Very good article and interview, we need more like her.
I understand what you say about the parallels between Catholic confession and psychotherapy but the institution of confidentiality to me has much more to do with Protestant ideas about privacy and private property (i.e. legal constraints on personal experience); also the one-on-one parallels the Protestant emphasis on an individual relationship with Jesus more than Catholic practice(s).
And the over-emphasis on childhood and childhood experiences originates with Freud who was not Christian.
You mean they would have done it if asked nicely? (Also keep in mind much of the time it’s Europeans and their descendants who do this themselves, not outsiders.)
Why not? Once it scales up and *if* medical costs in this society come down it can become more affordable (perhaps if states realize they’re actually saving money this way they would offer grants, also other parts of the country except for the West Coast and Florida aren’t as expensive as the Northeast).
At the same time neglectful social conditions do not cause disease in and of themselves, rather they allow for the spread of disease(s). (My fear is that the equation of politics with medicine will lead to a tyranny by doctors [rather than big business or demagogues] something that we already arguably see by psychiatrists and Big Pharma and may be a part of what anti-vaxxers sense and are pushing back against.) (The greatest form of patronizing power plays can be sometimes be doing things unilaterally because it’s “good” [for the other person]).
Yes as well but my point was that the name the facility goes by is not “Grace Brook” as the op seemed to suggest. (I don’t think they were implying that only programs run in that building have value.)
“In recent years, Birch says, she’s been approached about starting potential new Inner Fires in Texas, Northern California, Detroit, elsewhere — but right now, all she can do is focus on the one in Brookline.”
It would be great if there were some way to coordinate the people looking to start these kinds of places in other parts of the country!
fyi Grace Brook is the name of the stream and the farm where the facility is located but it goes by the name “Inner Fire”
I think it depends on how you define adaptive, yes a broken arm is not functional but the reaction of the body (swelling, bruising, sending white blood cells to kill off potential infections are adaptive even if they don’t feel or look good [in the context of so-called mental illnesses these are the things which get called symptoms and medicated away, in the same way in which anti-pyretics reduce fever whereas fever arguably restores health by increasing the body’s temperature to the point where certain bacteria can’t survive {so that by cooling the body you might make yourself feel better but it allows the illness to continue longer than it would have}]).
I don’t know which is worse, the fact that researchers fabricate data or the fact that the field doesn’t go back and refute them after it’s discovered (this kind of thing also gives credence to those who say that the research behind vaccines is bogus of course).
Well the cure I was referring to in this case was getting rid of all drugs (presumably apart from those with a clear medical purpose), not using psychotropic drugs to “treat” human misery.
I am no fan of the expansive long-term use of psychotropics but the decades-long radical failure of the so-called war on (recreational) drugs has created far more problems than it has solved in my opinion. Perhaps prescribing of legalized drugs needs to be made much more restrictive, but (for now) trying to simply ban them runs the risk of creating resistance and kickback (not to mention accusations of Scientology).
If you feel that the culture is the problem, as you indicate, I think you need to offer something more nuanced than simply an outright ban–such approaches throughout history have generally failed and/or created problems of their own (e.g., the rise of organized crime during Prohibition).
Again it’s just a word (“sociologically”) and doesn’t need to be read into too much (the very basis of sociology as a discipline, by the way, is *not* looking at issues through an individualized lens).
I agree that Western society is over-medicated but saying that the flow of all drugs needs to be stopped absolutely to me sounds like when people say that religion is the scourge of humanity and needs to be eliminated which in practice means imprisoning, torturing and/or killing believers (so that the cure becomes worse than the disease).
Removed for moderation.
Just use the word “sociologically” or something else than, it’s really not that important.
And why do you still think the drugs themselves are still the problem? It’s people’s relationship to them, and what drives them to use in the first place, that counts no matter how much you demonize the external object.
(Responding to rebel above, no reply box for some reason):
I’m not saying that anecdotes have no values, but they’re not the best way to understand issues collectively. Yes if thousands of people come out of the woodwork with personal stories that challenge the conventional narrative then it needs to be reexamined but by and large the epidemic of people deranged by psychedelics never took place (and it’s not done by experiments, no one gave LSD to participants and then calculated how many of them went crazy; it’s done by analyzing data on emergency room admissions correlated with the drug that caused the crisis; yes it’s imperfect like all statistics are but that’s how it’s done to get the bigger picture and not just listen to personal stories–people can have just as strong biases on their own, for example after completed suicides where the physical evidence is incontrovertible those around the deceased will insist they had not been suicidal, generally to assuage their own potential guilt).
(The story about returning Vietnam vets is well-known; any modern textbook on drug abuse will describe how branches of the American government were terrified of armies of heroin-addicted vets roaming the streets of American cities but it never happened, something that the disease model of addiction cannot explain.)
And *everything* affects the brain, including all positive (and negative) life experiences. Caffeine is the most widely-used drug in the world (half of all adults on the planet use it daily iirc) and is addictive, do you propose banning that as well because it changes the brain? (The brain is much more “plastic” than previously thought in any case).
The damage done by the so-called war on drugs is just as real, probably more so (especially for communities of color which have been systematically targeted by law enforcement despite having lower rates of drug use than the white majority) than the problems wrought by addiction/dependence (many of which are the by-product of criminalization and/or social/economic factors, not the substances themselves).
Your friend hurting himself is not a myth but it is anecdote (meaning not generalizable).
