Have It Your Way Blast It!
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Eh, it’s an attempt to have any sort of connection between fast food and mental health. Not like there’s a lot of options.
Given that, it’s clever. Has at least as much of a connection as, oh, Cinderella and the website to find the correct size of baby car seat. (For an example of a billboard I’ve seen.)
If they’d blitzed that ad on April Fool’s day, and never run it again, that would have been smart. But this . . . ?
I’ll take the Ima whiney lil brat meal with a self pity shake.
Are you judging me? You look judgemental.
I’m being judged! WITNESS THE MICROAGGRESSION INHERENT TO THE SYSTEM!
It makes you wonder. In terms of mental health, things aren’t going well. Now, is that because our mental health industry stinks and failed and is worthless? After all, I heard someone pointing to our suicide rates saying that suicide has been this bad in past eras. Given how much we spend on mental health, research, counseling and all, you’d think we could do better than ‘as bad as the worst periods in history’. I mean, that’s a low bar.
On the other hand, perhaps we owe the mental health industry our deepest gratitude, and if it wasn’t for them, this hot mess of a society we built would be killing people off at rates a hundred times worse than anything humanity has ever seen. That’s not good either, given how much of what we teach as a society is based on the advice from that same mental health industry. Just makes me wonder. I know I do.
Lack of religious faith and lack of the moral grounding that faith gives. This Vale of Tears can be quite rough, and confronting it without faith is to go to sea in a vessel with a hole in its bottom. Vigorous pumping can sustain the ship for a while, but if it founders there is little mystery why.
It makes you wonder. In terms of mental health, things aren’t going well. Now, is that because our mental health industry stinks and failed and is worthless?
From what I’ve seen, I’d say people get into their dispositional and behavioral problems in much the same way as people get into (and build their conscious existence around) their medical problems. Medication, talk therapy, time in rehab centers, time in asylums are simply steps in their own dance macabre. (The problem is exacerbated by the Social Security Administration’s escalatingly lax definition of what constitutes a ‘disability’), I
have several mental health tradesmen in my family (and a couple of social workers too), so I have some exposure to the minds making the sausage. I wouldn’t be any more critical of them than I would of any random person, and (with one exception), they’re generally an agreeable lot. But none of them are people carrying any peculiar store of wisdom with them (one was quite hopeless and drank herself to death). Their children and grandchildren seem to me to be as scuffed-up as anyone’s.
Ivan Illich’s thesis in Medical Nemesis may have been wildly overstated in regard to ordinary physicians and surgeons, but a passable argument in regard to psychiatrists and allied professionals. Men like Paul McHugh who’ve made their life in psychiatry have admitted and delineated the structural problems it doesn’t share with other subdisciplines of medicine. That goes double for allied professionals, whose training isn’t nearly as demanding.
And, of course, when you’ve deemed someone ‘healthy’, that’s a normative statement. Nothing about their training incorporates pondering what people ought to live and strive for, and the one’s I know adhere to whatever’s conventional in their social set or their guild. Well, my grandmother could do that too, but she wasn’t charging an arm-and-a-leg for 50 minutes of her time.
Dave Griffey-
I’d say it has to do with what boils down to the predictable fruit of the 60s style “being incredibly rude is OK for politics” thing, combined with ever more things becoming political.
That empowers bullies– you never know when you’re going to be yelled at, not just for things like holding a door (as the traditional complaint goes), but for wearing the wrong thing, saying “sir” when someone wanted to be called “ma’am,” heck my crazy uncle went into a rant on blood diamonds on seeing my engagement ring.
When folks are actively going around seeking to destroy anything that brings someone joy, of COURSE depression is getting worse.