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by carabiner·6y ago·view on hn ↗
The money quote:

> Study author Kristen Syme, a recent WSU Ph.D. graduate, compares treating anxiety, depression, or PTSD with antidepressants to medicating someone for a broken bone without setting the bone itself. She believes that these problems “look more like sociocultural phenomena, so the solution is not necessarily fixing a dysfunction in the person's brain but fixing dysfunctions in the social world."

This is EXACTLY what Kaczynski said:

> The concept of 'mental health' in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress ... Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.

3 comments
Kaczynski ends up positing a kind of return to the natural state as the ultimate solution (which he basis his actions on). The issue being that historically, these problems existed in earlier times even if not discussed in detail. Kaczynski blames "the state of the world" without ever listing some state where the problem didn't exist.

> “Research on depression, anxiety, and PTSD, should put greater emphasis on mitigating conflict and adversity and less on manipulating brain chemistry.”

Whereas Kaczynski blames society, the world at large, the paper sets these up as smaller addressable issues. You can identify "kid B needs extra recess" more readily than abolish schools as Kaczynski calls for.

He's a pretty agreeable guy if you ignore all the bombings.
Yeah and also what psychoanalysts have said for the last 100+ years. All Kaczynski offers is a normative stance.