[HN Gopher] Two recent books by historians explore the crisis in...
___________________________________________________________________
Two recent books by historians explore the crisis in biological
psychiatry
Author : Caiero
Score : 123 points
Date : 2022-10-11 22:47 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (bostonreview.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (bostonreview.net)
| tkk23 wrote:
| >Others engage in therapy with an artificially intelligent (and
| usually feminized) chatbot. Disturbingly, these digital apps are
| largely unregulated and have questionable standards of care.
|
| What alternatives are there? Therapists don't scale. If half of
| society could improve their life with therapy, and a therapist
| can treat 30 people per month over 10 years, then 1% of society
| have to become therapists. More therapists than teachers would be
| needed.
|
| I believe that this is a huge opportunity. Like medicine, people
| will be willing to pay anything to be happy. The biggest problem
| apart from developing a cure will be getting heard. The market
| will be flooded with enticing apps and a most likely bitter
| medicine will be a tough sell.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| This has become much more clear in the last couple years.
| Demand shot way up and is far outstripping supply. Then you get
| into the issue of how so many patients aren't a good match for
| the first therapist they try, so they have to jump through all
| the hoops and fill out all the forms to try another one, which
| also may not be a good match (all while potentially on the edge
| of some kind of breakdown)... I went through at least five
| before I found one I felt was effective for me, and my
| experience is not uncommon.
|
| Personally, I think we need to lower the barrier of entry for
| people to become therapists, and streamline the whole patient
| intake process. It's not like the quality is all that great
| with existing barriers, there are PhDs out there actively
| harming patients-- one kept trying to push Jesus on me when
| part of what I was dealing with was childhood religious trauma
| and the difficulties of restructuring my world view as a
| nonbeliever, an absolute breach of ethics.
|
| We need to make it easier for people to try out multiple
| therapists until they find one that's a good match for them,
| and part of that is increasing the supply of therapists.
| Unfortunately I'm not sure a chatbot is ever going to quite do
| it except for in the simplest & most clear cut cases, the
| mental tangles we can get into really require general
| intelligence to grapple with.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Not to mention that the dating game of filling out all the
| paperwork for the third time may be what pushes someone from
| on-edge but stable for the day into a breakdown.
| mola wrote:
| Therapist have a huge amount of influence and power over
| their patients. Do you really think lowering the bar is a
| good idea? Try and imagine the end result. Maybe it's me, but
| I shudder thinking of it.
|
| The real problem, IMHO, is we've built an inhumane economic
| system that causes tremendous stress over the psyche of the
| individual. Instead of optimizing for wellbeing,we optimize
| for GDP, this is a pretty poor proxy. A more humane and
| tolerant society, with less hyper stimulating culture could
| reduce the need for more therapists. But of course this is an
| ideal, I don't know how to get there, but it seems to me
| unleashing therapists into the wild, while streamlining out
| the ethical and self regulation that come with the guild
| structure is a terrible idea.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| I agree in principle, but in the mean time we need triage.
| The current system has reached a breaking point.
|
| > Do you really think lowering the bar is a good idea?
|
| How much lower can the bar go? The "ethical and self
| regulation" you describe is all too often nonexistent. If
| my experiences - and many others I've read about - are any
| indication, the situation couldn't be much worse. There are
| certified professionals doing everything from actively
| pushing religion to making a cynical game out of how fast
| they can pigeonhole your 'symptoms' into a checklist so
| they can prescribe the currently most marketed drug for
| that DSM entry. Then they tell you to report back in two
| months.
|
| Just having someone to talk your shit out with regularly
| who doesn't judge too much and has knowledge of practical
| solutions for common stressors would be a vast improvement
| over the 'care' all too many are currently receiving. The
| guidelines for providing simpler care like this can be
| clear & concise, and we have better tools now for filtering
| out bad actors. I see more reasons to continue advocating
| for such an approach than not at this point.
| bergenty wrote:
| Therapists just play the role close family fulfill in most of
| East and South Asia. That scales very well but requires a
| societal monoculture that I'm not sure the west is capable of.
| eimrine wrote:
| > The real crisis in academic psychiatry is that there is no
| crisis.
|
| I so love this words, especially I love to read that in the
| middle of my reading of Kuhn's "Structure of scientific
| revolutions" book because that book lets me clearly visualize of
| what crisis in psychiatry is being waited for.
| FailMore wrote:
| I started writing a long comment in response to this article
| (more to respond to the original catchy headline this topic first
| went live with "Mental Illness Is Not in Your Head").
