovery and other anti-self help materials that were encouraging. Apparently this is “moralizing”. I guess I need to apologize.
raven
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Most things I worry about
Never happen anyway
Crawling Back to You
you know who
Higgs Boson's Mate
@raven:
Hey, brothee! What a long strange trip it’s been.
Mnemosyne
@raven:
If you never did anything you needed to apologize for while you were drinking, you must not have been drinking as much as you thought.
mclaren
I’m extremely fortunate that I’m not addicted to anything, but as someone with friends some of whose parents were alcoholics, and as someone who has had acquaintances who spiraled down into addiction, it’s pretty clear that it’s a matter of brain chemistry, not willpower. I just got lucky.
Stats seem to show that about 6% of the people who use drugs become addicted to them. That percentage seems constant across the board. Even in regions where people smoke heroin tar for recreation (think: Afghanistan), the addiction rate seems constant at about 6%. (Here’s a NYTimes article about the current research on why a minority of people become addicted to drugs, while most don’t.)
If we could give people with the kind of brain chemistry to gives rise to addiction some kind of pill or gene therapy that would eliminate the craving, that would solve a lot of problems. More problematic is the procedure involving a vaccine to eliminate cocaine abuse.
Problem is that AFAICT that vaccine doesn’t eliminate the addiction, nor does it apparently get rid of the high drug abusers experience. It apparently just eliminates the drug molecules in the bloodstream. But as with any vaccine, I imagine it can be defeated, probably by overdosing on cocaine, which sounds horribly dangerous.
We need a lot more research on addiction. But Shithole America is a fanatically puritanical country, so addiction to any substance that gives pleasure is treated as a sin, like sex — in fact, anything that’s fun in America is basically verboten and regarded as evil and monstrous. America is a sick twisted country of sadistic bullyworshiping cowards who adore torture and suffering, and fear and loathe the human body and despise pleasure in any form. “No pain, no gain,” goes the bizarrely warped motto in America. So the order of the day for addicts is suffering, and lots of it.
You have to wonder why Americans just don’t cut to the chase and set up Aztec-style child sacrifice as a public sport. Maximum torment for the maximum number of citizens: that’s the American goal.
raven
@Mnemosyne: I apologized for adding my perspective, how’s that?
that is funny though, I was bar tending at a campus joint when I hit the wall and quit. The kids that worked there said “wow, you had a problem, we never saw it.” THAT was a problem.
raven
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: Man, I feel like somehow I was minimizing your situation. Fortunately I KNOW you know better.
El Caganer
As a 40+ year alcoholic who’s been struggling to stay sober for the last three years, I wish I could say I knew of some magic system that worked. The closest I’ve found has been SMART supplemented with some one-on-one CBT; a buddy of mine has several years sober with Rational Recovery, but he’s the only person I know for whom it’s worked (and Trimpey’s Ayn Rand libertarian shit doesn’t do much for me); and after several wasted years in AA, I don’t trust anybody who says that works for them. Even took part in an experimental drug treatment at Penn 7-8 years ago, which was interesting but ultimately didn’t last.
raven
@El Caganer: How did you manage the previous 37?
Neldob
There’s a good book out called Clean. I had no idea heroin is such a problem in the US til it blindsided me.
mclaren
@? Martin:
You’re not getting it. As usual.
The kids pressured most savagely to perform on insanely unrealistic standardized tests (which have been proven statistically to have no correlation with future achievement) are the kids who wind up turning to drugs or alcohol to numb the agony and unbearable stress of being treated like performing monkeys by their parents.
I have talked out of suicide more than one future doctor getting pressured into straight As by hi/r parents because the goddamn parents had never achieved anything notable in their lives and wanted a super-achiever Fulbright Scholar top-of-the-Dean’s-list kid to make up for their perceived inadequacies. In each case, the key was to get the fellow student to realize “Hey, this is your life, not your parents’ life. What the hell good will it do you to graduate as valedictorian if you get forced into a profession you hate and a life you don’t want?”
Incidentally, as a manager, you really need to learn the basic mechanics of the English language. “Its” is the possessive form, whereas “it’s” is a contraction for “it is.” You may want to go back and re-take Remedial English before posting this kind of thoughtless swill.
gene108
From people I know who have worked in mental health, a lot of folks self medicate.
They get out of a stay in the psych ward and go back to using.
Given the lack of funding for services for people once they are out, a large chunk of addicts could be reduced with better funding for mental health services.
And the stigma around mental illness is terrible.
El Caganer
@raven: a fifth of whiskey a day, and a work culture that didn’t care if I was shit-faced.
raven
@El Caganer: I’m sorry, I misread and thought you’d been sober for that long. Hang in there man (I assume man).
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Anne Laurie: The science generally demonstrates that most – if not all – of the brain disorders we call psychiatric illnesses have a genetic basis. It may be a tendency that requires some situational stressors to be expressed. As an example, MS and schizophrenia, as well as Bipolar Disorder, are linked to a specific human endogenous retrovirus (HERV-W). An early infection seems to trigger expression – explaining the “birth month effect” in all these diseases. Perron’s point is that whether people develop MS, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia may depend on how their immune system responds to HERV-W.
All three diseases are disease of the white matter of the brain, and bipolar and schizophrenia are (no) considered to be part of a spectrum of disorders. In my opinion (hypothesized) MS will be added to that spectrum within 20 years. It’s already documented that there is a much higher incidence of BP in MS patients: the lifetime prevalence of bipolar affective disorder is twice the prevalence in the general population and there seems to be a genetic predisposition to bipolar affective disorder in some female MS patients.(link). This is an area of some interest to me, as I have BP and MS.
A bit of a digression, to be sure, but it underscores what we know about brain disorders, and that they tend to be heritable. And the consensus in the medical community is that addiction disorders are brain disorders that can respond to treatment, sometimes including medication. That is not to deny that people can recover – in the sense of not using the addictive substances, be they booze, pills or inhaled – with abstinence. People do, clearly. Many do not.
And medical understanding of the brain is evolving. None of the brain disorders should be stigmatized, but many are. Please support NAMI to help fight stigma. (Full disclosure: I am a local NAMI director and we are in fundraising season)
@raven: I think most of us KNOW better. In my view you’ve nothing to apologize for. Though Michelle insisted that I love you because you’re weak.
WereBear
@Steeplejack (tablet): Good to know, thanks!
El Caganer
@raven: Hey, no harm, no foul. And even though most folks here use nyms, I’m impressed with the number of people willing to admit they’ve had (or have) a problem.
raven
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): There is something about burying friends who drank themselves to death that makes the topic compelling.
If, in fact, addiction “disorders” can respond to treatment does that mean they are diseases?
Nicole
Alcoholism runs rampant in my family. My father is drinking (and smoking) himself to death. Literally; he is now on a merry-go-round of ending up in the hospital, unable to eat or swallow water due to his damaged esophagus. He gets home, stays off alcohol for the bare minimum amount of time it takes his esophagus to heal enough to tolerate the alcohol going down his throat and then starts up again until he ends up unable to eat, throwing up blood and then back into the hospital and so it goes. He’s 67 and you’d think he was 87 for as frail as he is. His brother is almost six feet tall and currently 110 pounds, thanks to drink.
My paternal grandfather (their dad) was an alcoholic, but managed, later in life to limit himself to one drink a day (no way he would ever skip that one drink though). My maternal was also an alcoholic; I have no memories of him where he didn’t smell of beer.
On the other hand, my uncle (by marriage), started drinking at 20, dried out at 40, but promised himself he could start drinking again at 60 and would drink until he died. Then he hit 60 and decided he might as well see, as he put it, “how this sobriety thing plays out.” Heh.
I do think it’s a mental illness, likely genetic for many, and, unfortunately, there’s nothing harder to deal with than someone who is ill with something they don’t see as a problem. My uncle once said he was content drinking because he really convinced himself that he was only hurting himself and it wasn’t until he had dried out he even really understood how much it hurt everyone around him.
My mom died of breast cancer when I was ten, and as bad as dealing with that was, my dad’s lifelong alcoholism has been worse. And he’s not abusive when he’s drunk. I can’t begin to fathom what it’s like for those whose loved ones are mean drunks.
mclaren
@gene108:
One of the big reasons for self-medication among mental patients is that the psychotropic drugs used today to treat schizophrenia and other mental illnesses have horrific side effects. Tardive dyskinesia, pancreatisis, demyelination of the nerve cells, tons of truly alarming side effects.
We’ve come a long way from the dark days when insulin shock therapy and icewater baths were used to treat depression, but brain chemistry is still poorly understand at the molecular level. Some of the drugs most effective at controlling disorders like schizophrenia still have extreme side effects that, for many people with mental illness, apparently present a worse alternative than the symptoms of the mental illness itself.
The list of side effects is truly horrifying. Dysphoria, neuroleptic malignant syndrome, sexual dysfunction, dystonia, hyperprolactinaemia, tardive dyskinesia, a tendency to lower the indivdiual’s seizure threshold — delightful. And the list goes on.
raven
@El Caganer: And we also have a strong group of folks who think drinking is just the funniest goddamn thing in the world.
JWL
@Anne Laurie: Jeezuz, A.L., lighten up.
You addressed me as if I were a not-very-bright 13 year old kid.
Re-read what I wrote: “I’ll drink to that”.
Others, however, might not (few and far between though they may be).
El Caganer
@raven: I sort of doubt that those two groups overlap very much. I’ve made fun of my own drinking, but as a way of denial, not because I genuinely find passing out in the street to be humorous.
mclaren
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
There’s also the issue of epigenetics. Changes in gene expression as a result of changes in the environment, particular early environment as a child.
