what's next, medicalizing road rage? ... oh wait...

Source: http://www.sabinabecker.com/images/intermittent-explosive-disorder.jpg

Remember that time you were sitting in traffic for 45 minutes, cars barely moving, people cutting each other off and honking their horns, and all you wanted to do was get home and relax with a cup of herbal tea? You sit there patiently, radio blasting Enya to soothe your emotions, and finally the cars head of you start to move. As you put your foot down on the accelerator, a slick sports car somehow manages to maneuver three lanes over and cuts you off so quickly that you have to slam your breaks. Anger literally boils your blood and you swear that your windows fog up with steam from your ears. Your mouth opens and a string of profanities in three different languages spills out and your hands go up, middle finger waving around as you tailgate that inconsiderate idiot. You are blind with rage. But fear not, because what you are going through isn't your fault. It's the chemical activity in your brain that causes you to feel this way because you have Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED)... or you're turning into the Hulk. (I digress)

Intermittent Explosive Disorder is a behavioral disorder that, according to MayoClinic is, "characterized by repeated episodes of aggressive, violent behavior in which you react grossly out of proportion to the situation." At the bottom of the IED definition it says, "If you have this anger disorder, treatment may involve medications and psychotherapy to help you control your aggressive impulses." (MayoClinic, 2010) I don't disregard that people do suffer from symptoms of IED like road rage or domestic violence, but I don't agree with the idea to medicalize just anything and prescribe medication to it. In recent times, more news articles have come about describing new behavioral disorders and the preventative or curative measures people can take, mostly involving pill-popping and psychotherapy. A few years ago, I heard on NPR that road rage was now considered to be a medical problem that needed to be treated. I found an article on ABCnews.com that conveyed the same message about IED but added more disorders to the list such as:

• Post-Traumatic Embitterment Disorder
• Sibling Rivalry Disorder
• Mathematics Disorder
• Caffeine-related Disorders
• Oppositional Defiant Disorder
• Dissociative Fugue State
• Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
• Seasonal Affective Disorder

After seeing this list of disorders, I have to start wondering if these are actual behavioral disorders or just a marketing scheme brought on my pharmaceutical companies. A majority of these disorders require taking some form of anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medication which restores chemical imbalances in the brain. But my question is, should we be medicalizing these supposed behavioral disorders and prescribe treatment medication in order to normalize people who experience these symptoms?

In Margaret Talbot's article, "Brain Gain" Adderall and Ritalin are introduced as neuroenhancers for those who are not diagnosed with ADD or ADHD. These people take Adderall as a means to be able to focus and stay awake longer to be more productive. There are many ways to boost cognitive function as Talbot's interviewee Anjan Chatterjee mentions. He says that with regular exercise and intellectual stimulation, people are more apt to enabling their cognitive function. However, "... maybe they want something easier than sweaty workouts and Russian novels: a pill." (Talbot, pg. 4) This leads me to believe that society dependence on biomedicine has caused an almost addiction-like state. People are not aware that pills are not simply a magic drug that will eliminate your sorrows and make you happy. In fact, many of the pills taken have adverse side effects, most common in anti-depressants which ironically raise the risk of violence and suicide. Counterproductive much? The important message conveyed is that "...we are a society that so wants a quick fix that many people are happy to take drugs." (Talbot, pg. 4)

Nikolas Rose's article, "The Politics of Life Itself" really hits the spot when discussing the psychoanalysis of patients suffering from mental disorders. No visible defects were particularly found in the case of madness and "... psychiatrists often found that their own diagnoses of madness were unable to meet legal criteria of evidence and proof" and , "... psychiatric diagnoses were a 'category mistake' illegitimately translating difference, disruption, and deviance into disease." (Rose, pg. 4-5) But this brings me to another point. If there are no visible evidence or proof of madness, then how do we characterize a person who is sane and one who is mad? Does that mean that an angry driver has a disease because of his outburst or is it just his personality to be slightly short-tempered? In our society today, we have the need to always fix the human body and we saw this in the earlier readings pertaining to biomedicine ethics. We are a machine that is striving for physical, and now mental, perfection. But because people are so unique and experience life and disease differently, how is it that we can form a pill to treat a, "... potentially correctable, error or anomaly in... aspects of the organic brain"? (Rose, pg. 3) Perhaps what is being treated is our ability to be different and abnormal. But then again, who constructs the idea of what is normal and abnormal and who falls into these categories?

