Alchemical Musings

This season Fox premiered a new television series called Mental (this post has nothing to do w/ AMC’s fabulous Mad Men):

a medical mystery drama featuring Dr. Jack Gallagher, a radically unorthodox psychiatrist who becomes Director of Mental Health Services at a Los Angeles hospital where he takes on patients battling unknown, misunderstood and often misdiagnosed psychiatric conditions. Dr. Gallagher delves inside their minds to gain a true understanding of who his patients are, allowing him to uncover what might be the key to their long-term recovery.

The show’s format (very) closely resembles the hit TV show House, except that Mental is set in a nuthouse. The show has received lukewarm reviews and mediocre ratings, but very well might get renewed. Mental health consumer advocates like (pharma funded) NAMI have not reached a consensus on how to respond to these pop culture representations, and even the some of the radical Icarus Project’s membership were (initially) impressed by the show’s message.

While this show might seem innocuous, it really deserves a careful, critical analysis. We seem to be approaching a turning point in perceptions around altered states, as powerful marketing forces are hard at work working to remove the stigma around mental “illness”.  Brittany Spears was the unpaid celebrity spokesperson for the normlization of psychiatric crises, but Glenn Close will soon be leading up the BringChange2Mind campaign.  Don’t get me wrong — removing stigma is generally a good thing, but if the stigma is removed in order to increase the legitimacy of pharmaceutical treatments, the message (and outcome) is mixed.  We are all dying, sick and crazy.

I am reminded of a fantastic book I read last year called Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity.  In this work, Joshua Gameson examines hundreds of hours of trashy talk show footage from the 80’s and 90’s – Ricki Lake, Montell Williams, Phil Donaue, Jerry Springer, the works. During the period examined, LGBT guests were featured regularly on these shows, amongst some of the first representations of gay people in mainstream popular culture.

Gameson closely studies the controversy around these appearances. On the one hand, the guests were not always portrayed in the best light (to put it mildly). These shows thrived on sensational confrontations and humiliating storylines. On the other hand, alternative lifestyles were being featured and discussed on national television, and beamed into living rooms across the country. Is there ever such a thing as bad media?

What Gameson teases out of his exhaustive study are the subtle underlying ideologies these encounters embody. While homosexuals were often defended by the talk show audiences, trans and bi guests were often vilified.  He makes a convincing case that these shows endorsed monogamy and static identities, but were decisively hostile towards alternative lifestyles and choices that veered from these mainstream values.

Our critical “Mental” challenge is all about trying to tease out the underlying ideologies and unquestioned assumptions that permeate the storylines in this series. On the face of it, Mental offers a diverse range of voices and perspectives — from financially-motivated hospital administrator, to the confrontational interns, to the purportedly radical director – Mental gives watchers the impression that the mainstream is being represented, and challenged.

Consider Dr. Galleger’s establishing introduction:

Establishing Dr. Gallager from Generic Prescriptions on Vimeo.

He certainly seems like an alternative psychiatrist, who will do anything to help his patients. He even goes on to insist that patients participate in the staff meetings:

Medical Deities from Generic Prescriptions on Vimeo.

… a device that disappears immediately after its introduction. It doesn’t even come up in later meetings in this pilot, never mind later in the series. Here is the next meeting, where the shows truer colors begin to shine through – Drugs for life, no hope of a cure, and the problem lies with pharmas old drugs, like Haldol, but their new miracle treatments are a panacea:

He's gonna need drugs from Generic Prescriptions on Vimeo.

The rubber really hits the road in S01E04 (Manic at the Disco) — about a young boy named Conner who is eventually diagnosed with pediatric bipolar.

Elective Mutism, Conduct Disorder from Generic Prescriptions on Vimeo.

The attending staff discuss Conner’s case and authoritatively toss around dozens of diagnoses, never questioning the legitimacy of pediatric bipolar — a diagnoses that is currently hotly debated, and does not (yet) even exist in the DSM!

