We Should #DropTheDisorder Because….

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Around the Web: Allies of adisorder4everyone.com share their reasons why we should “Drop the disorder!” in a promotional video for the AD4E annual online festival on Friday, November 8.

“A description cannot cause itself, but we’re treating it as if it can.” Prof Sami Timimi

“Once labeled, a person’s story is so often obscured, it’s hidden, and sometimes it’s completely negated.” Jo Watson

“We should drop the disorder because, I’ve come to see that this is a soul’s journey, and the disease/illness model does not heal at the level of the soul.” Mitzy Sky

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5 COMMENTS

  1. As long as we don’t drop the idea that something has gone wrong with the social process that has produced the modern Western phenomena of both psychiatry and mental health, and remember that it is this social process that conditions our brains, conditions all our thinking and life activities, sets the horizons for all of our experience, fills our heads with all the useless and contradictory paraphanalia of our culture, and conditions us on how to judge ourselves and other human beings, even though it is the social historical process that manufactured us all out of the very same perfect stuff called Mother Nature. What else turned us from nature into the human beings we are today besides the accumulation and development of social forms through time including all that which conditions our brains and makes our lives what they are? You can’t blame Mother Nature for the car industry or Donald Trump.

    So dropping the disorder doesn’t take us far at all. In fact it denies the frightened socially conditioned and traumatised human being any kind of way of understanding and seeking help for an intolerable and perhaps life threatening psychological and emotional environment. The ONLY solution is uncovering the whole story from root to branch, which is an investigation on how perfectly healthy children are destroyed by the social process, which implies an investigation of the social and psychological terrain of each of our societies. If we loved our children more then anything else we would have done already. We discover the actual social and psychological terrain only through selfless and unprejudiced enquiry into what actually is. I have done this myself and I know obviously anyone can. But those who have grave or profound psychological or emotional experiences or traumatic complexes are the only ones who can really connect all the factors behind mental health which meet only in one place in the universe: in their own consciousness. Only they have access to this phenomena and unprejudiced awareness of it is the only means to understand the whole sequence and movement of the phenomena. Probably no-one in the world has ever yet managed to do this perfectly but I did it imperfectly and understood what you call psychosis and trauma better then any so called experts I ever heard. Because I discovered what everyone should and anyone can discover. Whatever I am, I am the fact, I am the actual, I am the truth, and so are all other people. The truth cannot be a judgement or interpretation of me or another: the truth can only be what I actually am, and only I can see that. As soon as I put it into words or interpret what I am I have turned perceptual insight into something else, namely a socially conditioned articulation or interpretation, and this latter is not the fact, and only distort facts. All my previous knowledge, conclusions, opinions and all other forms of social conditioning can only distort the perception and understanding of the phenomena of one’s own conscious mind and existence.

    I said probably no one has successfully observed and understood without prejudice or interpretation the whole of their psychological problems successfully but people have observed and understood their ordinary socially conditioned minds and this process is called meditation, and leads to a going beyond the socially conditioned mind entirely. This a psychosis can help you to do, as can all the psychological distress of a crushingly meaningless and destructive social existence. They call it ‘waking up’ today but they are dreaming that they are waking up, because they still all live in thought or, in the case of Eckhart Tolle, is indistinguishable from all the other political, social, economic and spiritual vampires that feast on us all in order to make themselves rich and seem important and harvest esteem and energy from the gullible sycophants who fall for him.

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    • I think this was a very well written and helpful comment. Thank you. The spiritual teacher I have found most helpful is Thich Nhat Hanh, the wonderful Buddhist monk and scholar who has now passed. I love his older whiteboard talks on YouTube, and one of his many books that I find precious is simply called “a guide to walking meditation”.

