In March 2022, a new grief-related disorder was officially adopted into mainstream mental health diagnosis nomenclature. Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) is a recent addition to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual fifth edition text revision (DSM-5-TR). A PGD diagnosis is to be used when a person is grieving too long and too intensely.

In this interview, Kaori Wada, Psychologist, grief researcher, and Associate Professor and Director of Training at the University of Calgary, builds upon her recent paper on the Medicalization of Grief in conversation with MIA Science News Writer and Psychologist Zenobia Morrill. Wada articulates a history of institutional tensions and financial conflicts behind the creation of this new PGD diagnosis. She also discusses the ways PGD could shape how we collectively understand and respond to those grieving.

Wada’s work demonstrates that the creation of PGD was not based on scientific findings but appears to be entangled in long-standing arguments between camps of mental health professionals with different stakes in whether the diagnosis became legitimized. Further, PGD, as with other diagnoses, represents elements of mainstream psychological theory that tend to render deviations from Western cultural norms as “unhealthy.” Is diagnosis needed to provide support and care? If so, those most likely to experience marginalization, violence, and unjust loss are also most likely to be classified as having PGD, a mental illness.

At a time when the world is fraught with tragic loss—owing to causes ranging from political failures, state violence, and the COVID-19 pandemic—grieving has been transformed into a mental health disorder. But the complicated question of what a mental disorder is continues to be glossed over. The opportunity for psychiatric professionals to embrace humility seems to have reverted to the familiar “diagnose-and-treat” response. Will pharmacological intervention become the dominant “treat” response to a diagnosis of PGD?

A new grief disorder is a clear departure, however, from the way grief used to be described in the field as an example of something that is clearly not a mental health disorder, Wada shared. She exclaims: “To me, the medicalization of grief is controversial because it may fundamentally shake up the concept of a mental disorder, [how it has] been defined and understood.”

Wada and Morrill explore what this new PGD diagnosis may mean, reflecting on the ways the “diagnose-and-treat” logic seems to medicalize experiences formerly considered part of the experience of being human. The need to pathologize experiences in order to address them represents a paradox. A new ethical and moral quandary befalls professionals tasked with determining when grief is an illness and when expressions of grief are inappropriate.

Will the public embrace this new disorder? Will the medicalization of grief be resisted? Will a pandemic of PGD diagnoses follow a global pandemic? Wada speaks to the personal and professional influences that shaped these curiosities and her approach to researching how grief is being construed in the mental health field.

The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the audio of the interview here.

Zenobia Morrill: Your work drew my attention to the major and recent developments and changes in how grief is being defined in the mental health field. Could you tell us what led you to research the ways grief is being construed? Have you always been interested in this topic?

Kaori Wada: Thank you. I’m from Japan, and my interest in grief dates back to growing up in Japan and experiencing multiple losses. After high school, I came to Canada as an international student, and I got involved in grief support groups and grief camps for children, and around that time, I started to study psychology. In my psychology courses, what I was learning, some of the concepts that I was learning—things like self-esteem just didn’t quite fit well with me. And that was the same for grief as well. In Western models of the theory of grief, there’s this image that grief is a linear process, so people go through stages, perform certain tasks to complete, and eventually get over it and move on with their life.

I don’t want to paint a simplistic picture of western theories and models because each of them has some important nuances. But in general, I think those models reinforce this idea of grief as a very linear process, whether or not that is intended, right? Also, there’s this notion that continuing bonds—or internal conversation or relationships with the dead—is something that’s not healthy. As someone who grew up in Japan, I felt some dissonance with that way of thinking about death and grief. And that led me to write a term paper, in one of my graduate courses, on understanding grief from a Buddhist psychology perspective, and that was eventually published.

Around that time, I think, I heard that the DSM Task Force was considering adding a new diagnostic category related to grief into its fifth edition. I got really curious about how this diagnosis will come to be given that the predominant way of thinking about grief in English, in the literature, was very much based on this Western worldview. The knowledge generated by psychology and psychiatry, including the DSM, is very powerful in how it impacts people around the world. I became very curious about how this new disorder category could change how we grieve or relate to others who are grieving.

 

Morrill: Yeah, you had noticed that the available Western narratives or psychological theories about grief were skewed and didn’t fit your lived experience of grieving or the observations around you. But more than that, I’m hearing how it rendered any deviations from those theories—you mentioned experiencing continuing bonds with the deceased—as something that was unhealthy.

Wada: That’s right, yes.

 

Morrill: Could you say a bit more about what you mean when you say grief is being medicalized? What would be some of the recent developments or examples of medicalizing grief that we should be aware of?

Wada: Yes. The sociologist Peter Conrad has been writing about medicalization since the 1970s. But to me, his book Medicalization of Society has a nice subtitle that captures what medicalization is: “On the Transformation of Human Conditions Into Treatable Disorders.” Medicalization refers to the process where a human condition that was previously understood outside of medical language gets transformed into a treatable disorder. It’s important to say that it doesn’t mean that something is illegitimately medicalized or over-medicalized. It’s just that an experience or phenomenon has come to be subjected to this “diagnose and treat” logic.

My position here is that grief is one of those human conditions that have recently been medicalized, and that is most evident in the creation of a diagnostic category, now called Prolonged Grief Disorder, which officially got listed in the ICD-11, which is the International Classification of Diseases, and now the DSM-5 Text Revision that’s recently published.

Prolonged Grief Disorder basically what it does is it officializes that if you’re grieving too long or too intensely, then you have a mental disorder. In the DSM-5 Text Revision language, it says “abnormally excessive in duration and/or intensity.” This abnormally excessive duration in the DSM is currently defined as 12 months, and in the ICD, it’s six months.

 

Morrill: I like the way you explained that; a “diagnose and treat” logic. So medicalization, in this discussion, would be taking grieving, which is universally experienced in some way or another and then transforming it into a medical phenomenon, in this case, Prolonged Grief Disorder. Then once this is done, grief becomes amenable to being fixed or treated.

Wada: Exactly, yes. I would add that we, in grief counseling communities, have had terms to describe profound and difficult grief—“complicated grief” was one, “prolonged grief” was one, “disenfranchised grief,” “traumatic grief,” “ambiguous grief”—we have all these terms already. But this disorder category takes the difficult profound grief that we’ve been discussing and trying to support outside of a medical language and framework and transforms it into a mental disorder.

 

Morrill: Could you speak to how prolonged grief disorder has come into being?

Wada: It dates back over a decade. It goes back to when the DSM Task Force started preparing the fifth edition of DSM, which was eventually published in 2013. Some people might recall that there’s a lot of controversy around removing bereavement exclusion from Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) diagnosis. Bereavement exclusion was in place up to the DSM-4-TR. It required that health professionals practice watchful waiting for at least two months before giving a major depression diagnosis to someone who recently experienced the death of a loved one unless it was a severe case.

This removal of bereavement exclusion allowed people who have lost loved ones to receive an MDD diagnosis without waiting for those two months. The removal of the bereavement exclusion was very controversial. It was huge, right? But unfortunately, it overshadowed the other change made in DSM-5, which included Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder (PCBD). This inclusion of PCBD didn’t receive as much attention as bereavement exclusion because it was not an official diagnosis yet. It went into the section on Conditions for Further Study. But to me, it was kind of a watershed moment because, basically, DSM declared that this was a sort of a next runner-up disorder, and it paved the way for the addition of a Prolonged Grief Disorder in the ICD-11 in 2019.