|
| I decided I'd turn it into a blog post and have posted it for
| discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33201781
|
| Here's it is as a comment:
|
| This is a response to an article currently being discussed on
| Hacker News [Two recent books by historians explore the crisis in
| biological psychiatry, originally titled Mental Illness Is Not in
| Your Head]. I believe that the, now replaced, catchy headline of
| the article is not correct. I believe mental health is in your
| head, but this does not mean that mental health is controllable
| through altering neurotransmitters (or in fact altering any
| specific biological process).
|
| ~All mental health issues use the same biological structures[1].
| A structure which interprets the emotional dynamic of the
| situation you are currently in. Another structure which
| reactivates the emotional memory you have associated with that
| dynamic.
|
| Most likely the same mechanism is used for both happy and unhappy
| paths:
|
| # Happy paths:
|
| If you grew up with a loving (but not overwhelmingly loving) and
| calm family, your unconscious association between the emotional
| dynamic of a situation you are in, and the emotional memory
| associated with it are positive. These could range from:
| "Everyone is having fun right now, I can relax and have fun
| too!", to "That person did something that made me uncomfortable,
| I know it's safe to express my needs and feelings, so I can
| communicate calmly to the person who upset me how I their
| behaviour made me feel".
|
| # Unhappy paths:
|
| If you grew up with caregivers who were stressed by certain
| situations, your unconscious association between the emotional
| dynamic of a situation you are in, and the emotional
| memory/requirements associated with it will contain protective
| responses. These could range from: "Everyone seems to having fun
| right now... but everyone got so stressed out when I was anything
| other than calm and happy when I was young, I better keep all my
| stressed feelings hidden inside, and be act like I'm happy and
| having fun too - even if something is going on for me which means
| deep down I'm not feeling good", to "That person did something
| that made me uncomfortable. Everyone go angry so quickly when I
| was little, that I'm sure this person will get really angry too
| if I say anything to them. I will just pretend that I'm ok with
| what they did." This list goes on and on, and will depend on the
| subtle dynamics of the relationships you were raised in.
|
| You will notice that in the happy paths there is not a separation
| between your external world and your internal worlds, whereas in
| the unhappy paths there is this split. This split is
| uncomfortable and it is lonely. It requires a tense form of
| control that the person on the happy path doesn't need to apply
| to themselves.
|
| # Things get worse [...before they get better?]
|
| I'm sure a bit of you related to the unhappy paths that I
| described. That is because we all have them. One of the
| biological survival mechanisms we have as highly dependent
| infants is to bend our emotional responses into ones which mean
| we get what we need from our caregivers.
|
| This is such a common requirement for making it through infancy
| that the human is built to shed these leant emotional shackles. I
| am in a controversial minority within psychotherapy that believes
| that the precise diagnosis of these emotional shackles is the
| function of dreaming (https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz).
|
| Getting rid of an emotional shackle is not complicated when it is
| clearly visible. It is not particularly pleasant, but you simply
| have to unlearn the fear by facing up to it. If you notice you
| keep your stressed feelings inside, you'll need to find the
| courage to start opening up. If you are not setting boundaries
| when you feel yours are getting trodden on, you need to find the
| courage to start having those (initially) awkward conversations.
| The same is true for whatever unuseful emotional conditioning you
| are trying to get free from.
|
| The mechanism behind this approach is very simple. We are
| extremely scared of facing these learnt fears (the type and level
| of fear we typically[2] only know in infancy). When we repeatedly
| face these fears and survive they are very quickly unlearned from
| the brain. It is highly inefficient for the brain to keep a fear
| in place that we now know (at an experiential, not only
| cognitive, level) to be superfluous, and the brain does not seem
| to want to do this.
|
| But what happens if no one is there to help you work our your
| emotional shackles and you are left to suffer their isolating
| consequences on your own? Again, I am in a bit of a controversial
| minority of the mental health community, but I believe it is the
| useful response that mental health symptoms should worsen.
|
| If things worsen both you and others begin to notice that
| something is wrong. If they notice something is wrong, there is
| an increased likelihood that you will get the emotional care that
| might lead you to successfully removing your emotional shackles;
| reducing your stress and isolation. Many people start treating
| their mental health because things have gotten bad, but the
| treatment (the process of discovering and facing up to
| unconscious fears) doesn't need to stop when you return to your
| base level.
|
| In summary, I think there is a strong component of mental illness
| that is very much within our own heads. Because the happy and
| unhappy paths of mental illness use the same structural processes
| we cannot force a change at the biological level. Instead we have
| to explore, challenge and ultimately change the underlying
| emotional memories that are elicited in the structural processes.
