The camouflage marketing of mental illness never seems to abate as today's article in the New York Times appears to evidence. Whether it be the New DSM-V reaching into every aspect of the human condition for mental illness labels to market, or NAMI's message that mental illness is a serious brain chemical imbalance that is a life long disease that must be treated with powerful psychotropic drugs or you will die, or TAC ( Treatment Advocacy Center) sending out their fear mongering messages of how dangerous mentally ill labeled individuals are in a never ending scheme to pass force drugging/commitment laws across America effecting large segments of our population with curtailment of their basic constitutional rights and principles. It always the same target and message in the end that markets false disease which leads directly to the marketing of psychotropic drugs.
I'm sure you have read or come across some of this misleading rhetoric and much ballyhooed headlines related to mental illness with a new gene discovered, postpartum mental disease, brain chemical might suggest something in this or that study points to illness origin, active questioning or high spirited normal children now ADHD, ADD, Temper defiant disorder, with 40% being Bipolar, depressed preschoolers under or undiagnosed with mental illness need treatment with anti-psychotics, aggressive preemptive drug treatment for those that might be predisposed or determined toward mental disorders, Bipolar or Schizophrenic Children 600% increased, more money needed for American Mental Health Crisis, Natural Disaster sparks mental health crisis, Police shoot crazed mentally ill man with such and such label, and many other similar misleading headlines that go on and on endlessly.
In fact those out there working with big pharma front pseudo advocacy organizations protesting most against stigma and labels, are in all reality doing the worst job of lessening the adverse effects attributed to those very labels. The reality of our times is the vast majority of those that are coined mentally ill with label are not mentally ill at all. They have either been sucked into a massive misinformation and marketing campaign or personally have decided it was easier to take on a label as an excuse for their situation and human emotions, than take life by the horns and live it with an attitude of individual responsibility.
Some have the audacity to call me anti psychiatry and so much worse (LMAO), when in fact I don't deny that some serious mental health conditions do exist that are not being effectively treated in today's greed and market driven mental health modality. We as a society, and especially a nation have become a culture of hypochondriacs in a futile effort to avoid the reality of our situations and times. We have been taught to look at the maladies within each of ourselves through a disease model, instead of looking toward are leaders and market driven forces taking us all down a devastating social and economic road of no return.
To clarify, I'm am against forced drugging, the incarceration and criminalization of mental illness, against misinformation campaigns, against bad medicine, against false science, and am against corporate front advocacy organizations. I am against demeaning labels and disease mongering especially when done solely for profiteering and status. I am for humane care, patient dignity, equal opportunity for those with serious health issues. I believe in "first do no harm". I believe we should not use misleading and unproven pathogenic origin to explain basic human emotions and conditions. We should allow children to be children, promote responsible & better parenting, and not stifle children into hopelessness and forever damaged disability or worse through pharmacological means.
In fact, if you don't feel some form of nagging depression or overt angry feelings about the institutionalized crimes being perpetrated out in the open upon the vast majority of citizens in America, and then are being excused with regularity by our corrupted supposed leaders, then I would strongly purpose you may in all actually have a truly incurable moral/ethical condition that can only be treated with the collapse of our Constitutional Republic while going on to live under extreme unrelenting cruel corporate tyranny.
Now onto the story about a supposed genius diagnosed as ???? mentally ill by a newspaper.
Ask your self this question as you read this piece: Do you want those like Einstein, future/current touted geniuses, or even those high spirited individuals that are willing to question the limits and boundaries of the deemed norm; drugged into a box out of existence just so they fit nicely into the twisted concept of what some in temporary power would say/rule is deemed acceptable?
Please pay close attention to these words: the person being written about here does not attest or speak to any mental health condition, it's the pundits spewing outrageous assumptions in this supposed news article.
Damn I'm jealous of this successful guy, Maybe I'll call him crazy in my article
Obviously excited reporter hearing news of possible Pulitzer nomination for crazy crazy crazy good story
NY Times editor fact checking this article from mental health prospective
appears reporter is practicing some pertinent interview questions here for this story
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/business/19entre.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&ref=business
Just Manic Enough: Seeking Perfect Entrepreneurs
Article by David Segal
Cambridge, Mass.