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      • Thank you. He was a lovely guy and I too read one of his books, but I have come to the truth of human consciousness and can see he too, as almost all ‘enlightened beings’, which he himself never claimed to be, were still nonetheless confused human beings. How can I possibly say this? I grant that Jiddu Krishnamurti, Sri Ramana Maharshi and the Buddha had a truly enlightened CONSCIOUSNESS, and that this consciousness WAS the truth. But the human being is the vehicle for consciousness, not consciousness itself, and the spiritual consciousness, in penetrating to deeper and deeper levels, is not an individual. The brain in your head is not your brain. It is the apple that fell of an ancient human tree, and that tree is the thing that needs to become enlightened, that body and brain and nature. The CONSCIOUSNESS can discover the truth but the whole body and brain and nature needs to be transformed by that truth, and that transformation is not individual: it requires spiritual consciousness to penetrate these levels IN HUMANITY AS A WHOLE. This is the only reason spiritual people and enlightened people have always said I am not important, the body is not important, my body is just a horse etc etc etc. This the brain had to believe, because if it saw the truth it could not stumble forward. The truth is unspeakable to the human mind because of it’s delusions, ignorance and false understanding, so I will not speak it today. But basically, the body and the brain has never truly been enlightened. The consciousness manifested the one singular truth of existence which is itself, but we have to wait for the whole of humanity to catch up before we can make the body and brain fully transform. And the human part of me (which is ignorant) just wants to say that in it’s estimation, in the estimation of this human brain, death will be unecesary because death is part of the process of evolution which includes the whole of society. Death is the result of the war of all against all based on ignorance. Once understanding and illumination is complete there is no war, no negation, and therefore perfect peace. And then even the body can live forever. It’s truth. I know this from many experiences. When I was possessed by a determined good consciousness I went 7-9 days (my memory seemed to suggest 9 but the intellect in it’s conservatism said at least 7) without eating, and I had more energy and health then normal and I didn’t seem to lose any weight at all. The only reason I started eating was a combination of an extent boredom and staff at my hostel coming on heavy and persuading me to eat, which was not hard in the context of such excruciating boredham. But I saw clearly the independence of spiritual energy from biological energy in this process. And there has been at least two well docimented cases of Indian yogis who claimed not to have eaten for years being monitored in a hospital setting without food. They said they got their nutrition from sun meditation or some other spiritual practice, and in one case the yogi lasted over a year with just water, and in another it was 15 days WITHOUT water (. Here’s quick citations: https://www.spacedaily.com/news/food-03d.html and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prahlad_Jani. The thing is you will only see socially conditioned human brains talking or writing about this stuff, which has no value. You have to discover these things otherwise it is belief, authority, not fact. So I can’t remember at all what I was going to say but my point is that in true freedom from all authority, if we are committed to the truth the truth manifests. If we follow anyone at all we are saying they know, I don’t, therefore I must listen to someone who does know. But truth is in seeing the actual, not believing what people say, and this I feel even Thich Nhat Hanh never understood, but neither do most who claim enlightenment. The Buddha and the other great teachers said we need to be a light unto ourselves and trust no-one, to see and perceive the fact directly. Who teaches this today? No-one. This is the only reason I wouldn’t look up Thich Nhat Hanh again, although I did really love the beauty of the one book I read some years ago.

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  2. I’m in two minds about the schizophrenia noun and am up and down about the bipolar noun.

    I’ve watched as psychiatric nouns and popular psychology have infiltrated the culture to a point now the language is so normalised, so acculturated, that to attempt to convince people to dispense with it looks like a bigger ask than ever before.

    In the last 5 years the explosion in self-appointed experts on Narcissism has been breathtaking to witness. About ten years ago we were being warned of the burgeoning explosion in narcissism as a pathology. Now we are at risk of being overdiagnosed by our friends, workmates, our lovers, and casual acquaintances on the internet. Also, I have learnt, these days, when a narcissist sniffs a potential whistleblower, they will often accuse them of the very thing they are about to expose.

    My giddy Aunt!

    The problem is… that despite all the noise and all the errors, people I believe are genuinely experiencing a shift in the psychology of others towards narcissism. And it’s confusing because many of our most valued people, particularly our entertainers, are despairingly narcissistic.

    At the risk of alienating the remaining 3.2 individuals in the Mental Health activism sphere who have a good word to say about me…

    I believe before we drop the disorder, we really, urgently, desperately need to address the characterological problems that are grouped by nouns, because losing those nouns undermines our ability to reference and talk about modes of being that are causing havoc in all of our communities, in some way or other.

    Happy New Year!

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