Psyberspace

Democracy Now! 1 March 2010

There are several stories in this hour long program, one about earthquakes, one about race in a Californian university, and one about depression. The last one tells me what I know as a psychotherapy to be true. Not that antidepressants don’t always work, but that why they work is a big muddle, it could be the placebo effect or just time. And the price for this dubious result is to pathologise millions of people, to get them thinking about the psyche in a medical & unhelpful way.

All for huge profit.

The DSM 5 is a scandal and will make the problem worse!

All part of a 150 year trend… that bit was new to me.

Video of the Depression story on Democracy Now

Every health professional should watch this video, listen to this last story in this episode of Democracy Now, or read the book by Gary Greenberg, Amazon:

Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease

Manufacturing Depression?:

The primary point that Greenberg expressed in the interview is that we are taking a normal human experience and turning it into a disease. He makes it clear that he has no problem with relieving the suffering of depression with drugs, but he questions whether we have turned normal blue moods into a disease in order to justify medicating away sadness.

A satisfying read online is where Greenberg is interviewed on the Well. Quote follows.

Brothers Karamazov is now in an audiobook! This mammoth task has been completed, thanks many readers and Rainer.

I read this book in 1967, at the Cragieburn ski-field where I was a custodian. I was upstairs in the sleeping loft of the ski hut, and often there would be a loud party downstairs. I’d read it by candle light or with a torch. I made notes! I may still have them. It was part of a few years of delightful self education, prior to going to the University of Canterbury, which by comparison was like a padded cell of the mind, though I have no regrets. I am looking forward to hearing the book read to me.

Click for larger image.

I have converted the mp3 for the first book into iPod Audiobook format (keeps track of where you are up to). Book 1 m4b Audiobook format

Links follow to the download page, Librivox, notes on a stage production where I found the image, and Wikipedia – where there is an excellent summary of the characters & their various names!

I just ordered the book after a horrendous experience trying to log in to various dutch sites. They don’t recognise a NZ postcode, though they ask for a country, and then finally after fudging one, they tell me the don’t deliver overseas. But, I found one where they would take my money: http://www.occidentbooks.com, I hope they deliver as well!

Click for larger image.

Item from an art show follows, the first two paragraphs translate the dutch ones in the earlier post.

Haraway_CyborgManifesto.html:

Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181. AN IRONIC DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE FOR WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.

Amazon.com: The Haraway Reader (9780415966894): Donna Haraway: Books:

An excellent introduction to the writings of Professor Haraway, but also a necessary addition to her previous books. (It is nice to find essays once only located in various anthologies now within the same book!) The new essays on dogs and kinship are stellar, illustrating how Harway’s work is moving forward to advance the study of science and politics in everyday life contexts. A must read in cultural studies, feminist theory, and the history of race and ethnicity.

I loved finding this book shop in King Street newtown!  Great that it is online and part of http://abe.com They found a book I’d been looking for, but they usually require 24 hours notice.

Gould’s Book Arcade:

Welcome to Gould’s Books Online.

Ampersand Bookshop Paddington, originally uploaded by Waltzzz.

Had a good time here today! Worth coming to Sydney for.

From Amazon: The Red Book The Red Book, where it gets good revies for content and presentation.

More about the Red Book – I have been following this a bit, so see “related posts”, and the tags.

Got this Video from Asheville Jung Center

I’d be interested in the seminar by Murry Stein, but I’ll be at a conference. Hope someone can record it!

Full text of “GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPY”
Vol. VIII, Nos. 3 and 4.

The whole volume is online in a poorly scanned version.

PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION

Revised and Enlarged

PAUL E. JOHNSON

Found this while looking for the original Theatre of Spontaneity.  The whole book is online.  Looks like the author was strongly influenced by Moreno.  Link and quote follow.

This book, Alfred Korzybski: Collected Writings, 1920-1950, from 1990 is only available second-hand – too expensive. I then found the Google edition below.

Later:

This book and all of Korzybski’s books are for sale cheaply at General Semantics Institute online

Later
I a Bought Science & Sanity from GSI – arrived in days! It is also online here.

Alfred Korzybski: Collected Writings, 1920-1950 follows (embedded)