And addiction is not even the paradigm that should be discussed as it is not the physical properties of the drugs themselves that matters most contrary to popular belief (e.g., the many thousands of American soldiers who returned from Vietnam hooked on opiates who simply stopped when they returned; the issue is dependence which is slightly different). Another example is that the studies on crack babies did not disaggregate other factors which had greater explanatory power, for example the fact that pregnant women who smoked also had poor nutrition, didn’t go to prenatal counseling, etc.
Marijuana may indeed be damaging but it’s *how* someone uses drugs that determines their harmfulness, same as eating white bread or overexercising.
(I agree that the media has downplayed the dangerousness of certain drugs but those tend to be the legal ones, not the criminalized ones such as psychedelics [whose danger is usually exaggerated]. Plus when you talk about “ridding the world of drugs” in practice that can mean getting rid of the people who use or sell them, in which the cure can be worse than the disease [in the Phillipines nowadays for example people sometimes kill people they don’t like and then claim they were a drug dealer]. For the record I don’t even drink caffeinated coffee.)
Interesting article; I think there’s a lot of hidden depression and trauma among athletes (especially former athletes).
I wonder, have you ever tried Feldenkrais?
She doesn’t delve into over-reifying PTSD and specifically addresses the split our culture often induces between the body and mind…and you have no idea what she did before or how she made time for her (compulsive) exercising…sounds like you need to do a little trauma work yourself before going after people under the pretense of asking provocative but valuable questions.
(Maybe you just didn’t actually read the whole article?)
Perhaps (although if we believe in neuroplasticity it’s important to clarify whether we’re talking about permanent non-reversible changes or not) I was just addressing the perception that things like LSD (which I thought the OP was implying) are so dangerous that often lead to psychotic breaks in their users (they don’t, like probably all illegal drugs their image has been crafted deliberately with heavy doses [no pun intended] of fear-based hysteria).
I’m not sure that psychedelics actually do cause brain damage; stories about people going on a bad acid trip and never “coming back” from what I’ve read turned out to be largely myths created by the media, similar to things like “reefer madness” and the putative crack baby epidemic (which never actually occurred).
P.S. I don’t use any mood-altering drugs myself, so I’m not trying to defend their recreational use for personal reasons.
What was the lower limit of the confidence interval for the NNT? Is there a rule of thumb about what kind of figures are considered acceptable?
“I am a psychiatrist and I have been watching my profession deteriorate for many decades.”
At the same time I am not sure that when Dr. Breggin started practicing psychiatry wasn’t grossly paternalistic, implicitly pathologizing and culturally oblivious (which isn’t much better).
I think it’s an exaggeration to say they are “in lockstep”; most psychologists in my limited experience dislike psychiatrists and are partially locked into the biopsychiatric model because of how health insurance reimbursement works.
Who do you think is doing the telling, and what is their method of getting so many others to do their bidding?
Or it’s something like groupthink or simple convenience (many print journalists simply paraphrase articles from other sources out of sheer laziness for example).
People on the left tend to support biopsychiatry because they think it’s the humane, enlightened thing to do (as opposed to condemning people with problems and telling them to figure it out on their own, similar to telling poor people to get a job and stop asking for handouts).
Rosalynn Carter because interested in mental health because her only child Amy developed a mental illness while in college back when her husband last held political power forty years ago.
Ironically some of them will accuse you of being a Scientologist as well.
I’m not sure if it makes me feel better or worse that northern Europe (land of Bernie Sanders’ democratic socialist utopia) has similar institutional forces pushing the biopsychiatric model onto the population (as opposed to just the U.S.).
Another danger is I think that many people in the media even without a personal connection think they are being “good liberals” by pushing the medical narrative because it removes blame and stigma as opposed to more explicitly moralistic conservatives narratives (although at what cost, and does it really even do the latter or does it merely shift the “problem” to something intractable?)
Maybe the researchers have their own reasons for doing it this way; the proposed study sounds a lot easier as a place to start than someone generically proving that mental illnesses in general have adaptive value.
I’m not so sure, first off if you believe that mental illnesses have adaptive value (as I do) then the concept of depression starts to become problematic in the first place (it is less of an illness, let alone a disease, as opposed to a coping strategy which isn’t very effective in its current form).
So you can still locate the source of dysfunction largely outside the client while helping them find new and different ways of conceptualizing and responding to their stressor; it’s a fine line but that’s the nature of the beast; I don’t think things ever really break down into distinct categories without interplay between them (i.e., over here is your problem, over there is you, over there is your coping strategy, etc.; they all influence each other).
Saying that something like depression is adaptive is saying that it is not a brain malfunction (and therefore doesn’t need to be fixed); it is *not* saying there is no external stressor (that should be removed), in fact it asserts it implicitly.
Sounds very interesting, hope they perform the study and publish it.
Most therapeutic communities have “step-down” facilities which are a bridge between themselves and full independent living. The brain also has an amazing ability to rewire itself (neuroplasticity) and there is also a danger of over-reifying things like identity as an addict as the article points out. Blaming life circumstances can indeed be a practice in avoiding responsibility, but if as you say all addiction has a basis in early disturbance, then that is a life circumstance (although in the past). You can’t say someone’s problems are caused by life experience, and then turn around and say blaming life experience is a copout, no?
There are different ways of defining the term “drug”; some people think it only applies to mood-altering substances which are illegal, some only to things which are prescribed by medical professionals, and some to anything based purely on its effects on the mind/body.
Well we can pick and choose our discussions; having a factual economic discussion doesn’t mean we can’t also talk about whether people are too quick to reach for drugs to make themselves feel better (having said that, centuries ago people arguably ingested much greater quantities of alcohol on a daily basis).