 

Morrill: In your work, you’ve discussed the institutional forces that may have had a stake in defining grief as a medical disorder and the financial interests involved in creating grief disorders.
Your work, I believe, has mentioned the ways that critiques of the DSM often are discussing what’s referred to as “pet diagnoses” in the revision process, which describes how prominent researchers become invested in their proposed diagnosis, wanting it to grow and be legitimized because their career and their professional success depend upon that. Do you think that this happened with Prolonged Grief Disorder?

Wada: I wasn’t part of the DSM Task Force. I don’t know what transpired. But I can claim from the literature that two camps of prominent researchers fiercely advocated having their version of the disorder name and a corresponding criterion adopted as an official disorder.

One camp was for “complicated grief disorder,” and the other was for “prolonged grief disorder.” In the end, the naming of Prolonged Grief Disorder was selected, but specific symptom criteria were drawn from the two criterion sets, and it all went through some negotiation. What I found interesting (almost kind of amusing) was that this decision about which category to be officially adopted was partly influenced by non-scientific factors, right? It’s interesting to me because it illuminates how scientific knowledge is constructed by combining scientific and non-scientific factors and human and non-human factors.

An example here is the naming of Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder. It’s a transient unofficial disorder that momentarily entered the DSM-5 as a condition for further study and now completely perished. This was a result of a bad compromise—as if the DSM Task Force just couldn’t pick one over the other. The naming and that being a combination of symptoms from two proposed disorder names, so “persistent” instead of “prolonged,” “complex” instead of “complicated.” Yeah, these kinds of things come into play in a very interesting way.

The way “pet diagnosis” is discussed is tied with the researchers who proposed the diagnosis. But what’s not discussed much is that there are a lot of researchers around, not just that those who proposed it, who also have a stake in that diagnosis. Those are the ones who develop screeners or translate diagnostic criteria or screeners into another language and validate them in other countries. So a web of researchers and institutions are connected and have a stake in what diagnostic categories get adopted. We have yet to see how that transpired with the grief diagnosis.

 

Morrill: I know it is difficult to speculate. At the same time, noteworthy and unusual developments have transpired that don’t seem to be based on new evidence or scientific findings that led to changes as this diagnosis unfolded. Similarly, what about big pharma or pharmaceutical interests? I wonder if there’s more to say about that.

Wada: A lot has been written about the influence of pharmaceutical companies on the DSM. Nearly 70% of those who sat on the task force for the DSM-5 had financial ties to pharmaceuticals. That’s well documented. One of my favorite examples, and it’s a favorite but also very chilling story, is in the book called Crazy Like Us written by Ethan Watters. There’s this fascinating but chilling story of how American pharmaceutical companies led a campaign in Japan that promoted a biomedical narrative of depression and, of course, resulted in the blockbuster sale of SSRIs there. Now, I don’t have any information or facts like that about PGD, so that’s another thing that we have to see.

But what I found during the literature review is that this paradoxical rhetoric or claim-making was at play about pharmacological treatment. Initially, one of the major claims that was used to advocate for the medicalization of grief was, “Okay, we need a new diagnosis for grief disorder because grieving people are getting a major depression or PTSD diagnosis, so they’re getting prescribed SSRIs, which we know don’t work for grieving people. So to spare them from being wrongfully medicated, we need to give them a different diagnosis.” So that was an argument.

The logic was that we needed a new diagnosis so people won’t be medicated. But once PCBD entered into DSM-5 as a condition for further study, there was a shift in the rhetoric. So now the DSM-5 says we need more research; let’s see what medications work, including SSRIs, for people with this soon-to-be-an-official mental disorder. Then, of course, there’s an RCT that’s underway, which is a randomized controlled study on Naltrexone conducted by Holly G. Prigerson and her team. This is the team that advocated for Prolonged Grief Disorder to be adopted in the DSM.

Naltrexone is a medication that is used to treat addiction. The idea is that people who are grieving too much or too long are in a state of addiction to grieving or the reminiscence of people who died. Donna Schuurman, who’s from the Dougy Center in Oregon, recently wrote a powerful piece article for the Mad In America website, and it’s called The Grief Pill is Coming!

She critiqued the prospect of pharmaceutical companies extending their reach to people who are grieving. I did not write about the study of Naltrexone in my paper, but I was aware of that happening. I wrote that, at this point, we know we have a disorder category, and it will not be surprising that we will soon see medication for grief management or grief reduction pills on the market.

 

Morrill: The medicalization of grief potentially has the effect of changing the way we understand grieving—as a mental disorder. Could you speak more about that?

Wada: This is one of the most important points I wanted to make. To do that, I think I need first to establish that we don’t have a definitive, clear answer to the question of what a mental disorder is. This is an unresolved question that philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists have grappled with for many decades. There’s no biological marker for mental disorders. Many genes, proteins, and neurons are connected to different disorders or groups of disorders. So it’s not one biological marker to one disorder. It’s more a many-to-many kind of relationship, and these biological blocks interact with social and cultural factors.

Also, what’s considered mental illness is socio-culturally, historically, and politically situated. We know this if we consider how “homosexuality” was once a DSM disorder. What’s fascinating about medicalizing grief is that it induces paradoxes in our understanding of what constitutes a mental disorder. The attempt to medicalize grief illustrates how difficult it is to define mental illness.

The most prominent example I use is the DSM definition of mental disorder. Each successive edition of the DSM contains the DSM’s version of the definition of mental disorder—right in the introduction chapter. In the past, bereavement has been used as a counterexample of mental disorder—so what mental disorder is not? In DSM-5 and the DSM-5 text revision, because it didn’t change, it says, “an expectable or culturally approved response to common stressor or loss, such as the death of a loved one, is not a mental disorder.”

To me, the medicalization of grief is controversial because it may fundamentally shake up the concept of mental disorders as they have been defined and understood, however provisional that may be.

 

Morrill: It’s so often overlooked that a mental disorder is a shaky concept and is not fully defined. The biological is always interacting with social, political, and relational contexts. One critique of medicalization is that when the mental health field demarcates “normal” and “abnormal,” what tends to get normalized are the experiences of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic samples, or what’s referred to as WEIRD samples.
There’s a way in which neocolonial and ableist forces almost collude to marginalize further, and render other experiences, other forms of grieving, as abnormal. I think that each time we do that, we risk upholding a status quo and supporting systems that, right now, aren’t serving people.

Wada: I discussed this in my paper using the notion of “concept creep.” Concept creep is proposed by Nick Haslam, who happened to be on this podcast a few months ago, and it refers to the expansion of a concept through stretching its boundaries, thresholds, and meanings. As a result, the concept comes to encompass a much broader range of phenomena than initially intended. I see this concept creep happening both in the evolution of PGD diagnostic criteria, as well as in the very definition of mental disorder being challenged right now.

A side note to this is that the DSM-5 definition has a reference to culture, where it says “culturally approved responses to a common stressor or loss.” The PGD diagnostic criteria also have something similar, “the norm deviation clause,” which says the duration and severity of bereavement reaction must exceed expected social, cultural, or religious norms for the diagnosis to be warranted. It’s an overriding clause. So there’s no diagnosis, even if you meet the number of symptoms if your grief reactions are within what’s expected in your social, cultural, and religious context. This is very important.

