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Proper Mental
Seems like book clubs are in at the moment, so why not do one here? # Proper Chill Book Club **How is it different?** There is no time limit, not really, this thread will be stickied up here for a (long) while. Expectations and deadlines are anxiety-inducing, and that's what we want to avoid. Sometimes there might be more than one book threads up, people are free to start their own, or suggest books. It's a *chill* book club. **Discussion?** Sure. Post thoughts, excerpts, quotes, page numbers to refer back to, whatever. Nobody is going to comment on style or substance, it's a free expression area. More than one comment allowed (and encouraged), don't worry about structure or anything like that. **I/me rule is suspended.** It is possible to talk about oneself, what one thought and what the book made them feel/think in this thread. It is still not allowed to talk about other people or comment on them personally, commenting on oneself is plenty. **Content:** Discussing books to do with the human mind and human condition. Fiction is allowed too, only if it is proper mental. # The Book Deleuze & Guattari: *Capitalism and Schizophrenia* It is actually two books, *Anti-Oedipus* and *A Thousand Plateaus*. There's also a companion book, *A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia*, it apparently makes reading the work more palatable and explains things. **Download links**: [LIBGEN](http://libgen.is/search.php?req=capitalism+and+schizophrenia)
A lot (if not most) "mental disorders" are caused by internalising and otherwise understanding the message of capitalism. "Accept" is the wrong word here, because acceptance implies agreement, when in fact it could be as simple as "going with it". Take hoarding for example. We live in a world of things. We are told from a young age that material possessions are important, that things are important. Marxists know that it's the relationships that make up things, of course, but capitalism focuses on the things themselves. When one considers *thing worship* in the form of rampant consumerism, high value "antiques" and other nonsense it is a surprise that not more people are hoarders. Shows like Pawn Stars and the like, Antique Roadshow and other antique "hunting" shows like it really drive home the idea that that old junk forgotten in the attic could be worth a lot of money some day. People who have a "mental disorder" are really just open and receptive to the dominant ideological ideas in our society. What spawned this post was a BBC article about [a woman who is going to "cure" hoarding by making an animated film](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-69053179). That idea is silly because one does not cure a disease by managing its symptoms. The animated film is going to show "how destructive hoarding is to relationships". Even the artist admits that "it took time to realise hoarding was a problem for her family". No shit, we are trained and socialised into thinking that having things is actually a good thing. The animated film won't work; a cynic-slash-realist would say the artist found a niche to exploit and make money/a name for herself on. No hate there, we all have to hustle in capitalism. This is why the sidebar says "train magic resistance". Sometimes having "mental health problems" can be a bit like being a lightning rod for all the worst things in capitalism. One way of helping yourself and/or others is to unpack why something is the way it is. Once that is done, and the issue is identified, it is much easier to tackle it and ultimately solve/defeat it.
www.youtube.com
They ain't fooling anybody. Mother should be charged too, cause upon learning her "non-verbal, autistic son" with the "mental capacity of a 2 year old" who "liked to have his arms bound" was outside playing alone decided to go back to sleep.
www.news18.com
>**28-Year-Old Dutch Woman to Legally End Her Life in May.** >A Dutch woman has decided to legally end her life citing her struggles with crippling depression and autism, according to a report. Zoraya ter Beek, a 28-year-old physically healthy, who lives in a small village in the Netherlands near the German border, is slated to be euthanised in May, according to the New York Post (NYP). >The Dutch woman said she decided to be euthanised after her doctors told her nothing more could be done to improve her condition. Didn't we use to try to *prevent* people who were depressed from committing suicide? The World has turned into a Monty Python skit.
>But in late January, Canadian Minister of Health Mark Holland announced the move would be pushed back further, citing concerns that the country’s health system wasn’t “ready” for the MAID expansion. [yet]
**The West is proper mental.** >Taken together, the actions by Western leaders – supported by their nations’ political elites – are indicative of a behavior pattern that has parted ways with reality. They derive deductively from dogmas unsubstantiated by objective fact. They are logically self-contradictory, impervious to events that shift the landscape, and radically unbalanced in weighting benefits/costs/risks and probabilities of success. How do we explain this ‘irrationality’? There are background conditions that are permissive or encouraging of this flight from sound reasoning. They include: the nihilistic socio-cultural trends in our contemporary post-modern societies; their susceptibility to collective hysteria/overwrought emotional reactions to unsettling events – 9/11, Islamic terrorism, the fable about Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election among other political matters, the conjuring of the menacing Chinese dragon, scary predictions of inevitable war with the PRC, outlandish claims that Putin is planning to launch an all-out campaign to conquer Europe up to the English Channel. The last two are fed by the free-floating anxieties, i.e. dread, engendered by the earlier bouts of mass psychopathology. Those allegations, in fact pure fictions, have gained currency among senior military figures, heads of government, and among strategic ‘thinkers.’ >Back to the ingredients of panic. We noted fear – of both the identifiable and the unknown, and sub-conscious feelings of insecurity. Those feelings derive from a matrix of disorienting shifts in the global environment inhabited by Western societies. They, in turn, grow in reciprocation with unsetting domestic developments. The outcome is two-fold: a stultifying of any reasonable debate about dubious policies – leaving premises and purposes untested, and opening opportunities for willful persons or factions who harbor audacious objectives of remaking the world’s geo-political space according to American hegemonic specifications. To that end, our leaders manipulate and exploit conditions of emotional disorientation and political conformity. The outstanding example are the so-called ‘neo-cons’ in Washington (who number Joe Biden as a comrade-in-arms) who have crafted a network of like-minded true believers in London, Paris, Berlin and at both ends of Brussels.