eye of the storm

pro-ana(rexia) websites have been causing quite a fuss lately. i was once engaged to an anorexic who was also a remarkable political theorist. the shit is life-threatening and must be taken seriously as a problem. but i think it is far more complex and interesting and important than people think. it's usually treated as a mimicry problem: girls mechanically imitating pictures in a monkey-see monkey-do structure. that is certainly an unbelievably impoverished, simplistic, and condescending account. we should think of it as raising issues of the power of girls over their own bodies, as a massive assertion of will or self-control, a declaration of autonomy. we need to think of food as a vector of power between parents/institutions and children, and also as a symbol of our animality and dependence on the world around us, a way the world enters into us and the way it leaves us. anorexia, among other things, is a demanding ascetic discipline, and provides the pains and pleasures, the slaveries and liberations, of ascetic disciplines everywhere. it is problematic on multiple grounds. but it is not simple, and it is not a mere reflection of misogyny or self-loathing. it is full of content, symbolic and actual, emotional, political, physical. it is more than a desire to disappear. it is self-assertion as well as self-abnegation. it is not always fundamentally a matter of false body image or of media effects. i think to treat it, we'd better try to deepen our understanding of it. it's not at all surprising that people find each other and support each other even in such a problematic way on the web; it's one of the things that the web is good for. i would not censor or break it in any way. there are thousands of problematic communities, or communities of people with problems, or people who are exploring ways out, around, through, and into the power structures of our society, and our dilemmas as existing human beings. it's ok. or it's not ok. but it's true. and it's important.

speaking of who's making the money on bipolar disorder. etc.

i see the history like this: we moved from various previous models, in which emotional distress was accounted for by demon possession or whatever it might be, to the concept of mental illness. this was a useful metaphor, or extension of the concept of illness, and nothing prevents a metaphor from becoming literal: after everyone calls things like schizophrenia an illness for a hundred years, it is an illness; it falls within the proper extension of the predicate. you could have two parallel but entirely distinct kinds of illnesses, of the body and of the mind. but the dualism behind that made everyone uncomfortable, and was of course thrown into question by the intimacy of the relation: damage someone's brain and, as it were, you hurt their feelings. so the research program moved to a model in which mental illnesses were supposed literally to be physical illnesses. here is where the terrain gets all scumbled up, where you suddenly realize you don't have a very good grasp on concepts like "disease" at all, where dormitive-virtue fallacies proliferate like fungi, etc. that's the conceptual mess we're researching inside now, and the most urgent task would be a clear set of definitions, acceptable standards of reasoning, and so on.

and then the question of whether addiction is a disease is far more complex even than the bipolar case. first, it would support the externalist notions: you can't be an addict just in virtue of brain states: you've got to ingest external substances. which you ingest and how are relevant to the brain chemistry, of course. here we have a huge family of behaviors and stuffs, on a continuum: i've known addicts who didn't last more than a year or two: just did what they did all the time until death or recovery. and i've known addicts who could probably go on to a normal life span, having, say, a few drinks every day, more or less. (let's hold in abeyance addictions to food, pornography, love, sex: good christ.) that it's a coherently-describable brain syndrome seems ridiculous. on the other hand, the disease model(s) gives you important truths about the phenomenology: it doesn't seem to be fully under your conscious control, it seems to have a genetic piece, and so on. and believing that it is a disease turns out to be pragmatically effective to some extent: it means you are not yourself completely to blame, or the people around you, and if you feel completely responsible, that's a collapsing burden of guilt that will keep you using unto death. but again, what is of use to believe and what is true are radically distinct questions. at any rate, i think it's extremely unlikely that you'll find the one wrong gene, or screwed-up synapse. keep trying, though, please.

