commentarymagazine.com
Click on the December 1999 Edition in Back Issues
"How Psychiatry Lost Its Way" Paul R McHugh.
<Identifying new mental disorders and their "cures" has become a productive industry; it is also bad medicine>
Not available on-line unfortunately.
Adelle Davis, in Let's Raise Healthy Children way back in the late 1960s was commenting that the USA [her zone of interest] was building a big problem in the poor nutrition of people from pre-conception onwards.
The chickens have come home to roost.
amazon.com
Nutrition doesn't explain everything - family relationships matter too! So does DNA.
I can't explain depression etc and do not claim any expertise other than observation.
The nihilistic 90s and a lack of sense of belonging are to me a causal part of the depression and suicide which seems [on my causal observation] to be epidemic.
Anonymity of modern mobile life with disconnected social relationships is, I suppose, a part of the cause. 'Fun' drugs seem to come right in alongside to exacerbate the problem. Life on a USA freeway seems nuts!
Humans developed in tribal clusters with belonging a natural part of the day and night.
Now it's into the car or plane and away from family, friends and background. If that pathway doesn't lead to connection through work or something, then bingo, big trouble. Parents at work with children pushed from pillar to post, divorced or no father. Caregivers instead of parents.
I don't think that stuff can be fixed by Ritalin [or even good diet - but without good diet you get other problems too].
Just theorizing while passing by.
But that reference is a good, professional one. Paul R McHugh is the Henry Phipps professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University Shcool of Medicine and psychiatrist in chief at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
I think he knows what he's talking about [because he agrees with my theories of course].
Worth a read if accessible somewhere.
Mqurice
PS: Father of 4 [ages 24, 21, 19, 16]
Raising children is a doddle! Sure, there's drama. Cancer in your child is NOT fun. But emotional stuff is good. We and they aren't little machines. It's an iterative, integrating process. Raising them is not something we DO to them. Get books before hand [not junk books], read, learn and develop as much knowledge as you do for a professional job. Supermarkets have traps as well as food supplies. Working is not parenting. Children need mothers and fathers and friends and play in the dirt. They need love, not money. They should NOT be allowed to misbehave, be rude, drop food off their high chair when they are 6 months old [when they are hungry, the food goes in their mouth - when not hungry, it goes on the floor - take the food away when they stop shoveling it into their mouth and teach them to be civilized - when they've finished eating, get them something better to do that throw food around]. |