Yes of course there is an underground industry in South America of sending drugs to North America and Europe but even including estimates of it in GDP it’s nowhere close to being the basis of the economy.
No South American country comes close to “having an economy centered around selling drugs to Americans”; this is pure hysteria/hyperbole.
If people are thinking for others by choosing not to think for themselves, doesn’t the description lose all meaning? (If it encompasses everything everyone does at any given time, what’s the point?)
Well they called themselves communists and/or based their policies on the teaching of Marxism-Leninism, that’s good enough for me (saying they were “only” socialist and/or “imperfect” is like saying the U.S. isn’t “really” capitalistic because it has policies like Medicaid, Social Security, and so on.
And all of those “oppressive situations” (some of which directly caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people) targeted specific ethnic groups in part, regardless of whether they fit a textbook definition of racism or not.
Strictly speaking you don’t disprove a hypothesis, you either find evidence to reject the null hypothesis or you don’t.
How do you see nationalism as endemic to liberalism?
At the same time many communist regimes have been institutionally racist in practice (if you take communism as the opposite of capitalism): China towards the Uighurs, Soviets towards ethnic Germans (who were many of the “kulaks”), Chechens, Kalmyks, and others, Vietnamese towards ethnic Chinese (so-called boat people) and so on.
Can you say more about why you think nationalism was originally liberal in nature?
Interesting article, as for me it calls into question the fact that mental health norms may be overly skewed towards female paradigms (in medicine it’s usually the reverse).
Also smuggles in a more supra-individualistic political perspective which the U.S. for one needs (in my opinion).
In any case as Nietzsche said: “Some people talk about themselves as a way of avoiding themselves.”
Sounds about right.
From the same place you developed a personal culture of skepticism?
Just because an idea can be misused does not mean it has no conceptual validity
Have you ever tried living in a foreign country? It will clear up your confusion around the concept of culture pretty quickly.
Do you have a current way of accept donations?
Sounds fascinating; I think there needs to be some marriage of the psychoanalytic and neuroscientific perspectives which doesn’t regress into medicalization; I just wish the book didn’t cost >$100 at Amazon.com!
The problem with that theory, once you get to know the reality of some people diagnosed with schizophrenia, their perceptions aren’t necessarily wrong.
Sorry to hear, you deserve better.
The tragedy is that she probably could have gotten better care at one-tenth the cost if there had been a crisis respite facility in her area.
Sad that she passed, maybe even sadder that someone like this is so unique that they need to be written about this way (shouldn’t all counselors be like this?).
The mind is stronger than just chemicals in the brain, what a surprise (not).
I’m actually a huge critic of genetic research, my comment (which I didn’t make very clear) was that proponents of favoring environmental variables sometimes extend their beliefs into realms where it doesn’t apply, specifically gender (yes gender roles are overly rigid in Western society but the radical egalitarianism born of popular movements during the modern era does not fit with the genders, insofar as equality is defined as sameness).
Eventually people need to start realizing that the “blank slate-radical environmentalist” position has its own socioeconomic agenda just like reactionary elites (the latter want to preserve their privilege, the former require a philosophical-scientific basis for deconstructing “to the manor born” ideals so they can seize power for themselves).
Well if they’re well-treated and allowed to socialize normally with other monkeys there’s nothing inherently malevolent about simply watching them learn is there?
Interesting article, although I thought there was going to be more on how the program ended (defunded by proxies for biopsychiatry?)
You are right.
I don’t think you really read or understood the article, it’s critiquing how the diagnosis of PTSD has been used and taken over by vested interests similar to what you are saying.
My impression was that many 12-step groups don’t approve of psychotropic drugs because they see them as another form of substance abuse though?
Also, the “advancement” from labeling something like alcoholism a disease rather than a moral failing is that it allows the person to externalize blame and thereby avoid the trap of constantly accusing the self and/or finding fault with themselves.
I’ve never heard that ADs “cause” alcoholism, do you have references for this? I don’t think it’s ever as clear as saying one thing causes a complex behavioral phenomenon like alcoholism anyway.
In those cases it sounds like it would obviously not be recommended.
Crisis respite houses, mental health courts and deescalation training for all LE!
I think it depends on who is funding the campaign, I agree with your description if it’s coming from Big Pharma but there are consumer groups like NAMI who genuinely believe in what they’re doing, for better or worse.
Individualism is not automatically at odds with mental health, in fact something like “building character” could be seen as a very individualistic endeavor. (There are just as many people who abuse substances in collectivistic societies, I would guess).
(I agree that awareness campaigns are largely symbolic but “individualized” treatment isn’t a bad thing, this just means tailoring solutions to people instead of imposing cookie-cutter solutions; it’s not simply defining all pathology as purely personal. [I’m with you 100% things like supported housing, peer support, etc.]).
Agree that “awareness” campaign feel hollow and meaningless to me, but I also noticed a subtly Marxian assumption that the antidote (and opposite) is simply improved material conditions…yes having a better job with better wages and benefits and less stress would help a lot of people’s mental health, but it’s not the only way (there could be direct government involvement in a way that actually helps–crisis respite houses, Soteria houses for longer-term issues, peer support training and groups, supported housing and employment, etc.).
I’m not sure of how you then prove the existence of said “recording process”, or well-done studies that have shown participants remembering things they were not previously conscious of (how is that tested? Maybe they simply forgot they were conscious of them previously, for example.)
Agree 100%. The problem lies, in my opinion, with 1) those who uncritically adopt the medical model thinking it makes them humanitarian and enlightened to do so, 2) the implicit Calvinism in Anglo-American culture; it always seems to find a way to reframe things in moralistic and punitive ways, and 3) regnant neoliberalism, which always seems to favor technological solutions which can be monetized.
