Editorâs Note: This article, written by Heidi Tommila, was first published on our affiliate site, Mad in Finland.
The title of this article is from Jaakko Seikkula’s book Dialogue Improvesâbut Why? One subheading in chapter seven: “Psychological behavior is part of dialogue, not pathology.” I read the book last winter, but I’ve skimmed through it again a bit now and thought I’d write a few words about it.
In the book, Seikkula emphasizes, through its many twists and turns, that the most difficult mental health problems should be seen as an active activity of the mind in insurmountable stressful situations.
“What if psychotic behavior is not a “pathological state of mind”? In terms of helping, a more constructive perspective is to look at all the activities of the human mind in response to life’s events. Also, psychological symptoms are responses to life, not signs of illness. Often even the opposite: they show the mind’s active ability to protect itself in stressful situations.”
“Dialogical practice makes it possible to understand psychotic behavior as one possible response to an extreme stressful situation. Psychosis is not a psychopathological condition or a disease, but an active act of the human mind in an extreme situation.”
“Instead of viewing psychotic behavior as an abnormality of the brain or other psychic structure, it can be viewed as an active attempt by the corporeal mind to cope with extreme stress.”
“This is not a psychiatric illness, but a possible and necessary way for all of us to defend ourselves if we are in a challenging enough high-pressure situation. It is the mind’s active way of defending itself against insurmountable pressure.”
“The basic condition for everything is that the person’s experience is not seen as an illness, but as his active attempt to function under extreme pressure.”
Well, this is of course something quite different from what we are usually told. When I now type “psychosis” into Google, the search results refer to an illness, a mental health disorder, a state where a person’s sense of reality is disturbed, there are hallucinations, difficulties in distinguishing what is real and what is not.
Of course, the possibility of delusions cannot be completely denied. On the other hand, what is delusion and what is not? What is true? It’s not always clear-cut either, especially in the way that the Health Library takes a stand on this:
“Philosophers argue about what is truth, and history has bad examples of how the authority of treatment systems has been misused. In modern psychiatry, the problem of truth is approached very practically. It is usually not unclear when a person’s sense of reality has been disturbed. A psychotic symptom isâto roughly generalizeâa thought or sensation that feels real, which other people representing the same culture think is not true.”
And when I look at it from my own point of view, many of the concepts of prevailing psychiatry appear to be delusions, even with scientific grounds.
In dialogical practice, according to Seikkula, the narratives of a person who comes to treatment for psychotic symptoms, which appear to be delusions, are treated as experiences that could not be put into words due to the massive emotional upheavals contained in the experiences. And delusion as a word does not describe the matter at all, but instead we think that the person is talking about something important that really happened through them. The memories related to those experiences awaken with the experiences of this moment.
The stressful situation at this moment can remind you of the original terrifying experience to some extent, or the reminder can be from a very small clue, for example a similar emotional experience or the sensation of a smell or color. In this case, the body reacts according to some real traumatic event, but it manifests itself metaphorically as if it also happened in this moment. For example, a person may feel that someone close to him is threatening his life because he has a memory of an old experience of violence where someone really threatened his life.
However, this also gives me the idea that the possibility should be taken into account that someone’s life may have been threatened even closer to this moment, and not just in the past. This too could possibly appear as similar emotional experiences and reactions considered psychotic, as the reactions evoked by past experiences.
Seikkula writes that hallucinations have been said to be stories related to real events in life, which are accompanied by the perceived horror of death. And it would be very important to understand that the patient is talking, if sometimes more or less metaphorically, about real experiences, and not just consider them meaningless delusions. And through them, a person can get in touch with the traumatic experiences of the past for the first time; they allow these experiences to be put into words, perhaps for the first time in a person’s life. A person also has fewer opportunities to get to know their own experiences if their reality is not accepted. In addition, this weakens his chances of controlling his own behavior. Focusing on symptoms, seeing them as a disease or a disorder of brain function, and over-pathologizing problems often also weakens a person’s ability to manage their own life and integrate experiences.
I think it is quite aptly said when Seikkula writes:
“Respecting and listening to the other person becomes the main goal of dialogical work, while in psychiatric treatment the goal is often to find out ‘how crazy the other person is’ and what the family’s problems are, if there is any interest in meeting the family at all.”
For some reason, I think it wouldn’t be such a big change to start treating patients and their experiences like this. And what a big meaning that could have!
100% agree based on real life experiences.
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Yes — stress causes unique responses and possibly illness. We should do a better job of helping those suffering process the afflictive emotions and reduce suffering.
Here is a book that is on point: https://www.amazon.com/WOEBEGONE-autobiography-about-mystery-psychosis/dp/B0CDR3XRX6/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_2?crid=27Y0SC8VXMMWW&keywords=thomas+fay+wobegon&qid=1704751949&sprefix=thomas+fay+woebegone%2Caps%2C140&sr=8-2-fkmr1
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“Of course, the possibility of delusions cannot be completely denied.”, yes, they can be denied completely.
If a person is not presented evidence to the contrary that said belief is FALSE, no delusion can be diagnosed nor imputed.
That does not consider if evidence is convincig, satisfactory or beyond doubt. A caveat.
If that sounds abstract, take THE most common delusion: infidelity by a romantic partner.
No patient is ever, ever, presented evidence that the partner is NOT, not, not being unfaihtfull to the “believer”.
No “Evidence to the contrary”.
Never.
As such, no celotipic delusion attribution, diagnosis, “recognition” is ever possible in THAT case, under THAT condition: presentation of evidence to the contrary. With the caveat it might not be relevant, convicing, beyond doubt, safe, legal or moral, among others.
And yet, as far as I know it is the most common DELUSION diagnosed, and even if it is CONTRARY to the definition of delusion.
âWhat if psychotic behavior is not a âpathological state of mindâ?
It is not, calling it pathology requires an organic beyond doubt evidence it is in a organ, tissue or cell*.
Reminder: genes, metagenomics, organelles, etc., are INSIDE cells, therefore inside tissues, therefore inside organs and therefore inside organisms.
Just that specification, inside a cell, tissue or organ clarifies WHERE and HOW to search for PATHOLOGY.
I invite some readers to grab a book of PATHOLOGY and see what kind of “things” PATHOLOGY actually studies…
There were in my old days chapters of “psychiatry”, they were not convicing and still they aren’t. As part of PATHOLOGY.
I invite glancing at one book on PATHOLOGY, or general pathology more properly, and SEE what pathology actually MEANS in MEDICINE, not in psychology, PSYCHIATRY, HUMANITIES or everything else.