The current thinking about mental illnesses like sociopathy is that genetic predisposition needs to be combined with an abusive early environment as a child to become a full-blown serial killer or CEO or presidential candidate.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@raven: The docs are coming down on the side of “yes.” And by “docs” I mean psychiatrists in the psych dept of a major college of medicine.
There’s clearly evidence that for some folks abstinence works great – like you! Anecdotally, most of the people for whom that is true do it like you and Pete Hamill – just quit – as opposed to doing the whole 12 step anonymous thing (in part because that program shames relapse, which we don’t do in MS relapses or cancer relapses). Some of the most effective tx is cognitive behavioral therapy, which addresses useful thinking strategies to create good cognitive habits (oversimplified).
And in many cases, the addiction is the result of self medication for an different underlying and undiagnosed/poorly treated psych disorder. When good dx and tx is applied, the addiction becomes very treatable, or just falls away.
I’ve buried way too many folks from alcohol and drug issues myself, so it’s another compelling area of research for me. I have the privilege of attending psych grand rounds 2-3x monthly, so I can follow the trends.
@El Caganer: I hope you find the CBT useful. This is not easy stuff, and in my opinion too many people place too much faith in 12 step self help. You may have figured out you’ve got a supportive group here. Be well.
raven
DIng! I got help but the help was much less about alch and drugs and more about what got me there. Stopping drinking was almost a sideshow.
Violet
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): Thanks for posting this. I have a friend who has a constellation of symptoms that might end up with her getting an MS diagnosis. She’s in the early stages of visiting various doctors, including multiple neurologists. She’s also had various mental health issues, including deep and difficult depression on and off through the years. I am going to pass the info on this retrovirus on to her. Not sure she’s aware.
Redshirt
Mental illness as a whole troubles me. As in, who’s not mentally ill? What’s the baseline for saying someone has a mental illness, or does not?
Now, the extremes are easy to categorize – there are people who suffer such tremendous mental issues they are clearly unable to function in the world. But then, there’s the middle area – what if you do like to check locks repeatedly? What if you do harbor some depressive thought patterns? Are you “sick”? Do you need to be on medication? Or are you just a normal, imperfect person?
I half think the prevalence of mental disorder diagnosis is driven by the drug companies, looking to sell product – oh, your kid’s high energy? Must be ADD. Give him these pills for the rest of his life.
jprfrog
@El Caganer: It works for me (coming up on 25 years now. However, I had to deal with the religious element in AA and solved it by founding a group for atheists and agnostics (in Cambridge MA) about 7 years ago. I now live in NY and go to meetings on average once a week, finding groups where there is little regimentation and almost no higher-power business. Since I am by trade a professional musician, I didn’t need AA to tell me that my conscious mind (and will-power) was not the real entity in charge of my life; as an artist I deal with he subconscious every day, and after almost 70 years of doing it, I can pretty well navigate the currents without needing to know what makes them go. As to addiction: I was never chemically addicted to booze (but psychologically for sure), and find that simply the support and encouragement of people in the group is quite enough for me to stay away from it: I firmly believe that I can’t have just one (30 years of experience at that with no success) and I am deathly afraid of it, a fear that I cultivate. However, I do have experience with the most addictive drug of all, nicotine, which I stopped, with help, 21 years ago. If you have ever suffered nicotine withdrawal (worse than heroin, I am told), you know that chemical addiction is far too powerful to lick with “will-power”.
Here’s a thought: I knew a man who was sober for about 6 years, then “went out” and really hit if hard, and when he tried to give it up on is own went into seizure and died. He was 34. Think about that if you want to sneer at rehab.
Redshirt
I have the same concerns regarding addiction. How is it a disease? And not just a behavior pattern etched into a brain by repetition? Conditioning? Calling it a disease seems to take away personal responsibility – I can’t stop: I’m “sick”.
Clearly, as Mem noted, there are addictive substances, and addiction to these things is a physical response. But addiction to the Internet? To Shopping? To sex? Where do we draw the line between personal responsibility and brain chemistry?
Anne Laurie
@JWL: Yeah, that was really addressed to the general audience, not you specifically. Apologies for over-explaining.
Anne Laurie
@Redshirt:
The meds can be overprescribed. But I assure you, from my own experience & that of many people in prior generations, getting “medicated” would’ve made growing up waaay less exhausting & frustrating.
My MiL, bless her heart, was bitching that her 19-year-old grandson should’ve “outgrown” his ADD in the same conversation where she was bitterly complaining about the nursing director who’d marked all her best efforts down for “bad attitude”, fifty years earlier. I have ADD and I’m really nearsighted; telling me that I should just “pay more attention, try harder” was about as useless as it would’ve been to tell me “just look harder” instead of getting me glasses!
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Redshirt:
In this instance, you haven’t the slightest fucking idea of what you’re commenting on. I advise you thus as a lifelong alcoholic. I’m not an alky by choice. None of the first graders in my sand box said “I want to be an alcoholic.”
Alcoholism is largely caused by genetically inherited differences in the brain. That’s the way it goes.
Now, use your brain and look up the genetic aspects of addiction. As an alternative you can shut your fucking pie hole.
Tyro
@mclaren: meh. I went to a high school full of achievers and counted many of them among my friends in other social contexts. All of the achievers turned out fine. Their form of “rebellion” against their parents was to marry someone on a distant ethnic spectrum from themselves. Any drug use was purely a recreational/experimental phase in the name of fun.
The drug usering burnouts were the low achievers of whom little was expected in the first place and their families would have just been happy if they were capable of finishing college in less than 7 years and holding down a full time job.
JWL
@Anne Laurie: Apology not accepted, because you have nothing to apologize for.
That’s my paternal lineage speaking (“noblesse oblige”).
My father instilled that virtue in me. He taught us one lesson, above all: that we had inherited Royal Irish blood from his side of the family, while my mother’s side provided the sturdy peasant stock that would also serve us well.
Toy, toy toy…..
quannlace
“Calling it a disease seems to take away personal responsibility – I can’t stop: I’m “sick”.”
**********
Hmmm, and someone attempting suicide is just ‘taking the easy way out.’
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: Kind of like none of my kindergarten pals said “I want to grow up to have bipolar disorder.” I’ve got nor more fucking choice to have that brain disorder than I do MS. I rarely feel judged for having MS, nor do people suggest I just work harder to get over it. Ironically, it’s much easier to keep BP in hand, as it were, than MS with medications. So add my fuck you to yours to those who espouse the myth of mental illness and assure themselves it’s all a scam for big pharma.*
A friend of mine had a recent behavioral problem – he started having loud and nasty rages without provocation. Then one day he could.not.talk. The original suspicion was a stroke, but the images showed a brain tumor instead. Prognosis poor.
But enough about me. Redshirt, you are incorrect. Please enjoy an evening of sanctimonious ignorance,
* Of course there are meds that are overprescribed and/or poorly prescribed by docs who are not actually qualified to make a dx out of their area of expertise and treat it, but that’s not the central point.
CaseyL
@Redshirt:
Yes, but…
I think that’s an irrelevant distinction. I, too, get mightily peeved at people who excuse things like shopping binges and chronic infidelity as addictions – mostly, though, because they use the word “addiction” as an excuse to continue the behavior. They’re not saying “Oh, this is a behavior I can’t control, therefore I’m going to find some therapy or method that will help me control it.”
But I don’t care if the people who say “I’m addicted” are only making excuses. If our culture took what they said seriously – if we saw addiction as a disease and were determined to treat it – those people would have to put up or shut up. “Oh, you’re addicted to being an asshole? Here are the resources to help you stop being one.”
It’s a form of reification: you change reality by taking things seriously enough to implement changes based on the belief that those things are, indeed, serious enough to address in a meaningful way.
? Martin
@mclaren:
In what way do I not get that? That was precisely my point.
The Moar You Know
Someone wants in on that sweet, sweet public school funding diverted to “charter” schools. How nice.
Gotta say they’ve got a hell of a sales pitch.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
Thank you for that. I have friends who are bipolar. Some of them eschew taking their prescribed meds because, although he lows are dismal, the highs for them are worth it.
What an interesting species we are.
Ruckus
@raven:
You sound like me. Was never a heavy user till I got out of the service but I made up for it. Then one day I decided that I’d had enough. And quit. I still drink socially, occasionally but everything else I’m done with. But I think people like us are the exceptions. We sure were when I worked as a volunteer in the mental health field.
Just because some of us can make that decision, many can not do so without help. It still has to be their decision but they lack the internal tools to control that. It’s not will power or lack of it, some drugs, tobacco and alcohol are physically addicting. On the other hand I’ve know heroin users who just stopped. Everyone has a story, some are much scarier than others.
Anne Laurie
@The Moar You Know:
“Like those grifters who insisted on a special school for LGBT kids — let the little pansies toughen up with the normal kids! And don’t get me started on the smart-kid schools — what has Bronx High School of Science ever done for the rest of us?”
phein39
I’ve spent 40 years as a functional alcoholic, just like my father and his father before him [Hank, why do you drink? Why do you roll and smoke?]. Started in 6th grade. Would have been nice to have a junior high that recognized alcohol was a part of growing up in 1970’s suburbia.
Ruckus
@CaseyL:
Well said.
