#hps

[transmutationisms]

forgive me if I'm being obtuse, but isn't every medical diagnosis an artifact of human taxonomic schemes? I know I'm not treading new ground here and that diseases/medical conditions aren't like, drawn from thin air in the way a lot of psychiatric conditions are i suppose it just confuses me a bit

no, & this is ancillary in some ways to what i'm actually criticising about psychiatry. it's true there are non-psychiatric medical diagnoses that work analogously to psychiatric ones: think ME/CFS, hEDS, fibromyalgia, most things that have 'idiopathic' in the name. these are names given to clusters of symptoms, like the way that psychiatric labels are just names for a certain set of behaviours. we don't know what causes these issues, though people have various theories and there is (a varying amount of) research ongoing that aims to find the etiologies.

however, that's not the case for all non-psychiatric diagnoses. think about a viral or bacterial infection, a torn ACL, or Down syndrome. these are diagnoses that do refer to specific infectious agents, anatomical problems, genetic variants, and so forth. that doesn't mean the diagnosis is always easy to make, or that it's always made correctly, but it does mean that when you are diagnosed with one of these problems, a specific cause is being identified (& sometimes they might even be right). it's not just a convenient shorthand name for a group of symptoms, even though of course, most things that are diagnosed are done so because they cause and are associated with symptoms. (most but not all lol.)

psychiatry is distinct as a discipline in that all of its diagnoses function the first way i described. they are not referring to disease entities or processes; there is no credible hypothesis for a biological etiology. why? fundamentally, because the psychiatric diagnoses generally exist to pathologise socially unwanted behaviour: the taxonomy is a reflection of a political agenda and the priorities of clinicians. it's not even really an adequate framework for grouping patients together, because you get placed in a category based only on, again, external manifestations (behaviours). who says any two people who hallucinate or cut themselves are doing it for the exact same reasons? well, no one, because again, even getting the same psych diagnosis doesn't indicate anything about an actual etiology or underlying biological process or anything. there is no referent; the psychiatric diagnosis is only defined heuristically and circularly.

many people are confused by this because, in both popular and professional discourse, psychiatric diagnoses are consistently spoken about as though they DO refer to an underlying discoverable disease or disease process. despite hundreds of years of looking for such things, psychiatrists are yet to find any, and if they did, the condition in question would be reassigned to the relevant medical specialty, because psychiatrists also cannot treat infectious agents, anatomical problems, harmful genetic variants, and so on. (when i worked as a bibliographer we used to have extremely funny arguments over whether materials pertaining to the psychiatric search for biological disease processes should be categorised under psychiatry, neuroscience, medicine general, philosophy of medicine, 'science and society,' or just 'controversies and disputes' with no real subject label.)

to be clear, when i say psychiatric diagnoses aren't referring to known or discoverable disease processes, that's not a moral indictment. it's not an inherently bad diagnostic process, provided the patient understands that is what the process actually is. sometimes we just don't know yet what we're dealing with; sometimes a heuristic diagnostic label is just a way of billing insurance for a treatment that we know helps some similar patients, even if we don't know why.

however, with psychiatric diagnoses, evidence for such efficacy is widely lacking and often even negative; this is fundamentally because psychiatric diagnoses are not formulated on the basis of patient needs but on the basis of employer and state needs to cultivate a productive workforce and by corollary enforce a notion of mental 'normality.' all medicine under capitalism has a biopolitical remit; psychiatry has only a biopolitical remit. it has never at any point succeeded in making diagnoses that refer to demonstrable disease processes, because that's definitionally not even under its purview. these diagnoses have never been satisfactorily shown to be related to any disease process—and why should we expect that? historically, that's not what they exist for; it's not the problem they were invented to solve. they are social technologies; they're not illnesses.

[toomuchracket]

huge pic for the insufferable (me)

[thetimecrystal]

this is so cunt

shot by yaël temminck

[daddy-in-law2]

HPS

[flipchild]

thinking about how we describe LLMs as hallucinatory (i.e., making disproven or unproven or unprovable statements which have a real-ish appearance), behavior/hypotheses about behavior, hypotheses generally, & about my experiences with hallucination.

idk quite what my gist is here, but hallucinations and hypotheses are both tested with experiment.

An outside perception exists, or a conceivable phenom exists, and a test is devised whether/to what degree/from what source/to what effect/within which conditions, etc, it exists (or doesn't, etc, all those in combination).

I have no broader point at the moment, just... my experience with hallucination is always to try and find reference points to prove whether or not my perception is grounded in the real. This seems similar AND distinct from how we describe LLMs as hallucinatory. Mostly, I'm just bickering over diction, I guess.

