This really needs no introduction
Do you ever wonder why the comments on this blog are moderated? Because, quite frankly, it's amazing, the amount of bile that people can express towards human beings on the internet, safe behind the anonymity of a monitor and a keyboard. I'm not even going to bother to edit this comment at all, I'm just going to post it, in its entirety, so you can see the full range of anger, hatred, projection and ungrounded assumptions that one stranger feels entitled to direct at another.
I suppose it's kind of testament to something, that my post, about mine own experiences, moved someone to such emotion that they felt compelled to take the time to write this.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Discontinuation Syndrome":
My grandfather has leukemia and is pushing 90. He has recently entered a deep depression on account of you know... facing the inevitability of death and all. Nothing as serious as being a whiny recluse with bad self-esteem, but, then again, nobody is as unlucky as YOU. He was prescribed Citalopram to regulate said depression. He took it, it didn't do much except makes some of his accompanying neuroses simmer down. He took it for a while, then yesterday i find out he had finished his prescription and had forgotten to tell me or my dad to refill it. So he'd essentially been off it, cold turkey, for a few days. Absolutely no withdrawal symptoms.
So yeah, my point is that you're pretty much a "lightweight" (a term i use in substitution of another only to elude any profanity filtering that may occur). Since you're looking things up on the internet, look up "hypochondria", "cry for help" and "grasping at straws to feed said compunctions".
Since i bothered to write this much, here's a bonus: that crush guy will never like you because he's a guy and you're fat, ugly and old. Even fat, ugly and old guys try to date up one league at least. Even where that not the case, you have an abysmal personality riddled with myriad made-up disorders that hide simple chagrin at not being everybody's favorite little princess. Plus you hate women and men equally in various creative twisted little ways that you rationalize as a "feminist" philosophy, simply because, unlike them, you're an amorphous blob.
When you next face a mirror i hope you meet your own gaze and in that terrifying glimpse into the void that is your soul your resolve to leave the internet forever and never take pills again, as the first two baby-steps in emancipating yourself from a super-vocal and well-connected spec of dust to a more demure, elegant, introspective and, ultimately, happier, human being.
Best regards,
Martha
Thanks for your time, "Martha".
I suppose it's kind of testament to something, that my post, about mine own experiences, moved someone to such emotion that they felt compelled to take the time to write this.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Discontinuation Syndrome":
My grandfather has leukemia and is pushing 90. He has recently entered a deep depression on account of you know... facing the inevitability of death and all. Nothing as serious as being a whiny recluse with bad self-esteem, but, then again, nobody is as unlucky as YOU. He was prescribed Citalopram to regulate said depression. He took it, it didn't do much except makes some of his accompanying neuroses simmer down. He took it for a while, then yesterday i find out he had finished his prescription and had forgotten to tell me or my dad to refill it. So he'd essentially been off it, cold turkey, for a few days. Absolutely no withdrawal symptoms.
So yeah, my point is that you're pretty much a "lightweight" (a term i use in substitution of another only to elude any profanity filtering that may occur). Since you're looking things up on the internet, look up "hypochondria", "cry for help" and "grasping at straws to feed said compunctions".
Since i bothered to write this much, here's a bonus: that crush guy will never like you because he's a guy and you're fat, ugly and old. Even fat, ugly and old guys try to date up one league at least. Even where that not the case, you have an abysmal personality riddled with myriad made-up disorders that hide simple chagrin at not being everybody's favorite little princess. Plus you hate women and men equally in various creative twisted little ways that you rationalize as a "feminist" philosophy, simply because, unlike them, you're an amorphous blob.
When you next face a mirror i hope you meet your own gaze and in that terrifying glimpse into the void that is your soul your resolve to leave the internet forever and never take pills again, as the first two baby-steps in emancipating yourself from a super-vocal and well-connected spec of dust to a more demure, elegant, introspective and, ultimately, happier, human being.
Best regards,
Martha
Thanks for your time, "Martha".
posted by Masonic Boom | 2:07 pm
9 Comments:
I can't imagine the level of tedium 'Martha' must have in his/her life to be so utterly enraged by your last blog post, and consequently have spent his/her time writing this. I wish I had that kind of spare time.
Keep your chin up, Kate; not everyone on the internet is an arsehole.
Yeah, Boom, obviously your problem is you're not girly and demure enough. Not like Martha, who despite rather obviously being the more bitchy, threatened kind of male, identifies himself with the uncreative loser sister who Jesus didn't like as much as her sister, which is frightfully girly and demure.
Jeez.
On 'her' comment part one: What hurts more, your broken finger or someone else's broken leg?
