jacksprostate - Tumblr blog

jacksprostate · 2 months ago

Text

Considering the vast majority of the analysis involved condemning psychiatric medicine, I'm not certain how you loved or mostly agreed with it.

Your thing about sleeping pills entirely ignores what I was saying; the insomnia is a symptom of his larger problem, not the driver of it. You're positioning the development of Tyler as a psychotic break resulting from him lacking sleep. Ergo, if he's forced to sleep, Tyler wouldn't've happened. However, the whole point of my above analysis is that the insomnia is merely a symptom of the rotting core of his issues. Tyler Durden syndrome isn't real; there's no more reason to believe forcing him to rest would have changed the development of Tyler, especially considering the narrator gets varying amounts of sleep throughout the book with no change to the development of Tyler.

Being forcibly drugged into getting sleep wouldn't've magically changed everything he knew. Changing his job wouldn't've changed everything he knew. He could have left his job. But as I said before, he cannot unlearn what he knows. Insomnia meds would not have changed that he felt radically isolated from pretty much everyone specifically on the basis of being very aware of insidious corruption in the overarching sphere of 'things that are supposed to protect people.' Simply saying, oh he could make friends and get involved in community activism! Ignores exactly how in depth these things are. This is the scale of things where it is very hard to get involved with small scale activism because you're deeply and unwillingly aware of who actually holds power and exactly how easily they get away with it. I am not saying that the hopeless implosion is correct, in fact I argue Fight Club is a story about how that's not the right answer, but it is callous in my opinion to take such a degree of isolated anguish and simply go 'oh join a random community activism thing!'

How would community activism solve the fact that he knows all the major car companies are allowed to get away with murdering people? That if they're allowed to get away with it, this means the government is fine with allowing it so these companies can continue to profit? Knowing that if the car companies are allowed to do this, certainly other companies, pharmaceutical, air, war, are allowed to do this? Do you think it is easy to ball this up and decide campaigning is an acceptable bandaid? Do you think it is? Drawn from later in your post; 'Citizen's Collective for Change'; what the fuck is the immediate impact you think they're making?

I'm not saying community work isn't important. I actually think it's one of the most important things one can do, and is the solution to feeling like the deep corruption is insurmountable. Personally, I'm orienting my entire career towards serving my local community. Specifically in providing necessary services. Because that's a difference as well. Community activism, citizens for change, are you just shouting about things? Or are you actually doing something? Because the whole point is the narrator needs to do something. He has already tried telling people and all it results in is, as I said in my post, him getting dismissed as individually crazy since it's easier to do so than to accept the truth. He is pushed into creating Fight Cluba and Tyler and everything specifically because it is an avenue of doing something with specific impact.

Regardless, back to the psychiatric medications thing. Despite saying you like my analysis or whatever you decided you needed to explain the old broken inaccurate analogy of psychiatric medication and broken bones. Thanks, really. Obviously, anyone who critiques psychiatric medicine just doesn't understand the concept of numbing an issue to give it time to heal. Silly me. Do you realize that this is insulting? I've been on psychiatric medications. I know many people who have been on psychiatric medications. I know people who swear it was needed and I know people who hate that they were ever brought into their life.

Saying psychiatric medication is like a cough suppressant ignores the absolute laundry list of horrific side effects and dependencies it creates. Cough suppressants also usually have a specific and well documented mechanism of action. (Though, as an aside, their effectiveness has actually been put into question, especially in children, so fuck me lol! Nothing is sacred!) Psychiatric medications, especially antipsychotics, produce chemically induced suicidality (which trust me, feels a LOT different to norm), involuntary movement disorders (neurological damage), metabolic syndrome, memory loss; I'm sure you'll just say I'm drawing from the worst of it but I'm not. These things are well documented and considered acceptable risks because the mentally ill have little rights to refuse medication. Akathisia, for example, which is considered somewhat mild of a side effect, literally makes people want to kill themselves due to the experience of it. Antipsychotics have huge discontinuation rates because of how fucking bad it is to be on them. If you think they give space to deal with problems, you're ignoring a hell of a lot of the experience of being on them. Even more 'benign' treatments can massively screw with someone's ability to regulate their own chemical balance, as evidenced by the fact that it can be catastrophic to go off the meds, even for something as widely prescribed as Prozac. Is that space to cope? Does that actually help people, if the drug leaves them in a muted, stagnated state, and whenever they try to leave it, they experience withdrawl?

