A century ago, somewhere around 8–10 percent of all psychiatric admissions in the US were caused by bromism.
Bromide sedatives vanished from the US market by 1989
(Though you can still get it by drinking, as one poor guy did, two to four liters of cola daily [!], if that cola contains “brominated vegetable oil.” Fortunately, the FDA removed brominated vegetable oil from US food products in 2024.)
This country and toxic substances. We find out something is bad and it takes centuries to get rid of it. Given the current lot of people in charge, they’ll just undo all this because bromide isn’t woke.
, two to four liters of cola daily [!],
impressive
it doesn’t seem like a big deal to stop using it but it also sounds like it’s only a problem if you have a ton of it.
There’s the issue of relatively acute poisoning vs chronic poisoning.
Much smaller quantities can be dangerous if taken regularly over a long period. One liter a day over 60 years might be equally problematic.
i was tired when i was reading about it but they seemed to think the bromide takes about a week to clear in adults, which was enough to get the medical use stopped.
Society needs to hold these companies and their investors fully accountable for all the suffering caused by “AI”.
It won’t but it needs to
Lmao that’s one of the cardinal rules! What do you say when someone offer you sodium bromide? Na Bro!
paraphrasing: “in the end it was all his own fault because he was too poor or dumb to understand the information ChatGPT was providing him”
Should we do something about the societal and cultural conditions that cause this sort of thing to happen, and try to help people in similar circumstances?
“No, let’s just blame them and laugh at them for being ‘stupid’ and treat them like the modern carnival freak show.”
i know american education is terrible, but he didn’t even glance at the wikipedia article. i genuinely don’t understand how we can do anything about adults that are so credulous and empty-headed.
By discouraging that sort of behaviour as children, teaching people that learning things isn’t something that stops at high school, and not breeding a culture of rampant anti-intellectualism where people view learning something as a personal insult.
I have no desire to absolve our overall broken society. If cutting benefits to disabled people can be termed social murder, I think something like “social attempted suicide” describes this event. Where the person nearly killed themselves, but in a just and rational society, he never would have been in a position to internalize the stupid ideas that nearly led him to his own death. If every news outlet didn’t constantly talk about how amazingly intelligent AI chatbots are, maybe this guy wouldn’t have taken this ones comment at face value.
But at the same time, he did decide to change his diet based on a single unverified source. He decided to forgo any other research. He decided, despite all the knowledge available to him, to take actions that nearly resulted in his death. All he had to do was open a new tab and type " is it safe to eat Sodium Bromide". This isn’t a matter of poverty, forcing someone to eat a diet of processed foods that results in cancer. This wasn’t a man who was failed by our education system and dropped out of school in 8th grade, he had a college education.
And, ultimately, he lived.
I think that shame, mockery, pointing to the person who nearly killed themselves because they dunning-krugered themselves into eating poison for weeks, are important social tools that we should not give up so easily. Yes, there is a lot of blame that rests on society. But this isn’t colloidal silver, raw milk or anti vax, sodium bromide does not have millions of dollars of advertising behind it. This was one guy, who thought he knew better than everyone else, based on a trumped up Markov bots hallucinations. Society isn’t blameless, but especially because he survived, we SHOULD point and laugh and the dipshit boomer. If only to impress upon the next arrogant 60 year old that ChatGPT is not a doctor.
of course, but the current crop needs a decade of full-time remedial education and who knows how long undoing the indoctrination.