Redshirt
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: Alcohol is an addictive substance, and thus addiction is easily understood. I didn’t mention that, by the way. I mentioned shopping, sex, the Internet. And I mention these in context to the idea that “addiction” is a disease and it manifests in different forms. I find that facile, and separate physical addiction (alcohol, heroin, nicotine, caffeine, etc) from mental addiction, IE Internet addiction.
Redshirt
@quannlace: I can’t stop reading Balloon Juice: I’m “sick”. Does that follow?
Ruckus
This is a great post with much good info.
To those of us here who are recovering addicts I add my congrats for all the hard work that it takes to get there and stay there. And to anyone out there who hasn’t been able to make that decision and stop or get help if that is what you need, life is better when you are not stoned or drunk or both. At least mine is.
Johnny Coelacanth
The nature of addiction seems inextricable from the nature vs nurture argument. For my part (this is supposed to be all about me, right?) my mom’s side of the family featured a series of raging alcoholics but I never caught that bug. I can take or leave booze, mostly leave. My addictions involved more, uh, exotic chemicals. I was addicted to crystal meth in the late 80s; I quit by moving out of state to a place where I didn’t know anybody who could find speed. I was smart enough not to look, and too poor to afford it any way.
The addiction’s still there, of course. Every time I think about those days; typing this paragraph, makes my heart beat a little faster. Fortunately, I’m wise enough now to know that speed is a young man’s sport. A line of good crank would give my fat ass a heart attack, which I do not want because it would put negatively impact my relentless pot-smoking and internet-surfing. And video gaming. Perfectly well-adjusted, nothing to see here. Move along.
Ruckus
@Redshirt:
But alcohol is not addictive to everyone. Many, including myself have stopped or cut back so far to prove that. As I stated up thread I have known heroin users that just stopped. As well as tobacco, cocaine and even meth. All of these are physically addictive but some can stop and others can’t. Obsessive personalities can obsess about many things, shopping, drinking, whatever. If it fucks with their lives it is a problem, whatever the obsession. Why is that so hard to understand? Is it because we have cut back mental health in this country to such an extent that we see these obsessions all around us? How many of us don’t know someone with a problem? How many of us can’t even look in a mirror with seeing someone with a problem? If you can say you to that last question, more power to you, you are the exception.
Johnny Coelacanth
@Redshirt: “separate physical addiction (alcohol, heroin, nicotine, caffeine, etc) from mental addiction, IE Internet addiction.” That might be easier said than done. How about gambling? Legitimate addiction or lack of will power? Shopping? The brain’s dopamine reward system plays a role in addiction, whether it’s to heroin or pornography, so the facile mistake might lie in thinking physical addictions can be easily separated from “mental” addictions.
gene108
@Redshirt:
As someone, who probably had chronic depression that bloomed into sever major depressive episodes, until I finally made a major suicide attempt, I think too much over diagnosis is not the issue we face as a society.
The stigma around mental illness means a lot of people do not want to admit they have a problem. They think it is a matter of will power.
“Why am so down, when other people have it worse and are able to overcome their problems?” Or “Why are you so down, when other people can overcome worse problems?”
There are different levels and types of mental illness and different ways to cope and treat episodes, but there are plenty of people who do not get diagnosed until they are in a state of crisis.
Over diagnosis isn’t the problem in our society.
Redshirt
@Ruckus: I’ve got lots of problems. We all do – that’s the nature of my question. I’m not trying to belittle or dismiss anyone’s experience, but rather ask the question: Where’s the line between personal responsibility and a disease? Do I choose to get in the car and drive to the casino, again, or am I a helpless victim to a disease?
For example: Can you cure yourself of the disease of addiction? If I have a gambling addiction, and stop gambling for the rest of my life, am I cured?
My real issue is with the notion of personal responsibility. Does it actually exist if we’re all in some way mentally ill? Or if we’re not, who’s normal? Who defines that? What’s the baseline?
Redshirt
I am in moderation for what, I have no idea.
magurakurin
@aimai:
I found out about RR after I had already quit drinking. When I read some of the literature, it was exactly the path that I came to sobriety. I think that for some people, AA just can’t work because it relies on surrendering to a “higher power.” My father couldn’t get sober through AA, he couldn’t surrender control…but he also couldn’t rationally admit that he couldn’t control alcohol. I don’t know if he could have gotten there had he read about people’s experience with Rational Recovery, maybe not. But for me the key point of RR is admitting to yourself, rationally and logically, that drinking is fucked…for me…and I can’t do it anymore, forever. This is very different than “one day at a time.” I have no doubt that there are people who get sober and stay sober with AA, but my trouble with AA is it is regarded as the THE way to get sober. It isn’t. It doesn’t work for some people, it would have never worked for me. Addiction is complex and there is a need for more than one approach for people to deal with it.
magurakurin
@Ruckus:
This. +1,000
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Johnny Coelacanth:
Bingo. Thanks for making the point. That’s what the docs are trying to educate about. The Calvinism is strong in this culture.
@gene108: Hear hear.
Exactly.
And Raven, El Caganer, Higgs Boson’s Mate, Ruckus, and magurakurin, to name a few from just this thread, have worked hard at recovering from addiction issues. They’ve used a variety of tools. Doesn’t mean it isn’t hard work – it is. AA/NA is not the only way (or even always a good one) and docs are working to educate about that, also.
The Moar You Know
Don’t touch anything myself but lost a good friend to heroin. It’s like a key and a lock, whatever your special key is, you put it in the lock and then you are off to the fucking races. They go and they’re not going to stop until they die.
Never seen anything like that before in my life and I pray to never see it again.
raven
@Ruckus: Ding.
Ruckus
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
Calvinism is strong in this culture.
Ain’t that the shitty truth. I think this is a much bigger issue than many understand. Even people who come here from other cultures wind up being affected by calvinism because it is so pervasive in our culture. And it affects so many aspects of our lives in a negative manner. And I can’t really think of anything positive. I like the English idea that they got rid of the convicts to Australia and the religious nuts to America. It may be a bigoted statement but there is some truth in it. More in the case of America than Australia for sure but still.
raven
@The Moar You Know: I’ve always felt really lucky that the smack blizzard started in Vietnam about 2 months after I came home. There were OJ’s and the like but the real tidal wave of high powered heroin was something I was really lucky to miss.
Ruckus
@The Moar You Know:
Never heard it put that way but it seems like an apt way of looking at it. A large number of if not most people do wake up and take note of how their lives are going to shit. A large number of those find or at least try to find a way to change that. Not all are successful unfortunately.
Mnemosyne
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
It’s interesting that you say that, because the people I know who have been successful with 12-step programs are in groups that are essentially group cognitive therapy where they spend a lot of time helping people figure out what about their thinking led them to make bad decisions.
I’ve always assumed that AA and similar groups are basically amateur group therapy sessions. If you find the right group, it works great, but if not, it doesn’t.
gene108
@Redshirt:
Not everyone is mentally ill. Mental illness is a chemical imbalance in brain chemicals.
Feeling depressed because of some life episode – custody battle with ex, death of a loved one, loss of a job, etc. – can be treated by medication, but once those life situations change or you get your self up enough to change them you can go off medications and never need drugs again to be “normal”.
People with mental illness will have worse relapses, if they do not stay one their meds, even if they start feeling better.
Think about it like any number of physical ailments.
Some people are genetically predisposed to high cholesterol (and heart disease). For a lot of people, with high cholesterol they can control it with diet and exercise, but some people end up taking Lipitor anyway. For people, who have chronic high cholesterol their bodies just produce more cholesterol and it will not be normal without medication, no matter how much they diet and excercise.
What’s the best method to get someone with a gambling addiction to get control of his addiction? The discussion of addiction as a disease is not to excuse behavior but come up with the best way possible for people to deal with their own unique situation and improve their lives.
mclaren
@Tyro:
Good thinking there, skippy. Let’s set public policy by your personal anecdotes. I’ve never had cancer, therefore no one gets it. Good on that, zero out the local hospital budget for cancer treatment.
Alternatively, someone with an actual brain might want to contemplate the possibility that pressuring kids to overachieve while ranking them in crazy counterproductive ways often has devastating consequences.
mclaren
@Mnemosyne:
The reported success rate for AA is about 12%. Unfortunately, that’s better than most other treatments for addiction.
It’s just a brutally difficult problem. Nobody really knows what causes addictive behavior, and we only have a vague idea how to treat it.
gene108
@Mnemosyne:
I wouldn’t call 12-step programs as amateur therapy session. Like you said above, they are set-up for people to help each other deal with how they come to make bad decisions and how to avoid making those decisions.
I was in – what was very effective for me – 12-step based program related to mental health and it helped me more than therapy, because the program had a structured set-up and the reading material gave me things to think about to get myself focused on dealing with my problems.
Having people and helping people, who were in similar situations also helped.
I don’t think you can effectively deal with mental illness alone and need people around you to help with the healing, for lack of a better term.
J R in WV
My neighbor’s niece went from senior paralegal at a real estate lawyer’s firm to heroin junky in no time… now she’s been diagnosed with a CNS disease that might have been turned around if they’d caught it in the beginning – but of course she didn’t have medical after she lost her legal job.
Her brother has been a junky/alky since he was 14 or 15 – got sober tried going straight, fell back into the gutter. My spouse’s dad was a mean drunk, he’d be straight for months, then binge for a month. Finally his liver gave up, the docs told him one more beer would do it. about 6 or 8 months later, he bought a 6-pack, which did him in.
Spouse is Bipolar/ADD etc. finally she’s on a good set of meds, after years of psychiatrists who couldn’t treat a mild mood disorder. The last one (before the apparently good one she has now) was gone when she showed up for her appointment… when she looked at the appointment card, it was originally printed up for another Dr in the practice, whose name was whited out and her Dr’s name typed in.
