Medicalization, Is it Too Much?

Medicalization has grown through the last few decades because of our huge advances in medicine. Medicalization is the process of behaviors and conditions that were once just personal problems, are now medical issues.

In a lot of cases this process is good, with mental illnesses like depression or schizophrenia. Some medicalization has become so common and second nature that we don’t even give it a second thought. Child birth is a major example of this, as a few decades ago, many women would have babies in their home with only family and a wet nurse. Now though, and for a while now, babies are predominately born in hospitals, where they can be given more appropriate care. This is very important to many families, especially for mothers that have to get C-sections because you can’t just go about that in a house.

However, there are some things that I feel have started to become over medicalized. A controversial example is child disorders like ADHD and ADD, which some people think kids are over diagnosed and over mediated for. When I was young, some doctors thought I should be diagnosed with ADHD, because I had a lot of energy, however, I didn’t struggle in school, it was honestly pretty easy, and being in sports helped with not being too energetic. If I had been diagnosed, things for me could have been very different, because the medication for ADHD often times makes kids not want to eat much and make them a bit scrawnier and shorter. This is where I feel that medicalization has gone to far because some kids that are diagnosed with these child disorders function completely fine without medication. If a kid can’t function at all, then yes they should have medication, but I feel that some doctors need to be more disciplined when diagnosing kids and checking for other factors before diagnosing them with a disorder.

So how do you feel about how medicalization has changed society?

One Business Rules All

We learned about leisure and media this week and in that chapter we learned of the corporations that are in charge of manufacturing and distributing the goods we use for our leisure time. We saw how conglomeration is how on businesses increases its power and influence through a variety of media. The two biggest companies out there are Comcast and Walt Disney Company. Both of these companies have significant power and influence over a wide variety of goods that are unrelated.

For example when the company GE (General Electric) bought out NBC, we saw how a company that focuses on electronics, mainly appliances decided to expanded its power by buying one of the biggest broadcasting networks in America. There was even a popular television show called “30 Rock” that was used to emphasize this merger and show how a company that didn’t specialize in networking screwed up a lot with NBC and the shows on it. The show also showed how whenever possible, GE would attempt to advertise their products in a show, like say a dishwasher in a kitchen scene in order to further their profits.

There are problems with this system of commercial power. Not only does this put billions of dollars of power in only a few companies, but this also makes it to where these few companies are the ones controlling what we buy and therefore heavily change people’s culture. This conglomeration I feel is something that can lead to cultural leveling because there are only a few companies controlling what we are exposed to and what we decide is popular and considered right.

So do you feel that conglomeration is good or bad? Or do you feel that power should be distributed to more companies?

 

The New Family

The traditional view of what a family is has been evolving over the last century, and there is now a whole new sense of what the term family entails. Many people see family as a married mom and dad with two kids, but even this concept of family wasn’t always the primary view. It was after the Industrial Revolution that we started to have this idea of family, the idea of the “nuclear family.” I feel that this had a lot to do with the movement of people during the industrial revolution. Young adults would leave their families and went to the city to find better opportunities. Children started to live away from their parents more, which is how I feel that the idea of extended family went to the nuclear family.

The nuclear family however is now starting to evolve as well. We see more unmarried couples having children, whether it be on accident or because people are becoming more independent and choosing not to marry. The Feminism movements have played a big part in this, women have gained more independence and power and it’s no longer their goal in life to just marry and have kids, they have professions and a lot of them work in very prestigious jobs. In the same trend as unmarried parents having kids, we have also seen a rise in single parent households. Normally this has the mom taking care of the kids on her own, maybe some child support money from the father if they are lucky, but that’s about it. We sometimes see single dads with kids, but this is much more rare, even though it is increasing in frequency. These are very difficult situations on the parent as well as the child, and its single parents that embodied the idea of the “second shift,” the best. They spend the day working while their children are at school and then come home a care for the kids at night. This is a very tough lifestyle, but there are a huge amount of single parent households on the rise in America.

A lot of these single parent households actual end up either marrying for the first time, or remarrying if they are divorced. This is a blended style family and it is also a very challenging family style for the parents but specifically for the children. This set up is especially challenging if both the adults have children. They have to all learn to start living together with people they aren’t blood related to and having really known for the majority of their lives. These families are especially difficult when there is a large age gap between kids. Having one kid in high school and another in elementary school is a lot for the kids to get accustomed to and a lot of times can actually drive families apart.

