Isn’t it interesting how two topics, manufacturing mental illness and nuclear proliferation, can be categorized under the same label as socio-cultural propaganda? Each instills fear. However, is it moral for both of them to advertise such personal, sensitive issues such as mental illness being a social construct, or is it correct to racialize a disease, without statistical evidence, now in the 21st century? People create society; society creates mental illness. Society also manipulates people’s minds because public propaganda is created by the people, for the people.

There are many positive resolutions. For example, pharmaceuticals have gained people’s trust, especially those that are most popular. Adderall and Vyvanse is used to treat the medicalized mental illness of ADHD , OCD, and even to treat “moderate to severe binge eating disorder.”2 On the other hand, why was it that “Schizophrenia [becoming] a radicalized disease in the 1960’s in ways that preferentially selected black male bodies?”1 It’s almost as if the drug companies are telling people one must take this drug to get rid of a certain disorder, yet there are many side effects one would need to attend to. However, radicalizing a legitimate chemical imbalance within the human brain, such as schizophrenia, is hard to manage, but that does not give others a right to shame one race for having a neurodegenerative disease when other races also suffer from the same illness. It is shocking to realize that treatments to such disorders, OCD or schizophrenia, changed only with the social constructs and within the social confines of what is deemed to be appropriate.

The main purpose of propaganda is to influence mass audiences to do or believe in an ideal material within a context of compelling ideas. Why would one listen to a psyche or a doctor when there is a nationally accepted manual? When handling medical records and files, the DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, offers generalized criteria through the observation of what is considered a mental disorder. The modified DSM-II "eliminated the word reaction from disease descriptors." Yet the new information "encourages doctors to disarticulate symptoms from the axis of essence, and to begin to think of mental disorders as distinct groups of illnesses rather than as individual extensions of normal personality."3 Obviously the DSM has its faults and can easily be spotted as a loophole for those who are currently trying to get a prescription; hence, the DSM is always updated, but only under the social conditions in which its writers find acceptable. "In years following its publication, [the DSM-II], maligned, critiqued, and ultimately revised due to its inclusion of homosexuality as a mental disorder."4

Imagine society as Big Brother and having a tight grip on the what society considers the medical care. What is society? Social structures are put in place to guide people, limiting open mindedness. Indulge in the thought that people create the social structures that just act back onto us. Maybe that is being innovative in creating new medications to cure another ‘mental disorder’. Maybe it is the basic fundamental fact that we all have our subjective internal and external struggles, and that our social surroundings ads to the discourse because of the stress we put onto ourselves of finding something to be acceptable. Davis agrees with the idea “that to diagnose a person with a psychiatric disorder using available categories might be against health.” Is it because psychiatry is made more and more uncomfortable, hard to schedule and even pay for? The actual question of psychiatry is whether or not it has been beneficial to those around us?: “Health is this a social construct that regularizes certain potentialities for the human body through an increasingly perverse process of naturalization and amnesia.”⁵ People feel the need to validate every single issue, that is probably the reason why we are so distracted from what is actually appropriate for the human body.

The words created to describe the events during the “atomic age” were heavily driven to scare the people of the United States. “Instant mass death, individualized cellular nutrition, and radiation-induced disease have become normalized threats in our world, producing a new concept of healthy life as well as a new relationship between citizens and the state mediated by catastrophic risk.”5 It’s not an ideal situation where one “no longer has a sovereign right that is in excess of bio power, but a biopower that is in excess of sovereign right.”6

Hasn’t America always been a country that has perused the goal of making everyone happy, no matter who steps foot on American soil. Is it that the United States cares too much for their citizens and prides itself on the innovation that we have? “It’s important to remember that the roughly ten thousand nuclear weapons that the United States maintains in its current arsenal are capable of holding the entire planet hostage.”7 Why must the United States feel the need to spend 5.8 trillion dollars on nuclear weapons when there are so many more important environmental, socioeconomically, and psychological issues that are of greater importance in maintaining human sanity. However, because there is no prioritization of what race is more ‘superior’ and now everyone must submit to medical testing’s only to have to come back to verify with the latest edition of the DMS. Our world has an interesting perspective on how things should work, as individuals in a state, or collectively as a whole, and we can all give a big thank you to society for that.

2 www.vyvanse.com

1 Metzl, A Racialized Disease, Chapter 13, pg. 95

3 Metzl, A Racialized Disease, Chapter 13, pg. 96

4 Metzl, A Racialized Disease, Chapter 13, pg. 97

5 Masco, Joseph., Atomic Health, or How the Bomb Altered American Notions of Death, pg. 133

6 Masco, Joseph., Atomic Health, or How the Bomb Altered American Notions of Death, pg. 141

7 Masco, Joseph., Atomic Health, or How the Bomb Altered American Notions of Death, pg. 140