Let alone “internet”, WWW, or anything variant thereoff that sputters the word PATHOLOGY.
INCLUDING MIA.
People who do that: speak of pathology without appreciation of it’s meaning, history, practice, methods, AND ENVIRONMENT, among others, really, to my opinion haven’t grasped what pathology meant, means and more concerningly: why…
Psychosis is not hallucinations AND “difficulties” in understanding what is real what is not.
That is an interpretation. Distinguishing real from non-real is science.
Psychosis is delusions AND hallucinations, nothing more. It is a definition, NOT an INTERPREATION.
Not many people can do that, distinguishing real from non-real, EVEN when there IS a way to do that in a narrow, very narrow field like scientific hypothesis testing and prediction.
But most of life is broad and not subject to that kind of testing that very conclusively distinguishes what is real from what is not.
So outside science, scientific hypothesis testing and scientific prediction, that distinction, real from non-real is NOT subject to BEYOND DOUBT distinction.
In those other “areas” it is subject to interpreation, belief, dogma, faith, ideology, politics, etc.
Many beliefs like religious, philosophical, moral, legal, political, etc., love, hate, compassion and empathy are not subject to such rigorous testing. They are outside science, and therefore out of BEYOND DOUBT**.
And as logic demands, if true is NECESSARILY TRUE, it’s negation is NECESSARILY FALSE. And therefore NOT subject to THAT standard: beyond doubt. Hold on please, this is difficult…
And therefore they are FALSE. That’s why they are subject ONLY to belief, dogma, creed, ideology, religion, philosophy, etc. Science starts only from BEYOND DOUBT TRUTHS.
They are not true in a logical sense, and therefore they can’t be scientific, they are not beyond doubt***. Even if I can say: my son loves me, and that is true. And I love him!. And that is true too!.
That is why they are outside science and it’s methods. And therefore open to question, since they are NOT NECESSARILY TRUE.
Opened to interpretation, belief, dogma, faith, love, compassion, politics, IDEOLOGY, consensus, and, among others ignorance, prejudice, pseudoscience and HATE.
There is no sense of reality, that is non-sense, there are five senses that have a genetic, biochemical, molecular, celular, histological, etc., way of UNDERSTANDING them, and all THAT involves, in the scientific way, Thus there are the ONLY FIVE.
Now, if we mean sense in the sense of meaning something, of “it makes sense”, that is NOT MEDICINE. It is NON-SENSE when applied to DISEASE/DISORDERS. That’s why technical language exists: to prevent NON-SENSE, not to obfuscate it!.
If that sounds abstract I bring theses considerations:
All five senses have validated ways to see if a given sense is faulty, diseased, whatever.
That is taught to med students HOW to do for each sense.
That is absent to “sense of reality”, among others because it does not exist as smell, taste, touch, sight, hearing and propioception exist. Exist in the sense, hehe, ARE real. Yes, 6, not 5…
And they are ALL medically testable. “Sense of reality” is not. That’s why psedosciences test for “sense of reality”, and not real medicine does.
As for the rest of this MIA post, appreciative and respectfull, really: it is CULTURE.
To me, it speaks of belief, idea, TRADITION and dogma, and yes some science understanding on the NEGATIVE, respectfully, among others, about what to believe about the mess clinical psychology and psychiatry made of our ideas…
Of out our sense of BEING, and believing about being OURSELVES, about being AND believing among others like ourselves…
And that second half is more valuable to me than what psychiatry and psychology put to starting my tirade… centuries of it…
* There are multisystemic diseases that are “merely” funcional, but to be diagnosed, studied and, above ALL, recognized they have to express themselves in an organic way.
Take hypertension: it’s just a meassurement, it is multisystemic, but recognizing it as a disease requires KNOWING, not BELIEVING, it causes strokes, heart attacks and kidney failure.
THOSE are ORGANIC evidence hypertension IS a disease, because they are linked CAUSALLY in a scientific way to meassuring blood pressure outside “the norm”.
They really are, they are BEYOND DOUBT for that use.
That required science, real science, not dogma, ideology, CREED, belief nor corruption nor deception.
Even, specially, in the use of the word: PATHOLOGY.
** If they were beyond doubt, with qualifications, they would be part of science, real science…
*** The Godel theorem proves there are truths that can’t be deduced, paraphrasing, witihn the rules of the way of reasoning one uses. Well, those sort of truths, euphemistically: Godel truths are EVIDENT. They are, ironically, beyond doubt just by looking at them, without further ADO. I’ll leave at that, except neither psychology, psychiatry nor HUMANITIES have that: beyond doubt. Really…
… but that kind of makes that Godel theorem and THOSE truths scientific… Why was that?.
I invite the curious, willing and able reader, respectfuly, to check, if at all, THAT.
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this assertation leaves the millions of people with functional illnesses to die because their struggles cannot be detected with any of the 5 senses WE CAN CURRENTLY EXPLAIN.
You’re not factually wrong about the line of demarcation in scientific observation… but this comment seems to turn a blind eye to how many of the truths we hold self evident are just limitations of the average intellect and sometimes limitations of our current place in temporal reality. Not currently having the technology to measure a part of reality is not synonymous with that reality being false.
Moral of the story? If your concern re: someone else’s quality of life is that someone who’s being manipulative might get some resources they don’t actually need (so a trait of human nature we’ve never been able to control for… ever) then don’t be in a position where vulnerable populations are ever affected by your decisions. Because the people who should be making these decisions will do so from a place of concern for “we cannot let someone who may need these resources to live die needlessly, even if that means a few con artists get through”
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This is quite amazing: SO: when the mainstream method is drugging everyone in the asylum, when this actually correlates with a spike in mental illness rather than a lessening, the answer is to say that’s discriminatory against what the 5 senses can’t explain. And who is “psychotic?
And when science and the senses prove that these “medications” disable the brain by CAUSING a chemical imbalance, when they for an interim suppress symptoms, when after than interim statistically and scientifically everything gets worse (a chemical imbalance that wasn’t there before, more relapsing, more disability, loss of life expectancy, side effects used to tack on that its the disease when its the drugs same with withdrawal symptoms)….. this ALSO is then some discrimination against what the five senses supposedly can’t see (when in reality they can), it’s just there’s this fantastic ideology that a pill is going to fix things, and when they correlate with a spike in the problem rather than a lessening it’s discriminatory!? But denying what science, statistics and the five senses actually CAN see, this isn’t discriminatory, it’s only discriminatory when its an ideology that correlates with the spike in mental illness when truly looked at by what you dismiss as discriminatory.