This is necessary to prevent us from misdiagnosing people from different cultures and religions. I almost wish that this was criterion A instead of criterion E. Then, if it’s within the social and cultural norms, you don’t have to go down the list of symptoms. But I have to say that this is imperfect because it is a very difficult criterion to implement.

First, it puts a lot of pressure on the clinician. It’s almost as if they are expected to have training in anthropology or religious studies to know the norms for each culture and religion, and that is without taking into consideration the person’s acculturation, bicultural identity, or intersectionality. It’s very complex to assess social-cultural norms. Also, we know most psychiatric diagnoses and prescriptions are given by primary care doctors who only see patients for 10 or 15 minutes per visit if you’re lucky. So I am quite skeptical about how well this normal deviation clause will function in practice.

 

Morrill: Some might say that adding grief disorders into mainstream diagnostic manuals is positive. Maybe it allows people suffering to access resources and provides for the rigorous scientific study of grief. What would you say or add in response to this view?

Wada: There’s a lot of unpacking to do with the notion of access to care. Robert Spitzer, who was the chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Task Force that led to the publication of the DSM-3 in the 1980s, had this very short paper entitled “Diagnosis and Need for Treatment Are Not the Same.” It’s a very telling title. Robert Spitzer, who’s obviously an advocate of the DSM, explains why it is unscientific to use access to care or the need for treatment as an argument for diagnosis. Theorists of psychopathology also say that you can’t include the need for care as part of the definition of mental illness because it leads to diagnostic inflation to the point that it becomes absurd.

If you can think of examples, right? Do couples who don’t get along, couples who need parental skills, or young people who need guidance with their career decisions benefit from accessing professional health? Sure. But are they suffering from mental illness? I don’t think so. We can’t let access to care be a driving force for creating a new diagnosis.

There’s also a social justice piece here that is important to consider. The flip side of the question “Who needs care?” is the question of “Who is currently lacking access to care?” We know that it is poor people, the disempowered, marginalized, and historically colonized—they are the ones who are also subjected to traumatic death at a disproportionately higher rate as a result of political failures, systemic racism, state violence, those kinds of things. So access to care is important, but if you let it drive diagnostic inflation, you risk pathologizing these people at a higher rate.

Access to care is where the logic of “norm deviation” falls apart and, as a result, challenges the notion of what a mental disorder is. For example, for parents who lost a child in a school shooting or any other tragedy, what are the social norms regarding how much or how long they should grieve? Is one year enough? Probably not, right? The research actually shows that they grieve longer than one year.

We can say that it’s socially acceptable that these parents would be grieving intensely beyond a year, two years, three years, or even more for the death of their child. Then they would be disqualified for the PGD diagnosis, according to the norm deviation clause, right? But here’s a paradox, isn’t the point that we wanted to provide care to those who suffer such agonizing grief? This was one of the main justifications used to establish the diagnosis, but in this case, it puts clinicians in a conflict. Okay, what do I do? There is a moral question here inherent in this.

Access to care is a very powerful discursive tool. It’s a moral question. It’s almost like we are morally compelled to give access to care because we are helping professionals. But I think there are more difficult questions that we need to ask ourselves. For example, do we really need to give a diagnosis to give access to care? In the States, I know that diagnosis is tied with third-party reimbursement, but in Canada or Japan, I know that diagnosis does not dictate access to doctor’s care or psychologist care as much as it does in the US. Then it becomes a question of healthcare policy issues.

Over the years, we know more and more diagnoses have entered the DSM. Has it improved access to care? If it has, what kind of care? Psychotherapy? What type of therapy? Pharmaceutical treatment? DSM diagnosis has become what Charles Rosenberg called “bureaucratic imperatives.” He talks about that in his classic paper, the Tyranny of Diagnosis. It’s not science; it’s a bureaucratic imperative driving diagnostic inflation. Then to me, it is time to collectively envision other ways that we can provide mental health care.

 

Morrill: What can we expect now that Prolonged Grief Disorder has been accepted as an official disorder in the DSM?

Wada: I alluded to this when I talk about psychopharmacology and this surge of efficacy studies that look at CBT’s efficacy for grief, apps on smartphones, or those kinds of things. This is a new diagnostic category, so we don’t know what will happen, but we know that every time new diagnostic categories come into being, there are always unintended social consequences. So I’m very curious to see what comes as a result of medicalizing grief, but in general, based on previous studies on other disorders, we know that when something gets medicalized, it triggers interesting and sometimes opposing reactions among the public.

There are those who embrace the diagnosis and actively incorporate it into their self-understanding. It’s understandable because a diagnosis validates the challenge that they might have faced in their lives.

In grief research, Esther Kofod did an interesting study on mothers who lost a child. She talked about this kind of normative nature of grief. For example, some mothers take on diagnosis as something to live up to: “This shows how much I loved my child. The fact that I’m experiencing this disorder shows how much I loved my child.” It’s almost like diagnosis can take on its own life, which is fascinating.

Some people who embrace diagnosis might participate in a patient advocacy movement to get more access to care or disability benefits. In that process, they may end up becoming the agent of concept creep, promoting the expansion of a disorder category. I don’t know what’s going to transpire with grief, but they might say, for example, don’t make us wait for a year or six months, because it’s hard to go back to work after three days or seven days or, so that might be kind of a bottom-up voice that promotes medicalization as well.

But there are other possibilities. The public may resist or reject medicalization. The neurodiversity movement is one example that we see today. It’s also very fascinating so the notion that it’s not that neurodiverse people suffer from mental illness; what’s wrong is that society is structured around neurotypical people only. That’s more of a social model of disability. Something similar could also happen with grief, so people might resist and say, “Don’t call my grief a disorder. Don’t even put my grief into a category because it’s mine to make sense of and my story to tell.” Or people might start saying, “Let’s make workplaces more compassionate.” Why is it in the first place that we expect high productivity all the time and a quick return to normal functioning after major life events like death and illnesses?

We might see this kind of return to a more humanistic, systemic approach to grief or social change in a reaction against medicalization. This is sort of already happening.

 

Morrill: I want to add too that these changes about how grief has been defined are occurring within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is something, I don’t know, disturbing to me about looking at the symptoms of grief during a time when our normal rituals have been thwarted so that grieving may be prolonged, but instead of recognizing the extenuating circumstances that are provoking our grief right now, including how the pandemic has exacerbated social inequality, we’re proposing how these extreme presentations are indicative of a medical problem and a mental health disorder.

Wada: Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the American Psychiatric Association released a document on COVID-19-related death, and it’s called Considerations for Family and Other Personal Losses Due to COVID-19 Related Death. In there, it’s stated that the rate of PGD resulting from COVID-19-related death might be as high as 20%, so that’s interesting because, as of today, over six million people have died worldwide due to this virus. So for each of these six million people, several people who were close to them are left behind. I mean, imagine 20% of them have this disorder.

If the APA’s estimate is accurate, that’s a pandemic of this new mental disorder diagnosis. But again, here is where paradoxes exist in this norm deviation clause. If it’s socially expectable worldwide that as high as 20% of people will have suffered from prolonged grief, then does the norm deviation clause apply or not? So there is a contradiction there.

 

Morrill: It also makes me think about other ways of understanding this. What if we were to recognize that grieving isn’t always the problem, but the circumstances provoking prolonged grief or interrupting our ability to grieve are what is harmful? From this view, perhaps we even need more grieving if grieving is connected with how we connect with the community and rituals.

