Post Election Stress Disorder (PEST)

This from the CityLink weekly entertainment newspaper in Fort Lauderdale:

A support group for people suffering from Post Election Stress Trauma (PEST), and who are distressed about the election results and/or the policies of the current administration, is offered noon Thursday at American Health Counseling Center . . . Lunch is provided. Free.

Ya know, that's actually kinda funny if ya think about it......

Not everyone is going to be happy when it comes to elections and such...but, that's one of the drawbacks to living in a democracy.

Jenn

Interesting. I like this and I agree completely with Jenn.

Ry

the illusion is that we live in a democracy. (i don't consider our representative democracy as a democracy at all.)

Hi folks,

Interesting topic.

I don't know the exact details, but I believe that the current US administration is not too generous towards people who are unable to work through chronic illness.

What can be worse than being at the mercy of a serious illness and economically insecure at the same time? It is the situation in life that most people are terrified of and rightly so.

Maybe the disorder isn't just in the sufferer.

Cheers, Myzen.

i've found a state agency that helps you with a career choice and i'm scared to death that they will be cut before i get through all the paperwork.......you know the website for women has been stripped of the opportunites and aid that was there for women? i was so shocked when i found outthat because i'm depressed, i could get help. cross your fingers for another 18 months.......

OMG I SOOOO needed this especially the day after I was soo upset! I'm totatly serious too!

Politics aside, I've been afraid to comment on this so called "PEST" disorder because I see this from a different angle.

This sounds like just another one of these "conditions" being invented in recent years with the goal of using such a thing to prescribe more drug$.

It reminds me of another condition they've created recently which has to do with people who shop too much. Just picture how many people will now run to their doctor asking for drugs to treat this "condition". If it weren't sad, it would be funny.

Hey SpazKatt, it didn't matter who won last year's selection.

It was nothing more than a choice between Coke and Pepsi.

That's why Bush's fellow Bonesman Kerry was the Democratic choice.

Had Kerry won, he would have followed the same agenda Bush and company have started.

It's not about America.

It does... because... never mind LARGE BIG HUGE ISSUES

read this article other day nytimes thought was interesting and kinda fits here sorta...

OS ANGELES - Aldous Huxley long ago warned of a future in which love was beside the point and happiness a simple matter of consuming mass-produced goods and plenty of soma, a drug engineered for pleasure. More than 70 years later, Dr. Peter C. Whybrow, the director of the Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles, has seen the future, and the society he describes isn't all that distant from Huxley's brave new world, although the soma, it seems, is in ourselves.

In his new book, "American Mania: When More Is Not Enough" (W. W. Norton & Company), Dr. Whybrow argues that in the age of globalization, Americans are addictively driven by the brain's pleasure centers to live turbocharged lives in pursuit of status and possessions at the expense of the only things that can truly make us happy: relationships with other people.

"In our compulsive drive for more," writes Dr. Whybrow, 64, a professor of psychiatry and bio-behavioral science, "we are making ourselves sick."

His book is part of a new critical genre that likens society to a mental patient. The prognosis is grim. In "American Mania," he argues that the country is on the downswing of a manic episode set off by the Internet bubble of the 1990's.

"It's a metaphor that helps guide us," he said, perched on a chair in the study of his rambling high-rise apartment near U.C.L.A. "I think we've shot through happiness as one does in hypomania and come out the other end, and we're not quite sure where we are.

"In fact, I think happiness lies somewhere behind us. This frenzy we've adopted in search of what we hope is happiness and perfection is in fact a distraction, like mania is a distraction."

"American Mania" is his fourth book for the general public about meaty psychiatric matters. An expert in manic depression and the endocrinology of the central nervous system, he has dissected depression and its relatives ("A Mood Apart" and "Mood Disorders") as well as the winter blahs ("The Hibernation Response").

Educating the public has been an abiding concern in a long career that began with training in psychiatry and endocrinology in his native London and in North Carolina. In 1970, Dr. Whybrow became chairman of the psychiatry department at Dartmouth Medical School and at the University of Pennsylvania. He moved to U.C.L.A. in 1997.

While the Gordon Gekkos of the world have long had their critics, Dr. Whybrow sees the Enrons and the Worldcoms - the mess left by unfettered capitalism - not as a moral problem, but as a behavioral one.