| From my personal experience, this causes the greatest improvement
| to our mental health/reduces our "mental illness".
|
| [1] I'm aware that I am talking with one of two layers of
| abstraction. I'm not talking about the specific parts of the
| brain, but these processes are consistent in all of us.
|
| [2] Stressful situations we experience as adults that cause PTSD
| are ones where our emotional processing of the situation we are
| going through mimics our childlike experience. The experience is
| overwhelming.
| lordgrenville wrote:
| This looks really helpful, favouriting so I can read it more
| carefully later.
| lebuffon wrote:
| My thought experiment question around Psychiatry is: How would
| pre-electricity age people explain the operations of a digital
| computer? They would probably invent some theories that bore no
| resemblance to the actual underlying technology. They might be
| close and even create some relevant metaphors but the theory
| would never be "correct", I suspect. Is this analogous to
| Psychiatry?
|
| An old engineering axiom is: "If you can't build it, you don't
| really understand it"
|
| This leads me to ask, will we only _understand the human mind
| after we learn how to build one or two?
|
| _ Notwithstanding the question, can a network with X neurons
| fully comprehend a network with X neurons?
| dmarchand90 wrote:
| The mechanistic view of the universe is ancient and thinking of
| things as a set of motion induced cause/ effect dates back at
| least to Democritus. The ancient Greeks had mechanical
| computers for astronomy. And mechanical automata have been
| around for a long time.
|
| Depends on the definition of understand. If you mean complete
| and faithful reproduction then maybe not. At least in one mind.
| Definitely a set of N minds with X-1 neurons can _together_
| understand the whole of X neurons if each simulates under given
| conditions or subsets of the whole.
|
| The mind also probably has a degree of fractal self similarity
| in its structure and understanding a part gives a
| representation of the whole.
| zniturah wrote:
| Maybe we rely on science here : it is genes + environment + head
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| I don't know if it's relying on science. It's a somewhat
| tautological statement.
|
| We are physical beings. All the processes happening inside us
| are mediated through chemicals. Most are assembled according to
| a building plans encoded in your genes and the building blocks
| come from your environment. Then obviously as the brain is the
| command centre of the body, it does involve the head.
|
| Still, it doesn't tell us much.
|
| For all intents and purposes, we have shockingly little
| understanding of how the brain actually works. We know some
| chemicals have unexpected effects but we don't always
| understand exactly how that happens. We don't understand how
| memories are stored or recalled. We have some understanding of
| the feedback loops involved in emotion processing but that's
| far from perfect. We are starting to realise that the
| processing happening in other organs like the digestive system
| have an effect on the brain but it's not entirely clear which.
|
| I think people generally are not humble enough regarding the
| level of actual knowledge we have reached in psychology and
| medicine.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if we came to discover we had actually
| been missing something foundational at some point.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| How would you construct an experiment to verify that
| hypothesis?
| tkk23 wrote:
| I agree that most likely genes, environment and the mind itself
| are an influence. But is science enough to resolve mental
| problems?
|
| The mind is very close to a computer. Few people use science to
| develop or debug software. Even if there is a scientific model
| that explains why somebody feels bad, is that model enough to
| determine a cure?
| tremon wrote:
| That doesn't look like a scientific statement to me. What are
| its implications? Under what conditions does this hold? How is
| it falsifiable? What is the relative contribution of each
| element in that equation?
| yibberish wrote:
| this article reframes the recent trend in psychiatric into
| psychedelics in a bad light:
|
| > _Understanding the undulating history of psychiatric hype and
| crisis is crucial today as the profession builds toward its next
| trend: psychedelics, already heralded as a "renaissance" and
| psychiatry's "next frontier." These two histories demonstrate
| that the academic and corporate pursuit of such hype [...]
| resulting in significant psychological and bodily harm._
|
| this articles ignores the unfounded claim: that the real purpose
| of the APA was not quite to heal, not after ww2.
|
| > _We also have not had any significant breakthroughs in
| treatment._
|
| They even say this, which is as nazi social control as it gets.
|
| > _psychiatrists in the 1970s who pathologized Black activism as
| "psychosis."_
|
| oh, and what Bush said in the 90s? I suppose all that went into
| marketing, and later on (i.e. nowadays) into 'engagement' metrics
| for online content and so on. so, as I said, they're not trying
| to heal you, they're trying to make a buck same as everybody else
| in a capitalist society/marketplace.
|
| now all that scientific progress is being used in an information
| war. as war crazy as it gets.