Apologies for the load-bearing etc's and vibes-based reasoning 🙏

[lupines-slash-recs]

Rec: The Three Abstracts by PseftisIncertus

Title: The Three Abstracts Author: PseftisIncertus Canon: Harry Potter Series Pairing: James Potter/Severus Snape Rating: Not Rated [🍉] Word Count: 48,292 Summary: Severus Snape just lost his mother and is having nightmares.

Continue reading...

[bonnielunkas]

hey uhhh sorry the main antagonist of your fazbear frights story? yeah the one who was bullying the protag and became a zombie robot??? uhhh, she's a girl now. yeah, her name's sophie now. sorry.

[sarukahparullah]

I feel extremely lazy finishing this so...enjoy this sketch of my OCs dressed as HPS chars

[techxart]

Itachi Uchiha Drawing ( Colour pencil art) by - Techxart #drawing #Naruto #anime

[transmutationisms]

can u elaborate on posture being a lie

As Beth Linker explains in her book “Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America” (Princeton), a long history of anxiety about the proximity between human and bestial nature has played out in this area of social science. Linker, a historian of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that at the onset of the twentieth century the United States became gripped by what she characterizes as a poor-posture epidemic: a widespread social contagion of slumping that could, it was feared, have deleterious effects not just upon individual health but also upon the body politic. Sitting up straight would help remedy all kinds of failings, physical and moral [...] she sees the “past and present worries concerning posture as part of an enduring concern about so-called ‘diseases of civilization’ ”—grounded in a mythology of human ancestry that posits the hunter-gatherer as an ideal from which we have fallen.

[...]

In America at the turn of the twentieth century, anxieties about posture inevitably collided with anxieties not just about class but also about race. Stooping was associated with poverty and with manual, industrialized labor—the conditions of working-class immigrants from European countries who, in their physical debasement, were positioned well below the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment. Linker argues that, in this environment, “posture served as a marker of social status similar to skin color.” At the same time, populations that had been colonized and enslaved were held up as posture paradigms for the élite to emulate: the American Posture League rewarded successful students with congratulatory pins that featured an image of an extremely upright Lenape man. The head-carrying customs associated with African women were also adopted as training exercises for white girls of privilege, although Linker notes that Bancroft and her peers recommended that young ladies learn to balance not baskets and basins, which signified functionality, but piles of flat, slippery books, markers of their own access to leisure and education. For Black Americans, posture was even more fraught: despite the admiration granted to the posture of African women bearing loads atop their heads, community leaders like Dr. Algernon Jackson, who helped establish the National Negro Health Movement, criticized those Black youth who “too often slump along, stoop-shouldered and walk with a careless, lazy sort of dragging gait.” If slouching among privileged white Americans could indicate an enviable carelessness, it was seen as proof of indolence when adopted by the disadvantaged.

This being America, posture panic was swiftly commercialized, with a range of products marketed to appeal to the eighty per cent of the population whose carriage had been deemed inadequate by posture surveys. The footwear industry drafted orthopedic surgeons to consult on the design of shoes that would lessen foot and back pain without the stigma of corrective footwear: one brand, Trupedic, advertised itself as “a real anatomical shoe without the freak-show look.” The indefatigable Jessie Bancroft trained her sights on children’s clothing, endorsing a company that created a “Right-Posture” jacket, whose trim cut across the upper shoulders gave its schoolboy wearer little choice but to throw his shoulders back like Jordan Baker. Bancroft’s American Posture League endorsed girdles and corsets for women; similar garments were also adopted by men, who, by the early nineteen-fifties, were purchasing abdominal “bracers” by the millions.

It was in this era that what eventually proved to be the most contentious form of posture policing reached its height, when students entering college were required to submit to mandatory posture examinations, including the taking of nude or semi-nude photographs. For decades, incoming students had been evaluated for conditions such as scoliosis by means of a medical exam, which came to incorporate photography to create a visual record. Linker writes that for many male students, particularly those who had military training, undressing for the camera was no biggie. For female students, it was often a more disquieting undertaking. Sylvia Plath, who endured it in 1950, drew upon the experience in “The Bell Jar,” whose protagonist, Esther Greenwood, discovers that undressing for her boyfriend is as uncomfortably exposing as “knowing . . . that a picture of you stark naked, both full view and side view, is going into the college gym files.” The practice of taking posture photographs was gradually abandoned by colleges, thanks in part to the rise of the women’s movement, which gave coeds a new language with which to express their discomfort. It might have been largely forgotten were it not for a 1995 article in the Times Magazine, which raised the alarming possibility that there still existed stashes of nude photographs of famous former students of the Ivy League and the Seven Sisters, such as George H. W. Bush, Bob Woodward, Meryl Streep, and Hillary Clinton. Many of the photographs in question were taken and held not by the institutions themselves but by the mid-century psychologist William Herbert Sheldon. Sheldon was best known for his later discredited theories of somatotypes, whereby he attributed personality characteristics to individuals based on whether their build was ectomorphic, endomorphic, or mesomorphic.

