Blood. Either here or there.

*Hermes post above

Quote :

Not really, just that these medical issues (deppression is an excellent example) seem to have cropped up around the same time as the welfare state and it's associated politics. Of course it's a chicken-egg argument as to which came first. It seems to have taken Reagan and Thatcher's ideals a long time to permeate these supposedly medical issues. Apparantly, the science to refute the idea of alcoholism as a disease goes back to the sixties.

That's gas - did that just come off the top of your head ?? Is it something to do with getting off work or chicken and egg as you say, people started to show signs of the illness with the advance of industrial processes... Coinciding with this modernist era as well was the rise of the science of psychology... I'm convinced that machinery and improved industrial processes have made our lives a lot easier and work less toilsome and bothersome and we should be taking advantage of the rewards machines give us to pursue higher goals. If we don't pursue those activities it could result in illness you know.

Aren't diseases themselves often culturally defined because they have a relevance in one culture but outside it they have no existence. A lot of these diseases are probably psychological alright and have meaning in our culture. What about someone with some personality disorder or Tourette's syndrome? What if you can't hold your temper very easily? Or if you can't prevent yourself from crying at the least little thing - we treat these as conditions now which have effective treatments and solutions. The latest one will be the Travel Bug I suppose i.e. anything to get off work and get on to the disability eh?

Alcoholism is an interesting one too as is the idea of the 'addictive personality' or compulsive disorders... What about teenagers who dress as Goths - aren't they in some way sick by wearing too much black and trying to look depressed all the time.

I used to think Existentialism was less a philosophy and more of a neurological condition.

There was a discussion the other night on Declan Carty's Late Night Whatever programme on Newstalk (I actually really enjoy it, though the full name escapes me) about child sex-abuse. I only come on it towards the end but one of the points which I hadn't thought of, but which makes a lot of sense is one made by Michael Mc Loughlin was that the vast majority of child-sex abuse occurs at the hands of someone who is known to the victim, often someone within the family and in those cases, some way of coping with it as a family is very important - some of the more lethal suggestions just don't work in those circumstances because families want everyone to be as well as possible and they want to function as normally as possible.

I also came across an article today while I was going through old magazines and newspapers about Pitcairn Island near New Zealand where half the adult male population was jailed in 2003 for sexually abusing the children of the island. Interestingly many of the women there were very angry with the victims who spoke out, saying that it's part of the culture for men to have sex with girls as young as 12. I'm not saying they're right (before anyone bursts a blood vessel), I'm simply pointing out that not all cultures even today share the same views that we do about the age of consent. Their own law, such as it is, would not have seen them prosecuted or convicted and the men, understandably, didn't want to be tried under British law because they felt it had no jurisdiction.

There were 32 women abused as girls -almost half the population of the island.
The men got what would be considered by our standards, very lenient punishments. The former mayor, for example, got a three year sentence for five rapes.

Kate P wrote:

There was a discussion the other night on Declan Carty's Late Night Whatever programme on Newstalk (I actually really enjoy it, though the full name escapes me) about child sex-abuse. I only come on it towards the end but one of the points which I hadn't thought of, but which makes a lot of sense is one made by Michael Mc Loughlin was that the vast majority of child-sex abuse occurs at the hands of someone who is known to the victim, often someone within the family and in those cases, some way of coping with it as a family is very important - some of the more lethal suggestions just don't work in those circumstances because families want everyone to be as well as possible and they want to function as normally as possible.

I also came across an article today while I was going through old magazines and newspapers about Pitcairn Island near New Zealand where half the adult male population was jailed in 2003 for sexually abusing the children of the island. Interestingly many of the women there were very angry with the victims who spoke out, saying that it's part of the culture for men to have sex with girls as young as 12. I'm not saying they're right (before anyone bursts a blood vessel), I'm simply pointing out that not all cultures even today share the same views that we do about the age of consent. Their own law, such as it is, would not have seen them prosecuted or convicted and the men, understandably, didn't want to be tried under British law because they felt it had no jurisdiction.

There were 32 women abused as girls -almost half the population of the island.
The men got what would be considered by our standards, very lenient punishments. The former mayor, for example, got a three year sentence for five rapes.

That kind of population size is hardly viable in any normal sense. In our village they say the arrival of the bicycle was the saving of the place.