Conner's Diagnosis from Generic Prescriptions on Vimeo.

“There is no cure, as such”

There is no cure, as such from Generic Prescriptions on Vimeo.

and of course, “you can’t ignore the symptoms.”

You can't ignore the symptoms from Generic Prescriptions on Vimeo.

The decisive “evidence” of a broken brain was a brain scan – a technique which is highly controversial, profiled in the Frontline investigative piece The Medicated Child.

So much for alternative psychiatry.

Don’t get me wrong, I am in favor of treating people instead of bodies, but the psychiatrists on Mental still treat brains instead of minds.

I’m not sure if this kind of publicity is fooling anyone, but I am afraid it is. As folks like smartmeme describe, narratives are often far more persuasive than stats, facts, or logic.

We need to keep a close watch on shows and campaigns like these, that implicitly establish a baseline acceptance of disorders and treatments when there are vibrant alternatives to consider. People cannot make informed choices about their mental health if the questions they are deciding are deceptively framed. Mental is far more insidious than its seemingly innocuous plotlines and banal characters suggest.

[For more critical clips from Mental S01E01 and S01E04 see GenericPrescriptions].

Filed by jonah at 9:53 pm under dangerousgifts,ethics,fire
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Heh.  I enjoy a nice long weekend off, and a few of my worlds collided while I was away…

This weekend msnbc.com snatched up the Knight Foundation funded everyblock.com project, and now a bunch of people I know – from  journalism, free software, law, and software development are all talking about the ethics and implications of choosing different Free/Open Source licenses for grant funded projects and experiments in sustainable journalism 😉

The Knight Foundation has been funding innovation in technology and journalism for a few years, and lately has been mandating open licenses for all the code and content they sponsor.  Knight is not alone. Mellon, Hewlitt, OSI, NSF, NIH, and other grantmakers have all begun to encourage that the IP they fund be as open as possible (to varying degrees).  Seems obvious.  If you want to maximize your philanthropic ROI, make sure that the future can extract the full potential of the work you fund – not be shackled, stifled, or duped by the misapplication of intellectual property.

I continue to be hopeful that pressure from funders might represent a tipping point for openness.  Many organizations need bunches of carrots to overcome their knee-jerk institutional momentum to horde – even if sharing costs them nothing (in dollars, labor, or resources, although sometimes transparency can take its toll on egos).

But is all openness created equal? No way am I going to attempt to recreate the great BSD-GPL wars in this post, but I will say that it stings every time I hear someone accuse the GPL of being viral (are vaccines viral?).  I also wince every time I see a vibrant open source community make an argument against the GPL – I have seen this happen around Sakai, OpenCast, and even lately around around Plone and its plugins.

[From my perspective, its the purportedly unencumbered communities that are really viral, as they continue to ratchet down GPL communities to lowest common denominator licenses, by whining about how they can’t use GPL code (which they can, provided they share-alike).  But don’t take my word for it – ask Zed why he (A/L)GPLs.]

To me, first and foremost, the GPL signals trust. As I understand it, this legal instrument has helped enable institutions and individuals, large and small, to trust each other, without fear of being stabbed in the back or being taken for a sucker. In the end, the GPL is just a license, and while it has been increasingly taken more seriously, enforcement is never fun (except for lawyers, I guess).

Eben Moglen is the founder of the The Software Freedom Law Center and also the author of GPL, but their firm can’t officially shill for the GPL. They care enough about freedom to continue to help any open software communities in need, but I sometimes wonder how they manage to bite their tongues and not scream We told you so or We warned you. Some of these same communities who have scorned the GPL have had to turn to the SFLC to bail them out when they got attacked by patent sharks. Perhaps the Everyblock story will serve as a cautionary tale, and people will learn to start taking the SFLC’s legal advice seriously. I believe that history will show that it was the GPL that ultimately averted Microsoft’s monopoly – no license could have accomplished this without the boundless energy and will of the open source developers, but the GPL was the pentagram restraining a very bad actor.

