- Joined
- Aug 10, 2016
As others already said, doctors can't do much beyond stabilizing someone if they're brought in while being basically unconscious and they tend to promptly check themselves out against medical advice the second they're able to drag themselves out the door. Forcing care on someone who emphatically doesn't want it and will fight it tooth and nail at every turn is not only horribly unethical but a giant waste of resources if everyone knows the person is either just playing ball until they convince everyone to leave them alone, or they are openly telling you to go fuck yourself the whole time. Honestly it was very surprising to me that she got 5150'd at all. If Eugenia sees a GP, which I seriously doubt because they'll obviously ride her ass and she doesn't want to hear it, they'd have to walk a fine line between helping with harm reduction without outright enabling her.
A good way to understand the medical perspective is to compare it to terminally hopeless drug addicts or alcoholics who are carried into the ER (sometimes more than once a day) unconscious due to overdoses or other issues that would otherwise be imminently fatal due to their substance abuse. What would be the point in 5150ing them into a rehab facility? You can't really do that, you just stabilize them, offer them a referral to addiction services that you know they won't take you up on, and either you discharge them or they just leave so they can resume drinking/shooting up. It's very sad but part of medical ethics is respecting the right of the individual to make their own choices and forcing someone to accept treatment against their will is taken extremely seriously, if they aren't basically end stage Alzheimers it is very difficult to justify.
I don't blame you for your cynicism, but the "medicine as customer service" is mostly unique to the US. Afaik it's only really America where doctors will avoid mentioning shit like an obvious weight problem (though usually fat fucks) because they need to keep their business and get in shit if they get bad Yelp reviews or whatever. Not that American doctors don't have ethics, but I'd think having their hands tied by the financial/customer service aspect leads them to lean more towards trying not to antagonize the patient with hard truths and just prescribe whatever for harm reduction since you know they won't change their lifestyle.
That's the vibe I get. It's creepy as fuck in any context that Eugenia's mother takes the scantily clad photographs for Eugenia's internet attention seeking hobby. The fact that she is clearly ill makes it weirder, like most mothers wouldn't do this in the first place I don't think, but especially not if the kid they're photographing is sick to the point of being disturbing to look at. Money would be the only understandable motivation, but they don't need that. The mother is fat and dumpy looking right? I'd guess she's living vicariously through her thin, pretty daughter and feeds into her anorexia because Eugenia's got looks, discipline around food intake and a degree of notoriety that she is extremely jealous of and Eugenia living it is the only way she can experience it. The more Eugenia relies on her, the more she can claim ownership of the traits she envies in Eugenia. An extreme degree of inappropriate reliance on their mother is a pretty common dynamic in severe eating disorders, but usually it's a more straightforward case of not wanting to grow up or become independent and being too physically frail for that anyway, sometimes with the mother's own self image issues and unhealthy sense of ownership over their offspring being mixed up in it too. Either way it's a fucked up dynamic and treatment would make breaking it a priority, Eugenia's mother would probably have therapy pushed on her harder than even Eugenia herself.
One thing I don't agree with people on is that trainwrecks like Eugenia should be deplatformed or even demonetized. It's my opinion that if you're willing to have them on your platform you should damn well allow them to profit from their own content, I seriously don't care if they're openly shooting meth into their eyeballs, if you're fine with hosting it, they should be able to profit from whatever potentially self defeating behavior they so choose. Handwringing about "muh bad influence" is gay in general, I'm a strong believer in personal autonomy and anti-censorship, I personally think people have the right to indulge their curiosity about morbid or uncomfortable things if they want and there's no benefit in coddling people by sanitizing everything. It's not society's job to censor or trigger warning everything for the sake of grown ass adults who can easily choose not to view certain content. In the case of minors, I can understand age restrictions but teaching kids not to emulate bad influences or even be exposed to them is the job of parents to get off their ass and either monitor their kids' access to the weird parts of the internet or evaluating if they have the mental maturity not to be badly affected or influenced by it.
I think I said it before in this thread but basically, fucked up people who want to make money from displaying their trainwreck lives to the morbidly curious should be absolutely allowed to do so. The owners of olde tyme freak shows at least split profits with the freaks, as it should be. Denying them this with some bullshit justification of "not encouraging their bad behavior" is just infantilizing, meddling do-gooder nonsense and in no way ethical, at least in my opinion.
(Apologies for the long ass ramble, I'm passionate about the subject and indulge myself in spergy text walls sometimes.)
