SchrodingersCat
Active member
I've been thinking a lot about mental health issues over the past couple years.
Sometimes I wonder if the way we label these people doesn't just make it worse. I believe very strongly in the power of manifestation / law of attraction, and by that logic, the best way to make someone act crazy is to convince them they are crazy. It's like systematic gas-lighting.
Since the 60's, there's been an idea floating around that there's no such thing as "mental illness." I wouldn't go that far, as in the case of bipolar and schizophrenia... But I strongly suspect there too many clinical diagnoses of "Anxiety Disorder" and "Major Depressive Disorder" when, in my opinion, that brain is acting predictably and very "orderly" given the stimulation it's received. Maybe pills can be useful for getting them to a place where they're able to talk it out and re-wire their brains through psychotherapy, but for sure medication is over-prescribed as a be-all-end-all cure for mental illness. I see some of these "illnesses" as being perfectly reasonable and rational reactions to the lives people have lived, and the world we live in today -- disconnected from each other, constantly bombarded by reports of terrorism and Armageddon. Honestly, it's a miracle we're not all crazy!
I saw a really good documentary once about survivors of the psychiatric system... yes they had some mental health challenges, but going through the psych ward and being misdiagnosed, overmedicated, and generally treated like "diseases with a human host" instead of "humans who need help" made their mental health orders of magnitude worse.
I've been studying nonviolent communication pretty intensely over the past few months, and the psychologist who came up with that modality quit clinical practice in part because he didn't agree with the systematic labelling of "what people are" rather than "what they feel & need." I've also been studying a modality called Bioemotive Feedback more recently, which is a method of really getting in touch with your emotions and feelings, and finding things that were buried deep down and finally processing them and releasing the hold they have on your life. So much of how we behave and what we believe is related to coping mechanisms we developed during challenging or even traumatic times in our lives, and these became habit without us even realizing we'd been doing or thinking those things in the first place. A lot of "destructive behaviour" can be traced back to specific events or series of events, and the behaviours can be nipped in the bud by bringing the trauma to the surface and dealing with it directly. This applies to addictions, interpersonal behaviour, and self-destructive tendencies -- many of which are labelled as "diseases" by modern psychology.
I just don't know what to think anymore. It's so easy to sit on the sidelines with a fairly neurotypical brain and try to guess at what the experience is like for these people. The last thing I want to do is deny anyone's personal lived experience, and if someone tells me that they found relief and benefit from a clinical diagnosis and pharmaceutical treatment, then I'm not going to deny it or take that away from them. I fully understand that a depressed person cannot "just cheer up and stop being depressed" any more than a cancer patient can "just get over it and stop having cancer." But a Type II diabetic can reverse their disease with the right diet & lifestyle, and I'm convinced that a lot of "mental illness" can also be reversed with the right kind of non-pharmaceutical treatment -- beginning by removing the label of "you're sick" and replacing it with "you have the power to change this."
I pretty much have no respect for modern psychiatry. My mom has been in that system for the last 40 years and I'm not sure it's done her any good. She has all kinds of organ damage from the pills she was on, and her psychiatrist doesn't about that as long as she stays out of the psych ward. She had to flat-out refuse to keep taking lithium because she had diagnosed kidney failure, and even then he refuses to try any of the new medications that have come out in the past 10 years, just upped her Seroquel and called it a day. It's a total joke. She's scared to ask for someone else because they could be even worse -- he's considered one of the best psychiatrists in the province. Her previous doctor nearly killed her by overdosing pills that had her sleepwalking half-naked in the street. He was transferred to another region (not fired!) when he failed to answer his pager while on-call and his patient killed herself.
I bookmarked a Mooji meditation and got her into yoga, and I think those have had more benefit on her overall mental health than all the pills these morons have shoved down her throat. And more importantly, this diagnosis has her convinced it's hopeless and there's nothing she can do to improve her mental health, so she doesn't even try. I'm not saying she could cure her bipolar with some yoga and chanting ohm -- I'm not a moron -- but the self-defeating attitude she has a result of the diagnosis surely isn't doing her any good.
