Wednesday, July 22, 2009

At What Point Do We Lose Ourselves?

Within American society, our bodies belong purely to us.[i] We are not provided with health care by the state.  We are given “choice” when it comes to how much we want to spend on our own health care.  Women have the right to regulate their reproductive systems with whatever methods they see fit.  When we die we don’t owe the state anything, just as when we are born the state provides each individual with very little.  Our bodies are cared for through our own accord. Organs that are “donated” after an individual’s passing are given out of generosity and not by government mandate or financial compensation.  But as the need arises, when it comes to our organs and other tissues we are rapidly transforming ourselves from natural beings into commodified objects of desire.[ii]

The Uniform Anatomical Gift Act of 1968 was implemented in response to attempts that were made by brokerage firms seeking to profit from kidney sales.[iii]  As technology and surgical practice have increasingly become more sophisticated, organ transplantation has become far more effective and common.  The increase in commonality of transplant procedure has put the United States of America is in the midst of a serious organ shortage.  Currently less than one third of those who are on transplant waiting lists receive the organs that they so desperately need.  This amounts to about sixteen people dieing each day.[iv]  “Proposals [for ending America’s organ shortage] now discussed frequently and openly at transplant events include offering donor kin a maximum $10,000 tax credit, a funeral expense supplement, a charitable donation credit, or a direct payment.”[v]  Particularly in the case of direct payment, it is of real concern that by restructuring a system that has operated on charitable “donations” into a paying for organs system would create an exploitative culture that would routinely prey upon the poor.[vi]

“The marketability of the body is highly dependent on how parts are categorized medically, socially, and legally in this country.”[vii] Fluids that are produced with abundance, such as blood and semen, can be bought and sold at “banks”, but organs that cannot be “naturally” reproduced are understood as rare and precious goods and can only be given as “donations.”[viii] Arjun Appadurai argues that, “commodities, like persons have social lives,” and the social lives of organs have a very interesting story.[ix]  “Whereas organ recipients speak of their experiences as a form of “rebirth,” surviving donor kin embrace the idea that the lost love one can live on in others.”[x]  It is a common belief that the organ will carry qualities of an individual to the new owner.[xi] But what if the implant is not of human origin?

What marks the boundary between human and non-human?

To deal with today’s current organ shortage, science has devised two experimental trajectories for the production of organs destined for transplantation–one involves animals, the other biomechanical prototypes.[xii] Despite the fact that the majority of the research conducted in the field of organ transplant is working to develop more effective uses of animal organs, overwhelmingly society prefers bioengineered organ replacements as opposed to animal.[xiii] Not only is there concern that organs harvested from animals may contain pathogens that might jump the species line when introduced to individual human bodies,[xiv] but questions as to weather a human remains truly human if they harbor animal parts is a concern to many.   “A frequently expressed concern is that the patient might take on the characteristic of the animal in question; when this is imagined, response ranges from a desire to cut short the conversation to a tendency to degenerate into ribald joking behavior.”[xv]

Is it fear of losing our humanity that drives many patients desire to have mechanical devices over animal?

Or more broadly, what defines our Humanity?

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, western culture has been unable to hide its love for machines. Some individuals have even replaced their animal companionship with machines. They certainly are much more predictable, take up less space, don’t induce allergies, and are much easier to care for. Where animal nature is unruly, unpredictable, and untamed, the machine is cultured and predictable since they are often times created in our own image. In an increasingly mechanized world many people see themselves as machines. “…Organ recipients are frequently encouraged by professionals to imagine their organs as replaceable parts, their bodies are similar to automobiles, and transplantation as an elaborate form of repair.”[xvi]

While warnings of relying too heavily on machines is a common theme in distopian film and literature, reality proves that overwhelmingly machines improve the quality of our lives and in some cases, even have the ability to love us in return. On the other hand, the half man half beast that is void of human culture, ethics, and sociability is a much more widely feared icon in popular culture and has been since our society’s classical origins.

 Beyond the realm of companionship, there is no room within our society for human animal coupling.  Porcine and simian implants prove too threatening to the integrity of the body, the self, and society.  If a person must loose their natural heart, let it be to machine, not an undersized pig.  No recipient that I have encountered to date is willing to be debased by the beast.[xvii]
As we expand our increasingly sophisticated body of knowledge we have the ability to improve the quality of our lives and to hold death a bay. 

