March 23, 2024

"In some ways, 'dysregulation' is an updated version of another science-coded phrase we used to like: 'chemical imbalance.'"

"Picture the Zoloft commercial from the early aughts that featured line drawings of 'nerve A' and '“nerve B' on a plain-white background. 'Depression may be related to an imbalance of natural chemicals between nerve cells in the brain,' chirped the voiceover, as dots floated erratically between the two illustrated nerves.... A major 2022 umbrella review showed what had been an open secret in the field: There is no substantial evidence that low serotonin causes depression.... Dysregulation... 'implies relationships.'... 'It’s saying your body has been harmed, or decentered, or stressed from a set of traumatic events, so you are dysregulated, and that is just a normal biological consequence of what you’ve experienced.'... The fundamental appeal of regulatory language is the idea that there is a calm stasis to return to, a 'you' separate from your acute distress.... You may be a wreck on a hair trigger now, but that isn’t at the core of who you are...."

Writes Rachel Sugar, in "When Did Everyone Get So ‘Dysregulated’? How managing our mental health became a matter of monitoring our nervous systems" (NY Magazine).

Here's the original Zoloft commercial with the nerves and the dots:

17 comments:

Leland said...

Sorry Sugar, but not everyone is whatever new word you think there are. If you were mentally healthy, you could use the existing words quite nicely to make your point.

Kevin said...

We don’t solve problems anymore. We just make up new words to describe them.

rehajm said...

In the mist empathetic and compassionate way possible: suck it up.

gilbar said...

how many people in the USA are currently on mood modifying meds?

of THOSE people.. how many believe ANY THING the establishment shovels at them?
wokeism?
transism?
global climateism
ism-ism
Do we have ANY IDEA, What these mood modifying meds are REALLY doing?

OH! OH! even MORE IMPORTANT..
Of the school mass murderers in the USA in the last 20 years.. Were ANY of them NOT on modifying meds?

gilbar said...

which is the cart? which is the horse?
do these mode modifying meds have ANY useful effect? That is: useful to the patient?

stlcdr said...

Making up new words allows the ‘disease’ or ‘illness’ to encompass more people.

Drugged people become a dependent people.

Wince said...

A foreshadowing of social media-induced depression?

Assuming the blue bird in the commercial is the Twitter bird, we see the pre-Musk “before” Twitter caused depression and the Musk ”after” Twitter cured depression.

Jake said...

Letting pharma advertise was a huge mistake

Bob Boyd said...

I bet drug companies started using the words regulated and dysregulated because it appealed to the regulators who approve their new drugs.

When you're a regulator everything is a nail.

Leland said...

Ok, to tie my comment to a later post; one stigma created by android phones is their AI auto correct. I type the words "you think they are", and it converts it to "you think there are". I think we need the FBI to solve this problem. Later they can help some mom who didn't get the right toy in the Happy Meal. These are the cases the FBI should focus.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

The good news is that corrective mechanisms are still running. The bad news is that it took twenty years for it to take effect. How much damage did it do during all that time?

There is a lot more to our bodies than the Cartesian model would have us believe.

Keep asking questions.

Tom T. said...

"Medical products that I don't personally use are fake."

Howard said...

Like everything else, the mental health epidemic is multi factorial. An actual cure requires hard work, consistency and discipline in a non judgemental environment devoid of guilt and shame. Unfortunately, it's not possible to get people to adhere nor is it scalable nor disruptively profitable.

One can watch the psychosis blossom on these very comment threads over time in parallel with the woke mind virus on the left.

However, you crazy fucks are not the majority by a long stretch. Just because you get all of the media attention does not confer normality to your pathologies.

Bill Burr talks about this on Neal Brennan's podcast Blocks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWEutQSQrws&pp=ygULQnVyciBibG9ja3M%3D

Yancey Ward said...

The SSRIs were the perfect drugs- there were no objective tests to determine who needs one or more prescriptions, and they are for lifetime use from an early age.

Yancey Ward said...

Howard, you are a crazy fuck just like the rest of us.

Roger Sweeny said...

But isn't that part of just about any therapy/religion: there is a "real you" which is better and more satisfying and just more real than the way you are now, and we will help you get (back?) to it.

Howard said...

Roger: No and yes. Most issues are caused by overflowing the sympathetic fight or flight) nervous system and underutilizing the parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous system.

Exercise, deep breathing, meditation or prayer, cold exposure, gut health all combine to stimulate and tone the vagus nerve increasing serotonin and reducing depression and anxiety.