The point of drugs is not to benefit the patient!! The drugs and treatments protect the community and serve the collective good.
The drugs are administered first to foster obedience, credulity, and fidelity. The patient learns to keep their appointments, lest the drugs be withdrawn. The patient becomes a regular customer at the pharmacy, which must also be done on precise schedules. The drugs must be taken as directed, and the patient learns how to read and understand and follow intricate rubrics for rituals at home, and what foods to avoid, how to coordinate meals with the drugs, etc.
The patient, having demonstrated obedience and fidelity is well-supervised now by the clinic and provider. The drugs are "virtual shackles" that stand in for actual restraints and confinement methods. Just as "chemical castration" substitutes for surgical mutilation, any patient who's on drugs and making regular appointments can be let loose, a feral in the human population, often undetected and blending in.
It's important to consider that Mental/BH has never been a medical discipline, and while today's scrubs and white coats are the priestly raiment of BHT, NP-LPN-RPh-BH, and M.D.s alike, they take blood pressure and do labs, and they prescribe drugs and work in clinical systems, even Western-style BH is, fundamentally, a religious temple cult of profound spirituality. In order to fit the mold of modernist secularism, the BH temple must array itself in trappings of science and respectable, professional jargon. The BH orthodox profession is that mental illness begins and ends in the body, somewhere, hopefully the brain, or at least where the neurotransmitters flow, to be manipulated by sacramental means. Because if mental illness is not bound or subject to the body, or the secret HIPAA-protected rites and liturgies are not concrete and high-tech, then treatments become subjective, outcomes are unpredictable, and evidence cedes ground to superstition or faith in deities and the intangible world of spirit, which must be ignored in order to promote and foster D.E.I.
Ramp up drug regimes trying to blunt aggression, anxiety, restlessness, independent thought and reason, resistance to authority, and other compulsions to harm others, or sometimes the drugs magnify those compulsions and homicidal ideations, and the patient just goes totally apeshit, until the hospital can get to billing their insurance in earnest. But since President Reagan "closed the asylums" the paradigm shifted to keeping people out and free and at-liberty. Because institutionalization is an excessive burden on taxpayers, families, and insurance carriers, and it's labor-intensive: this is recapitulated in the past 5 years because the "Flatten the Curve" mantra was promulgated because there are widespread staff shortages and a lack of skilled, certified HCPs, especially for Defence Against the Dark Arts. I recommend viewing the critically acclaimed, award-winning film "Ladybird" starring Saorsie Ronan; her mother is a psychiatric nurse played by Laurie Metcalf, and see how Ladybird herself turned out
Even for the HCPs on staff, BH facilities are closer to meat-grinders than revolving-doors, as they burn out, train up, move up, drink their own Flavor-Aid, circulate within the system. So those homeless psychos meet a new team of strangers every month or so. Over 25 years, I personally witnessed one clinic that changed its name/brand/ownership 5-6 times, expanded/moved at least 3 times, and there are literally dozens of BH systems that didn't exist 10 years ago, including 8-story hospitals with no 6th floor.
Would you believe dozens of New Religious Movements operating under auspices of BH services? You may find yourself in a shotgun shack, worshipping Shiva or Kali, or I don't know, in a UFO cult, or practicing tantric yoga with authentic Punjabi Guru, because Medicaid funding. BH Funding for Treatment is Public Safety and a National Security concern: every time a mass shooting is reported on the news, Congress acts to bolster BH funding and services, and so "every time a shell casing pings, someone's clinic builds a wing!"
Ask anyone working in hospice/palliative care and they may confide that drugs are administered when family or staff are irritated or vexed by the patient, rather than basing it on the needs of patient herself. An incoherent or insane patient may be unable to articulate their needs, but when they act out, or become criminally dangerous, they must needs smacked down. "The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease" indeed.
The patient works with the provider to identify and treat more and more conditions. The drugs layer-up, and sometimes extra drugs are shoveled on top, to complement really debilitating effects. But in general, the drugs are exacerbating and magnifying the patient's sins and proclivities. The drugs are interacting and the patient is increasingly entangled in the intricate ritual of provider->pharmacy->daily pill rituals->pharmacy->provider->pills.
It's impossible to know whether recovery is attributable to a true underlying change or whether the drugs have papered over the worst symptoms. Therefore, it's never advisable to stop those drugs or titrate off them, because they don't get labeled with maximums or limits like the OTC stuff can be (this guy once OD'd on fiber supplements).