When does life turn into something or purchase?


[i] Lesley A. Sharp, Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies: Death, Mourning, and Scientific Desire in the Realm of Human Organ Transfer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 48-49.

[ii] Sharp, 50-51.

[iii] Sharp, 54.

[iv] Sharp, 51.

[v] Sharp, 56.

[vi] Sharp, 56.

[vii] Sharp, 52.

[viii] Sharp, 51.

[ix] Sharp, 64.

[x] Sharp, 63.

[xi] Sharp, 68.

[xii] Sharp, 84.

[xiii] Sharp, 89.

[xiv] Sharp, 85

[xv] Sharp, 90.

[xvi] Sharp, 104.

[xvii] Sharp, 104.

Images Cited:

http://futurepredictions.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/robot_270x360.jpg

http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b136/barefootbeachbum23/pro-choice-abortion-rights-northern.gif

http://northcoastcafe.typepad.com/north_coast_cafe/homeless.jpg

http://cosmos-liturgy-sex.com/2006/08/11/embryonic-fetal-and-post-natal-animal-human-mixtures/

http://www.zml.com/content/covers/147896_3.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAmPIr4pcNw

http://blogue.us/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/fembot02.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM5yepZ21pI

http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/giant-r2-d2-plush/

http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/greeks/religion/myths/pictures/minotaur.jpg

Sunday, July 19, 2009

The Commoditization of the Public You: Developing Your Purchased Personality

Before attending the University, I lived another life as a ballerina.  The decision to pursuer a career in ballet was made early in my life.  By the time I was in the seventh grade I was leaving school early three days a week to attend rehearsals.  At fourteen, I spent my first summer away training in San Francisco.  After returning home I begged my mom to let me move to the city on my own.  In my mind, it would have been the best move for my career.  She vetoed that idea.  When I graduated high school at seventeen I was finally set free from Washington.  I moved to Chicago on scholarship.  On my eighteenth birthday I cried all day.  In the world of ballet, eighteen is the beginning of the end. I was getting old.  A female dancer has until she is twenty-one to get a full time job, after that, your simply out of luck.  After three years of a seemingly endless parade of attempting to prove myself though performances and auditions, I “retired” at 20 years old.  From age 12 until 20 I devoted the entirety of my life to one singular pursuit. “We tend to see ourselves as the managers of life projects that we map out, organize, make choices about, perhaps compare with other possible projects, and ultimately live out to completion.” [i]  I had failed.  I didn’t know who I was anymore. To everyone in my family and to all of my friends I was “Christina the ballerina”.  I did everything right.  I had experienced teachers in my corner who helped me to plan every step of the way. While I could have trained for another year in hopes that my luck would change, ballet was no longer fulfilling for me.  Ballet was too completive and I was too emotional.  Somehow along the way, my foolproof life plan had left me lost and unfulfilled.  It was time to make a change.   

I had made a deliberate choice to develop my personality into that of a ballerina.  It was how I had distinguished myself from the crowd. [ii] Personality and its association with self-presentation began to be developed a centaury ago.  Self help books published around the turn of the centaury in America began to promote the idea that the self is something to be developed and can be made to make an individual appear attractive and interesting. Character is either good or bad but “you want your personality to be ‘dazzling.’” [iii]  This change in thinking associated with personality and character has very real contemporary repercussions, particularly in the world of politics. 

In the 2000 presidential election, Democratic nominee Al Gore suffered greatly for his apparent lack of personality which ultimately made his character suspect in the eyes of many.  He was dubbed “stiff and boring,” “…he has been stumbling everywhere he goes and as a public speaker Gore is only slightly more animated than a corpse.”[iv]  On the other hand, his opponent George W. Bush was a “real person”, someone you would want to sit and have a beer with.  Discussion had by the political right focused almost entirely on personality rather that character or qualifications.  George W. Bush’s social performance oozed sincerity.  He was a God fearing Texan, who governed by his moral compass, lived on a working ranch, and wore cowboy hats.  He didn’t need to act the part because he lived it. [v]  On the other hand Al Gore was elitist and awkward who had not yet learned to be sincere in the way that Bush and Ralphy from A Christmas Story had already learned.  You only have to wear your pink bunny suit when your aunt Clara comes over.

