Soldiers suffering much for nothing much at all
This Wednesday is ‘ANZAC Day’ in Australia, a day on which we remember those men and women who marched bravely off to war and especially those who did not return. For those who did, a necessary myth of the unrelenting war machine is that just as young soldiers must be honourably blown to bits by land mines (or whatever), the damaged ex-veterans must carry themselves with quiet dignity. There is little sympathy shown for any solider who comes home and cannot keep his shite together. That war is necessarily horrific and commonly traumatic are deadly facts obscured behind the carefully constructed facade that these deeply troubled men were already predisposed to their now, demonstrable madness. Moreover, solutions to this centuries’ old problem increasingly hinge on building up young recruits to become even more resilient in the face of constantly anticipating or participating in death and destruction. In fact, perhaps the most bizarre solution I have heard about involves using Martin Seligman’s positive psychology approach against soldiers, simultaneously stripping the war machine of any culpability while compelling those hapless soldiers to simply try harder.
It will not work.
War stinks…
Like this:
Gay men getting madder by the minute
The second ‘Private Lives‘ study here in Australia has confirmed that us pewfs are totally fucking mad and are getting madder, still, by the minute. This report conveniently apportions absolute blame for our burgeoning psychopathology to ‘heterosexism’…
‘There is now a well established body of research showing significant variations in the prevalence and patterns of mental ill-health between GLBT and mainstream communities (Corboz, Dowsett, et al. 2008; Herek and Garnets 2007; Meyer 2003; Smith et al. 2003). In particular, the research suggests that GLBT people are at increased risk of a range of mental health problems, including depression, anxiety disorders, self-harm and suicide, due to their experiences of heterosexist discrimination and abuse (Cochran and Mays 2000; Cochran, Sullivan and Mays 2003; Cox, Dawaele et al. 2009; Hillier, Jones et al. 2010; Pitts, Mitchell et al. 2006; Suicide Prevention Australia 2009)’.
While I can admire the ‘good politics’ of holding onto the now dated concept that heterosexism renders us fags crazy, that quaint finding is not reflected in how other researchers approach this problematic, which is mostly through the epigenetic lens, whereby gay men are born with a genetic predisposition to madness, but alternatively, for some researchers, in which homosexuality and mental illness are melded into one. Thus, cure one, cure the other.
The rush to get as many fags as possible into mainstream health services to have their madness treated will instantly leave at the door discussions about the impacts of ‘heterosexism’ or whatever upon our mental health to instead have us become the passive recipients of the pharmacological gear to which we will be plied, and our pathetic transition into the category of diseased subjects.
When, for example, serial homophobe Jeff Kennett claims that he wants to help out, we should all be extremely concerned…
Like this:
Psychotropic Medications Increase Cardiac Death
Honkola J, Hookana E, Malinen S, Kaikkonen KS, Junttila MJ, Isohanni M, Kortelainen ML, & Huikuri HV (2012). Psychotropic medications and the risk of sudden cardiac death during an acute coronary event. European heart journal, 33 (6), 745-51 PMID: 21920969
What do you do when you discover that the medication that you manufacture causes manifest harm to those patients that it is supposed to help?
What do you do when you prescribe that medication to your patients and instead of getting well they actually get sicker or drop dead?
What do you do when your mental health policy rests entirely upon patients taking or being forced to take medications such as these?
At what point does objective, empirical evidence come to the fore?
We have known for some time that psychotropic medications increase morbidity and mortality. What we have yet to confirm is precisely how those medications cause ill health and early death (2012,p.749). One thing of which we can be certain is that any purported cause-effect relationship between the so-called mental illnesses and higher rates of morbidity and mortality is illusory. I would suggest that this myth was created to cover the arses of those who have most to lose from the truth, that is, big pharma, psychiatrists, and the other parasites that collectively constitute the grubby business of marketing madness.