I know I won't convince you since you read my entire first post and thought 'oh I agree except for literally everything' but come on.

Again, you position the development of his weird Tyler Durden syndrome as purely due to his insomnia, which I disagree with for the reasons I've already stated. A copy of Stone Butch Blues ain't doing shit for a man, christ. Not that it's any better for women. Fucking hate that book <3 I know it's become a popular pick for people who feel very nouveau but alas it's actually hilariously insulting if you're a butch who doesn't think that means she can be a colossal dick to everyone around her. Still don't get why you brought it up for the narrator of Fight Club but you do you I guess. Fucking, benzos and a copy of Stone Butch Blues. Do you hear yourself. You do not agree with me.

I agree with forming community and collective action. Ironically, that's what he DOES do. That is literally what Fight Club is. The whole point is that those things alone are not a miracle, they still need to be oriented properly.

And again! Oh my god! Obviously, you do NOT know how the sausage gets made, because if you really did, if you really had an experience that left you with something so horribly huge and nebulous that everyone treats you like you're crazy because the alternative where you are being honest is too horrifying to consider, you would be very aware that NO, most people definitely are unaware of these things. Like, holy. Come talk to me when your friends all drop you for being honest about experiencing medical malpractice or something. When your boss tries to give you a pay raise so you ignore how you're being used to rubberstamp the opposite of the safety or protection your job is supposed to serve. When you actually have your life fall apart for a while because you learned something no one wants to talk about.

Of course his issue is he's decided the beast is too sick and needs to be put down instead of changed for the better. That's what the book is about. But you're putting the cart before the horse. He already felt it was unbeatable. That's why he can't sleep.

Forming a community and doing collective action. To do what, bud? What should he be doing instead? I agree, community and collective action. But he's not finding solace in fucking marches and leaflets. Most people aren't. Hence why the vast majority of people feel detached from politics and like it's all a puppet show.

He's not going to the support groups because he knows he needs support and he's subconsciously gravitating and he just didn't know he needed to go to the Green Leaf Peace Brigade. He's going to the support groups because it's the only place where if he acts like everything is dying, people don't dismiss him. They let him feel like he's dying. Because then he's acceptably isolated as the problem.

Again, I do think community and collective action is the answer. But you can't just say that and end it there like it's some novel insight. Those things are literally what he develops via Fight Club. He wants action. And I can't take you seriously when you proclaim community and collective action to be the answer but turn and call the dudes in Fight Club sheeple for falling for a political suicide cult. How fucking insulting to the fact that it's portraying how deeply lost and hopeless these people feel, lol. Do I think their crimes should be ignored or whatever? No. But I'll give the pain that makes Fight Club seem like a good alternative to life the respect it should have.

The narrator feels isolated about having discovered a lot of corruption in society because he IS. It is heavily established in the book that literally everyone dismisses him. But congrats on finding a new way to do so by literally saying it's just a personality flaw and not a product of his stated experience being constantly rejected and ignored and speared on his own stake!

Anyway. I will do you the courtesy of not lying: I very strongly agree with your analysis, as is evident in my response. I'd love if you were honest next time instead of pretending our positions are not literally diametrically opposed. I agree collective action is the answer, but I think you're blind to how dismissive you are and consider yourself more knowledgeable than you are. Additionally, your final line acts like there's no disabled or chronically ill people who disagree with your view here lol. You might want to take a step back on that.