IMAGINE you are a venture capitalist. One day a man comes to you and says, “I want to build the game layer on top of the world.”
You don’t know what “the game layer” is, let alone whether it should be built atop the world. But he has a passionate speech about a business plan, conceived when he was a college freshman, that he says will change the planet — making it more entertaining, more engaging, and giving humans a new way to interact with businesses and one another.
If you give him $750,000, he says, you can have a stake in what he believes will be a $1-billion-a-year company.
Interested? Before you answer, consider that the man displays many of the symptoms of a person having what psychologists call a hypomanic episode. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual — the occupation’s bible of mental disorders — these symptoms include grandiosity, an elevated and expansive mood, racing thoughts and little need for sleep.
“Elevated” hardly describes this guy. To keep the pace of his thoughts and conversation at manageable levels, he runs on a track every morning until he literally collapses. He can work 96 hours in a row. He plans to live in his office, crashing in a sleeping bag. He describes anything that distracts him and his future colleagues, even for minutes, as “evil.”
He is 21 years old.
So, what do you give this guy — a big check or the phone number of a really good shrink? If he is Seth Priebatsch and you are Highland Capital Partners, a venture capital firm in Lexington, Mass., the answer is a big check.
But this thought exercise hints at a truth: a thin line separates the temperament of a promising entrepreneur from a person who could use, as they say in psychiatry, a little help. Academics and hiring consultants say that many successful entrepreneurs have qualities and quirks that, if poured into their psyches in greater ratios, would qualify as full-on mental illness.
Which is not to suggest that entrepreneurs like Seth Priebatsch (pronounced PREE-batch) are crazy. It would be more accurate to describe them as just crazy enough.
“It’s about degrees,” says John D. Gartner, a psychologist and author of “The Hypomanic Edge.” “If you’re manic, you think you’re Jesus. If you’re hypomanic, you think you are God’s gift to technology investing.”
The attributes that make great entrepreneurs, the experts say, are common in certain manias, though in milder forms and harnessed in ways that are hugely productive. Instead of recklessness, the entrepreneur loves risk. Instead of delusions, the entrepreneur imagines a product that sounds so compelling that it inspires people to bet their careers, or a lot of money, on something that doesn’t exist and may never sell.
So venture capitalists spend a lot of time plumbing the psyches of the people in whom they might invest. It’s not so much about separating the loonies from the slightly manic. It’s more about determining which hypomanics are too arrogant and obnoxious — traits common to the type — and which have some humanity and interpersonal skills, always helpful for recruiting talent and raising money.
Some V.C.’s have personality tests to help them weed out the former. Others emphasize their toleration of mild forms of mania, if only because starting a business is, on its face, a little nuts.
“You need to suspend disbelief to start a company, because so many people will tell you that what you’re doing can’t be done, and if it could be done, someone would have done it already,” says Paul Maeder, a general partner at Highland Capital. “There are six billion human beings on this planet, we’ve been around for hundreds of thousands of years, we’re a couple hundred years into the industrial revolution — and nobody has done what you want to do? It’s kind of crazy.”
He will explain the genesis of Scvngr, and offer a sort of guided tour of his mind, while sitting on a stool in his bare feet, wearing jeans and a Princeton T-shirt. A pair of Oakley sunglasses are perched, as they nearly always are, atop his head — part talisman, part personal branding.He is lean, smiley and partial to the word “awesome,” which he uses as a noun — as in “an extra dose of awesome.” He speaks quickly and with what sounds like a Canadian accent, which seems odd because he was raised in Boston.
He first pitched Scvngr as a freshman at Princeton, to a professor linked to an annual business plan contest open to undergraduates and graduates. “I told him I wanted to build the game layer on top of the world,” Mr. Priebatsch recalls. “And he didn’t say, ‘You’re insane.’ So I said, ‘And I want everyone in the world to help me build it.’”
This, apparently, has enormous implications. “If we can bring game dynamics to the world, the world will be more fun, more rewarding, we’ll be more connected to our friends, people will change their behavior to be better. But if this is going to work it has to be something that anyone can play and that everyone can build.”
