It seems like for the past 10 or 15 years, various forms of mental illness have been sweeping the masses. I’m not necessarily talking about Baker-Act type insanity, I’m talking about your run of the mill mental illnesses that psychiatrists diagnose and prescribe stuff for. Some classic examples are clinical depression, ADD, and anxiety disorders. What I’m trying to figure out is this: Have people always had these mental illnesses in such large numbers and they just went undiagnosed for millennia, or are the psychiatrists of the world overdoing it?

Okay, before people get offended without me intending to offend them, please note that at no point in this entry do I mean to claim that I do not believe that these mental illnesses are real. I dated a girl who was clinically depressed, and believe you me – you did NOT want to be anywhere near her on a day that she missed her medication. What I intend to do here is to investigate the question of whether or not the magnitude of people today who are currently being medicated actually needs to be so great.

Let’s start off investigating the first possibility that I suggested at the end of the first paragraph: Maybe the same exact percentage of people who are diagnosed with some form of mental illness today have had mental illness since the dawn of man. This is definitely possible, and there are instances where historians believe that certain famous historical figures did, indeed, suffer from some form of mental illness that would be diagnosable and could take medication for today. Of course, this is what one would expect who believes that these mental illnesses are, indeed real. The question we are asking, however, is quite different.

Are these mental illnesses over diagnosed, and how might history help us to decide? I think that, looking at history, these mental illnesses are almost certainly over diagnosed. I mean, imagine if in, say, the early to mid 1900s, ADD was exactly as significant a problem as it is with children today. Back then there were two kinds of kids: Those who were fairly well off and went to school, and those who were immigrants and worked in sweat shops. In either of these cases, ADD would be a huge problem; however, we do not hear many stories about kids in sweatshops with ADD who were fired, for example.

Another place to look at for evidence is that our over diagnosis of mental illnesses might be a cultural phenomenon. Is there as much diagnosis of these same medications in Australia, for instance, as there is in the US? I’m not going to look up this information, because quite frankly, I wouldn’t know where to find it. If you do, then please educate the rest of us. Until then, however, I’m going to assume that this medication is almost certainly diagnosed less in other cultures, especially non-western cultures. Do these people just fundamentally suffer less mental illness due to their biological makeup? I doubt it.

Again, I admit that much of this would be a lot clearer with more empirical evidence, as I am kind of asking an empirical question here. But in terms of mere plausibility, I think that my assumptions are probably correct. I mean, most countries can’t even begin to afford anywhere near the magnitude of medication that the US consumes for mental illnesses. Yet, does that mean that they have thousands of clinically depressed people jumping off buildings? Maybe hundreds, but certainly not thousands, or we would be hearing more about it in the news, don’t you think? As stated earlier, the claim is not that these mental illnesses do not exist, just that these mental illnesses are exaggerated in our current society.

Okay, that’s my stance, and I’m sticking to it. You probably saw it coming from the first paragraph. But now comes the fun part: What should be done about it? If these mental illnesses are being over diagnosed, then how do we prevent this exaggeration? Well, I think one obvious solution is for psychiatrists not to be such slackers. I mean, recommending medication is the easy way out. When they get a patient in who says that he is kind of depressed, many of these psychiatrists immediately write out a prescriptions for Prozac and send him on his way. Instead, the psychiatrist can just ask him a few questions and realize that he was just divorced, for instance. I have a hunch, however, that there is a general preference to write prescriptions, which makes the psychiatrists jobs easier, and more lucrative, as you shouldn’t be surprised if these large drug companies give doctors a kickback who are loyal prescribers of their medication.

Other than the doctors needing to stop slacking off, I think people need a different attitude about things too, as it’s their fault as well. What am I talking about? Well, people need to stop thinking that a pill can solve all of their problems. Yes, in some instances, people actually do need this medication, but in many (or dare I say most) others, it’s just the easy way out. If you have a kid who is just being a kid in school, and doesn’t always pay attention, that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to get him on Ritalin ASAP. Medication should become a “last resort” not a “first line of defense”.

I know I’m cynical, and some of that is coming out in this I’m sure. But it just seems like on all sides of the discussion, the problem is that people are too damn lazy. Doctors are too lazy, so they just write out prescriptions on a whim; people are too lazy, so they just take a pill instead of trying to work out problems in their life. The really bad part about the current state of mental illness medication in our society is that it actually has begun to minimize the mental illnesses of those who actually are suffering from them. I mean, when most people hear that a kid is on some anti-ADD drug, they usually chuckle, but some kids really do need the drug. But I guess as a society, we make our own destiny, and as the days progress, I just think we get closer and closer to Aldous Huxley’s vision; we are becoming a Soma nation.

Can you imagine a world without bread?