Seems promising, gets rid of the rigidity of the categorical approach which overly reifies the linguistic trap of saying someone “has” a (singular) mental disorder.
The argument is that remembering and recording are not as separate you are saying.
I don’t know what methodology was used; they could have asked participants to indicate which images they remembered by pointing to them, for example.
The research is there, you’re free to believe whatever you want (or not).
If you reread the article you’ll see that it references studies that show people from different cultures recognize different objects, outside the medium of language.
That’s a different argument then (“wokeness” *is* different from cultural relativism) and we’ll have to agree to disagree if you think culture is irrelevant.
I was making a point, if people are spiritual beings but still need language, then why would they also not need other facets of culture to understand one another?
I think most psychological research nowadays (could be wrong but that’s my impression) shows that memory and interpretation of experience are virtually the same thing, and that memories can be easily manipulated (both created and expunged, and not just in “ordinary people”).
While any movement or ideology can be misused by some of its proponents, that doesn’t automatically negate its underlying principles.
In any case it still doesn’t make any sense in reference to this article, as it’s merely about how certain cultural values and/or practices influence the formation of memories (and only references DSM diagnoses in the context of saying how people are more likely to get diagnosed when their style of mnemonic focus conflicts with their host society’s).
That is not “woke”, “woke” would be saying that the Western way is inferior/defective; the author never does that or implies that it should be done.
(But I agree that pushing cultural sensitivity doesn’t mean the pseudo-scientific nature of the medical model should be overlooked, in fact I think that the DSM should itself simply be seen as a cultural artifact.)
I think Nietzsche once said something like: “When historically accurate memory and self-image collide, self-image wins.”
I don’t think you understood the article; it had virtually nothing to do with the DSM.
I wasn’t being.
How are you defining Western civilization? (Religious or secular? Most psychologists are not religious I would imagine. Also, nowadays most psychologists might be more on the side of *over*reporting child abuse [think of the false memory syndrome in California in the 1990s]). (I agree with you that we should not be exporting biopsychopharamcology to the rest of the world.)
The article lists several examples of how memory works differently depending on the participants’ cultural background and it has nothing to do with “wokeness”.
To your point, if people are spiritual beings not tied to any individual culture, could you (re)write your comment in such a way that it can be understood by all humans and is not tied to any specific language?
Removed for Moderation.
Interesting, especially the part about people with PTSD and whether their culture was more individualistic or collectivistic.
@snowyowl
“Because if matter can exist in paradox: a particle & a wave…”
In this particular case I think you’re talking about light not matter, and the shortcoming may lie in the conceptual categories (particle vs. wave, some physicists have begun using the portmanteau “wavicle” for this reason).
@l_e_cox
Of what, common sense? Most people think that humid air is heavier than dry air, for example (it’s not, it’s lighter).
Many psychiatrists do like to prescribe drugs for life, but that’s not the same thing as “killing a cure”. And it’s not really doctors that are inventing diseases or at-risk categories/syndromes, it’s the pharmaceutical companies.
(And don’t get me started on people who claim to have cures for everything; it’s a fallacy to believe someone is honest just because they’re mistreated by the mainstream.)
(But I agree the system needs a reboot and is wholly too focused on profiteering.)
I agree that psychiatry needs to be much more transparent about its shortcomings, I’m just also asserting that the methods of the natural sciences may never be adequate to understand/explain human beings and their experiences.
Science is often scientism in reality but common sense is also full of fallacies.
I agree that science has been way overextended to areas where it doesn’t belong, but saying “nothing is science” makes no sense.
I don’t understand why anyone continues to fall for physicalist treatments for psychological disorders (this drug isn’t addictive, this treatment has no long-term side effects, etc. etc.)
I’m saying it’s not really realistic to ever have a “workable technology” that controls/predict human behavior 100% of the time.
I’m not sure that the rest of medicine takes its cue from psychiatry, traditionally the rest of medicine does not even consider psychiatry to be a real medical (sub)field.
Also I think the big money is not really is “killing” (or failing to develop) cures for diseases (you would actually become rich and famous for curing them) but rather inventing and/or creating disease categories which are chronic and uncurable to begin with (e.g., defining people as “at-risk” for developing diabetes and prescribing them preventive pills). (Almost everyone is “at risk” for multiple disorders, part of being alive means you’re at risk of dying lol.)
These criticisms do apply in other fields but in other parts of medicine that there is a much stronger element of external validity compared to psychology; also other fields are not as inherently difficult to fit into an empirical model, nor do they tend to have as many confounding variables.
Even quantum science nowadays acknowledges that there is no such thing as neutral-free observation, even of things like atoms and quarks.
Why should it be possible? Human beings are not things in the same way that circuits are.
I’m not a huge fan of CBT but it’s not simply “trying to reason with people to change their behaviors”, at least not when done by a skilled practitioner (but I agree that there is an irreducible element of mystery to life and people, although I’m not sure parapsychology would be my first choice of dealing with it at that level.)
My sense is that most universities list it as a social science, not as part of the humanities (and many people in psychology try to pretend it has the same external validity as something like physics or math).
(The problem is not that there is anything wrong with the sciences, but with a fish that claims to be a bird.)
Maybe the difference comes down to what you see as primary objective of psychology–if it is to understand (predict/describe) human behavior you are correct.
If it is to help people in psychological distress, I don’t know if the natural science model of so-called objective observation is appropriate.