And in the end the people that DO recover are then con artists apparently, because they actually recovered. So treatment is only treatment when it causes more of the problem in the long run!?
WOW! What all one can tack onto: “We are making headway,” or “the brain remains a very difficult organ to investigate,” and one can say that what science truly is pointing out, and statistics, and the five senses, this is discriminatory to this……
They used to think this about human sacrifices or animals or what have you (losing your senses with consumerism), the ideology that this appeased “The Gods,” or “God,” or who knows what, when someone didn’t believe this, and with their five senses didn’t notice any “improvement” on whatever, this was “discriminatory,” this was “delusional,” this was “crazy,” this was “non compliant” this was “dangerously rebellious,” this was this was this was…..
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It is not my assertions that leave anyone to die, it is the ignorance and lack of means, at least, of how to save them, and that is not my fault, and it has no causality to my assertions. It’s not an effect of it, it is not a result of it, not even a conclusion of my assertions.
“Not currently having the technology to measure a part of reality is not synonymous with that reality being false.”, it is false in the sense there is no proof it is true. Therefore it cannot be claimed it is true, and if it’s not true, then by necessity it is false. Excluded middle.
And that is important because then it can’t be used as a premise to argue from them, that requires IT to be true. So saying people will die if we do nothing requires proving that IS true in each and every case.
Medicine can do that in many cases, psychiatry and clinical psychology can not. They can’t prove anything because the truthfulness in a logical sense of their assertions is not necessarily true. And by excluded middle false.
No argument can be built with premises that are not true. Except in reductio. Like saying something saves lives to prove that it is true it does not, it’s negation. That it is false it saves lives.
But, rhetorically, something might be not proven and considered true, even self evident and be outside science. Not scientific but still be considered true OUTSIDE science. Like the love of God. All persons, human ones, are born free.
I am not talking about those truths in the colloquial or philosophical sense. Even in philosophy those can be true and ARE outside science.
Medicine is science based even if it’s an art. It has philosophy, epistemics, politics and ideology, which is part of my point not clearly stated. As it has, prejudice, bigotry, ideology, creed, fraud and hate. The whole works, in principle, of the non-scientific. Part of my point exactly, not clearly stated.
My comment is directed, has the intention, to see what is scientific in medicine from what is not. I was not negating that medicine, as human activity, has non science in it, nor that it shoud not. That ALL medicine should be scientific: no, I know that is not the case, and I believe it should not be wholy scientific.
But interventions that causally save lives require truths beyond doubt. Otherwise they are not causally linked to any positive outcome, they can’t be. Strictly speaking they can’t even be experimented without truths beyond doubt. They would be empirical findings without theoretical basis. Mere correlations from imaginary “constructs”, as such unreal…
Your last paragraph seems an attribution to my comment that I don’t follow it’s connection to. I did not say that and my intention was not to lead anyone to conclude that.
Someone needing care does not mean either care is available, it should be given nor that anyone has to provide it, among others. Particularly if that care is not causally linked to the outcome.
It would be forcing to give a treatment that is useless for the sufferer. No one can be obligated to provide that. But I am not a lawyer. And that is something psychiatry HAS to argue to be off the hook: their treatments in the aggregate are at least useless.
Or worse, as in psychiatry, that causes more harm than benefit, at great expense when meassured in the aggregate of all it’s victims. Even including those benefiting from it.
And in some places one cannot provide a treatment for the benefit of someone else. If a third benefits somehow, the other two thirds need to consent, at least, explictly that the benefit might or will accrue to someone else, like a transplant from a living donor. And even then, that might be forbidden as is the case of psychiatric treatment in Mexico: it cannot be given for the benefit of someone else. That leads to abuse and harm to someone who will not benefit, at least.
And it provides perverse incentives as in payed organ donation.
Again, I am not a lawyer, so the details, caveats, etc., of that I don’t know.
Thanks, I liked your comment. đ
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Thank you for being a voice of reason here! It is so dangerous having pseudoscience articles like this out there because these ideas can and do lead to death.
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I can of agree on the dangerousness of pseudoscience.
Leslie “Les” Ruthven, Ph.D. has compared, I think implicitly in a not clear way psychiatric treatment with bloodletting or was it leeches?.
From Peter C Gøtzsche, in:
https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2730/rapid-responses or https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2730/rr
“Antidepressants do not work for very severe depression either”
“Some meta-analyses have found that the effect of depression pills is larger if the patients are severely depressed … but the fact is that the pills do not have clinically meaningful benefit for very severe depression either…”
“Moreover, the apparently larger effect in severe depression is likely just a mathematical artefact…”
“Since depression pills double not only the risk of suicide but also actual suicides … THEY SHOULDNâT BE USED AT ALL. In contrast, psychotherapy HALVES THE RISK of a new suicide attempt among those at the highest risk, namely those admitted after a suicide attempt … ” Uppercase mine.
What PSG letter does not say is that antidepressants do cause murderous akathisia, even if “rare” or “very rare”.
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If you’re going to call this wonderful article pseudoscience, you would have to list how this method causes statistically death, when the ideology of disabling a person’s brain with substances that disable the brain causing a chemical imbalance, and then are touted as treating one, that this doesn’t correlate with the amount of death associated with it caused by 1) statistically more mental illness, more relapsing, more added on diagnosis also treated with more meds, side effects, withdrawal symptoms labeled as the disease when science points out the chemical imbalance came from the meds, and wasn’t there before; and then all of the death it causes (someone put on neuroleptics for “schizophrenia” in general loses 20 to 25 years off of the life expectancy)
2) You would have to open up the medical records of so many violent offenses, the ones you often see in the papers of inexplicable acts, where there’s one sentence: “the person was being treated for depression, or had gone to their doctor for depression,” and then rather than hiding whether psychiatric drugs were involved, actually having the information that’s withheld, you would also have to discredit the information that IS there but it has to FIRST be openly available not witheld for privacy concerns (the possible cause of mass shootings is not a privacy concern), you’d have to open the drug treatment for so many incidents involving mass shootings which wasn’t going on before the chemical imbalance ideology.
3) Instead of stating how there’s a spike in mental illness, which there is, and saying this needs more treatment with the mainstream method, you’d have to prove that the mainstream method, which correlates very strongly with the spike, not only statistically but scientifically regarding what it does to the brain, you’d have to prove that the mainstream method is a solution rather than what statistics show, that its correlates with the spike.