Total Pro, huh?
Interesting about the virus. A few years ago I read an article about stomach ulcers being caused by an infection. No one wanted to believe it, couldn’t be so! The author, also a med Dr, allowed as how he believed we would discover that most diseases were infections, either bacteria (like ulcers) or virii, like mentioned above. They treat ulcers with antibiotics now.
Ruckus
@The Moar You Know:
Another point.
At various times in my life I have taken stock so to speak and one of the things that has occurred to me is that so many people that I’ve know have had problems or are related to people with problems. And many of those people have been, at least from my perspective, in much worse situations than me. And they have figured out how to come out of the shit. So it must be possible. This has kept me going on numerous occasions. I’m pretty sure not everyone sees things this way. And that someone may be one of those people in a much worse situation, whose only view is not only is the world a shit sandwich but they are so deep in the middle of it all they can see is shit. When that happens they will do anything to make it stop. Drugs, alcohol, suicide, suicide by drugs and/or alcohol, whatever it takes. The lucky ones survive and recover.
gene108
@mclaren:
Having some relatives near by with kids, who just graduated high school and are high achieving individuals with high achieving friends, they all seem very well adjusted.
At some point the work habits that make high achievement possible become a good habit. They just have that habit to make sure they understand their homework and get it done, when other people might be goofing off a bit more.
Saying high achieving kids are all burned out drug addicts in the waiting is painting with a broad brush.
mclaren
@The Moar You Know:
With politicians, the key is power. Scary.
Mnemosyne
@Redshirt:
So, in your world, an eating disorder like anorexia isn’t a real disease. All those girls have to do is eat, and if they end up starving themselves to death, then it was all their own fault, right? They should have taken personal responsibility and made themselves a sandwich.
Honestly, what’s really coming across is that you don’t have any kind of mental illness or neurological disorders, so when those of us do have them try to explain them, it’s like trying to explain the difference between red and green to someone who’s colorblind.
I fortunately managed to evade addiction even though it runs in my family, but I do have ADHD that has impacted my life in major ways, including causing a serious depression that took 7 years of therapy and medication to overcome. I read books, I took classes, I did everything I could to fix myself, but only professional assistance was able to help me do it. I guess in your world, that makes me weak and stupid since I wasn’t able to pull myself up by my bootstraps.
patroclus
John Calvin is responsible for the democratic election of church leaders, the concept of priesthood of all believers, which basically translates into the principle of equality and opposition to the papacy and its doctrines of infallibility, the end of the sale of indulgences and the founding of the Reformed tradition of Christianity, which is the basis for liberal theology. To use “Calvinism” as a slur is inappropriate in the extreme and wildly inaccurate to boot. He was condemned for his liberal views by the the Roman Catholics and excommunicated and was forced to found his own version of Christianity, which was far more Christ and love-centered than his Catholic counterparts. Would you similarly use “Lutheran” as a slur?
mclaren
@gene108:
Ludicrous horseshit. Nobody gets into Harvard by having “good work habits.”
And good work habits are not what makes high achievement possible. Nowadays, a 4.0 GPA isn’t high enough to qualify as valedictorian. You need to take AP course and boost that GPA well above 4.0 to even think about outdoing everyone else.
And then, of course, if you want to get into an Ivy League school, just that 4.2 GPA and a 1600 SAT won’t do it. No, you need more. Always more. Forever more. More, more, more. Extracurricular credits. Better win that Westinghouse Science prize. Gotta write poetry too and get publsihed in one of those fashionable small magazines. But even that’s not enough. The Ivies want someone well-rounded, so you’d better volunteer at the local soup kitchen in your nonexistent spare time while being a track start.
It’s insane and impossible. No human being and do that. The people who create the illusion of doing so are running a scam, and it kills ’em.
That’s retarded. No one gets a 4.0 in AP calculus by “good work habits.” You’d better have a damn good head for math. Most people don’t. It’s not a matter of hard work, it’s just impossible for most people. Yet parents force their kids through these hoops and it makes ’em crazy.
Didn’t say that. What I do say is that most of the high-achieving college students I’ve known blew up in spectacular ways. They got that medical degree, then chucked it all to work for the Peace Corps just to piss off daddy. Or they got that MIT degree and then worked in a xerox shop because they were so burned out on all the math and engineering. (One guy I knew graduated summa cum laude from a highly respected engineering college and designed the first-ever PCI sound card. He wound up living on a goat farm.) Or they got that Ivy degree and got a great job and within 5 years their marriage was toast and they were drinking a fifth of scotch a day while living in a one-room studio.
There are a few genuine geniuses out there. Most people who get those super-high GPAs and academic honors do it because they’re pressured by their parents, and the results are disastrous. It’s the same deal as with girls who are raised by super-strict religious parents. If you want to date a girl who will fuck your brains out in the kinkiest ways imaginable, date a Mormon girl with ultra-strict parents. Only problem there is she’s probably banging all your friends as well.
Redshirt
@Mnemosyne:
Seems like you bootstrapped your way out of your disease. Are you cured? Or are you still diseased?
Do you see what I’m getting at? If you’re diseased by an eating disorder, when will you ever not be diseased? Is it curable? If so, what is curable? Is it a specific chemical recipe in your brain? Is it behavior?
Does culture play any part in this disease? Does the individual?
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@J R in WV: Even weirder, H. Pylori, the bacterium responsible for ulcers, has some potentially significant benefits early in life as part of the gut microflora. Those have been discovered in the last couple of years.
Mnemosyne
@patroclus:
Sorry, but it was in fact the Calvinists who came up with the idea of reprobation and all of its attendant idiocies, like saying that worldly success was proof of salvation. It may not have been created by John Calvin personally, but there are plenty of churches based in Calvinism who preach it.
Mnemosyne
@Redshirt:
Uh, how did I “bootstrap” my way “out of my disease”? My brain functions differently than other people’s brains. It is a difference that will never go away. I can mitigate the issues I have to deal with by taking medication and getting therapy, but there is absolutely nothing in this world that will magically make me neurotypical. My brain chemistry cannot be “fixed” through willpower any more than someone born with a club foot can magically will their foot to be normal.
patroclus
@Mnemosyne: Sorry, but you’re going to have to find actual things John Calvin did or said in order to use his name as a slur. There is no church called “Calvinism” and there are no “Calvinists” – there are instead a number of Protestant churches and denominations which some, who are not in them, label “Calvinist” inaccurately. That is, Calvin preached and practiced independence from the Roman Catholics and all Protestant churches are essentially “Calvinist” in that they are all independent. But they do not all follow Calvin’s theology nor do they adopt Calvin’s essential form of church government (democratic election) nor do they emphasize the “good works” thesis of James’ epistles. Slurring John Calvin as a means of criticizing evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant denominations is inaccurate and you really should educate yourself about the liberal Reformed tradition vis-a-vis fundamentalism, which is really what you’re criticizing.
Ruckus
@Redshirt:
There really is no baseline. Think about that. I’ll say it again. There really is no baseline.
For some a drink a day or an hour of slots is not a problem. For others it is a major life altering issue. The only point of reference is how it affects each individual life-and the lives around them. Trying to fit each of us into a pigeon hole of how we should be never works and in many cases is a huge part of the problem. Take the case of parents who have decided that their precious little package will go to a particular college and have a particular life because that is what they deem appropriate, never taking into account that Johny just wants to be a musician, a life for which he has inordinate talent. How much of an issue is that going to be for Johny? Possibly life threatening.
Or the case of a friend whose mom died when she was 11, leaving her to be raised by her drunk, heroin addicted dad. She is one of the greatest people I know by the way but if you know her well you can see the scars.
The point is there is no baseline. You may want to say that someone who drinks a fifth a day is having real problems but a gentleman up thread lived decades doing just that. He managed and he managed to change that. Notice I didn’t say he fixed that. He changed it. That is an important idea, that one persons issues are not yours until they affect your life. That is why there is no baseline. Each of us has to take life as it comes to us. Some of us get a better deal in life than others and the converse is just as true. Some of us can handle the deal that life gives us better than others as well, some can not. It’s not a crap shoot but some days it feels like it.
That’s my take and I’ll climb down from my soap box now. Didn’t mean to sound like I was talking to a child for I know that I am not, I just don’t know how to explain it better.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
No one says “It’s just cancer. Get over it.” Nor do people expect those with cancers to bootstrap themselves to a cure.
Medicine has turned many cancers into chronic diseases that can be managed – often unpleasantly for a spell – for a period of survival, in remission, unheard of when I was young and “cancer” was a terminal diagnosis.
The brain disorders we call mental illness are chronic diseases that can be managed with treatment, both behavioral and prescribed pharmacology, and may stay in remission for long periods. Patients, and their loved ones, must stay vigilant for signs of relapse, as the brain’s response to all of the above may change.
Redshirt
@Mnemosyne: What if everyone’s brain functioned differently than everyone else’s? Or, conversely, is there a “normal” brain and 88% of the population has it?
Also, you made an effort. A big effort. This effort allowed you to “overcome” – your word – the issues that plagued you before. Is this not bootstrapping? No recovery happens without effort – recovery from depression, from alcoholism, from drug addiction, etc. Each step requires a massive effort. Is this not bootstrapping?
You brought up the word, not me.
mclaren
@Redshirt:
With respect, if you’re not suffering from serious depression today, you’re not paying attention to what’s going on in America.