While not everything given to us is going to contribute to the creation of our individual selves, purchases that we make individually present to the public the self that we create.[vi]  The market helps us to achieve our “individuality” by constantly shifting with consumer’s current need to fulfill happiness.[vii]  Standard are often times set by members of the upper echelons of class.  By consuming certain items, it is thought that one has the ability to transcend their current class in the perceptions of others. [viii]  

In the process of Americans looking for direction in how to dress and act, some elites become celebrities by having “desirable” style and personalities.The purchased personality instills the buyer with the necessary confidence needed to live their lives in the public realm.[ix]  For many, identifying with your “inner class” is the goal of the public life.[x]  Hair and makeup are also important tools that work to establish the real “natural” you,[xi] or the person who you were meant to be. [xii]  When if comes to self presentation we live in a democratic society.  "If the culture that surrounds you sees clothes and hair as signs of liberation, then in some strange sense they are." [xiii] 

Expressing one’s self through their dress has become the definitive way that consumer society judges it members, particularly celebrities.  Tabloid magazines have created an all seeing eye in which the public formulated judgments of celebrities based on appearances when they are out on the town, walking their dogs, or grocery shopping.  Everyone must express themselves through clothes, hair, and makeup because every one, even strangers, are always watching you.[xiv] Every individual is always on stage as a social actor, even the hermit living in a cave.[xv]

When it comes to making statement about rebellion, appearance is vital to an individual’s liberation.[xvi]  Going against the grain happens within a society-approved formula. After loosing the 2000 presidential election Al Gore grew a beard to declare his defiance of politics.

After completing a divorce, many women cut their hair, just as many ballerinas cut their hair after retiring from professional ballet companies.  All of these acts are public declarations of a change in an individuals self declared personality.  Formulaic actions of rebellion are not limited to major life changing events.  In attempts to exhibit a general rebellion against mainstream culture, goths, punks, emos, and hipsters all end up looking the same in their acts of rebellion.  They dress the same as one another in order to be labeled as part of a specific counterculture group. If they didn’t fit within a specific group they would be seen as too far outside of culture and would be labeled as crazy; just as Brittney Spears pushed her rebellion too far when she shaved her head and threw milkshakes at the paparazzi.  Society defines the parameters in which we can express our selves.  Society defines the parameters in which we can express our selves.  

Society makes us who we are, yet we make society.[xvii]


Is there some essential element to the self that is vital to each individual?


 

 

 


[i] Carl Elliott, Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), 299.

[ii] Elliott, 61.

[iii] Elliott, 60.

[iv] Al Gore Support Center, “Al Gore Myths Debunked,” http://www.algoresupportcenter.com/goretruth.html (accessed July 15, 2009).

[v] Elliott, 64.

[vi] Elliott, 101

[vii] Elliott, 298.

[viii] Elliott, 108.

[ix] Elliott, 102.

[x] Elliott, 111.

[xi] Elliott, 109.

[xii] Elliott, 103.

[xiii] Elliott, 112.

[xiv] Elliott, 109.

[xv] Elliott, 119.

[xvi] Elliott, 111.

[xvii] Elliott, 304.

Images Cited:

http://www.netamorfasis.com/m/blogs/a/britney-spears-shaves-her-head-03.jpg

From the personal collection of the author

http://hi-techlive.com/Personality-Development.html

http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/obama/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf69EEL3WBk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkqrI3IibYI

http://jonjost.wordpress.com/2008/12/04/the-gospel-according-to-friedman-and-others/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZTZ_lxvBes

http://www.topnews.in/files/paris-hilton_0.jpg

http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Business/images-2/fake-purses.jpg

http://activitypit.ning.com/

http://images.teamsugar.com/files/users/0/88/22_2007/jessica-simps.jpg

http://blogs.usatoday.com/onpolitics/images/2008/02/04/gore.jpg

http://www.emoboyfriend.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/emo-kids-300x225.jpg

http://www.gobritney.com/album3595/britney-spears-3595-69590.html

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Truth In What We See

Accusations fly from the political right as conservatives try to abash Supreme Court Justice Nominee, New York district judge, Sonia Sotomayor.  The criticism that she is an “activist judge” stem from a speech that she made in 2001 at the commencement ceremony of the University of California Law School.  In her speech, Sotomayor said that “a wise Latina woman” would, more often than not, reach a “better conclusion” than that of a white male. She also said: “Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to seeI simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.” While some Republican senators have claimed that they will offer her a fair confirmation hearing, on an online posting dominant republican figure Newt Gingrich has called her a “racist”. In defense of Sotomayor, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that Sotomayor was “simply making the point that personal experiences are relevant to the process of judging, that your personal experiences have a tendency to make you more aware of certain facts in certain cases, that your experiences affect your understanding.”[i] The judgments that people arrive upon, even judgments that were approached “scientifically” always are seen through a filter that is colored by past experience, knowledge, and explanation.  We are conditioned by culture to impetrate what is placed before us in certain ways. 