4) You’d have to actually have legitimate clear drug trials, not like with antidepressants where a)anyone getting better in the non control group the first week or so is taken out rigging the statistics for that non control group b)you’d have to count how many people had to leave the trial in the control group because of side effects, which in some trials was a majority c)you’d have to honestly tell the statistic of how many people in the control group, who had to get off of the medications had severe disabling side effects c) you’d have to from the beginning report that there were homicidal and/or suicidal thoughts going on , which there were, not suppress that, then when enough people were addicted to the drug after it was approve, first not report the reporting of such effects outside of the initial trials, but be honest from the beginning and then afterwards, rather than waiting to be forced to have a black warning label d) you’d have to not buy out cases that exposed the dangers of the these drugs, just because your drug companies have the funds to do so e) you’d have to require informed consent regarding the dangers and how the drugs don’t treat a chemical imbalance but disable normal functions of the brain that can seem disruptive, and then also say there are other methods that allow a person to relate to what’s going on cognitively and that this has greater recovery rates along with not making a person dependent on the drug companies to avoid withdrawal symptoms, f) you’d have to ALLOW a person in an asylum to say they don’t want psychiatric drugs, and allow the scientific methods reported in this article chance to show what they have already accomplished, rather than forcing a person on psychiatric drugs, and then labeling them non compliant, and disregarding how the drugs correlate with a spike in the problem in the long run…. g) in the trials you’d have to have them for antidepressants, NOT for an antidepressant and a sedative, and then act like it’s for the antidepressant, and beyond that not report the akithesia effect. h) you’d have to look at ALL trials for the drug, not just the ones that happened to be favorable, discard the rest, and do all of the other finagling I’ve detailed..
With neuroleptics, a) you’d have to have legitimate trials, rather than taking people, in the non control group, already on one neuroleptic off of it, counting the withdrawal symptoms as symptoms of the disease while not offering them appropriate support or even informed consent regarding what’s going on, and in the control group you’d have to give those already addicted to neuroleptics a different kind of neuroleptic but one whose action is enough akin that it prevents withdrawal symptoms.
b) you’d have to allow people who get themselves off of the neuroleptics or have never been on one, allow them the chance to tell their story rather than simply being dismissed as non compliant and not included with the statistics unless you can force them and say that helped c) In the trials where those in the non control group who already were addicted to the meds, when taken off then show signs of psychosis, you’d have to look further whether they did recover later, without the meds, and you’d have to look at whether those on the control group, said to have recovered, later got themselves of of the meds. d) you’d have to show that these meds don’t statistically cause more relapsing after an interim, e) you’d have to prove AGAIN the chemical imbalance theory rather than trying to attribute the chemical imbalance the drugs cause to the disease f) you’d have to allow therapists that CAN work with extreme states, rather than resorting to forced drugging when they can’t relate, and see whether this works, which outside of the mainstream method HAS been shown to promote greater recovery g) you’d have to look at what happens in countries where they don’t have money for these “meds” where even when the asylum setting can be more harsh than in the countries with enough money, there’s more recovery h) you’d have to actually LOOK at why the WHO states there’s more recovery in countries without the money for these “meds, i) you’d have to actually LISTEN to why the UN, with scientific and statistical evidence says that forced institutionalization in psychiatry is a human rights abuse….
ALL of those things would compromise a legitimate statement of pseudoscience, and that isn’t going on at all.
And if you’re going to go on about pseudoscience you’d have to prove that current medications, touted to treat a chemical imbalance actually do that, but that isn’t the case with grounded scientific data, it’s that they cause chemical imbalance, they disable normal functions of the brain, which for an interim disable normal functions and suppress symptoms, but in the long run cause more recycling of symptoms, and less recovery. And thus the spike….
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I tried commenting, it kinda failed the first time, but it says I already commented that!. Kind of when editing it after submit failed. Might have sounded off topic too…
My attempted reply:
https://pastebin.com/YUeBJLXi
Thanks, I liked your comment.
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Thank you for your time and effort in writing this. Mind you I had to reread parts of it a few times, but it makes sense to me. I could say “well, that makes sense to me and gives me a lot to think about!” Thanks again, Caroline
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Thanks, you made my day!.
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Yeah I get how things are not not not. I’m afraid this brilliant, dark and heavy work of philosophy may actually be the best basis for making an organic psychiatric diagnosis or even better, the best excuse from taking one on. The classic, I get all these delusions, hallucinations and false perceptions but I don’t believe them or rather, I only believe them rarely, when I’m well and truly convinced I’m staring down the barrel of that loaded gun [some metaphor], this song is about my life and yours, sadly it really does sound different after so many times. Again, only when things are not, not, not. Daughter goes through and deletes everything. Maybe it was self-defense. Now you can talk me up and half the time I’m bringing the room down in answer. At the end you say, stick ’em with drugs because you’re not thinking properly! Then you go on, nothing tinted, nothing tray, nothing glib, nothing I say… A scientific fact is a scientific fact, obvious from a mile away. Knowing you’re right about everything I try to be emphatically the opposite, knowing my feelings are sometimes, usually always better than that pathology you get so obsessed with. Otherwise I’m just sorry, at the end of the day I don’t want my feelings to get hurt. I can’t always help myself. Maybe they should just write the warning more honestly: “These pills might hurt your feelings.” Even I have to admit, they might also be the entire cure for our hypochondria. Therefore, if I take something that causes me pain, if I can’t save myself from that fire in time, hopefully later I’ll just say, no I didn’t like that, so maybe with enough help I can still do it again, before I’ve had enough. I hated that enough, it sounds hokey but maybe this is really always about learning to love ourselves better. I had lots more to say, would love to hear your reply.
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Dear dear souls I love you
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I’m not certain what point 27/2017 is trying to make. I would like to respond to a part of what I think is being said — that the area of psychology is not science and therefore cannot use the term pathology due to pathology referring to organs, tissues, etc. Thoughts, including hallucinations and delusions, occur in the brain, which is an organ. Due to the difficulties in studying thoughts in action as the neurotransmitters send their signals, we do not yet have the ability to use the scientific method to describe all brain pathology accurately. So psychology has come along and, using the scientific method as far as it can go, has methodically studied humans and their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, which are all physical, employing organs, tissues, senses, etc.
