Posted by mtdewcmu on April 28, 2011, at 12:19:47
In reply to Re: is pleasant/but odd, posted by sigismund on April 28, 2011, at 2:35:24
> > My introductory economics professor in college claimed that the most rational way to distribute adopted children would be to sell them to the highest bidder. He claimed that it was only squeamishness that prevented us from doing what was optimal.
>
> I suppose he was right. Thank God for squeamishness. This is from the same people who believe that the more choice you have the happier you are. "Voltaire's Bastards" may have been about this. I didn't feel right when I read it, so I'm not sure.I read the two editorial reviews of that book. It looks like one where the pleasure of reading it comes more from the clever style (it's written by a novelist) than the clarity of the arguments. But I sort of went off on a tangent when I wrote that post, as my Dexedrine was winding down. Now that my Dexedrine is going strong, I remember a point I wanted to make.
If you think about the life trajectory that leads someone to graduate from medical school, and successfully complete a residency, there can't be much pain and failure involved. For the most part, you can't have gone through depression in college and nearly flunked out, and med school itself is a pressure cooker that drives some previously-sane people to become suicidal, so if you manage to get through it all, you must have had a pretty clean bill of mental health, and a pretty charmed life, all things considered. So mental anguish is something theoretical to them, and they're not going to be able to relate. So it shouldn't be altogether surprising when they make a comment that shows that they can't relate.
And then you add to that the peculiar nature of psychiatry as a specialty, where you have to sort of suspend disbelief that it's not a bunch of unscientific voodoo...
poster:mtdewcmu
thread:983461
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20110407/msgs/983964.html