But not everyone sees the world this way, and there are other valid perspectives.  In conversations I have had with Jacob Kaplan-Moss (who co-founded Django, alongside Everyblock’s Adrian Holovaty) Jacob voiced a strong conviction that transparency, openness, and sharing are better ways to develop software, and that those values ought/need not be legally mandated. He prefers to participate in a community where those values are understood and shared.  Some might call his perspective slightly naive (while others might trace some of these attitudes to the roots of Django and the proprietary journalistic corporation that birthed it), but James Vasile makes a very similar point:

It might be disappointing that MSNBC.com can close-source Everyblock, but we still have the code. If the code is valuable to the community, we can take the last published version and use it as we want. If MSNBC.com trades a healthy free software project for a proprietary development cycle, we’ve lost nothing, and MSNBC.com has thrown away the most important asset they had– the community behind and around the code.

As for the future of Everyblock, I am am still hopeful that rationality will prevail. Everyblock runs on an incredibly sophisticated stack of open software – python, postgres (with GIS extensions), django (or something very, very similar), and msnbc.com will not get very far with this software without engaging these communities. In the 21st century, owning code is a liability, not an asset. Sure, they can try to leech and poison the well, but they will meet with pretty staunch resistance – trouble hiring programmers, getting their patches accepted, maintaining and upgrading – good luck going it alone. They will end up with the IE of hyperlocal news websites.

I also don’t think it’s necessarily evil for a corporation to participate in this ecology, or for funders to seed new user interfaces or patterns, and then hand off the innovation to capital. Sustainability is really quite complicated, especially was we embark on hybrid economies. And on the open side, it can be difficult for funders to keep software honest.

If Everyblock has a real value right now, its in the relationships they have forged with the data providers, and the effort they put into scraping and formatting this data. What we want from them now isn’t just an open platform, its also open apis, to get at the data they are collecting and harvesting. Code is only one corner freedom’s jigsaw puzzle. Never forget about the data. And, I am not really sure what Knight could have done to better protect the future openness or integrity of that data.

Filed by Jonah at 12:54 am under earth,ethics,freeculture
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I have to thank my friend and colleague Clayfox for comparing (positively) the vibe at this weekend’s fabulous Open Video Conference to High School. The optimism, diversity, and composition of the crowd was really inspiring.

In some ways, this conference might as well have been called the “Independent Media” conference, but of course, if it was, the right people wouldn’t have attended. Somehow they managed to attract people involved with every layer of the stack needed to create independent media.  Subcultures representing hardware, html5, metadata, content, law, production, funders and more were all represented.

To make independent new media, you either need to understand all of these details, or know someone who does.  I don’t think I have ever been in a room with this particular blend of expertise and interests before.

The networking was great, and my office was closely involved in making the education stuff at this conference happen (I have a great job). At the conference we announced the liberation of a great piece of software – VITAL is free! Run, VITAL, Run.

The highlight of the talks had to be Amy Goodman’s inspiring speech. I had seen her introduce Chomsky last week, and was left a little bummed out by his talk since it was blow after blow of what’s broken in the world, with very little vision, and no call to action. You don’t hear too many female preachers, but Goodman has really mastered an hypnotic cadence – speeding up to fit in alot of ideas, but slowing down for emphasis.  Her soundbytes are eminently tweetable (twitter essentially  replaced irc at this conference, and there was an incredibly active backchannel around the #openvideo tag/frequency/channel).

Benkler also opened with fresh material – he has clearly been thinking about journalism in the wake of this year’s collapses (and maybe even our CDPC conference?). It is amusing to think that between Benkler and Moglen (and his metaphorical corollary to Faraday’s law), it might be the sociologically-inclined lawyers who arrive at a theory of creativity (instead of the cognitive scientists).  And Zittrain covered for the missing Clay Shirky, and pulled of a funny and intelligent talk.