None of the sciences are 100% accurate. Which, I think, is why it is important to consider alternate ideas and theories. My own hallucinations and delusions are the product of trauma and, to some extent, are based on real events in the past and some from extreme stress in the present. What might be considered a delusion could be my brain’s way of trying to protect or even heal itself.
I think I may read the book.
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When a psychopathic patient is put into an fMRI machine, subtle physical structural differences can be seen in the organ when compared to those who are not diagnosed with a mental illness. So how can you say psychology isn’t a science when it has to do with the physical functioning and structure of the brain just as much as it does emotions, like stress from certain environmental stimuli, and the resulting behavior, or the symptoms of mental illness. Lastly, you stated that psychology can’t go further in science, yet you stated that we don’t know everything about any science, especially exactly how the brain works. So if there’s more to learn about EVERY science and we don’t know much about the brain works (and the resulting emotions and behaviors, or aka the field of psychology) how can the scientific method not apply to a field that you said we know little about? The scientific method can be applied to almost any problem in any discipline in any field. Therefore, unless we know EVERYTHING about a subject, which you said we didn’t about psychology, why wouldn’t the scientific method apply to psychology if there’s still problems to be solved and new information to be discovered?
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Perhaps a narrow funnel constricts. Fiction writing and some poetry enters more deftly into the arena of psychology herein explored. Perhaps widening perception, not to be confused with drugging.
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Psychology is a humanity, like social sciences, literary analysis, etc., not a science. And there is the tendency to change “sciences” in those fields by “studies”, social studies, mad studies, latino studies, women studies, etc.
There are empirical fields in psychology that try to be “agnostic”, like old behaviorism based on the minimum of stimulus-response. But they have no scientific theory behind them.
Not everything can be studied scientifically.
One strong requirement is for it to be falsifiable, that is could be disproven by experiment or logical reasoning. That requires knowing how the thing to be disproven works, otherwise it can’t be disproven, even if in practice lots of experiments on it can show it’s an unfertile ground for experiments.
In that sense and cases it is abandoned, like many “theories” of personality, drapitomania, homosexuality, hysteria, neurosis, etc. Those were not disproven, as far I understand, were abandoned.
Hysteria and neurosis were proven to be unfalsifiable and therefore pseudoscientific. All Freud’s ideas except the slip of the tongue were never confirmed with experiments, and no experiment could disprove them, they were pseudoscientific and unfalsifable.
With heavy speculation on my part, the mind would have to be studied directly, to be made objective to make any correlation with the brain, since all we can in principle observe directly is the brain.
In that sense the mind has the same problem as studying scientifically the soul: neither mind nor soul can be studied directly. And the mind, unlike the soul, has to be studied indirectly through the brain.
Any inference between mind and brain, the mind-body problem, would need studying the mind directly, otherwise false inferences could not be disproven, they would be unfalsifiable.
The mind as conceived now also has the problem that the omnipresence of god had: it is all over the brain. And omniprescense had the problem of time: god had to be across all time. And know it all, and do it all.
That lead to contradictions in reasoning about the christian god. The mind is not even pinned qualities that allow such reasoning as in the case of the christian god. It’s worse than the medieval arguments about the attributes of god, those were only 3 qualities and were relatively well defined.
The attributes of mind, human mind are not defined as well as omniprescence, omniscience and omnipotence. And are probably more numerous than just 3. Even if god loves us all, is a creator, etc.
Psychology and psychiatry in it’s original meaning meant “soul”, not “mind”, that’s a 19th century evolution of the word, I think.
Then there is this pseudoscience of psychology/psychiatry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_principle
“the reality principle (German: Realitätsprinzip)[1] is the ability of the mind to assess the reality of the external world, and to act upon it accordingly”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_testing
“People exhibiting limited reality testing might lack the insight and ability to distinguish between the external and internal world as a factor of psychosis. For example, hallucinations and delusions are often taken as signs of a failure of reality testing.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7355917/ :
“Accordingly, sense of reality (SoR), the ability to discriminate between true and false perceptions, is a central criterion in the assessment of neurological and psychiatric health.”
Three different concepts speak of the same thing. Two developed by Freud.
But Ferenczi was a psychoanalyst and in 1925 we wrote this “Stages in the development of the sense of reality.”:
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-21557-004 or https://doi.org/10.1037/11350-004
“The sense of reality attains its zenith in Science, while the illusion of omnipotence here experiences its greatest humiliation: the previous omnipotence here dissolves into mere “conditions.” (Conditionalism, determinism.) What we may conceive about the phylogenesis of the reality-sense can at present be offered only as a scientific prediction.”
Prediction in science requires a scientific theory of beyond doubt facts that are general, falsifiable, etc. That has not happened in almost 100yrs, at least.
It is true scientific knowledge is incomplete, but it is enough to describe the reality accurately that is in the science books, and make predictions, accurate ones from them. So, incomplete is not insufficient. In short, simplifyng, real scientific knowledge is incomplete, but it is sufficient. Cars, airplanes, computers, spacecrafts…
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You are right, I had trouble after rereading my comment and yours remebering what was my point. đ
It happens a lot to me.
In a narrow way my point was that the most common belief diagnosed as a delusion, celotipy, is diagnosed without fulfilling the definition of delusion. And therefore it cannot be diagnosed thus, and the diagnosis of a delusion of celotipy can be denied, repudiated, discarded on those bases.
What I not argued:
In a broader way, perhaps most “delusions” do not fit the definition of delusion: holding a false belief despite evidence to the contrary. Since the most common one never does fit the definition.
Only those that by it’s nature are impossible could be diagnosed thus. But one would have to argue, prove, present evidence, to establish it’s impossibilty, and that can’t be done with things that can’t be proven wrong, like all non-sciency, sort of. Even if I claimed they are false being not necessarily true.
Delusions are an inversion of probatory burden by definition: One needs to prove something false.
Science says something is false until proven true. đ
I don’t have to prove a scientific paper is false, the authors need to prove it is true. It’s the mythical “show me the body” of skeptics. It’s told a lot in skeptics talks and discussion.
In practice patient’s, sufferers, have to prove they are right, contrary to the definition of delusion.
And even then, when impossible or way unlikely, can be wrong:
As far as I remember, even delusions of persecution sometimes could be correct, true beliefs. From several reviews in psychiatry at least 1 in 500 individuals with delusions of persecution in “paranoid disorder” are true beliefs, recognized retrospectively. And that seems to be the experience of some psychiatrists: it happens the delusion even if improbable is true.