Treatise on why No, the doctor just giving the narrator of Fight Club (full name) his requested sleep medication or sending him to therapy would not have Fixed Him

Firstly, saying giving him the insomnia meds would’ve fixed him ignores the reason he has insomnia in the first place. He is so deeply upset by his place in society that he literally cannot sleep. Drugging him to sleep would not change that. That, of course, is the easy, quick response.

But with regard to therapy? The biggest flaw is that it ignores a central tenet of the book. Part of what tortures the narrator and drives him to invent Tyler is that his feelings about this collective, systemic issue are constantly reduced to a Just Him thing. His seatmates ask what his company is. He’s the only one upset at the office. He gets weird looks if he says the truth of what he does. People will do anything in their power to pretend he is the issue, as an individual, because it is far scarier to consider the full implications of the systemic issues implied by what he is saying. Everyone treats it as if the issue is him, so he goes insane. He does anything to get someone to say, holy shit, that’s fucked up, what you’re a part of is wrong. In an attempt to feel any sort of vague sympathy and catharsis, he goes to support groups to pretend to be dying, because then at least people don’t habitually blame him for his anguish.

Saying therapy would fix him ignores that his problems are not individual. They are collective. It’s the reason the entire story resonates with people! Something deeply, unignorably wrong with society, where people would rather blame you for bringing it up than try and address it, because it feels impossible. I don’t blame people for this, really, because it IS scary. It’s terrifying to sit and feel like you’ve realized there’s something deeply, deeply wrong, but if you say something, people will get mad at you since it’s so baked into everything around you. Or, even if they agree, it’s easier to deal with the dissonance by pretending it’s individual.

And it’s not like that’s not the purpose therapy and medications largely serve, anyway. Getting into dangerous territory for this website, but ultimately, the reason the narrator was seeking medication was because it’s a bandaid. A very numbing bandaid. For these very large, dissonance causing problems, therapy does very little. Medications do what they always have, and distract you with numbness or side effects. It’s a false solution. He is seeking an individualized false solution because he has been browbeaten with the idea that this is an issue with him alone, when it's plainly clear it's not.

Don't get me wrong. Obviously he has something wrong with him. But it's a product of his situation. It is a fictional exaggeration of a very real occurrence of mental illness provoked by deep unconscionable dissonance and anguish. There is a clear correlation between what happens and his mental state and his job and how isolated he is.

The thing is, even if he were chemically numbed, I do think he would’ve lost it regardless. Many people on meds find they don’t fix things. For reasons I’ll get into, but in this case because even if numbed or distracted, once you’ve learned about deep, far reaching corruption in society, it’s very hard to forget. Especially if, in his case, you literally serve as the acting hand of this particular variety. He’s crawling up the walls.

So why do people say this? Well, it's funny I guess. Maybe the first time or whatever. But also, often, they believe it, to a degree. Maybe they've just been told how effective therapy and meds are for mental illness, they believe wholeheartedly in The Disease Model of Mental Illness, maybe they themselves have engaged with either and have considered it successful. Maybe they or someone they know has been 'saved' by such treatments.

But in all honesty.... What therapy can help with is mentality, it's how you approach problems. For issues on a smaller scale, not meaning they are easier to deal with my any degree, but ones that are not raw and direct from deep awareness of corruption; these are things that can be worked through if you get lucky and get an actually good therapist who helps build up your resiliency. But when your issue is concrete, something large and inescapable? It's useless. At best it can help you develop coping mechanisms, but there is a limit for that. There is a point where that fails. To develop the ability to handle something like this requires intense development of a comfort with ambiguity and dissonance and being isolated and a firm positioning of your purpose and values and and belief in wonder and all the other shit I ramble about. The things that the narrator lacks, which lead him to taking an ineffectual death knell anarchist self-destruction path. Therapy, where the narrator is, full of the knowledge of braces melted to seats and all the people that have to allow this to happen? It fails.