Many other highlights which I hope to curate once the video is all posted and I have a chance to decompress. I know I should have gone to more talks that I didn’t belong at, but I kept getting pulled in to great conversations…

Kudos to the organizers for pulling off a small miracle. I’ve been to many conferences that cost hundreds of dollars to attend, and don’t even offer lunch.  They managed to pull off a beautiful space, food, and even video djs and an open bar.

I wonder to what degree freeculture’s networked proximity to techies and lawyers simplifies some of the logistical nightmares that often plague organizers. It just sems like they are able to organize with relative ease, as the communications media and social capital are intuitive and readily available. Good thing for everyone they are using their super-powers for the greater good 😉

In terms of the longer term, they were consciously trying to create something bigger than a one time event. I was impressed at the purposeful scaffolding of the infrastructure meant to sustain this conversation now that conference is over.  Many gatherings only figure out at the event that they want to keep talking afterwards.  THe OVC crew did a great job of setting up, and using a wiki, and some sensibly divided mailing lists to seed a healthy after-party.

Filed by jonah at 12:09 am under earth,ethics,freeculture,water
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Well, its been 2 months since I participated in MIT’s Media in Transition (MiT6), but the event is still vividly fresh in my mind.

The conference was really amazing. It attracted a really diverse mix of theorists and practitioners, academics and professionals, and folks from many walks of life. This conference I tried to go to talks where I “didn’t belong” – hoping to learn from disciplines I don’t regularly encounter. It was a great strategy, as I often gravitate towards talks that I know something about, wanting to hear the presenter’s take on it, but venturing beyond my usual horizons was much more fun.

Aram Sinnreich and I presented a paper on Strategic Agency in an Age of Limitless Information (abstract, slides), and I am really happy with how things turned out. Hopefully, we’ll work on polishing this paper up to submit to a journal soon, though I don’t really know where we should submit yet.

The videos for the main plenary events are now up and I am looking forward to clipping the little hand grenades I remember throwing during Q&A.

This panel on Archives and History (my question starts @ 1:35:15) wasn’t the only conversation about archiving, but it was fairly representative of the perspectives. It’s too bad MIT World does not provide me with a mechanism to address a point of time in their videos (like our recently liberated VITAL tool allows), so you’ll have to advance the playhead manually to hear me out. It’s basically a riff on – Why Archive? – The beauty of the Sand Mandala and the effort required to actually delete something….

The conversations were very similar to some that we had back in May ’07 at the Open Content conference, but not I think I can finally articulate what’s been bugging me about these conversations. With the help of Ben and John Durham Peters (we shared a bus ride to/from the conf), I realized that archiving can be thought about as a transmission, for anyone, into the future.

I also realized that ordinarily, when we look to the past, we use history to help us understand ourselves better. The presumption that future generations will actually care about us for our own sake, strikes me as narcissistic (narcissism and new media has surfaced on this blog before).  I imagine they will want to use the messages that we send them to help themselves, understand themselves better.  So, to archive purposefully the question becomes – how can we best help the future?

To the archivists who claim we don’t have any idea what questions the future will be asking, so we better save it all – I think I know what the future will be trying to understand about us.  They will likely be trying to figure out what on earth was distracting us while we let the planet die!  We were busy devoting our resources to saving every last copy of American Idol and Big Brother while Gia screamed in agony for help.

So, how can we increase the signal-to-noise ration of the messages we send into the future?  Without somehow reducing the message to the critically problematic golden record on the voyager spaceship, or its successors?  I guess the Long Now Foundation is thinking along these lines, and I have always envied David Vakoch’s job title (Director of Interstellar Message Composition)…  The conference helped me realize that Vakoch and the Long Now have a really similar task – but I don’t know how many archivists conceive of their task as Intergenerational Message Composition.

Perhaps we need to spend even more time curating?  Indicating in our archives why we think they were worth saving? And what’s the most important message we can send into the future? Not like it matters much longer, as I really do believe we are embarking on The End of Forgetting (see our conf paper for more details).

