Random quotes on mental illness

-- Marx, Karl, 1978, Capital, Volume II, p. 492, London, Penguin.

I wanted to point out that capitalists were just playing tag, but the English translator was probably as bored (and confused) as I was. The 2 different French translation don't reproduce the mistake that was done on item 5. Reading book two of capital is an adventure, and really helps situating Marx in the history of economic thoughts. But even David Harvey qualifies the book as "rather boring" in his companion for the book. The end section is supposed to wrap the arguments together, but its just a complete mess. Harvey just say that the section completely fails at its goal, on top of showing contradictions with volume I:

If the schemas point to anything in the way of a politics, therefore, it is to the necessity to stabilize worker incomes in order to harmonize the relationship between the total output of means of production and the total demand for consumer goods. This contradicts the findings of Volume I, where Marx envisages the increasing impoverishment of the working class as an inevitable outcome of free-market capitalism. Marx only hints at this contradiction, however, because the equivalent chapter to the “General Law” chapter is missing from Volume II. It is interesting to surmise how we might have read Volume I if the “General Law” chapter had not been written—and we therefore had only the chapters on simple and expanded reproduction. Conversely, we need to imagine what the equivalent chapter in Volume II to the “General Law” chapter might have looked like.

-- Harvey, David, 2013, A companion to Marx' Capital volume II, p. 242, Verso, London. (the page number refers to the pdf that's easily available online ;).

-- Tomlinson, Sally, 2017, A Sociology of Special and Inclusive Education, Routeledge.

Wu, Tim, 2016, The Attention Merchants, Knopf, New York City.

[...] the Pure Food and Drug act in 1906 [...], a law that specified that a drug label could not be false or misleading and further required that the presence and amount of 11 substances, including alcohol, heroin and cocaine had to be included on the product label.

-- Singer, Merrill, 2008, Drugging the poor, legal and illegal drugs and social inequality, Waveland Publishing, p. 145.

I never bothered reading about drugs, because, heck, there is enough Christian's and Antivax whining about drugs, but the history is somewhat interesting. It was in 1938 that some substances weren't allowed to be sold in without prescription in the US, and had to be somewhat tested, obviously after a bunch of death. In those 30 years, a lot of people got addicted to heroin, and those folks left to themselves were essential to establish illegal drug markets. In the 1970s scandals emerged about the fact that drug testing (clinical testing) happened in prisons, and from then, a lot of testing went overseas. There is so much fucked up stories, but it boils down to the fact that you need to be desperate to try experimental drugs.

Mrs. Anna Duzynski was a recent Polish emigrant; neither she nor her husband had learned to speak English. They were living on the northwest side of Chicago when on October 5, 1960, Mrs. Duzynski discovered that $380 in cash was missing from their apartment. Suspecting that the money had been stolen by the janitor, who was in possession of a spare key, Mrs. Duzynski rushed to his flat and demanded the return of the stolen money. The janitor called the police complaining that both Mr. and Mrs. Duzynski were insane and should be put in a mental institution. Without further examination, the police seized both Anna and her husband Michael, and took them in handcuffs to the Cook County Mental Health Clinic. At the clinic the Duzynskis were unable to answer any of the questions directed to them in English. Pursuant to lax commitment procedures, the Duzynskis were pronounced mentally ill and were committed to the Chicago State Hospital. Six weeks later, Michael Dunzynski still less about why he had been denied his freedom than when thrown in a Nazi concentration camp in World War II. Finally in complete desperation, he hanged himself. The very next day, the hospital officials released Anna Duzynski.

-- Kittrie, Nicholas N., 1973, The Right to be Different, Deviance and Enforced Therapy, Pelican Books, pp. 83-84.

Hey ! Long time no nothing here. I'm stuck in BS doctoral exam. Found this amazing book on how delinquency is a social construct, that I really wish to read, but I have to focus on methodology, to show that I can prove that its the most vulnerable among us are the one getting medicalized and criminalized.

In the 1870s a 9-year-old child named Mary Ellen was being severely mistreated by her foster parents. Concerned church workers refused to intervene, primarily because they viewed the rights of parents over their children as absolute, and there was no law under which they could intervene to protect the child. Finally, Mary Ellen was brought to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who took her case and was able to have Mary Ellen removed from her home. Ironically, the ASPCA was able to intervene because Mary Ellen was a member of the animal kingdom, and thus could be included under the laws which protected animals from human cruelty.