"The outbreak of greed we've seen, especially in business, is partly a function of the changing contingencies we've given businessmen," he said. "If I say to you, 'You can make yourself extremely rich by holding up the share price until such time that you cash out your shares, which are coming due in another six months,' it takes an incredibly unusual person who'll say: 'The share price is going down? I'm afraid I lost that one.' There is an offer of affluence there which the person cannot refuse. They don't need that extra money, but they want that extra money."

People are biologically wired to want it, he contends. We seek more than we need because consumption activates the neurotransmitter dopamine, which rewards us with pleasure, traveling along the same brain pathways as do drugs like caffeine and cocaine. Historically, he says, built-in social brakes reined in our acquisitive instincts. In the capitalist utopia envisioned by Adam Smith in the 18th century, self-interest was tempered by the competing demands of the marketplace and community. But with globalization, the idea of doing business with neighbors one must face the next day is a quaint memory, and all bets are off.

Other countries are prey to the same forces, Dr. Whybrow says, but the problem is worse here because we are a nation of immigrants, genetically self-selected to favor individualism and novelty. Americans are competitive, restless and driven to succeed. And we have succeeded.

But the paradox of prosperity is that we are too busy to enjoy it. And the competitiveness that gooses the economy, coupled with the decline of social constraints, has conspired to make the rich much richer, he asserts, leaving most of the country behind while government safety nets get skimpier.

Dr. Whybrow cites United States government statistics that are sobering. Thirty percent of the population is anxious, double the percentage of a decade ago. Depression is rising too, especially among people born after 1966, with 10 percent more reporting depression than did people born before that year.

With the rise of the information age in the 1990's, when the global marketplace began staying open 24 hours a day, American mania reached full flower, Dr. Whybrow said. And now that the nation has retreated from that manic peak, we should stop and survey the damage.

"Neurobiology teaches us that we're reward-driven creatures on the one side, which is great," he said. "It's a fun part of life. But we also love each other and we want to be tied together in a social context. So if you know that, why aren't we thinking about a civil society that looks at both sides of the balance rather than just fostering individualism? Because fostering individualism will be great for us and it will last a little bit longer, but I believe it's a powerful negative influence upon this country and it's not what was originally intended. Should we be thinking about whether this is the society we had in mind when we started this experiment 200 years ago or are we perhaps moving too fast for our own good?"

Dr. Whybrow's analysis of the mania afflicting contemporary society has been praised as acute, but he has been faulted for failing to prescribe any political or economic action as an antidote.

"Whybrow does offer an interesting version of the social and cultural contradictions of capitalism," Michael Roth, president of the California College of the Arts, wrote in a review last month in The San Francisco Chronicle, "but it is one that leaves us without much sense of how we might reconstruct the social and political system to create more meaningful work and a more equitable distribution of wealth and of hope."

But for Dr. Whybrow, with globalization here to stay, the solution lies with the individual: It's up to each of us to ruminate on our lives and slow down enough so that we can limit our appetites and find a better balance between work and family.

He suggested following the example of a man his friend saw running along the beach: "A high tide washed all the little fish onto the beach where they were all gasping for breath. So here's this fellow scooping up each fish and throwing them back into the sea, and my friend goes up to the fellow and says: 'This is a fruitless task. It's not going to make any difference.' And the fellow picks up a fish, throws it into the sea and says, 'To this one it does.' "

I plan to stop into the PEST group this week.

I'd go with you in a New York second....remember every thing so you can share it.....you go, girl! when we become resistant to new ideas and theories, we lose.

I just typed the address for the PEST meeting into a route finder -- and discovered that it is 7 towns away from here. Given heavy traffic, that is about an hour and 20 minute drive. My friend next door gave me a good talking to about [i]unpacking my boxes[/] so that I can stop living in a warehouse and have a retreat.

She pointed out that, since I've not held a job in a while, I will be exhausted once I find one. So I better focus completely on this one thing. And stop painting the bathroom, which can wait. Don't make appointment with electricians, etc. that interrupt the day. Just do this one thing.

Which is hard in itself because there simply is NO PLACE to put everything. And I can't afford to go out and spend hundred of bucks on bookcases and other storage I need.

So, no PEST for me today.

ummmmmmmmm, an exchange seems in order here.....you come help me unpack my boxes and i'll come help unpack yours.......i don't have enough storage in this house to hold what's in a shoebox. whatever i was thinking about how cute this house was, etc.etc.etc....was WRONG!
plus, i've frozen to death in it...so, i'm looking forward to getting out of it....i totally understand about the bathroom and the unpacking...hope you get it done!!!!