SY321 Lecture Notes - Coronary Artery Disease, Prostate Cancer, Ayurveda
31 views8 pages
Post traumatic stress disorder:
-a new mental disorder of recent vintage
-cultural context:
-public and private organization they find it profitable to come up w/ new mental
disorders
-pharmaceutical companies can come up w/ drugs to treat these disorders
Vietnam:
-war vets started returning home in 1971 and had problems adjusting
-the war was very unpopular in America
-young men and some women in the war
-treated as hardly heroes
-recession hit at so no jobs for them
-by 1974 many were finding the stress too much to take and many began to
believe that their problems were psychiatric and that they had a specific
disorder
-launched a national campaign and directed it at the APA
-asked them to make it a mental disorder but eventually APA caved in and
mad PTSD a mental disorder
-some scattered evidence that it was a disorder but it only became a disorder
b/c of the political pressure
-if you are injured usually the government will pick up the tab
-the Vietnam vets saw that they too could be eligible for compensation from
the government
-so the APA made it a disorder and they got compensated
-example of a mental disorder being delabelled:
-self-defeating personality disorder”i’m my own worst enemy”
-feminist community objected b/c DSM is twice as common among women as
among men
-they argued before the APA that this amounted to blaming the
victimwomen should not be blamed or saddled w/ this label b/c the real
culprit is partriarchy which makes women feel inferior
-the 1994 edition diagnostic and statistical manual dropped self-defeating
personality disorder
-thus see how politics played a key role
-leads us to the conclusion that culture (sociological concept) plays a big role in
deermining whether or not you are healthy or not healthy
-mental disorders are shaped by thing other than scientific evidence
-social values, political forces, professional interests, corporations and their
interests
-psychiatric labelling
-no clear dividing line between mentally health and unhealthy individuals
-there’s a sort of continuum
-don’t have the tools to measure it
-there are a lot of social pressures that get in the mix and they get to decide what
and what not is a disorder
-culture looms as critical in this process
Political sociology of mental illness:
-beginning of 20th century, there is one mental disorder recognized by feds and
courts
-can be used in the courts as a mitigating factordon’t bear the full responsibility of
your crime
-and so the sentence is produced accordingly
-first happened in 1860s in common law
-man murdered someone as defence claimed him innocent due to a mental
disorder
-courts went along w/ it
-the more mental disorders we have the more people are affected by it
-the most common is depression disorder 1of4 Canadian women and 1of10
Canadian men
-if you do vigorous cardio this stimulates the production of endorphins
-they produce a feeling of well-being
-being depressed is part of life and if depression affects you, you should exercise
-Canadian mental health association estimates that 1 in 5 Canadians will be
affected by a mental disorder sometime in their life
-definitions are extended and expanded to include ailments w/ no detectable
biological basis like minor depression and borderline schizophrenia
-the list keeps getting longer
-psychiatrists are currently working on the new DSM (2012)
-consider including post traumatic embittermnent disorder
-if husband, wife, boyfriend, leaves you and you are bitter/resentful for
too long then you’re suffering from some type of disorder
-internet addiction disorder
-apathy disorder
-compulsive buying disorder
-compulsive pathological overeating disorder
-hoarding disorder
Christopher Lane:
-book called shyness: how normal behaviour becomes a sickness
What’s responsible for this?
-corporate interests
-in the economic interests of specific corporate groups like pharmaceutical
companies
-they create new drugs for medical purposes
-thus, they have an interest in expanding the list of mental disorders
-ex. Prozac the world most widely prescribed anti-depressant
-was then repackaged as seraphin and marketed to women suffering
from a newly discovered condition called premenstrual disphoric
disorder (PDD)
Why? Eli Lily is a huge pharmaceutical company that sold Prozac
and Eli Lily made 1/3 of its revenue from Prozac sales (6.5 billion)
-if come up w/ new drug you need to patent it, and for a certain period
of time you won that product and no one else can sell it and you make
the money
-eventually they run out and don’t last forever
-in 2001, they ran out of patent protection and they did not have an
exclusive franchise on it
-thus they came up w/ seraphin which is slightly different for this new
disorder
-thus can see why corporations have an interest in this expansion of labelling
Everyone is an expert:
-contributes to labelling as well
-self-help literature grown rapidly over the years
-faced w/ self help experts (on tv or mass media)
-experts played a key role in the labelling of attention deficit disorder ADD
-needed a drug to treat this disorder which is Ritalin
-it was proscribed almost exclusively for hyperactive and inattentive boys in the
classroom
-it is controversial, by mid 90s doctors were writing 6 billion prescriptions a year for
Ritalin
-it’s an amphetamine type compound (ex. Speed, meth kind of like it)
-children’s and adults with ADD (CHAD) 600 chapters a 30000? members worldwide
-who makes it?
-on friendly terms w/ CHAD and has given them a large amount of money
over the years
-there is some evidence although highly controversial that people w/ ADD have
problems absorbing glucose in the brain
-some people have found what is vaguely called a chemical balance in the brain
that regulates behaviour
-if it a disorder or not is disputable
-no physical evidence
-problem w/ Ritalinwhen people are diagnosed they are not tested for brain
chemistry or chemical imbalance, but its clinical and done on the basis of
observation of behaviour
-what they look for is inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity
-these are the traits that all little boys have
-clinical diagnosis is not the same as a biological test
-this is why Toronto school want to make separate school for hyperactive boys