Can we please stop beating up on Mnemosyne for a second here? This is a person who’s admitted that she’s had severe emotional problems earlier in her life. The fact that she didn’t kill herself or spiral downward into hopeless addiction is by itself a quiet triumph.
Coming from someone who’s evidently never had anything to do with people who have life-destroying problems like alocholism or drug addiction or binge-purge syndrome or [fill in the blank — there are zillions, from sex addiction to chronic gambling to…], I call those tall words.
It’s easy to toss around glib terms like “disease” and “illness” but the plain fact of the matter seems to be that people who suffer from these kinds of compulsive destructive behaviors have a serious dysfunction in their brain chemistry and we don’t know how to fix it right now. A tiny amount of empathy might be in order.
Redshirt
@Ruckus: If there’s no baseline how can anyone have a chemical imbalance, or even a disease? The concept of each presupposes a norm.
Ruckus
@patroclus:
I use all religions as a slur but that’s just the way I roll. Religions being made up of people, there are good sides and bad sides to them all. The problem is that while John Calvin may have made major strides in the practice of religion, he also had major faults. Not to see that about all religions is a blindness that has detrimental affects for all of us.
Redshirt
@mclaren: So everyone is at the mercy of their brain chemistry? The Will plays no part? Culture plays no part? Family plays no part? Experience plays no part? It’s all just brain chemicals?
patroclus
@Mnemosyne: Further, as your own link explains in some detail, “reprobation” is a corollary to the Calvinist concept of predestination, but they are most certainly not the same concept. Predestination does not designate some as “retrobates” who are incapable of salvation; predestination, in most Reformed churches, merely means that when born, there is already a plan for one’s life. That is, a person is born with certain genetic markers, some artistic talents, some athletic talents, many of which are inherited – a person then has free choice to determine whether to follow that path or to follow another. Salvation comes through grace and is available to all. Please do not loosely conjoin liberal Reformed theology, which preaches equality of all, to some weird corollary preached by more fundamentalist sects.
gene108
@mclaren:
I graduate high school a little over 20 years ago and we had to take Advanced and/or AP classes which carried 5 grade points, instead of four, if you wanted to have a high enough class rank for grades to matter. I think now AP classes carry 6 grade points, where as advanced classes only have 5, so you aren’t penalized for carrying harder AP classes versus advanced classes.
It actually makes sense, because there’s a huge difference between the proficiency of students in high school. Sure a kid, who went through remedial everything will get a high school diploma, but he/she isn’t at the same level of proficiency as a kid, who went through AP classes and their class rank should have some more differentiation.
As far as SAT’s go, whoever came up with the test just got punch drunk with power. They added an essay section, so the total score is now out of 2400 (thinking 1600 is a perfect score is just dating yourself), plus sectional SAT’s like physics, history, etc.
Someone needs to slap the test makers down, because it’s gotten excessive and colleges seem happy to have prospective students take the extra subject specific SAT’s for whatever reason, so students feel they have to, to impress the colleges.
My cousin’s son, who lives a couple of towns over, just got into an Ivy League school. He did a lot of things you mentioned because he enjoyed doing them.
Sure some kids plan out extra curricular activities a bit to look good for perspective schools, but if you do not enjoy science, you will not enter into science competitions. If you do not enjoy music, you will not make all-state chorus. If you do not like public speaking, you will not be part of your school’s speech and debate team.
There are plenty of things for kids to do to be well rounded enough to impress prospective colleges, without having to drag them across a bed of burning coals to do more than just coasting along.
With your world view no one would push themselves to excel at anything.
magurakurin
@Ruckus:
indeed. Everyone has to approach from their own space and some folks just are going to be luckier than others. I clearly have an addictive personality — whether it’s called a disease or not seems irrelevant; it’s a problem — but I also have a personality that is very restive to society’s norms and pressure. This helped me. For me, one beer could be very, very problematic. I have to have zero. But when I first decided to stop, I realized just how much pressure there was to drink. People were always saying things like “just one won’t hurt,” or “come on, have just one,” and I realized that they themselves were just falling prey to the pressures in society that help propagate alcoholism and in many cases they were just in denial of their own problems. My decision to quit threatened them and put them in danger of having to face their own problem. Since, I never liked being told what to do, this kind of pressure only made me want to not drink all the more. But I can see how this kind of pressure can make it very hard for some people.
When people encounter someone who is trying to quit, they should be given only encouragement and assistance. Anyone who tells a person trying to quit to “have just one” is either a completely ignorant asshole or an alcoholic themselves. Not commenting on anything that was said here, just tossing out another observation on why addiction is so hard and society is really kind of fucked up in the way it deals with it.
Mnemosyne
@Redshirt:
Then I used the wrong word — the more correct word would be “manage,” as in “learned how to better manage my issues.” The same issues still plague me, every day, but I have learned better ways to manage them through medication and therapy and to go through routines that other “normal” people don’t have to do so that I can function in modern society.
And, really, there’s no way at all to tell if someone’s brain works differently than anyone else’s? I’ll have you spend half an hour with my older cousin, who has been retarded since birth, and you can let me know if you think there’s no difference between her and any other 48-year-old woman because, after all, who’s to say what’s normal brain function and what isn’t?
gene108
@Redshirt:
Everyone is at the mercy of whatever genetic chronic conditions we inherit. There are lifestyle choices that can make those conditions better or worse.
If you have Type1 diabetes, eating cake and ice cream and sucking down packets of sugar probably isn’t going to help your condition, despite taking insulin.
Same thing applies to mental illness.
You may have some behaviors and habits that help you and others that don’t, but underneath it all you have a chemical imbalance in your brain that needs medication, so you can function normally.
Just like the diabetic needs insulin, on top of watching diet and exercising, in order to control the chemical imbalance in his body.
EDIT: Think about mental illness like any other chronic condition people have with their bodies that cause chemical imbalances – whether high cholesterol, diabetes, etc. – and realize life style choices can help or hurt the condition, but underneath the life style choices is a real problem with how a part of the body functions that needs medical treatment.
patroclus
@Ruckus: Sure, Calvin had plenty of faults and he freely admitted as such. He pointedly denied any special status like that of the papacy or a bishopcracy, and, while he worked with others to found churches, he definitely did not believe in founding a religion with his name on it. He was a sinner; he was wrong a lot; he made errors – lots of them. His biggest faults were in taking then-conservative positions on a whole set of theological/philosophical issues, but that is understandable given the position in which he was put – a heretical excommunicated apostate from the Roman Catholics. If he wanted to be regarded as a religious guy, he felt that he had to take moralistic positions, with ritualistic condemnation of what he considered to be bad behavior – he was somewhat of a “church lady” in this regard. But his central accomplishments – leading the reformation, was decidedly liberal, and his principal theses – democratic election and equality, later swept the world once the printing press made his ideas well-known. He is not just a religious figure – he is one of the greatest democrats of all time.
mclaren
@Redshirt:
The baseline is behavior. People who exhibit compulsive self-destructive behavior far from the norm are giving strong circumstantial evidence of a brain chemistry disorder.
Playing verbal calisthenics with terms like “baseline” and “normative” and “median vs average” doesn’t wipe away the brutal fact that for some people, taking one swig of alcohol or one injection or heroin destroys their lives. And for most people that simply does not happen. Most people take one drink of hard liquor and that’s about it. It’s not life-ending. There’s no downward spiral of addiction.
But for about 6% of the population, yes, there is a neurochemical hamartia.
Redshirt
@Mnemosyne: I said earlier there are clear examples of mental issues that completely incapacitate people. What I’m referring to are cases like yours, or mine, or I’m sure many people’s on this thread. Addiction, compulsion, negative thoughts, scarification, suicidal tendencies, etc. That’s what I’m referring to, and the only thing I’m questioning is not your experience, not your suffering, not your trials, but rather the overall concept of will versus mental disease in otherwise functioning adults.
In sum, I think we as a society have gone too far in classifying behaviors as disease, rather than as bad habits that can be corrected through effort.
Redshirt
@mclaren: “Normal” alcohol consumption for a Russian mechanic is going to be far larger than consumption for a Mormon student out on a conversion mission. Are all Russian mechanics alcoholics? Is there something in the genes of Russian mechanics that make them especially pliable towards alcoholism, and conversely something about Mormon missionaries that make them especially resistant towards this “disease”?
Mnemosyne
@Redshirt:
One of my co-workers was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. He missed almost two weeks of work because his blood sugar was so high that it caused his blood pressure to skyrocket and his vision to be so clouded he couldn’t work.
Right now, his diabetes is completely controlled through changing his diet and exercising more. It’s certainly not cured, but his blood sugar is normal as long as he watches what he eats and exercises.
So does he have a disease, or did he just have some bad habits that needed to be corrected?
mclaren
@Redshirt:
You are correct, sir. If you don’t believe me, I’ll introduce you to a neuroscientist named Persinger in Canada who can reliably induce in you an ecstatic religious experience by using powerful magnets embedded in a football helmet.
If you don’t believe in the overwhelming power of brain chemistry to influence behavior, evidently you’ve never seen a convulsing addict in the throes of cardiac arrest brought out of it inside three seconds by an injection of narcan. Or seen the difference between a suicidal person suffering from biopolar mood disorder whose life gets saved and totally turned around by taking lithium.
If you think “will power” and “family” and all the rest of that stuff is so all-fired important, presumably you’ll explain to us why the sudden degeneration and collapse of Phineas Gage’s life after his left frontal lobe was impaled by a railroad spike in a work accident in 1848 was due to his supposed “lack of willpower” and his alleged “insufficiently supportive family.”
