Sociology

We Need To End The Stigma Around Mental Illness VIDEO

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 3 Comments

We Need To End The Stigma Around Mental Illness VIDEO.

Way to go, Rick Mercer!  I’ve been dogged by depression my whole life, but that hasn’t immobilized me and I think I get along quite well most of the time.  It does make daily activities a challenge at times and it is a constant struggle. The top administrator at St. Joseph’s hospital in Comox told me a few days ago that anxiety and depression are the leading reasons for hospitalization.  We often think of illness as a quality of the individual.  We think of it as idiosyncratic.  We acknowledge that environmental degradation can cause illness, but we seldom think that illness can have social roots.  There is a lot of evidence to suggest that much illness is social in origin, ‘mental’ illness particularly so.  We drive each other crazy all the time and the anxiety caused by uncertainty over mundane aspects of our lives combined with the certainty of death is a killer.  I think that the incidence of mental illness, distress and anxiety is highly underreported.  After all, no one wants to be labelled mentally ill.  That label carries with it profound consequences as the video shows.  Who wants to face the rejection and opprobrium that comes with a diagnosis of mental illness?

Roger

 

 

It’s about class and race and sex and…

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 6 Comments

Just a teaser there!  Now for the real post!

So, I’ve been writing a biweekly column for the local paper, The Comox Valley Record.  Not exactly the New York Times, the Globe or the Guardian.  It’s a paper published twice a week and emphasizes ads over editorial content, but it’s making an effort to provide some coverage of social issues.  The Record is read by substantial numbers of people locally so I get some people reading my work.  They tell me so occasionally.  It’s a challenge to write a regular column sometimes. Not that I’m at a loss for words.  I’ve been writing for some time now about homelessness and affordable housing and local government involvement in such things.  Problem is, I’m not at all convinced I’ve changed anybody’s mind on these topics.  I generally try to provide evidence for my position and appeal to reason, but I doubt I’m having much effect.  Of course, I may be surprised by what people are feeling about my work, but I have no idea what impact I’m actually having.

Generally I think that people are loathe to change their minds in any way.  They have a huge vested interest in their ideas and more often than not in my experience when I’ve spoken in public I sense that people are not so much listening to learn, they are listening only to respond on the basis of their own ideas.  That was how many of my students listened in class over the 36 years I taught at BC colleges.  Not all of them.  It’s hard to say just how many of my students had a change of mind after taking my courses.  I know that some of them did to the point of going on to take sociology as a university major.

Obviously we teach and write with the hope that people will listen and change their minds if the evidence is compelling enough for the arguments we make.  I’m not sure that happens all that frequently.  I’m thinking that people change their minds for lots of reasons, just not often by appeal to reason.  It strikes me and has struck me for some time that a person’s social status, class, ethnicity or nationality and sex have a profound impact on their worldview and what they allow ‘into’ that worldview.  Of course, age, intelligence and many other factors will also have an impact.  There have been a few studies about how people change their minds or don’t.  Not a lot.  A recent article in The New Yorker by Maria Konnikova (May 16, 2014) entitled I Don’t Want To Be Right addresses this issue.  She writes: “When there’s no immediate threat to our understanding of the world, we change our beliefs. It’s when that change contradicts something we’ve long held as important that problems occur.”  So many of our attitudes, beliefs, values and ideas are habitual, entrenched and lovingly held, that we resist any attempt to change it. Some of our beliefs are held tentatively as in science, but for most of us most of the time, we don’t like evidence that contradicts what we believe or espouse.

Attitudes we hold towards other people in the class structure are generally quite entrenched.  We hold wealthy people in high esteem and we feel that poor folks are less than worthy of our consideration. That’s class at work.  We don’t want to support housing for the homeless because it’s their bed, they made it and now they must sleep in it, never mind all the evidence that suggests that the homeless are not always responsible for their life circumstances, especially homeless children.  Evidence in this case will be discounted time and again by whatever means possible including misrepresentation, misquotation, lies, deceit, ad hominem argumentation and any number of other strategies.  No, we don’t like our ideas to be challenged.  After all, they’re served us so well for our whole lives.  Why change now?  Indeed.