| mrxd wrote:
| I wondered what is this "community-based" mental health care that
| the author advocates for, and how is it different from
| psychiatry. Are psychiatrists not part of the community? It turns
| out it refers to "dream-work, breathwork, herbalism, and
| meditation."
| rustmachine wrote:
| in what way did it turn out to refer to those things?
| Community-based health care seems to me like a way of saying
| that mental health is connected closely to the community you
| are a part of, and that this community therefore can play a big
| part of keeping your mind healthy.
|
| Which, I think, sounds very reasonable. If your work
| environment is toxic, the way to get better is to improve the
| work community, or find another community to be part of.
| newsmonkey5 wrote:
| Compare to community policing, in which crimes are created
| and solved by modifying the environment. It is a very good
| thing.
| mrxd wrote:
| I clicked on the "soteria houses" link in the article
| nyc111 wrote:
| Mental ilness is in your gut. That's where we should be looking
| at.
| BurningPenguin wrote:
| How about: Mental illness is a complex thing, that involves
| multiple parts of the body, and probably also the environment.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Almost as though the human body is one integrated system,
| rather than a set of individual components connected through
| well defined interfaces.
| serpix wrote:
| I detect the sarcasm but others may not. As a thought
| experiment I present that any emotion can always be felt in
| the body.
|
| If you feel nothing, no emotion or no sensation in the body
| then that is also a felt emotion in the body as a lack of
| feeling.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| No sarcasm intended. I genuinely don't think you can
| reduce the human body into parts without simplifying how
| it works. Humans design machines component-wise that way,
| but that is a methodology unknown to evolution.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| This. I think that people too often overemphasize one factor
| when it is many that can contribute to mental illness. The
| gut is definitely an integral part of mental health as has
| recently been popularized. Being in long-term social
| isolation or damaging relationships can also lead to mental
| illness. Having chronic stress (noise/chemical pollution/lack
| of good sleep/etc) can also lead to mental illness. All of
| these factors can be combined or work completely on their
| own.
| jvm___ wrote:
| The human system really has only three inputs your
| conscious brain has control over (and they're almost all
| 'loose' controls). Loose controls meaning imagine feeding
| birds, you don't feed the individual birds you just provide
| seeds and let them figure it out. Your inputs to your body
| are rarely localized, you just provide signals and your
| body figures it out.
|
| So, three inputs.
|
| Energy input as food/drink, how fast you breathe in. Energy
| output as what you do in the world and how much your
| muscles exert themselves.
|
| The third input to your body is your stress response as
| interrupted by your brain. Stress in this case can be pain
| and discomfort, but also any other input or thought from
| your senses.
|
| Your body doesn't know that a lion jumping out of the grass
| is terrifying, it just responds to your brain throwing
| terror seeds at it.
|
| Your body doesn't know that seeing "23 53 34 78 and bonus
| number 5" means you just won the Powerball lottery, it's
| just responds to the your brain throwing happiness seeds at
| it.
|
| Like you said, mental health can be systemic, but having
| bad inputs can stress you out as well. If your problem is
| mainly bad inputs, then you can control your response, just
| in a loose way rather than a tight way that we humans seem
| to prefer.
| nyc111 wrote:
| I don't agree. Our perception of the world is colored in
| the gut and served to the conscious mind. When I was living
| in New York, the jingle of the ice cream truck draw me
| crazy, it was torture. But for kids, it was happiness
| because the gut microbes feeding on sugar send a message to
| the conscsious mind to buy the sugary stuff and they
| created an irresistible desire for it. This is all done in
| the guts. Some people can remain cool under any adverse
| situation because they have a healthy gut.
| 50 wrote:
| Not "probably" but certainly. Mental illness not just as a
| psychological or even chemical problem but also as an
| ontologically-inflected political one.
| yibberish wrote:
| my own mental illness exists in relation to the society I have
| grown up into.
|
| but you're still right, our own guts are what I had to look at
| in order to deal with this illness.
| jossclimb wrote:
| It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly
| sick society.
|
| Jiddu Krishnamurti
| tsol wrote:
| Which society in human history was not sick? Truth is that's
| the norm, not the exception
| jerojero wrote:
| But how many of the earlier societies had thousands of years
| of experience to look back to? Wouldn't you say in a society
| where we're capable of talking to anyone anywhere in the
| world at any moment we'd be able to at least try and solve
| these problems?
|
| We've solved so many problems that afflicted humanity for
| thousands of years in the past 200 years. So why not this
| one? I guess because, as the article says, to solve this
| problem we actually need to change society as a whole.
| concinds wrote:
| This quote is comically misused. It refers to people being
| called "controversial" or misfits, or being disapproved of for
| questioning the orthodoxies of deeply immoral societies.
