Comments on: Lifestyle drugs and the new wave of pharmaceutical personality sculpting http://thepublicsphere.com/lifestyle-drugs-wave-pharmaceutical-personality-sculpting/ A Provocative Space of Critical Conversation Fri, 03 Apr 2015 11:39:49 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.3.2 By: franz http://thepublicsphere.com/lifestyle-drugs-wave-pharmaceutical-personality-sculpting/#comment-1931 Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:05:51 +0000 http://thepublicsphere.com/?p=1789#comment-1931 I appreciate your insight and your depthful writing. However, as someone who suffers from clinical depression, who has struggled all her life with “Biopolar II”, who has both attempted and further contemplated suicide – on drugs and off – I can’t help but feel totally left out of this equation of branding antidepressants “lifestyle” drugs AND depression itself a “lifestyle” that is a necessary part of “the human condition”. Wheres I entirely concur that to be human necessarily involves the peaks and valleys of contemplation, isolation, interiority and exteriority, there is a tremendous chasm between your assessment of what constitutes “lifestyle” and what constitutes a life-threatening and debilitating disease, a chasm that has an endless pile of rotting corpses at its bottomless bottom. There are so many articles of this type appearing and, yes, the pharmaceutical industry in this country is greedy and the doctors are over-prescribing, but in these sorts of analyses there are shrill absences of the actual mentally ill, the actual neurological disorders; to compare acid reflux to depression is mind-boggling. And to romanticize depression as a necessity of being human is dangerous and a slippery slope. Such absolutes leave out the realities of those who suffer by means beyond their “lifestyle choices” every minute of every day and don’t seek the help that is out there (yes, in drug advancement) because of the stigmas that STILL exist and are perpetuated by pieces like this one that could have used some clarification, distinction and compassion.

]]> By: Saoirse http://thepublicsphere.com/lifestyle-drugs-wave-pharmaceutical-personality-sculpting/#comment-926 Mon, 29 Nov 2010 16:38:02 +0000 http://thepublicsphere.com/?p=1789#comment-926 Thank you, Prof. Fahs, for a succinct analysis of the branding of normal physiological processes as disease by those entities colluding to make us ill for their profit. The reluctance of a shared, public government to regulate properly these entities to protect one of our nation’s most precious resources – i.e., the health of its citizens – belies just as much its fascist relationship with the private sector as does its long-standing, and ongoing, bioenslavement of its citizens:

http://dontfearyourfreedom.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.html

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