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[bassnation]

Huh this is very interesting info. I have never heard this. Weird, because the one thing I've never had a problem quitting at will is smoking!! The mechanism for addiction with smoking is quite powerful, too, from what I understand about it (very very complex as far as addiction mechanisms go)...

lol, wandering increasingly off-topic but why break a habit

some companies are even going as far as manufacturing nicotine based sprays specifically for schizophrenics. if nicotine is fine, weed is a bad thing though. i once knew a paranoid schizophrenic who was ok until someone gave him a spliff. we didn't know back then that he was this ill, just thought he was a bit strange. the moment i realised he actually had mental illness was when he asked me if i ever heard voices coming from washing powder adverts. he thought the devil was speaking to him via this obscure medium (like, not even all ads - just washing powder ads). seen him a few years back and hes on the right medication, is running a business and seems completely happy and normal.

 

[nomadologist]

lol, wandering increasingly off-topic but why break a habit

some companies are even going as far as manufacturing nicotine based sprays specifically for schizophrenics. if nicotine is fine, weed is a bad thing though. i once knew a paranoid schizophrenic who was ok until someone gave him a spliff. we didn't know back then that he was this ill, just thought he was a bit strange. the moment i realised he actually had mental illness was when he asked me if i ever heard voices coming from washing powder adverts. he thought the devil was speaking to him via this obscure medium (like, not even all ads - just washing powder ads). seen him a few years back and hes on the right medication, is running a business and seems completely happy and normal.

aww. Poor guy.

Luckily I don't see things, and I've only had a few random incidents where I had auditory hallucinations (it's always music! never voices. a few times when I was a kid I'd randomly hear music the way people hear it in their heads, but it would be coming from "outside"...once I thought there was a choir on the quad in college--kept calling people and asking "where is that choral music coming from???). They can't work out whether that was my natural brain or from all of the serious hallucinogens I was doing. I've been told bipolar symptoms can mimic schizoaffective disorder or schizophrenics if you get stressed out enough, and this was during finals week

 

[bassnation]

aww. Poor guy.

Luckily I don't see things, and I've only had a few random incidents where I had auditory hallucinations (it's always music! never voices. a few times when I was a kid I'd randomly hear music the way people hear it in their heads, but it would be coming from "outside"...once I thought there was a choir on the quad in college--kept calling people and asking "where is that choral music coming from???). They can't work out whether that was my natural brain or from all of the serious hallucinogens I was doing. I've been told bipolar symptoms can mimic schizoaffective disorder or schizophrenics if you get stressed out enough, and this was during finals week

lol at the choral music - wonder why it was that in particular? was it lygeti kind of stuff cos that would be highly disturbing.

i hear music in my head sometimes, not stuff i know but just tunes randomly making themselves up. used to also get it a lot when i first started doing e, trying to go to sleep after a club with this mad cacophony of voices, music, random and very weird thoughts going round and round. its like living at the end of a beatles song where they've gone nuts with samples.

 

[nomadologist]

lol at the choral music - wonder why it was that in particular? was it lygeti kind of stuff cos that would be highly disturbing.

i hear music in my head sometimes, not stuff i know but just tunes randomly making themselves up. used to also get it a lot when i first started doing e, trying to go to sleep after a club with this mad cacophony of voices, music, random and very weird thoughts going round and round. its like living at the end of a beatles song where they've gone nuts with samples.

I know, right? It was actually really beautiful, polyphonic, but yes it was in a very weird pentatonicy scale. Probably a tonal system that doesn't really exist!!

I think if I ever heard a mean or malevolent voice telling me things I'd immediately check myself in to a hospital. I know how bad it can get for people without the depakote/zyprexa/whathaveyou when that starts happening.

 

[nomadologist]

i hear music in my head sometimes, not stuff i know but just tunes randomly making themselves up. used to also get it a lot when i first started doing e, trying to go to sleep after a club with this mad cacophony of voices, music, random and very weird thoughts going round and round. its like living at the end of a beatles song where they've gone nuts with samples.