Very good article and interview, we need more like her.
I understand what you say about the parallels between Catholic confession and psychotherapy but the institution of confidentiality to me has much more to do with Protestant ideas about privacy and private property (i.e. legal constraints on personal experience); also the one-on-one parallels the Protestant emphasis on an individual relationship with Jesus more than Catholic practice(s).
And the over-emphasis on childhood and childhood experiences originates with Freud who was not Christian.
You mean they would have done it if asked nicely? (Also keep in mind much of the time it’s Europeans and their descendants who do this themselves, not outsiders.)
Why not? Once it scales up and *if* medical costs in this society come down it can become more affordable (perhaps if states realize they’re actually saving money this way they would offer grants, also other parts of the country except for the West Coast and Florida aren’t as expensive as the Northeast).
At the same time neglectful social conditions do not cause disease in and of themselves, rather they allow for the spread of disease(s). (My fear is that the equation of politics with medicine will lead to a tyranny by doctors [rather than big business or demagogues] something that we already arguably see by psychiatrists and Big Pharma and may be a part of what anti-vaxxers sense and are pushing back against.) (The greatest form of patronizing power plays can be sometimes be doing things unilaterally because it’s “good” [for the other person]).
Yes as well but my point was that the name the facility goes by is not “Grace Brook” as the op seemed to suggest. (I don’t think they were implying that only programs run in that building have value.)
“In recent years, Birch says, she’s been approached about starting potential new Inner Fires in Texas, Northern California, Detroit, elsewhere — but right now, all she can do is focus on the one in Brookline.”
It would be great if there were some way to coordinate the people looking to start these kinds of places in other parts of the country!
fyi Grace Brook is the name of the stream and the farm where the facility is located but it goes by the name “Inner Fire”
I think it depends on how you define adaptive, yes a broken arm is not functional but the reaction of the body (swelling, bruising, sending white blood cells to kill off potential infections are adaptive even if they don’t feel or look good [in the context of so-called mental illnesses these are the things which get called symptoms and medicated away, in the same way in which anti-pyretics reduce fever whereas fever arguably restores health by increasing the body’s temperature to the point where certain bacteria can’t survive {so that by cooling the body you might make yourself feel better but it allows the illness to continue longer than it would have}]).
I don’t know which is worse, the fact that researchers fabricate data or the fact that the field doesn’t go back and refute them after it’s discovered (this kind of thing also gives credence to those who say that the research behind vaccines is bogus of course).
Well the cure I was referring to in this case was getting rid of all drugs (presumably apart from those with a clear medical purpose), not using psychotropic drugs to “treat” human misery.
I am no fan of the expansive long-term use of psychotropics but the decades-long radical failure of the so-called war on (recreational) drugs has created far more problems than it has solved in my opinion. Perhaps prescribing of legalized drugs needs to be made much more restrictive, but (for now) trying to simply ban them runs the risk of creating resistance and kickback (not to mention accusations of Scientology).
If you feel that the culture is the problem, as you indicate, I think you need to offer something more nuanced than simply an outright ban–such approaches throughout history have generally failed and/or created problems of their own (e.g., the rise of organized crime during Prohibition).
Again it’s just a word (“sociologically”) and doesn’t need to be read into too much (the very basis of sociology as a discipline, by the way, is *not* looking at issues through an individualized lens).
I agree that Western society is over-medicated but saying that the flow of all drugs needs to be stopped absolutely to me sounds like when people say that religion is the scourge of humanity and needs to be eliminated which in practice means imprisoning, torturing and/or killing believers (so that the cure becomes worse than the disease).
Removed for moderation.
Just use the word “sociologically” or something else than, it’s really not that important.
And why do you still think the drugs themselves are still the problem? It’s people’s relationship to them, and what drives them to use in the first place, that counts no matter how much you demonize the external object.
(Responding to rebel above, no reply box for some reason):
I’m not saying that anecdotes have no values, but they’re not the best way to understand issues collectively. Yes if thousands of people come out of the woodwork with personal stories that challenge the conventional narrative then it needs to be reexamined but by and large the epidemic of people deranged by psychedelics never took place (and it’s not done by experiments, no one gave LSD to participants and then calculated how many of them went crazy; it’s done by analyzing data on emergency room admissions correlated with the drug that caused the crisis; yes it’s imperfect like all statistics are but that’s how it’s done to get the bigger picture and not just listen to personal stories–people can have just as strong biases on their own, for example after completed suicides where the physical evidence is incontrovertible those around the deceased will insist they had not been suicidal, generally to assuage their own potential guilt).
(The story about returning Vietnam vets is well-known; any modern textbook on drug abuse will describe how branches of the American government were terrified of armies of heroin-addicted vets roaming the streets of American cities but it never happened, something that the disease model of addiction cannot explain.)
And *everything* affects the brain, including all positive (and negative) life experiences. Caffeine is the most widely-used drug in the world (half of all adults on the planet use it daily iirc) and is addictive, do you propose banning that as well because it changes the brain? (The brain is much more “plastic” than previously thought in any case).
The damage done by the so-called war on drugs is just as real, probably more so (especially for communities of color which have been systematically targeted by law enforcement despite having lower rates of drug use than the white majority) than the problems wrought by addiction/dependence (many of which are the by-product of criminalization and/or social/economic factors, not the substances themselves).
Your friend hurting himself is not a myth but it is anecdote (meaning not generalizable).
