Introducing Astrid

[Chris]

My exercise is to go swimming, I've been doing that for 17 years now and it makes me feel better. You use almost all your muscles in the water, so it's great for your body.
It also makes your head empty, because you're forced to focus on your breathing, on your body instead of your mind.
When I'm angry, I can take all my agression out on the water ;-). And on days that I don't feel very energetic, I go slowly and float a little bit. Whatever I do when I'm in the pool,
it's always o.k. For me it's always an achievement to have been there. This is the thing I have the most discipline for to do, because it always makes me feel good .

I'm so glad you wrote this--swimming is also my best exercise and I will get more motivated from your example. Sometimes it is hard to motivate what with all the winter clothes changing and other excuses, but like you , I always feel it is beneficial to get in the water. I'm pisces so water is a good environment for me. I never thought of that--how you have to concentrate on your breathing when swimming --so true--and that is also a key to meditation so swimming is meditative for us.

[Astrid]

Hi Chris,
I even go swimming when it's raining, and here in Holland we have a lot of rainy days ;-)
I'm very lucky to live close to the pool, so I can go there by feet.
I'm a Taurus, but my Chinese sign is a Water Rat! How fitting!
I have days that I don't want to go, but then I just give myself a kick and go.
I have a bag with all the stuff I need for swimming in there, so I can grab it and go.
And I also have paid for 50 visits in advance, so it's easier to motivate yourself.

[Chris]

Astrid, though I succeeded to maintain most of my friends, there is one with whom I also chose to quit any contact. He is working for the farmaceutical industry and dismissed my story as complete nonsense and literally laughed at it. .

When I wanted to taper, I called around to various pharmacies to inquire about compounding and liquids for taper; when I explained to the pharmacist how sensitive I am to slightest taper, he laughed. He said he has heard this from other people but he laughed because it's so absurd to him. WHen you hear something from various people independently (they didn't conspire to make it up), a rational person would think there might be something to it.
Hence, the nervous laugh --pretty inappropriate way for a professional pharmacist to respond to a patient's distress. and in other siituations--even with hyprocondriacs--a pharmacist might be more patronizing, but this situation cuts a little to close to the bone--hence the involuntary laugh.
A pharmacist who literally abets this scourge many times a day would laugh nervously to brush it off, rather than take it seriously--too much cognitive dissonance.

[Astrid]

I was more lucky with my doctor. I told him I needed the suspension of Seroxat to taper, and he subscribed it to me without hesitation.
I had done a lot of research before I went to see him, so maybe it was also because of my perseverence that he didn't argue about it.

[Chris]

So during all those years of our friendship I was drugged.
And I never criticized her, because I couldn't react in the moment. It was always a few days later that I realized she had said or done
something that hurt me.
Most of the times it was too late then to be angry, or I just wanted to forget about it because I couldn't handle confrontations with people.
I think I'm feeling all the anger now, crying my eyes out for things that have happened in the past and were stuck somewhere in my brain.
It's all coming out now.

"Because I couldn't react in the moment." Astrid, This really resonates with my experience to a tee--there has been good discussion here about how the SSRIs flatten out our emotions.
More and more I think this is how they "work" (to paraphrase Luc --and by work, I mean destroy).
While the original Pig Pharma BS was that they increase levels of serotonin and therefore make you happy, if I have this right, many actual scientist/expert types now admit that SSRI narrows the spectrum of feeling. Now I'm really out of my depth here, but isn't that what antipsychotics do? Like librium? A Flattening, kind of deadening of feeling, so the "good" feelings are eliminated along with the "bad." I picture zombies. . . This seems like social control to me--make the inmates more manageable (less reactive in the moment)

[Luc]

And I also have paid for 50 visits in advance, so it's easier to motivate yourself.

I like this part, Astrid. It surely *is* motivating. Ha! Anyway, that is very very good you're doing it. It'll help you a lot.

[Astrid]

I never thought of that--how you have to concentrate on your breathing when swimming --so true--and that is also a key to meditation so swimming is meditative for us.

YES it is! Actually, I'll go swimming tonight, talking about it makes me want to dive in

[Astrid]

A pharmacist who literally abets this scourge many times a day would laugh nervously to brush it off, rather than take it seriously--too much cognitive dissonance.

I believe that when you're a doctor and you really care about your patients, you want to know about all the bad side effects of medication.
But if you allow yourself, as a doctor, to prescribe something that is so bad for your patient, you wouldn't be able to sleep anymore, or do your job without feeling guilty all the time.
So the doctor behaves like an ostrich, and is in complete denial. It's purely psychological, a coping mechanism for the doctor.

[Claudius]

I swam my 35 lanes today too :)

[Luc]

"This seems like social control to me--make the inmates more manageable (less reactive in the moment)

And that's what it precisely is, Chris. The money factor (the Big Pharma raking in huge money from the sales) is just a "collateral benefit". That is what Michel Foucault and Tomasz Szas, among others, pointed out;

“One of the most influential and time honored criticisms is associated with Michel Foucault’s social control thesis. Foucault’s critique of institutions (i.e. psychiatric, penal) viewed confinement of the noncriminal as a method of controlling (or isolating) the socially undesirable….Given Foucault’s position, a number of important issues arise that yield alarming, or at least troubling, effects. Specifically, psychiatric and legal systems of control (e.g., the hospital and prison) promote legitimate social welfare interests; however, these interests are based on questionable and, in some cases, inaccurate science….This article examines the present-day vitality and utility of Foucault’s social control thesis as revealed in several enduring psycho-legal controversies”


'Although we may not know it, we have, in our day,
witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major
implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.'

Thomas S. Szasz, Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry:
An Inquiry Into the Social Uses of Mental Health Practices,
The Macmillan Company, New York, 1963, p. 212.

And, as they say, the most efficient prison is this of which bars are almost invisible... Too bad for the controllers that so many, and to such an extent, started to see those bars in recent time.