|
| It does _not_ mean that if you 're low-functioning in daily
| life, you get to blame climate change/economic
| inequality/injustice/whatever. Refusal to take responsibility
| for one's behavior is _always_ a sign of lack of emotional
| health.
| soledades wrote:
| wow, quite the quote adjudicator, aren't we? where does your
| krishnamurti lineage come from, may i ask?
|
| have you ever heard of an eastern philosopher who didn't
| think western civilization was profoundly sick??
|
| it's deeply immoral that we force kids to sit in chairs for
| hours a day, and then diagnose them with "the ADHDs" when
| they don't like it. but we could multiple examples
| endlessly...
| [deleted]
| ansc wrote:
| >This quote is comically misused.
|
| It is! I suppose because of its dubious origin. First
| attribution seems to be from Mark Vonnegut in The Eden
| Express. Did you read the book, or where did you learn what
| it _actually_ refers to?
| concinds wrote:
| Good question; I can't read the author's mind since the
| quote is made up.
|
| But basic logic dictates that the quote (which is
| apocryphal) means that we cannot deduce that we are healthy
| simply because we are well-adjusted to society, _if_ that
| society is sick. It does _not_ say that psychiatric illness
| is rooted in societal or social problems. And empirically,
| proponents of the quote (theosophists and Buddhists) also
| rarely use it to refer to actual psychiatric illness, but
| rather to moral compasses, values, and overall behavior.
|
| I doubt you'll find many Buddhists parrot the "I'm only
| depressed because of how messed up society is" line that
| you often see on the web, since Buddhism explicitly
| preaches self-transformation.
| serpix wrote:
| And the way to feel healthy, truly healthy, is to be connected
| to networks of society or communities that are safe, supportive
| and which have your back.
| Penyngton wrote:
| Sadly, that's not something easy to find if you're not born
| into one...
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| But being able to fit into society does wonders for your mental
| health, so maybe don't listen to random philosophers.
| 1ncorrect wrote:
| Contorting myself to fit a mould I find profoundly
| reprehensible has done wonders for perpetuating my depression
| and suicidality.
|
| I don't want to develop my sociopathy to the level required
| to be mistaken for acceptable in what passes for society
| today.
| narrator wrote:
| Suicides have been rising since 2000. I think we should go back
| to tricyclics antidepressants. They worked better than SSRIs.
| jerojero wrote:
| Sorry but, did you even read the article?
|
| The crisis is societal argues the author, it's not really about
| the drugs. The drugs might be effective (and a lot of evidence
| suggests they're not really all that effective) but in our
| society even if they were. They would probably be behind
| paywalls and only accessible to rich people.
|
| I've recently immigrated to Australia, trying to seek mental
| health help here has been a huge struggle and it's funny
| because you'd think for people with mental health problems to
| find a solution should be really easy. Imagine you have an
| accident and one of your legs stops working and the only way to
| get to the doctor is by walking; that's how it feels. To my
| australian native friends the situation has not been much
| easier, recently a friend was in the hospital on a suicide
| attempt and not only they were discharged fairly quickly but
| the only support they got was with a completely apathetic
| doctor.
|
| Mental health is a big business and there is no interest in
| solving it, because as it says in the article, the biggest
| crisis in psychiatry is that there is no crisis in psychiatry.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Years ago my doctor switched me to an SSRI as a one time trial
| to see if it would better help/could be tolerated... yeah never
| again. That shit straight up induced mania and suicidal
| thoughts. I cut that trial off real quick right after noticing.
|
| Everyone's different, but SSRIs are a hard no for me.
| fatneckbeardz wrote:
| yeah that or 30 hour work week, walkable cities, free
| healthcare.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| That's testable. That's already the case in some places, or
| close to it. Do those places also have rising suicide rates?
| alvarezbjm-hn wrote:
| Tricyclics are as good as the SSRI, but they aren't first line
| because of the secondary effects.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| Yes, it's kind of a long article. It's also one of the best
| analyses I've ever read of our current mental health treatment
| situation, whether you agree with the final paragraph or not.
| Save it for later if you don't have time now.
|
| I was particularly drawn in by the idea of the Soteria approach [
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soteria_(psychiatric_treatment...].
| boxmonster wrote:
| "Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self esteem,
| first make sure you are not, in fact, just surrounded by
| assholes."