But nobody inspires N.Z.S. without a promising idea, intelligence and a lot of charisma. Scvngr today has 60 employees, many of them veterans of very successful tech start-ups. As of December of last year, it also had $4 million from Google Ventures. Any list of the qualities that have netted all this talent and money should include Mr. Priebatsch’s quasirobotic work ethic. He does not socialize. He no longer reads books, nor does he watch TV or movies. He works from 8 a.m. until 10 p.m., seven days a week. He was reluctant to have a photographer visit for this article because he worried that it might distract employees.
Doesn’t he miss going to bars, just hanging out, being 21? Here’s where Mr. Priebatsch starts to sound like a teenage Vulcan.
THE hypomanic temperament is, of course, not limited to entrepreneurs. It’s found in politics (Theodore Roosevelt) the military (George S. Patton), Hollywood (the studio head David O. Selznick) and virtually any field where outsize risks yield enormous rewards.
But the business world has contributed more than its share of hypomanics, particularly the abusive, ornery kind. The most colorful of the breed was arguably Henry Ford.
“He epitomizes the unhinged, entrepreneurial spirit,” says Douglas G. Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University and author of “Wheels for the World,” a book about Mr. Ford and his company. “He became monomaniacal in his belief that the internal combustion engine should be fueled by gas, at a time when everything was electric, and nobody thought you could put gas on a hot motor.”
Nearly all conversations about contemporary hypomanics start with the Apple chief executive, Steven P. Jobs. Like Mr. Ford, he is a pitchman extraordinaire with a vaguely messianic streak, and, like Mr. Ford, he can anticipate what people will want before they even know they want it.
Mr. Jobs is also routinely described as a despot and control freak with a terrifying temper, says Leander Kahney, author of “Inside Steve’s Brain.”
Scholars in organizational studies tend to divide the world into “transformational leaders” (the group that hypomanics are bunched into, of course) and “transactional leaders,” who are essentially even-keeled managers, grown-ups who know how to delegate, listen and set achievable goals.Both types of leaders need to rally employees to their cause, but entrepreneurs must recruit and galvanize when a company is little more than a whisper of a big idea. Shouting “To the ramparts!” with no ramparts in sight takes a kind of irrational self-confidence, which is perfectly acceptable, though it can also tilt into egomania, which is usually not.
“We have a grid personality scorecard, across 10 or 12 dimensions, attributes that are critical to success,” says Michael A. Greeley, a general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners in Boston.
The goal is to spot the really erratic characters, whom Mr. Greeley calls “rail to rail”:
“One day they get up and their favorite color is pink. The next day, it’s green. I’ve worked with hypomanics, and where I think it can be quite insidious — people like this turn on colleagues quickly. An employee could be an incredible contributor, and then, after one mistake, they are out of the lifeboat.”
Dr. Gartner, the author and psychologist, says he believes that hypomanics come by their disposition genetically. But it is hard to tease out what Norman and Suzanne Priebatsch — a biotech entrepreneur and a financial adviser at SmithBarney, respectively — bequeathed through their DNA and what they instilled in Seth and his older sister, Daniella Priebatsch, as they grew up.
Because chez Priebatsch sounds like boot camp for the brain.
“Seth has such a fertile mind; you just know that he’ll attract great people to the company,” he says, “and the ideas will continue to flow and morph until he finds something great.”You also get the sense that Mr. Priebatsch won’t stop, even if Scvngr is a glorious triumph.
Great piles of money would not slow him down, either.
“I’m not anti-money,” he says. “I like nice bikes, I like nice computers. I like that money is a representation of success, but the actual entity itself is not interesting for me. There is little that I would want that I don’t have, and the things that I want money can’t buy.”
Like?
He doesn’t pause.
“I want to build the game layer on top of the world.”
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I encourage you to read the entire article at the link provided above: If those NAMI-ITE types are going to shout, jump up and down hollering about trivial things like "psycho-donuts" and mentally ill stuffed animals, they should be screaming from the top of mountains over this article.
But somehow I believe they will stay quiet as church mice. Why? This piece does little to promote how devastating mental illness is within their marketing model that is brought to you via those pharma funded life long disease mongering campaigns that must be treated with profitable drugs.
What this piece does do, is it continues to perpetuate false perceptions and misleading information about mental health issues. This is News?
for further reading and discussion @
NYTimes infers this 21 yr old genius entrepreneur is crazy, manic and uses DSM-slanted biased article
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