I’ve always said that Eeyore should switch to Lithium. The Prozac obviously isn’t working.
So my favorite cookbook was probably ghost written?
This is kind of a problem with the fact that a short kids story got ballooned out into a media spanning franchise. So the secondary character in the book that showed that it was ok to be sad sometimes is now perpetually depressed.
It’s an important distinction that smart professionals realize that the public often fails to: a lot of mental illness diagnoses only happen when it’s causing you distress.
Like, you might get a cold this winter. Maybe you get a runny nose and a sore throat. You deal with it. It doesn’t ruin your life. Or maybe you have mild allergies. It’s something that makes spring a little unpleasant, but whatever, you get some Allegra and deal with it. You don’t go to a doctor and get a diagnoses and medicalize your sniffles or your irritation at being the unwilling participant in a floral bukkake event. You only look for help when it’s bad enough to make living your normal life a frickin’ struggle.
That’s the difference between have a bit of the sads every once in a while, and being truly, medically, depressed. Or the difference between being a little geeky and having full-blown Asperger’s. Or the difference between being bored at school and having ADHD. One doesn’t really cause you pain and suffering in life. The other does. Just because the mild version exists doesn’t mean the hard version is a lie, and just because the hard version exists doesn’t mean every sniffle is the Black Death.
Which isn’t to say that people are always smart about that distinction. Shit gets crazy overdiagnosed, because mental illness is scarier for the West, because we have this unstated assumption that everyone has the same mind – that your thinking is exactly like my thinking. That we have different bodies is obvious to anyone with eyes, but that we have different minds – different ways to understand the world – is bloody hard for a culture that respects individuality and choice so fucking intensely. So if someone thinks different, it’s scarier than if someone has a cough, it makes us question our own assumptions of equality (and homogeneity).
I mean, if that geeky kid isn’t SICK somehow, what does it say about me that he’s so good at computers and I’m not, right? If my child isn’t ILL, what does it say about her that she can’t get good grades like I did?
Over-medicalization of mental difference is a symptom of our fear of other peoples’ minds. Which, again, isn’t to say that this difference, when big enough, doesn’t cause some actual problems, just that we’re probably over-sensitive to the difference that is permissible, because WTF DO YOU MEAN YOU THINK DIFFERENT THAN ME WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!?!
Paddington Bear is really an allegory about illegal immigration policies. Peter Pan illustrates the dangers of arrested development in boys. Did Mr Banks pay all the appropriate payroll taxes when hiring Mary Poppins?
Where does the madness end?
That animated gif is worse than the blink tag.
Authorship is always going to be problematic with the Pooh corpus.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rsposse/pooh.htm
My god that formatting is awful. The web was designed to SCROLL.
I really really hope that some of the designers I work with don’t see that page. I will have to implement it by the end of the week if they do
I always thought Pooh Bear was simply a Taoist.
The tradition of using Pooh as a satirical tool is at least 50 years old.
The flinging of poo, of course, is an even older critical device.
There’s also John Finnemore’s sketch Pooh’s Interdivention.
A related issue I’ve noticed is that, during early school years, girls seem to have better coping skills and social skills than boys. As a result, vast numbers of boys get labeled with ADHD - or worse - when they’re really just being boys. It’s one good argument for sex-segregated education.
I’m pretty sure everybody I’ve ever known is nuts. I am. It’s part of the human condition, is it not? Tough to be self-aware in our current world and NOT be nuts, in some way. It’s all good.
Pooh doesn’t have an eating disorder. He’s trying to fatten up so he can hibernate without starving to death. Also, time for another Heritage Moment.
Say what you will, but Mary Poppins was at least as much about class politics as Downton Abbey. For example:
- Working-class women lined up around the block for a chance at a demanding full-time job that only had one day off every two weeks.
- Everyone treated Mrs. Banks’ Women’s Suffrage movement like a joke except for the downtrodden working-class chimney-sweeps, who sang and marched in solidarity.
- A crazed aristocrat shot a cannon at said working-class chimney-sweeps and faced no consequences whatsoever.
- A rich banker literally stole a child’s life savings to prevent it from going to support a destitute woman who supported herself by selling pigeon food.
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