Wada: Your comment reminds me of something that this French philosopher Simone Weil said—evil or bad things coexist in good and beautiful things, and our attempts to get rid of the evil or bad things sometimes end up destroying the beautiful as well.

I wonder sometimes if grief is one of those things that is so painful, and maybe we want to take a pill to get rid of it, but at the same time, there’s something humane and beautiful in that experience.

 

Morrill: What is next for you and your research? Recently you’ve been involved in community-engaged research with Indigenous communities.

Wada: Yeah, I’ve been involved in Indigenous research with my colleague, Dr. Karlee Fellner, who is a Cree/Métis researcher. It’s still too early for me to say much about Indigenous ways of grieving. To do Indigenous research and as a non-Indigenous researcher, I first have to make my entry into the community in a good way. I’m still learning by staying in the community, living together, eating together with people in the community, and being part of ceremonies and sweat lodges in the community.

You need to be very careful of speaking for them because misrepresentation and appropriation of their knowledge and traditions have been part of their colonial history. It will take me more time to learn, reflect, and decolonize my thinking process, and that involves, to a certain degree, unlearning my mainstream psychology training. But one thing I can say—and I can say this because this is what Indigenous scholars have been writing and talking about already—is that their grief is tied with the ongoing colonial history and power. There’s collective grief over children who did not return from residential schools, the sixties scopes, missing and murdered girls and women, suicide, and substance overdose deaths resulting from the despair implanted by colonialism. At the same time, it’s important to acknowledge that there’s also collectiveness and resiliency. A resiliency that is not an individual kind of trait, but it’s more of a collective survivance— I know that’s what it is called.

Also, the Indigenous way of grieving is very much connected with their spirituality. It’s through their connection with the land, spirits, and the Creator. I’m starting to understand that the conceptualization of grief from the DSM or Western psychology is a very individualistic, non-spiritual, pathology-based framework. Providing care and treatment based on that framework will be yet another form of colonial violence. What gets pathologized is socially and historically embedded. Often, it’s the dominant power that decides it.

 

Morrill: Thank you for speaking with me today. Really edifying to discuss these major changes around grief with you.

Wada: Oh, thank you so much. It’s a fascinating topic, and I think we are in a key moment in history when we think about grief, which is very much a human experience. Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to talk about this.

 

 

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MIA Reports are supported, in part, by a grant from the Open Society Foundations

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37 COMMENTS

  1. Grief, Being Depressed, these have all been made into disorders. And if you are seeing a Psychotherapist, they probably don’t use Lobotomy, ECT, or TCM, and they may not use DSM or diagnostic labels, but they are still trying to use talk to do to you the same things a Psychiatrist would.

    Joshua

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  2. https://youtu.be/olVg_8q5CSo

    I forseen this from afar. Many, many years ago. All the doors that should stay closed to humanity are opening, the over emphasis on twisted logic is providing the keys, picking old emotional trusty locks.

    They will get their foot through the gap in agreeing that grief is natural, sadness is natural, joy is natural, but they won’t stop at that. They will say impatience is only natural, entitlement is only natural, rage is only natural, justice is only natural, vengance is only natural, crime is only natural, incest is only natural.

    A door is for protection. Too much liberty takes all doors off their ancient hinges.

    Beware. Bolt the doors against depravity. Humans are not well. So when you add liberty to unwellness a mass sickness begins to spread everywhere. Then the too devout, the too strict, clench a pious fist against any healthy extent of liberty that is normal and grown up. This backlash is also a manifestation of human unwellness.

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    • When I say “they” I do not mean psychiatry. My message keeps getting jumbled in the mix. Click on my name here to get what I say.

      In my sojourn in a psychiatric hospital at one stage three women arrived as patients. The peaceful healing ward suddenly became like a scene reminicent of Berlin before the war, with physical aggression and hostile roaring from those separate women. They demanded everything all day long, no hour had peace in it, they ranted and exploded and caused scene after scene. This was NOT because they were forced to do anything or even forced to be in the hospital. They were free to go home. But they just wanted to bellow at the poor exhausted nurses. At one point it got to so extreme that the staff had no choice but to baracade themselves away. The rest of the patients; also there by free choice, were left to fend for themselves. Some of those patients were confused or suicidally depressed. The sense of trauma at not having safety anywhere almost drove some over the edge. Violence rides on the stallion of revolution and more often than not makes the beast charge at all the quiet people. When being quiet becomes a crime we enter a world of war crimes.

      “Only love will set you free”.

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  4. Nothing surprises me anymore in this world. However, making grief a disorder is more of psychiatry’s reflection of who have come to be. Sadly, we devalue life and thus we devalue “death” and the natural process of grieving that results from it. I, think, that if there are those “patients” who feel empowered by the medicalizing of grief, then, it is their life path and course and would be very wise if I did not interfere. However, it would be wrong to impose this as a disorder upon those who would feel very uncomfortable with it. But, sometimes, when in the passing of someone close, a “well-meaning” friend, family, or even clergy member might urge the grieivng person to seek professional help. Considering that in this time, the individual is very vulnerable and may be unable to entirely think for themselves, they may be caught in something that is not in their best interest. It is important to note there is no time limit on grieving. There can not be. The minds, especially of some people, do not tell time in clock/month/year shape order as we are led to believe. Our concept of modern time is solely based on pre twentieth century train time schedules that we have adopted and adapted to work, school, etc. and now the ultra technology era. In many ways, time is an abstract that doesn’t exist. But, each person is allowed to choose their own life path and each one of us should not interfere unless a “contract” has been made such as in a marriage or in a parent/child relationship, etc. “Contracts” also can’t be breached or interfered with, unless someone’s life is in danger. As someone who lost very important people in my life if someone tried to put a time limit on my grieving, I would ask who really needs the diagnosis; them or me? Thank you.

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  5. Listening to this disturbing Thomas Insel interview.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/22/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-thomas-insel.html

    I think we have been negligent. And by we I mean the entire society. We have let ourselves be cast into this position of “Oh I have a problem, I need Recovery, I need Therapy.” And of course this leads directly into Lobotomy, Electro Shock, Transcranial Magnet, and Drugging.

    I think we need to back up some and go back to what was learned from R. D. Laing.

    Attempting here to explain it myself, people do not have problems, mental illnesses, and they do not need recovery or treatment.

    Rather they have lived in horrible dynamics and they probably continue to. Usually it is the family.

    But one must never let this be case as needing Recovery, Therapy, or Treatment, as this puts it back onto the individual, makes it all into a self-improvement project.

    Laing was coming from a perspective of existentialism, where there are not discrete objects or essences. Rather there is only existence and everything is in relation.

    And so I listen to this Thomas Insel interview and he explains about a father looking for treatment and care for his son. What an absurd idea. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with the son, it is merely the preposterous situation which the son has been cast into by the parents.

    And then Deleuze and Guattari say that the schizo is the one who cannot be oedipalized. That was in France in 1972. In America today it would be the one who cannot believe in therapy and recovery.

    But the schizo is not a clinical schizophrenic. That would be what therapy, recovery, and the mental health system hammer the schizo into.

    Joshua

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  6. How is it that people come to believe in ~Mental Health~ and come to believe that everyone needs it, needs check ups, treatment, and recovery?

    https://engagesac.org/blog-civic-engagement/2022/6/10/t8b0kf66l2dawfzi86coq4wr85ouxv

    at 45 sec: (maybe 45 min)

    “Imagine the outcome of the COVID pandemic if 30 years ago our country had really invested in public health as a national priority, hot different that would be. In our state and in our city there are historic example of wish we would have, and on the other side of thank God we did.