And addiction is not even the paradigm that should be discussed as it is not the physical properties of the drugs themselves that matters most contrary to popular belief (e.g., the many thousands of American soldiers who returned from Vietnam hooked on opiates who simply stopped when they returned; the issue is dependence which is slightly different). Another example is that the studies on crack babies did not disaggregate other factors which had greater explanatory power, for example the fact that pregnant women who smoked also had poor nutrition, didn’t go to prenatal counseling, etc.
Marijuana may indeed be damaging but it’s *how* someone uses drugs that determines their harmfulness, same as eating white bread or overexercising.
(I agree that the media has downplayed the dangerousness of certain drugs but those tend to be the legal ones, not the criminalized ones such as psychedelics [whose danger is usually exaggerated]. Plus when you talk about “ridding the world of drugs” in practice that can mean getting rid of the people who use or sell them, in which the cure can be worse than the disease [in the Phillipines nowadays for example people sometimes kill people they don’t like and then claim they were a drug dealer]. For the record I don’t even drink caffeinated coffee.)
Interesting article; I think there’s a lot of hidden depression and trauma among athletes (especially former athletes).
I wonder, have you ever tried Feldenkrais?
She doesn’t delve into over-reifying PTSD and specifically addresses the split our culture often induces between the body and mind…and you have no idea what she did before or how she made time for her (compulsive) exercising…sounds like you need to do a little trauma work yourself before going after people under the pretense of asking provocative but valuable questions.
(Maybe you just didn’t actually read the whole article?)
Perhaps (although if we believe in neuroplasticity it’s important to clarify whether we’re talking about permanent non-reversible changes or not) I was just addressing the perception that things like LSD (which I thought the OP was implying) are so dangerous that often lead to psychotic breaks in their users (they don’t, like probably all illegal drugs their image has been crafted deliberately with heavy doses [no pun intended] of fear-based hysteria).
I’m not sure that psychedelics actually do cause brain damage; stories about people going on a bad acid trip and never “coming back” from what I’ve read turned out to be largely myths created by the media, similar to things like “reefer madness” and the putative crack baby epidemic (which never actually occurred).
P.S. I don’t use any mood-altering drugs myself, so I’m not trying to defend their recreational use for personal reasons.
What was the lower limit of the confidence interval for the NNT? Is there a rule of thumb about what kind of figures are considered acceptable?
“I am a psychiatrist and I have been watching my profession deteriorate for many decades.”
At the same time I am not sure that when Dr. Breggin started practicing psychiatry wasn’t grossly paternalistic, implicitly pathologizing and culturally oblivious (which isn’t much better).
I think it’s an exaggeration to say they are “in lockstep”; most psychologists in my limited experience dislike psychiatrists and are partially locked into the biopsychiatric model because of how health insurance reimbursement works.
Who do you think is doing the telling, and what is their method of getting so many others to do their bidding?
Or it’s something like groupthink or simple convenience (many print journalists simply paraphrase articles from other sources out of sheer laziness for example).
People on the left tend to support biopsychiatry because they think it’s the humane, enlightened thing to do (as opposed to condemning people with problems and telling them to figure it out on their own, similar to telling poor people to get a job and stop asking for handouts).
Rosalynn Carter because interested in mental health because her only child Amy developed a mental illness while in college back when her husband last held political power forty years ago.
Ironically some of them will accuse you of being a Scientologist as well.
I’m not sure if it makes me feel better or worse that northern Europe (land of Bernie Sanders’ democratic socialist utopia) has similar institutional forces pushing the biopsychiatric model onto the population (as opposed to just the U.S.).
Another danger is I think that many people in the media even without a personal connection think they are being “good liberals” by pushing the medical narrative because it removes blame and stigma as opposed to more explicitly moralistic conservatives narratives (although at what cost, and does it really even do the latter or does it merely shift the “problem” to something intractable?)
Maybe the researchers have their own reasons for doing it this way; the proposed study sounds a lot easier as a place to start than someone generically proving that mental illnesses in general have adaptive value.
I’m not so sure, first off if you believe that mental illnesses have adaptive value (as I do) then the concept of depression starts to become problematic in the first place (it is less of an illness, let alone a disease, as opposed to a coping strategy which isn’t very effective in its current form).
So you can still locate the source of dysfunction largely outside the client while helping them find new and different ways of conceptualizing and responding to their stressor; it’s a fine line but that’s the nature of the beast; I don’t think things ever really break down into distinct categories without interplay between them (i.e., over here is your problem, over there is you, over there is your coping strategy, etc.; they all influence each other).
Saying that something like depression is adaptive is saying that it is not a brain malfunction (and therefore doesn’t need to be fixed); it is *not* saying there is no external stressor (that should be removed), in fact it asserts it implicitly.
Sounds very interesting, hope they perform the study and publish it.
Most therapeutic communities have “step-down” facilities which are a bridge between themselves and full independent living. The brain also has an amazing ability to rewire itself (neuroplasticity) and there is also a danger of over-reifying things like identity as an addict as the article points out. Blaming life circumstances can indeed be a practice in avoiding responsibility, but if as you say all addiction has a basis in early disturbance, then that is a life circumstance (although in the past). You can’t say someone’s problems are caused by life experience, and then turn around and say blaming life experience is a copout, no?
There are different ways of defining the term “drug”; some people think it only applies to mood-altering substances which are illegal, some only to things which are prescribed by medical professionals, and some to anything based purely on its effects on the mind/body.
Well we can pick and choose our discussions; having a factual economic discussion doesn’t mean we can’t also talk about whether people are too quick to reach for drugs to make themselves feel better (having said that, centuries ago people arguably ingested much greater quantities of alcohol on a daily basis).
