Sorry, maybe I did overstate things. This is just a very emotional subject for me as you can probably understand. However, if you read this and other articles like it, can we agree the Prozac fad of the 1990's was overblown?
I took Prozac and other SSRIs. They had absolutely no positive effect on my depression. Instead I got little blistering bumps on my skin that itched like mad and lasted for months and all of the usual sexual side effects. Worse, they gave me a flat affect and occasional visual hallucinations upon waking up in the morning, which got me a misdiagnoses of schizophrenia which lead to me having to drop out of college due to the side effects of the schizophrenia medications (which incidentally did nothing for the flat affect or hallucinations.)
At one point a doctor made me abruptly quit the SSRI I was on. That seemed to lead to the worst depression I have ever experienced. The hallucinations stopped. The doctor put me on a different SSRI.
I ended up gradually weaning myself off of all of the drugs almost a decade ago. I haven't had schizophrenia-like symptoms since. Doctors since then agree I was misdiagnosed and just had an unexpected reaction to SSRIs.
My guess is that SSRIs seem to work mostly due to the placebo effect. Anything beyond the placebo effect is due to some people having just the right kind of depression that can benefit from what SSRIs do. When I quit the SSRIs cold turkey, I believe that rebound depression was of the neurochemical type that SSRIs can successfully treat. In other words, I think there are probably many biological causes of depression and SSRIs only treat one cause. For some, like me, SSRIs just throw our neuro-chemistry way out of wack by overstimulating parts of the seratoninergic neurotransmitter system.
In my opinion, sloppy science or fraud allowed SSRIs to get FDA approval as a treatment for many kinds of depression when it only really treats a subtype of depression. That lead to those drugs being promoted as a panacea for everything from major depression to just not being cheerful all the time. It cost me the education and career and better life I wanted and otherwise would have had. While massaging of data might sound like a faux pas to a non-scientist, it can have tragic consequences.
I think it is time to stop giving special status to delusions such as Scientology and Christianity. In the USA churches are tax exempt. Church businesses should pay a "sin tax," a higher than normal tax rate, the way tobacco is taxed because it too is harmful. It should also be illegal to give children religion just as it is illegal to sell a child a carton of cigarettes to smoke. Many parents actually force children to attend brainwashing events one to three times a week at their local church. That is just plain sick.
We are currently genetically programmed to get the most bananas possible, even when that means crushing the skulls of other monkeys and taking their bananas.
So fix the programming bug through genetic engineering. The tendency toward peace already seems to exist so it probably only needs to be enhanced a little so that we can more easily override our skull crushing tendencies.
Solution probably also is possible via uploading our mental software to non-brain computer hardware and redesigning the relevant code. That is probably a little further into the future though.
Both are probably easier to achieve than FTL travel.
Once upon a time I tried LSD. I would say it was the most profound experience of my life. The guy who went down the rabbit hole isn't quite the same guy who came out 12 hours later.
Good changes in no particular order:
Not so good stuff:
Overall, I think the world would be a better place if most people tried LSD at least once, providing they spent months of their free time learning all they could about LSD before using it and used it in a safe environment in a responsible way.
I agree that libraries are wonderful places, temples of knowledge, one of the very few things I hold sacred. I love printed books. They are sensuous right down to their spicy scent between their leathery leaves. I have not yet been able to imagine the Internet providing the full sensory experience I get from books. Maybe in time...
However, it pains me that Mr. Bradbury, one of my all time favorite authors, has allowed himself to stop growing. I think it is very likely that some people reading this will never die unless they choose to. Imagine living to be 20,000 years old and hating whatever newfangled things replace the Internet, hating pretty much everything about the world because it has changed and you have not. Human history is tiny, the future potentially vast; why confine yourself to some small region of the past and let history race by you into the future?
I was just listening to something a little old, Alexander Scriabin's 2nd symphony. A month ago, I never even heard of Scriabin. I found him on the Internet and now have his music. I doubt I would have found him at the local library. Now I'm listening to Shpongle which is kind of new (2005) and goes shockingly well with mushroom soup and strolls through mossy eldritch forests as well as with computer programming. I wouldn't have found Shpongle at the library either. This Fall I hope to share my home with an 18 year old college student for the simple reason that she will bring novelty--both modern youth culture and her tribal culture which is completely and wonderfully alien to me. That's how I try to live, always throwing something new into the old brain pan so it never goes empty.
Now if you'll excuse me, my head feels like a Frisbee...
There's a lot of work still to be done on tuning the satellite and instruments for optimum performance
What does tuning involve?
HELP!!!! I'm being held prisoner in /usr/games/lib!