|
| @debihope (Boosted by William Gibson)
| carabiner wrote:
| The whole article is worth reading. It's a tortured history of
| the failures of psychiatry, least of which is the DSM and worst
| of which is mass incarceration of blacks engaged in activism due
| to "schizophrenia," similar to how homosexuality was once
| considered mental illness. It ends too early with:
|
| > "The fact is, if we didn't have such a fucked-up society, I'd
| be out of a job." ... As historian Joanna Radin encouraged me to
| discuss in my undergraduate course on the History of Drugs, the
| question is not only, What is the right drug for me?, but also:
| What would the world have to look like for me not to need drugs
| at all?
|
| He stops short of really exploring this concept. I'll paraphrase
| an old comment of mine:
|
| Are you ready for me to diagnose your totally normal reaction to
| our shitty society as mental illness so I can get you addicted to
| mind altering drugs for the rest of your life?
| https://imgur.com/Jb1mJyx
|
| Or as the social critic Dr. Ted Kaczynski said, "Imagine a
| society that subjects people to conditions that make them
| terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their
| unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some
| extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions
| that make people depressed modern society gives them
| antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of
| modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to
| enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise
| find intolerable."
|
| The problem is, this is the only life most of us have lived, and
| so we cannot imagine it otherwise, like a fish who cannot
| conceive of a world without water, or even that water is the
| medium surrounding it. If our entire society is causing this,
| then what can we do? Wage slavery, oligarchy, attention theft by
| tech companies, disintegration of community from various causes.
| Life for so many people is crawling through glass Monday through
| Friday, then getting shitfaced on the weekend. Is that happiness?
| automatic6131 wrote:
| It's so easy to call this society "shitty" and "sick". It's
| much harder to articulate what it should be - and how it should
| be.
|
| Oh I know you can give a wishlist of things you want society to
| be; I bet you can't even begin to describe how you achieve it.
| No one ever does. The only method ever given is "revolution and
| then New Soviet Man". Every method is a restatement of those
| six words in longer format.
| narrator wrote:
| Yeah, it seems like everything these days is about figuring
| out how to get everyone motivated to have a revolution. We
| probably already hit peak civilization at some point over the
| last 20 years and this revolution stuff is just speeding up
| the downslope off of that.
| feet wrote:
| To leave a local maximum and find the global maximum, you
| must traverse the graph downward
| creata wrote:
| (The singular is "maximum", the plural is "maxima".)
| feet wrote:
| Thank you for the correction, fixed :)
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Universal healthcare and higher education doesn't seem all
| that much to ask for (US). Offering those seems like a solid
| start for improving society without unwanted, heavy handed
| direct action/totalitarianism.
| automatic6131 wrote:
| A cause worthwhile advocating for, but do you think you'll
| get people to stop saying that society is "sick" if you get
| it?
|
| Hint; Scotland has both universal healthcare and free
| higher education and also the highest drug deaths per
| person in Europe - or close to the highest.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| Ted Kaczynski had an infamous description of his ideal
| society, and from a quick glance (I didn't fully read) he
| seems much more of a primitivist than a socialist.
| dunnodidntneed wrote:
| TO pick only: 'Form on the Day', well doesn't that sound
| real, realy Mood-controlled ? So IF there are 'high-ends' in
| 'mood' THAN picking up a receptor-blocker to diddn't let
| those ('overwhelming' neuro-transmitter) be a part of the
| unwanted chemistry docking, cos ... _hu_ you know... 'it may
| be NOT favorable FOR others' -so what's the thing ? That
| modern psychiatry went from behavior-analysis of criminals,
| scum and murder to a broader market of salesman... _um_ that
| maybe is more in touch with the main story behind
| psychiatrists and 'illness-management'... ?
|
| Sry, non native english speaker... but a broader view... ^^
| iamevn wrote:
| Ted Kaczynski like the Unabomber?
| j-bos wrote:
| He was a well educated terrorist.
| serf wrote:
| >Or as the social critic Dr. Ted Kaczynski said,
|
| yknow , I agree with your broad points -- I even agree with the
| sarcastic tone you used to convey the line, but the families of
| those murdered or injured by Ted Kaczynski would probably
| prefer the title murderer/arsonist/terrorist.. even inmate.
|
| _Most_ folks would probably prefer that the most infamous
| title be used when speaking about those that society has deemed
| to be of ill repute.
|
| 'Spiritualist Genghis Khan' sounds weird. So does 'music
| aficionado and critic Charles Manson'.
|
| It's a grim take, but the condemnation offered by the legal
| process is one of the things that helps the victims of a crime
| cope. In other words, the social branding of 'murderer' or
| 'convict' onto the person charged with the crime is also part
| of the justice offered to the victims via the legal system --
| to ignore that the social title and distinction of the person
| has been affected by their transition to 'convict' status is to
| ignore a facet of what the prosecution was attempting to
| achieve for the sake of the victims.
