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Did you read the article? Or are you adressing a comment I missed?

The article is a letter to an advice columnist wherein a person describes herself as lazy, and the columnist literally says: "Doing the bare minimum at the last minute isn’t lazy. It’s simply a choice, devoid of moral weight. It’s a strategy that’s mostly worked for you, up until this point."

So I'm finding it hard to understand:

> You aren't qualified to condemn every "lazy" person on the planet.

Who are you addressing?

> Did you read the article?

I believe not, or given the length of the thing and current attention span trends, GP skimmed over it (!= genuinely read), because the following is a direct quote from TFA:

> Get a therapist

Also,

> You aren't qualified to condemn every "lazy" person on the planet, so quit it with the victim-blaming.

The essence of the column is precisely the opposite. The columnist directly says that the person should not blame herself like she does and that she shouldn't call herself lazy.

How lazy of them.

> Modern psychiatry has infinitely better cognitive tricks than the moralizing platitudes in motivational essays. If you're really lucky, your physician will guess two-thirds of your symptoms before you describe them, diagnose you with a particular neurochemical deficiency, and prescribe you a medication that, in the space of a week, does more to help you with your problems than you'd managed in your entire life to date.

this is highly contentious

Well, meds work for some people some times, and not others. And they tend to have severe side effects. That's why people have different opinions.

I believe that medications can be extremely helpful, but aren't always, and it's tragic we don't understand why. We desperately need objective, quantitative means of measuring what the problem is and what meds do. It takes a rather long time before meds have an effect, so it seems obvious to me that the common saying that they "correct chemical imbalances" can't be correct - otherwise meds would be take immediate effect. People speculate that it takes time for neurons to grow, but we really don't know specifically what's going on with either a mental condition or a treatment.

My dream is for care for mental illness to be improved to resemble diabetes, where you can check a metric like blood sugar, quickly correct it if it is too high or low, and check long term health with a metric analogous to A1C.

Edit: It may be unclear to some whether I am disagreeing with the statement in the parent about contentiousness.

If you accept that different people have different experiences, then it no longer makes sense to "contend" which is the true reality. The different experiences are all real.

You're discounting the value of moral thinking. You can reduce everything to a medical issue, because all human behavior is indeed biologically caused, but you are failing to consider that blame and fault and other moral concepts are exactly the kind of thing the mind is responsive to. Why are you so hostile to those, but so eager to pump people full of drugs, designed and dispensed on the basis of our very poor understanding of the the brain[1].

[1] Which is not to say that there's no place for psychiatric medication, but they should not be the first course of action.

Psych meds have significant drawbacks, so they usually aren't the first course of action. I mean, a doctor may prescribe something on the first visit, but if the patient tried unsuccessfully for a decade to will themselves to change, it wasn't the first course of action. I think your tendentious language ("pump people full of drugs") is painting a caricature of psychiatrists that's unwarranted.

Because if you do need that drug or have condition, shaming you instead so that other people are scared and less lazy is unethical.

Because blaming and shaming people for their mental conditions makes treatment harder.

Because if we are talking about people who tried to change and did not succeeded multiple times, adding more shame solves literally nothing.

> Modern psychiatry has infinitely better cognitive tricks than the moralizing platitudes in motivational essays.

Please name two such tricks.

Amphetamines, get enough exercise, get enough sleep, SSRIs if you’re depressed

The tricks sometimes work, for some people, but they are definitely not the silver bullet. SSRI effectiveness in treating depression, for one, is not that great.

Have you ever wondered why in our society when people stop taking their medications a significant portion of the population will go mad?

The crux of the problem here is trying to conform to some ideal of what a good person is and using drugs to get there. Then you will be happy and all is good in life. Until something else comes along and back to square one again.

> Let the professionals do it, because they can, first, do no harm.

:O=