[...]

Today, the descendants of Jessie Bancroft are figures like Esther Gokhale, a Bay Area acupuncturist and the creator of the Gokhale Method, who teaches “primal posture” courses to tech executives and whose recommendations are consonant with other fitness trends, such as barefoot running and “paleo” eating, that romanticize an ancestral past as a remedy for the ills of the present. The compulsory mass surveillance that ended when universities ceased the practice of posture photography has been replaced by voluntary individual surveillance, with the likes of Rafi the giraffe and the Nekoze cat monitoring a user’s vulnerability to “tech neck,” a newly named complaint brought on by excessive use of the kind of devices profitably developed by those paleo-eating, barefoot-running, yoga-practicing executives. Meanwhile, Linker reports, paleoanthropologists quietly working in places other than TikTok have begun to revise the popular idea that our ancient ancestors did not get aches and pains in their backs. Analysis of fossilized spines has revealed degenerative changes suggesting that “the first upright hominids to roam the earth likely experienced back pain, or would have been predisposed to such a condition if they had lived long enough.” Slouching, far from being a disease of civilization, then, seems to be something we’ve been prone to for as long as we have stood on our own two feet.

[toomuchracket]

the dare glasgow show omg i am going to pull him

[kneipe]

weimar 2023

[oldbutnotyetwise]

The Legend of Sergeant Peter Couture

When I started in Policing our training consisted of nine weeks at Police College before coming back for a three month training period with a training officer before returning to the Police College for another six weeks. It was while I was back at the college for the second session that a fellow recruit started talking about the best sergeant ever, some guy name Peter Couture. The thought of this legendary sergeant intrigued me. I remember the first time I saw Peter Couture, in was in the basement range at Central Station. Someone said hey it’s Peter Couture and I turned around to eye up this legend, and what I saw didn’t look like a legend to me. Here stood this relatively short guy, his hat was on crooked, he had thick plastic rimmed glasses on, wrinkled uniform shirt, scuffed up black boots and an old beaten up briefcase in his hand. Not sure what I was expecting but it was not that. Sure enough a short time later I came up town and was assigned to Peter Couture’s squad. It was then that I got to see what a really well run squad looked like for the first time. The most fun I had on the job was the years I worked for Couture. When I had started in the Stoney Creek Station I never saw my sergeant at a call, but on Couture’s squad it was like he was everywhere. You could take that as he was checking up on you but it wasn’t like that. He was making sure you were okay and that you had everything that you needed. Couture worked every bit as hard, if not harder than everyone on his squad. Although he didn’t look like a legend, I quickly came to understand why he was the best road sergeant around. In the early days your yearly assessment was a once page affair, I will tell you that the best assessments I ever received in my entire 31 year career were from Couture. He wrote very well, and from what he wrote it showed he was paying attention to everything that you did all year long. He made you feel appreciated for the work you did, no one else’s assessments ever meant as much to me as his did. He was a leader who lead his squad not by fear or intimidation but because if you worked for him you did not want to let him down, and that me friends is how real leaders lead. There is something nice about working for a supervisor who isn’t chasing further promotion, who is happy where they are and only interested in doing their job, looking after their people. To be honest it was Sergeant Peter Couture who made me want to be a road sergeant, I wanted to be like him. He supported those of us who liked to work hard and he knew who his go to people were. I remember sitting in Court once watching Couture testify, the defence lawyer is cross examining him. I understand you punched the defendant in the head several times he was asked, and Couture said “Yes I did”. Then the defence lawyer asked him would you agree you’re a fair bit bigger than the defendant? Couture didn’t pause with his response, “Yes, and a good deal older too”. Even the Judge chuckled at that line and the Cross Examination ended. In the end Couture was forced into retirement by his age, and he did not go happily. He was a larger than life figure in Policing, it was hard for me to imagine him having another life outside. After he retired I phoned him a few times, took him out to lunch once but then lost touch with him when I moved away. His home number had been disconnected and I was trying to find out what had happened to him when I learned of his death. I was sad to learn of his death, the death of a friend, a mentor, a legend, a good and well respected leader. I was a better officer and am a better person thanks to him. Rest easy Sarge, thank you for everything that you did for me, and for so many others like me.

[flipchild]

Is this comprehensible to anyone besides myself. i.e., does constructing nutrition studies as a trade-off of population:individual::utility:empirical adequacy track to you.

like, generalizable nutrition is more useful but has kind-of inherent difficulties in sound method; individual nutrition can more soundly make recommendations for intervention, but is concomitantly nongeneralizable & has the same biases for wealth as individualized medicine

sorry, trying 2 get argument sketch for my thesis well-ordered in my head and on the page

[i-identify-cats-in-posts]

EMS Code - HPS n

Household Pet Shorthair - black

My latest cartoon for New Scientist.