Maggie's Farm

A new book by a shrink friend (and his daughter): F*ck Feelings: One Shrink's Practical Advice for Managing All Life's Impossible Problems

Freud famously discussed the Psychiatric goal as one of replacing neurotic unhappiness with normal unhappiness. When Freud wanted to feel merry, he would do a little coke and jump on his wife. I think he preferred coke to alcohol for merriment.

Certainly real life is tragic in many ways, real life is full of worries, joy is fleeting, no promised rose garden, etc etc.

There is no "right to happiness."

I may be blessed in that, despite all of my own inner concerns and real life challenges and worries, I often find myself humming contentedly or smiling for no reason. Sometimes I think that might come from a life in Christ, and sometimes I think it's just me. I was a depressed, unmoored adolescent.

The pursuit of happiness is big business. The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being  The transcript of the podcast is there. 

It's a shame that happiness can't be purchased but, as they say in the program, "It's an inside job."

India has to be one of the most complicated nations on earth. It is not really a nation except nominally. It's an antique empire with little except a corrupt, incompetent, and inertly-lazy bureaucracy to duct tape it together.

It seems unlikely to me that government could manage medical care there because it can't manage anything else.  India Is Training Quacks to Do Real Medicine

Well-trained paramedics and EMS-type people can do a lot of good, if they have the skills to decide what needs more expertise and what does not. Even the best-trained MDs often get that wrong.

There are two ways to get rid of ugly, burdensome, hip-and-knee-damaging, heart-damaging fat.

The easiest way is carb restriction, or zero-carb diet. Fat will melt away just to fuel normal life. Remember, all carbs = sugar, and excess carb/sugar gets long-term storaged as fat in case of starvation conditions.

The hard way is to combine that with exercise. This basic physiology explains why it is so hard to reach down into your fat stores.

Emily Yoffe's modern day advice column: Dear Prudence.

For example, Prudie counsels a letter writer whose atheist husband coopts Thanksgiving grace to rant about God.

Peter Singer and the trap of logic.

It might sound crazy, but I have always seen Singer as evil.

Can male and female sex drives be compared in any useful or interesting ways? It's difficult to get honest data for studies, individuals vary widely, and there is no easy way to measure "sex drive" anyway. I am pretty much convinced that the average male is more affected by physical sexual pressures and sexual fantasies than the average female. Why do men, especially young men, masturbate so much even if they have a sexual partner? It is because they do not always have a willing partner at hand when the pressure mounts.

There are two things, really: An (interpersonal) "urge to merge," (ie desire/love/lust), and a more impersonal need for sexual release/relief/recreation (a longing in the loins). A few pieces on the topic:

Women may be more sexually omnivorous than men, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're as hungry.

Turns Out Women Have Really, Really Strong Sex Drives: Can Men Handle It?

Do men really have higher sex drives than women?

How Often Do Men and Women Think about Sex?

Brain cells specific to men fire up when mates are present and override the  need to eat, scientists have found

   All male animals are like that. The comments are amusing.

Males and females are sex objects, and most want to be that sometimes - plus sometimes, or often, more than that. In today's world, a bold woman has far more easy access to sexual experience than a bold guy.

From Ted Dalrymple (who is a Psychiatrist), Everyone on the Couch:

Psychiatric diagnosis—more overblown, all-inclusive, and shallow in the DSM-5 than ever before—has almost driven the word “unhappy” from the English lexicon.

In the borderlands of physiologic abnormalities, changes happen all the time. For example, yesterday's perversion is today's celebrated "difference," while yesterday's lazy kid now has an internet addiction disorder.

Common sense people take it all with some humor and many grains of salt.

By borderlands, I mean the areas in which there are only subjective, untestable, vague complaints. Of course, that applies to many disorders in the Psychiatric domain.

One of my favorite bugaboos is Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. I am told that one can obtain lifetime disability for this impossible disease which is, in fact, either fictitious in some cases and "hysteria" in others.

Another is "Chronic Lyme Disease," and another is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.  It used to be called Neurasthenia. Freud thought, at first, that it was caused by the chemistry of sexual deprivation. Every patient I have seen referred to me with this trashcan diagnosis has had a mood disorder and/or a personality disorder. No, one of them had an undiagnosed schizophrenia.

Nevertheless, the squeaky wheels get the grease:  The Tragic Neglect of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

She said "I've been thinking all week about what you said about how I always focus on whether a boy likes me, and never think about whether I like the boy. I am changing this right now. What was wrong with me?"

Me: "Not worth thinking about that. You have made me a happy doctor today."

"Whole grain." Don't bother with it unless you like the taste of it. It has zero "health" benefit. Living as we do in a prosperous part of the world with an abundance of varied foodstuffs, there is no reason to consume any grain products at all except for enjoyment and to soak up gravy. Breads were once poverty food, just enough carbs to keep the proles and soldiers working one more day. The rich ate meat and lived far longer and more happily.