Shifting frames for a moment, what if the ancients had a really important message to send us? Their Theory of Everything, or the equivalent of E=MC^2.  How would they have attempted to transmit it?

When I discussed these ideas w/ my friend Rasmus he recommended I start up a consulting firm specializing in Future Relations. 😉

Filed by jonah at 11:17 pm under air,ethics,fire,metaphysics
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What happens when the Swine Virus breeds with the Avian Flu?

Pigs Fly, of course.  Welcome to the end of time. I’m off to collect a few debts.

This latest data point is the most recent in a string of bizarre crimes that I have been tracking in my capacity as a double agent (in the Kierkegaardian sense).

Consider these events from last year’s news:

1. The Aqua Teen Hunger Force Mooninite Bomb Scare in Boston
2. The Rat poison in the Cat and Dog Food triggering an FDA recall (it only affected wet food)
3. And, the E-Coli in the Spinach resulting in CNN journalists looking directly into the camera and instructing kids not to eat their green leafy vegetables.

Given everything I know about reality, there is only one man who is sinister and brilliant enough to execute this sequence of terrorist punchlines…

Good riddance to the age of Biblical Myth. Welcome to the Age of Marvel and DC.

Now, if only I could figure out which organization this intentionality emerged from.

Filed by jonah at 11:49 am under earth,ethics
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This past weekend I took part in an exciting panel on internet labor at the Left Forum, but the highlight of the weekend was serendipitous. I attended a salon hosted by Reality Sandwich:

Electrical energy is political energy is personal energy is metaphysical energy: A discussion on technological tools and political policy for opportunities of human freedom and evolution.

While I am usually open to edgy ideas, and am quite comfortable entertaining (and sometimes visiting) alternate realities, I certainly wasn’t expecting the treat I encountered. Ryan Wartana orchestrated an amazing experience, successfully interweaving the metaphors of energy and power through the lenses of the physical, personal, political, and metaphysical.

Ryan has PhD in chemical engineering and has been researching and working with nanotechnology and batteries for over a decade.  Professionally, he is the CTO for the alternative energy startup iCel Systems and is quite committed to alternative renewable energy solutions. He was on the East Coast participating in conference in DC on Advanced Battery Manufacturing, and swung through NYC to connect with other segments of his network.

To give you a sense of the atmosphere, Ryan spoke against the backdrop of a revolving slideshow of sacred geometry (which I have studied also), whose forms and principles have inspired many of his artistic/scientific inquiries and designs. He has worked with researchers growing self-repeating and self-replicating nanostructures, and it soon became clear how inhabiting this domain influenced his thinking. Some large problems can be effectively broken into tiny parts, but it can be difficult to imagine how to practice this w/out radically adjusting our perspective.

I left the lecture with a much clearer vision of what an intelligent energy grid, or an “internet of energy” is all about.  Basically, the current energy grid is unidirectional, and on-demand.  It is a centralized distribution system, much like last century’s mass broadcast media. If we distribute a dollop of storage and intelligence to the network, many amazing possibilities emerge. The analogy with integrated circuits was quite provocative – our current grid is like a circuit board w/out any capacitors on it. iCel and companies like them are trying to become the Cisco of the Energy platform, and create integrated energy systems. So, individuals could draw power when its inexpensive (at night) and produce power and return it to the grid, or even to their peers – bittorrent style.

The power of distributed networks to improve redundancy and resilience, and reclaim lost bandwidth and capacity is well known in information technology and network theory. Google has even been distributing their physical power storage in their servers. But the possibilities Ryan illuminated intuitively clicked for me – and I trusted his vision, even though he is in the battery business 😉

These distributed energy systems are vital, and starting to happen. I wondered about connections with the electric car venture – Beter Place. Their system is immensely promising, but riddled with uncertainty. Will their hardware interoperate with other power providers, or will people be locked in? Will their customers be better off relying on a centralized transportation provider, instead of remaining independent and relatively autonomous?  What there be provisions to mitigate the surveillance threats their network poses?  When you mash good batteries up with Better Place (with a bit of peer-to-peer pressure), many of these problems melt away.