This was much the case in anatomical studies conducted in the Renaissance.  While it may seem silly, even beyond our current day comprehension to think of the human species not as two, but one sex, that was the dominant theory of the day.  Scientific inquiry reported in Latin transcripts, compendia, and Arabic Intermediaries prior to and during the sixteenth centaury had failed to accurately include the female body in the scientific investigation of human anatomy.  “There was still in the sixteenth centaury, as there had been in the classical antiquity, only one canonical body and that body was male.”[ii] 

Between the years of 1493 and 1658, nine times out of fourteen, the subjects of dissection in books published on anatomy were male.[iii]  When anatonomists finally began to include the feminine form with more frequency, the more they were convinced that the female body was simply another version of the male anatomy.[iv]  With a scientific “truth” in mind, it seemed only natural that subsequent scientific investigations produced the same findings putting a physical body of knowledge into circulation amongst physicians and lay people.  With time, “a whole world view makes the vagina look like a penis to a Renaissance observer.”[v]

In the Renaissance medical text Frabrica, anatomical drawings of female genitalia are not wrong, “[their] proportions are roughly those of ‘accurate’ nineteenth-century engravings and illustrations from modern text, though these of course were not drawn to illustrate the isomorphism between male and female organs.”[vi] These drawings are advertisings for their own truth[vii] which function to further perpetuate the idea that females are inverted males.[viii] An artistic eye interprets the culturally constructed scientific reality, even in the case of scientific illustration.

No artist, judge, or scientist exists in a vacuum.  Each individual comes to the table with different experiences, desires, and a culturally interpreted set of knowledge that will influence the representation of their findings.  For example, in addition to being revered as a true Renaissance man, Michelangelo has been criticized for his inability to depict the female form.  Any art historian will tell you that Michelangelo was a homosexual.  His inconsistency in mastery is due to his personal disconnect in finding beauty in the female subject.  If it was suggested to an art historian that Michelangelo’s inability to render the female form was not because he was a homosexual, but because he was indoctrinated in Renaissance one-sex theories the informant would be meet with opposition.  Such suggestions are irrelevant to an individual who believes in something else.  The art historian will most likely will never see the one-sex theory as the underlying cause of Michelangelo’s poor depiction of the female form because they know the truth, even if they are presented with sound “fact”.[ix]  Simply enlightening someone to “truth” will always be met with opposition when they have been immersed in a different cultural reality.

The fact that female sex organs did not have their own set of vocabulary worked in similar ways that artistic representations of female organs did in perpetuating the one-sex theory.  Modern terms of: vagina, uterus, or fallopian tubes have no Renaissance equivalent.[x] “The language simply did not exist, or need to exist, for distinguishing male and female organs.”[xi]  With this in mind, it seems only natural that when Renaldus Columbus “discovered” the clitoris in 1559 “…he felt himself entitled to name what he found in nature: a female penis.”[xii]  Culture develops new words only when the need arises.  According to Renaissance science, there was no female reproductive anatomy, only a marked, lesser version of the male anatomy.

The scope of reality is heavily influenced by our exposure to individual bodies of knowledge.  It may seems bizarre to current society that in a time that deeply impacted contemporary western views of the world, prominent theory could be so far removed from our current reality.  This cycle of truth and falsehood of fact is bound to repeat over and over again.  Every generation conceives of itself as modern, better informed and equipped than the one before.  But what will our grandchildren think of our “modern” practices.   Patients who undergo chemotherapy are pumped so full of lethal drugs with the hope that the cancer will be killed before the patient.  While in many cases this practice has seen positive results, will it accompany the now backwards practices of bloodletting or shock therapy in the future?  History has shown that despite our current notions of out societies empowerment by technology and human rights, in the not so distant future some practices and ideas are destined to become ignorant, abusive, or blind.  Even in “unbiased” science we create or own reality through the use of language and visual presentation.  Are we experiencing global warming or climate change?  While they both describe the same occurrence, choice of words or graphics carry very different meanings.