I do believe that people experience symptoms of extreme sadness (depression), high stress (anxiety), or road rage (intermittent explosive disorder). I do not believe that we should treat people with medication in order to end whatever ails them mentally because the adverse side effects can ultimately harm the person in the future (in the case of addiction to amphetamines, anti-depression medications, etc.) There are alternative methods to coping with life, but life isn't supposed to be simple. It's a challenge and a pill should not be used just because it's the easy way out. At the same time, psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies should not continue to diagnose people with disorders and prescribe medication because it only will increase the dependency on pills and believe that something is mentally wrong with them. We are unique creatures with the ability to vary from one another because of our personalities. Just because some of us are sadder than others, happier than others, or angrier than others doesn't mean that there is a mental deformity. If these personality traits get in the way of living one's life, then there are methods to lessen the traits' impact on an individual's life without the use of a magic pill.

Source:
"Brain Gain", New Yorker. Margaret Talbot, April 27, 2009.

"The Politics of Life Itself" Nikolas Rose, 2007.

"Intermittent Explosive Disorder" MayoClinic, 2011
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/intermittent-explosive-disorder/DS00730

"Is Your Bitterness a Medical Condition?" ABCnews, 2010
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/ColdandFluNews/story?id=7688631&page=3

Eat This, Not That!

Image Source: http://www.amazon.com/This-Thousands-Simple-Swaps-Pounds/dp/1594868549

Eat This, Not That! is a diet book of what the healthier option is between two similar products. For instance, as the image above portrays, a Big Mac is supposedly a better choice than a Whopper. Author David Zinczenko who is the Editor-in-Chief of Men's Health magazine, characterizes unhealthy foods by the amount of calories, fat, saturated fat, trans fat, sodium and sugar content and healthy foods as having higher fiber and protein content. Multiple books have been published to target certain audiences or restaurants. Some include Eat This, Not That! For Kids, Eat This, Not That! Supermarket Survival Guide, Eat This, Not That! The Best (And Worst) Foods In America, and so on. The "non-diet" book urges its readers to count their caloric intake, while also identifying the amount of fat, sodium, and sugar is entering their body when they eat certain foods. Kathleen Zelman of WebMD came out with an article on the website pertaining to the "Eat This, Not That!" books, stating, "it is loaded with calorie, fat, sugar, carbohydrate, and sodium counts designed to help you make smarter food choices." (Zelman, 2009) What is interesting is that this book promotes the idea that making these smarter food choices can aid in weight loss, but judging from the picture above, it is impossible to say that eating a Big Mac over a Whopper will induce weight loss. "Eat This, Not That does make some unscientific and misleading claims -- saying the plan specifically targets belly fat, reshapes your body, and builds firm, lean muscle while shedding useless flabby pounds. Experts agree that building muscle requires no strength training, and no diet plan is capable of targeting specific body parts." (Zelman, 2009)

Eat This, Not That! books tie into the nutritional reductionism that Gyrogy Scrinis discusses in his, "On the Ideology of Nutritionism" article, where "... this focus on nutrients has come to dominate, to undermine, and to replace other ways of engaging with food and of contextualizing the relationship between food and the body." (Scrinis, pg. 39) Zinczenko's books target calories, fats, and sugars as bad for the body and that reducing these in what we eat will lead us to a healthier body. Granted, Zinczenko fails to mention that even though there is a healthier option with less calories, fats, and sugars, eating these types of foods on a daily basis can still be detrimental to the body. Scrinis also approaches this idea in the comparison between butter and margarine where, "The promotion of margarine over the better tasting but supposedly less-healthy butter is an example of the primacy of this healthism and the power it has to shape dietary behavior." (Scrinis, pg. 40) But alongside, he mentions that, "Nutritionism promotes the idea that the perceived problems with contemporary diets can be tackled by... nutritional tinkering, rather than by means of more far-reaching qualitative changes in diets and the types of foods eaten." (Scrinis, pg. 43) Essentially, Eat This, Not That! books are based on nutritionism where eating the "healthier" of two not-so-healthy options is better. This is opposed to the idea that incorporating a healthy diet and exercise regime can promote weight-loss.