With new movements in the LGBTQ community, we also see more families that involve same sex parents. These families have a hard time because they are always accepted by other families and aren’t viewed as ‘real families.’ Sometimes these families consist of unmarried couples, but now with same sex marriages being legal, there will probably be an increase in these families being married couples. We have talked a lot about families with kids, but there is actually a large number of families that live “childfree” lifestyles. These people can be married, unmarried but in a long term relationship, or just single, but they just opt to not have kids because they don’t want to, and I think the Feminist movements have made these families more common because women don’t see themselves as having to have kids anymore and focus on their professional careers more than they did in the past.

The idea of family is evolving more now than ever into many different and diverse systems. Each system is a family but they all different significantly from the stereotypical mom, dad, and two kid model.

The School System

This week we read about the different types of education that students can receive, and honestly I was surprised about just how many different ways kids could get their education. I grew up in the public school system and honestly really enjoyed it and wouldn’t switch for a private school what so ever. I had friends that transferred from private schools and they actually didn’t seem as prepared as the rest of us when it came to taking more standardized test. I feel this has to do with the fact that a lot of private schools make up their own curriculum and don’t always have a set guide line to follow.

Back home in my city of St. Petersburg, almost every private school has or is shutting down. This could be for a multitude of reasons, but the underlying thing is that they don’t have enough students attending. Some of the schools have bad reputations, so aren’t preparing their students enough academically, and some are just too much money for parents to afford, and when money is tight, one of the first things to always go is the education.

The idea of school vouchers that we learned about in the book doesn’t make much sense to me. They give parents money to go to a private school if their neighborhood public school is failing. Instead, I really feel that they should send that money on trying to better that public school because not every kid in that school is going to be able to move to a private school. Maybe the school is too far and their parents don’t have access to transportation, or maybe the times of the school would conflict with work, or perhaps the private school is still too much money, even though vouchers pay roughly 75 to 90 percent of the private school tuition. If the government would just pay money instead to fix up the public school, bring in some new teachers, or a new principal, put teachers that aren’t preforming at the level they should be through more training to help bring up their grades then all around the public school would improve and more kids would be able to benefit from it.

I wish that I had been able to go to a neighborhood school, because I was always having to drive 20 t0 30 minutes to get to school or to see some of my friends that went there. I was in public school, but in a program called fundamental, which was basically just a school for kids to go to in order to not have to go to their neighborhood schools if they weren’t very good. Having to make this trip everyday or if I wanted to see friends on the other side of town honestly sucked. I wish I had had more friends in my actually neighborhood because it would have been easier to hang out with them and I would’ve been able to make more friendships since I wouldn’t have to go very far to see them. This is a huge reason that I feel the government should spend their money on trying to improve these neighborhood schools, because they are extremely important in shaping a kids life, in how they make friends, to how far they are able to go academically.

So how do you feel students should be getting an education?

 

 

 

The Fourth Estate

With the emergency of the internet, media has skyrocketed in its ability to inform citizens of the United States. The media has gotten so huge and trusted by the people that it has received the title of the “Fourth Estate” or the fourth branch of power. The founding fathers created the constitution with three branches of power, the legislative, executive, and judicial. They gave the people the first amendment for freedom of speech and press, but they never expected it to reach the level that it has today.

Being in a democratic nation is what allows the media to have so much power over the people. In other countries that are authoritarian (North Korea) or communist (China), we see heavy censorship of the media and internet. This prevents people from finding out what is actually happening throughout the world, and lets those in power make decisions without the people below them ever knowing. However having such freedom with the media can also lead to complications, like with fake news or simulacrum, such as the Daily Show, that bend the truth to a point that it’s no longer accurate but more for entertainment.

Having the media gain so much power over the people I feel isn’t all that bad, as long as we can differentiate between real and fake news. We learn more and more things that are happening in our country and the world, and we see the not so good things that people in power do. I find all of this to be very important to any country because it’s what forces those in power to make sure that they actually abide by the law and not make decision that the people of the country would go against. These things still happen however, no matter how much information the media can find, but I do believe without the media we would see more people abusing their power in our country then we do.