    On the former I think about 50 years ago when the state shut the mental hospitals and promised a decent system of community health care. How different would homelessness be today if our predecessors had followed through on that promise and made mental health care a right, and not just a governmental option.
    ”

    This guy is a slick talker, and I do agree with most of what he says, but there is a central flaw in it, this commitment to “mental health”.

    Joshua

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  7. We have to organize against the mental health system. As long as we do not challenge it, and as long as we allow our government to license Psychotherapy, then we are in a Psychiatric Police State where forced procedures are just a phone call away. And we all are expected to disclose our affairs to therapists where learning to blame ourselves for the injustices which have shaped our lives becomes a self improvement project.

    Darrell Steinberg Mayor of Sacramento
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ3_gzSbXKc

    Steinberg even wants “preventive mental health”.

    Joshua

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  8. I have several Classic Sufi Music CD’s from the Fes Festival of Sacred Music in Morocco that I enjoy. In the music on these CD’s, there’s a lot of wailing and grief. That’s just part of Sufi Music. I joked with my Moroccan Friend, Mohammed, that, if psychiatrists forced Sufis to take psychotropic drugs for “Prolonged Grief Disorder” the Sufis might then become the Militant Islamists that we dread.
    Of course, with Climate Change accelerating and with this bloody war in Ukraine dragging on and on and on, how can anyone not be filled with grief.
    Then, I’m a divorcee. After I divorced, I wanted to move to a neighborhood where there would be more Community Activism to get involved but the Trustee that manages my Father’s Trust refused to support me. So, the only relationships I developed around here are with plants…..not people. Therefore, I remain haunted in dreams by my relationship with my ex-wife. I guess the Bank Trustee, J.D. Bloom didn’t think I knew what was good for me due to my “Bipolar Disorder”. So, now, I’m stuck in “prolonged grief”, listening to my Sufi Music!

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  9. Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration
    Sal Mendalio editor.

    Great Potential Press, Scotsdale AZ 2008.

    Now GPP is a major Gifted Movement Publisher, and Dabrowski is very highly thought of in the Gifted Movement.

    He was a Polish Psychiatrist, tortured by the first the Nazi’s and then by the Communists.

    He came to Canada and to the US and he had work groups and students, and many of these wrote the chapters in this book. I recognize some of the names.

    Michael M. Piechowski, Linda Kreger Silverman, Nicholas Colangelo.

    Now, what exactly is Positive Disintegration? I have long wanted to know. I will have to read it to find out.

    So Michael M. Piechowski was the one who really promoted Dabrowski in the Gifted Movement.

    Theory of Positive Disintegration, in Dabrowski’s theory, personality is not a fixed, universal attribute; personality must be shaped — created — by an individual to reflect his or her own unique character. Positive disintegration, the process by which personality is achieved, is a twofold process of: (1) disintegration of a primitive mental organization aimed at gratifying biological needs and mindlessly conforming to societal norms, and (2) re-integration at a higher level of functioning, in which the individual transcends biological determinism and becomes autonomous. Personality, shaped by positive disintegration, develops primarily as a result of the action of developmental potential, which is a constitutional endowment that includes overexcitability–a high level of reactivity of the central nervous system, and dynamisms–autonomous inner forces, assumed to be normally distributed in the population.

    Dabrowski took an interest in Rudolph Steiner’s Anthroposophy and in Alice Baily (Theosophy UK). Parasychology and Eastern studies, and he practiced meditation daily.

    He saw emotions as directing forces of development.

    Got into areas covered by DSM., things he came to call Psychoneurosis. And he said, Psychoneurosis is not an illness.

    These serve the transition from lower to higher development by generating the disintegration process.

    Reading about Dabrowski here and knowing that his first major English language book was in 1964, I can see that being trained as a psychiatrist what Dabrowski was doing was serving as an anti-psychiatrist, in the same manner and Frantz Fanon, R. D. Laing, and D. G. Cooper.

    So Deleuze and Guattari are clear that clinical mental illness is created in the mental health system, it’s the drugs and it’s the talk therapy.

    But they do say that there is one genuine mental illness, Neuroticism, and it is incurable and it is fatal.

    Well, Dabrowski decimates the conventional notions of mental health. He describes that as psychoneurosis.

    His idea of Positive Disintegration is something which is happening on multiple levels simultaneously. So there is always intense flux.

    And it is always the disintegration of biologically determined and social conformity drive structures. So there is this biologically determined mental development.

    Then there is this autonomous mental development, which is what we want. Transends the demands of biology and social norms.

    Then there is also this one-sided mental development which is anti-social. It is egocentric and manifests in crime and paranoia.

    Dabrowski takes apart the views that Mental Health is the absence of mental disorders or is a state of psychological integration.

    Dabrowski’s ideas revolve around his concept of Overexcitability.

    He writes in 1970:

    ”
    [Overexcitability] first provokes conflicts, disappointments, suffering in familily life, in school, in professional life–in short, it leads to conflicts with the external environment. Overexcitability also provokes inner conflicts as well as the means by which these convlicts can be overcome. Second, overexcitability precipitates psychoneurotic processes, and, third, conflicts and psychoneurotic processes become the dominant factor in accelerated development.
    ”

    Dabrowski called a lot of this “positive infantilism” or “positive immaturity”, and this is all associated with creativity and accelerated development.

    And so inner conflicts and frustrations are inherent in positive disintegration. And so one with high developmental potential will become more introspective, more aware of possible choices and consequently, more conscious of different levels–higher and lower–in his or her feelings, thoughts and behavior. In his or her feelings, thoughts, and behavior. In these internally and often externally tumultuous conditions, such an individual “introduces into his life a new controlling factor, where higher feelings [being to control] the lower forms of instinctual, emotional and cognitive functions”.

    Joshua

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  10. Naming “prolonged grief”, a disorder, points out how all other labels are bogus.

    What does “prolonged” mean anyway? There are those who do not grieve. Depending
    on how big a part the lost one, or that lost thing meant in your life, the longer you might grieve. Perhaps forever, perhaps to the point where it alters your future.

    Our responses to losing important parts of ourselves, come from such varied places. Culture, family habits generations old etc etc.

    And it is effin fine to grieve differently from the one next to you.

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  11. Continuing with Dabrowski’s TPD.

    Theory of Positive Disintegration (TPD) places emotions in a central role.

    TPD: A Grand Theory of Personality

    Kawczak, attorney, who later was academic philosopher in Canada

    Conflict and Psychopathology: Essential for Development

    Emotions: Directing Forms of Development

    Levels of Development

    Level I: Primary Integration

    Level II: Unilevel Disintegration

    Level III: Spontaneous Multilevel DIsintegration

    Level IV: Organized Multilevel Disintegration

    Level V: Secondary Integration

    So Dabrowski did talk extensively with Abraham Maslow and they became friends. The only reason he did not adopt Maslow’s theory is that it lacks the multiple levels.

    Michael M. Piechowski did a great deal to make Dabrowski known.

    Living with intensity : understanding the sensitivity, excitability, and emotional development of gifted children, adolescents, and adults / Susan Daniels and Michael M. Piechowski, editors. (2009) Great Potentials Press

    Mental growth through positive disintegration, by Kazimierz Dabrowski with Andrzej Kawczak and Michael M. Piechowski. (1970)

    Found many subjects for extensive research project, but also used the writings of Antoine de Saint-ExupĂŠry.