In this article, Honkola et al. (2012, p.749) conclude that there is a positive association between the use of psychotropic medications and sudden cardiac death (SCD). That association strengthens dramatically when those drugs are used in combination with anti-depressants:
‘A very high risk of SCD was observed in those individuals who were using both antipsychotic and antidepressant medication. The risk was particularly high with phenothiazines combined with anti-depressant medication, suggesting that the combined use of these drugs may potentiate their proarrhythmic effects at the time of an acute ischaemic event. The use of benzodiazepines, a class of drugs which do not have any recognized proarrhythmic potential, was similar between the groups, suggesting that psychiatric disorders, at least anxiety, does not increase the vulnerability to fatal events, whereas the drugs used for mental disorders have a more marked effect’ (2012, pp.749-750).
I guess that if you were pushing people off the twig 20 years or so in advance of their expected use by date, you would have good reason to be defensive about that unpleasant reality…
What we have here is a magnificent cause-effect fallacy in which some people diagnosed (sic, labelled) as suffering with depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, etc., do indeed demonstrate a tendency toward getting sicker and dying younger than everyone else (2012, p.745). The presence of these two distinct phenomena has led to an untouchable line being drawn between the two, as confirmation that the former is sole cause for the latter. That is junk science. If an undergraduate student put up such rubbish straw arguments in an academic essay, her or his lecturer would boot them out the door and into the gutter. However, big pharma and psychiatry can concoct a stupendous farrago of lies and half-truths that mental illness causes higher morbidity and mortality, without the proof necessary to back it up.
Any patient so grandiose in her or his ideas could expect to have their psychotropic medications increased…
The authors (2012, p.750) make a few recommendations:
- Curbing the ‘liberal off-label use’ of psychotropic medications
- Avoiding combined, anti-psychotic and anti-depressant treatment
- Promoting good physical health in people who are mentally unwell
We will look back at this marketing madness era with horror and disgust, wondering how the fuck could we have ever allowed this to happen? How could we have forced perfectly healthy people to take drugs that would trash their lives and smash them into their graves way ahead of schedule? No doubt, the instant rejoinder to that would be twofold: acknowledging that all drugs have side effects and that a diminution in physical health is the price paid for peace of mind. That sounds like a perfectly reasonable response until we remember that the primary duty of any health practitioner is to do no harm. What can be said about any doctor who, when telling or forcing patients to take psychotropic medications, fails to inform those patients about the potential side effects or worse, who obfuscates around the truth to deceive those patients into believing that it is their mental illness which is making them sick?
I note that neurological damage to the brain does cause physical ill health but mental illness is not neurological damage to the brain, right…?
Moreover, if you ever have any concerns about any medication you are taking, please seek sound medical advice…
No Sunny Gay Land for Queens
For the uninitiated, Queensland is stuck in the deep north of Australia and stands rank as an embarrassing social, cultural and political backwater. When foreigners (and to Queenslanders, anyone not born in that state and who is not also white, straight and Christian, is a foreigner) comment that the so-called ‘Sunshine State’ is 50 years behind the times, they really are being generous. A more pathetic place one could hardly imagine. That Queensland’s greatest claim to fame is that it attracts elderly citizens from the colder southern states who, too afraid of the violence on the streets below, hide away in their luxury apartments to await their lonely deaths, speaks volumes for the local zeitgeist.
The current Queensland state election would usually attract about as much interest in the rest of Australia as a sheep in Scotland composing a symphony on an IPAD. However, every now and then, one of the local loons up there throws a stinking clanger high into the air and whereas reasonable people would usually scatter before the shit splatters, in Queensland, they stand firm and relish in it. Where else, after all, could people defend an election campaign video that not only pours scorn on gay marriage equality but does it by making a disturbing association between homosexuality and paedophilia? My suggestion would be that unless you are a southerner close to death’s door, there is every reason to give the Sunshine State a swerve…
The Common Origins of Homosexuality and Mental Illness
Zietsch BP, Verweij KJ, Heath AC, Madden PA, Martin NG, Nelson EC, & Lynskey MT (2012). Do shared etiological factors contribute to the relationship between sexual orientation and depression? Psychological medicine, 42 (3), 521-32 PMID: 21867592
We are bombarded with an ever-worsening picture of gay men’s mental health. Every time I tune into the gay press these days there are lofty claims about how mad we all are, and getting madder by the second. I know and others who regularly read my blog would also know that I stopped counting when the LGBTI Health Alliance called us the most suicidal Australians of all (a big rap, to be sure, and motivation enough for me to hastily drop my local citizenship to be restored as fully Irish). The shimmer in those shocking statistics was that ‘worst’ can actually be enumerated as 14 times more likely than non-pewfs to do the deadly deed. Fourteen times, I say, why not 100 or 1000? Thankfully, Zietsch et al. (2012, p.p.521) pull back in this article to a measly twice as often but dang, who really cares about a 700 per cent gap between researchers, anyway?