Eat This, Not That! books also fail to mention the importance of self-control. We all have that weak spot to indulge and sometimes even over-indulge. The fact of the matter is that with control over the amount we eat, we can change our eating lifestyles and live a healthier life. Granted, it should be obvious that eating a meal with 2000+ calories in it shouldn't be consumed every day, some think it's okay to indulge in it once a week or so. Marie Griffith's article, "Don't Eat That: The Erotics of Abstinence in American Christianity" showcases self-control in a religious aspect. One man recalls how divide intervention prevented him from eating in a "sinful" food: "... I wanted to eat a fattening dish -- it was spareribs soaked in greasy tomato sauce. Ugh! Anyhow, just as I was about to order it, the Lord spoke to me and said, 'Don't eat that." (Griffith, pg. 42) Although many of us are not contacted through a higher spiritual being to direct us in what we eat, we all experience that little voice in the back of our heads that asks, "do we REALLY need to eat this?" Perhaps it is God really telling people to watch what they eat or it could just be their subconscious; regardless, that self-control is impertinent to a successful and healthy body.

"Gender on a Plate: The Calibration of Identity in American Macrobiotics" by Karlyn Crowley also addresses spirituality and self-control in terms of food. The yin and yang model presents opposites of each other and when together, the body is in harmony. Certain foods represent the yin and other foods represent the yang. Excess of one or the other makes an individual predominately yin or yang. Crowley discusses this idea with Michio Kushi and which also ties in with the Eat This, Not That! books. "... men can achieve a superior spiritual sensibility and avoid... 'strong cow-like bodies, big in structure, but low in intelligence'. The spiritual foal for all, and for men especially, should be to reclaim the 'passivity' that comes from a 'vegetable' way of living." (Crowley, pg. 41) Essentially, opting for a vegetable lifestyle can eliminate the aggressivity in men. Crowley also mentions that extreme "yin-ness" is associated with women and sugar. Yin diseases associated with sugar can lead to "... chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and breast cancer." (Crowley, pg. 42) Thus, the solution to prevent these yin diseases is to balance the gender harmony by incorporating yang foods into a woman's diet.

Back to Zelman's article, Elisa Zeid mentions the book's misleading information, specifically addressing the self-control issue. She says, "Lots of nutritious and healthy foods, like Stonybrook Farms smoothie, the Odwalla blackberry fruit shake, on the 'not that' side that are perfectly healthy, and some choices on the 'eat this' side, like berry punch, which are not necessarily healthful choices. Jimmy Dean sausage is OK, but buttermilk waffles are not? You could add fruit to the waffles to make it a better choice, but sausage should be a food you eat only occasionally." (Zelman, 2009) Even though Eat This, Not That! books have good intentions on publicizing the high-caloric, high-fat, high-sugar of certain foods and restaurant, it is important to also note that there are many factors that contribute to weight-loss and healthy lifestyles and it is not solely dependent on eating the lesser of two evils.

Sources:
"Eat This, Not That: What it is" Kathleen M. Zelman, October 2009.
http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/eat-this-not-that?page=3

"On The Ideology of Nutritionism" Gyorgy Scrinis, Winter 2006.

"Don't Eat That: The Erotics of Abstinence in American Christianity" R. Marie Griffith, Fall 2001.

"Gender on a Plate: The Calibration of Identity in American Macrobiotics" Karlyn Crowley, Summer 2002.

Male vs. Female, Gay vs. Straight, Human vs. Vampire...?

Image Source: http://tvgorge.com/shows/true-blood/

We live in a dichotomized world and there is no doubt about it. Regardless of how hard we try to eliminate the extreme separation and attempt to establish a common ground amongst those who do not "fit" the social norm, things may always remain black and white. We experience the black-and-white model in almost everything as well as the need to separate and to categorize. This becomes evident in the concepts of gender and sexuality, where the idea is that there are only two sexes and two genders. However, Terry's article, "Fluid Sexes" demonstrates that categorizing people into only one of two groups is impossible considering that no person can be strictly male or strictly female. Terry also brings up the point that people such as, "... Ulrichs, Hirschfield, Ellis, and Freud suggest that humans were fundamentally bisexual and that each individual would have features of the other sex, to one degree or another." (Terry, pg. 161) But to say that supposed experts did not believe a third sex was possible is incorrect. In previous times, the third sex was considered to foster homosexuals, who were, "... between the normal categories of male and female..." (Terry, pg. 160) The fact that these "experts" were able to recognize that there was space between "male" and "female" was a step forward, however, the fact that they believed that whatever was in between the male and female characteristics were considered to be homosexuals was essentially taking two steps back.

