The Link Between Trauma, Drug Use, and Our Search to Feel Better

This article makes a lot of assumptions or claims with nothing to back them up, mostly the parts about a system built to traumatize, Charlottesville as an example, etc. It seems to be entirely lacking any context of what life was like in preindustrial times vs modern times. Death was way more common back then, including losing your children. Let's not forget the impacts of religions and superstitions as societal frameworks and how those tended to handle anything different. Even punishments like stoning, flogging, or crucifixion were much more brutal.

One of the main premises of this article is that society today is more traumatic than in the past, which I find to be laughably incorrect. They took what could have been a good article simply exploring modern drug use and ruined it with all these tangential and unfounded claims.

As a piece of generic advice, I suggest turning one's search to feel better into a search for feelbetter. Notice that how we feel is not stable, but changes constantly from moment to moment. Notice that moments of feelbetter and moments of feelworse basically even out over the longterm. Notice that feelings are causal, that everything is a consequence of something prior according to consistent and comprehensible rules. Notice this on anjimmediate moment-to-moment here-and-now emperical basis.

Notice that attributing feelings here and now to decade old stories and narratives is spooky action at a distance.

physical exercise results in 2000 myokines active throughout the body which have many actions, including anti-anxiety, and better sleep. But the pharma industry can't put it in a pill form. So it's not advertised like the pills are.

It remains one of the minor curiosities of digital modernity that every recipe blog insists on beginning with a 5,000 word ethnography of the Hugo Spritz, SEO-optimized invocations of Tuscan terraces, grandmotherly hand-gestures, and the precise terracotta shade of sunset, only to resolve in instructions amounting to little more than "insert beverage into rectum."

Meanwhile, I occupy a less celebrated corner of culinary praxis: crouched in the dirt, literally on my hands and knees, begging the search bar to reveal how many meprobamate tablets one is meant to dissolve into a lukewarm gin glass to properly constitute a Miltini.

There are no Medium posts, no Substack manifestos, no "Ultimate Guide to Recreational Tranquilizer Mixology (2024 Edition)." The epistemic silence is total. The Hugo Spritz has a cathedral; the Miltini does not even have a footnote.

And so we encounter, yet again, the asymmetry of knowledge production: the internet, glutted with spritz-bloggers optimizing for engagement, yet barren when it comes to cataloguing the rituals of genuine desperation. Borges, in his Library of Babel, anticipated this imbalance: an infinity of recipes for lining the pockets of the prosecco-producing class, but not a single one for escape.

I advise a lot of caution when reading articles like this. This is more of an opinion piece or stream of consciousness writing style, even though it’s presented as if it was well researched authoritative material.

The article starts with buzzword bingo for topics that appeal to a certain group: Trauma, drugs, capitalism is to blame for our pain, and so on.

The sections describing the drugs will make anyone familiar with basic pharmacology groan. Meprobomate isn’t a drug with unknown action like he claims. It’s a GABA-A agonist with adenosine reuptake inhibition activity. When we say it isn’t fully understood we mean there’s more to it, but that’s the case for literally every drug. This person has misunderstood that as if don’t know how it works at all.

The sections about GABA are also full of similar mistakes. Benzos don’t “flood your brain with GABA”. They bind to part of the receptor that modulates its activity. We switched to them because they are much better in overdose relative to older drugs.

The author’s drug use is also in an unfortunate pattern. Modern prescribing practices only suggest benzos for short term situational use. They are not a primary treatment for chronic anxiety and they do not address psychological issues. SSRIs, buspirone, and therapy techniques are indicated for long term treatment, not benzos. Benzos are also not good for sleep quality even though a high dose can help someone get to sleep. The number of issues with the treatment described in this article is large, and I feel sorry for anyone who gets misled into thinking this is normal psychiatric practice. These days most doctors are hesitant to prescribe benzos at all because many patients want them and can start abandoning the better long-term treatments while they seek more benzos (a strategy that doesn’t work, as this author sadly discovered).

There is also an undertone of “America bad” in the article (not surprising for an article that opens by blaming capitalism for all of our suffering) but many would be surprised to learn that benzos are currently far easier to acquire in many other countries. France has some eye-popping numbers of benzo prescriptions across the population right now, whereas you’re going to have a hard time walking into an American doctor’s office and getting a benzo prescription (there are exceptions, of course).

