Sports writer kills himself, leaves behind website describing how and why

Famm_sl said:

Were any of your suicidal friends on anti depressants? Why weren't they cured? Do you imagine there will be a vaccine for depression someday?

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No, none of my suicidal friends ever sought therapy. They got all their treatment from the black market and the bottle instead. Like most depressed people.

Why weren't they cured?

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This is an interesting question. Do you know how, exactly, chemicals bond to active sites in the cells of the body to cause interactions? Basically the way it goes is various molecules, whatever they may be, can only interact with your body if there are compatible receptors in the forms of particularly shaped proteins and molecules which can bind or be bound to, causing a protein shape change that creates some sort of function. In the case of medicine like anti depressants, they often do things like block serotonin uptake by latching onto the locations that serotonin would latch onto in the brain at the end of various synapses and other chemical receptors, effectively preventing some of this chemical from being bound and thus causing its function to occur. Others may stimulate more of a chemical. Anyway, if your particular physiology happens to have different receptors that dont conform to the chemical binding locations coming in, then medication won't work, or won't be as effective.

Do you imagine there will be a vaccine for depression someday?

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Vaccine would be the wrong word. A gene therapy treatment would be more likely.

For every article you link about genetics, there can be another one linked about the environment.

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Then do so, rathar than relying on an assertion fallacy to back up a stupid argument. Derp environment influences heart disease. You think? Heart disease isn't one thing and isn't caused by one thing exclusively. But the propensity to develop heart disease, just like cancer, breast cancer, stroke and so many other illnesses, is much higher with those with a genetic predisposition towards developing them.

You're like the king of citing shit that has nothing to do with the debate at hand.

You think feeding kids loads of sugar and caffeine might influence their behavior a little? Derp?

Citation requested: Depression is caused by environmental factors not genetics or a chemical imbalance

Citation received: Feeding kids sugary drinks makes them act like assholes.

Dumar gonna Dumar I guess.

My understanding is that flooding the brain with serotonin kills receptors, hence the potential for low grade brain damage when you engage in heavy drug use that involves flooding the brain with serotonin (X, for example) but fuck if I know the specifics of every receptor and every drug combination on the market. I was speaking broad strokes.

I'm not a doctor although maybe....but anyway, most anti depressents are fairly well tested by this point I don't have much problem with them.

Oxycontin is a drug that probably should be even more restricted than it already is though. Not a mental health drug, but a pretty potent one that I think is way overdiagnosed.

I like that Joe Rogan video. Good shit.

Dumar_sl said:

The problem with this position is that it describes reality only by the constituent parts that make up the ability to experience it - it doesn't describe realityas is.

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He thinks he can describe reality as it truly is, rather than how it is perceived.

Its so cute.

He doesn't even realize that his own perception will forever mark his understanding of reality, as quantum physics shows, reality is all about perspective.

But tell me, Dumar, how does your assertions that reality can be perceived as it truly is by eschewing quantifiable facts, observable phenomena and reasonable inquiry differ from religious dogma again?

It ignores any downward causation of the system: that is, the whole of the system may exert influence on the parts that make up that whole. Reductionism completely ignores this and most emergent properties

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This is one massive strawman, the downward influence of the whole of the material reality in terms of physics and chemistry are the result of interactions between forces and rule sets such as the tendency of energy to disperse towards its lowest energy state. Basically, you want to imply that there is no capacity in the realm of understanding the universe from a biochemical standpoint for comprehending the system as a cohesive whole with impacts from the macro to the micro.

This is once more regurgitated nonsense. Cultural and environment and genetics interact together, that's been stated, by me, many multiple times in this thread. The entire point of anthropology is to synthesize the micro and the macro into a cohesive whole, which is why it is a holistic discipline. It is you and only you who wants to restrict the debate to the finite area within which you are comfortable.

But you're way off topic at this point. You still have yet to describe, explain, or justify the mechanism by which our humanity is stripped from us by ownership of commodities.

Environment defines genetics. Genetics define the individual biologically. This biology interacts with the environment. This interaction between biology and environment leads to the development of intellect as a process of learning and retention of experiences, which is influenced by environmental conditions as base as types and quality of foods available all the way through the gamut of things which you could consider "learned" behaviors. These learned behaviors are passed on, modified, this is how culture is built up. Culture then begins to feed back into this interaction, altering it as well. Over many generations and thousands of years these behavior exchanges and environmental interactions/biological reactions to external stimuli are compounded and become more complex, more abstract as intelligence and (more importantly) free time to consider the abstract increase.

To ignore any facet in these interactions is to ignore the whole, yet Dumar ignores entirely the biochemical and physiological aspects as well as the "environmental" aspects in regards to physical environment rather than cultural, in the process he focuses entirely upon cultural impacts and blows them up and distorts them as the sum total and cause of all human ills.

Never minding the fact that modern society was an attempt to move out of a world of constant and unending human ills and pain and suffering of unimaginable proportions, he rails against it because part of the cost of that cultural evolution was the commodification of materialism, which he sources as the font of all wickedness in our world.

Trollface_sl said:

Suicide is for scums.

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Right, the idea that sociology could ever justify suicide for base reasons like "Life is hard because people suck" is nonsense. Suicide because you have a terminal disease is a lot different from suicide because depression.

The fact that suicide causes immense harm to everyone who is related to that person in some way is enough for sociologists and anthropologists who adhere to a doctrine of primum non nocere to know to back away right off the bat. Suicide for reasons subjective to one's perception of the fairness or unfairness of life is not, and never will be, justifiable just because mean people suck, which is really the crux of Dumar's greater overall point.

For one thing, no reasonable, logical person should be allowing the actions of others to dictate their own life's course so completely as to consider death a justified reaction to what amounts to being bullied.