a few notes: i'm more or less a materialist, and i accept some version of a token-token identity thesis: that is, for example, there might not be an interesting identity between, let's say, anger, and a discernible family of material brain states, but in any given case of anger, there is some material state that corresponds to or is that event. my only qualification would be that the state is not necessarily exclusively a brain state, but could encompass a state of the nervous system, the organism as a whole, and the external world (i am a "content externalist").
also, on the concept of disease: we usually think of disease as the operation of an external agent on an organism, like a virus, e.g. but this is a difficult question, and some ways that the organism might degenerate or be deranged could count as diseases, as in some caused by malnutrition or vitamin definciencies etc: the notion of disease is not well-defined in common use. alzheimer's is an interesting case, for example.
but i don't think that bipolar is likely to be well-described in either of these senses. rather, there might be a family of characteristic brain conditions correlated to some extent with a constellation of symptoms. but that's the very best you will get, moving from an extraordinarily rough symptomatic constellation, generalized as a disease. since every brain-state resembles every other brain-state in indefinitely many respects (indeed, every thing resembles every other thing in indefinitely many respetcs) it's definitely not surprising if we could roughly identify some resemblances between the token brain states correlated with bipolar mental/emotional states. and notice, there might also be correlations to environmental factors and so on that are probably more or less exactly as good.
then direction of explanation introduces a whole host of further complications, not seriously present even in a case like alzheimer's: you're not liable to be able to temporally arrange the relevant brain states as prior to the emotional symptoms and so on.
and then you have to ask: what do you get out of believing that bipolar is a disease? who's making the money and devising the models? etc. i don't do all this to fuck up your treatment, but what one wants or needs to believe to get better is not the same as what is true; indeed, that you want or need to believe it or benefit from believing it is a good reason to be sceptical of it.

i want briefly to consider henry's view that bipolar disorder is a brain disease, treatable with drugs. i do not reject it out of hand, and also i am not really acquainted with the research, so this will be at a pretty high or useless level of generality. now first of all of course the illness is not defined in terms of brain states, but in terms of symptoms: you're down, then you're manic. do that intensely enough, and you're bipolar, whatever your brain states. furthermore, i will stipulate that any particular (token) emotion, thought, etc is identical to some sequence of physical events, (some of them) in the brain. but it's not like we have a bacteria or virus which we can identify as the cause of the symptoms, which is what gives heft to the physiological concept of disease. now what we want to do is see whether, in people that report such symptoms, there are underlying similarities of neural structures or events, pharmaceutically alterable. i am betting that there are such similarities among many, though not all, cases, if we withdraw to a suitable level of generality. but once you give any very precise characterization of these similarities, i'm also betting that there are people with bipolar symptoms who don't display them, and people who don't have bipolar disorder who do. also i'm betting that to encompass as many cases as possible, the characterization of brain states has to become more and more amorphous and impressionistic, taking in as many varied individual states as possible: the characterization of the brain states is from the get-go an attempt to account for as many symptomatically-similar mental states as possible: the reasoning is from symptom to state rather than vice versa. in such a strategy, you will always be able to generate a rough set of symptom-correlated brain states. furthermore, though there are good reasons to think that people who display the symptoms of bubonic plague are all caused to do so by a certain germ, in the bipolar case the relation, to whatever extent it does intend to identify an organic cause, is far, far more elusive, ranging over constructed families of similar brain events. and of course, the matter is correlation rather than causation: the bacteria causes plague, more or less demonstrably. but the brain states, described at a certain level of generality, sort of correlate with the emotional states; either might be the cause of the other or, plausibly, the causal relations are extremely complex.
to just say it's a brain disease is, hence, simplistic. to the extent that this helps us diagnose and treat - to the extent that it makes people less miserable (for one thing by eliminating the disturbing idea that one is responsible in some way for one's emotional disaster) it is useful, though for all that...metaphorical. the "disease model of addiction" is surely exactly like this, and it's embroiled in a whole ethics of responsibility and a whole strategy for treatment. the question of whether it's true or not, no matter how many recovering addicts believe it with total commitment, is a hard question. yes and no. it depends on what you mean, etc.

just back into the breach for a second: "wait. is that a metaphor?" or "to what extent is our conceptuality embroiled in dormitive-virtue fallacies?" are not questions you can answer with, say, mri studies or something. these are questions that lie well outside of the sciences that they are about, and - evidently - outside the skill-sets of the scientists doing the studies. insofar as there are experts on questions like that, they're, like, literary critics or critical-thinking teachers. but obviously they go right to the heart, straight at the foundation, of what these scientists are doing. the discussion cannot be internal to the scientific community. you can't have any science, and you definitely can't have good science, without moving to external questions about taxonomies, methodologies, genealogies. to take the last: ok, say we're doing mri studies on adhd or opposional defiant disorder. when did this concept emerge, and from what, and by whom? how is it deployed in institutions? who benefits? and what then happens to the diagnosees? how else might we conceptualize this terrain? how have we before and how might we later? etc etc. if you've got no take on that, and just keep giving people pills and watching their brains light up, you don't even have any idea what you're doing or why.

