27. February 2010 by admin.

You start waking up at 3 A.M., apparently in order to stare at the ceiling. You can’t stop picturing the face of the employee who was deputized to give you the bad news. You have fantasies of terrible things happening. You react irritably when friends advise you to let go and move on. After a week, you have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. After two weeks, you have a hard time getting out of the house. You go see a doctor. The doctor hears your story and prescribes an antidepressant. Do you take it?

However you go about making this decision, do not read the psychiatric literature. Everything in it, from the science (do the meds really work?) to the metaphysics (is depression really a disease?), will confuse you. There is little agreement about what causes depression and no consensus about what cures it.

There is suspicion that the pharmaceutical industry is cooking the studies that prove that antidepressant drugs are safe and effective, and that the industry’s direct-to-consumer advertising is encouraging people to demand pills to cure conditions that are not diseases (like shyness) or to get through ordinary life problems (like being laid off). The Food and Drug Administration has been accused of setting the bar too low for the approval of brand-name drugs. Critics claim that health-care organizations are corrupted by industry largesse, and that conflict-of-interest rules are lax or nonexistent.

These complaints are not coming just from sociologists, English professors, and other troublemakers; they are being made by people within the field of psychiatry itself. As a branch of medicine, depression seems to be a mess. Business, however, is extremely good. Between 1988, the year after Prozac was approved by the F.D.A., and 2000, adult use of antidepressants almost tripled. By 2005, one out of every ten Americans had a prescription for an antidepressant. IMS Health, a company that gathers data on health care, reports that in the United States in 2008 a hundred and sixty-four million prescriptions were written for antidepressants, and sales totaled $9.6 billion. As a depressed person might ask, What does it all mean?

The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that more than fourteen million Americans suffer from major depression every year, and more than three million suffer from minor depression (whose symptoms are milder but last longer than two years). Numbers like these are ridiculous—not because people aren’t depressed but because, in most cases, their depression is not a mental illness. It’s a sane response to a crazy world.

There is good reason to believe pathologizing of melancholy and despair, and the invention of pills designed to relieve people of those feelings, is a vast capitalist conspiracy to paste a big smiley face over a world that we have good reason to feel sick about. The aim of the conspiracy is to convince us that it’s all in our heads, or, specifically, in our brains—that our unhappiness is a chemical problem, not an existential one.

One can be critical of psychopharmacology, but one can be even more critical of cognitive-behavioral therapy, or C.B.T., a form of talk therapy that helps patients build coping strategies, and does not rely on medication.

C.B.T. , is to some, a method of indoctrination into the pieties of American optimism, an ideology as much as a medical treatment.

In fact, contemporary psychiatry in most of its forms except existential-humanistic talk therapy, which is an actual school of psychotherapy, is mainly about getting people to accept current arrangements. And it’s not even that drug companies and the psychiatric establishment have some kind of moral or political stake in these arrangements—that they’re in the game in order to protect the status quo. They just see, in the world’s unhappiness, a chance to make money. They invented a disease so that they could sell the cure.

A call to arms is gaining momentum, echoing a common criticism of contemporary psychiatry, which is that the profession is creating ever more expansive criteria for mental illness that end up labeling as sick people who are just different—a phenomenon that has consequences for the insurance system, the justice system, the administration of social welfare, and the cost of health care.

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16. February 2010 by admin.

Many spiritual experiences have nothing to do with gender, but it is deceptive to think that religious experience will always be the same for men and women. Simply living inside of a female body produces a different life experience than existing as a male, yet until recently there has been little in our traditional religions encouraging us to place the physical aspects of a woman’s body — menstruation, childbirth, rape, abortion, menopause — in a spiritual context. Much has been written on sexuality, of course, but largely from the male point of view.

The Christian concept of a god up in the sky has resulted in negativity toward the body in general and female sexuality in particular. Little by little, this is beginning to change as women articulate their experiences and delve into nontraditional beliefs to draw together a collection of concepts, rituals, and meditations that fit a woman’s felt bodily experience., and create heightened consciousness about what female embodiment entails for themselves and others.

Women are often led away from a feeling of spiritual connectedness and into frustration, shame, or anger when they dwell on the issues that result from the patriarchal structure of their churches, temples, and meditation halls. The situation begins with a pervasive lack of representation of women and the feminine in almost every aspect of traditional religious, supported and reinforced by masculine God-language in the Judo-Christian scripture and liturgies, language which results in a host of ideas that patriarchy claims to be “natural.”

The Christian vision of a god “out there” rather than within produces negative attitudes toward embodiment in general and female sexuality in particular - attitudes that have far-reaching consequences both personally and culturally.

A basic inequality of women and denigration of the feminine in established religions also leads to disputes concerning the ordination of women as priests, preachers, and rabbis; homophobia; sexual abuse in religious communities; and to the idea that as man serves his god, so woman should submit to her man.

These issues — and this is just the short list — often create a conscious or unconscious barrier between women and the church or women and their indwelling spirit.

Upstream of all these issues — transcendence versus embodiment, male superiority versus female inferiority –lies the larger problem of dualism, so pervasive in our culture that it seems to disappear into unquestioned acceptance. In addition to the basic problem of dualism — the positing of everything in terms of polar opposites — we tend to choose one side against the other. For instance, male/female has become aligned in our culture with such other polarized concepts as mind/body, superior/inferior. This type of black-and-white thinking becomes automatic, leaving out the complexity of intervals and the reality of shifting, changing situations.

Dualism can be transcended through meditation, not through argument or analysis. If we work with the fundamental duality of self and other in deep meditation and contemplation, if we can learn to unify the subject that perceives with the objectified world, then other polarities lose their potency. To become conscious of our tendency toward dualism forms the first step in overcoming it.

In view of what women in the major religious traditions of the world have suffered in the name or interest of patriarchal values or systems and structures of thought and conduct, it is hardly surprising that many feminist theologians consider the rejection of patriarchy a prerequisite for the liberation of women from various forms of injustice. However, when patriarchy is seen as indissolubly linked with the “core” of a religious tradition — for instance, with God in the context of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — then the rejection of the one generally involves the rejection of the other. This is why a number of feminist theologians have in the post-patriarchal phase of their thinking gone beyond their religious traditions altogether. Rejecting God, who is identified by them with maleness, they have also, oftentimes, rejected men-women relationships and childbearing, seeing both heterosexual men-women relationships and childbearing as patriarchal institutions used to enslave and exploit women.

When we study the religious thought of those who have already outgrown the father-god, we see a direction inward. All of these people tend to place their gods within themselves, to focus on spiritual processes whose values they experience internally.

Judging from these harbingers of our new religious culture the psycho-religious age will be a mystical one. It seems highly likely that the West is on the brink of developing a new mysticism — post-Christian, post-Judaic. It will most probably be a type of mysticism which emphasizes the continual observation of psychic imagery.

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8. February 2010 by admin.

Adult male Amazon river dolphins, or botos, carry natural objects such as sticks and rocks, sometimes throwing them or thrashing them against the surface, likely to impress females.

Dolphins are turning out to be smarter than once thought and should be considered eligible for more humane treatment.

Dolphins are among several animals that use tools. But studies have shown they can do much more. Dolphins name themselves and they can recognize themselves in mirrors. They think about the future, can learn a basic symbol-based language, and behave more socially than was known. One dolphin taught to tail-walk in captivity later spread the trick to wild dolphins. Dolphins may even think about thinking.

Many people are conscious of this already, however most people are not, so scientific research hopefully will both spiritually and intellectually enlighten them that dolphins are ‘non-human persons’ who qualify for moral standing as individuals.

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