In the chapter on neurochemical selves, Nikolas Rose discusses how the advancement and development of biomedicine and bio technology since the early twentieth century has affected our daily lives with our life decisions and the amount of time spent on our concerns of medical health. The effect of increased research and medical technology has geared us away from focusing on our biological selves and reasoning to a more neurochemical and psychological reasoning. Rose discusses how the exploration to find truth with certain behavioral activities were linked with biomedical research and allowed us to supposively find reasons and create cures for them. With technology, scientists and researchers were able to tell medical patients answers they thought to be the cause of their psychological and behavioral illnesses with proof from their brain scans, graphs, and x-rays. It was generally distinguished the differences of what was considered as normal activity, what was not, and figure ways through medical treatment and pharmaceuticals in which the patients can follow to return back to the normal behaviors in society.
The rise of psychological reasoning and research led to many concerns and contradictions with what doctors, scientists, and researchers wanted to correct and treat their patients back into what they considered part of the norms and regulations to a social order to the general public. “Psychiatrists often found that their own diagnosis of madness were unable to meet legal criteria of evidence and proof. It arose in cultural disputes, where critics argued that psychiatric diagnosis merely medicalized deviance and upheld the norms of patriarchal social order” (Rose, 194). How were these doctors and scientists able to prove and put upon to society what was normal and what was not? Although, I don’t want to criticize the amount of effort and time put into their research and development for cures but what really gives them the right to draw a line in the norms and correct behaviors that patients needed to follow?
Rose follows through in this chapter with a reason to why we may have come to believe that certain behavioral and psychological changes in our mind was able to be fix through the eyes of scientific research and treatment. The differences between the mind and the body was finally linked with the help of medical advancement and technology and because of this medical doctors and scientists were able to get their patients to believe and follow their diagnosis and treatment needed to regulate the functions in the body. “When mind seems visible with the brain, the space between person and organs flatten out-mind is what brain does” (Rose, 198). The linkages and connections with the mind and brain was considered an undiscoverable problem in the past, so with the type of advancement scientists can use now, they can provide evidence to what can be done to fix what they saw as a problem to the human body. The beliefs of scientists and doctors with the higher power is clearly not questionable, especially since they have the higher education and experience to make these statements and create a line for what was considered normal, and to follow up with their statements they even provided to the public evidence and proof that they were in fact right after all.
In yesterday’s presentations and also in the next few parts of the chapter, the issue of the rise of pharmaceuticals was raised and with this, there proved and showed another type of reasoning put upon in society for patients to follow. “Many earlier criticisms of the use of psychiatric drugs claimed that they were used as “chemical coshes” in control strategies seeking to pacify and normalize. But today I suggest, such drugs do not so much seek to normalize a deviant but to correct abnormalities to adjust the individual and restore and maintain his or her capacity to enter the circuits of everyday life” (209). The focus on correcting and regulated the body was geared more towards the individual body rather than the human body as a group. This focus could have been helpful to prove a more individualized diagnosis a patient might have preferred more, but it lacks the focus on illness and sickness in the general public health. The need to focus on society as the main picture was necessary to fix such great deals of diagnosis, but pharmaceuticals in this case led the patients to believe and feel that their individual body needed individual medications to fix what their individual mind had problems with.
Similar to what I have just discussed, in the short film, “More” by Mark Osbourne, the images depicted made me aware and think of how it was so much linked to the reading by Rose and topics raised in class yesterday. In the movie, the main character never seemed happy with what he or she was living with, the immense time spent on labor, being criticized by his or her boss every day, and especially the need to find something new he or she could rely on to make themselves happy. Thus, this person was able to create a new invention that showed to increase happiness in the person; the product became a huge hit, changing the role of the blue collar worker into the big boss of the industrial company. In the end all the success and fame, there seemed to be something that the person was missing and I came to think of this as the need to find what their inner self needed and have given up to create and continue to follow along with the new product. In relation to this film and what we have been discussing in class yesterday, with the rise of pharmaceuticals and medical advancement, we come to believe, with the help of what scientists and researchers say, that our problems can be fixed with this new advancement, but the real issue is that, although these new products may have a temporary result to our body, it does not fix anything. These products were generally created for profit and for the general public to believe and follow what higher power thought of as the norm and social order of our society today.
Works Cited:
Rose, Nikolas. Neurochemical Selves, In the Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2007. Pp. 187-223.
Pictures Used In Order:
http://www.pharmacongress.com/past7/
http://bipolarblast.wordpress.com/2009/05/01/addiction/
http://www2.canada.com/vancouversun/news/westcoastlife/story.html?id=bb99fb0a-0354-4e84-a47f-92db59cfc439
No comments:
Post a Comment