We also talked alot about the importance of energy awareness, giving way to energy responsibility, leading to energy intentionality.  These ideas actually had alot to do with my presentation at the Left Forum, which are hinted at in my take on Free Energy.

The talk left me invigorated and hopeful. NYU’s ITP has had some great projects on energy awareness, and there is even a prof at Columbia who wants to rig up a dorm with energy monitoring.  And, some of our work at CCNMTL with the Earth Institute and the Millenium Villages might benefit from these insights and connections as well.

I attended the Reality Sandwich event hoping that a dose of creative consciousness expansion would offset the heaviness of struggle at the Left Forum. What a refreshing contrast to feeling trapped inside an inescapable system. We can imagine our way free.

Banish the word struggle from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” — Hopi Elder

Filed by jonah at 10:03 pm under earth,ethics,freeculture,metaphysics
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At the beginning of the semester I shopped a class offered in the Columbia CS Dept on mobile computing.  Sadly, I didn’t have time to take the class this semester, but I suppose I can follow along Standford’s version free of charge.

Prof. Nieh was personable, animated, and bright, but the first day of class made me realize the impact CCNMTL has had on me. I doubt I would have made these observations/connections as an undergrad.

First, I was a bit sad that the curriculum did not include even a spoonful of social/cultural context.  The only books on the reading list were SDKs. A little Rhiengold, Shirky, or Zittrain, judiciously applied, could go a long way.

Second, Nieh announced that the entire semester would be organized around projects. That’s a great way to learn, but he also imagined a competition, with the possibility of a venture capitalist evaluating the projects at the end of the semester.

Now, although I am presenting at the Left Forum this weekend, I have nothing against turning a profit (after all, I’m an Alchemist).  But, would it really be too heavy handed to require that students at the university organize their production around the Public Good (and maybe become mobily active)?  What about the needs of the university?  Or even, an Open Source project? 60-80 Columbia CS students (w/ some Masters students) – that’s alot of creative labor power.  And, there is a dire need for applications like this, around the world, and across campus (SIPA, The Earth Institute, Teachers College, the J-School, the libraries are all groups on campus that are investigating mobile apps).

Even if students are required to create something for the public good, at least giving them that option might expose them to a possibility they hadn’t considered. To Prof. Nieh’s credit, he invited me to submit an application idea to the class forum, though I am not sure if any of the students actually followed up on these suggestions.

As I wrote in my email, while VC’s won’t likely chase the students down to invest in these kinds of apps, they might be surprised by the overlapping technical requirements across sectors. And foundations are definitely very interested in innovations in this area right now too.

I am under no delusion that most undergrads could actually complete a useful application in a semester, but a few might. And the opportunity to make a hyper-local useful application (find a book in the library stacks, anyone?) seems promising.  And its getting so easy.

Filed by jonah at 12:03 am under ethics,fire,freeculture
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It’s been almost 2 months since I participated in the intense and spectacular conference/discussion/seminar on the Changing Dynamics of Public Controversies (CDPC). Since then, numerous municipal dailies have declared bankruptcy, and the question of the future of journalism has gone mainstream – with urgency. (four print-media-collapse stories on the front page of yesterday’s business section of the nytimes!).

Here are a few of the better analyses that have been buzzing around inside the halls of the Columbia J-School:

• A New era of corruption? Yochai Benkler responds to Starr’s nostalgia for the old days in a debate that seems to have kicked off at the CDPC conference.
• Newspapers and the Unthinkable Clay Shirky does as great job of explaining the uncertainty in the midst of a revolution.
• 2020 Vision: What’s next for News And this piece offers a very concise and intelligent take on the future (for those that survive).  I think he is onto something w/ the Semantic Web – Four of the SemWeb NYC meetups this spring have been at media companies (NYTimes, Dow Jones, ThomsonReuters, Hearst Corp), and the strategy shared at the OpenCalias presentation the has confirmed much of this outiline.