In the case of "lunatics" and other folks who just had a temporary nervous breakdown or trauma-based freakout, they certainly can recover and exit the system--anyone can exit the system until they're court-ordered or incarcerated, anyway.
There's plenty of other non-drug treatment for outpatients on the streets; counseling/therapy can be done 1:1 or in groups and other supports in the clinic for building life skills, etc. The homeless nutjob population can typically get benefits from us taxpayers to keep them in the clinic 3-5 days a week, just doin' stuff, because the clinic is pretty much a church, and the mentally ill need a religion with structure, rituals, priests, and sacraments like Prozac.
I don't fully disagree with you but my personal opinion is that people give too little credit to contemporary movements within Western art music. Their cultural force is significant, but it's clouded so it's not easy to make an accounting of it.
- First, I need to note that although serialism proper isn't so relevant today, when it comes to film music dominant styles in the last couple decades or so have been minimalism and neo-romanticism. Neo-romanticism is obviously self-explanatory and well-understood, but minimalism [1] is harder to deal with only because it's a contemporary and peculiar style, and it's also rather controversial within Western art music community (especially since the kind of minimalism I hear in film music is closer to the style of Glass and Richter, and not Reich, Adams; or not even Ligeti et al's similar works such as "Selbstportrait mit Reich und Riley" (1976)). We can debate endlessly about the history of Western classical music, and I'm no art historian, but my personal opinion is that minimalism is a direct and clear response to serialism [2] which makes it a cultural heir. In art, we do see that things swing pretty far like a pendulum. What drives an artistic force in one direction can often be a previous force in the opposite. So, when you hear the soundtrack of something like Amelie (2001), in a way you do hear serialism, except in negative.
- Second, although the music of "the Second Viennese School" and later serialists (Boulez, Stockhausen) found no mass appeal, they did find sufficient amount of appeal within the music community. Serialism was practically the dominant style in early 20th century. Neo-romanticist composer David Diamond talks about his frustrations about this in this interview [3]. Given this, it's not true to state serialism has no cultural power, what's true is that most music produced today is one way or another post-serialist, in the sense that it's aware of its failed experiments and its merits. For example, music (film music/art music/whatever) today is not particularly contrapuntal, but composers are regularly, formally taught how to deal with counterpoint and it's considered a core skill for all composers. This makes composers skilled in this regard, but they consciously decide not to apply the full length of the skill. The same way painters are taught to draw like the old masters, but that kind of photographic realism doesn't have the same cultural relevance today in art. This still makes Bach (or old masters) culturally relevant today, albeit rather indirectly.
- You call that the rules were contrived but that is one particular interpretation of serialism, which is fair only because it's similar to how Schoenberg thought of it. However, if you look at other serialists such as Berg, Webern, Boulez and especially Carter, you'll see that the kind of "use each pitch once before using all others" silly rules are not taken any more seriously than you take counterpoint rules seriously while writing music (which was the source of disagreement between Boulez and his teacher Leibowitz [4]). Those rules are for practice. It's debatable, of course, what is "serialistic" about serialism (especially for later figures like Carter), but I think the core of the idea is for musical language to be comprehensive, and have a presentation of all possible forms of a given set of structures. Given this understanding, I don't think your statement "the rules were contrived rather than evolved" holds up. Within the tradition, there was the understanding that the way tonality evolves is that each composer comes and creates their own spin on the diatonic scale, all the way from Froberger to Bach to Chopin to Debussy we keep seeing this pattern again and again. Serialism has a will to go one step further and present all such possibilities in music. Again, I don't shy away from calling this, in many ways, a "failed experiment" but calling it "contrived" is not true.
[1] Example movies are countless, from Amelie (2001), The Shape of Water (2017), Blindness (2008) to Ladybird (2017) etc...
[2] Philip Glass talks about how his music is a response to Boulez scene (who is a late serialist composer) in this interview from 1976: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elAtF6UdefI
Hacker Cinema
3 comments on Hacker News
And for over half of a decade already! The award-winning 2017 movie "Ladybird" was a nostalgic look at that distant year of 2002!
The point of drugs is not to benefit the patient!! The drugs and treatments protect the community and serve the collective good.
