Mt Sac ENGL 1A

“Of all the studies drug companies carry out, 40 percent are never released to the public, and lots more are only released selectively, with any negative findings left on the cutting room floor.”

This is the golden line because I think it is a really shocking statistic. The fact that 40% of research not published to the public just shows that drug companies care more about profits instead of the well being of their consumers. This suggests why Hari experienced negative side effects when he was taking the antidepressants because the drug company did not publish any results showing those side effects. This would also affect doctors when prescribing their patients because they would not know about the side effects and making them believe that the medication is all good for their patients.

Another reason is because of the thought that the side effects may put the consumers on other medications. Some of the drugs can cause side effects and may require other forms of medication. Hari also mentioned in his book that companies publish their research only if it is good for their own company or bad for their rival companies. The company would not publish results of research if it was bad for the product they were trying to sell which just makes no sense from a business perspective. If this case is true it would put the consumers in a cycle of drug consumption which will only increase the profits of the drug companies.

Pinker response

Pinker’s article was a very complicated one as there are lots of ideas in it. There are some ideas that Pinker supported but later condemned in the article. Usually when Pinker condemns the statement it is usually other peoples ideas. Pinker backed his ideas and condemned others by providing very detailed explanations based on past experiments and research. Pinker even managed to include graphs and charts in some of his explanations. Overall Pinker concluded that people are happier than before but not to the extent that they thought. I have to agree with his statement as Pinker managed to back his statement that the current generation are happier than ever as well as the way he condemned other people’s ideas with his explanations and evidence.

“But of mental illness, we’re a particularly long way from understanding the interplay among those factors.”

This line is very important to the overall argument because I think it really summarizes the overall content of the article that there is no conclusive evidence to what causes mental illness and it will take a long time before we can understand it. The article mentioned many experiments and their results, but there is still no definitive answers to the cause of mental illness.

According to the article the factors that causes mental illness are genetic, environmental, psychological and physiological factors. I think 4 different factors makes it very difficult to come up with a conclusion especially genetic. The genetic factors an experiment concluded that “Certain genes are turned on, or turned off, expressed or not expressed, depending on environmental inputs”. This would be impossible to get a conclusion as people would not know what genes are not expressed because they would not know that they had it in the first place.

Research Proposal

Research question

Does work affect a person’s mental health?

Motivation

Hari mentioned in ‘Lost Connections’ that only 13% of people find their job meaningful. Working is something that everyone has to do in their life it cannot be avoided. With depression and anxiety on the rise there must be some correlation with a person’s work and their mental health.

Genre

Blog post

Timeline

Research proposal due: 10/1

Part A due: 10/3

References

Website 1

“Furthermore, occupational burnout may exert a partial mediating effect on the relationship between work stress and depression level.”
Lin, T. C., Lin, H. S., Cheng, S. F., & Wu, L. M. (2016, February 23). Work stress, occupational burnout and depression levels: a clinical study of paediatric intensive care unit nurses in Taiwan. Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jocn.13119

In the book Hari talked about how a meaningless job can link to depression. However the experiment suggests that there is a correlation between burnout causing work anxiety and depression. It does not mention whether the job is meaningful or not.

Website 2

“Patients with work anxiety described their workplace significantly more negatively than patients without work anxiety and employees in the general population, with no differences in workplace descriptions between psychosomatic patients without work anxiety and the general population sample.”
Muschalla, Fay, & Linden. (2015, October 28). Self-reported workplace perception as indicators of work anxieties. Retrieved from https://academic.oup.com/occmed/article/66/2/168/2750613.

Employed patients in a psychosomatic rehabilitation hospital with common mental disorders participated in completing a survey. The results were that the amount of work anxiety would have a negative impact on how they describe their job while people without work anxiety and with the same job gave a more positive review of their job.

Website 3

“Evidence exists that high job demands, as well as low job control and social support, increase the risk of depression.”
JariHakanena. (2014, April 2). Relationship between burnout and depressive symptoms: A study using the person-centred approach. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213058614000060?via=ihub#sec0005.

This quote supports what Hari mentioned about depression. A higher job demand, higher amount of unsociable hours and low control over your work can increase the risk of depression.

Solutions

A problem with work burnouts is due to the company’s demands from the workers. A solution to this problem has to start with the company itself. This requires companies to set targets which are reasonable for employees to meet. Another solution to this is the way the company distributes a group project accordingly so that everyone has an equal role in the project instead of putting most of the burden on one person which could lead to job burnout.

Keywords

Meaningless jobs
Control
Work burnout
Company hierarchy
Depression
Contributions at work
Work anxiety
Responsibility at work
Job satisfaction
Work environment

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