Comments? Oh, go on then

Week 7 already. Oy gevalt, where does it go...

While I'm playing Blog Catch-up, I may as well throw some more drivel at some of you:

Graham (They tried to make me go to rehab): bear in mind that typologising every conceivable form of misbehaviour or dysphoria in terms of ever-more-pedantically-specific 'disorders' is also great for business--if you're a big psychiatric consultancy group and/or an international pharmaceutical corporation (which also happen to be the places that government and media tend to look for 'expert analyses.' How about that).¹

You might say that medicalisation is the new new Western disease...

A Rebel Yell (Chocolate May Cause Violent Behaviour): I'm not picking on you, I swear... but I fear you may have fallen prey to bad journalism on the part of HealthandAge.com, whose Susan Aldridge (yeah, PhD) appears to have done a very suspect job of reporting on the Cohort Study analysis. Reading the BJP article and the actual report itself, I get the impression that the whole chocolate-on-demand thing is being cited as symptomatic of ineffectual parenting in general: not as a primary factor, and certainly not as a medical cause of later delinquency.

I do agree that the study itself doesn't satisfactorily demonstrate a direct correlation between juvenile chocolate consumption and adult conviction. (It also doesn't really suggest anything about emotional development that isn't already widely-recognised, and far better articulated by other studies).

That said: there are plenty of medically sound reasons why it's not a great idea to give kids chocolate and sweets frequently, or in large amounts... so I'm not sure exactly what the author was aiming to accomplish with that article.

A Horse called Golgotha (Lies): "If you take a disliking to somebody, surely pretending to get on with them for the sake of avoiding hostility is the right option?"

Hell no. Absolutely the opposite. If someone pisses me off to the point at which I feel they should know about it, then believe me: they'll know about it. Dissembling about interpersonal grievance and conflict only leads to passive aggression and other despicable behaviour. Better by far to have all that stuff out in the open and honour satisfied.

(It also gives the offended party the chance to find out if they're wrong, or have misjudged the offender(s) without realising--whereas if they just keep it to themselves and sulk about it, they risk being stuck with any misconceptions).


¹ In fact, I've noticed that in this country the government tries to actually hire said experts to advise on an ongoing/permanent basis, rather than just paying them a load of money for one-off policy endorsements. If that's supposed to make the whole arrangement look less sordid to public observers, someone should let them know it isn't working...