CLAUD

Wednesday, March 02, 2011

A breather

So this ought to be something I'm happy about.

Someone stole my MP3 player a couple of weeks back and I have been without music for the entire recess week and some bits of today. Realised how much I relied on those players to cut off ambient noise, irritating people on handphones, aunties talking to their children, fathers scolding their son/daughter, Primary school kids comparing leg lengths, ITE students trying to size each other up, NUS students panicking about midterms and finally, the MRT annoucement system of "please do not leave any belongings behind" or "YEW TEEE!!!!!" or "IF YOU SEE ANY SUSPICIOUS ARTICLES…"

Goodness! I want my peace back!

I have a very low tolerance for noise and 'unstructured' sounds. I study better with my MP3 beating to Ne-Yo than to sit there easily distracted by conversation…you can hardly blame me, you won't be distracted about someone talking bad about their husbands?! HAHA!

This brings me to an interesting point about Mp3 players. I decided that I missed a lot of the crowd after a while, like you can plug in and listen to music, but what are you plugging out of and will you be missing it? I was once so tired on the songs I'm listening, I decided to just listen to the sounds of the city. It's a pleasant comfort and overseas, you only realise how disconcerting (haha) when you don't hear the familiar MRT chimes of "Tampines" or "YEE-shun" and instead, something in Dutch or Japanese.

I have no idea why they need to drag out the YI-shun.

In any case, I'm still plugging in because sometimes, other people's troubles are just a little too much and some say, too public.

I'm just glad I got a new one. It's hot pink with built in speakers! <3

Reading Kris's blog about Cognitive Distortions sparked a debate in my mind:

The word "distortions" reminds me something about the medical community. Foucault wrote a book "Discipline and Punish" on how in the past torture was used to punish criminals and during the 18th century Englightenment movement, people felt that it was too barbaric and that made people less human. So they rationalised their actions and studied them - consolidating into what we know as the Psy-sciences. Yet Psychology and Psychiatry, argues Foucault, is not any different from torture because psy-scientists still institutionalise and label them, attaching a stigma to 'depressives', 'schizophrenics' and 'personality disorders'. Now the individual has to live in death, the lifetime of treatments that include electric shocks, water baths and sleeping pills. The idea of controlling the human mind via intravenous means. Foucault feels that this is also punishment, no different from medieval torture.

Of course, things have got a bit better. We know that electrical shocks no longer can 'cure' Blackness or Asianess, or Homosexuality. We now know that water baths can not cure the 'delusions' of the schizophrenics etc. However, they are still stigmatised, still labeled (and despised around 'normal people' and kept apart from us as the result of this classification of pathology in the medical sciences. They are made reliant on drugs and orderlies, some never know what it means to take buses or feed themselves. UK in the 1970s? Not too sure about the dates, there were closing and releasing of mental patients into society, many became homeless because they did not have the opportunities nor were taught the know-how about 'normal' society.

It's pretty interesting and raises many ethical issues which of course, is even beyond me. I'm not saying that the medical community is entirely cold and bloodless - in fact, they are more than compassionate to want to help those in suffering. What Foucault is saying, is that at the expense of their METHOD of explaining and curing, they inconsequently created a new prison and a new suffering.

Intriguing isn't it? It presents us a new can of worms to analyse how we can make medicine a more inclusive part of society, how it can expand its efforts.

HAHA…Nat/kris: if you managed to read until here, I meant no disrespect to your occupation. Just wanted you girls to get a sense of a little of what I'm studying. I sometimes feel that you all can't connect to what I'm learning because it's so abstract sometimes. Hope this can bring our fields together =)

08:08