Often synonymous with good health, whole grains may lack heart-healthy
fiber—in fact, some processed forms increase cardiovascular risk.

The American lobbying and advertising Whole Grains Council has had huge success in selling their health scam. Just like Whole Foods. Food piety has two arms: the ignorant, and their commercial predators.

Enjoyment applies to OJ too. It's basically sugar with no other food value. Years ago, the Florida Citrus cabal convinced Americans that they should have it for breakfast. Tasty, but no different from a Coke. Scurvy is not a problem.

My point with my nutrition myth posts is that you should eat whatever you enjoy. If you have a weight problem or a health problem, that's another matter. Just don't pretend, for example, that an OJ is any "healthier" than a Pepsi, or brown bread is "healthier" than white bread. That is just marketing to the low-info shopper and gullibles like Michelle Obama.

We all love happy myths, do we not? The fantasy that we can control fate.

From Alva Noe's How Art Reveals the Limits of Neuroscience:

If you are at all sympathetic to the skepticism about neuroscience that I am advancing, then you will perhaps find it plausible that neuroaesthetics is another instance of neuroscience’s intellectual imperialism, another chapter in its attempt to come up with a brain theory of everything. But neuroscience’s recent preoccupation with art, however, reveals something deeper and more fundamental about the neuroscience project itself.

I am no skeptic about basic neuroscience. I am skeptical about its overeach, its hubris. Aesthetics can never be understood at a neuronal level of organization any more than a living cell can be understood at an atomic level.

The problem with a powerful central government in the US is that it is a big place with many localities with highly-varying viewpoints on life and values. With all of our immigration and home-grown subcultures, and with divisive politics, the US has few shared values or foundational attitudes.

All we have is a bedraggled Constitution, and most Americans don't know what it says.

Thus the average American sees himself as a citizen of the US in the abstract, on national holidays, and in time of war, but lives life primarily as a citizen of a community, or communities, of some sorts.

As a New England Yankee myself of original heritage and thus with minimal respect and instinctive distrust for government, politicians, amd government power, I was led to this subject by the post about David Leff. He is a fellow who seems to be a pillar of his community.

Every community requires such people who jump in and participate in a positive way, with no personal advantage expected other than the rewards of positive involvement. It's been the American Way since de Toqueville described it so well. Other than the Founders, that Frenchie explained American Exceptionalism better than any American ever had.

I have written about the "Circles of Community" in which we all live, and their importance to a good life. Except for hermits, humans need that for pleasure and life enrichment if not for support and survival. Venn diagrams, circling around, with family circles, social circles, neighborhood circles, athletic circles, professional circles, club circles, civic circles, political circles, church circles, hobby circles, etc. Most circles end up overlapping. Much of life consists of these circles, but they do not happen by themselves. Somebody made them happen just as somebody organized the barn-raisings. Government did not do that.

However, I am just focusing on local community here. Big cities have local communities just as Mr. Leff has his little Collinsville.

JFK's famous inaugural line about "Ask not..."  (who wrote that line for him?) can be better applied to one's local community and to one's circles of community than it can to this huge nation.

All localities, like all "circles," have energetic contributors, minor contributors, benign passive recipients, parasites, exploiters, and damagers of the social fabrics. It's probably a bell curve like everything else. Just paying your taxes does not count, nor does holding down an honest job or making some effort to obey the laws because those are the minimal expectations of residency anywhere.

What does count? Cub Scout Mom, Bible study, book club, Kiwanis, town meeting attendance or being on town committees, club committees, volunteering for virtuous or charitable purposes or at the library, organizing a block party or book club or softball games. It doesn't have to be big like being on the board of your local hospital or president of your country club, but if you are not engaged in positive ways without personal advantage, you are no capital "C" American Citizen in my book because you are a free-rider. A resident, not a Citizen.

We all ask ourselves daily how we wish to live, what example we wish to set, how we wish to be known, and how we wish to be remembered. Every human has a gift or gifts to offer and it is sinful to withhold them.

I've always been told that the pursuit of personal "identity" with its "personality integration" and "self-realization" was a distinctly modern and Western notion. Perhaps a too-precious conceit of artistes and suchlike.

In recent years, we have even used something called "identity diffusion" as a diagnostic marker. It's a thorny topic that very few people ever think about.

When I meet a new patient (or sometimes just a new person), I never ask "Who are you?" I just ask "Tell me about yourself" or "Tell me about your life."  I once met a fellow who told me that he was an "unresolved self." He was one of the most pleasant, well-put-together people I have ever met.

It is often said that psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are about inventing comprehensible, presumably explanatory narratives. Well, our narratives change with time. We evolve with time and experience; sometimes with awareness of our flaws and sometimes with awareness of God.

Some of these topics discussed here: I am not a story: Some find it comforting to think of life as a story. Others find that absurd. So are you a Narrative or a non-Narrative?

The Alternative Medicine Racket: How the Feds Fund Quacks

There is a huge market out there for the gullible and the ignorant. It's a shame.