Conrad, Peter and Schneider, Joseph, 1980, Deviance and Medicalization, from Badness to Sickness, Mosby, St-Louis.

On several occasions while riding with police officers, I and my students observed ghetto residents' hostility toward the police manifested in overt attacks and disruptive behavior. On one occasion police pursuing a car for speeding stopped the car in a cul-de-sac. People sitting on their front porches began pummeling the police with rocks, kitchen utensils and even children's toys.

Chambliss, William J., 1999, Power, politics and crime, Boulder, CO, Westview press, p. 76.

Equally prohibitive are the secret settlement designed to prevent offenders by preemptively blocking future circulation of incrimination information about them - a perfectly legal form of essentially bribing victims in exchange for their silence. [...] In 1933 the Johns Manville company settled a lawsuit by 11 employees who had been made sick by asbestos. If that settlement had not been kept secret for 45 years, thousands of other workers might have not contracted respiratory diseases.

-- Zerubavel, Eviatar, 2006, The Elephant in the Room, Silence and Denial in Everyday Life, New York, Oxford University Press, pp. 42-43

And to that extent it too has given rise to a whole series of revolts of conduct, what we could call a strong medical dissent, from the end of the eighteenth century and still today, which extends [from] the refusal of certain medications and certain preventive measures like vaccination, to the refusal of a certain type of medical rationality: the attempt to constitute sorts of medical heresies around practices of medication using electricity, magnetism, herbs, and traditional medicine; [the] refusal of medicine tout court, which is frequently found in certain religious groups.

Foucault, Michel, 2007, Lectures at collège de France 1977-1978, Security, territory, population, Palgrave-MacMillan, p. 266.

Although we did not evaluate specific state licensing requirements, we did observe that in at least 5 of our cases, the teachers or other staff involved in the injurious restraint or seclusion of children continued to work with students or had licenses to do so. For example, a 230 pound teacher in Texas who fatally restrained a 129 pound teenage boy facedown on a mat currently works as a public high school teacher in Virginia.

Kutz, G, 2009, Seclusion and Restraints: Selected Cases of Death and Abuse at Public and Private Schools and Treatment Centers, United States Government Accountability Office, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED505313.pdf

I did cover 7up having lithium in its earlier iterations and sold as a health product, but I would never have thought that I would come across cheap beer as health product:

And the Pabst Brewing Company (1897) spoke of a young mother “flushed with perfect health” after consuming its malt extract, the “best” tonic.

-- Goldstein Jutel, Annemarie, 2011, Putting a name to it, diagnostic in comtemporary society, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Massachusset

Radical social movements, then, are both the products and the producers of culture at the crossroads of not-success and not-failure, an ecology of perseverance.

That is to say, the interest of the managers of a modern corporation need not to coincide with the permanent interest of the corporation as a going concern ; neither does it coincide with the interest which the community at large has in the efficient management of the concern as an industrial enterprise.

-- Veblen, Thorstein, 1904, The Theory of Business Enterprise. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons (okay, I got fucked over by AbeBooks and got a print on demand version made from puppy tears, children’s broken dreams of freedom and shackled labor, this book saw only one print)

I think they do get into fights more than the non-ADHD kids, but I don’t think they’re always the ones starting it. Some of these kids have a target painted right in their forehead and the other kids just go for it. They really take aim on them (special education teacher, age 42).

-- Rafalovich, Adam, 2004, Framing ADHD Children, A Critical Examination of the History, Discourse and  Everyday Experience of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Lanham, Maryland, Lexington Books.

Instead of attempting to achieve certain ends by respectable means, they can attempt to achieve that the impression they are achieving certain ends by respectable means.

Until the passage of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, closely followed by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975, it was common practice to treat students with disabilities as second-class citizens, regardless of their race or ethnicity. Commentators on the rights of students with disabilities referred to the “ghettolike” conditions within schools, where students with disabilities were taught in closet and unheated stairwells while the majority of students sat in adequately resourced classrooms.