Sometimes I wonder if the way we label these people doesn't just make it worse. I believe very strongly in the power of manifestation / law of attraction, and by that logic, the best way to make someone act crazy is to convince them they are crazy. It's like systematic gas-lighting.
Since the 60's, there's been an idea floating around that there's no such thing as "mental illness." I wouldn't go that far, as in the case of bipolar and schizophrenia... But I strongly suspect there too many clinical diagnoses of "Anxiety Disorder" and "Major Depressive Disorder" when, in my opinion, that brain is acting predictably and very "orderly" given the stimulation it's received. Maybe pills can be useful for getting them to a place where they're able to talk it out and re-wire their brains through psychotherapy, but for sure medication is over-prescribed as a be-all-end-all cure for mental illness. I see some of these "illnesses" as being perfectly reasonable and rational reactions to the lives people have lived, and the world we live in today -- disconnected from each other, constantly bombarded by reports of terrorism and Armageddon. Honestly, it's a miracle we're not all crazy!
I saw a really good documentary once about survivors of the psychiatric system... yes they had some mental health challenges, but going through the psych ward and being misdiagnosed, overmedicated, and generally treated like "diseases with a human host" instead of "humans who need help" made their mental health orders of magnitude worse.
I've been studying nonviolent communication pretty intensely over the past few months, and the psychologist who came up with that modality quit clinical practice in part because he didn't agree with the systematic labelling of "what people are" rather than "what they feel & need." I've also been studying a modality called Bioemotive Feedback more recently, which is a method of really getting in touch with your emotions and feelings, and finding things that were buried deep down and finally processing them and releasing the hold they have on your life. So much of how we behave and what we believe is related to coping mechanisms we developed during challenging or even traumatic times in our lives, and these became habit without us even realizing we'd been doing or thinking those things in the first place. A lot of "destructive behaviour" can be traced back to specific events or series of events, and the behaviours can be nipped in the bud by bringing the trauma to the surface and dealing with it directly. This applies to addictions, interpersonal behaviour, and self-destructive tendencies -- many of which are labelled as "diseases" by modern psychology.
I just don't know what to think anymore. It's so easy to sit on the sidelines with a fairly neurotypical brain and try to guess at what the experience is like for these people. The last thing I want to do is deny anyone's personal lived experience, and if someone tells me that they found relief and benefit from a clinical diagnosis and pharmaceutical treatment, then I'm not going to deny it or take that away from them. I fully understand that a depressed person cannot "just cheer up and stop being depressed" any more than a cancer patient can "just get over it and stop having cancer." But a Type II diabetic can reverse their disease with the right diet & lifestyle, and I'm convinced that a lot of "mental illness" can also be reversed with the right kind of non-pharmaceutical treatment -- beginning by removing the label of "you're sick" and replacing it with "you have the power to change this."
I pretty much have no respect for modern psychiatry. My mom has been in that system for the last 40 years and I'm not sure it's done her any good. She has all kinds of organ damage from the pills she was on, and her psychiatrist doesn't about that as long as she stays out of the psych ward. She had to flat-out refuse to keep taking lithium because she had diagnosed kidney failure, and even then he refuses to try any of the new medications that have come out in the past 10 years, just upped her Seroquel and called it a day. It's a total joke. She's scared to ask for someone else because they could be even worse -- he's considered one of the best psychiatrists in the province. Her previous doctor nearly killed her by overdosing pills that had her sleepwalking half-naked in the street. He was transferred to another region (not fired!) when he failed to answer his pager while on-call and his patient killed herself.
I bookmarked a Mooji meditation and got her into yoga, and I think those have had more benefit on her overall mental health than all the pills these morons have shoved down her throat. And more importantly, this diagnosis has her convinced it's hopeless and there's nothing she can do to improve her mental health, so she doesn't even try. I'm not saying she could cure her bipolar with some yoga and chanting ohm -- I'm not a moron -- but the self-defeating attitude she has a result of the diagnosis surely isn't doing her any good.
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