The drugs are administered first to foster obedience, credulity, and fidelity. The patient learns to keep their appointments, lest the drugs be withdrawn. The patient becomes a regular customer at the pharmacy, which must also be done on precise schedules. The drugs must be taken as directed, and the patient learns how to read and understand and follow intricate rubrics for rituals at home, and what foods to avoid, how to coordinate meals with the drugs, etc.
The patient, having demonstrated obedience and fidelity is well-supervised now by the clinic and provider. The drugs are "virtual shackles" that stand in for actual restraints and confinement methods. Just as "chemical castration" substitutes for surgical mutilation, any patient who's on drugs and making regular appointments can be let loose, a feral in the human population, often undetected and blending in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_psychiatry#/media/File:Philippe_Pinel_%C3%A0_la_Salp%C3%AAtri%C3%A8re.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Pinel
It's important to consider that Mental/BH has never been a medical discipline, and while today's scrubs and white coats are the priestly raiment of BHT, NP-LPN-RPh-BH, and M.D.s alike, they take blood pressure and do labs, and they prescribe drugs and work in clinical systems, even Western-style BH is, fundamentally, a religious temple cult of profound spirituality. In order to fit the mold of modernist secularism, the BH temple must array itself in trappings of science and respectable, professional jargon. The BH orthodox profession is that mental illness begins and ends in the body, somewhere, hopefully the brain, or at least where the neurotransmitters flow, to be manipulated by sacramental means. Because if mental illness is not bound or subject to the body, or the secret HIPAA-protected rites and liturgies are not concrete and high-tech, then treatments become subjective, outcomes are unpredictable, and evidence cedes ground to superstition or faith in deities and the intangible world of spirit, which must be ignored in order to promote and foster D.E.I.
Ramp up drug regimes trying to blunt aggression, anxiety, restlessness, independent thought and reason, resistance to authority, and other compulsions to harm others, or sometimes the drugs magnify those compulsions and homicidal ideations, and the patient just goes totally apeshit, until the hospital can get to billing their insurance in earnest. But since President Reagan "closed the asylums" the paradigm shifted to keeping people out and free and at-liberty. Because institutionalization is an excessive burden on taxpayers, families, and insurance carriers, and it's labor-intensive: this is recapitulated in the past 5 years because the "Flatten the Curve" mantra was promulgated because there are widespread staff shortages and a lack of skilled, certified HCPs, especially for Defence Against the Dark Arts. I recommend viewing the critically acclaimed, award-winning film "Ladybird" starring Saorsie Ronan; her mother is a psychiatric nurse played by Laurie Metcalf, and see how Ladybird herself turned out
Even for the HCPs on staff, BH facilities are closer to meat-grinders than revolving-doors, as they burn out, train up, move up, drink their own Flavor-Aid, circulate within the system. So those homeless psychos meet a new team of strangers every month or so. Over 25 years, I personally witnessed one clinic that changed its name/brand/ownership 5-6 times, expanded/moved at least 3 times, and there are literally dozens of BH systems that didn't exist 10 years ago, including 8-story hospitals with no 6th floor.
https://www.azahcccs.gov/Fraud/Downloads/ProviderSuspensionsTerminations.pdf
Would you believe dozens of New Religious Movements operating under auspices of BH services? You may find yourself in a shotgun shack, worshipping Shiva or Kali, or I don't know, in a UFO cult, or practicing tantric yoga with authentic Punjabi Guru, because Medicaid funding. BH Funding for Treatment is Public Safety and a National Security concern: every time a mass shooting is reported on the news, Congress acts to bolster BH funding and services, and so "every time a shell casing pings, someone's clinic builds a wing!"
Ask anyone working in hospice/palliative care and they may confide that drugs are administered when family or staff are irritated or vexed by the patient, rather than basing it on the needs of patient herself. An incoherent or insane patient may be unable to articulate their needs, but when they act out, or become criminally dangerous, they must needs smacked down. "The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease" indeed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy#Lobotomy
The patient works with the provider to identify and treat more and more conditions. The drugs layer-up, and sometimes extra drugs are shoveled on top, to complement really debilitating effects. But in general, the drugs are exacerbating and magnifying the patient's sins and proclivities. The drugs are interacting and the patient is increasingly entangled in the intricate ritual of provider->pharmacy->daily pill rituals->pharmacy->provider->pills.