So, Why teach journalism if newspapers are dying? One of our Deans has a plan to revamp the curriculum and Keep J-School Relevant, but it hasn’t gained much traction yet. 🙁

And, while we’re on the topic of the Academy, are their institutions next? Maybe not, but the printed scholarly monograph is certainly on the chopping block.

I keep coming back to the generatives described in Kevin Kelly’s Better than Free (skip the giddy utopic intro):

These eight qualities require a new skill set. Success in the free-copy world is not derived from the skills of distribution since the Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. Nor are legal skills surrounding Intellectual Property and Copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can’t be replicated with a click of the mouse.

Could this be the perspective needed to recalibrate the profit compass and find the Sasquatch of sustainability?

Filed by jonah at 10:07 pm under earth,ethics
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A recent post at Furious Seasons on the spooky future of psychiatry prompted me to dig a little deeper into the origins of prodromal diagnoses.

A prodrome is “a symptom or group of symptoms that appears shortly before an acute attack of illness. The term comes from a Greek word that means “running ahead of.”” A spooky emerging trend in clinical psychiatry is the appropriation of this concept under the paradigm of “early intervention in psychosis” for “at risk” patients. Psychiatrists are preventively diagnosing mental illness and treating people prior to them exhibiting any behavioral symptoms.

Earlier diagnosis and early intervention. The past decade has witnessed a surge of progress in identifying individuals at high risk for psychosis or mood disorders. The “prodrome” has become a fertile area of research, with a focus on early “treatment” even before the clinical syndrome of schizophrenia or mania appears. The goal is to try to delay, modify, or ameliorate incipient serious mental illness by using both pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy.(“Psychiatry’s Future is Here“)

Instinctively, preventative health care seems like a good thing. Western medicine is often criticized for primarily responding to acute crises, instead of proactively promoting health and well-being. However, the reductionist flattening of minds into brains leads to categorical errors which pervert the Hippocratic principle to “do no harm”. Applying the medical paradigm of treating risks (instead of disorders) to mental conditions stretches the dangerously elastic diagnostic net beyond the breaking point.

Analogies between mental conditions and diseases of the body, such as the measles or heart failure, are often the point of departure for proponents of prodromal treatment. However, this rhetorical sleight of hand disguises many relevant disanalogies.  The pathologization of diverse mental states remains controversial, unlike life threatening viruses or organ failures. Furthermore, there is currently no casual theory explaining why some people’s psychological experiences degenerate into crisis. Arguably, there can never be such a theory until we make significant progress towards resolving the mind/body problem, (a.k.a. the “hard problem” of consciousness). Without a causal theory explaining the transitions between mental states, all prodromal diagnoses of mental conditions are necessarily speculative correlations.

The roots of prodromal diagnosis of mental conditions can be traced back to work on the prodromal identification of schizophrenia.

What is needed is not the early diagnosis of schizophrenia, but the diagnosis of pre-psychotic schizophrenia. We must learn to recognize that state of mind which will develop into schizophrenia unless appropriate measures are taken to prevent deterioration.[*]

However, the identification of reliable predictors of schizophrenia has proven to be notoriously difficult and conceptually slippery:

Identifying symptoms or signs that reliably predict onset would obviously aid attempts to prevent mental disorders. Such specific predictors do not currently exist. In fact, one could argue that if any such risk factors were identified they would be conceptualized as early phenomena of the disorder itself… The nonspecific nature of these common features is notable. [*]

The Diganostic Statistical Manual is the psychiatric bible, effectively the working definition of insanity. The clinical gaze embodied in its pages is rooted in behaviorism – the symptoms it defines are all observable behaviors. The trend towards prodromal mental diagnoses is frightening precisely because it cedes even more power to an already cold and inhumane apparatus, which fails to listen to the voices of the people it claims to treat. The risks of preemptive discipline and prescriptive moral judgment reek of rhymes with eugenics, and are simply too great and horrifying for this practice to continue. Patients are being indicted on the basis of hereditary factors, thought crimes, and innocuous deviant behavior.

