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TRANSCENDENTAL MEDICATION, PART ONE

I live close to Boston. Within the last four months, we Greater Bostonians have had to deal with two heinous, graphic cases of rotten thinking; the Boston Marathon terrorist bombing, and a New England Patriot player being arrested for execution-style murder. Both clearly point to behavior that was shaped in part by negative influences on relatively young people. The Tsarnaev brothers who committed the bombings were both youthful, and had significant exposure to Muslim extremist indoctrination prior to committing their murders. Patriot’s rising star Aaron Hernandez was so strongly influenced by gang mentality in his younger years that even as a very wealthy, famous athlete, he still lived the same gang-banger lifestyle, which apparently included at least one and possibly more premeditated murders. These young men made extremely bad, willful choices and they are responsible for their actions. Yet, somewhere, a huge disconnect occurred that no pill was likely to address or reverse.

Again, it is not my intention to scuttle the use of psychotropic medications. They have benefit in certain cases, helping individuals who legitimately cannot control their impulses to maintain a level of consistent functionality. But before we continue down this path of inundating the public with brain-bending drugs and uncritically accepting whatever the psychiatric community espouses and promotes, we need to look at why we’re this “sick” in the first place. We need answers to what the long-term use of these drugs carry for side effects, which profits from their use and what the role manufacturers play in the overall scheme, and the methodology by which cases are diagnosed.

In the next installment of this column, we’ll be taking a look at diagnostic trends and the criteria used to determine who falls under the heading of mental illness, among other things.

Public service television ads today urge parents to ask their children about their drug and Internet usage, as part of responsible parenting. As mental health consumers, we Americans need to be asking the psychiatric and pharmaceutical communities about their activities and actions. There are too many questions, and not enough answers.

Image:Mk2010; Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 truetrue

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Nathan Clark

Nathan Clark is a conservative commentator who resides with his wife in New Hampshire. He is passionate about preserving the vision of our nation's Founders and advancing those tried and true principles deep into America's future. His interests range broadly from flyfishing, cooking and shooting to pro sports, gardening, live music and fine-scale modeling.

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