Now you’re getting it. The difference between Charles Manson and Mohandas K. Ghandi is: brain chemicals.
Apparently you still harbor delusions about mythical invisible fairies inside your head called “your soul” or, as was more typical in the 17th century, “vital effluvium.” In that case you might want to read up on t he experiments conducted by neuroscientist Jose Manuel Delgado:
Source: Wikipedia article on Jose Manuel Delgado.
mclaren
@Mnemosyne:
Lack of willpower, dontcha know?
Redshirt
@Mnemosyne: Diabetes can be brought on by behavioral choices, but it can also be completely genetic, regardless of behavioral choices. Is that your point?
Redshirt
@mclaren: Then I guess we are all but slaves to the random dealings of brain chemistry handed out at birth, and our lot nothing but fulfilling that chemical destiny. Without big Pharma pills, if lucky!
mclaren
@Redshirt:
Yes, alcholism is endemic in Russia, both today and during the Soviet era.
You’re forgetting about the importance of epigenetics. It ain’t as simple as “nature or nurture.” Epigenetics means that the environment can cause gene expression which in turn thoroughly rewires the brain/nervous system, particularly in the early developmental years. There’s a feed-forward loop operating between environment, behavior, genes and your brain wiring. It can operate beneficially — a good example is the case of people with brain damage or strokes or who’ve been struck by lightning who have spontaneously developed remarkable artistic or mental abilities — or destructively, as in the Russian case.
We also see the same thing in America, by the way. When a city like Flint Michigan collapses and employment goes down the tubes, you see a massive spike in alcoholism and wife-beating and child abuse and all sorts of other pathological behaviors. Environmental stressors activate genes that produce entirely different brain neurochemistry.
For more on how brain damage can induce remarkable abilities, see “Ten people who gained extraordinary abilities from brain damage.” It’s not even as simple as bad or good neural pathways: brain damage that eliminate inhibitory pathways can unexpectedly produce savant abilities, or an entirely unanticipated positive change in personality.
Mnemosyne
@Redshirt:
Actually, diabetes is always genetic, but it requires an environmental trigger. There is no one anywhere who got Type 2 diabetes solely from behavioral choices — they have to also have the genetic predisposition to it.
But, really, my point is that some people can control their diabetes solely through their lifestyle and making personal choices, but others cannot. Does that mean that the people who need medication are bad, or weak, or need to learn self-discipline? Or are they just unlucky?
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Redshirt:
I feel like I’m talking to a wall responding to you. The brain is a physical organ. An organ like the liver or the heart or the pancreas. The brain, and the function of its neural connections, affects behavior.
As I mentioned earlier, a good friend began displaying loud and aggressive rages earlier in the year. For no apparent reason. People could not figure out why he turned into such an amazing asshole. Then one day he could.not.talk, so he went to a doctor. He had a glioblastoma – a brain tumor. When it was removed, the rages stopped. If only he’d corrected his habits to behave better.
Some brains are wired in such a fashion that subtle changes in levels of neurotransmitters can affect not only behavior but cognitive function. Sometimes if these levels are not adjusted with medication, there is damage that is permanent. Somewhat like permanent damage after a stroke, which can also affect behavior. It’s not all about bad habits.
@mclaren: Thank you. I suspect we’re not managing much persuasion though.
mclaren
@Redshirt:
If you were genuinely thoughtful, you’d be scared spitless that Big Pharma will develop a pill that succeeds in making you happy to be an oppressed starvation-wage panopticon-surveiled serf.
That’s what scares the spit out of me. The possibility of “desire modification.” Everyone wants to be free and have enough food to eat and a clean place to sleep. What if cognitive neuroscience can find a way to modify such basic desires? That’s not so far-fetched, considering that parasites like toxoplasma gondii have been shown to be capable of inducing significant behavioral and desire changes in their hosts.
Your claim that it’s all nature and no nurture is an absurdly cartoonish caricature of the reality, as you know, of epigenetics that links genetic predisposition with neural brain wiring with environment with culture. What Mnemosyne is saying is that many people can eat pretty much damn whatever they want and they’ll never get diabetes because they’ve no genetic predisposition for it, just as most people can take a social drink whenever they want and they’ll never become alcoholics because they’ve not genetic predisposition for alcoholism. But other people take one drink of bourbon and they’re goners, or go on one weekend twinkie binge and bingo! Their incipient diabetes erupts.
Let’s try at least to preserve some semblance of nuance in a serious discussion, shall we?
Mnemosyne
@Redshirt:
Pretty much, yeah. And, as mclaren pointed out, we are also at the mercy of having outside events like head injuries, brain tumors, or viruses suddenly changing our brain chemistry and being forced to adapt to that.
There is very good evidence that ADHD can be helped with large amounts of exercise — some people are even able to go off their medications if they’re able to use exercise to stimulate their brains into producing the chemicals that they lack. If they do this, have they “cured” themselves, or does the underlying problem still exist?
Redshirt
@Mnemosyne:
You tell me – are we all but slaves to our genetics? And our own personal choices mean nothing?
Redshirt
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): And as I’ve mentioned several times, there are clear cases where mental illness is incapacitating. What I’ve been talking about this entire time is the diagnosis of a hyperactive child with ADD, or a depressed teen getting the latest anti-depressant, or the alcoholic saying hey! It’s not my fault I drink 12 Miller Lights a day – I have a “disease”!
In these cases where clearly the person can operate as “normal”, are we all still nothing but chemical imbalances? And if so, who’s the template for the perfectly chemically balanced? I wonder – is he blonde?
Mnemosyne
@Redshirt:
Ask my niece with Asperger’s if she can’t just make a personal choice to just, you know, be normal. Why does she have to be a slave to her genetics?
Yes, there are always personal choices you can make to mitigate the effects of your genes, but that doesn’t magically make those genetic effects vanish. It just mitigates them.
Redshirt
@Mnemosyne: Yeah, I guess if I didn’t grow up in a culture that emphasized eating sticks of butter, I’d never have got this disease!
Maybe we’re all just flotsam on the jetsam and there’s nothing we can but go along.
Lurking Canadian
@patroclus: Your depiction of Calvin as “one of the greatest democrats of all time” is so far from what I usually read about him that you drove me to google. My understanding is that he was as oppressive of heresy (and anything else he considered “sin” or “crime”) as the Catholics of the day, he just defined heresy differently. I found thiswhen I googled “John calvin rule in Geneva”. It is not impossible, of course, that this is an old-fashioned history based on biased sources, but it’s the usual kind of thing I see. Are there other, competing versions of his rule in Geneva that support the “greatest democrat” interpretation?
Mnemosyne
@Redshirt:
Once again, you have the disease model completely ass-backwards. It’s not, Go ahead and drink a 12-pack a day, you have a disease! It’s, You’re not going to be able to control your drinking without help any more than a diabetic can control his/her blood sugar without help because you have a disease.
People refuse cancer treatment all the time — does that mean they don’t have a disease because they refuse to do anything to treat it?
Well, let’s see. I barely got through high school despite getting A’s in English, because it was hard for me to pay attention in class and get my work done. I almost flunked out of college. I drifted from menial job to menial job until I was almost fired for not being able to concentrate. Then I got 7 years of therapy and medication and was eventually diagnosed with ADHD, mixed inattentive type.
But, hey, I was operating as “normal,” so obviously I should have passed on the therapy and medication since I had been kind of scraping by, right?
mclaren
@Redshirt:
The question reflects the depth of your misunderstanding of the issue. Genetics determines brain wiring…which in turn predisposes us to certain types of choices.
A koan:
Redshirt was walking along a path and saw an elder sage. “Do our personal choices mean nothing? Are we nothing but the slaves of our genes?” he asked.
The sage, having an irritable disposition, struck Redshirt in the head with his staff and walked away.
And in that moment Redshirt became enlightened.
Mnemosyne
@Redshirt:
If I wanted to, I could eat sticks of butter all day long, get to be 400 pounds, and I would never get Type 2 diabetes. Because it’s not the food that causes it.
Redshirt
@Mnemosyne: Well, then, based your anecdotal experience, clearly we are all doomed to suffer whatever destiny was laid out for us at pre-birth. Lucky I was birthed “DISEASE FREE”! I guess.
Redshirt
@Mnemosyne:
You mean it’s genetic, and not based on behaviors?
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Redshirt:
How do you know that these “cases where clearly the person can operate as ‘normal’ ” aren’t in fact people being treated? You don’t. Are there cases of inaccurate diagnoses? Sure. Are there cases of inappropriate medication? Certainly. But part of those problems is the cultural view that these diseases are simple and can be diagnosed/treated by any old doc, who would never dream of trying dx/tx of a suspected endocrine disorder, liver disease, or cancer, because those require specialists.
Some of the docs haven’t kept up with the advances in neuropsychiatry, and misunderstand what they can do with their limited understanding of the field, and that they should refer to the actual specialists. That attitude is an artifact of the longstanding cultural belief that these brain disorders aren’t serious physical disorders.
Redshirt
@Mnemosyne:
You mean “normal” amounts of exercise, I assume. And what a shock! Walking around is a cure for many “diseases”. Further, what a shock that living like a normal person produces a normal brain.
mclaren
@Mnemosyne:
Redshirt’s fearful response to the fact of brain hardwiring and genetic predisposition results directly from the typical American puritanical terror of the myth that we’re fated from birth for a certain destiny. As Stephen Pinker points out at length in his book The Blank Slate, the bizarre American fetish with the Blank Slate as the imagined paradigm for the human psyche is due to a great many fears turn out to be based on a misunderstanding of basic neuroscience.