We do change our minds sometimes but it usually takes a profound change in our life circumstances to do so.  We change our ideas because our lives change and not the other way around.  We may fall ill, become disabled, or experience a business failure, a marriage breakdown, death in the family, death of the family.  So many life experiences have the power to change our minds and attitudes towards other people or other ideas.  Appeals to reason on the other hand fail to move us, especially if the new beliefs would require us to re-think our whole worldview.  The more highly we are committed to our worldviews and to our material interests, the less likely we are to change, no matter what the evidence to the contrary might be.  No better example of this is the Cheney/Bush insistence on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.  Such bullshit so highly defended as truth.  I’m sure Cheney would still argue that the weapons are there somewhere.  He would be completely disingenuous in this, but he would at least be consistent.

So, why am I writing a column in the local paper that tries to convince people of the advantages, economic and moral, of providing housing for the homeless?  Beats me.  I’m still thinking about it.

King Lear and the Walking Dead – From Earth in Transition

~ Roger JG Albert

Given what I’ve been writing here lately this is quite timely.  A good read.  Mountain is generally a very thoughtful writer and in this case, he nails it.  From King Lear to the Walking Dead, what drives us culturally and collectively is our fear of death.

King Lear and the Walking Dead

 

No, You’re Not Entitled To Your Opinion | IFLScience

~ Roger JG Albert

No, You’re Not Entitled To Your Opinion | IFLScience.

I quite like this piece. I used to tell my students at the start of every term that they did not have a right to their own opinions in my classes.  In fact I told them that I had no time for their opinions at all.  Now, why would I say such a nasty thing?  Because ‘ordinary’ opinion, not based on evidence, as in the case of taste and preference in colour, is not the same as scientific opinion, which is based on evidence and argument.  Until one has ‘done’ science, one has no right to an opinion in a science class.

I Work for the PHS

~ Roger JG Albert

Read this without being ‘touched’ and all I can say is that you must be a sociopath.

ironnieg's avatarStruggle On

Yes, I work for the Portland Hotel Society. Yes, I work at Insite, the only legally sanctioned supervised injection site in North America. And yes,  injection drug use, most frequently with illegal substances, occurs there. In fact, many hundred times per day. Yes, I’ve also heard the news about us, and have read our accusations.

Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. What a place. Make no mistake, this is a community of unique historical importance, no moment so great as now. This apparent gem of a city, ocean, mountains, and this ghetto, not too long ago, known as Canada’s poorest postal code zone. All representing for me and many the collision of all the big questions and big solutions of our culture. The beauty of the mountains and the despair of poverty sharing the same horizon line, obscured only by the division of concrete, glass, and the cranes used to create more, bigger…

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Of life and death

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

This quote from Luc Ferry seems appropriate today for some reason.  Having attended a memorial service yesterday and knowing that there will be another one tomorrow in Kelowna for the son of a dear friend of ours, I offer you this.  It deals with Greek myths which often involve struggles between gods and mortals.  The lesson is difficult for us mortals…it’s hard not to be angry with the gods.

Luc Ferry:

With Orpheus and Demeter, properly speaking, we are no longer dealing with stories of hubris.  Nevertheless, I will speak of them here because their extraordinary adventures are in one essential respect related to the theme touched on in the myths of Sisyphus and Asclepius: in effect, the question of escaping death – or at least that of returning from the underworld to the light of day.  As we shall see, this journey, impossible for mortals (there is as far as I know only one exception in the whole of Greek mythology), is not easy even for those gods who, albeit immortal, find themselves imprisoned in the kingdom of the dead. And this theme of resurrection bears upon the nature of cosmic order within which gods and mortals cohabit, for it is in the nature of things that men die, from which none can escape without provoking a disorder that, in the end, would overturn the course of the universe.  We must therefore accept death, in whose shadow we must nonetheless seek the good life. [my italics]

From: Luc Ferry, Wisdom of the Myths, Kindle Edition, 2014, page 228.

