Carolyn Gage
  • Home
    • Butch Visibility Project
    • Bio and Vitae
    • Endorsements
    • Production History
    • Catalog of Books and Plays
    • Online Essays >
      • Lesbian Culture and History Essays
      • Theatre Essays
      • Feminist Essays
      • Tributes/Obituaries
      • Reviews
    • Interviews >
      • Audio/Video Interviews
      • Print Interviews
  • Books and CD's
    • Gage Play Anthologies
    • Feminist Thought And Spirituality
    • Lesbian Theatre
    • CD's and DVD's
    • Anthologies with Other Authors
    • Journal Anthologies
  • Plays
    • One-Woman Shows >
      • The Second Coming of Joan of Arc
      • La Seconde Venue de Jeanne d'Arc
      • Joana Dark - a re-volta
      • Giovanna d'Arco - la rivolta
      • ВТОРОТО ПРИШЕСТВИЕ НА ЖАНА Д’АРК (Bulgarian tranlsation of The Second Coming of Joan
      • 贞德再临_中文 (Mandarin translation of The Second Coming of Joan of Arc)
      • The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman
      • Crossing the Rapelands
    • Musicals >
      • The Amazon All-Stars
      • Babe! An Olympian Musical
      • How to Write a Country-Western Song
      • Leading Ladies
      • Women on the Land
    • Full-Length Plays >
      • The Abolition Plays
      • The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women
      • AXED!
      • Black Star
      • Coming About
      • Esther and Vashti
      • The Goddess Tour
      • In McClintock's Corn
      • Sappho in Love
      • The Spindle
      • Stigmata
      • Thanatron
      • Ugly Ducklings
    • One-Acts >
      • Ain't Got No - I Got Life
      • The A-Mazing Yamashita and the Millennial Gold-Diggers
      • Artemisia and Hildegard
      • Battered on Broadway
      • Bite My Thumb
      • The Boundary Trial of John Proctor
      • Cookin' with Typhoid Mary
      • The Countess and the Lesbians
      • The Drum Lesson
      • Easter Sunday
      • Entr'acte or The Night Eva Le Gallienne Was Raped
      • The Evil That Men Do: The Story of Thalidomide
      • Female Nude Seated
      • The Gage and Mr. Comstock
      • The Greatest Actress Who Ever Lived
      • Harriet Tubman Visits A Therapist
      • Head in the Game
      • Hermeneutic Circlejerk
      • Heterosexuals Anonymous
      • Jane Addams and the Devil Baby
      • A Labor Play
      • Lace Curtain Irish
      • Lighting Martha
      • Little Sister
      • Louisa May Incest
      • Mason-Dixon
      • The Obligatory Scene
      • The P.E. Teacher
      • The Parmachene Belle
      • The Pele Chant
      • Planchette
      • The Poorly-Written Play Festival
      • Radicals
      • The Rules of the Playground
      • St. Frances and the Fallen Angels
      • Souvenirs from Eden
      • Starpattern
      • 'Til the Fat Lady Sings
      • Valerie Solanas At Matteawan
    • Short Short Plays >
      • 52 Pickup
      • At Sea
      • Black Eye
      • El Bobo
      • Calamity Jane Sends a Message to Her Daughter
      • The Clarity of Pizza
      • The Great Fire
      • Hrotsvitha's Vision
      • The Intimacy Coordinator
      • The Ladies' Room
      • Miss Le Gallienne Announces the New Season
      • On the Other Hand
      • Patricide
      • The Pickle Play
    • Dramatic Adaptations >
      • Amy Lowell: In Her Own Words
      • Brett Remembers
      • Deep Haven
      • El Bobo (one-act play)
      • El Bobo (short screenplay)
      • Emily & Sue >
        • Touring Production of Emily & Sue >
          • The Creative Team
          • Director's Vision
          • Adaptor's notes
          • Open Me Carefully
      • I Have Come to Show You Death
      • Speak Fully The One Awful Word
      • We Too Are Drifting (Screenplay)
    • Special Index: Plays That Deal with Sexual Violence Against Women and Girls
    • Special Index: Women's History Plays
    • Special Index: Romantic Plays with Happy Endings
  • Touring Work
    • Performances >
      • Lace Curtain Irish
      • Crossing the Rapelands
      • The Parmachene Belle (performance)
      • Calamity Jane Sends a Message to Her Daughter (performance)
      • Gage on Stage
    • Lectures >
      • Lizzie Borden and Lesbian Theatre
      • The Secret Life of Lesbians
      • Paradigms and Paradigm-Shifting
      • When Sex Is Not the Metaphor For Intimacy
      • Meeting the Ghost of Hamlet's Father
      • A Theatrical Journey Through Maine's Lesbian History
      • Tara and Other Lies
      • Teena Brandon's Inconvenient Truth
    • Workshops >
      • The Art of the Dramatic Monologue
      • Acting Lesbian
      • Interrupting Racism: A Workshop
      • Playwriting Techniques for Poets and Fiction Writers
      • Ugly Ducklings Workshop
    • Residencies
    • The Lesbian Tent Revival >
      • Testimonials
      • The Lesbian Tent Revival Radio Hour Podcasts
      • The Lesbian Tent Revival Sermon on Dying Well
      • Sermons for a Lesbian Tent Revival
      • Supplemental Sermons
      • Hotter Than Hell
      • The Synapse Pendant
    • Cauldron & Labrys >
      • A Brief History
      • Upcoming Productions
  • Calendar
    • Gage Performances and Appearances
    • Productions of Gage's Work
  • Contact/Storefront
    • Privacy Policy
  • Blog

Leeches and Psychotropic Drugs Part One

12/5/2010

0 Comments

 
PictureLeeches
Did you know that bloodletting was the most common medical practice from the first century AD until the nineteenth century—nearly two thousand years!—even though, in the majority of cases, the practice was harmful and even fatal to patients?

