If anybody’s waiting for Aspazia to respond to this post, you may just as well have to wait for a while. As of last Friday, Aspazia’s a mom! How transcendentally cool is that?
Why in the world a new mom would be giving any thought to a subject as depressing as depression right now is beyond me.
But a mere two days after Madeleine’s arrival, Aspazia revived a dormant feature on her blog: “Notes from the Prozac Nation.” (You know how philosophers are about their obsessions: well, obsessive.)
The item of the most philosophical interest in this edition of the Notes is a link to a discussion at Ethics Etc of conceptual problems with the notion of “human nature.”
The item most closely related to things I’ve been blogging about recently is a link to a NYT article claiming that a new study refutes the alleged link between SSRIs and suicide.
The one that most aggravates a pet peeve of mine is a link to article about a new documentary film, which states that the film depicts how American pharmaceutical companies are “exporting American definitions of depression and the use of antidepressants to the ancient culture of Japan.” I don’t want to defend Big Pharma’s tactics, and it’s important to be aware of the degree to which concepts of mental health, and the human good in general, are culture-bound. What irks me is the reference to Japan’s “ancient” culture. To me, as a former resident gaijin, this reeks of nihonjinron. Japan’s culture is no more “ancient”, and no more “modern”, than the northern Atlantic culture that the United States was bequeathed from Europe. If anything characterizes the Japanese as a people, it’s their collective capacity for wholesale borrowing from foreign cultures and for rapid shifts in cultural norms.
And by far the most entertaining one is the link that contains this You-Tube video.
I started this post with the intention of returning to my earlier examination of the “Prozac debate” as presented on Aspazia’s site. That’s next on my list.
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