Yes of course there is an underground industry in South America of sending drugs to North America and Europe but even including estimates of it in GDP it’s nowhere close to being the basis of the economy.
No South American country comes close to “having an economy centered around selling drugs to Americans”; this is pure hysteria/hyperbole.
If people are thinking for others by choosing not to think for themselves, doesn’t the description lose all meaning? (If it encompasses everything everyone does at any given time, what’s the point?)
Well they called themselves communists and/or based their policies on the teaching of Marxism-Leninism, that’s good enough for me (saying they were “only” socialist and/or “imperfect” is like saying the U.S. isn’t “really” capitalistic because it has policies like Medicaid, Social Security, and so on.
And all of those “oppressive situations” (some of which directly caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people) targeted specific ethnic groups in part, regardless of whether they fit a textbook definition of racism or not.
Strictly speaking you don’t disprove a hypothesis, you either find evidence to reject the null hypothesis or you don’t.
How do you see nationalism as endemic to liberalism?
At the same time many communist regimes have been institutionally racist in practice (if you take communism as the opposite of capitalism): China towards the Uighurs, Soviets towards ethnic Germans (who were many of the “kulaks”), Chechens, Kalmyks, and others, Vietnamese towards ethnic Chinese (so-called boat people) and so on.
Can you say more about why you think nationalism was originally liberal in nature?
Interesting article, as for me it calls into question the fact that mental health norms may be overly skewed towards female paradigms (in medicine it’s usually the reverse).
Also smuggles in a more supra-individualistic political perspective which the U.S. for one needs (in my opinion).
In any case as Nietzsche said: “Some people talk about themselves as a way of avoiding themselves.”
Sounds about right.
From the same place you developed a personal culture of skepticism?
Just because an idea can be misused does not mean it has no conceptual validity
Have you ever tried living in a foreign country? It will clear up your confusion around the concept of culture pretty quickly.
Do you have a current way of accept donations?
Sounds fascinating; I think there needs to be some marriage of the psychoanalytic and neuroscientific perspectives which doesn’t regress into medicalization; I just wish the book didn’t cost >$100 at Amazon.com!
The problem with that theory, once you get to know the reality of some people diagnosed with schizophrenia, their perceptions aren’t necessarily wrong.
Sorry to hear, you deserve better.
The tragedy is that she probably could have gotten better care at one-tenth the cost if there had been a crisis respite facility in her area.
Sad that she passed, maybe even sadder that someone like this is so unique that they need to be written about this way (shouldn’t all counselors be like this?).
The mind is stronger than just chemicals in the brain, what a surprise (not).
I’m actually a huge critic of genetic research, my comment (which I didn’t make very clear) was that proponents of favoring environmental variables sometimes extend their beliefs into realms where it doesn’t apply, specifically gender (yes gender roles are overly rigid in Western society but the radical egalitarianism born of popular movements during the modern era does not fit with the genders, insofar as equality is defined as sameness).
Eventually people need to start realizing that the “blank slate-radical environmentalist” position has its own socioeconomic agenda just like reactionary elites (the latter want to preserve their privilege, the former require a philosophical-scientific basis for deconstructing “to the manor born” ideals so they can seize power for themselves).
Well if they’re well-treated and allowed to socialize normally with other monkeys there’s nothing inherently malevolent about simply watching them learn is there?
Interesting article, although I thought there was going to be more on how the program ended (defunded by proxies for biopsychiatry?)
You are right.
I don’t think you really read or understood the article, it’s critiquing how the diagnosis of PTSD has been used and taken over by vested interests similar to what you are saying.
My impression was that many 12-step groups don’t approve of psychotropic drugs because they see them as another form of substance abuse though?
Also, the “advancement” from labeling something like alcoholism a disease rather than a moral failing is that it allows the person to externalize blame and thereby avoid the trap of constantly accusing the self and/or finding fault with themselves.
I’ve never heard that ADs “cause” alcoholism, do you have references for this? I don’t think it’s ever as clear as saying one thing causes a complex behavioral phenomenon like alcoholism anyway.
In those cases it sounds like it would obviously not be recommended.
Crisis respite houses, mental health courts and deescalation training for all LE!
I think it depends on who is funding the campaign, I agree with your description if it’s coming from Big Pharma but there are consumer groups like NAMI who genuinely believe in what they’re doing, for better or worse.
Individualism is not automatically at odds with mental health, in fact something like “building character” could be seen as a very individualistic endeavor. (There are just as many people who abuse substances in collectivistic societies, I would guess).
(I agree that awareness campaigns are largely symbolic but “individualized” treatment isn’t a bad thing, this just means tailoring solutions to people instead of imposing cookie-cutter solutions; it’s not simply defining all pathology as purely personal. [I’m with you 100% things like supported housing, peer support, etc.]).
Agree that “awareness” campaign feel hollow and meaningless to me, but I also noticed a subtly Marxian assumption that the antidote (and opposite) is simply improved material conditions…yes having a better job with better wages and benefits and less stress would help a lot of people’s mental health, but it’s not the only way (there could be direct government involvement in a way that actually helps–crisis respite houses, Soteria houses for longer-term issues, peer support training and groups, supported housing and employment, etc.).
I’m not sure of how you then prove the existence of said “recording process”, or well-done studies that have shown participants remembering things they were not previously conscious of (how is that tested? Maybe they simply forgot they were conscious of them previously, for example.)
Agree 100%. The problem lies, in my opinion, with 1) those who uncritically adopt the medical model thinking it makes them humanitarian and enlightened to do so, 2) the implicit Calvinism in Anglo-American culture; it always seems to find a way to reframe things in moralistic and punitive ways, and 3) regnant neoliberalism, which always seems to favor technological solutions which can be monetized.
