[HN Gopher] Honestly: Does Glorifying Sickness Deter Healing?
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Honestly: Does Glorifying Sickness Deter Healing?
Author : paulpauper
Score : 26 points
Date : 2022-07-24 21:02 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.commonsense.news)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.commonsense.news)
| thrown_22 wrote:
| It not only deters healing, it makes people act ill when they are
| not. Social media is filled with people pretending to be sick. If
| you want some of the most blatant see [0] the disability there
| isn't three broken ribs requiring a ventilator.
|
| Reminds me of Luis the 14th and his anal fistula [1]. Courtiers
| started faking anal fistulas after the king had an operation to
| remove his. It got to the point where they would get treatment
| for them, or fake getting the treatment, regardless of health.
| This was not a simple operation at the time. Chances of death
| were high, to the point where the first was performed on a
| condemned criminal who was pardoned if he survived.
|
| [0] https://www.insider.com/who-is-youtube-star-nikocado-
| avocado...
|
| [1] https://tidsskriftet.no/2016/08/sun-kings-anal-fistula
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| See also: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-
| crazy-like...
|
| > Around the Meiji Restoration, when everyone was obsessed with
| how great foreign stuff was, Japanese medical students went to
| Germany, learned psychiatry, came back to Japan, and told
| everyone they were neurasthenic. Being neurasthenic became
| first a fashion, then a class marker. The idea was that
| neurasthenics were people who were working too hard (good,
| admirable), and who were so smart and doing so much furious
| intellectual activity that it was straining their nerves
| (impressive). Also, they were probably sensitive souls too pure
| for this world. The most embarrassing extreme of this happened
| in 1903, when some photogenic Japanese youth carved a poem in a
| tree, went to a beautiful waterfall, and leapt to his death.
| Everyone praised him for how sensitive and artistic and
| neurasthenic this was, and turned him into a posthumous
| national hero. Meanwhile, "in 1902 an article reported that
| fully one-third of patients visiting hospitals for
| consultations were suffering from the new disease."
|
| > Eventually Japanese psychiatrists got fed up, and started
| announcing that actually neurasthenia sucked and you should not
| have it. From a 1906 Japanese neurology journal:
|
| >> These days, young students talk about such stuff as "the
| philosophy of life". They confront important and profound
| problems of life, are defeated, and develop neurasthenia. Those
| who jump off a waterfall or throw themselves in front of a
| train are weak-minded. They do not have a strong mental
| constitution and develop mental illness, dying in the end. How
| useless they are! Such weak-minded people would only cause harm
| even if they remained alive.
|
| > Finally everyone struck a compromise and agreed that most of
| the lower-class patients weren't real neurasthenics (hard-
| working, intelligent, sensitive, admirable), but had a similar
| condition, imitating the symptoms of neurasthenia, based on
| being too weak and pathetic to cope. This seemed to do the
| trick, and people stopped coming to the hospital with
| neurasthenia symptoms. Watters writes:
|
| >> Looking back on the debate, it seems as if acceptance of
| neurasthenia had been so successful that psychiatrists felt
| obligated to restigmatize this mental disorder in hopes of
| limiting its adoption. By the end of World War II the diagnosis
| had almost completely gone out of style among both
| psychiatrists and the population at large.
|
| > He who has ears to hear, let him listen.
|
| Glorifying illness causes a lot of harm.
| astrange wrote:
| Seems misleading that this page talks about its own author in the
| third person.
| np_tedious wrote:
| Definitely weird. Perhaps the podcast summary was not itself
| written by Bari?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'll be the first to admit that I don't have my finger on the
| pulse of what's chic, but this line:
|
| "..."the gentrification of disability," how sickness became
| chic..."
|
| is quite something.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Not a big Twitter uswr
| ineptech wrote:
| Anyone find a transcript? I'd be curious to read it but I really
| dislike podcasts.
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(page generated 2022-07-24 23:00 UTC)