Meds Drive Autistic Boy Over the Edge into Insanity

Post Reply New Topic

When someone diagnosed with Autism starts deteriorating mentally after ingestion of toxic medications to the point where they are catatonic, do not bathe and are on the brink of suicide, where that behavior was NOT in existance BEFORE admistration of the pharmaceuticals, one does need to be a rocket scientist to put 2 and 2 together and understand that the culprit is the medication. How many catatonic ASPIES do you know?

For a different perspective on raw-foodism:

Idealism Vs. Realism: A comparison

That article goes through, at length, the idealistic claims made by some proponents of raw-foodism (such as that it will cure all known diseases, that nature is always pure and benevolent, etc.), and then the actual realities present in the world (that for some people it might be very healthy, but it won't cure everything, that very few animals in "nature" die of old age, etc). It's from a perspective that accepts some potential benefits from raw-foodism without being dogmatic about it.

Functional and Dysfunctional Lunch Attitudes

That article goes into depth about a number of attitudes towards food (calling them "lunch attitudes").

"Lunch-mindfulness" is the functional attitude mentioned. It means being aware of what you eat, and trying to eat healthily, but not going overboard. Then it goes into a number of dysfunctional lunch attitudes. Lunch-righteousness is the first one mentioned. This means becoming self-righteous about food, putting others down and alienating them, and feeling superior to those who eat a different kind of food. Then there is lunch-identification, where a person's diet becomes so integrated into their sense of self that they are offended by criticism of their diet. As an example, it mentions people lashing out at other people who challenge their idea of The Perfect Natural Diet. It suggests, for that one, the affirmation, "I am more than just my lunch; others are free to choose a different lunch." Lunch-obsession is the thing that can lead to the other dysfunctional attitudes, by thinking excessively about the details of the exact purity of their diet.

The article says that everyone is some combination of function and dysfunctional in these areas, but it's important to try to move more towards functional. It also notes that a lot of people are initially more dysfunctional than functional, because they have just started the diets, they feel better (possibly because of the effect of nutritional deprivation that leads to a feeling of alertness that is supposed to help a person go out and find food, but that is turned into a perception of a "health benefit" instead), and they want to tell everyone about it. Later, as things either go back to normal or to even worse than normal, people become less dogmatic.

The Seduction of Simplistic Raw Vegan Dogma

While this is about raw vegan dogma, a lot of it can be said about raw-food dogma in general too. It discusses what the common dogma is, such as that a raw-food diet is the most "natural" diet in the world, that cooked food is toxic, that a raw-food diet will cure all diseases and lead to perfect health or spiritual perfection, or even that if everyone ate raw food it would lead to world peace. It says that these are basically the "party line", and that when these things are challenged, it can lead to personal attacks. The reason for the article is to make raw foodists (who are not necessarily dogmatic) more aware of how to avoid dogma, and to educate non-raw-foodists about raw foodism's dogma and reality. It even goes into the reasons that people subscribe to the dogma (idealism, gullibility, false sense of security, uniqueness in social settings, a sense of moral superiority over others, etc.)

And those are just some of the articles on the site. There are a lot more, they are not nonsense, and repeating slogans such as "You are what you eat" (does that make raw foodists actually raw vegetables?) and "Garbage in garbage out" (which implies that non-raw food is "garbage" even if people have a good reason for eating it), doesn't change this. These are concerns brought up from within the raw food community about how people can become very caught up and ensnared in a simplistic and idealistic version of diets like this that doesn't match the reality of people who really use these diets long-term.