Random fashion thoughts - Page 4833

Ha, I see - I thought you meant they were playing this weekend. I got a little excited.

Thanks for posting this, Razele - it's pretty sad to see how many people with ADD, ADHD, Depression, or any other mental illness/disorder get written off as "wanting attention," or "going through a phase," or even just "being that way." The fact that people abuse prescriptions, and that over-active parents can get what they want from quack doctors has no bearing on the existence or presence of an illnes. As someone who has struggled with a couple of these issues, and has known even more people who've gone through much, much worse, it's refreshing to run into someone who doesn't just categorize you as a nut, or a wet blanket, or whatever other offensive name they can come up with on the spot. I know several people who, quite literally, wouldn't be alive today if they hadn't had some sort of medical intervention, be it a prescription or simply counseling - and several who perhaps would be, had they been given those aids. In my opinion, it does them all a disservice to disregard their (sometimes constant) struggles with ill-thought-out internet posts. It doesn't seem like something to take lightly.
Edited by Synthese - 1/29/13 at 12:03pm

obviously mental illnesses are real diseases, but you ca't conflate them with something like leukemia -- although obviously if you have a diagnosed condition, you should take appropriate medication. doing otherwise is stupid.

on a related note, it really bugs me how on so many reality shows the host/mentor or whatever tries to put the contestants through therapy. like on the biggest loser, that one bitch trainer is always trying to 'uncover' issues. it's dangerous -- she's not a trained therapist, psychiatrist or psychologist, but she's pretending to be. harmful.

yep TOJ invented the all black varsity jacket.

oh wait..

Lol @ this quackery and pseudoscience talk

As if the mind can even grasp a concept such as the mind...

We understand a lot of how the mind functions. Just because we don't have total understanding doesn't mean the understanding we do have isn't valuable.

Reality is that we have extremly vague ideas of the actual mechanisms mediating the effect of drugs e.g., anti-depressants on illnesses of the mind/brain e.g., depression. Heck, even something as presumebly straight forward as l-dopa against parkinson is very disputed. We really dont get the workings of the neurotransmittor systems on any fine grained level.

But anyway, if clinical trials show that this or that drug works against some condition, its better than nothing (even though anti depressants really isnt that much better than placebo)...

 

We actually don't, though.  An analogy I heard recently was that it's like handing a modern 2013 stealth bomber to scientists in 1900.  They can probably figure out that certain buttons will turn it on, make it go, etc, but actually taking it apart and figuring out what does what is so far beyond current technology... 

The reality of the situation is that I just got the new Ke$ha album and it's a very, very good album.

/banalthoughts

For real though I have been listening to a lot of Taylor Swift

^ exactly, bobo, I said nothing about value of current body of knowledge.

Re: clinical trials, a drug that had 5X higher mortality rate vs placebo was just fast-tracked for TB treatment and the exact mechanism of action ? Unknown (within a certain range of possibilities).

I'm so happy she has a blossoming music career after her stint as a villain in tmnt

Red is great too. ("22" is a fucking awesome.)


The new-er tmnt? Didn't see it.

I loved the old live-action ones with the weird ass costumes and shit. Great stuff.

It's because every Tom, Dick and Harry wants to do a PhD to get them into whatever fellowship they want to do, and the easiest way to do that is to just measure the effectiveness of something.

Noone wants to figure out what is actually going on when they can just do a statistical analysis, find some random statistically significant result, write a few papers and get a doctorate.

woohoo, you're now an expert on how many people this drug exhibits a positive effect in.

The best they aim for is to match the drug's effectiveness with some demographic, or if they really pulled their finger out, they found a gene that has mild association.

They still have no idea why/how though.

All I need are my Songza playlists these days


Rooftop Indie Party, After Dark, Guitars and PBRs, Critical Mob's Critical Playlist and Cool Music series are all fantastic