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> The DSM is not medical science - it's a social control manual disguised as healthcare. It transforms human suffering into profitable disorders while ignoring

> The DSM is not medical science - it's a social control manual disguised as healthcare. It transforms human suffering into profitable disorders while ignoring the social conditions that create distress. It's time to abandon this harmful system and embrace approaches that actually help people heal. We'd need to abandon a lot of things... not just our economic system but also how we live, i.e. urbanization. Just like you can't just coop tens of thousands of chickens into a mega shed without having to deal with psychological (ever saw chicken peck each other half dead?) and physiological (bird flu!) issues, you can't coop millions of humans into megalopolises with no greenery and barely any space...

cafard 1y ago
What little I know of classic literature suggests that predominantly rural societies (and cities running to the low tens of thousands) were acquainted with mental disorders.
piva00 1y ago
In the past week it's the third time I've read a comment on HN with this rhetoric against urbanisation/denser cities. I'm really curious on what has triggered this, has that argument appeared in some widely viewed YouTube video? Is it spreading through some other ways in social media? It's rather bizarre to see this pattern emerge out of nowhere, three very different threads where someone comes ranting about urbanisation or dense cities.
- lurk2 1y ago
  This isn’t really a new sentiment on HN. It chiefly comes here via a loose network of right-wing influencers on Twitter who adopted the attitude from early 20th century ultranationalists, Ted Kacynzski’s Industrial Society and Its Future, and (perhaps most significantly) the work of John B. Calhoun [0], who studied the impacts of overpopulation in captive rats. This influence network was quite likely bought out by Peter Thiel in the last decade and skews young, educated, and male, so there is a lot of demographic overlap with Hacker News (you can watch links and discussion topics diffuse between the Twitter network and Hacker News to confirm this for yourself). You occasionally see urban skepticism coming from left-wingers (usually techno-skeptic climate doomers convinced the world ended yesterday), but in those spheres urbanism is generally viewed much more favorably. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    > You occasionally see urban skepticism coming from left-wingers (usually techno-skeptic climate doomers convinced the world ended yesterday), but in those spheres urbanism is generally viewed much more favorably. I'm one of these, but for another reason: hyper-dense urban areas are much more expensive to build (especially skyscrapers, they require massive amounts of concrete), and all sorts of other technology to work. In rural areas, you need streets and that's it (give them autonomous cars or their own electric cars to move around), in urban areas to cope with the masses you need trains (which are, again, expensive to build, just look at my home city of Munich). Additionally, we already have millions of units that stand empty in rural areas in Germany, so it doesn't make sense to build extremely expensive urban housing. And from the medical side of things, which is my original post's point, we have seen in the coronavirus pandemic just how much faster the virus swept through urban areas than it did in rural areas. Makes sense, given that viruses depend on high contact frequency and density. And with Japan and its hikikomori, caused partially by young Japanese having not much place of their own to live in, we see the extreme end of the psychological effects of too dense living.
    - piva00 1y ago
      > I'm one of these, but for another reason: hyper-dense urban areas are much more expensive to build (especially skyscrapers, they require massive amounts of concrete), and all sorts of other technology to work. In rural areas, you need streets and that's it (give them autonomous cars or their own electric cars to move around), in urban areas to cope with the masses you need trains (which are, again, expensive to build, just look at my home city of Munich). Additionally, we already have millions of units that stand empty in rural areas in Germany, so it doesn't make sense to build extremely expensive urban housing. It's much more expensive to build and maintain a vast network of roads, sewage, water, power lines across a huge area servicing fewer people. You don't need skyscrapers to build a denser city, you live in Germany so you are aware of that. Trains are expensive to build but the costs get spread out over a massive amount of people, it's economies of scale at play, which you do not get if you don't build dense enough places, you might have 10-50k people paying for each 500 metres of rail construction, the same for sewers, electricity, water, rubbish disposal, so on and so forth. That won't ever be possible if everyone lived in similar densities as rural areas, it's simply not economically possible for society to provide all the necessary modern infrastructure to people spread out.

cafard 1y ago

What little I know of classic literature suggests that predominantly rural societies (and cities running to the low tens of thousands) were acquainted with mental disorders.

piva00 1y ago

In the past week it's the third time I've read a comment on HN with this rhetoric against urbanisation/denser cities. I'm really curious on what has triggered this, has that argument appeared in some widely viewed YouTube video? Is it spreading through some other ways in social media? It's rather bizarre to see this pattern emerge out of nowhere, three very different threads where someone comes ranting about urbanisation or dense cities.

lurk2 1y ago
This isn’t really a new sentiment on HN. It chiefly comes here via a loose network of right-wing influencers on Twitter who adopted the attitude from early 20th century ultranationalists, Ted Kacynzski’s Industrial Society and Its Future, and (perhaps most significantly) the work of John B. Calhoun [0], who studied the impacts of overpopulation in captive rats. This influence network was quite likely bought out by Peter Thiel in the last decade and skews young, educated, and male, so there is a lot of demographic overlap with Hacker News (you can watch links and discussion topics diffuse between the Twitter network and Hacker News to confirm this for yourself). You occasionally see urban skepticism coming from left-wingers (usually techno-skeptic climate doomers convinced the world ended yesterday), but in those spheres urbanism is generally viewed much more favorably. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > You occasionally see urban skepticism coming from left-wingers (usually techno-skeptic climate doomers convinced the world ended yesterday), but in those spheres urbanism is generally viewed much more favorably. I'm one of these, but for another reason: hyper-dense urban areas are much more expensive to build (especially skyscrapers, they require massive amounts of concrete), and all sorts of other technology to work. In rural areas, you need streets and that's it (give them autonomous cars or their own electric cars to move around), in urban areas to cope with the masses you need trains (which are, again, expensive to build, just look at my home city of Munich). Additionally, we already have millions of units that stand empty in rural areas in Germany, so it doesn't make sense to build extremely expensive urban housing. And from the medical side of things, which is my original post's point, we have seen in the coronavirus pandemic just how much faster the virus swept through urban areas than it did in rural areas. Makes sense, given that viruses depend on high contact frequency and density. And with Japan and its hikikomori, caused partially by young Japanese having not much place of their own to live in, we see the extreme end of the psychological effects of too dense living.
  - piva00 1y ago
    > I'm one of these, but for another reason: hyper-dense urban areas are much more expensive to build (especially skyscrapers, they require massive amounts of concrete), and all sorts of other technology to work. In rural areas, you need streets and that's it (give them autonomous cars or their own electric cars to move around), in urban areas to cope with the masses you need trains (which are, again, expensive to build, just look at my home city of Munich). Additionally, we already have millions of units that stand empty in rural areas in Germany, so it doesn't make sense to build extremely expensive urban housing. It's much more expensive to build and maintain a vast network of roads, sewage, water, power lines across a huge area servicing fewer people. You don't need skyscrapers to build a denser city, you live in Germany so you are aware of that. Trains are expensive to build but the costs get spread out over a massive amount of people, it's economies of scale at play, which you do not get if you don't build dense enough places, you might have 10-50k people paying for each 500 metres of rail construction, the same for sewers, electricity, water, rubbish disposal, so on and so forth. That won't ever be possible if everyone lived in similar densities as rural areas, it's simply not economically possible for society to provide all the necessary modern infrastructure to people spread out.