That said, if I was hoping for the authors (2012) here to embark on a sensible revision of the bulging mountain of crap that has sprung up, linking pewfness to madness, I was soon sorely disappointed. In fact, by the time I got to the end of this article I was positively seething that the authors (2012) felt compelled to issue a plea to homophobes that their findings not be used as anti-pewf fodder:
‘It should be emphasized that the findings of this study should not be interpreted so as to pathologize non-heterosexuality, any more than we should pathologize non-right-handedness, which is also associated with higher rates of psychiatric disorder (Elias et al. 2001; DeLisi et al. 2002). Research aiming to understand the link between sexual orientation and psychiatric disorder should not be stymied by groups that seek to misuse the findings to support an anti-gay agenda’ (p.529)
A similar argument might be put for the right to free speech versus the intended or likely outcome of such speech to promote violence against gay men or any other marginalised group. One can wish for research to be objective, critical inquiry and one can start out earnestly wanting to discover why it is that pewfs are ever so shockingly mad in comparison to non-pewfs. However, anyone claiming that ‘non-heterosexuality’ (2012, p.522) and depression share common etiological backgrounds is bound to ramp up passions on both sides of this hotly contested debate. Even more so, I would suggest, since Zietsch et al. (2012) trash the widely-held notion that sexual orientation is fixed at birth (p.529). They quip that it is the freaky interplay between genes and environment (2012, p.529) and not any ‘biological theory of male sexual orientation’ (2012, p.529) that creates male subjects who grow up bent, and blue (p.528).
Caused perhaps by an absent father and overbearing mother?
Well, not precisely, but Zietsch et al. (2012, p.523) do promote those well known criminals, that is, poor parenting and (pp. 523, 526, 528-529) childhood sexual abuse (pp.523-524, 526, 528-529), as possible explanations for later, co-existing homosexuality and depression. When claiming ‘that 60% of the correlation between sexual orientation and depression can be accounted for by genetic factors’ and that pewfs are born predisposed to neuroticism and psychoticism, the authors (2012, p.528) are veering so worryingly close to coming out with their own flaky gene theory that they might as well be selling pink slime on top of that grotty DNA. According to that theory (by whatever name), pewfness and madness are co-located in the same messed-up genes and so finding those faulty genes opens the door to knocking out two duds for the effort of one. Unfortunately, it also buys right into the homophobic garbage that homosexuality is a sickness that can be cured.
Admittedly, at first glance I was fascinated to read in this article (2012) that pewfs in that progressive liberal democracy, Norway, are still so resolutely down in the dumps, despite all the lavish servings of humanity bestowed upon them in recent years (pp.521-522). Does hard evidence of that type confirm, therefore, that even accounting for contextual variations, pewfs are more prone to madness than are non-pewfs and further, that pewfness and madness are spat from the same stinking pot? On that point, Zietsch et al. (2012) appear to simultaneously back the certainty of that causal association while conceding ‘uncertainty’ as to how one gets from stinking pot to gloomy queen (pp.528-529). Even discounting the critical causation problems associated with the frustrating fuzziness of any depression ‘diagnosis’, there are numerous alternative explanations for why pewfs are seemingly exponentially madder than non-pewfs, including that:
- Gay men are more likely than straight men to be aware of and responsive to their emotions;
- Gay men are more likely than straight men to seek professional help for their emotional problems;
- Even in enlightened domains such as Norway, health professionals are likely to hold stigmatised behaviours and attitudes toward gay men, among them that such men are inherently flaky;
- And flowing from above: just as health professionals are less likely to recognise depressive symptoms in straight men, they are more likely to recognise depressive symptoms in gay men; and
- The immense power imbalance that is usually contained within the doctor-patient relationship enforces the will of the former over the latter or more simply put, the patient tends to confirm what the doctor wants to hear:
D: How are you feeling?
P: I feel like total shite.