| tsol wrote:
| This is a good explanation of what I felt was off about that
| wording
| soledades wrote:
| I think that the branding of the UNABOMBER as a "bad guy" is
| pretty secure at this point.
|
| > to ignore that the social title and distinction of the
| person has been affected by their transition to 'convict'
| status is to ignore a facet of what the prosecution was
| attempting to achieve for the sake of the victims.
|
| why on earth should that take precedence over everything
| else?
| dEnigma wrote:
| Postcard artist and hobby architect Adolf Hitler
| creata wrote:
| Do most people even take psychiatric medication for "the rest
| of their life"? I thought that most people who take psychiatric
| medications take them for a few years, but I don't have the
| stats on that.
|
| > Or as the social critic Dr. Ted Kaczynski
|
| Whose doctorate is in mathematics.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Well, Ted Kaczynski is certainly someone we should emulate
| right? Go live in a cabin in the woods, and send bombs in the
| mail to people, sounds like the epitome of great mental health.
| jerojero wrote:
| Someone might have a good analysis of the problem but being
| incapable of coming up with an appropriate solution to it.
| These are definitely two different skillsets.
|
| Imo a lot of what Kaczynski says is actually very well
| thought out and there are multiple other philosophers and
| thinkers that have come to similar conclusions or have
| pointed similar problems with society.
|
| If you had read that statement without reading who it was
| that said it, what would you have thought about it?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I think this section is worth emphasizing - mental disorders are
| as unlikely to be due primarily to underlying genetic issues as
| getting an infectious disease is:
|
| > "The oft-cited claim, for example, that schizophrenia has a
| genetic basis has failed to pass scientific muster. As Scull
| discusses, after failing to find a Mendelian set of genes that
| could explain schizophrenia, researchers in the 2000s pinned
| their hopes on new genome-wide association studies (GWAS) that
| could investigate hundreds of thousands of base pairs in the
| search for genetic linkages to psychiatric disorders. But GWAS
| studies have not revealed a clear genetic basis for schizophrenia
| (or bipolar disorder, for that matter). While combining hundreds
| of genetic sites can help explain, at best, 8 percent of the
| observed variance of schizophrenia, it is still possible for an
| individual to have many of these genetic variations without
| developing the disease."
|
| There might be some influence - for example, someone born with
| genetic immunological defects is likely to be more susceptible to
| various infectious diseases, and there might be some kind of
| brain development issue that means that some people are less able
| to cope with high levels of stress, disappointment, trauma and so
| on - but the claim that this outcome is somehow ordained at birth
| is nonsensical.
|
| All in all, the science of mental disorders today could be
| compared to the science of infectious disease in say, 1890 - they
| didn't have much in the way of understanding of core mechanisms,
| even if some approaches (surgical sterilization, rigorous post-
| operative hygiene, etc.) were being shown to reduce mortality.
|
| Probably the most promising tools in this regard are the use of
| psychedelics under controlled settings to improve outcomes, but
| even here, the research is basically in its infancy due to the
| socio-governmental paranoia over these substances.
| derbOac wrote:
| I do research in this area, and that paragraph is misleading.
| GWAS was a mistake from the beginning -- it was overhyped and
| ridiculously oversimplified from an analytic-design
| perspective. No one should have expected genes of major effect
| to emerge, and everyone generally agrees with this now. To me
| it's fine to point to GWAS as a major failure, but it's a major
| failure with academic systems and how research foci and funding
| occur, not with the idea of genetics in psychiatric phenomena
| in general.
|
| What's more realistic to me -- and what I tried to get
| colleagues to do for years -- is a focus on polygenic risk,
| where numerous genes have small effect. This research has been
| more fruitful, but again, it's overhyped and oversimplified
| (the article mentions this too, briefly). The problem isn't
| with the idea of genetic influences on mental illness,
| especially severe mental illness, it's the way that academic
| research occurs in general.
|
| The truth is, the most likely _genetic_ explanation (which will
| only be a small part of the pie) -- the one that 's been the
| case all along -- is some combination of polygenic influence,
| involving some complex cascade of genetic effects, along with
| very rare mutations occurring within single individuals or
| families. There's also probably lots about genetics and genetic
| expression we are totally wrong about in general.
|
| I'm deeply sympathetic with the articles' arguments. Modern
| psychiatry has really lost its way and has neglected more
| psychosocial, systems-level explanations, along with things
| like chemical and microbiological exposures. I myself have
| written critiques of popular psychiatric genetic positions.
