Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Last Ronson Blog!


Chapter 10 focused on how labels are placed on different types of mental disorders. The chapter started out with a Scientology banquet that Ronson was invited to. There he saw that these scientologists were coming up with the most outrageous mental disorders with no real logical sense behind them whatsoever. Later on in the chapter, Spitzer gets introduced and it is explained that he becomes an editor for the DSM and has this goal of, in the DSM, getting rid of all the judgment from psychiatry. David Rosenhan was a psychologist who, much like Spitzer, was very opposed to psychoanalysis because he believed it to be of no use. He showed it’s uselessness by conducting an experiment involving seven other people who were sent to different mental hospitals and pretended to be mentally ill. All of them were identified as insane and were not allowed to leave the hospitals until they were fully “recovered.” Because of this experiment, psychiatry was not very accepted in the world of medicine. Another example in this chapter of the problems with psychiatry was the incidence with Rebecca Riley. Her parents gave her cold medicine and her bipolar medication one night when Rebecca had a cold and could not sleep. The next morning she was found dead and it was concluded that she died from an overdose of the drugs her parents gave her, which weren’t approved for distribution to children. Rebecca was only three years old and was taking ten pills a day ever since she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Her mother was then asked in an interview if she believed her daughter was really bipolar. She answered, “Probably not.”


I'm not sure exactly how I feel about this book because there were so many parts in the book that I found very confusing, like the previous chapter about the conspiracy theorists. But there were also parts that I found to be very intriguing, like everything that happened in chapter 10. I guess I have an ambivalent feeling towards this book. The ending could've been better because it didn't explain what the point or meaning was of the idea, "being of nothingness." Based on all that happened in the book, I think Ronson himself could've very well lacked some sanity, which also made me think about everyone else in the world. It's possible that everyone could be a tad insane. 

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