Terry's closing statements also included that, "Endocrinologists persisted in thinking that homosexuals had physiological defects," and "... the very framework, methods, and conclusions of psychometricians indicated that they saw homosexuals as inferior and defective." (Terry, pg. 177) This last segment of Terry's article really started to remind me of the show True Blood, which is centered around the romance between a human and a vampire in a small town in Louisiana. Although this seems to be the main plot, True Blood also embodies an allegory for LGBT rights. The idea of vampire equality is similar to that of LGBT equality as well, especially in the deep parts of the South (phrases such as "God Hates Fangs" stemming from the Westboro Baptist Church's propagandist anti-homosexual campaign "God Hates Fags") . Although True Blood does include homosexuals and homoerotic relationships, the main focus of discrimination is mostly on vampires, simply because they are not living. The blood-sucking aspect has even been dissolved since the creation of a synthetic blood that is used by vampires to sustain "life" without the use of human or animal blood. This is very reminiscent to the AIDS scare during the 90's where people were afraid of homosexuals because it was based on the belief that homosexual men were all infected with AIDS. This bias and lack of correct information is what led people to fear homosexual men just as with vampires, the bias that they killed humans and drank their blood. NPR wrote an article of when the show first came out, noting the obvious allegories toward LGBT equality. TV critic David Bianculli stated, "True Blood has other things on its mind. It's big on allegory, and the tension about accepting vampires into society is an obvious play on civil rights in general, and gay rights in particular." These vampires were coming out into society and were, "... starting to mainstream into regular society..." (Bianculli, NPR Sept. 5, 2008) and with a play on words, "coming out of the coffin".

In regards to Terry's "Fluid Sexes" article, the human vs. vampire dichotomy exists too (at least in True Blood). The vampires in the show are discriminated against due to not being part of the dominant culture, but in fact being part of the deviant culture, just as homosexuals are portrayed. In the case of homosexuals, Terry states, "...the popular perception that homosexuals belonged to a distinguishable and pathological group, set apart from the normal healthy population." (Terry, pg. 176) This is evident amongst the vampires in True Blood, where they are set apart from the "normal" population due to their lifestyles and the fact that they are non-living. At the same time, if one were to over-analyze the situation and were to look up the definition of "human", one would find that a human is defined as, "a characteristic of humanity" and/or "having human form or attributes as opposed to that of animals." (Merriam-Webster Dictionary) Note that there are no references to living or dead. Lacquer's article perfectly fits this analysis of what is human. The representations of the body and form are "...dictated by art and culture" and that these representations can differ in historical settings (i.e. the development of the mythical vampire) and different cultural portrayals. (Laqueur, pg. 164) But because of these historical and cultural constraints on the representation of the body, biases are formed and what is irregular amongst a society can be deemed deviant or even unnatural (as in the case of vampires in True Blood) Laqueur continues to state that, "... anatomy, and nature as we know it more generally, is obviously not pure fact... but rather a richly complicated construction based not only on observation... but on an aesthetics of representations as well." (Laqueur, pg. 163-164)

To conclude, these representations of the body are significant to how we portray others. At the same time, we must also take into consideration that there are no black-and-white models when it comes to gender and sexuality and that we must give leeway to the gray areas where people do not necessarily conform to dominant culture. The example of True Blood is to provide an insight of the LGBT community's fight against discrimination and that just because they do not fit the social norms of the dominant culture does not mean that they should be categorized as "inferior".

Sources:
"Fluid Sexes" in An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society. Jennifer Terry, pg 159-177
"Discovery of Sexes" in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Thomas Laqueur, pg. 149-192
"True Blood: Tasty New TV from HBO"
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94320825