Seems promising, gets rid of the rigidity of the categorical approach which overly reifies the linguistic trap of saying someone “has” a (singular) mental disorder.
The argument is that remembering and recording are not as separate you are saying.
I don’t know what methodology was used; they could have asked participants to indicate which images they remembered by pointing to them, for example.
The research is there, you’re free to believe whatever you want (or not).
If you reread the article you’ll see that it references studies that show people from different cultures recognize different objects, outside the medium of language.
That’s a different argument then (“wokeness” *is* different from cultural relativism) and we’ll have to agree to disagree if you think culture is irrelevant.
I was making a point, if people are spiritual beings but still need language, then why would they also not need other facets of culture to understand one another?
I think most psychological research nowadays (could be wrong but that’s my impression) shows that memory and interpretation of experience are virtually the same thing, and that memories can be easily manipulated (both created and expunged, and not just in “ordinary people”).
While any movement or ideology can be misused by some of its proponents, that doesn’t automatically negate its underlying principles.
In any case it still doesn’t make any sense in reference to this article, as it’s merely about how certain cultural values and/or practices influence the formation of memories (and only references DSM diagnoses in the context of saying how people are more likely to get diagnosed when their style of mnemonic focus conflicts with their host society’s).
That is not “woke”, “woke” would be saying that the Western way is inferior/defective; the author never does that or implies that it should be done.
(But I agree that pushing cultural sensitivity doesn’t mean the pseudo-scientific nature of the medical model should be overlooked, in fact I think that the DSM should itself simply be seen as a cultural artifact.)
I think Nietzsche once said something like: “When historically accurate memory and self-image collide, self-image wins.”
I don’t think you understood the article; it had virtually nothing to do with the DSM.
I wasn’t being.
How are you defining Western civilization? (Religious or secular? Most psychologists are not religious I would imagine. Also, nowadays most psychologists might be more on the side of *over*reporting child abuse [think of the false memory syndrome in California in the 1990s]). (I agree with you that we should not be exporting biopsychopharamcology to the rest of the world.)
The article lists several examples of how memory works differently depending on the participants’ cultural background and it has nothing to do with “wokeness”.
To your point, if people are spiritual beings not tied to any individual culture, could you (re)write your comment in such a way that it can be understood by all humans and is not tied to any specific language?
Removed for Moderation.
Interesting, especially the part about people with PTSD and whether their culture was more individualistic or collectivistic.
@snowyowl
“Because if matter can exist in paradox: a particle & a wave…”
In this particular case I think you’re talking about light not matter, and the shortcoming may lie in the conceptual categories (particle vs. wave, some physicists have begun using the portmanteau “wavicle” for this reason).
@l_e_cox
Of what, common sense? Most people think that humid air is heavier than dry air, for example (it’s not, it’s lighter).
Many psychiatrists do like to prescribe drugs for life, but that’s not the same thing as “killing a cure”. And it’s not really doctors that are inventing diseases or at-risk categories/syndromes, it’s the pharmaceutical companies.
(And don’t get me started on people who claim to have cures for everything; it’s a fallacy to believe someone is honest just because they’re mistreated by the mainstream.)
(But I agree the system needs a reboot and is wholly too focused on profiteering.)
I agree that psychiatry needs to be much more transparent about its shortcomings, I’m just also asserting that the methods of the natural sciences may never be adequate to understand/explain human beings and their experiences.
Science is often scientism in reality but common sense is also full of fallacies.
I agree that science has been way overextended to areas where it doesn’t belong, but saying “nothing is science” makes no sense.
I don’t understand why anyone continues to fall for physicalist treatments for psychological disorders (this drug isn’t addictive, this treatment has no long-term side effects, etc. etc.)
I’m saying it’s not really realistic to ever have a “workable technology” that controls/predict human behavior 100% of the time.
I’m not sure that the rest of medicine takes its cue from psychiatry, traditionally the rest of medicine does not even consider psychiatry to be a real medical (sub)field.
Also I think the big money is not really is “killing” (or failing to develop) cures for diseases (you would actually become rich and famous for curing them) but rather inventing and/or creating disease categories which are chronic and uncurable to begin with (e.g., defining people as “at-risk” for developing diabetes and prescribing them preventive pills). (Almost everyone is “at risk” for multiple disorders, part of being alive means you’re at risk of dying lol.)
These criticisms do apply in other fields but in other parts of medicine that there is a much stronger element of external validity compared to psychology; also other fields are not as inherently difficult to fit into an empirical model, nor do they tend to have as many confounding variables.
Even quantum science nowadays acknowledges that there is no such thing as neutral-free observation, even of things like atoms and quarks.
Why should it be possible? Human beings are not things in the same way that circuits are.
I’m not a huge fan of CBT but it’s not simply “trying to reason with people to change their behaviors”, at least not when done by a skilled practitioner (but I agree that there is an irreducible element of mystery to life and people, although I’m not sure parapsychology would be my first choice of dealing with it at that level.)
My sense is that most universities list it as a social science, not as part of the humanities (and many people in psychology try to pretend it has the same external validity as something like physics or math).
(The problem is not that there is anything wrong with the sciences, but with a fish that claims to be a bird.)
Maybe the difference comes down to what you see as primary objective of psychology–if it is to understand (predict/describe) human behavior you are correct.
If it is to help people in psychological distress, I don’t know if the natural science model of so-called objective observation is appropriate.