Ya know, I have always been one who believes that stereotypes suck. I mean, it’s horrible when people judge you based on some feature that you have which causes people to assume things about you. But ya know what? Stereotypes got that way for a reason. Let me explain what I mean.

As much as I hate stereotypes, there is one thing to note about stereotypes: They often are, indeed, true. After all, that’s how they got to be stereotypes. If people who have certain stereotypes placed upon them failed to perpetuate those stereotypes, then these stereotypes would eventually die off.

Want an example? Sure you do. Well, tonight was my brother’s graduation. The Valedictorian was a very smart girl, obviously. She had a nice speech and all, it wasn’t bad. There was one thing though: The speech’s major theme was “Star Trek.”

Oh c’mon. I mean, honestly. I get that this girl likes Star Trek, and I don’t hold that against her. But talk about perpetuating a stereotype! Let’s see: Nerds are really smart people; really smart people become Valedictorians; Valedictorians watch Star Trek. Thus, Nerds watch Star Trek.

Get it? I don’t care how much she loves Star Trek, but putting it in her speech, she just perpetuated a major stereotype. Why does this bother me? Because I happen to have been the Valedictorian of this very same school five years ago, and damnit, I’m not a nerd! Alright, maybe a little, but I’m not the kind of nerd that does nothing but watch re-runs of Star Trek all day long. I’m the kind of nerd that has an online journal. Big difference.

I dunno, I guess I just don’t understand what could possess ANYONE to make the major theme of their speech Star Trek. To each their own, I know it. But don’t be that guy (or girl in this case). Don’t perpetuate bad stereotypes. It’s hard sometimes to challenge what the system expects of you, but if you’re going to conform to it, at least don’t broadcast your conformity so that others suffer as a result. Because if anyone ever accuses me of being a religious Star Trek fan, I might just have to bust some heads.

Do you think Venus Flytraps have dreams?

Not too long ago, I wrote an entry about the angst that I experience as a result of my decision not to flirt with girls at the gym. Within the entry, I probably made a comment about it being difficult to meet quality girls in general – the kind you’d actually want a relationship with and not just a “fun night” with. In that same spirit, I would like to address what I consider to be one of the most bizarre aspects of dating life: The Bar Scene.

You know what the bar scene is – it’s when you go to a bar or club and hang out sometime. I think that, in fact, a bar/club is kind of the stereotypical place you think about if you were to try to envision a place where single people might meet other single people. What I can’t figure out is why the hell that is. Let me explain what I mean.

As far as I have seen, there are two kinds of people who go to bars/clubs. There are those people who are there with friends and almost certainly NOT open to meeting people who they might date. Then there are those people who go to bars intentionally to meet people who they probably only really want to know “that night”, if ya know what I mean, and I think you do. So let’s see where someone like me fits in.

When I refer to someone like me, I’m talking about someone who wants to meet girls, but not for a mere romp in the hay, but girls who I actually LIKE and might be able to get along with once we’ve sobered up and gotten past the small talk stage. In other words, I’d want to meet girls who I could potentially have a relationship with, not a fling. I don’t think you find this kind of person at a bar, however. At least, you don’t find them there if my two bar “types” above are accurate, and from my experience, I believe that they are.

So quite frankly, I think that it’s dumb to go to a bar to meet people because of this. But let’s forget that a moment. Let’s pretend that there actually are cool, interesting people that you can meet at a bar who you could potentially have a meaningful relationship with them. I know it’s far fetched, but let’s assume that just in order to address the following question: How then does one meet these rare few in a bar?

One option is a classic pick up line: “That outfit looks really good on you; of course, it would look even better on my bedroom floor.” “I’ll make you a deal: If you buy me a drink, I’ll promise to buy you breakfast.” “If I told you that you had an incredible body, would you hold it against me?” Exactly. Do pick up lines really work? God, I hope not. Even if they do work, I think you’d have to be a total tool to actually use them. And certainly no girl I would ever consider dating would let a pick up line work on her anyway.

Perhaps a more subtle way would be a simple introduction kind of thing: “Hi. My name is Dan. What’s yours? Well Rita, would you like to dance?” Eh. Maybe. It’s better than a pick up line, but it’s still kind of sketchy-McSketch if ya ask me. I mean, how does the girl know that you aren’t just looking for a night of fleeting pleasure? I know if I were a girl, I’d be pretty wary of guys introducing themselves in a bar.

Perhaps the most promising of ways to meet people in a bar is through mutual friends. What I mean is that your friend Ron is dating a girl named Gina. She has a good friend named Sherri, who they’ve been wanting you to meet. Okay, sure. You know she isn’t psycho, since she’s a friend of a friend, and she presumably has heard the same about you. But here’s the thing: This definitely isn’t a uniquely bar-driven situation. What I mean is that this situation can happen in a restaurant, a museum, heck, anywhere. If it happens in a bar, the fact that you were in a bar is almost incidental. So it still isn’t really helping me to appreciate the bar scene any more than I already did (which isn’t at all).