Wow.

Wouldn’t you think that in two millennia, people might have noticed that folks losing pints of blood got worse instead of better?

Actually, I’m sure they did. They would definitely notice when the patient died. So why the extraordinary longevity of such an obviously pernicious therapy?

The answer is simple: human nature. We are emotional, not rational creatures. And we are creatures of habit; our traditions die hard. And we are social animals; shunning by the herd will bring most of us back into line. 

Picture
Bloodletting was the accepted practice. The patient who challenged it, would be accused of malingering. The parent who refused it for their child would be perceived as negligent, or even malicious. The story is so strong, so rooted in human nature that it hijacks the  narrative: The patient who gets worse after bloodletting would have been even sicker without the procedure. The patient who eventually dies from loss of blood was going to die anyway, and the bloodletting came too late to save her.

Who needs science when there is a story as powerful as the story of blood gone bad, blood carrying humors which must be expelled? It is a graphic and compelling story—blood being such a dramatic metaphor for life. Blood is present at the birthing, present on the battlefield, emblematic of the transition to womanhood, and also emblematic of the manhood rite of wounding. Blood ties of kinship, blood feuds to the death. Blood as giver and as taker of life.

And then there is that human tendency to believe that it is better to do something than nothing. And bloodletting had the additional advantage of being quantifiable. Specific amounts of blood could be let at specific intervals. These could be recorded, charted, studied. There could be right ways and wrong ways for the letting-of-blood. Various techniques were developed, each with its own theory. But best of all, everyone has blood.

And, finally, there is an exchange of some sort going on. The bloodletter is receiving payment. The bloodletter is invested in promoting the practice, and the patient and the patient’s family have a disincentive in understanding that they have been hoodwinked… or that they might be responsible for enabling the harm or death of the one they loved. And then, of course, there is the lucrative cottage industry of leech-farming/ leech-harvesting.

Picture
Why am I telling you this? Because it might make it easier to swallow the fact that millions of people today are receiving a medically prescribed treatment that is making the majority of them much sicker, shortening their lives, and sometimes killing them… and there is absolutely no research to support the theory upon which these treatments are based.

In this case, the practice is only a few decades old instead of millennia, but the principle behind it is the same: human nature.

This blog is my response to reading Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker. The subtitle is “Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America."

The first thing that impressed me about this book was the story of the author’s involvement with the subject. He was not a counter-culture type guy. In fact, he had co-founded a publishing company to report on the business aspects of the clinical testing of new drugs. In his own words, “we wrote about this enterprise in an industry-friendly way.” Clearly Anatomy of an Epidemic is not “industry-friendly.” What changed?

Whitaker stumbled across a story about the abuse of patients in a research setting. He did a series of articles on the subject for the Boston Globe. In one of the stories, he reported on a study which had involved withdrawing schizophrenic patients from anti-psychotic medications. Since the medication for this disorder is likened to “insulin for diabetics,” the author questioned the ethics of a study that would deprive the patient of a medication supposedly known to be essential for their health.

In the course of researching this article, Whitaker ran across two findings that nagged at his conscience:

1)    In 1994, Harvard researchers announced that outcomes for schizophrenia patients has worsened since 1974 and were no better than they had been a century earlier… as in 1894.

2)    Two separate studies by the World Health Organization which found that schizophrenia outcomes were much better in poor countries like India and Nigeria, where only 16% of the patients were maintained on anti-psychotic medications.

The point of all this is that the author of the book was a solid believer in the conventional wisdom of modern psychiatry. He believed that psychiatric researchers had discovered biological causes for mental illness and that their findings had led to the development of a new generation of psychiatric drugs to “balance” brain chemistry. He was to discover that none of these assumptions were true.

Anatomy of an Epidemic is the story of his awakening.

Click here for Part 2.

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Picture

    Carolyn Gage

    “… Carolyn Gage is one of the best lesbian playwrights in America…”--Lambda Book Report, Los Angeles.

    SUBSCRIBE:
    To subscribe to the blog, scroll down and click on "RSS Feed". To subscribe to my newsletter, click here.

    Categories

    All
    Child Abuse
    Civil Rights
    Incest
    In Memoriam
    Interviews
    Lesbian Feminism
    Lesbian History
    Psychotropic Drugs
    Rape
    Reviews
    The Environment
    Women And Theatre
    Women's History

    Archives

    June 2022
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    July 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    October 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    November 2018
    September 2018
    June 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    February 2017
    December 2016
    October 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    December 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    July 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    August 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    January 2011
    December 2010
    October 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.