Can science exist free of Culture?

 

 


[i] Chuck Todd and Alex Johnson, “Obama Calls Criticism to Sotomayor ‘Nonsense’”, MSNBC, (May 29, 2009), http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31004091//.

[ii] Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 63.

[iii] Laqueur, 74.

[iv] Laqueur, 70.

[v] Laqueur, 82.

[vi] Laqueur, 85.

[vii] Laqueur, 75.

[viii] Laqueur, 70.

[ix] Laqueur, 90.

[x] Laqueur, 96.

[xi] Laqueur, 97.

[xii] Laqueur, 64.

Images Cited:

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/c/cranach/lucas_e/1/01adam_e.html

http://www.vimooz.com/blog/category/people/

http://hotfile.wordpress.com/2008/12/16/newt-in-2012/

http://filipspagnoli.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/human-rights-cartoon-122-justice-after-genocide/

http://cyborgmommy.blogspot.com/2003_11_01_archive.html

http://reminiscence.wordpress.com/

http://www.stanford.edu/class/history13/earlysciencelab/body/femalebodypages/penis.gif

http://www.lazydork.com/movies/bubbleboy.jpg

http://adventuresofbrookeandvan.blogspot.com/2008/12/italy-day-11-florence.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/apr/21/chemotherapy-cancer-chemobrain?TB_iframe=true&height=650&width=850

http://www.stampedeblue.com/2008/10/31/651082/need-help-and-advice-for-a

http://www.sundaysenergy.org/catalog/1/poster-prints/global-warming

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http://southasia.oneworld.net/ShowCategory?b_start:int=10&type=Article&id=66

Friday, July 10, 2009

Mental Normality: An Object of Societal Definition and Desire


In 2002, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) published a volume outlining the revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the DSM IV.The APA had begun compiling the DSM IV in 1999 as the definitive text containing “discussions of such issues as to whether disease, illness, and disorder are scientific and biomedical concepts, or sociopolitical terms that necessarily involve a value judgment.”[i] One essay entitled, “Neuroscience Research Agenda to Guide Development of a Pathophysiologically Based Clarification System”, by Charney et al., is explicit with the fact that DSM IV definitions “are virtually devoid of biology, and are merely based on clusters of symptoms and characteristics of clinical course.”[ii] The DSM IV itself states that the definitions of mental illness are self-created and lack biological backing.  Ideas of what the true “natural” self is comes from the indoctrination of a certain style of thought and speech executed by those that society has deemed as credible in such matters. “This sort of thought in biological psychiatry not only establishes what counts as an explanation, it establishes what there is to explain.”[iii]

In “Neurochemical Selves”, Nikolas Rose claims “[psychiatric] drugs do not so much seek to normalize a deviant but to correct abnormalities, to adjust the individual and restore and maintain his or her capacity to enter the circuits of everyday life.”[iv]  Between the years of 1990 and 2000, the United States saw an eight-fold rise in the number of cases of prescribed psychiatrics.  By the end of the decade, the United States spent a reported $19 billion on psychiatric drugs, nearly 18 percent of a $107 billion pharmaceutical industry.
A marked example of “purchased personalities” is visible in the rise of diagnosed cases of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, ADHD.  In 2004 it was reported that between 1996 and 2003 Scotland saw an increase of prescriptions of Ritalin, the pharmaceutical treatment for ADHD, from 69.1 to 603.2 per 10,000 children.[v] The rise of diagnosed cases of ADHD is a classic example as to how the labeling of a behavior as problematic, and not as variation among individuals, leads to higher rate of diagnosis of specific created disorders. 

