The Banana Peel Project

As I’m busily balancing a bunch of projects–two classes, one teaching job, a car in the shop, and the early glimmer of a paper on Foucault and material semiotics–I thought I’d share some of the things that have been keeping me entertained and curious about the fate of the world in the last few weeks.

MDMA as an adjunct to psychotherapy

Nature reports on some new research led by psychiatrist Michael Mithoefer that suggests that MDMA (3, 4-methylenedioxy-N-methyl amphetamine or “ecstasy”) might help patients respond better to psychotherapy.  While drugs have been used for a very long time to help control patients during therapy sessions, it’s always interesting to watch when the world of illicit drugs overlaps with the world of psychiatry and psychopharmacology.  From the article:

Mithoefer believes that MDMA tends to decrease levels of fear and defensiveness and increase levels of trust when used in a clinical setting. “It can remove some of the obstacles in therapy and act as a catalyst to the therapeutic process,” he says.

Of course, it’s not the first time a psychedelic has been used in therapy–it’s just interesting to see it framed here specifically as a treatment for PTSD.

In a bad economy, prescription drugs are among the first to go (NYT; may require subscription)

Usually, when the economy is slow, we don’t really notice.  We wait for a sale before we go shopping, we make one less trip to the movie theater, we wait on buying that new gadget, or we don’t buy organic this week.  That is, it rarely seems to have much of an effect on our day-to-day lives.  But it seems that it’s getting harder and harder to ignore the economy (or politics, for that matter).  Now, many people are having to let go of their prescription drugs because they’re too expensive, the American health care system is virtually extinct (mythical creature that it was), and Grandma’s Alzheimer’s medication didn’t really seem to be doing anything anyway.  Yep–on one hand, we’re being told that we can’t live without our pharmaceuticals.  On the other hand, we can’t afford them.  It isn’t pretty.

It’s just a placebo–is there a problem with that?

More and more doctors are prescribing placebos, according to a recent article in BMJ.  There’s a number of issues here, from whether using placebos is getting in the way of better understandings of “real” drugs to how doctors manage to convince their patients that they’re taking something they aren’t–and whether they should.  Somatosphere has a great post on the subject.

Society’s causes

Is it possible and productive to think of society in terms of causal mechanisms?  Daniel Little at UnderstandingSociety seems to think so.  I think it’s important to be very, very, very careful when we talk about causes, whether we’re talking about politics or physics.  I mean, excruciatingly careful.  Is it possible to think of cause as anything other than deterministic, linear, and arborescent?  Can cause be something more contingent and narrative, like telling a story about how any number of things could have come together to produce an effect?  Or has cause gone the way of agency and become something so uncertain and chimerical that it makes little sense unless it is radically detached from its foundations in classical philosophy?