I'd have to look this up, but I think excess serotonin from e could be responsible for this--I know there are vision disturbances and auditory ones on a lot of SSRIs, which increase the absorption/uptake of serotonin.

 

[bassnation]

i think if I ever heard a mean or malevolent voice telling me things I'd immediately check myself in to a hospital.

i get that every day, unfortunately the voice belongs to my boss and i don't think it would go down well, as much as i'd like to walk out

 

[nomadologist]

roffle

or stop going till they fire you so you get paid for a few extra days

 

[turtles]

This damn thread is moving too fast! Can we bring it back to this:

after people become more healthy, they become better oiled capitalist consumption machines I'm afraid.

I have no interest in that.

and this:

Another problem with this idea: some people get off on pain. They like it. It's blissful to them.

and also some of gek's comments about parental love. I guess I have a rough understanding of what you people are trying to get at here, Resisting arbitrary, culturally determined emotions that clearly play a role in maintaining the status quo. Breaking out of those emotional states as a means of resisting capitalism. However, I just find it contradicts my own experience in life. I had a very balanced, very "normal" upbringing (actually not normal at all, but "normal" in terms of ideologically, what's supposed to be normal, middle class). I loved my parents, they loved me, and we have no problem expressing that. Both of my parents are clinical psychologist, and I think as consequence of that I'm very emotionally and mentally well balanced (sometimes TOO well balanced, I'm realizing more and more). So a lot of my experiences seem very much the opposite of eg gek's or nomad's (we're apparently the same age too!). And yet I am no less committed to trying to undue all the terrible shit that capitalism has done to our society. OK so I don't have the same background in critical theory that you folks do, but I like to think I've got the basics clear, and am committed to the cause. (Besides, umm I dunno if any of us is really helping to bring down the capitalist machine any more than the other at this point in time; we think about it a lot, but haven't really figured out how yet)

I guess the point is I find myself being at least a bit more partial to zhao's view of things (which, interestingly, reminds me of a lot of things my dad values in the work of schiller and goethe, who--I think--Freud was trying to move against). I know its stupid to base beliefs on a vague sense of "hope" but I do hope that a more positive means of rebellion against the influence of capitalism can be found, one that emphasizes caring and love and health, rather than more negative conditions of disorder and pain. My negative/positive codings are probably ideological, I know but...


(sorry i keep butting in to these threads with long weird comments about shit that was discussed way back...i'm slow)

 

[Gavin]

Don't feel bad, turtles, I'm normal too.

I've never been to a shrink... I fancied that it might be fun, but the dumbasses you will get in Ohio! It would have probably just been boring.

 

[nomadologist]

It's a great comment, Turtles.

It would be completely ridiculous to try to tell someone they were not committed to anti-capitalism because they've had the good fortune to be brought up well by caring, loving people. The discussion was happening (on my end at least) on a more ideological level, where--although I would love to believe that the "wisdom of the East" leads inherently to peaceful, more healthy living and loving--the fact that capitalism has infected BOTH Eastern societies (which have ostensibly had their cultural foundations in these ideas Zhao cites) and the Western ones we all know and hate, seems readily apparent to me. Just look at China, Japan, South Korea now---even look, as Zhao pointed out himself, at the GROSS human rights violations that have been perpetrated by the very monks who *live* his ideas the most strictly.

I would love to have hope based on these Eastern ideals, but I can't ignore what a couple hundred years of clinical psychology based on the psychoanalytical model has accomplished (and all the progress we've made with it--just look at our ability to "profile" serial killers), despite the objections Gek and I have been making.

Some psychotherapists might even write me off as a sociopath, or at very least, highly resistant to progress. I know when I go into therapy whether I'm going to use it properly, and I know when I'm going in and I'm going to sound off and act out.

 

[Gavin]

Not so much on the parents thing maybe... they're nice to me now though.

 

[Gavin]

So much for 'leftism as pathology' eh?