It's impossible to know whether recovery is attributable to a true underlying change or whether the drugs have papered over the worst symptoms. Therefore, it's never advisable to stop those drugs or titrate off them, because they don't get labeled with maximums or limits like the OTC stuff can be (this guy once OD'd on fiber supplements).
In the case of "lunatics" and other folks who just had a temporary nervous breakdown or trauma-based freakout, they certainly can recover and exit the system--anyone can exit the system until they're court-ordered or incarcerated, anyway.
There's plenty of other non-drug treatment for outpatients on the streets; counseling/therapy can be done 1:1 or in groups and other supports in the clinic for building life skills, etc. The homeless nutjob population can typically get benefits from us taxpayers to keep them in the clinic 3-5 days a week, just doin' stuff, because the clinic is pretty much a church, and the mentally ill need a religion with structure, rituals, priests, and sacraments like Prozac.
I don't fully disagree with you but my personal opinion is that people give too little credit to contemporary movements within Western art music. Their cultural force is significant, but it's clouded so it's not easy to make an accounting of it.
- First, I need to note that although serialism proper isn't so relevant today, when it comes to film music dominant styles in the last couple decades or so have been minimalism and neo-romanticism. Neo-romanticism is obviously self-explanatory and well-understood, but minimalism [1] is harder to deal with only because it's a contemporary and peculiar style, and it's also rather controversial within Western art music community (especially since the kind of minimalism I hear in film music is closer to the style of Glass and Richter, and not Reich, Adams; or not even Ligeti et al's similar works such as "Selbstportrait mit Reich und Riley" (1976)). We can debate endlessly about the history of Western classical music, and I'm no art historian, but my personal opinion is that minimalism is a direct and clear response to serialism [2] which makes it a cultural heir. In art, we do see that things swing pretty far like a pendulum. What drives an artistic force in one direction can often be a previous force in the opposite. So, when you hear the soundtrack of something like Amelie (2001), in a way you do hear serialism, except in negative.
- Second, although the music of "the Second Viennese School" and later serialists (Boulez, Stockhausen) found no mass appeal, they did find sufficient amount of appeal within the music community. Serialism was practically the dominant style in early 20th century. Neo-romanticist composer David Diamond talks about his frustrations about this in this interview [3]. Given this, it's not true to state serialism has no cultural power, what's true is that most music produced today is one way or another post-serialist, in the sense that it's aware of its failed experiments and its merits. For example, music (film music/art music/whatever) today is not particularly contrapuntal, but composers are regularly, formally taught how to deal with counterpoint and it's considered a core skill for all composers. This makes composers skilled in this regard, but they consciously decide not to apply the full length of the skill. The same way painters are taught to draw like the old masters, but that kind of photographic realism doesn't have the same cultural relevance today in art. This still makes Bach (or old masters) culturally relevant today, albeit rather indirectly.
- You call that the rules were contrived but that is one particular interpretation of serialism, which is fair only because it's similar to how Schoenberg thought of it. However, if you look at other serialists such as Berg, Webern, Boulez and especially Carter, you'll see that the kind of "use each pitch once before using all others" silly rules are not taken any more seriously than you take counterpoint rules seriously while writing music (which was the source of disagreement between Boulez and his teacher Leibowitz [4]). Those rules are for practice. It's debatable, of course, what is "serialistic" about serialism (especially for later figures like Carter), but I think the core of the idea is for musical language to be comprehensive, and have a presentation of all possible forms of a given set of structures. Given this understanding, I don't think your statement "the rules were contrived rather than evolved" holds up. Within the tradition, there was the understanding that the way tonality evolves is that each composer comes and creates their own spin on the diatonic scale, all the way from Froberger to Bach to Chopin to Debussy we keep seeing this pattern again and again. Serialism has a will to go one step further and present all such possibilities in music. Again, I don't shy away from calling this, in many ways, a "failed experiment" but calling it "contrived" is not true.
[1] Example movies are countless, from Amelie (2001), The Shape of Water (2017), Blindness (2008) to Ladybird (2017) etc...
[2] Philip Glass talks about how his music is a response to Boulez scene (who is a late serialist composer) in this interview from 1976: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elAtF6UdefI
[3] https://crisismagazine.com/vault/americas-greatest-living-composer-an-interview-with-composer-david-diamond
[4] https://fugueforthought.de/2016/07/13/boulez-piano-sonata-no-1/