There are other considerations, but I think I went too long on this one, and veering into off topic. Like reality testing inducing false belief because the victim is never told that the voice coming from a turned off radio was part of a “test” ordered/administered by a psychiatrist. And psychiatrists don’t talk about those reality tests enough, I think. They, as far as I infer do simulate hallucinations as part of reality testing, that can lead to delusions, but I might be wrong on that one. They won’t talk about it explicitly, at most, as in many other situations, will say something along the lines:I don’t do that, we stopped doing that, or I have not heard anyone doing that.
Even if it is a good explanation for some patient’s experience. It sounds conspiranoic, delusional, I admit, but it explains my experience, so I am biased, and of some folks that go into ray control stuff, new world order, mk-ultra, etc., from their published/posted accounts. When reality testing gone wild might explain at least a number of those experience that sound delusional, even hallucinatory.
But I am not saying “hallucinations” should be discarded. Only delusions when they don’t fit the definition. But arguing that to a practitioner might unleash worse things on the patient, saddly.
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That’s why they use the sense of reality fabrication: to avoid presenting evidence, that is by definition objective since anyone can see it, evident*, and use the subjectivity to say someone is deluded, even psychotic because he/she/x can’t reason properly. He/she/x “lost” their sense of reality.
* Evident: “Easily perceived or understood; obvious. synonym: apparent.” “Obviously true by simple observation.”
As 1+1=2, or 1+1=3 is false. That is evident, obvious, the rest, as far as I understand, as when it requires an argument is not.
An argument is not true simply by looking at it. Only claims could be. Conclusions are not obvious since they require an argument. Premises could be. Some premises are not, as when they have to be proven false by reductio ad absurdum.
After all building an argument requires work, thinking and writing, and that can’t be done just with the physical eyes alone. The third eye, spiritual eye, the soul, might, but I don’t know about that, even if do believe in intuition, even revelation, even in epiphany!. đ
And evidence is not always evident but languages do evolve, unlike psychiatry, it spins around it’s own delusions, already proven wrong.
As in the use of delusion.
But I think that evidence in an argument has to be evident or else the argument is incomplete. It requires arguing for the evidence before the final proof, the final argument.
In an argument any and all statements have to be evident, that’s why mathematical arguments can run into the hundreds of pages. To prove each “step” is evident. And that can and goes wrong.
I digressed again didn’t I?. đ
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I really appreciate the insights of this essay. Unlike most of my colleagues, I very much enjoy working with psychotic patients and I have always felt that what they are saying is extremely important. My notes will contain details of the delusions, because to me they seem critical to the patient experience. Most nurses are content to write patient presents with delusional thought content. But how many times do you need to look into the eyes of a terrified woman asking you “Where is the girl that’s being raped? I can hear her. I can hear her” before you know that something terrible happened to this woman that might be helped in part by hearing her.
I remember when I was still in nursing school, and a patient with psychosis came up to me and said I need my tail. I need my tail. I started to ask him what he needed his tail for, when a mental health tech turned to me and said don’t encourage their delusions! However, the patient responded anyway and said I need it for balance..
That made perfect sense to me. Weirdly, they ended up threatening him with an injection if he didn’t go back to his room, so I asked if I could just sit and talk to him, which they allowed. We watched a couple of episodes of late night comedy together while chatting and then he went to sleep. I became suspect. Until I came to work at My current facility where the staff are humane and compassionate and non-hierarchical with the patients and the boss expects us to spend time talking to our patients, I was always suspect at the facilities where I spent time talking to patients and most of the other nurse wanted to pass meds and then use the rest of the shift to plan their vacations and order the wardrobes required for them.
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Sometimes not answering or not answering appropiately to a comment, particularly if it’s a question is a form of psychological agression: the silence treatment.
It is recognized by current psychology thus, as a form of interpersonal violence of psychological type, and yet seems to be standard of care of delusions. “I am ignoring you if you say that”.
So, in a way, it seems psychological violence in at least one form, is standard of care in psychiatry.
Threatening is another, coercion is another.
What scientific or medical merit has saying that if one does not shut up one needs treatment in the case you narrated?. Particularly if it reflects the need to have a human connection, even if it were in the form of a false belief.
It would be punishing, attacking, a need that is to be encouraged in people who suffer from delusions and hallucinations: to have a bond with others, to talk to others, to engage with others. And as such atrocious and reprehensible, even from the medical stance. What if the need of connection stems from a need to save one’s life?. But it’s expressed clumsily or without skill?. To name a few…
It creates a barrier to actually ask for help. Many if not most physicians and health care workers know that is among the worst thing one can do: prevent someone in need to ask for help. Like putting a cannon, a warning, outside the office: only truths in this office are allowed, punishments will be severe, threats abundant, every time, with no exceptions, no redress and no due process. You’ve been warned.
And that need, that right to connection has requirements for its excercise, like not being offensive, not being aggressive, etc. But I doubt the requirement for it to be truthfull is a requirement for the excercise of that right that annuls the obligation of a health care worker to fulfill it, to guard it and promote it’s growth.
But I am not a lawyer. But to me it does not look like an ethical, moral or medical question, but a legal one.
And the way society handles false beliefs is precisely by talking them. Not always with the desired effect of abandoning false beliefs, but it beats by miles arguing about them by one’s lonesome, my voices might disagree, but what do they know!, they are biased and have an incentive not be be alone!. Who is going to talk to them if I dont?. đ
And in fact, forcing someone to think without feedback about one’s false beliefs can lead to more delusions, not less. Particularly in impoverished and abusive environments.
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Thank you!
I was sectioned months after suffering head trauma from a construction accident, affecting my head and thoracic spine. I was on Prednisone and under overwhelming stress, weeks after our second daughter was born. While at physical therapy, my wife and I had to rely on unreliable family members, as she was having spinal tap headaches any time she sat up. When I was home, I wanted to do all that I could to prevent her from getting headaches, and to keep our 2 week old baby from getting medicated through breastfeeding. Sara had eaten organic food as much as possible during pregnancy for Ellie’s sake and it killed us to see our baby acting so lethargically when Sara took the painkillers. In the hospital, Ellie was staring into my eyes and I was watching them change colors. But at home with the headache meds getting into her system, she slept 20 hours a day and wouldn’t open her eyes much. Having to rely on narcissistic family members to take care of Sara while I was at physical therapy magnified the stress. It was ground zero minus one.