 

[bassnation]

Don't feel bad, turtles, I'm normal too.

lol, we've only got your word for that gavin! (only joking).

i'm not really sure what normal means anyway. normal is essentially what you are used to, which doesn't seem to be a very objective yardstick to me.

 

[nomadologist]

Not so much on the parents thing maybe... they're nice to me now though.

Yeah, one area where I've made a ton of progress is with my parents. We've all forgiven each other for any and everything. My mom is one of my best friends now, really. I can go to her with all sorts of things and she understands.

 

[turtles]

thanks gavin, nomad.

I guess i'm just going on the rather trite observation that positive emotions are better than negative emotions, and especially given the frequent critique that leftists are all negative criticism and no positive solutions, I think love as a force for positive anti-capitalist change is a very intuitively appealing idea. (also, sooooooo hippy! good god what am i talking about??)

and yeah, "normal" upbringing is total bullshit. I'm sure i sit nowhere near the middle of what an actual normal curve would look like. But ideologically, my upbringing was pretty normal. With more witty one liners and less constructive discussions it would fit pretty well into an american sit-com setting.

 

[noel emits]

Glad you brought this back turtles.

"after people become more healthy, they become better oiled capitalist consumption machines I'm afraid."

I don't buy this, at least not by my definition of healthy - which might mean feeling more alienated and less adjusted to an unhealthy society. Spiritual wellbeing could mean though that you feel more complete in yourself and so have less need to compulsively consume

"Another problem with this idea: some people get off on pain. They like it. It's blissful to them."

Maybe they do, but could this not be a function of pathology? Having to experience pain in order to feel anything at all, or because other emotions are more difficult? Pain does have an amazing capacity to bring you back to yourself in the present moment but there are other ways to do that too.

 

[noel emits]

I do hope that a more positive means of rebellion against the influence of capitalism can be found, one that emphasizes caring and love and health, rather than more negative conditions of disorder and pain. My negative/positive codings are probably ideological, I know but...

This makes total sense. I mean the whole disorder / pain / self-destruction thing is basically something fun up to a certain point but it's really sad if a person or a society doesn't grow out of it.

 

[nomadologist]

Glad you brought this back turtles.

"after people become more healthy, they become better oiled capitalist consumption machines I'm afraid."

I don't buy this, at least not by my definition of healthy - which might mean that you will feel more alienated and less adjusted to an unhealthy society. Spiritual wellbeing would mean though that you feel more complete in yourself and so have less need to compulsively consume

"Another problem with this idea: some people get off on pain. They like it. It's blissful to them."

Maybe they do, but could this not be a function of pathology? Having to experience pain in order to feel anything at all, or because other emotions are more difficult? Pain does have an amazing capacity to bring you back to yourself in the present moment but there are other ways to do that too.

Ok, interesting. I don't believe in spirits, of any kind. I am a materialist/atheist and so I do not think that focusing on your spirituality is somehow exempt from the mechanistic determination of capitalism. No more so than anything else is.

Re getting off on pain: I brought this up to illustrate that people don't always like or enjoy the sort of living that prescribed notions of "health" would otherwise dictate. Not that masochism isn't pathological--all or most desire is under capitalism!! This is why it's so important not to be Oedipalized, so that you don't have an "Ego" (in Freud's sense) mediating the Id in the same way a properly Oedipalized person would.

 

[nomadologist]

This makes total sense. I mean the whole disorder / pain / self-destruction thing is basically something fun up to a certain point but it's really sad if a person or a society doesn't grow out of it.

So what do you propose, Noel?

No one can just "grow" out of addiction, unfortunately. They discover more and more everyday about how complex the biochemical mechanisms for addiction are.

 

[turtles]

I don't buy this, at least not by my definition of healthy - which might mean feeling more alienated and less adjusted to an unhealthy society. Spiritual wellbeing could mean though that you feel more complete in yourself and so have less need to compulsively consume

Yeah I like this (though agree with nomad on the "no spirits" front) that really the issue is how we're defining "health" and that what passes for health (especially mental health) in our society really is a form of sickness. I'm sure this point has been made by many people before but it bears repeating.