Good point. I found a lot of what Satcher said, particularly about the poor insurance support for mental health care, and the prevalance of various psychological conditions among Americans, pretty much right on. What does concern me is Satcher's implication that *because* there is now a better biochemical understanding of the brain that various afflictions can/should be treated pharmaceutically. I know that in many cases this is true, but in other cases I'm afraid that we are as a society overmedicating ourselves. There are many cases of depression which can be treated without drugs, or perhaps with short-term use of seratonin reuptake inhibitors to take the edge off a patient's depression to allow psychotherapy to pay off. But there are two forces at work to minimize the role of psychotherapy: patients who would like to "get better" quickly, and insurance companies who find lengthy therapy treatment plans too expensive for their tastes and much prefer quick and cheap pharmaceutical fixes. A therapist once told me that a major insurer/HMO in my area was pressuring psychologists to keep treatments down to an average of under 3 visits - hardly enough to establish the ground rules of therapy, let alone to allow a patient and therapist to accomplish anything. This overuse of feel-good drugs worries me both for its fraudulence (nothing is fixed long-term), and for its potential for social control. - Dave
I enjoyed the original review of Blish's CIF tetrology here, and the followup comments. I first read the novels that make up CIF in the late 60s while in junior high, and over the years I've reread the single-volume collection in paperback. That volume has an appendix which discusses (as a fictional academic commentary) the CIF series in parallel with Oswald Spengler's ("The Decline of the West") view of the history of civilizations. If you look at Spengler after reading CIF, you'll see some parallels indeed... esp. how one (or a few) major cities come to represent the final embodiment of a culture before it declines and falls. Contrary to some of the posters here, I've always found CIF more accessible than the Foundation series, despite it's being anchored in the Fifties, with its McCarthyism, slide rules, and - in what was forward-looking in its day - emphasis on germanium for its use in transistor technology. In CIF, there are cultural and political forces which are given expression once a handful of innovations come about, most particularly the spindizzy (stellar drive) and death-postponing/anti-aging drugs. There is less of a fantastic nature to Blish's storytelling, despite the wide sweep he takes over the four novels. Just my opinion, but I think CIF has more to offer its readers than just decent sci-fi. Dave
Slashdot Mirror
Good point. I found a lot of what Satcher said, particularly about the poor insurance support for mental health care, and the prevalance of various psychological conditions among Americans, pretty much right on. What does concern me is Satcher's implication that *because* there is now a better biochemical understanding of the brain that various afflictions can/should be treated pharmaceutically. I know that in many cases this is true, but in other cases I'm afraid that we are as a society overmedicating ourselves. There are many cases of depression which can be treated without drugs, or perhaps with short-term use of seratonin reuptake inhibitors to take the edge off a patient's depression to allow psychotherapy to pay off. But there are two forces at work to minimize the role of psychotherapy: patients who would like to "get better" quickly, and insurance companies who find lengthy therapy treatment plans too expensive for their tastes and much prefer quick and cheap pharmaceutical fixes. A therapist once told me that a major insurer/HMO in my area was pressuring psychologists to keep treatments down to an average of under 3 visits - hardly enough to establish the ground rules of therapy, let alone to allow a patient and therapist to accomplish anything. This overuse of feel-good drugs worries me both for its fraudulence (nothing is fixed long-term), and for its potential for social control. - Dave
I enjoyed the original review of Blish's CIF tetrology here, and the followup comments. I first read the novels that make up CIF in the late 60s while in junior high, and over the years I've reread the single-volume collection in paperback. That volume has an appendix which discusses (as a fictional academic commentary) the CIF series in parallel with Oswald Spengler's ("The Decline of the West") view of the history of civilizations. If you look at Spengler after reading CIF, you'll see some parallels indeed... esp. how one (or a few) major cities come to represent the final embodiment of a culture before it declines and falls. Contrary to some of the posters here, I've always found CIF more accessible than the Foundation series, despite it's being anchored in the Fifties, with its McCarthyism, slide rules, and - in what was forward-looking in its day - emphasis on germanium for its use in transistor technology. In CIF, there are cultural and political forces which are given expression once a handful of innovations come about, most particularly the spindizzy (stellar drive) and death-postponing/anti-aging drugs. There is less of a fantastic nature to Blish's storytelling, despite the wide sweep he takes over the four novels. Just my opinion, but I think CIF has more to offer its readers than just decent sci-fi. Dave