So there you have it. I think the bar scene really sucks. Maybe I’m just missing something, who knows? Maybe I just haven’t discovered the wonders of the bar properly. Maybe my perception is just the product of the bizarre dating culture that I was forced to tolerate during college, and bars elsewhere are different. If you happen to believe differently, by all means, fill me in. Perhaps one day I will discover that bars really are a place with incredibly deep, fun, single women who are dying to meet a guy like me, but I’m certainly not holding my breath in hopeful expectation.

Ever wonder just why it is that someone decided to call crushed up fruit, yogurt, and juice blended together a “smoothie”?

The today I was reading about the top movie grosses of the week, as I often do. Ever since my internship last summer at a major film studio (a place where such things as movie grosses are of the utmost importance), I have been interested each Monday to see what movies did the best the prior weekend. Well, it turns out that this weekend, being Memorial Day weekend, was a pretty good weekend for the box office. The weekend’s box office receipts totaled $201.8 million, in fact a record for Memorial Day weekend. Seeing this made me realize something: That’s a lot of damn money.

I’m not going to bore you with the top 10 movies for the past weekend, but everyone knows that the Matrix sequel has been doing quite well. Although it fell to second to the new Jim Carrey movie, it has already made $209.5 million domestically, and over a hundred million more internationally. I say again: That’s a lot of damn money.

So people are spending extraordinary amounts of money going to the movies. Of course, there are also extraordinary amounts of money being spent making these movies, as the Matrix, for instance, cost something like $140 million to make. X2 cost $110 million. This means, in order to make just these two movies it cost $250 million. If ya ask me: That’s a lot of damn money.

Okay, what’s the point? Well, it occurred to me that maybe this should raise a very important question: Is the cost of entertainment too high?

Because it doesn’t begin and end with movies. Indeed, movies are the tip of the iceberg. How about TV? Hundreds of channels mean thousands of people being employed by the television industry, all being paid. It means thousands of advertisements, all being paid for by firms across the world. We’re talking billions upon billions of dollars here, and that’s a lot of damn money.

And yes, there’s more. There are plays, shows, amusement parks, and perhaps most notably – sporting events. Top athletes alone sign contracts in the hundreds of millions of dollars these days. Most teams in any sport have yearly salary budgets of at least $50 million, and some exceed $100 million. That means that they are pulling in even more revenue than that with their ticket sales, advertiser revenue, and merchandise sales. The bottom line? Sports involve a lot of damn money.

It is a broader category than entertainment, so I’ll call the group of ventures which I speak of the “Amusement Industry”. As you might guess, I’m referring to the ways which we spend money in order to amuse ourselves. And the question rephrased is this: Is the cost of amusing ourselves too high? If you look at the money spent (not even considering resources, like jobs), the amusement industry may very well reach a trillion dollars every year. And a trillion dollars is a lot of damn money.

But is it too much? I’m not sure. I mean, the easy way out is to say “yes”. Sure, we could be spending this money doing something else. If the amusement industry was half the size, maybe we could use half a trillion to invent a cure for cancer; maybe we could use half a trillion to provide health care to all people; maybe we could use half a trillion to fly to Mars. There are a lot of things we could do with this kind of money, because this is a lot of damn money.

I think, however, that the real question is this: How does one decide if there is a moral imperative to spend money one way over another? Certainly traditional moral imperatives don’t really spend much time dealing with how to spend your money. Sure, benevolence is a good idea, but that’s different than saying that you shouldn’t go to the movies, but you should fund NASA instead. But somehow somebody’s gotta have some idea right? After all, we’re talking about a lot of damn money.

Personally, I think just intuitively, it seems like the amusement industry probably has gone a little overboard. Do we really need 30 major league baseball teams, for instance? Wouldn’t 15 really do almost as well? Do we really need to spend $201 million in a weekend on movies? Wouldn’t $100 million really be almost as good? Maybe, maybe not. It’s a strange animal, because we’re talking about capitalism, and the market dictates what people spend their money on, and those people have a lot of damn money.

As a result, I think that if anyone wants to make a claim that too much money is spent on amusement, then the only way to stop this degree of spending is to change our nation’s priorities. Of course, one solution is to have the amusement industry voluntarily lower their prices. I don’t know about you, but I don’t see Tom Cruise refusing $20 million per movie and asking for only $10 million instead any time soon. Since that probably won’t work, people would literally have to either become more easily amused, or become amused by different, less expensive things. Since I don’t know what it really means to become more easily amused, I think that the latter option is probably the only one which is particularly tangible. It may be one of the few ways we could salvage a lot of damn money.