D: So you’re depressed, then?
P: Yes, I guess so…
The quest to improve our understanding of why gay men are seemingly overrepresented in mental health statistics must be undertaken with due regard to the constant presence of homophobia in our lives. Those who would gladly see us burn in hell because of who we are or what we do, predominantly, that many of us engage fervently in anal sex, would be full of joy to learn that researchers are getting closer and closer to proving what they already knew, that is, that homosexuality is a discrete, psychopathological subset. Dissin’ the dominant ‘‘minority stress’ hypothesis’ (p.521) is hardly a radical step by the authors (2012) when one considers that many within the gay rights movement have already done the same, primarily because the they hate us hypothesis does not properly explain why so many gay men are depressed, suicidal, self-harming or drug-fucked. However, replacing that hypothesis with a biogenetic one will not itself yield more robust findings and could pave the way to pewf extinction…
Update: Having been told about this article, seasoned gay haters, Salt Shakers, commented that the findings ‘certainly confirm what we have said for some time’…
Drunken Escape Fuels Much Male Suicide
Coleman, D., Kaplan, M., & Casey, J. (2011). The Social Nature of Male Suicide: A New Analytic Model International Journal of Men’s Health, 10 (3), 240-252 DOI: 10.3149/jmh.1003.240
Male suicide is a highly emotive topic. Few of us like to talk openly about any sort of death, let alone when someone has topped or attempted to top himself. Ever more disinclined we are likely to become to start blathering on, should the subject person have been an immediate family member, close friend or trusted colleague. The poor sod must have been depressed or was somehow masking his depression through drinking like a fish or frittering away his life savings on the pokies or working himself into the ground. These are the quick, preferable coveralls to any deeper, alternative explanations of the truth. That we refrain from stepping into that troubled space where men frequently think about suicide and infrequently act upon those thoughts no doubt underpins why male suicide remains such a decidedly stubborn problem to fix.
On breakfast television this morning, commentators from opposing sides were debating the hypothesis, whether we should decriminalise the personal use of drugs that are currently illegal. The prohibition argument rested on pathologising the pathetic addict as a helpless deer caught in a trap, waiting for some evil drug dealer to set upon her or him to rapidly suck the life from their veins. That two-bit fairy tale reminds me that the suicidal male, too, is invariably stripped of all individual agency, self-efficacy and knowing intent to become instead the passive recipient of some dark, external force. ‘Was depressed’ is what we mostly say nowadays when whispering about some guy found the night before hanging off a tree in our local park. We then nervously shuffle off such untimely deaths to medical orthodoxy, for them to consider in glorious isolation.
Medical orthodoxy can never adequately explain why any particular man chooses to kill himself. For one, they are deprived of what was going on inside that man’s head at the precise moment he decided to take his own life. Moreover, almost invariably they are denied an accurate description of the context in which that man was living around the time of his death, often relying on the perhaps unreliable reports of others to fill in the gaps. Those reports are then filtered through a doggedly biomedical lens to confirm that yes, for sure, that poor sod was woefully depressed. Missing from that constricted explanatory framework is the first-person narrative in which the male subject describes his own suicide attempt and further, what Coleman et al. (2011) refer to here as the requisite ‘social lens’ (p.240).
That is, as they put it, ‘[u]nderstanding male suicide requires a social lens’ (2011, p.240).
I think you need to grasp the personal and the context elements and therein, the myriad of relationships between that subject and his settings, to get a proper understanding of what drives any man to push his own life over the edge. It is a great shame that male suicide survivors continue to be shut out of most research into suicide prevention or, perversely, when they are admitted it is usually on the strict pre-condition that they accept medical orthodoxy as fact. You were mad, you were depressed, you were irrational, out of your mind, and of course, you never really wanted to die. We continue to thrash around in a sea of clichéd value judgments about male suicide, falling back as the authors (2011) do here on noting various risk factors for early demise: whiteness (p.243), gayness (pp.243-244) and drunkenness (p.242), among others.