On reflection, it probably is a woman. Thing is, conservative females often police other women the hardest because they have the most invested in this mindset of the "demure" woman. Like there's this groundswell of anger that they can't acknowledge, that they've had to play by these restrictive roles, so how DARE another women presume that she can escape them?
Paragraph 1 was actually the strangest to me, though. There's a part of me that thinks "Hang on, PRESCRIBING SSRIs to a 90 year old man with a terminal illness... WHAT?!?!"
For a start, hasn't he had 90 years to come to terms with his own mortality? I mean, I accepted the fact that I, and everyone else I knew, was going to die one day, back in my teens, after our family pet died.
Hey, maybe that's flippant. Poor guy makes it to 90 and gets leukaemia. Shouldn't this be the time when the guy sees his priest (if he's that way inclined) or a counsellor if he's not religious and get Martha into some bereavement counselling - I *know* for a fact that hospitals have chaplains and counsellors on hand to deal with this kind of thing because my mother WORKED as one for several years.
The conflation of GRIEF, or the acceptance of mortality - normal, natural human emotions that no one gets to avoid - with the actual disease of Depression (or in my case, Bipolar Disorder) is something very troubling. From a layman like Martha, troubling but expected - from whatever doctor was prescribing psychoactive drugs for normal human emotions - EXTREMELY troubling and, to my mind, symptomatic of the rampant over-medication which has lead to my disillusionment with big pharma.
The paragraph after that is pure WTF, showing a willing disregard of any kind of medical knowledge. Um, yes. I'm a pussy because I've experienced documented side effects of a psychoactive drug. Uh-huh.
Knowing nothing of her father's dosage or length of prescription, (especially considering she says that he's had no trouble after "a few days" when the Discontinuation Syndrome kicks in after the residual drug has drained from the system - which can take weeks) I could easily turn around and say something like "Hey, I smoked for a couple of months when I was 17. Quit stone cold when I got bored of it, never had any problems. These people who have smoked 2 packs a day for 20 years - LIGHTWEIGHTS and attention seekers the lot of them, for not being able to quit, right off, like I did!"
I’m used to this kind of medieval attitude towards mental illness. I’ve experienced it so much in my life. This idea that you’re somehow faking it, or just “attention seeking” or you should just pull your socks up and get over it. That’s what the difference is, between normal human emotions like grief, or sadness – and actual mental illness on the scale of things like clinical depression and bipolar disorder. It *doesn’t* have any basis in wilfulness or laziness or somehow refusing to “get over it.” It’s a medical disease, and one that deserves the same kind of compassion as, say, leukaemia. But no. Martha is too concerned about being perceived as “demure and elegant” to have any time to waste on compassion or understanding.
I know a lot of non-psychiatric doctors prescribe SSRIs to dying old people for facilitative reasons - making things easier for themselves, the family, and of course the aged dying person in terms of the dying person's crankiness, rather than in an effort to help the dying person with his psychological need to come to terms with his own demise. I don't have the ethical understanding to say if that's wrong or not. To me it seems less wrong than some of the other reasons SSRIs are prescribed.
Meanwhile everybody who makes it into early middle age loses their grandparents, and usually it sucks, and usually they somehow still manage without being a jerk-off female impersonator who vomits all over other people's blogs about how they're fat, ugly, old, amorphous, abysmal, lightweight, pseudo-feminist, hypochondriac, undemure, "", "", etc.
Hmmm, perhaps the venom is also due to some repressed guilt at the fact that she's such a doting granddaughter and cares so much she managed to let his medication run out in the first place!
My initial thoughts on reading this were pretty much the same as yours, Kate. Being elderly and facing a terminal illness and the inevitable grieving process and dealing with that shouldn't automatically be medicated, and I kind of hope that the story is just made up nonsense because I'd like to think that anyone in this person's situation would be offered appropriate counselling etc.
As for the "there's always someone worse off than you" moral to her story - yeah, you might be young, physically healthy and not facing a terminal illness etc etc, but that doesn't make the chemical inbalance in your brain any less real. By the same token, perhaps health services in the "developed" world should start turning away people and reminding them that their overall standard of living is probably pretty good and there are kids in India scavenging in rubbish tips to try and make a living, so quit whining about your illness/injury etc, pull yourself together and that broken leg will just heal itself.
I should say I do dip in and out of your blog occasionally because you're an interesting writer, so I apologise for lurking and not saying much up until now, but reading this and your last post compels me to say 1)You're ace, and don't let "Martha" or anyone else say otherwise, and 2)I hope your withdrawal is going okay - it is a big deal and difficult, I know, but stay strong and I'm sure you'll succeed.