Societal creation of norms and reinforcement through advertising affects individual perceptions of normality.  Within the United States, the combination of ADHD awareness campaigns targeted towards doctors, and the inclusion of ADHD as a behavioral problem that would merit schools with additional federal funding drove the rise in the diagnosis rate of ADHD in the 1990’s, all of which was funded by the pharmaceutical companies.  While one might expect that forceful application of defining how a “true” child behaves would be meet with opposition from parents and schools, research has shown that the inverse has happened.  Parents have begun to lobby for “their” problem of active children and speak frequently of the drug “as enabling the child to take control of him or herself, restoring the child to his or her true self again.”[vi]

Coupled with societies acceptance of physician and pharmaceutical definitions of normality, medical imaging technology has increasingly played a vital role in the diagnosis of deviance. Where other body parts and organs had been objectified earlier in history, as evident in artistic representations of the body as machinery with interchangeable parts , the development of the frontal lobotomy by Egas Moniz in the 1930’s ignited a cultural shift in physicians thinking of the brain as an organ.  Like other organs, the brain performed a specific function and, like machinery, was liable to break down. Moniz based his work off of previous work that had been conducted on monkeys and chimpanzees that noted the calming effects of the destruction of the frontal lobe of the brain.  In 1936 Moniz developed techniques that he preformed on human subjects.  First he destroyed the frontal lobe by injecting alcohol directly into the brain.  Later he developed a technique that surgically cut nerve fibers.  Walter Freeman and James Watts developed similar techniques.  They entered the brain through the eye with the aid of a tool that resembled an ice pick.  By 1948 lobotomies had been executed on about 20,000 patients worldwide, and by 1949 Moniz had been awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology for his work.[vii]  “These techniques were linked to a new way of visualizing the brain as a differentiated organ traversed by neural pathways with specific mental functions amenable to localized intervention.”[viii]

Medical imaging technology has certainly advanced since Moniz’s days yet the visual interpretation of illness is still interpreted by physicians who are culturally qualified.  Rose tells the story of Leigh Anne, a patient who was diagnosed with severe depression after the birth of her first child.   Initially she was prescribed Prozac and began psychotherapy sessions.  Her symptoms were elevated after several weeks of therapy and discontinued her therapy regime after several months.  For several months after the stoppage of her therapy she remain relatively happy.  When the symptoms returned Leigh Anne was reluctant to go back on to Prozac, she associated the use of the drug as the actions of a sick person .  Only after her physicians performed a brain study and presented her with visual evidence, that was only readable to her via translation , was she was convinced that she did in fact need to go back on medication.[ix]  “When mind seems visible within the brain, the space between person and organs flattens out-mind is what the brain does”[x]

As mentioned in the conversation about ADHD, advertising has changed the publics’ relationship with disease.  While Leigh Anne had been reluctant to continue the use of medications and was only convince through foreign visual aid, the advertising of pharmaceutical drugs has given a new angle to the culturally indoctrinated power of the media by “enabling” patients to take control of their own health by self-prescribing. Through “direct-to-consumer advertising” pharmaceutical companies “…suggest to individuals that that their worry and anxiety at home and work might not be just because they are worriers but because they are suffering from a treatable condition.”[xi]  By encouraging viewers to asses their health from a list of possible symptoms and by advising them to talk to their doctor about starting treatment on a specific “designer” drug the viewer is convinced that they are taking an active role in the monitoring of their own health and are able to function more accurately within society.

But when did it become wrong to worry, or to be sad?  Sadness is a natural emotion to be experienced within the course of life.  If we never experience sadness how are to understand our own happiness?  Why can’t examining and attempting to change the cause of our sadness ascertain normal happiness?  From personal experience, seeing family members refusal to accept that certain events had taken place has led to them taking anti-depressants.  What happened to “talking things out”?  When confronted about these certain events this family member denies that they ever happened.  While the rest of the family has accepted reality and moved on to find happiness with out the aid of anti-depressants, the one living in denial still struggles and needs psychiatrics to feel their “true” self.    

An ethics is engineered into the molecular makeup of these drugs, and the drug themselves embody and incite particular forms of life in which the “real me” is both “natural” and to be produced.  Hence the significance of the emergence of treatments for mental ill health lies not only in their specific effects, but also in the way in which they reshape the ways in which both experts and lay people see, interpret, speak about, and understand their world.[xii]

 

 

 

 


[i] Nikolas Rose, “Neurochemical Selves,” in The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Centaury.  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 206.

[ii] Rose, 207.

[iii] Rose, 192.

[iv] Rose, 210.

[v] Rose, 209-210.

[vi] Rose, 211.

[vii] Rose, 195.

[viii] Rose, 196.

[ix] Rose, 197.

[x] Rose, 198.

[xi] Rose, 213.

[xii] Rose, 222.


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