[HN Gopher] Honestly: Does Glorifying Sickness Deter Healing? ___________________________________________________________________ Honestly: Does Glorifying Sickness Deter Healing? Author : paulpauper Score : 26 points Date : 2022-07-24 21:02 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.commonsense.news) (TXT) w3m dump (www.commonsense.news) | thrown_22 wrote: | It not only deters healing, it makes people act ill when they are | not. Social media is filled with people pretending to be sick. If | you want some of the most blatant see [0] the disability there | isn't three broken ribs requiring a ventilator. | | Reminds me of Luis the 14th and his anal fistula [1]. Courtiers | started faking anal fistulas after the king had an operation to | remove his. It got to the point where they would get treatment | for them, or fake getting the treatment, regardless of health. | This was not a simple operation at the time. Chances of death | were high, to the point where the first was performed on a | condemned criminal who was pardoned if he survived. | | [0] https://www.insider.com/who-is-youtube-star-nikocado- | avocado... | | [1] https://tidsskriftet.no/2016/08/sun-kings-anal-fistula | thaumasiotes wrote: | See also: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review- | crazy-like... | | > Around the Meiji Restoration, when everyone was obsessed with | how great foreign stuff was, Japanese medical students went to | Germany, learned psychiatry, came back to Japan, and told | everyone they were neurasthenic. Being neurasthenic became | first a fashion, then a class marker. The idea was that | neurasthenics were people who were working too hard (good, | admirable), and who were so smart and doing so much furious | intellectual activity that it was straining their nerves | (impressive). Also, they were probably sensitive souls too pure | for this world. The most embarrassing extreme of this happened | in 1903, when some photogenic Japanese youth carved a poem in a | tree, went to a beautiful waterfall, and leapt to his death. | Everyone praised him for how sensitive and artistic and | neurasthenic this was, and turned him into a posthumous | national hero. Meanwhile, "in 1902 an article reported that | fully one-third of patients visiting hospitals for | consultations were suffering from the new disease." | | > Eventually Japanese psychiatrists got fed up, and started | announcing that actually neurasthenia sucked and you should not | have it. From a 1906 Japanese neurology journal: | | >> These days, young students talk about such stuff as "the | philosophy of life". They confront important and profound | problems of life, are defeated, and develop neurasthenia. Those | who jump off a waterfall or throw themselves in front of a | train are weak-minded. They do not have a strong mental | constitution and develop mental illness, dying in the end. How | useless they are! Such weak-minded people would only cause harm | even if they remained alive. | | > Finally everyone struck a compromise and agreed that most of | the lower-class patients weren't real neurasthenics (hard- | working, intelligent, sensitive, admirable), but had a similar | condition, imitating the symptoms of neurasthenia, based on | being too weak and pathetic to cope. This seemed to do the | trick, and people stopped coming to the hospital with | neurasthenia symptoms. Watters writes: | | >> Looking back on the debate, it seems as if acceptance of | neurasthenia had been so successful that psychiatrists felt | obligated to restigmatize this mental disorder in hopes of | limiting its adoption. By the end of World War II the diagnosis | had almost completely gone out of style among both | psychiatrists and the population at large. | | > He who has ears to hear, let him listen. | | Glorifying illness causes a lot of harm. | astrange wrote: | Seems misleading that this page talks about its own author in the | third person. | np_tedious wrote: | Definitely weird. Perhaps the podcast summary was not itself | written by Bari? | Waterluvian wrote: | I'll be the first to admit that I don't have my finger on the | pulse of what's chic, but this line: | | "..."the gentrification of disability," how sickness became | chic..." | | is quite something. | aaaaaaaaata wrote: | Not a big Twitter uswr | ineptech wrote: | Anyone find a transcript? I'd be curious to read it but I really | dislike podcasts. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-24 23:00 UTC)