Day of Silence

Today was the Day of Silence at school and, while I strongly believe in the cause and I tried to commit to the event as much as possible, I found myself surprised at the amount of people not participating at all and I ended up gaining a new perspective on what I personally think the day should be about.

I started out the day with the intention of remaining silent for its entirety, but I soon found this to be a redundant and pointless aspect of the Day of Silence. I completely respect those who were able to go through the whole day without talking, and maybe this is all just an excuse for my lack of the ability to shut up, but I found myself feeling very uncomfortable and confused during the time I spent in silence. Maybe this is the point of the day: to experience the uncomfort, confusion and anger that in-the-closet or openly GLBTQ students feel every day, but personally I felt that being open with my opinions would have made a much stronger impact on those around me.

When I walked through the halls at school wearing all black and refraining from speech, I still heard people making fun of those who were choosing to participate, yelling out things like "Day of Silence is so gay!" and the like, for the sake of irony. And there was nothing I could really do about it. People at my lunch table used the word 'fag' on purpose, just to see if they could provoke me to speak. Ultimately, I ended up giving up on remaining silent just because I felt like it was not only an unrealistic representation of the suffering GLBTQ students face, but it also put me at a disadvantage in defending the cause I was supposed to be taking pride in.

Like I said, maybe my frustration with my inability to speak is exactly what the day is supposed to be about- the frustration that students feel every day when they're forced into the socially-molded niches of straight boys and straight girls. At the same time, I don't think that silencing the students in school who want to speak out against abuse is the right way to go about making a change. If we want to encourage more students to end their silence, don't we want to encourage speech?

I understand the gesture of giving up one's own ability to speak to encourage another to exercise theirs, but it all just seemed too forced to me. While I will continue to support the Day of Silence and I'll continue to try every year to keep myself quiet for a day, (it hasn't worked in the last three...) I really wish that there was something more I could do- something more vocal and more active. Something that wouldn't be so difficult for the whole school to participate in, but would still ellicit a positive response. Something that would make GLBTQ students see the amount of support that they have from the New Trier community, without having to walk through the halls and hear the voices of hundreds of students on a day when supporters are supposed to remain silent.



P.S. I don't really know how this relates to anything that we've talked about in class... Umm, Perilous Times? Freedom of Speech y'all.

The Pathetic Beginning of a Mental Outline (JT#2)

...So this paper is due in roughly two weeks, right?

Having had the past three weeks in the library to research, luckily I'm feeling pretty confident in my topic. Since it's changed a little bit since the last post I made, I'll give the blogosphere a refresher on what I'm writing about.

Q. Why does America believe in the use of psychoactive drugs in molding a nation of more "productive" citizens?

A. The American "quick-fix" mentality has become our identity, and psychoactive drugs are the quickest and most widely available "fix" for lapses in mental health that we know of.

Maybe that's not worded too well... But hopefully it makes sense. I still don't really know what we're supposed to be using the blog for in the writing process, but I'm just going to use it to organize my thoughts. So here's my pathetic beginning of a mental outline; don't judge.

I've been focusing most of my research in the past couple of weeks on antidepressants, although I'm going to talk about ADD/ADHD stimulant drugs as well. The fact that I'm still in the midst of reading Prozac Nation is probably what's causing me to focus in on this part of my essay. I know we're supposed to be working with tons of different sources and materials and fitting them together, but I'm sure my essay will still come together just fine. Either way, I think I've done a pretty good job of getting together multiple contasting sources for each of my two current desired topics. Have a look!

ANTIDEPRESSANTS:

-Prozac Nation -Elizabeth Wurtzel

-Listening to Prozac -Peter D. Kramer

-"Exit Joe Camel. Enter Joe Prozac." -Arianna Huffington

ADD/ADHD STIMULANTS:

-"The Ritalin Epidemic" -Vincent H. Miller

-"The Evolution of Play" (NPR story)

So this post ended up being a lot more pointless than I thought it would be... I'll definitely make some human progress by the time I try to post anything else up here and call it a blog. Fourth quarter stressin', that's all. Goodnight!

American Ideals in Mental Health (JT#1)

So I think that I finally know what question I want to cover for my (ahhh!) Junior Theme. While it's taken me a long time and a lot of confusion, I think I've got it at last.

Why, as a nation, do we believe that prescription drugs can alleviate our mental health problems?

Of course, I haven't run this question by Doc O'C or Mr. Bolos, and I'll probably end up changing it six more times before coming to a final final conclusion, but I like it! And I definitely feel like it's based on a true American stigma. The "American Dream" defines not only American ideals for things like what social class you shoul belong to, what kind of car you should drive, when you should marry, how many children you should have, and what kind of occupations are considered "success," but it also defines another aspect of the ideal American's life: their mental health.

After beginning to read Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation, I find it clear that through Wurtzel's eyes, prescription antidepressants do much more to a person's life than just solve depression-related problems. In fact, they create just as many problems as they solve. With each drug she's placed on, Elizabeth seems to need another drug to counteract its negative side effects.

"I take two little green and white Prozac capsules when I leave his office, and dutifully resume taking a twice-daily dose of lithium, also downing twenty milligrams of Inderal each day- a beta-blocker normally used to lower blood pressure- because I need it to counteract the hand shaking and the other tremorous side effects of lithium. Taking drugs breeds more drugs" (19).

All of this, to me, begged the question why do we think that drugs will solve all of our problems? While I have no idea what the answer to this question is, I look forward to pursuing it in my Junior Theme. It's a problem that's really prevalent in America, and while I try really hard to take as few medicines as possible, it's easy to see the over-use around me. Especially when dealing with something as fragile as the human brain and its emotions, it's scary to think that over-prescription and over-use are so common.