    Compare with Carl Roger’s Client Centered Therapy.

    For Level V they considered the worlds greatest religious leaders. They considered Dag Hammarskjold. They looked at Eleanor Roosevelt.

    Looked at Mildred Norman (1908)
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_Pilgrim

    Three forms of development:
    1. Biologically determened
    2. Autonomous Mental
    3. One-sided (this is pathological)

    All revolves around Overexcitability.

    Five Forms:

    psychomotor,
    sensual,
    imaginational,
    intellectual,
    emotional

    Dynamisms

    Joshua

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  12. Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration

    Dabrowski talks about development potential, and he can best gauge this in Overexcitability. He sees this overexcitability as being the best way to detect giftedness, better than any kind of aptitude or IQ tests.

    Nicholas Colangelo and Linda Kreger Silverman are the ones who went to Canada and worked with Dabrowski and then propagated his ideas throughout the Gifted Movement. He in Iowa and she in Colorado. I have read each of them and they are good.

    Joshua

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  13. Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration

    This book is mind blowing. It exceeds my ability to describe it here. It is also showing me that to really understand I need to avail myself of a lot more related books.

    Some of the works are buy Laurence F. Nixon, Chair of Religion Department, Dawson College, Montreal Quebec.

    He writes:

    “When I first encountered the theory of positive disintegration, I was struck by the fact that the stages articulated closely fit the process of mystical development as described by scholars of mysticism, the authors of mystical manuals, and the autobiographical writings of mystics themselves. My interest was further aroused by the fact that the author of the theory provided not only a systematic description of the underlying personality structures at each stage of development, including the connections between the structures at different levels, but also further further identified a set of causes for the growth process–developmental potential and external frustration combined with some measure of environmental support.

    Nixon subsequently applied this to a review of meditation in his own M.A. thesis.

    Andrew Kawczak was the lawyer turned philosopher associated with Dabrowski.

    Text references D. D. Palmer, Kierkegaard for Beginners, 1996

    Kierkegaard for beginners / written and illustrated by Donald D. Palmer. (1996)
    **

    Palmer writes books, like this, 150pp. They are fun.

    No L. F. Nixon
    0

    Irina Starr (1991) Eight Rungs on the Ladder. A personal passage (Ojai CA)

    Coming out of Ojai, she might have been with the Theosophical Society. Here they are calling her non-denominational Christian mystic.

    ”
    The theory of positive disintegration hypothesizes that the interaction between heredity and environment activates certain autonomous inner forces called dynamisms.” (Piechowski)

    Overexcitabilities
    five channels of perception: psychomotor, sensual, intellectual, imaginational, and emotional.

    I would add that as the book develops this some narrow it down to intellectual, imaginational, and emotional, especially when looking at mysticism.

    Joshua

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    • Yes, many mystical philosophers say that parts of us must die so we can continue to live. I think an experience like this is part of the reason why I no longer need to take Depakote for “Bipolar Disorder”. I’m more naturally under control because part of who I used to be is gone.
      If one looks at videos of some Sufi Rituals, it seems as if they often try to simulate “psychiatric decompensation”. Then, they have a group hug, and resume the ritual! Maybe, instead of try to SUPPRESS Madness, we should try to get as crazy as possible under controlled conditions?
      Of course, Mysticism is part of my normal information diet. I always enjoyed this recording “Night Silence Desert” by Kayhan Kalhor and Mohammad Reza Shajarian from Iran. If I’m having trouble sleeping, listening to this recording on my Mp3 player often puts me out.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keAN_wZFqkQ&list=OLAK5uy_kQsqW4d1DoI9ACpf1MyX1ol_0w3BNw794&ab_channel=KayhanKalhor-Topic

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  14. Thanks Denver Dan and I will watch your video.

    So Dabrowski was trained in Poland as a Psychiatrist, but from early on he was clearly serving as an Anti-Psychiatrist in the model of Szasz, Fanon, Laing, and Cooper. And his stuff is completely antithetical to Mental Health.

    page 204, “Of the five forms of overexcitability, the most important, in terms of developmental potential, are emotional, imaginational, and intellectual.”

    Talks about Therese of Lisieux, a highly regarded 19th Century Carmelite Saint.

    Irina Starr
    https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/093059603X/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i0

    p212: “Darowski’s statement that personality development cannot take place “when all basic needs have been satisfied,” is a reference to Abraham Maslow (1971), who took exactly the opposite position. For Dabrowski, negative life events and frustrations were occasions for growth, and persons who possess psychic overexcitability ar the ones who can best take advantage of negative environmental conditions in general and the experience of loss in particular.”

    Joshua

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  15. “Mysticism is as much a natural part of being human as sexuality..” I fully agree, and I will check out your links.

    In my opinion the 3 Abrahamic faiths are wrong in trying to make sexuality only for procreation. They deny this, but it is still true. They were afraid of religious prostitution.

    But hidden in them is sacred sex, in Kabbalah, Sufi Mysticism, and in the Alchemy of the West, and in the esoteric traditions.

    Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis only exist because of the abject failures of western religion. And this is also their failing.

    The religions stigmatize violence, and they stigmatize unapproved sex. Christians decided to abandon Kosher Food and Kosher Genitals, but they still require Kosher Sex.

    Freud said that we are all basically animals, so sex is okay. This is why people followed him.

    But he still never understood that people want to live with public honor, and that sometimes that requires retributive violence. Freud never understood this, and successors still don’t.

    To Live with Honor and Die with Honor
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlWVV5imXSM

    Fortunately there were no Psychotherapists in the Ghetto.

    Joshua

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    • Yes, Joshua. When psychotropic medications attack a person’s sexual reproductive system, they make him or her CRAZIER whether he or she is involved in an intimate relationship or not. Sexuality is an inherent part of our being. Here in Colorado, Marijuana has been decriminalized, but Marijuana is generally detrimental to male sexual functioning. However, sex work remains in the criminal underground. Is this sort of social policy really what’s best for people’s mental health? I think, oftentimes, people use Marijuana in an attempt to escape from their Sexuality.
      Of course, one part of Scriptures that is highly erotic is the Song of Songs of King Solomon. He really had a thing for the Ethiopian Queen of Sheba. I can see why. Many women from the Horn of Africa are quite lovely in my view!
      One recent critically acclaimed popular recording that deals with the topic of Grief and Loss is Marchita by Silvana Estrada from Mexico.

      https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_l6GzTBdbydz6_Kld66DCUHxJ2jSRCgEdc

      In general, grief and loss are very important topics for artists, but I don’t think all artists need to be put on psychotropic drugs.

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  16. “Marijuana has been decriminalized, but Marijuana is generally detrimental to male sexual functioning.”

    I can see that this is true. But there are so many people who strongly believe the exact opposite. I think that is because that is how they have it wired up. Most of the limitations on male sexual functioning are psychological. And drugs then are never going to be a real solution.

    Reading about Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration, and it is highly relevant for artists. Dabrowski seems to have been an Anti-Psychiatrist.

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  17. Living with intensity : understanding the sensitivity, excitability, and emotional development of gifted children, adolescents, and adults / Susan Daniels and Michael M. Piechowski, editors.
    Scottsdale, AZ : Great Potential Press, c2009.