But how does one cause an entire society to become amused by different, less expensive things? I don’t think one does. I think that this would have to be a gradual process and a major paradigm change for an entire society to undergo due to some fundamental change in behavior. Sounds difficult, eh? I think so too. I guess for now, I’ll try to do my part by avoiding seeing the Matrix for a 3rd time, but it won’t be easy. After all, $8.50 is not really a lot of damn money.

Will the rain ever stop?

One day, I was riding home on the train from another day of high school. I was sitting with my friends Adam, Jason, and Aaron. Aaron was telling the rest of us how he had to go to his acting job after school. He was on a really dorky kids cooking show, which was on some obscure channel very early on Saturday mornings. Anyway, he was telling us about the building that he films it in. He said that it had really intense security and that everyone who goes in has their retina scanned for identification purposes. The rest of us nodded, slightly smiling.

You see, Aaron was one of those people who are often referred to as “habitual liars”. My friends and I realized this fairly early on after being friends with him. I mean, he would tell some real whoppers, so it became fairly obvious fairly quickly. So by the time we heard the retina scanning story, we were so used to his lies, that it didn’t even phase us. We waited until he got off the train, and then we would laugh about what a moron he was.

People like Aaron are not as rare as you might think. There are habitual liars all over the place, and they fascinate me. I know another habitual liar who used to be a friend of my brother, nicknamed “Theodore”. This kid lied so badly and so often that he almost had forgotten how to tell the truth. Sometimes, it seemed like he lied just for the sake of lying.

Why do they do it? I suppose they do it for a variety of reasons. Obviously, in the case of Aaron, most of his lies were created in order to make him look “cooler” than he really was. This is probably the most common reason that they lie. Yet, I think in the case of many truly habitual liars, a time comes where they no longer even make the choice to lie; they just no longer know how not to lie. I would equate it with stealing and kleptomania; in that, the kleptomaniac doesn’t really even consciously make a decision to steal, s/he just can’t help him/herself.

I guess the biggest problem with habitual liars is that sometimes you become so used to their lying that they could even be telling the truth and you wouldn’t know it. A great example of this comes with another story involving Aaron. So we were going to this party and needed to buy some beer. Of course, we were underage; we’re talking like 16 years old here. He told us about this place that would sell us beer. We thought he was lying, but we figured that we might as well give it a shot, since we needed beer for the party. As it turned out, he was actually telling the truth this time, so if we had gone with our gut, we wouldn’t have gotten the beer. (Which would have been truly tragic, since then that fabulous game of strip poker wouldn’t have happened with all of the consequently drunk girls at the party.)

While habitual liars fascinate me, something fascinates me even more than they do: The people who are gullible enough to never catch on to them. Like habitual liars, these ridiculously gullible people aren’t nearly as rare as you might think. In fact, they’re much greater in number than the habitual liars.

I kind of believe that, in some sense, it is the gullible people’s fault that the habitual liars continue to lie. How’s that? Well, because their lies work on the gullible people. If no one believed their lies, they’d give it up. Yet another Aaron example involves a girl named Kimber. Kimber was one of the hottest girls in my high school, and she totally bought into Aaron’s line of B.S. on numerous occasions. Although Kimber was blessed with physical superiority, she was clearly not blessed with truth detection superiority.

So you might be thinking: “Well, it’s sad for the gullible people that they’re so, well, gullible, but that’s just their problem. It’s the habitual liars who are the real problem for everyone else.” There is some truth to that statement; in that, habitual liars definitely are a problem. But don’t underestimate the blight that the very gullible people represent to society.

The gullible people represent the stupid voters who believe people running for political office when they tell lies in the form of campaign promises. Remember how in college, there was always some candidate running for the student who promised something totally ludicrous, like making sure Fridays were days off for everyone? Ever notice how those people often win? Many people believe them.

And it’s even worse for regular politics, but it doesn’t stop there. How about lies that the media might tell? Some people are so gullible, that if they read something in a newspaper, or hear it on a news show, then they believe it must be true. This is even more dangerous than the political figures, because the media can influence hundreds of millions of people with one headline, while politics takes time and involves compromise. Those in the media who lie, and get people believe them, have more power to harm a society than a terrorist could imagine in his wildest dreams.

The solution is quite simple really. These gullible people just need to stop taking everything at face value. They need to begin questioning everything. For me, this has never been problematic, as it’s my nature to question everything (in case you haven’t noticed). How does one make the transition of not questioning everything to questioning everything? Well, just think more about things. The whole problem with gullible people is that they don’t think about the lies that they’re being told, and just blindly believe them. So gullible people: I call on you to stand up to the liars of the world and put a stop to their false ways! If you don’t act soon, Aaron could end up a Senator some day.

When fish cry, do they tear up under water?