Comment on Open Thread, October 16-31, 2012

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 02:00:40 GMT

Castration works very well to reduce violent behavior based on the research I read. I didn't spend months researching this, but I went through a lot of information, and reducing testosterone was the most effective thing they had tried.

which vaguely suggests that giving T blockers to most men could make them miserable

Or could help them in the event that their testosterone is ten times the level of non-violent inmates, which was the case in one of the studies I read. It was so effective that I wonder why they're not using it. One bottleneck that has been proposed is that people perceive testosterone reduction as unhealthy or as a thing that would depersonalize a man by reducing his manliness. In light of this, it's interesting that you reacted to my comments about high testosterone and chemical imbalance with the idea that giving testosterone blockers to most men would make them miserable. That's irrelevant because most men don't need them. Only the ones who have such unusually high testosterone that it significantly raises the risk of criminal violence, or for some other health reason qualifies as excessive / qualifies as a chemical imbalance should be prescribed testosterone blockers.

Now I'm wondering if the reason people don't use testosterone blockers might be because people are, for some reason, afraid that it would be prescribed to most men.

I wish I had known there was a place where people appreciated this type of nerdy-yet-un-credentialed dip into subjects. I'd have made a site similar to Gwern's. Alas, my research findings are not written up and my citations are scattered throughout things like bookmark backups from old OS installs.

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