When I was home, I had been slipping mentally, walking and talking in circles while trying to keep Sara from needing to get out of bed. I thought it was just anxiety that I could push through, like at work. I didn’t realize that I was becoming manic and after 2 weeks with little sleep and overwhelming stress, I had a hallucination that I thought was real. I panicked and alarmed Sara who had to explain to me, once she realized what was going on, that it wasn’t real. I agreed that I needed to be hospitalized and being an OT she knew that I was going to be sectioned.
My second hallucination happened that night in the Hospital and I woke up to myself screaming and banging on the door of my room. Thankfully, I realized that if I didn’t calm down that I would be drugged. My biggest fear was that I was losing my sanity and wouldn’t find my way back.
Having an intelligent conversation with a compassionate person in authority calmed all my anxiety and I was able to sleep without meds and submit to the process. I was so afraid and still am of being stigmatized with a mental health sickness. I missed Thanksgiving with my wife and 2 daughters but I wanted to get healthy so they could feel safe with me back home. After 5 days I was released without a prescription or clear diagnosis. I kept the details of my situation pretty private, only wanting people to know about my physical recovery.
All this happened 7 years ago. It was my first and only manic experience and hallucination until just four weeks ago. If I hadn’t been through a similar experience before where a caring and competent therapist was able to talk me down, I wouldn’t have been able to regulate my behavior when it occurred, this time while at work at a new company.
I’m waiting for a call back from a psychiatrist and have begun online behavioral therapy after seeing my primary care so that I can take the steps to see what is going on.
I apologize for this inappropriately lengthy and detailed comment. Writing it out was therapeutic for me but when I began to respond to your comment I didn’t intend to go so deep. That being said, I don’t know how else I could clearly describe how critical your perspective is to patients like myself who fear the stigma of a mental health disorder diagnosis and how badly I wanted and needed someone like yourself who was willing to listen rather than drug me up. Outwardly I’m a successful first responder and I’ve learned how to switch gears to push through anxiety to get my job done. But to truly be strong, I have to stop hiding from these experiences and talk through them to undo the trauma that my brain is trying to process and I think conversations on this topic can free people like me to seek the help we need from people like you and become healthier and more helpful community members, husbands and fathers.
And for those patients who are in regular contact with you, it must mean the world to them to have someone who cares enough to listen and understand, especially if their story doesn’t sound as justified or rational as I try to present mine. People like you are the true heroes, doing the right thing, not for self image but because it’s the right thing to do and you have a heart of gold.
So thank you and God bless you.
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Seikkula thinks like a poet, or perhaps his clients think like poets and Seikkula thinks like a literary critic? He reminds me of Laing.
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Considering that we do not experience reality directly, but interact with it by way of a statistical model of relationships that we’ve built up in our heads, it’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that we are _all_ living in separate delusions.
However, I agree with the general idea that all behavior (whether adaptive or maladaptive) is designed to serve a purpose and that, at least in the absence of physical neurological issues (in other words _intentional_ behavior), even maladaptive behavior is just normal behavior inappropriately applied or applied to an inappropriate degree. Carving out specific situational exceptions and calling those behaviors something else (like a disease) is not helpful.
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Grateful to the Writer for this Article!!! I have always become “suspect” (to respond to another person’s reply,) when I treat people with love and respect and that INCLUDES LISTENING REVERENTLY AND non-critically or non-judgementally, for goodness sake!!!!! Since I enter each situation withe premise that i KNOW NOTHING!!!!! I am more apt to hear the Truth and Grace of what a person is trying to say to me. IT MAY JUST SAVE MY LIFE!!!!! Or that of someone else!!! That person has JUST Graced me with their Divine Truth and Wisdom!!! It appears we are all suspect who dare to do so, if in the wrong (read emotionally or spiritually/psychically TOXIC) group, where the decks are stacked against us. Conversely, being in the RIGHT emotional climate can be VERY POWERFUL in furthering our goal of Loving People exactly as they ARE.
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I have to say that understanding the trauma from my youth. What caused the anxiety so extreme that I wasn’t even aware I was anxious, that the “psychosis” or “schizo-effective response,” was truly a coping mechanism. Many times when push came to shove and I would have had to listen to my own inner quiet voice, given how this had been received with tirades, malicious abuse by my father (who is a psychologist), I in the end couldn’t follow my own thoughts anymore, although they would present themselves through the subconscious or unconscious means of “psychotic reactions.” Paranoid fears and/or extreme critical thoughts reflecting the harshness of the abuse I had encountered. Or quite profound spiritual and metaphysical things happening that one also can’t talk about, as little as I found responsible resonance with my thoughts from a father that supposedly was a “psychologist.” It’s taken me years of mostly being OK, then going through an episode that could be called psychotic, and being OK again. Not really knowing what went on, not understanding. Knowing the “medications” wouldn’t be a good idea, still not knowing what was going on. Then starting to understand, noticing that I would have started smoking or drinking too much coffee, but only in a muted way understanding the emotional cause. Then finally my father got to be so old he moved out of the city to be taken care of by a sibling. I’m still quite baffled how utterly subtle it is what puts one into such a state or not that can be called “psychotic,” although in reality it’s simply a reaction. Same as a limp which needs to heal. Even more baffling is the UTTER discrimination in society. From psychology, from psychiatry, from social institutions, from the legal system, from the government, how its allowed to be portrayed in entertainment or the media, and then the “drug” companies.
In the meantime, during the intervening years, simply being someone that openly has been going through this process, simply walking around in the city I’ve been in the whole time since being on disability, simply being “one of those crazy people,” and beyond that being open about memories of having been this name I use (Vaslav Nijinsky), to find that this is talked about to such an extent (and it’s such a hot topic for entertainment, roles that actors want to get involved with), that two of the top actors having portrayed “schizophrenics,” who can come into this city where there never are paparazzi, and apparently hear about me, they start referring to me as “Nijinsky.” They never actually talked to me about such memories, or even what I was going through, but this was some “cool” thing, along with quite a bit of presumption. While actually being quite disturbing as little as they understand or know about what’s going on, despite the roles. And then there’s another actor who did such a role, also ameliorating the asylum system in an unrealistic way, and the female side of a couple that since have divorced and are all over the news, one of which was the other of the two referring to me as “Nijinsky” (as is the other “actor”), I couldn’t walk through a place, a restaurant downtown without hearing from her: “That’s the guy that I-won’t-mention-his-name was crying about.” Because as an actor he had touched upon the phenomenon, and as art goes it became intertwined with his emotional responses to life, saw me, and…….. while the movie HE also made wasn’t realistic at all. That’s THREE top billed actors having portrayed “mental illness.” There’s someone else that I could mention, come to think about it, a lady, quite a bit older than the other guys, but she also did a movie and I remember seeing her on TV at the time going on about how so many are diagnosed and untreated, ameliorating AGAIN the very chemical imbalance theory that correlates with the spike, NOT with recovery.