Furthermore, the psychopharmacological treatments prescribed for these prodromal diagnoses are physically dangerous and psychologically damaging.  The atypical anti-psychotics that are often prescribed in these circumstances have been linked to excessive weight gain, metabolic disorders, and diabetes. The stigma attached to these diagnoses is also emotionally threatening. Advertising campaigns such as the award winning “Prescribe Early” poster have heightened the pressure to preventively prescribe dangerous medication, before it is too late. Children and teens often traverse defiant emotional terrain on their journey of self-discovery and becoming. Adult disapproval towards behaviors (smoking, drinking, inappropriateness, and irritability) and appearances (fashion, body piercings, hair style) has increasingly taken the form of chemical discipline,[*] with psychiatry’s permission and blessing.

That future of psychiatry is quite disturbed. Prodromal treatment is the latest progression in an ever constricting system of control. Preventative psychiatric treatment hints at forms of control that resonate with fears of omniscient surveillance, and we can begin to glimpse how grotesque these practices will become in an era of electronic medical records. Pathologizing the neurologically diverse is bad enough. Extending this attitude (and treatment) to those at risk of being neurologically diverse is downright evil.

Filed by jonah at 11:30 pm under dangerousgifts,ethics,fire
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As I’ve claimed previously, Big Pharma’s crimes and cover-ups will soon make Big Tobacco’s scandals look like jaywalking.

AstraZeneca’s Seroquel trial began last week, and the industry’s criminal antics surrounding anti-psychotics are coming into better focus.  Documents introduced as evidence are confirming that, like Eli Lilly with Zyprexa(Kills), AstraZeneca knowingly downplayed the fatal side-effects of their toxic pills. They covered up the fact that Seroquel causes diabetes and massive weight gain, and have been gaming the drug approval process to expand the diagnostic reach of their drugs.

In a move which hits new lows, even for Pharma, documents introduced into evidence reveal sex scandals and conflicts of interest in the approval of Seroquel for treating depression, the burying of unfavourable studies, and deeper insight into the pathological cognitive dissonance underlying Pharma’s logic. Get ’em while they’re hot!

43_Exhibit 15.pdf

There may be a rationale to explain why acutely psychotic patients may gain weight in the short term, following effective therapy. The relief of negative symptoms, apathy, etc, disorganized thinking, may result in return to normal activities like having regular meals.

I see. Blame the weight gain on the crazy people. Gotta love it. I am reminded of the current economic situation, where corporations privatize the profits and socialize the risks/loses. All the good is caused by the drugs, the patients/victims take all responsibility and blame for the bad.

Meanwhile, this week yielded a few more alternate hypotheses on behavioural issues in children:

Are Bad Sleeping Habbits Driving us Mad?

The 3 R’s? A Fourth Is Crucial, Too: Recess

adding to the growing list (nutritional issues, boredom, and increased stress) of plausible explanations for children’s irritability, restlessness, and erratic behaviour.

I thought the scientific method was supposed to be about systematically exploring causal possibility spaces, and iteratively refining our narrative understanding based on critical observation. Pharma’s scientists have seriously lost their way. They have betrayed the sceptical stance at the foundation of scientific knowledge production.

That’s some abstract, theoretical jargon, but the threat here is quite concrete and real.  Just ask these horrifically abused elderly patients. People who have never manifested psychotic symptoms are no longer safe!

That future of psychiatry is quite disturbed. They might actually beat
omniscient surveillance to the punch on absolute control over the populace. But heaven help us if/when Big Brother forges an alliance with Big Pharma.

Filed by jonah at 11:04 pm under dangerousgifts,epistemology,ethics,fire
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