Sending you positive thoughts (because not everyone on the internet is horrible),
Emily x
I don't know. I'm really ambivalent about this usage of psychotropic drugs for "normal" emotions such as grief and loss and coming to terms with mortality. My gut reaction is that it's wrong - whether ethically or morally, I can't say, but it just seems really, really questionable.
I know that I come from a different age and a different mentality - but I do honestly believe that emotions, even negative ones, exist for a reason, and it is not wise to magic them away with a pill, even if that were possible. I don't know if this is some Calvinist streak in me, or if it's some more psychological idea that "whatever unpleasant emotions you repress or refuse to deal with, in whatever way, will eventually come back to bite you."
That's not even getting into the machinations of Big Pharma, which probably deserve their own blog post (I've been reading a lot on this subject recently for obvious reasons.) They are purely profit driven corporations who are certainly not above manufacturing new usages for their pills in order to boost their profits. The more I read about the drive to increase the profitability of medications during their patent period, the more I realised that there was something not entirely altruistic about the increasing medicalisation of human conditions like shyness and, in this case, grief.
But I suppose in the ultimate cost-benefit analysis of where insurance companies and/or the NHS are gonna spend their money, I suppose pills work out cheaper than actually paying a counsellor to help someone work through something. (I can picture some actuarial grunt working it out, going "dudes gonna kick the bucket soon anyway, no use paying for expensive talk therapy.") It does seem like it’s something done to facilitate those around the patient, rather than care for the patient in any kind of meaningful way, and that to me seems exploitative.
The irony being, of course, that due to my mother's job, I've come to realise how much of this kind of talk therapy work is considered part of the role of a chaplain or parish priest. That the training for priests does actually consist of large amounts of pastoral counselling and guidance for exactly these kinds of issues. Makes me kind of wonder how much of the baby we've "thrown out with the bathwater" WRT religion. I mean, lord knows, I wouldn't want to go back to the kind of repressive woman-hating religion that someone like "Martha" would clearly recommend. But that kind of communal care, and tackling of philosophical issues like, why do people die, why do people suffer - that's one of the things that spirituality is supposed to be *there* to provide an answer to.
With the dying person usage I was mentioning, the doctors who prescribed it didn't have any idea in mind of interfering with the grieving process, or the coming-to-terms-with-one's-own-death process, or even making the person less sad, but the very facilitative goal in mind of not having the dying person be impossibly cranky with their own family, or indeed (as they readily admitted) impossible with the doctor.
But then these are doctors whose training in terms of psychiatry was really minimal, and even if it hadn't been I think practical knowledge of how SSRIs prescribed for one purpose interfere in others is really thin on the ground. While I'm all for people being less cranky, especially in their last days with their loved ones, it is hard to see how SSRIs, from my experience of them, wouldn't interfere in the natural emotional processes of death.
But that's the thing, the crankiness. I'm not sure I see crankiness as an emotion so much as a reaction, to being in pain, to being in great distress. I have a pre-emptive horror of being very cranky as I die, and being, in my last days with my loved ones, about as sweet to them as someone who's just had their wisdom teeth out. And though I'm almost pathologically anti-SSRI, that seems suddenly like a damn good reason to take them.
Don't know.
the very facilitative goal in mind of not having the dying person be impossibly cranky with their own family, or indeed (as they readily admitted) impossible with the doctor.
Are SSRIs really that much help with this?
That's a genuine question, not me being facetious. Because in my (albeit limited experience) SSRIs did nothing to to help with crankiness, or being in pain, or being difficult to deal with.
They had a fairly blanket effect on *depression* - they momentarily lifted the hopelessness, cleared the suicidal thoughts, gave me just enough energy to get out of bed, go through the motions of doing the actual stuff that *did* help me manage my illness. But they did so at a cost.
It just seems so misprescribed, if they are just viewed as this magic Happy Pill to magic away crankiness.
Better to look at what is causing the crankiness. When I am dying, I am sure I am going to be cranky as hell. But I'd like someone to listen to what is *causing* that. Physical pain? For gods sake, get some painkillers in me. The hysterical US drugs policy is so ridiculous if you can give someone with a terminal illness SSRIs, but not Morphine, which would actually help with the problem.
Am I cranky because I'm lonely? Get me a counseller. Because I'm having a spiritual crisis? Get me a priest (or a Buddhist monk or whatever belief you subscribe to.) Because I've got absolutely no control left over my life in an enviroment that has medicalised every emotion I experience?
Ah, there have been quite some famous and very interesting studies done on the improvements in the lives of the extreme aged/terminally ill based on tiny aspects of control, but this is probably not the place to go into them.
Post a Comment
<< Home