The Spectacle Blog
I can see you will not be bludgeoned quietly into submission
here. Good.
First, and fairest enough, the hucksters deserve their own
thousand words of public revilement. But blame in this instance is
not a zero-sum game, and heaping ignominity on doctors who act as
particularly expensive and interactive vending machines does not
require that we shovel away the other dunghill piled around
Glaxo.
Second, “our insane” described the really unbalanced people
who require medical attention, not the unfortunates who are
presented at every opportunity on television and in popular culture
with drumbeats and parades of fresh disorders and the saving power
of Pill Grace. Tom Cruise’s attack on medicine isn’t chic; the way
we accept the turning of every attitude and emotion into a disorder
is. The way we medicate our children at the drop of a hat, without
any eye to when we might stop medicating them, is. The way that the
postmodern malaise of endless wants and sexual disgracefulness is
breeding ingrained soul-sickness is. And the way we turn to our
great therapeutics, to our factories of coping, is.
The attacking slap of my rhetorical glove, when directed at
Glaxo (and doctors), declares a duel; that slap, when it lands on
the faces of patients, is meant more benignly to snap them out of
their lemmings’ march. If I cause an introverted dork to seek
confidence, not consultation, by shouting boo, this pleases me. And
I think anyone dorky and introverted enough to read my article
through to the end will probably sense the times when a
tongue-shaped bulge appears in one commentarian cheek or
another.
I don’t discount your insistence that more people
deserve our bile for cashing in on trumped-up angst, and though
Paxil (having no hands of its own) has not singlehandedly lowered
the bar, as we say, you must agree that limboing HMOs and
profiteering physicians would only be entertaining themselves were
we not presently in the giant grip of a culture of therapy, where
physical and mental freedoms expand apace with the desperation of
their wants and needs.
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http://spectator.org/blog/2005/12/13/re-dont-like-the-drugs-2
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