We talk to Andrew Kay about the political and cultural aspects of psychiatric disorders — looking specifically at how OCD has gone mainstream because of the kind of society in which we live.
This was such a great conversation, thank you! It’s so obvious our society is making us sick, but it’s easier to medicate people than actually change our environment.
Attempting to wrestle with the political, cultural, and psychological foundations of human behavior/motivation just happens to be one of my current obsessions. In my opinion, one of the many reasons for the collapse of the New Left of the 1960s is its collective failure to more seriously consider this issue. (Most movement people back then were pretty sure they had all the answers when, in fact, we didn't know much about anything but, especially, we had little insight into ourselves and the full spectrum of potential reasons about why we were actively political.
As your discussion quickly revealed, you first found yourselves face to face with what the sociologist Philip Rieff, in his book written in 1966, called "The Triumph of the Therapeutic." (check it out)
Then you ran into the more current quagmires of debates about the nature of human consciousness, the scientific method, and the current apparent stagnation in the field of neuroscience (including the metaphor of mind/brain as computer).
There is so much to say on all these issues. I will raise just one.
Thomas Kuhn stated in his book,"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" that, historically, science often found itself in what he called a pre-paradigmatic situation, where it is fundamentally in some kind of crisis-- because of some disturbing anomaly.
Such a situation then usually demands some kind of large-scale paradigm destruction.
For more on this issue please see "The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will and the Limits of Science," by Erik Hoel.
I know this issue appears quite far afield but each of us does swim in our own stream of consciousness which is instrumental to how we behave.
This was such a great conversation, thank you! It’s so obvious our society is making us sick, but it’s easier to medicate people than actually change our environment.
Attempting to wrestle with the political, cultural, and psychological foundations of human behavior/motivation just happens to be one of my current obsessions. In my opinion, one of the many reasons for the collapse of the New Left of the 1960s is its collective failure to more seriously consider this issue. (Most movement people back then were pretty sure they had all the answers when, in fact, we didn't know much about anything but, especially, we had little insight into ourselves and the full spectrum of potential reasons about why we were actively political.
As your discussion quickly revealed, you first found yourselves face to face with what the sociologist Philip Rieff, in his book written in 1966, called "The Triumph of the Therapeutic." (check it out)
Then you ran into the more current quagmires of debates about the nature of human consciousness, the scientific method, and the current apparent stagnation in the field of neuroscience (including the metaphor of mind/brain as computer).
There is so much to say on all these issues. I will raise just one.
Thomas Kuhn stated in his book,"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" that, historically, science often found itself in what he called a pre-paradigmatic situation, where it is fundamentally in some kind of crisis-- because of some disturbing anomaly.
Such a situation then usually demands some kind of large-scale paradigm destruction.
For more on this issue please see "The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will and the Limits of Science," by Erik Hoel.
I know this issue appears quite far afield but each of us does swim in our own stream of consciousness which is instrumental to how we behave.