Cognitive Dissonance… it’s when your beliefs and your reality don’t match, causing psychic strain. It’s like trying to fully believe in two opposing ideas simultaneously. It just can’t work, it’s a mental paradox.
What’s the point? The point is that cognitive dissonance is stressful, makes you feel crazy. That’s what my addiction treatment is like. It is absolutely, determinately, absurdly, ludicrously painful to bear.
You see, I’ve got this problem. I’m too smart, too clever. Additionally, I’ve been educated in the way treatment works, the fundamentals behind the theories. So I know that the counselors and doctors know that they don’t really know what they’re doing. Ask any doctor to tell you why a medication works, how it works. They can’t tell you because they don’t know. What they do know, is that when they put certain compounds of elements in your body, the symptoms in question diminish. And the really fucked up part? That’s all they care about, that the medication has an effect on the symptoms they are trying to treat. To hell with all the other effects these medications have, you know, side effects.
The truth is, they [the Doctors, Researchers, Pharmaceutical Industry] don’t know what effects these psychological drugs have on your brain. They know that the meds can ease depression, anxiety, mania, schizophrenia, etc., but they don’t know how and they don’ t know what else they’re doing to your brain. My counselor tried to give me the run around yesterday, explaining that the new medication I’m on [which I’ll get too shortly] has been thoroughly tested over the years and all of the effects, both the expected ones and the side ones, are known and overall harmless.
Really though? What if these kinds of drugs, mood drugs, are altering neurotransmitters and their pathways? Oh wait, that’s exactly what they’re doing! So what if these changes become permanent after the medication is stopped? And what if those neural changes get passed on too further generations? And what if the effects aren’t exactly what we thought they would be? Dumb people, sorry, I mean average globally ignorant people, assume that kind of change would be a good thing. Erase depression and anxiety from our genetic code, right? Because the doctors and scientists have convinced you that these conditions are the result of chemical imbalances in the brain, actual physical diseases that were inevitable in the individual. But what if they’re wrong? What if the chemical imbalance is secondary, not primary? A symptom, not a cause? If that’s the case, then these meds that are rewiring the brain aren’t fixing something, they’re breaking something.
Generations down the line [perhaps even happening now], every child born could have an irregular brain and die. It could destroy us.
Or more likely i think, we all become drones, hooked on our Soma [A Brave New World – not the actual drug Soma], relying on it. Makes us so much easier to control.
Anyway, I had a more passionate rant about this and about my feelings toward my life at the moment earlier when I started it. Now the urge is gone, so I’m gonna leave this be an bitch another day.
The ALTER EGO _ 