Blog – blog – blggity – focus! – psyche rant

I’ve just finished my last exam for psychology and I got an A which means that I don’t have to take the comprehensive final and I have an A for the class, so one less thing to worry about. I now have two hundred short papers to write for my final education class of the summer and they are all do by Thursday. I am doing a quick round trip to Springfield MO this weekend to see BJ’s new place and truck him some left behind furniture from his sister. I am going to be well and truly fried by the time I get all these papers in, but I am relieved that all my tests for my current course work are now behind me.

I am just doing a little prewriting here, so don’t get your hopes up. I’m not insight chasing of late, just setting them up and knocking them down. Mary has a friend in from California that she is currently taking to the emergency for some kind of infection or sepsis in an old surgical wound. They might spend their visit together in a ward. Eek!

Liz had her baby up in Chicago. He was born back on the 22nd and she just got in touch with the wider circle of friends – Alexander Robert has all his fingers and toes, so I’ll post pictures soon. (12:23pm 8lbs 12oz 21.5" - he was also clocked at 2mph, which is fairly fast for a newborn)

I got a long motorcycle ride in on Saturday last, transporting Jessica’s new Suzuki Savage 650 to its latest refuge of licensing hibernation. I haven’t seen Seth around in a bit, but if you’re still lurking Seth we need to get working on a two wheel solution to all my psychological needs.

I was going to complain about the state of that disciple for a moment. The statistics I was just tested over indicate that eighty percent of Americans who experience what are considered to be treatable mental health episodes do not seek professional help. Is this surprising to anyone? I am reminded of the old Steve Martin barber sketch from Saturday Night Live, “We used to think this disorder was caused by a small toad or dwarf living in the stomach, but now we know that its an imbalance of the bodily humors.” I couldn’t count the number of times that I read, “We don’t really know how this works, but it seems to…” in my textbook. That line preceded the description of several medications, including the potentially lethal Lithium (which they used to put in seven up to help counter balance Coca-Cola’s cocaine).

Vicki, I understand that playing Candy Land with kids can help a great deal, but are the medicated masses any better off? Obviously extreme cases require what intervention science can offer, but so much of what happens in terms of treatment and chemical dependency reminds me of early physicians paying dockhands to let them swap out their bodily fluids with the equivalents taken from sheep. A dockhand filled with sheep’s blood may help advance the course of science in interesting and affordable ways (probably not going to be spending his stipend), but I’d rather not be the modern dockhand for pharmacology’s march of progress.

I know for certain that some well meaning interventionist would have talked my parents into a diagnosis of ADD and got me medically mellow had I been born but a few years later. My fears could be seen as ironic in light of my occasional tendency to self medicate, but I trust Ben Franklin’s tautology linking spirits with an proof of divine goodwill a lot further than Freud’s fervent fecophiliacs diagnosing to the general detriment. The videos I had to watch, with their heightened vocabulary akin to pseudo science, “We call altruistic behavior altruism,” were laugh out loud funny examples of University pissing contests over ownership of semantic space. As an intellectual I am generally embarrassed by what passes for both knowledge and science in nearly every field of psychology that I have been exposed to.