Billion Dollar Deals and How They Changed Your World review – so brilliant, you want to take notes
Jacques Peretti’s revelatory three-parter began with the creeping medicalisation of the human condition.
See part 2 here: https://dai.ly/x762j0n
If you have scope in your day and the mental and emotional capacity to deal with evidence of yet another kind of imminent apocalypse, I would recommend you devote it to Jacques Peretti’s new series Billion Dollar Deals and How They Changed Your World. It’s a brilliant concept brilliantly executed. The three-parter looks at the commercial imperatives covertly driving and shaping developments in such vitally important areas of our little but collectively lucrative lives as work, money and health.
Peretti opened with health, and the creeping medicalisation of what used to be considered normal parts of the human condition. He traced the evolution of one pharmaceutical CEO’s 1976 vision of making pill-popping as natural as chewing gum, from dream to near-reality. The third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) in 1980 added 205 new categories, together with standardised tests for many, precipitating an avalanche of drugs – including, most famously Prozac – developed or repurposed to match these new markets. Research and marketing have become ever more closely entwined since.
Palantir: the ‘special ops’ tech giant that wields as much real-world power as Google
Antidepressant and anti-anxiety prescriptions now cost the NHS about £60m a year. Does everyone who takes them need them, or has the bar for diagnosis – due to whatever confluence of factors – been set too low? And the questions, as Peretti noted, go wider still: are the drugs enabling poverty? If you medicate people so they can cope with unendurable circumstances, are you saving lives or effectively suppressing a necessary revolution? Or both? Peretti circled these rabbit holes without disappearing down them.
Doctors themselves questioned the increasing popularity of ADHD diagnoses. In the US, one in seven children is being medicated for the disorder with drugs whose long-term effects cannot yet be known: 10,000 of them two- and three-year-olds. One doctor estimates just 10% of children brought to him for treatment – and this is by a self-selecting group of parents who know he offers alternatives to pills – are genuine cases. But they all have a label that, as Allen Frances (a psychiatrist on the DSM-III task force) says, will follow them for the rest of their days. “All diagnoses should be written in pencil,” he says. “We should underdiagnose and find out how nature takes its course.”
Entrepreneurs are now looking to cognitive enhancers to beat the natural inclination to slow down occasionally, and more consistently as we age, during the day. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/sep/28/billion-dollar-deals-the-pact-jacques-peretti-brilliant
Jacques Peretti’s revelatory three-parter began with the creeping medicalisation of the human condition.
See part 2 here: https://dai.ly/x762j0n
If you have scope in your day and the mental and emotional capacity to deal with evidence of yet another kind of imminent apocalypse, I would recommend you devote it to Jacques Peretti’s new series Billion Dollar Deals and How They Changed Your World. It’s a brilliant concept brilliantly executed. The three-parter looks at the commercial imperatives covertly driving and shaping developments in such vitally important areas of our little but collectively lucrative lives as work, money and health.
Peretti opened with health, and the creeping medicalisation of what used to be considered normal parts of the human condition. He traced the evolution of one pharmaceutical CEO’s 1976 vision of making pill-popping as natural as chewing gum, from dream to near-reality. The third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) in 1980 added 205 new categories, together with standardised tests for many, precipitating an avalanche of drugs – including, most famously Prozac – developed or repurposed to match these new markets. Research and marketing have become ever more closely entwined since.
Palantir: the ‘special ops’ tech giant that wields as much real-world power as Google
Antidepressant and anti-anxiety prescriptions now cost the NHS about £60m a year. Does everyone who takes them need them, or has the bar for diagnosis – due to whatever confluence of factors – been set too low? And the questions, as Peretti noted, go wider still: are the drugs enabling poverty? If you medicate people so they can cope with unendurable circumstances, are you saving lives or effectively suppressing a necessary revolution? Or both? Peretti circled these rabbit holes without disappearing down them.
Doctors themselves questioned the increasing popularity of ADHD diagnoses. In the US, one in seven children is being medicated for the disorder with drugs whose long-term effects cannot yet be known: 10,000 of them two- and three-year-olds. One doctor estimates just 10% of children brought to him for treatment – and this is by a self-selecting group of parents who know he offers alternatives to pills – are genuine cases. But they all have a label that, as Allen Frances (a psychiatrist on the DSM-III task force) says, will follow them for the rest of their days. “All diagnoses should be written in pencil,” he says. “We should underdiagnose and find out how nature takes its course.”
Entrepreneurs are now looking to cognitive enhancers to beat the natural inclination to slow down occasionally, and more consistently as we age, during the day. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/sep/28/billion-dollar-deals-the-pact-jacques-peretti-brilliant
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