Re ending - while it probably alludes to the fact that we need community to feel better - expecting another person to be able to help you with your emotional state (or expecting from yourself that you might be able to fix someone's emotional state) is a slippery slope.

One might argue that if someone is appreciated on the basis of whether that person makes one feel good in the moment - they are being treated no different than a drug (alcohol, etc). Some argue that such unhealthy dependencies on soothing agents (drugs or people) stems from lack of self soothing skills. Apparently, most "happy healthy people" (there are ofc caveats with this definition but for arguments sake let's assume that we share some understanding of what that means) have an intuitive understanding of how to take care of themselves both physically and emotionally in ways that return them to a baseline state of sorts. If you lack such skills, you often resort to less healthy coping strategies to draw yourself towards this baseline state.

Funny quote from sir Terry Pratchett: Death: "THERE ARE BETTER THINGS IN THE WORLD THAN ALCOHOL, ALBERT." Albert: "Oh, yes, sir. But alcohol sort of compensates for not getting them."

I recently read the paper "Opioid Crisis: No Easy Fix to Its Social and Economic Determinants" which argues that the opioid epidemic isn't as supply driven as we tend to think and that places with weaker social ties and economies recently changed for the worse tend to see more overdoses.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5846593/

"As capitalism has invented ever more ways to be miserable, so too has it invented ever more specific ways to ease that misery."

What? Is the author saying that misery didn't exist in socialism or communism?

If this is a guy and he says things like a platonic snuggling with a lesbian made him feel good, then it’s an automatic disqualification. I can’t look up to this person. Being staunchly leftist, as a man, I hate this and the exact opposite of what I want a man to represent. You can ask any follow up questions you want but the baseline assumption is someone that acts like this is an automatic, baseline, fundamental opposite of a role model.

We desperately need a centrist party that is contemporarily “sexist” to pull men back from the brink. Honestly, thought most feminists are going to recoil from this paradigm, this is way better than the alternative where we essentially lose the men (of all races) to the far right void.

This matches my personal experience that people who feel some kind of emptiness inside are more likely to develop problems with drugs/alcohol.

A trick I learned a few years ago that has made writing like this and the entire web much more useful to me is this: Instead of asking myself "is this piece overall correct?", I ask myself "what can I take away from this piece that is useful to me?" Instead of striving to come to some sort of overall conclusion about a written work, I just treat it as a potential source of nuggets that I can choose to keep and use.

Do I agree with the overall premise that capitalism is an unbridled source of trauma and that a pre-capitalistic world was better? No, that's obviously silly leftist absolutism. Yes, being forced to work in a coal mine is traumatic. But watching your kid die of starvation because you don't have fertilizer is too. So what? No one cares what conclusion I come to about the author's worldview.

What I think this article does a good job of is pointing out that our modern physical and cultural environment, which is largely a product of capitalism, is structured in a way that creates new traumas that we aren't well-equipped to deal with.

I think of widespread psychological drug use as a social warning light, flashing to tell us that we aren't living right in some way. That doesn't mean we should throw out the entire capitalist baby with the bathwater. But if you don't think something is seriously off about the world today, maybe this article that help open your eyes to that.

The frame on capitalism is classic Kool-Aid. The broader truth is that industrial modernity, regardless of system, generates trauma, and people reach for substances to cope. Others blame capitalism. Alcohol is endemic in communist societies for a reason. (China does not have alcoholics, don't ya know.)

Under socialism or communism, you still had/have factories, railways, 996 culture and regimented time. Trauma from pace of change, regimentation, and accidents still exists. Under socialism or communism, instead of gig work being bad, gig work is good. Patriotic even.

Under socialism or communism, profit is not the motive. It is chemical pacification of undesirable elements.

Under socialism or communism, instead of each generation of pills being marketed as desirable, they would be part of mandatory education as desirable or just given through Directly Observed Therapy.

On and on we can go. There is a direct translation of every point in this author's make-believe reality of capitalism. Also, a very weird, Hollywood picture of the 20th century.

So capitalism bad bad ptsd and communism good? What's the point of mentioning economic regimes every two sentences as if it makes a lick of difference in how much suffering people can inflict on each other and what people use to cope with that? What is the revelation that I am missing here?