    ^ Would have been really good. But sticky to get it right now.

    So:

    Mental growth through positive disintegration, by Kazimierz Dabrowski with Andrzej Kawczak and Michael M. Piechowski.

    basically the same crew and the same ideas, but 1970.

    Joshua

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  18. Kazimierz Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration (1964)

    a Polish Anti-Psychiatrist, most revered in the Gifted Movement, anathema of the mental health and autism industries

    ed and intro by Jason Aronson, Dept of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School.

    from back of book:

    ”
    The theory recognizes and emphasizes positive aspects of what are usually described in Western psychiatric literature as negative or “pathological” symptoms of mental illness.
    ”

    See, I figured out for myself that the Gifted Movement is the anathema of the Autism / Asperger’s Hoax. It’s just that their people do not say that. They can’t. They are involved in Teacher Training, School Counseling, and even Psychotherapy. To challenge the Autism / Asperger’s Hoax would be to declare nuclear war on the parents.

    Well a kind of inner circle of the Gifted Movement holds Dabrowski as scripture. And that is interesting as his work was not originally pitched as Gifted Movement. He is coming from another kind of a society.

    But as I see more of this I see that his theory is also the anathema of the Mental Health System!

    Joshua

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  19. And we need someone like Dabrowski to fight the mental health system, tortured by both the Nazis and the Communists.

    Our state mental health apparatus continues to expand without bounds, until now it is a lot like what it must have been like behind the Iron Curtain.

    Joshua

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  20. “Kazimierz Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration is outside the current modes of personality theory; it stems from sources at the present neglected in the United States, it views “pathological” symptoms as generally positive factors in personality growth, and it was developed in Poland, a country that has been largely isolated from the West in recent decades.”

    Joshua

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  21. Positive Disintegration, by Kazimierz Dabrowski, 1964, Intro by Jason Aronson.

    p. XVII

    ”
    Like Thomas Szasz, author of Myths of Mental Illness, Dabrowski rejects the medical model of “illness” for psychiatric disorder. Szasz’s definition of psychiatric disorder as “disturbances in patterns of living” is congenial to Dabrowski’s point of view, but Dabrowski regards slight psychiatric disorders as necessary for personality development and would not consider them wrong patterns.
    ”

    Szasz in Hungary and Dabrowski in Poland. We here in CA and the US are using the concept of Mental Illness in exactly the same way that had been the norm in the Communist East Block.

    Dabrowsky talks about Erich Lindemann and Erik Erikson, neither,

    “… has written specifically on the positive functions of acute psychoses. The anxiety, even psychoneurosis, may have a positive function in personality development is not inconsistent with current attitudes in Western psychiatry, but that psychoses – the persecutory delusions of paranoia, the hallucinations and the withdrawl of a schizophrenic, and the wild hyperactivity of a manic – may play a positive role in an individual’s maturation falls strangely on our ears. e tend to view psychosis as a failure of defense, the surrender of attempts at adaptation. Yet Thomas French and Jacob Kasonin some years ago and Bateson recently have suggested that psychosis may have a positive function.”

    Percival’s Narrative: A Patient’s Account of his Psychosis 1830 – 1832. G. Bateson (ed) Stanford Univ Press, 1961

    https://www.amazon.com/Percevals-narrative-patients-psychosis-1830-1832/dp/0688078834

    Perceval’s narrative; a patient’s account of his psychosis, 1830-1832. Edited by Gregory Bateson. (1961)
    *

    Bateson, “suggests that schizophrenia is a “vast and painful initiation rite conducted by the self,” and that it has a definite course to run leading to the birth of a new identity. “… congruent with Dabrowski’s emphasis on te positive function of acute psychosis.

    Joshua

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  22. How the Autism – Apserger’s – Neurodiversity Hoax still rages on, and what those being targeted should do to protect themselves from it.

    Positive Disintegration, by Kazimierz Dąbrowski, 1964

    Dąbrowski was a Polish Anti-Psychiatrist

    Because of poor communications between Poland and the west, he ideas are very different. Some of his views come from the English neurologist John Hughlings Jackson, but it is also very compatible with the Anti-Psychiatry Movement, Fanon, Szasz, Laing, and Cooper.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimierz_D%C4%85browski

    As it worked out, Dąbrowski spent the last decades of his life working in Canada, where he pick up quite a cadre of followers who make up the core of the Gifted Education Movement.

    And I have a lot more respect for the Gifted Movement now that I understand this about it and know who these core members are. It is not just the upper middle-class trying to replicate itself. These kid really are way out there, and they will go thru continual cycles of reinvention at multiple levels.

    And so Dąbrowski’s ideas are the antithesis of the Mental Health System, as though this is not said openly, this core of the Gifted Movement is the antithesis of the Autism – Asperger’s Hoax.

    Joshua

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    • Positive Disintegration, by Kazimierz Dąbrowski, 1964

      page 78

      What is the role of the third agent? The third agent, together with the first agent (inherited and inborn dynamics) and the second (environmental influences), becomes the major developmental agent in highly cultured individuals with a high degree of self-consciousness. They dynamics of the third agent arise and develop in certain number of individuals during periods of stress and during the developmental crises of life such as puberty, adolescence, and the climacteric. Rudiments of this agent may be seen in especially talented, sensitive, and sometimes nervous children. The third agent functions to deny some and affirm other specific peculiarities and dynamics within the individual’s internal environment, at the same time denying and affirming certain forms of influences of the external environment. The third agent selects, separates, and eliminates heterogeneous elements acting in both internal and external environments. The third agent becomes active during periods of strong tension of the developmental instinct and during positive multilevel disintegration. It operates in individuals endowed with strong tendencies toward positive development and, therefore, may be often seen in nervous, neurotic, and psychoneurotic persons. Such individuals often have inferiority feelings (typical of these disorders), connected as a rule with the process of disintegration.

      In psychopath, there is neither a process of disintegration nor the development of a third agent because the disposing and directing center consists of an impulse or group of impulses integrated at a low level. Nor does the psychopath experience inferiority feelings with regard to himself because the development of this feeling presumes the process of disintegration.

      Joshua

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  23. Positive Disintegration, by Kazimierz Dąbrowski, 1964

    pg 77

    The Feeling of Inferiority

    ”
    Although the psychopath does not undergo any essential processes and experiences characteristic of multilevel disintegration, he may experience a feeling of inferiority. But it is a feeling of inferiority with regard to the external environment, not a self-dissatisfaction. A contrary phenomenon occurs in psychoneurotics. Such individuals demonstrate various types of increased excitability. Psychoneurotics are typical examples both of the process of development of internal environment and of the process of disintegration, especially the multilevel type. All the above-mentioned processes, which are lacking in psychopaths, are chacteristic of psychoneurotics.

    Essential elements of psychoneurosis are the dynamization of the internal environment, the experiencing of hierarchy in oneself, and the strong manifestation of dynamics processing toward an ever higher hierarchy in oneself, and the strong manifestation of dynamics progressing toward toward an ever higher hierarchy of values up to the personality ideal. With a growing awareness and stabilization of his personal ideal, the individual becomes more conscious of the distance separating him from it; his sense of reality increases, and the dynamics of the ideal become the principle disposing and directing center in the individual’s development–the main source of developmental energy.