The fears Pinker identifies which drive people to an embrace of the foolishly false “blank slate” fantasy of human nature are:
The fear of inequality (if behavior is genetic, this fear claims, we can’t fix it. As I’ve pointed out, that’s flatly false because the situation isn’t that simple. Changing the environment can often induce enough epigenetic change in gene expression and brain chemistry to fix things. The evidence here is impressive: check the stats of IQ for black children adopted before age 3 by white people. They score the same as white children on IQ tests, whereas black children who aren’t adopted score significantly lower. Early environment makes all the difference in brain development.)
The fear of imperfectibility (if genetics determine our brain wiring then our behavior is fixed. This is false because our brains can rewire themselves, as often happens after a stroke. Once again, environmental factors are key.)
The fear of determinism (this is the crude fear that cerebral anatomy is destiny. This can’t be true and the evidence is clear — examples like Helen Keller prove it. There are also spectacular cases of children born with broderline hydrocephaly who have 80% of their brain destroyed by fluid pressure, yet who exhibit normal IQ and language and spatial skills because the remaining 20% of brain matter remarkably goes into overdrive to take up the slack.)
The fear of nihilism (this is the root fear, I think, the terror that if we remove a magical “soul” or “will” from people, then humans are nothing but meat puppets, and society becomes a Pol Pot Year Zero. That’s just a crudely foolish caricature of the “Darwin caused the Holocaust” fallacy — the evidence very clearly shows this to be a false misconception. Ask yourself: which group commits more murders? The religious types who prate about the alleged specialness of the human soul, or neuroscientists who point out that the brain is three pounds of meat? Last I heard, it was the Taliban who were chopping off heads and fundamentalist Christians who were blowing up abortion clinics, not the neuroscientists. So if the nihilism argument holds any sway, it ought to favor the people who refuse to believe in a soul, just on the basis of the evidence.)
Redshirt here is giving us a strangely warped version of the same argument that far-right Republicans give when they claim that a poor person born into a single-parent family in a ghetto doesn’t need Head Start or free lunch programs at school or extra tutoring because “that kid can achieve anything he wants if he just as the willpower.”
It’s Ayn Rand’s The Virtue of Selifshness with a slightly more attractive paint job. But spraypainting a turd gold doesn’t turn it into bullion.
patroclus
@Lurking Canadian: Well, he didn’t exactly “rule” in Geneva although his critics might have depicted it that way. He was invited by some in the Swiss Confederacy to be a leader of churches there (and he was kicked out by one or more at various times) and he was a central influence on Knox and Weselyn elsewhere in the development of their churches (who were similarly fighting the Anglicans like he was fighting the Roman Catholics). In addition to democratic election and equality, one of his central tenets was breaking up the fusion of church and state, so the idea that he “ruled” the independent-minded Swiss is, in my view, completely wrong. If he ruled anything, it was only the churches with which he was affiliated.
Yeah, he condemned what he regarded as bad behavior, but there was certainly no Inquisition, no torture, no Catholic-like repression. He simply told people with which he disagreed to find a church more to their liking and churches sprouted up like weeds, not only there but all around the world (Europe). He was far less authoritarian than Luther and he cordially supported other churches and communicated regularly with their leaders.
The reason he was a great democrat is that the idea of electing church leaders (based on one-person one-vote) is a revolutionary concept which was not being practiced by any church at that time; nor governments. Sure, the Greek and the Romans (and others) had limited forms of representative democracy in history, but the idea didn’t really catch on until the Bible and other books were printed and were made available to all and the concept of equality of believer status became generally known. The “priesthood of all believers,” a Calvinist concept, meant that everyone’s views were of equal worth. Many Reformed churches adopted this polity and it eventually spread into other political spheres. It was the Reformation that did this and of all Reformed leaders, it was Calvin that pushed this the most.
Calvin’s theology is basically conservative, but his political impact is decidedly liberal. To slur his name is to disregard his history and his influential role.
Ruckus
@Lurking Canadian:
Calvin was an asshole. There I said it. The fact that he broke off and formed his own religion was not so much that the catholic church didn’t get along with him it was that he didn’t get along with them. They weren’t strict enough. The list of things a person could do wrong wasn’t long enough nor the personal internal punishment (guilt)strong enough. Just because he thought everyone should come to the same conclusions that he did makes him democratic? Bullshit.
The puritans were in the same boat. They didn’t come to America to get away from religious persecution, they came here to practice it.
Redshirt
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): Once again, I’m talking about the “addiction” of excessive internet use, or sex, or gambling, or generic OCD (“Oh, I thought about if I left the stove on, therefore I have OCD, therefore I have a disease…”), not alcohol or nicotine or morphine or any other truly addictive substance. Or, do you not acknowledge this difference?
mclaren
@patroclus:
You’re confusing politics with theology here. The point in the original post is that Calvin’s theology is distinctly sadistic and nihilistic, not to say brutal and anti-life.
According to Calvin, some people are born members of the elect and nothing they do can prevent them from getting into heaven. The rest are doomed to be damned and nothing they can do will save them.
This is just a cheap excuse for enforcing a rigid social hierarchy by means of religious smoke and mirrors. We get a slightly altered version today with the claims by the billionaires and their Tom-Friedman-Charlie-Rose-Paul-Ryan apologists that some people are born shiftless and unwilling to work, while others are born thrifty and hard-working, and the way we tell the difference between them (this is the key and most poisonous part) is how successful and wealthy they are.
It’s a pernicious doctrine and needs to be denounced with the utmost vehemence. Study the evidence. Nations with good GINI coefficients have less social pathology, less divorce, less murder, less suicide. Nations with wide inequality (bad GINI coefficient) have enormously greater rates of social pathology. Societies with rotten GINI coefficients are also less wealthy per capita.
I guess I need to bludgeon people in the fact with the facts, so here’s the evidence — the commies had it right. Inequality is destructive. It wrecks societies.
Societies like Finland that concentrate on equality as a primary value in their societies, giving everyone an equal opportunity as much as possible, are the societies that consistently score right at the top of the charts for low violence, high school achievement, top per capita GDP, the whole deal.
Societies that have the foolishly destructive notion that “willpower” and “true grit” is what counts in life, more than equality of opportunity and general economic equality, are the societies where violence and drug addiction and K-12 school dropout rates and poverty are off the charts compared to the rest of the OECD countries — that is to say, benighted shitholes like America.
patroclus
I’ll correct the last post – there were some instances of repression while Calvin was in Switzerland – but these were imposed by the local councils; not Calvin, who had no formal role other than “reader” at one of the local churches. His views were influential, though, so he doesn’t escape blame.
Redshirt
@mclaren:
Here’s where you’re wrong, cuz if enough people get together and protest, then sometimes, The Leader falls.
patroclus
@mclaren: You are mis-stating Calvin’s theology and conflating reprobation with predestination, which are entirely distinct concepts. I suggest you read further.
patroclus
@Ruckus: Yeah, Calvin could be an asshole at times, but he certainly didn’t believe that everyone had to come to the same conclusions as he did. He was decidedly pluralist and ecumenical for his times. He certainly didn’t like “libertines” and, rather obviously, was against free love and alcohol and all sorts of other cool stuff. I’m pretty positive that neither one of us would have liked him. But he still had a decidedly liberal political impact.
Redshirt
I suggest you dance, Mr. Bond.
mclaren
@Redshirt:
The population of countries like Finland don’t need to protest against a Leader (with a capital L) who does things like lie them into an illegal immortal war of aggression, as Dubya did, or order the murder or kidnapping or mass surveillance of their own citizens without a trial or even charging those citizens with a crime, as Obama does.
Because countries like Finland have a decent GINI coefficient.
You’re acting as though Shithole America is the norm, whereas it’s a wild outlier, and massively pathological in many ways.
Mnemosyne
@Redshirt:
Only if you think that training for bicycle races by riding four hours a day is a “normal” amount of exercise:
What is “normal,” anyway, amirite?
Ruckus
@Redshirt:
No she doesn’t mean normal amounts of exercise. She stated large amounts of exercise. Walk enough and you can lose weight, lower blood pressure, cholesterol. But you probably won’t be able to do much else, you’ll be waking several hours a day. And you still have to eat right. And if you stop, because you reach your goals, you will probably gain weight, raise your BP and cholesterol. You haven’t changed the problem you have altered it for a period of time.
Explaining all of this to you hasn’t seemed to sink in at all. So I’ll try a different tack.
We are all a product of our genetics and our environment. That environment may include alcohol or drugs or poisons or other triggers that cause our genetic information to react differently than others. MS is one of those diseases. It is fairly rare in some parts of the world, it doesn’t affect everyone who has it the same way, there are 4 main forms of it, with outcomes that vary by person, and there is no cure. There are drugs that can help manage MS for a while but that is all that happens, management. The body is a fairly complex organism and while we all have traits that allow us to be called homo sapiens, we are all individuals, slightly different in many ways. We can be grouped by some of those different ways but the groups are usually pretty broad. We all have different fingerprints and genetics. And while we have different genetics I believe that something like 98% of all mammals genetic code is the same. Whales, dogs, cats, humans, etc, etc. Most of us don’t look like cats or dogs and yet we share most of the basic building blocks that make us what we are.