And meds â€” meds are a fucking scam. We know the working mechanism of basically none of them, the serotonin receptor model was made up and paid its way into prominence. We have very little evidence they're any better than placebo, and they come with genuinely horrific side effects. Maybe you got lucky. I did, on some meds. On others? I don't remember 2018. The pharmaceutical industry is also known for rampant medical ghostwriting, and for creating 'off-label' uses for drugs that have gained too many protests in their original use, then creating a cult of use to then have 'grassroots' campaigns for it to be made a label use (ie, legitimize their ghostwritten articles with guided anecdotes).

The DSM itself is basically a marketing segregation plot. It's an attempt to legitimize the disease model by isolating subgroups of symptoms to propose individualized treatments for subgroups that are not necessarily all that separate. But if the groups exist, you can prescribe more and different medications, no? Not to mention, if you use the disease model, you can propose that these diseases are permanent, or permanent until treated, considered more and more severe to offset and justify the horrific side effects of the medications. Do you know why male birth control doesn't really exist? Same reason. They can justify all the horrible side effects for women, because the other option is pregnancy. For men, it's nothing.

And they're not bothering to invent new drugs without side effects. When they invent new drugs it's just because the last one got too bad of a name, or they can enter a new market. Modern drugs don't work any better than gen1 drugs. They still have horrific side effects. At best, the industry will shit out studies saying the old one was flawed (truth) so they can say this new gen will be better (lie). They're doing it with ssris right now.

Fundamentally, the single proposed benefit of any of these drugs is that they numb you. To whatever is torturing you. It's harder to be depressed if you can't feel it, or if you just can't muster the same outrage. Of course, there is people who find that numbness to be helpful, or worth it. But often, it's stasis. For the people who have problems that can be worked on, it serves as a stopgap to not actually work on said problems. The natural outcome of the disease model is stagnation for those whose need is to develop skills and resiliency. It keeps them medicalized and dependent on the idea that they're diseased and incapable. Profitable. Stuck in the womb.

I’ve been there. It’s easier, to wallow, and resist growth because it’s difficult and painful and unfair and cruel and you can think of five billion reasons to justify your languishing. But don’t listen to anyone who tells you you’re just permanently damaged, no matter how nicely they word it, no identity or novel pathologization, no matter how many benefits they promise, especially if they swear up and down some lovely expensive medications with little solid backing and plentiful off-label usage and side effects that’ll kill you. Some days it feels like they want us all stuck in pods, agoraphobic and addicted to the ads they feed us to isolate the markets for the drugs they’ve trained us to beg them to pump us with. Polarization making it as easy as flashing blue light for go, red like for stop, or vice versa. I worry about the kids, for fucks sake. That’s a bit dark and intense, and I apologize. But I want you (generic) to understand, there is a profit motive. Behind everything. And they do not mean well. They do not care about your mental health or your rights or your personhood or your growth. They care about how they can profit off of you.

For those struggling with immovable, society problems, like the narrator grappling with how his job fits into and is accepted by society while his rejection and horror in the face of it does not, it can work about as well as any other drug addiction. Your mileage may vary. From what I've seen, recovering from being on prozac for a long time can be worse than alcohol. They put kids on this shit. They keep campaigning for more. Off label, again. A pharmaceutical company’s favorite thing to do has to be to spread rumors of someone who knows someone who said an off label use of this drug helps with this little understood condition. Or, in the case of mental illness, questionably defined condition. And like, damn, I know I'm posting on the 'medicalization is my identity' website so no one will like all this and has probably stopped reading by now, but yall should be exposed to at least one person who doubts this stuff. Doesn't just trust it. Because I mean, that's the thing right?