|
| However, I think the underlying problems stem from wanting to
| shoehorn behavioral science into to some model where it doesn't
| fit. Typically this is physics or chemistry, or molecular
| biology. It's not that. It's kind of like that, but not the
| same. It's also kinda like economics, and kind of like
| infectious disease science, and kinda like computer science,
| but not quite like any of those things. But people want to
| oversimplify it nonetheless, and it becomes this all-or-nothing
| argument, between the "brainless" and "mindless", and you're
| not allowed to take some integrative position. Then you get
| into people in say, physics, complaining that because it's not
| that it's not scientific, which is also not true. There's just
| a lot of politics and pendulums swinging back and forth.
|
| Combine this with academic fad-chasing and the funding nonsense
| that fuels that fire, and you have a recipe for disaster. It's
| like layers of people wanting to oversimplify things for
| attention, combined with some kind of narcissistic
| vulnerability with people wanting to prove they're "real
| scientists" or "real physicians" and in the end people with
| problems just end up becoming pawns in this political back-and-
| forth.
|
| I'm happy to see these articles, but also a little frustrated
| because although their underlying arguments are on-point, they
| kind of end up perpetuating the same problems. Yes, part of the
| problem is that genes just aren't the end-all-be-all
| explanation for behavior. But part of the problem is we just
| don't know very much right now. So what will happen is the
| biopsychiatrists will retort with some new method or R-squared
| that refutes the specific points, but not the underlying
| message. And the process will just go round and round.
|
| Some of this is maybe true of academics in general --
| oversimplfying things to get attention -- but some of it is
| made worse by the field not having some consensual agreement
| that behavior is really complex and not likely to be reducible
| to anything simple.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I'd compare and contrast the state of the field to something
| like how modern molecular biology can produce an unambiguous
| diagnosis of drug-resistant tuberculosis in a patient and
| prescribe an effective course of treatment, relative to
| diagnosis and treatment of schizophrenia.
|
| There's no unambiguous physical test for schizophrenia that
| I've ever heard of, it's just things like patients having
| auditory hallucinations and so on. There's no known
| mechanistic pathway (i.e. there's no known defective proteins
| that the genes express that somehow mess up the auditory
| pathway in the brain causing such hallucinations). It really
| sounds more like a mis-wiring-of-neurons type of thing that
| develops over time in the person, due to external pressures
| that they're unable to cope with.
|
| Now with infectious disease, there is a great mystery still -
| out of a thousand people exposed to the same level of the
| same pathogen, some get sick and some don't. Some of this is
| explained by previous immunological exposure, but a lot
| isn't. Some of it is probably genetic in that one's in-born
| complement of immunological genes likely results in increased
| resistance or sensitivity to viral and bacterial proteins
| used to target cells.
|
| What I'd guess here is that people just don't want to admit
| that mental illness is more of a social problem than a
| biological one, due to things like mass homelessness (which
| could cause schizophrenic breaks), poor parenting (which
| parents would rather blame on 'bad genes' rather than their
| own personal failures), etc. Of course, the same can be said
| of the prevalence of infectious disease due to poor public
| health regimes, contaminated food supplies, etc.
| jokoon wrote:
| Even a diagnosed bipolar woman started telling me my depression
| should not really affect my work.
|
| I'm tired of people.
|
| I feel the antiwork movement is starting to become the shelter of
| people with depression who are not being treated like they have a
| handicap.
|
| I'm glad I don't have a career, because my health would have
| crashed of I had one.
| tovej wrote:
| I don't think it helps that working a lot of jobs it feels like
| I've had a negative contribution to human well-being and
| ecology. I cannot think of a large successful private company
| that is a net positive to society.
| feet wrote:
| This is one of the primary reasons I'm disgusted with private
| industry. It's BS, pointless at best and harmful at worst
| purely to make a couple people rich on the backs of others
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Honestly, if you travel around a bit as consultant, you don't
| even need to dig to know a "companys crimes". Just sit in the
| canteen and talk with some. The employee neurosis tells you
| all about it.
|
| Lots of vegan activism - grows animals on farms or trades in
| that sector.
|
| Pro-Peace and cultural sector activism. Produces weapons.
|
| Greenpeace? Usually chemical dumps or other environment
| damage.
|
| Virulent Patriotism? Usually exploits cheap labor &
| conditions abroad.
|
| List goes on.
|
| The more desperate the cooperate souls peddling their
| convictions to "outside strangers", the more morally rotten
| the business usually is.
|
| Just a observation.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-10-14 23:01 UTC)