What I did like about this article is that Coleman (2011, pp.246) move quickly past the usual dross to come up with a plausible explanation for male suicide, based on Baumeister’s (1990) ‘escape theory of suicide and Hufford’s (2001) subsequent elaboration of it in analysing alcohol use and suicide’:
‘The theory is at the individual level, but the dynamics described by escape theory reflect consequences of the dominant male gender role. Though Baumeister (1990) did not emphasize gender in his theory, he argued that depression was not a satisfying explanation for the majority of suicidal behaviour, and his theory sought to explain both depressed and non-depressed suicidal acts. Stated simply, escape theory proposes that suicidal acts are more likely when an individual is emotionally distressed by a self-perception of failure and this leads to a narrowing cognitive state of limited emotion, attention, and lowered inhibition. The suicidal act is an effort to escape an intolerable view of self and the related negative affect’ (p.246)
Another plausible explanation for the exponentially higher rate of completed suicides in men, when compared to women (Coleman et al. 2011, p.244), can be expressed like so:
- From birth, males are subjected to multiple instances of attachment trauma, first by their primary carers wanting to raise them as boys should be raised and thereby establishing distance and a refusal to comfort. That odious practice is reinforced in the public domain, where boys soon learn that to seek emotional support from their peers is to run the risk of getting their heads kicked in (Pollack, 2006, in Coleman et al. 2011, p.246).
- At the same time, these boys are continually reminded of their patriarchal dividend, that is, what power and control they currently possess or at least can expect to realise, purely because they were born male. Grandiose expectations collide with an inflated sense of entitlement that certain things should always be just so like, for example, that once married your wife will obey and serve you, always.
- Stemming from that bizarre sense of entitlement, all men retain the option of using violence to prosecute their cause (Hunt 2006, in Coleman et al. 2011, p.249). Ergo, the men’s rights movement was founded and has persisted to date on a steady supply of mindless aggression. These men are seriously affronted that their former partners and others would dare to challenge their god-given right to resort freely to the biffo.
- Which can all lead to that most interesting of outcomes, that is, that when push comes to shove, and men are confronted by one or more life stressors, many crumple into a pile of dog shite or otherwise, thrash around wildy, inflicting violence on others and if need be, on themselves. While the authors (2011) suggest that male suicide might be the product of men’s meanderings into the extremes ‘of the traditional male gender role’ (p.249), I would interject that something more rudimentary might be at work…
Something, perhaps, long ago, when a distressed little boy turned to his ma or da or other primary caregiver for a hug and they brushed him off, thinking ’tis better to crush his immediate need for closeness than to transform him later, into an immaculate pewf…
Like this:
Narcissism Drains Men’s Credibility
Reinhard, D., Konrath, S., Lopez, W. & Cameron, H. (2012). Expansive Egos: Narcissistic Males Have Higher Cortisol PLOS One, 7 (1)
Narcissism is a funny ‘personality trait’ (2012, n.pag.) and an even funnier mental illness, since the prime condition of being irreversibly and unquestionably stuck up one’s own arse is as much admired as it is loathed. We live in an era where we daren’t call or criticise anyone, where every degree of human suffering can be equivocated and every failing, dismissed. The pumped-up person and even more so, the pumped-up man is something to which we can all aspire and yet, as Reinhard et al. (2012) lament here, this man is actually suffering like a mongrel dog. As I write this I think back over narcissistic men I have known or still know and wonder how I came to portray such total arseholes as objects of my pity instead of my derision?
‘Despite grandiose self-perceptions, many researchers find that narcissists simultaneously possess fragile self-views grounded in a sense of inferiority and worthlessness. For example, Horvath and Morf [2009] demonstrate that a threat to the ego activates concepts of worthlessness in those scoring high in narcissism, but has no effect on low scorers. To cope with these feelings of inferiority, narcissists use defensive strategies following threats to self’ (2012)
No disrespect to Horvath and Morf (2009), but a paucity of ego resilience is a consequence common to many different blunt blows to the psyche. Adults abused as children, for example, often grow up easily rattled by the slightest jarring to ‘who’ they are. That does not mean that such people are also woefully narcissistic. Most are not. The fundamental problematic of the narcissist is that she or he is totally incapable of empathising with anyone. Worse than that, she or he derives perverse pleasure from causing torment to others, particularly those to whom that narcissist is ‘close’. Why we then anguish over such calculating fuckwits and reconfigure their dastardly deeds as the unwitting outpourings of a troubled soul, would go some way to explain the surge in the prevalence of this disturbing ‘disease’.