Business-Managed Democracy

~ Roger JG Albert

I was just about to embark on a lengthly rant about how we treat the poor when I ran across this blog and decided to share it with you.  This is Sharon Beder’s website and I’m letting her do the ranting for today.   She would definitely pass as a rebel and a dangerous radical in Stephen Harper’s world so that’s why I kind of like her work.  I’m not saying I agree with everything on this website, but she has some interesting insights into why we treat the poor the way we do and why we blame them for everything they are and aren’t.  Click on the link below to see what I mean.  Then we can talk.

Just saying, though, that if money equals mobility and life, then poverty must equal immobility and death.  Zombies are such a good metaphor for the homeless, aren’t they?

 

Business-Managed Democracy – Site Map.

The Greeks, the Christians and Women: We are a tragic species.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 6 Comments

In Greek myth, humankind started out as exclusively male.  The gods created men, mortal beings, but in the age of gold, their mortality was scarcely given any thought because men always died peacefully, in their sleep, with no pain and suffering and it didn’t end there for them.  After death they became pure spirit ‘daemons’ who are essentially given the task of ‘dispensing wealth to men according to individual merit.’ (Ferry 2014, 146)  That’s not a bad gig, really, not unlike how classical economists see the ‘invisible hand’ of the market.  These were invisible daemons doing the same job.

Pandora is the first woman.  She is Zeus’ creation and is given something by every god.  Of course, she’s drop-dead gorgeous but she also comes with a lot of, let us say, unsavory characteristics.  Without going into detail, Prometheus, the creator of men (males only at this point) has pissed off Zeus because he’s been trying to help his creation with getting on with the job of creating civilization. (What really pissed Zeus off was that Prometheus had stolen fire from Olympus and given it to man so that he could now cook his food…a very civilized thing indeed).  Up to this point, still in the golden age, men are living a pretty cool, decent life.  But because of the internecine pissing contests between the gods, things start going sideways for humans.  It comes to pass that Pandora seduces Epimetheus, Prometheus’ hapless brother at which point all hell breaks loose (which is what Zeus wanted in the first place).  Mankind is cast from the golden age into the age of iron, forced to feed himself, etc., and because of the nasty contents of Pandora’s box (pain, fear, old age, death) doomed to lead a miserable life with nothing but hope for succor. (Hope being the only thing not to escape from Pandora’s box.)

So, the point of all of this is that it’s at this stage in the development of the cosmos that men are now born from sexual intercourse between men and women.  Pandora gives birth to other women and that’s it for man.  Sex is where it’s at now.  We come to be born, as it were, between shit and piss and the rest is history.

What I find interesting here as much as anything is the similarity of this account of the origins of people on this planet with the one offered by Christianity.  The details are obviously very different, but the principles are the same and so are the results. As the story goes, God creates man who is pure and spiritual, living in the Garden of Eden, the golden age.  Almost as an afterthought, God creates woman and she seduces the pretty dumb male and is punished for his stupidity by having to work for a living and by having to put up with woman who is never satisfied and reminds him of death every day.

Because this is the whole point and the tragedy of the relations between the sexes since forever.  Woman is associated with the body, temptation and death.  Men are associated with purity, spirit and life.  Women successfully seduced the stupid men and now we all pay the price of mortality.  How’s that for blaming half the world’s population for what came out of Pandora’s box.  Unfortunately, our world is still driven by these old stupid ideas.   Are we ever going to get over this crap and actually start real human history?  Of course, it’s much more complicated than this, but this is an important dimension of the issue especially when laid next to our incessant warlike behaviour and our drive for puffing ourselves up and smiting our ‘enemies.’  Dumb species we are.  Just plain dumb.  This is not to say that every man is a stupid mysogenist.  The fact is that our cultures are fundamentally mysogenistic.  Individuals can be better than that, but our lives are governed to a great extent by mysogenistic principles and practices. Hard to escape. I know some men and women who have.  For me, that’s grounds for optimism and for what little there is left in Pandora’s Box.  More later (of course).

Women as weak and unclean!

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

Barbarian Status of Women, Part 2:  Women as Weak and Unclean.