Mnemosyne
@Redshirt:
Correct. I have a friend who has a genetic predisposition to Type 2 diabetes — not only does her mother and other relatives have it, but she herself developed gestational diabetes with both of her pregnancies. She’s currently mitigating her risk by adopting a vegan diet and taking up running, which apparently in your world means that she’s “cured” and no longer has any risk of diabetes.
mclaren
@patroclus:
All the available sources say you’re lying.
Source: wikipedia article on Calvinism. Substantially what I said, with more detail filled in.
If you want to go into the specifics of Calvin’s warped and sadistic doctrines of “total depravity” and “unconditional election” we can do that, as long as you can stand being chainsawed by the facts. Calvin was a sociopathic asshole and his doctrine is brutal and vile. Civilized people reject it by instinct as a matter of common human decency. Naturally Calvinism makes a good fit with the sadistic and depraved doctrines which today go by the name of “conservatism” in America. In fact, Republicanism in America today can be succinctly defined as an attempt to turn America into the Confederacy based on Calvinism. The unconditionally elect are, of course, rich white guys.
Ruckus
@patroclus:
I look at the effects that he has had. I don’t really care that he was one thing or another. The outcome of his ideas was crap. That he may have gone about them in a good way for his time doesn’t give him absolution for his overall work and what it has done to the world.
Redshirt
@Mnemosyne: Haha. But obviously, people can make dramatic swings in their personal lives to accomplish a goal. This is what I’ve been talking about – the power of will, the desire to make something come from nothing, at your command. Not to be the victim of a disease but rather a striver in the Jungle Clan.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
MS is an ideal example of a chronic (incurable) disease that starts with the genetics and gets set in motion by the environment. No cure, but some management may be possible with chemistry, for a while. Comes and goes, and each case is different. Known as “the faker’s disease” in the US until the late 1950s because clearly people were faking since sometimes they were fine.
Oddly enough, similar to some brain disorders known as mental illness! In particular, the mood disorders. Which can remit and relapse – just like MS. But relapses can make recovery into remission less successful, which is why the psych docs tend to want to treat with meds, to prevent relapse to the extent it can be prevented.
No one has yet suggested that I work harder at getting over MS. BP – a different story. Redshirt, I think, would suggest that I simply modify my behavior.
Redshirt
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): Perhaps if you more fully accepted Odin, all would have been well?
Mnemosyne
@Redshirt:
Except that it wasn’t a dramatic swing. She was already at a normal weight and was exercising occasionally. So it was really just an additional move along the path she was already on, but she had to take additional steps that other people wouldn’t have to because of her genes.
Yes, because she conquered Type 2 diabetes through willpower!, not through a medically recommended diet and exercise program that reduces (but does not eliminate) her risk. If she does end up taking medication later on because the diet and exercise couldn’t completely overcome her genetic tendencies, is she just a loser who didn’t have enough willpower?
Ruckus
@Redshirt:
I think you are trying to say that any particular disease has to be a singular, measurable, non changing thing. And that just isn’t so. There are degrees, there are differences due to environment, and that means not just the chemistry we are exposed to, it is also the people and how they treat and react to us. You seem to be trying to simplify it and really it can’t be done, especially diseases of the brain and nervous system. But that is what people do when they don’t understand things, they want to simplify things till they can understand. And that is a huge problem in the mental health field because so much is dependent upon things that can’t be measured or even seen. My reaction to my environment is different that your reaction to your environment, think how different your reaction to my environment would be. Do you have siblings? Are you all the same? That’s because your genetics are slightly different. That’s because your environment and your reaction to that are different. Now think how different the two of us are. You can’t because you don’t know me, my genetics, my environment(by which I mean the entirety of my life events) and my mental and physical reactions to all of that.
Redshirt
@Mnemosyne: And some people with the disease of alcoholism stop drinking. For a variety of reasons, all of them based on their will.
Ruckus
@Redshirt:
And some people can not.
That has not changed the disease, they changed how they reacted to it. If they start drinking again they will fall back into the same problems and physical reactions to alcohol that they did before.
They are still alcoholics.
Redshirt
@Ruckus:
No, not really. That’s just your guess.
Ruckus
@Redshirt:
I’m done here.
My time is not that valuable but it is more valuable than wasting it this way.
Mnemosyne
@Redshirt:
You have no idea that you’re relying on an outdated and discredited model of psychology, do you?
If you base your attempts to stop drinking, or lose weight, or stop gambling on your willpower, you will fail. Period.
El Caganer
I realize I’m reviving a thread that appears to have gone completely off the rails, but I thought a bit of my own experience might be informative (anecdotal only – no general application). I was able to give up a 3-pack-a-day cigarette habit 16-17 years ago just by going cold turkey. The immediate motivation was that I had just gotten a puppy that hated smoke: I was more attached to the puppy than to the nicotine. Haven’t smoked since. I have been unable to make a similar break with alcohol, despite AA, CBT, treatment with naltrexone (very unusual experience), etc. I haven’t stopped trying, but it’s a hell of a struggle.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@El Caganer: The struggle is a matter of brain composition, not a lack of will. Different things – substances or behaviors – get tied deeply into the dopamine pathways for different people. I’m pretty sure you know this, but please don’t be discouraged by the old fashioned ignorance.
Tyro
@mclaren: Alternatively, someone with an actual brain might want to contemplate the possibility that pressuring kids to overachieve while ranking them in crazy counterproductive ways often has devastating consequences.
Or you could actually have data rather than idle speculation.
I think everyone,particularly the mediocre, really wish that the consequence to being pushed to achieve means that you’ll end up in the gutter of addiction. It feels better than way and justifies your laid back ways. But it doesn’t actually work like that. It turns out that the alumni of Bethesda-Chevy Chase and the children of “Tiger Mothers” end up doing fine.
Tyro
@mclaren: No one gets a 4.0 in AP calculus by “good work habits.”
That’s exactly how it worked for me. And I say this as someone who failed 8th grade algebra. Genetics isn’t really that important. You just have to be vaguely above average. After that, Calculus is just a matter of working really hard at it.
Some people are obsessed with natural talent and “brains”, but I know a ton of lazy brainiacs.
Tyro
I somehow feel like a few years ago I was involved in some other inane “debate” with mclaren about education here at Balloon Juice. Is he/she always this crazy?
Ruckus
@El Caganer:
The only thing I’ve got is to encourage you to keep trying. Hip hop is right, it is how we react to each substance. My use of drugs was different than my use of alcohol. My response, and I’m not talking about the high, was a lot different. I didn’t just like the high, I liked and I mean really liked using even though I knew right down to my socks that every day I was using was a shtty day. I really don’t know how I stopped other than changing my situation. For me, and I say that for me alone, what made it work was finding out that a day without was far better than a day with. And that was a slow adjustment.
That’s all I’ve got. It’s not advice, just my story.
Good luck.
ricky
Glad this excellent piece opened with the overwhelming evidence of the rotting Calvinism/Janeism curled at the shriveled core of too many American hearts. Gives a precise place where we can look for, the excise this problem.
ricky
@Mnemosyne:
Your two examples of the preordination to failure from use of willpower
show nothing of the sort. However I did like finding a Buddhist Internist writing about diets in Psychology Today as the definitive source for discrediting a whole model of psychology while writing about his success in shedding middle aged pounds.
As an internist I bet he would be just as good looking for that Calvinism/Janeism curled up somewhere near shriveled coronary tissue.
tiny
So then what about this line of thought:
Most of you have probably heard that depression is due to a “chemical imbalance in your brain,” which these drugs are designed to correct. Unfortunately for anyone who has ever swallowed this marketing ploy, this is NOT a scientific statement.
…
The low serotonin theory arose because they understood how the drugs acted on the brain; it was a hypothesis that tried to explain how the drug might be fixing something. However, that hypothesis didn’t hold up to further investigation. Investigations were done to see whether or not depressed people actually had lower serotonin levels, and in 1983 the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) concluded that
“There is no evidence that there is anything wrong in the serotonergic system of depressed patients.”
The serotonin theory is simply not a scientific statement. It’s a botched theory—a hypothesis that was proven incorrect.
?
Applejinx
Wow, quite a thread we got here.
20 years clean and sober here, and a bunch of years as a nonsmoker (more than 10?)
I go to 12 step meetings and do actually find that working those steps is the only mechanism that makes my life get better. Without it, I’m at best treading water and at worst backsliding.
Strangely… I gave up smoking exactly like Raven gave up drinking. That was different somehow. It just clicked with a big ‘F**K THIS’ one day while I was trying to smoke while having the flu, and I was done more than I’d ever been done with anything before, and truly did not give a rat’s ass what happened to me so long as I didn’t have to suck smoke into my agonized lungs ever again. It stuck.
For everything else, and for clumsily and blindly trying to grow up as a person, it’s the meetings and the 12 step stuff. I think the better 12 steppers are honestly thrilled when anyone anywhere goes ‘click’ and doesn’t have to use anymore, no matter how strange the path. It’s fair to look at the odds, though, which are usually terrible and only slightly better for 12 steppers.
I like to tell folks there are no odds and every single person in the room can stay clean.
IF that is really what they want.
‘Cos it ain’t.
The Other Chuck
@tiny: If one were to take just a few minutes to peruse the NIMH website, you’d find they’re not even remotely about making sweeping breathless pronouncements like that, so perhaps I have to take these conclusions of … yours? … with more than a little skepticism myself.
Do you at least have a link to this 30-year-old study?
The Other Chuck
@Applejinx:
Which is awfully convenient, because anyone who lapses can simply be declared as one who didn’t really want it, and one is saved from having to measure anything quantifiable. No True Scotsman indeed.