Culturally, conditions are presently ripe for the proliferation of narcissists…
I would dispute the contention put forward by the authors (2012), that narcissism is characterised by defensiveness and that in turn leads to an increase in physiological arousal which in turn, again, can be matched by a bleed of chemicals into the bodies of the on edge subject. Well, at least when the subject is male (2012). Granted, tests like those conducted in this study (2012) might reasonably conclude that a positive association exists between being male, a higher degree of cortisol and unhealthy (or destructive) narcissism. However, I would hazard a guess that it is not defensiveness driving the cortisol flooding in narcissistic men but alternatively, aggression. It sadly remains a culturally acceptable practice for men within most industrialised nations to take down anyone who threatens their jive:
‘Males tend to score higher on narcissism, and males also have larger increases in cortisol concentrations after stressors…Given societal definitions of masculinity that overlap with narcissism (ie. they include arrogance and dominance), we hypothesize that these difficulties in maintaining an inflated sense of the self are at least in part related to the extent to which males endorse stereotypically male gender roles. Threats to male gender roles and masculinity are constant, and provide a source of stress that make these roles difficult to maintain. Narcissism is also stressful and difficult to maintain. In addition, both high masculinity and narcissism advocate for high independence and agency, and empathize individualism over an acceptance of social support’ (2012)
Earlier this week I read that ordinary grieving linked to death or other significant forms of loss is heading for inclusion in the DSM-V. It is likely that narcissism will be up for the chop from that bloated psychiatrists’ bible. For the latter point, I say loudly, hurry up already! Narcissism should never have been classified as a mental illness, to then serve as a grotesque get of jail free card for men who cannot keep their grubby paws, or whatever, to themselves. The deification of certain bodily chemicals as being the shut down to any dissenting critique can only be sustained if one adheres to the rubbish that such chemicals have a single causative effect like, for example, that cortisol causes defensiveness. I know, defensiveness also causes cortisol but so too does aggression, among many other considerations.
The next time I see a man behaving narcissistic-ally, I shan’t be fretting over the poor thing’s cortisol levels. Why men ramp up so readily, with hubris and gusto, is not a chemically induced reaction based on the pretext of defensiveness but simply a culturally acceptable practice that men can and often do, behave badly…
Like this:
Australian Men Still Stark Raving Mad
Jorm, A., & Reavley, N. (2012). Changes in psychological distress in Australian adults between 1995 and 2011 Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry DOI: 10.1177/0004867411428017
As the Australian Government rolls out its 10 year ‘roadmap‘ for mental health reform, research by Jorm and Reavley (2012) tells the sorry tale that over the past 15 years or so, the mental health of men (and women) across this wide brown land has stagnated. Considering the mega billions poured by Government directly and indirectly into mental health generally and into specific programs targeted at men (think National Suicide Prevention Strategy), it would reasonably be expected that the dour-o-meter should be going backwards. To that end, at least the suicide rate for men has declined considerably from its peak in 1998 (2012, n.pag).
Jorm and Reavley (2012) postulate socioeconomic factors and ‘environmental change’, including ‘major flooding’ as possible reasons for the statistical blockage. Another potential explanation that they offer up is that as people become more aware of mental health issues they are more likely to report (2012). Controversially, the authors (2012) wonder if poor quality mental health services, the overprescription of anti-depressants and the misuse of the Medicare, Better Access (psychological counselling scheme) have not added to the malaise. Where they end up is where I always start, that is, that there needs to be much more emphasis by Government on taking ‘preventive action’ to account for the ‘social determinants of mental health’ (2012).
Tragically, the Government’s roadmap for the upcoming decade continues to largely ignore those social determinants.
Yes, dear readers, we all know, ’tis the Australian way to go round and round and round in circles, like a dingo with distemper…
See also: I only stumbled upon this rant from Alan Rosen on Croakey the day after sprouting out the above. I swear, so pointed, so insightful, and so funny, a solid boot up the date for the circular nothingness that constitutes not only mental health reform in Australia right now but essentially, also how the Government generally does business. No wonder so many Australians, who can afford it, spend so much time travelling abroad!
Blah! Blah! Blah!