So what do you think, do you believe that the media having so much freedom and power over its viewers in a good or a bad thing?

 

 

 

When We Rise

This past week, the new show “When We Rise,” premiered and I thought that it was a show that really went along with our reading of gender and sexuality. The show is set roughly in the 70s maybe early 80s and is all about the lives of gays, lesbians, and women in general. The storyline centers around three main characters, a teenager just coming out that he’s gay, a younger woman who is lesbian but tries her best to hide it instead of accept it, and a well honored black navy sailor who is gay with another man on the ship he is stationed on.

The show mainly takes place in San Francisco, which before this time was the place of major gay marches and protest, but they were eventually put down. The teenage boy had just come out to his father, who was a psychologist and his reaction is what I imagine many people viewed gays at the time. His father diagnosed him with a mental disorder and wanted to try and do procedures on his own son to “fix” him. The boy left his whole family because of this and went off on his own to San Francisco. This show really does a good job emphasizing the life of people that came out as gay at this time. They were treated as outcast and had to live on the streets for some time because no one would accept them.

The lesbian woman has an interesting story. She is originally in a women organization that is trying to get woman more power since men still hold much of the power. However news gets out that one of the women in the group was lesbian and was expelled because of her sexuality from the organization. I find this part interesting because the women’s group is trying to get more rights and power for women and yet here they are turning against each other when the only way they can succeed is by sticking together.

The black sailor is basically transferred because the captain of the ship suspects that he is gay and he wants him away from the rest of his crew. He sends him to a port in San Francisco, which is interesting to me because apparently the navy would send many people they suspected as being gay there, and its like they see they as a virus and want to quarantine them to a region where they can’t infect anyone else.

There are parts of the show that show some protests that the lesbians of San Francisco try to do and it shows how police just attack them. They tear gas them and beat the women horribly without mercy until they can’t fit back and it’s just crazy to me because this is on TV and it seems bad which means when this was going on only about 30 or 40 years ago, it was so much worse and something that really was a horrible part of US history.

So how do you feel about how gay and lesbian people felt during this time period. How much do you think it has improved for them?

This Is Us

In the popular TV show “This Is Us,” one of the main characters is a black man named Randall. He didn’t have the upbringing that most blacks did in the 1970s and 80s. He was adopted into a white family that was supposed to have triplets but one of them didn’t make it.

Throughout the show we she how Randall as a child was continuously being discriminated against by his own brother Kevin. He was a part of the family, but always felt separate. He had to go to a different school, but not because he was black, but because he was so overly smart that he couldn’t stay at an ordinary school. We see as a kid how hard it was as a kid for him to make friends with kids that went to his school, or friends of his siblings because they were all white and so they treated him differently.

This show is interesting and you see the lives of the triplets when they were kids as well as when they are adults. So we see how Randall ends up in life. He ends up having an extremely well paying job and is obviously in the upper class, has a wife and two kids and of the three of the triplets he’s doing the best. While watching this show I think of how Randall’s life may have been completely different. The situation that he’s in really shows how race is more of a social construct instead of a biological make up, because of the fact that he grew up in a white household.

So throughout the show I think about how or if his life would’ve turned out differently if he had grown up in a black household. He probably wouldn’t have had the opportunities he did, he probably wouldn’t have been able to go to his gifted school, and very likely wouldn’t have been able to get the job that he has. There’s a chance he could’ve still been able to accomplish the end goal and get that well paying job and have nice family, but the odds are just much slimmer.

Do you feel that an upbringing like this could affect someone’s life this greatly in real life?

Spent

As I’m sure we all know, the game we played in class called “Spent” was quite a challenge to get through. We saw the difficulty that is associated with living a poor and struggling income. We were asked some really tough questions like “should we let our kid play sports?” or “should we put our dog down?” These are some tough social questions and most of the time you have to take the path that you don’t want to take because you just don’t have the money to make it through.

This is a rough estimate of what life is for the average person living in poverty. A lot of times we had to choice to forget about our child so that we could earn enough money to survive. We also had to ask our friends for a lot of help throughout the simulation. Now think about what if you were actually going through this in real life. How hard would it be to make these choices when you can actually see your child’s reaction, or the way your friends react when you ask for yet another favor.