i think one implication of the sort of observations i make below is that there just cannot be science without philosophy. the taxonomies and basic methodological assumptions on which a set of scientific results rest cannot be the results of the very inquiries they make possible: that is, science cannot rest on science, or on actual observation and experiment. so for example you can have a couple of centuries of science resting on the concept of race, but the initial taxonomy of races and the initial development of the concept of race are not themselves scientific results; they are assumptions. nor do they yield or dissolve at last under scientific scrutiny, because the observations made under their auspices always confirm them. (in ths case, they yielded to political pressure.) the disease model of emotional difficulties is similar. once you start identifying or enumerating the illnesses under the auspices of the model, all data confirm it, necessarily. and it's not within the purview of science per se to say, hmmm: is that a metaphor? or what? if such things are illnesses, then of course they must be categorized and so on, even if this activity lands you in extreme dormitive-virtue-type fallacies. if there are logical fallacies at the basis of a science (or if, as in the kiddie-dsm case, there is nothing at the bottom besides such a fallacy) that science cannot of course identify them: you need some sort of logician.
putting this in a more practical manner: these "scientists" are so inside questions like whether the proper diagnosis is severe mood dysregulation or oppositional defiant disorder or adhd, and so funded up to their eyeballs inside the whole idea that such questions are significant, and so basically non-conceptual in their approach, that they're just not going to go: what the hell are we doing over here? how do these terms secure reference? etc. they don't have sufficient externality to their own questions to evaluate the basic conceptions on which they rest, and on which their research cannot, by definition, bear.

i was antiquing and quilt-shopping in lancaster county today with the redoubtable ms. judith s, and i bought a little dovetailed wooden box that once evidently contained a patent medicine: "hemaboloids, arseniated with strychnia." feel better, honey?

thus the guardian/observer

Infections from the debilitating norovirus stomach bug will peak this week as millions return to work after the holidays and spread the germs, the government has warned. People are advised to protect themselves by washing their hands thoroughly at all times.

on the other hand, if you're washing your hands "at all times" you may also end up hospitalized, though in a different ward. quite the damn dilemma.

i think we better fight for this guy's right to run his own life. and death. i think we better fight for everyone's.

this is an interesting, hard story. and speaking of "alternative treatments in mexico," you may remember that as the final move of andy kaufman  and coretta scott king, who should have been a couple.

sneeze on

leave it to the diabolical mind of charles krauthammer to wise us up to an extreme unnoticed emergency: that osama is about to release the 1918 flu, creating the final pandemic, the end of the glory that is america. this is how a neocon thinks: here's an interesting event, essentially irrelevant to my worldview: how can i fold, spindle, and mutilate it until it becomes a motivation for increasing the power of america abroad and the power of the executive branch at home?

new brain cells

good news for your head .
i always hate to quibble with rigorous scientific methodology, but this result does rest on the somewhat questionable inference that a bad case of the munchies is evidence that a rat's anxiety has lifted. spelling out the various possibly unwarranted assumptions impacted into this result would mess up my high.

Zhang's team suspected the new brain cells also might be associated with a reduction in anxiety and depression, because previous studies had indicated medications used to treat anxiety and depression achieve their effect this way.

To find out, they treated rats with HU210 for 10 days and then tested them one month later. When placed in a new environment, the rats were quicker to eat their food than rats that did not receive the compound, which suggested there was a reduction in anxiety behaviors.

Another group of rats treated with HU210 showed a reduction in the duration of immobility in a forced swimming test, which is an indication the compound had an anti-depressant effect.

so i'm thinking that maybe we can put terri schiavo out to pasture through intact dilation and extraction .

blood will tell

finally , the secret of eternal youth revealed.
hell would i be without mikey?
wait a second. betterhumans.com??? well i guess we can't get any worse. on the other hand, we can't  get any better, either.

i just posted this: bite the cobain stick .