    Joshua

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  24. Positive Disintegration, by Kazimierz Dąbrowski, 1964

    Dąbrowski was a Polish Anti-Psychiatrist

    pg 80:

    Psychopaths as a rule do not create cultural works. The psychopath’s intelligence, even at a high level is not of a creative nature; it merely serves the egoistic purposes of the dominating impulse or group of impulses. Hence, even extensive use of intelligence leads not to creative ideas but to destructive action. As a result of these strong impulsive dynamics, it is difficult for the psychopath to make a long-range, controlling estimate of his own and other people’s acts; therefore, he has no capacity for sympathetic insight into the states of mind of others and is unable to grasp any social, moral, or cultural problems.

    Pyschoneurotics, on the contrary, create works of culture because of their high moral sensitivity, their capacity for introspection, their ability to estimate their capacity for introspection, their ability to estimate their own and other people’s attitudes, and their ability to differentiate levels and to experience the “subject-object” process within themseleves, ie., because of their susceptibility to the process of disintegration, especially those of multilevel disintegration.

    Joshua

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  25. Positive Disintegration, by Kazimierz Dąbrowski, 1964

    pg 71:

    The psychopath does not experience the anxiety one sees in the psychoneurotic; he does not suffer conflict in his internal milieu. In other words, he never undergoes a period of multilevel disintegration. Therefore, he neither is conscious of the complexity of his internal environment no sees himself objectively. He is incapable of either self-criticism or self-control.

    Hughlings Jackson,

    Mazurkiewics, died 1946, Polish psychiatrist, neo-Jacksonist.

    Joshua

    Being adolescent : conflict and growth in the teenage years / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson. BasicBooks 1984

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  26. Being adolescent : conflict and growth in the teenage years / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson. Basic Books Inc 1984

    This book is only so so. As in another Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi book I read they are using this Experience Sampling Method, which means they have got a class of 75 adolescents running around with these pager like things that go off sometimes. They have this stack of response forms which they are supposed to fill out.

    He wants to know how they spend their time, and with who, and doing what.

    This is not really a Gifted Movement Book, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is not really a Gifted Movement writer, but in some ways this makes it more interesting. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was a student of Dabrowski, and though he does not mention him in this volume he is clearly influenced by him.

    Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about Entropy: Disorder in Consciousness, as something faced by adolescents, and I think everyone.

    pg 19, “The tension between adolescents and the rest of society usually takes the form of a conflict between goals structured by instincts and buy values. On the one hand, a young person develops goals based on sexual desires, the need for dominance, for a social territory, for acceptance by peers. These urges are experienced as coming from the body, and therefore many adolescents accept them as their own, even though, as we have seen, this belief is based on an illusion, because instincts are geared to help the survival of the genes and not necessarily the welfare of the person carrying them.
    ”

    Csikszentmihalyi talks about Entropy: Disorder in Consciousness, at length, and in this he distinguishes himself as a follower of Dabrowski and the anathema of the Mental Health System.

    And it applies to adults just as much as it does to adolescents.

    Csikszentmihalyi also talks about Negentropy: Order in Consciousness. What he really means is self-oganization, inner direction.

    The 2nd law tells us that entropy is always increasing, never decreasing. But living things are self-organizing, so it looks like entropy is decreasing. It can be like this because living things can never be closed systems. They have to be be open systems, and it only looks like entropy is decreasing. Living things are more properly categorized as dissipative strutures. They are self-oganizing and they can be like this because they are not in thermal equilibrium with the environment.

    And then Negative Entropy or Negative Temperature, these are things that come up in some unusual non-equilibrium structure. What is important here is that our author is talking about some situations when adolescents in particular are clearly very highly self directed. And though he does not come out and say this, we have to keep the mental health system away from them.

    pg 23,

    “Regard of the specific activities, people mentioned a set of consistent elements that related to the optimal experience. They described profound involvement with their activity, which combined a loss of self-consciousness with deep concentration. The experiences was subjetively pleasing — compelling enough to inspire rock climbers to risk their lives — and at the same time required highly complex use of mental or physical skills. Many respondents used the word “flow” to describe the effortless buoyancy of the experiences.
    This state of consciousness we will call psychic negentropy, literally “negative psychic entropy.” It is a condition in which one feels whole and acts with clarity, commitment, and enthusiasm.
    ”

    (It is interesting, I and a friend used to talk about flow in exactly the same way that this author does. And to find the things you really should be doing, your life’s calling, you look for that flow. But I fear, I know that in adolescent or an adult, the mental health people would call this manic. And in a pre-adolescent child they would call it autism.)

    Joshua

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  27. Csikszentmihalyi talks about negentropy:

    pg 24,

    ”
    The elements of this state are opposite from those identified with psychic entropy. First, psychic negentropy includes positive feelings toward self and others: happiness, friendliness, and good cheer. This is a common part of adolescent experience, set off by a wink from a girlfriend, a good shot on the basketball court, or just the taste of spring in the air.
    ”

    To me, this author is extrapolating on what Dabrowski made he Theory of Positive Disintegration.

    Negentropy includes psychological activation, action follows without the need for thought or hesitation, a sense of energy and competence, intrinsic motivation, effective concentration.

    page 25,

    ”
    … it might make sense to conclude that negentropic experiences are incompatible with community order and the goals of development because they drain attention away from more essentially productive tasks. The is the reason for the puritanical aversion to enjoyment that is expressed by the Protestant Ethic.
    ”

    Joshua

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  28. I think that this Experience Sampling Method that Csikszentmihalyi is influenced by Dabrowski. He wants to know that the teenagers are thinking when randomly polled. There will likely be big mood swings recorded in that.

    Csikszentmihalyi sites lots of ongoing conflict with parents and siblings.

    pg 153,
    “But it is questionable whether the principle of postponing gratification really works as well as the so-called Protestant Ethic suggests. Quite apart from the fact that children who grow up in entropic families are likely to replicate the conflict in their own lives and spread it through their adult relationships, the question is whether one is justified in producing disorder in another person’s experience, no matter how lofty the goal for the sake of which the action is taken.

    Joshua

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  29. page 181,

    ”
    Apparently solitude, despite all its drawbacks, is an ecological niche that has some advantages of its own. The the main advantage is simply the other side of the coin of witchcraft; the great personal power that accrues to the sorcerer. It is as if people drew the conclusion that anyone who was able to pull away from the gravitation of the group must possess superhuman powers, and this belief, in itself, is he sorcerer’s power. Society attributes power to those who defy it even out our days, as exemplified by so-called charismatic leaders. Charismatic authority, as Weber suggested, derives from a person’s ability to disregard the rules of the system: “Pure charisma does not know any ‘legitimacy’ other than that flowing from personal strength” Weber 1924, p. 22). The point Weber did not make is that people pay attention to a charismatic leader, not in spite of his rebelliousness, but because of it. Anyone who presumes to hold authority independently of the social order will be thought of either as a madman or as someone with superhuman strength, because only such would dare to defy public opinion, the concentrated psychic energy of the collectivity. The act of defiant individuality attracts attention; it might eventually attract a following, and therefore gain actual power. Students who are loners in high school partake of the same ambivalent image. THey are often ridiculed and ignored, but sometimes they are secretly respected and envied.
    .
    .
    .
    In many preliterate societies, only persons who already differ psychologically from the rest of the tribe become involved with magic; they might be epileptics, albinos, or bearers of some other mark that sets them apart. Transition to the life of the hermit — feared and respected, but isolated — is easier for those who fail to fit the system in the first place.
    ”

    Joshua

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