 

To start, I include here a sample of Thorstein Veblen’s writing to give you a sense of what it would be like to read a more substantial piece of his work, like his book The Place of Science in Modern Civilization.  Of course, this long quote is relevant to what I want to pursue in this post, that is, the general cultural institutional perception of women as weak and unclean, associated with the earth, dirt, blood, the night and death.  After all, Gaia, the first of the gods in Greek mythology was female, she was the earth. [She wasn’t personified as later Greek gods were, but she is a god helping to bring order into a chaotic universe.]   Veblen doesn’t go in all of these directions, but others do, including the Freudians.  We’ll have a little visit with them today too.  Now for Veblen:

In such a community [of barbarians] the standards of merit and propriety rest on an invidious distinction between those who are capable fighters and those who are not. Infirmity, that is to say incapacity for exploit, is looked down upon. One of the early consequences of this deprecation of infirmity is a tabu on women and on women’s employments. In the apprehension of the archaic, animistic barbarian, infirmity is infectious. The infection may work its mischievous effect both by sympathetic influence and by transfusion. Therefore it is well for the able-bodied man who is mindful of his virility to shun all undue contact and conversation with the weaker sex and to avoid all contamination with the employments that are characteristic of the sex. Even the habitual food of women should not be eaten by men, lest their force be thereby impaired. The injunction against womanly employments and foods and against intercourse with women applies with especial rigor during the season of preparation for any work of manly exploit, such as a great hunt or a warlike raid, or induction into some manly dignity or society or mystery. Illustrations of this seasonal tabu abound in the early history of all peoples that have had a warlike or barbarian past. The women, their occupations, their food and clothing, their habitual place in the house or village, and in extreme cases even their speech, become ceremonially unclean to the men. This imputation of ceremonial uncleanness on the ground of their infirmity has lasted on in the later culture as a sense of the unworthiness or Levitical inadequacy of women ; so that even now we feel the impropriety of women taking rank with men, or representing the community in any relation that calls for dignity and ritual competency ; as for instance, in priestly or diplomatic offices, or even in representative civil offices, and likewise, and for a like reason, in such offices of domestic and body servants as are of a seriously ceremonial character ‚ footmen, butlers, etc.

Veblen, then, in his odd style, explains that women are considered lesser than men because they can’t fight.  What they do around the house is fine, but the really important stuff, like hunting and protecting the group, is the purview of men and that type of activity becomes entrenched as the value standard by which to judge all action.  So, men, powerful men, manly men, become the standard by which to judge all of humankind.

Veblen’s explanation, then, remains at the level of performance.  The tabu on women is a result of their ‘infirmity’, their inability to pursue the hunt and to fight.  Because this ‘infirmity’ is infectious, men must avoid women, especially at certain times of the year and when women’s infirmity is most obvious during their time of her ‘customary impurity’ otherwise they risk losing their prowess.  There have been obvious residual instances of this proscription when it’s been made clear to professional athletes by coaches and others interested in winning.  So I googled: Is it ok to have sex before a high level athletic competition?  There were enough ‘hits’ to suggest that its still on people’s minds, mindless though that is.  After all when the French refer to orgasm as ‘la petite mort’ what they are referring to is the overwhelming bodily release of tension and semi-immobilization that comes with it.  One dies a little upon ejaculation.  At least that’s my interpretation and I’m sticking by it.  Others have suggested that ejaculation and orgasm give up a little of a man’s ‘life’ every time it happens.  I don’t think so, but it does bring up the notion that bodily functions in general, especially those that involve orifices, ejaculates, evacuations and such are subtle little reminders of our mortality.  Why else do Catholic priests and others vow to be chaste?  Why else would people (men, that is) in certain societies wear butt plugs?  Well, both practices deny the body and its downright nasty habit of getting ill, diseased and eventually dead.  Men can delude themselves into thinking that if they just abstain from bodily stuff and stick to the symbolic, spiritual side of life then they can live eternally.  Yeah, right.

Next class, we visit the Freudians via Norman O. Brown and Ernest Becker.  It might be fun later to look at Greek philosophy and myths to get a sense of how they see this stuff.