podcasts
movies
- Awakenings - based
upon neurologist Oliver
Sack's book about the transient resurrection of essentially comatose patients
with encephalitis lethargica via L-DOPA. Dr. Sachs' other books are the source of more than a
few House episodes.
- Ikiru - coming to terms with cancer and
death as a bureaucrat in postwar Japan
- Equilibrium - "...a future dystopia where both feelings and artistic expression are outlawed and citizens take daily injections of drugs to suppress their emotions" - I would describe this as wonderfully ridiculous
aging: why should we put up with it if we don't have to?
Cosmetic Pharmacology and DSM-IV
- 'The Encyclopedia of Insanity - A Psychiatric Handbook Lists a Madness for
Everyone.' By L.J. Davis
Excerpt:
"Not content with the merely weird, the DSM-IV also attempts to claim dominion over the
mundane. Current among the many symptoms of the deranged mind are bad writing (315.2, and its
associated symptom, poor handwriting); coffee drinking, including coffee nerves (305.90), bad
coffee nerves (292.89), inability to sleep after drinking too much coffee (292.89), and
something that probably has something to do with coffee, though the therapist can't put his
finger on it (292.9); shyness (299.80), (also known as Asperger's Disorder); sleepwalking
(307.46); jet lag (307.45); snobbery (301.7, a subset of Antisocial Personality Disorder); and
insomnia (307.42); to say nothing of tobacco smoking, which includes both getting hooked
(305.10) and going cold turkey (292.0). You were out of your mind the last time you have a
nightmare (307.47). Clumsiness is now a mental illness (315.4). So is playing video games
(Malingering, V65.2). So is doing just about anything "vigorously." So, under certain
circumstances, is falling asleep at night."
- THE GOOD DRUG GUIDE - THE RESPONSIBLE PARENT'S
GUIDE TO HEALTHY MOOD-BOOSTERS FOR ALL THE FAMILY - my friend David's
negative-utilitarian thoughts on looking through our blunt pharmacopeia towards the
elimination of suffering
- Society for the Advancement of Cosmetic
Pharmacotherapy - shameless plug for our old blog
- Listening
to Prozac - ~ 'SSRIs are miracles'
- The
Anti-Depressant Fact Book: What Your Doctor Won't Tell You About Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa,
and Luvox by Dr.
Peter Breggin - ~ 'SSRI research is full of bullshit and these drugs probably cause irreversible brain damage'
(good analysis of how clinical trials can be legally rigged/unscientific)
- Psychiatry
Labeling Kids with Bogus Mental Disorders - CCHR
- Philip K. Dick's
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"
Excerpt:
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened
Rick Deckard. Suprised--it always surprised him to find himself awake without prior notice--he rose from
the bed, stood up in his multicolored pajamas, and stretched.
...
Now, in her bed, his wife Iran opened her gray, unmerry eyes, blinked, then groaned and shut her eyes
again.
"You set your Penfield too weak," he said to her. "I'll reset it and you'll be awake and--"
"Keep your hand off my settings." Her voice held bitter sharpness. "I don't want to be awake."
...
"I can't stand TV before breakfast."
"Dial 888," Rick said as the set warmed. "The desire to watch TV, no matter what's on it."
"I don't feel like dialing anything at all now," Iran said.
"Then dial 3," he said.
"I can't dial a setting that stimulates my cerebral cortex into wanting to dial!"
healthcare economics and policy
et al.
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