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xssve -> RE: Link between bdsm and chronic fatigue/fibromylagiA/ms (9/20/2011 3:44:56 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: ProlificNeeds
Seem to be confusing a symptom with a cause here, as far as I am aware neither MS nor Fibromyalgia are caused by lack of energy, the persisting pain and inflamations caused by these conditions cause fatigue as a result. Chronic fatigue is just that... fatigue that persists, and in most cases is again a symptom of something else wrong in the body.
Unless you can cite an article that actually denotes the cause of these diseases as a 'lack of energy' scientifically I'd call it a bunch of mumbo jumbo. There is nothing mystically powerful about BDSM that isn't reproducable in other sports or activities, so by that token, there is nothing that can be linked to BDSM alone that can't also be linked to other similar activities.
Sounds like new age garbage to me, especially when the article referes to your first heavy endorphine and adrenaline rush as a spiritual awakening.
If this sort of religion, (that is what it is, for it is a system of belief in the insubstantial, not a scientific system) is something that helps someone, I'm all for it, but I can't pass off a religion as a factual medical source.
I disagree, BDSM has the potential for psychological stress that are far more profound than encountered in sports or any other similar activity, and people deal with stress in different ways, the experiences described in the article are descriptive of an adaptive processes: the process of adapting to a set of stressors you haven't been trained from birth to adapt to - for a lot people BDSM is just that: however fulfilling, it is a whole new set of stressors, both physiological and psychological, that they are neither physically or psychologically fully prepared to deal with - changes may even occur on the cellular level, in the RNA, that facilitate adaptation to a new state, and an unfamiliar set of stressors.
Same thing happens physically in sports, but the psychological adaptations required, while present, are nowhere nearly as intense or extensive - military boot camp is probably the closest analog to BDSM, and trust me people do go off their rockers (in my sister company, one annoying recruit was tied down to his bunk in his sleep with dental floss - when he awoke and discovered he couldn't move, but couldn't see the dental floss in the dark, he lost it, had to be carted off in and ambulance, section 8).
In any case, chronic fatigue is consistent with depression, which can accompany a sudden change in lifestyle, going from the familiar to the unfamiliar, where one doesn't know the rules, or ones place in it, or loss of status, which I suspect might afflict male subs more than female subs, but the fact is that married women have among the highest rates of depression; marriage being, a lot like BDSM, a whole different and very demanding reality that romanticism is really a very piss poor preparation for, it often involves a complete reassignment of identity, everything you thought you were, or would ever be - Andrea Yates was a Quiverful Baptist, her husband reportedly a demanding perfectionist control freak.
So there is some degree of psychological risk going through these things, even vanilla marriage, without a drill instructor, internal or external, to keep you going and head off any potentially debilitating funk while they are relentless breaking your personality down to it's most fundamental form - those guys are actually usually very good at spotting that and not driving people completely off the deep end: it would be considered poor leadership skills to drive your entire company to the brink of insanity or depression, but it has happened.
The guy who wrote the article is playing the role of drill instructor, and I find nothing particularly egregious about his observations, mystical states are often deliberately induced though mental and physical stress - Forty days in the desert and Jesus was arguing with the devil. I musta missed the bit about MS and Fibro, but psychosomatic illness is commonly associated with stress.
Anyway, BDSM is more like marriage: some people take to it like a fish to water, for others, there is a learning curve and a lot of adjustments - stress, flat out, does things to you, there are literally physical changes in the body, social stressors alone are implicated in leaning disabilities, negative effects on physical health, and can even be lethal - take the recent facebook suicides, for example - "social death", leading to people just flat dropping dead from the stress, has been an established phenomena in Anthropology for decades.
Part of the reason the question of where the line between rough play and outright abuse is due to the simple fact that physical play, even hard physical play can leave you with little more than a few bruises and a satisfying afterglow, look forward to more,or even complain it wasn't enough - whereas with psychological abuse, you can drive a person into a suicidal depression, or flat kill them - without laying so much as a finger on them.
That's the extreme, but that is where the far end of your curve is located.
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