Through this simulation I really got to see how when you live in poverty you have to sacrifice social and cultural capital, and the idea that you can move social class is really limited. We live in a society where we believe that people just have to work hard to make it out of poverty, but really no matter how hard you work, there’s a really small percent chance that you’ll be able to improve your social class.

The big thing that really affect this is something we don’t have control over. And that is luck. Luck plays the biggest part of people’s lives, especially those in poverty. Something with your car goes wrong, you have to fix it, or else you’ll be unable to work. It also usually takes luck to move you from one social class to another. You have to be lucky enough for nothing to go wrong, and lucky enough for someone to notice you and help you out. These odds are very small, but for a lot of people, the idea that one day they’ll live outside of poverty is the one thing that gets them through the day.

So how well would you do living a life like this?

 

 

How your friends shape you

The idea that we learn deviant behavior through our association with our peers is probably on of the most accurate things I’ve ever heard. The differential association theory by Sutherland claims that our peers are the ones that shape our deviant behavior.

I’ve seen this for sure first hand due to the fact that in high school I had different friend groups. One group was my nerdier group that I always enjoyed being around and the group consisted of people I’d know since middle school. The other group was my cross country and track team that I would hang out with from time to time and occasionally party with.

What I did with these two groups was completely different, just because of the type of people that I was hanging out with. I would even go as far as to say that myself was a bit of a different person depending on which friends I was hanging out with. With my nerdier group I would really just chill with them around the house or go walking downtown to find a place to eat. We’d play ping pong, video games, watch TV, and swim in one of our friends pools. To pretty much everyone this is really deviant at all, and is actually pretty normal.

With my team friend group however I was a bit different because my friends in this group were different. There would be times when we’d go along Madeira Beach and hot tub hop from hotel to hotel, or we’d go to a party, or actually trespass on certain city properties during practice because we were bored and wanted to see what was there. So by being with this group, my behavior had changed quite a lot. I didn’t just sit around and chill, I was out and about doing not horrible things, but more deviant things some would say with my team.

So do you have different friend groups where you notice that you behavior is different?

 

Deviance in Dress Code

It’s weird just how much some people, businesses, and schools emphasize a prime and proper dress code. Like for me, my high school was kind of weird in what the considered “appropriate dress code.” You could wear t-shirts, but could never show shoulders and had to have sleeves, had to always wear pants, and those pants had to be either jeans or soccer pants, no yoga or sweats allowed. The weirdest one for me however was the “no showing ankles” rule. You couldn’t show any ankle while walking up and down the halls which I still don’t get to this day. The consequences for breaking this dress codes was pretty severe actually. You couldn’t stay at school unless you had a change of clothes and you were always given a detention.

I also have had two jobs that I held for a decently long time. I was a cashier at Chick-fil-a and a lifeguard at a pool back home. The dress codes between the two was completely different. As a lifeguard we really didn’t have a “strict dress code.” We could wear any tank top, t-shirt or no shirt even, as long as the shirts had our aquatics department on it. We wore bathing shorts given to us by the city, a fanny pack for medical supplies, and sunglasses. A pretty lack dress code, and yet it was socially acceptable.

At Chick-fil-a however, dressing for the job was completely different. I had to wear a polo style shirt, with slacks and a belt, black work sneakers, and an apron. All this was pretty uncomfortable because Chick-fil-a wasn’t the best when it came to clothing. The biggest part was that if you worked in the front you had to have a clean shaven face, no facial hair at all. This part sucked the most. Shaving is already pretty annoying, but having to all the time because your job forces it was even worse. Just a little stubble was enough to actually get me sent home which one I was pretty made at, but two, at least to me was kind of overkill. Some people look good with some stubble. I get not having a full Santa beard, but a little bit of facial hair to me seemed alright, like I’m not even dealing with the food so hair in people’s wouldn’t have been an issue.

So, to me I find it amazing just how different social dress can be depending on the situation. It crazy how one form of dress would be considered deviant in one situation, but part of my work attire in another.

What do you think, have you been exposed to how different dress code is depending on what you’re doing?