I’ve figured it out, actually. despite all of that.
The anxious response to something can be quite subtle. I think everyone has been so anxious that they think they just have to do “something.” This also is a big mind control method used all of the time. Make people think they are under attack or that there will be repercussions, and you can gain control over them, make them think all sorts of stuff. Imagine that effect of just thinking you have to do something, without knowing you are anxious, or having the ability to navigate through to what you are anxious about, or even knowing you are anxious. This ends up being real subtle, also. Any conditioned responses can be affected by this. How you pick up a cup, how you type, what you decide to put in your stomach, what thoughts you take a moment to entertain or consider or not…..
How many times is the media full of something to get the populace to think SOMETHING needs to be done, and then comes the spoon feeding? How many times it there the response to decide someone’s thinking is wrong, and needs to be altered, whether it’s by parents, by schools, by religions, by the government, by social patterns, by the economy etc?
How much actually is denying that the thoughts came first? It’s not what you’re thinking, it’s that thing out there, it’s that problem it’s something outside of you, and then comes the spoon feeding again…..
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We can make a patchwork quilt of all these ideas and the multiplicity is the making of meaning, in which case the meaning is never fixed, it changes according to who is casting their gaze upon it, and so the quilt is transformed into a kaleidoscope.
Sensible to remind ourselves we are delusional to some degree because we construct, construct, construct, individually and socially, constantly. What is the difference between a social construction and a social delusion? Norms. Which themselves are constructs.
Can a construct be non-delusional?
Agree too that the poetry innate to madness is always apparent, and then psychosis is a synonym for absurdity. Which do you prefer? The art of Dali or the psychosis of the Bedlamite. Both are encounters with art, both invite construction of new insights, or the death of old ones.
A poem sits on a page and an artwork stains a canvas. Psychosis has agency. It is art on the move, art with a human forum. It is art in process, not quite resolved to interpretation, as it is unravelling, as opposed to static. It has a beginning, middle, perhaps an end, yet none can be decidedly defined. Art has all three and thus is safe, yet dangerous, yet safe.
Psychosis as absurd or abstract art, as encountered metaphor, poetry in motion, is frightening, and challenging, and countercultural, because it has no limits, or limitations, or even reliable predictiors.
A novel has an opening sentence, a closing paragraph and a set number of pages. Most importantly: an author.
Who or what is the author of psychosis?
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So wouldnât a similar pathological experiential process like Ibigogaine, Ayuhasca, Psilocybin, LSD (possibly different because synthetic) work like the psychosis being referred to in article? It seems like other worldly hallucinations grandiosity religiosity life/death all show up consistently. So are people experiencing psychosis in an altered state as one might experience taking the other?
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My most psychotic episodes were honestly just language spewing from my mouth with no internal filter. These so-called psychotic edisodes closely following the most stressful experiences of my life, after being expelled from 8th grade, and after losing good employment at the Post Office, respectively.
To say that “A Psychotic Experience can Help to Process Difficult Memories” is like telling me that water’s wet. Whenever I’ve taken the time to process my most difficult memories, my friends and family tend to perceive that I’m rambling psychotically and suffering from an incoherent thought process.
Thank you, publishers and contributors of Mad In America. Your writings are rays of sunshine in a cloudy, cloudy land.
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Exactly
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For context sake I wanted to clarify that my first comment was in response to the thoughtful insights of Laurie Lee and then to Missouri Guy, if anyone cares to know.
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This is truly incredible. Diagnosed with acute & reoccurring PTSD I can relate to this so much. It would be amazing when those instances occur, of a flashback that blurs the line between time, space & reality to be just heard. I can think of occasions where I was, ones where I was not. The events which continue to trip me up the most are certainly those to which my experience has yet to be validated by a listening, empathetic ear. This article helped introduce me to a radical thought leading to further understanding of my own struggles. Thank you so much for covering this !
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I have recovered myself from multiple ACE’s doing exactly what this article is talking about. My consultant thinks I’ve done extremely well with my way of doing things, and she is the big cheese of the mental health department of my local hospital, so I’m trusting her assessment! Maybe it only works in Finland because of the overall additional layer of safety written into the culture with its exemplary social welfare system. It’s not perfect by any means but it’s a front runner for sure
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I whole-heartedly agree, through personal experience, so happy to see this coming to light!
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Thank you.
As someone “suffering a mental illness” I get so frustrated by the popularly accepted (and completely incorrect) “truth” that these “illnesses” are intrinsic flaws.
That medications are the cure, not something that should only be used temporarily until the source is actually discovered and cured.
Sure some people are too injured to ever really function without meds again, but the prevalence of anxious and depressed people being thrown on heavy neurotransmitter-altering drugs with permanent side effects to simply raise their tolerance for what these emotions arose to either protect them from or encourage them to make changes about…
Antidepressants should be banned in all but the most severe cases. But they’re thrown at people like candy to shut them up and keep them exploited.
People consider depression and anxiety mental illnesses, intrinsic, but they’re not. They’re as temporary as emotions if the source is removed. They only become chronic when people accept them as flaws of their own mind, take the pills, and keep living with the external situation that depressed or worried them so severely.
The only “genetic” factor is passed along through generational trauma and learned coping mechanisms.
I can’t speak to psychosis, but I believe ANYONE can have a psychotic break. You accidentally kill your child, etc. Any situation could trigger it. There is no genetic predisposition. There is the level of support a person has. Some are more vulnerable.
It was just so good to read someone else knows the truth. Being in a depressed state does NOT warrant personality and sexuality altering drugs. (Nobody knows how ssris work. They alter neurotransmitters. 80% of people on the suffer a sexual dysfunction as a side effect, from mild to severe). Losing your job and feeling hopeless in a bad economy does NOT warrant such a violent attack against your body when the cause of the depression was NEVER intrinsic or physical. Some effects of these drugs are permanent; they alter your chemistry. There’s never even a guarantee they carve out the “problem” emotions.
Someday they are going to be viewed as soft labotomies. A quick and easy method to avoid dealing with the problem and shut the hurt person up by destroying who they were. And at such a low level of distress as Anxiety or depression.
I applaud the psychologists who view conditions for what they are. Who see the truth.
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