It's so big. What would it mean, for this all to be true? Yeah, everyone says pharmaceutical companies are evil and predatory and ghostwriting, but to think about what that really entails. Coming back to the book, everyone knows the car lobby is huge and puts dangerous vehicles through that kill people. What does it mean if the car companies all hire people to calculate the cost of a recall and the cost of lawsuits? No one wants to think about the scale that means for people allowing it or the systems that have to be geared towards money, not safety like they say. Hell, even Chuck misses the beat and has the narrator threaten his boss with the Department of Transportation. And shit, man, if every company is doing this, you think Transportation doesn't know? That they give a fuck? You're better off mailing all the evidence to the news outlets and hoping they only character assassinate you a little bit as they release the news in a way that says it's all the fault of little workers like you, not the whole system. Something something, David McBride, any whistleblower you feel like, etc.

So I don't blame you, if your reaction is "but but but, that can't be right, people wouldn't do it, they wouldn't allow it" or just an overwhelming feeling of dread that pushes you to deny all of this and avoid thinking about it. Just know, that's in the book. That's all the seatmates on the flights. That's all his fellow officemates. It's easier to pretend, I know.

But think about, how the response fits in with the themes of the book. The story, as a movie too. What drives the narrator’s mental breakdown? How would you handle being in his position? How would you handle being his seatmate? It’s easy to say you’d listen. But have you? Have you had any soul wrenching betrayals of how you thought society worked? How about a betrayal by the thing that promised to be the fix of the first? Can you honestly say you wouldn’t follow that gut instinct, saying follow what everyone says, that person must just be crazy, evil, rude, cruel, whatever it is that means you can set what they said aside?

For a lot of people, they can do that, I guess. Set it aside. Reaching that aforementioned state of managing to cope with the dissonance and ambiguity and despair is very hard. The narrator made the Big Realization, but he couldn’t cope. He self-destructed. Even when people don’t make the big realization consciously, they’re already self-destructing. It’s hard to escape it when it feels easier than continuing anyway. When it feels like the only option,

Would therapy fix the narrator of Fight Club? Would meds fix the narrator of Fight Club? No. He knows too much. All meds will do, by the time he’s in the psych ward, is spiritually neuter him. A silly phrase, but really. Take the wind out of his sails.

Is he fixed if he doesn’t try to blow up town? If he just shuts up and settles in and stops costing money? If he still can’t cope with the things he’s unearthed? Do you see how this is a commentary in a commentary in a commentary?

Fight Club is an absolutely fascinating story because of this. The fact that it addresses the fallout of knowing. The isolation. The hopelessness. The spiral that results from a lack of hope. This is, I think, what resonates most with people, even if not consciously. Going insane because you’ve discovered something you wish you could unknow. It’s a classic horror story. Should our society be lovecraftian evil? I don’t think so.

Do I think changing it will be easy? No. Lord knows a lot exists to push people who make these sorts of Realizations towards feelings of individuality and individualized solutions and denial and other distractions and coping methods. And to prevent people who make One realization from expanding on it and considering further ramifications. Fight Club itself gets into this; the isolation of men being a strict part of the role society shapes for their sex leaves them very vulnerable to death fetishes, in a sense, and generally towards self destructive violence. It helps funnel them away from substantial change and towards ineffectual change. Many things, misogyny, racism, serve to keep people isolated from one another, individualized, angry, and impossible to work with. Market segregation; god knows even appealing on those fronts has become such a classic ploy that companies do it now, the US military frames its plundering that way, etc.

I’ve wandered a bit but ultimately, my point is this: Fight Club is a love letter to the horrors of critical thinking, and the importance of not falling into the trap of self destruction and hopelessness in the face of it. The latter is why Tyler was an anarchoterrorist instead of anything useful. The latter is why it was a death cult. It’s important to work through the horrors of critical thinking so you can do it, and stand on the other side ready to believe in each other. It’s worth it.

#normally I try to be a lot more peaceful #but frankly 1. i found this incredibly insulting 2. i dont really care much anymore

75 notes · View notes