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SneezingPenis
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philosophical distinction among mental illness
#6596346 - 02/22/07 01:28 AM (17 years, 30 days ago) |
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ok.... modern medicine has been able to isolate things like being anxious and depressed, and even "attention span", and claimed that when it comes to these emotions, genetic or even biological factors are to blame.
But what about phobias? Why does the psychiatric community "treat" such "emotional disorders" with counseling, yet others with drugs? Why is depression claimed to be caused by imbalanced brain chemicals, but arachnaphobia is a logical/irrational fear?
It seems to me that our emotions have to be either solely dictated by biological/genetic factors, or they have to be dictated by environment/self/ego.
Lets take for example, "sense of accomplishment or failure", we can all agree (i hope) that this is a very commonly shared emotion..... it seems right now that current psychiatry would claim our persona's to be responsible for a feeling of accomplishment, but would blame a sense of failure on physiology.
lets say that someone has arachnaphobia, if the current philosophical model held by psychology/psychiatry were applied to it, we would conclude that there is a certain imbalance of chemicals that are the cause of this "irrational" fear.... but that isnt the case. Instead, the blame is placed into the category of "Trauma", in which case our view of reality and our own unique/individual logic has lead us to have this fear of things with 8 legs.
your thoughts?
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redgreenvines
irregular verb
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Re: philosophical distinction among mental illness [Re: SneezingPenis]
#6596430 - 02/22/07 03:07 AM (17 years, 30 days ago) |
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maybe it is triggers vs triage for triggers you use desensitization or unravelment or reconnection, for emergency you apply what you can to make the patient fit the ER.
less of science than management of bodies.
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vigilant_mind
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Re: philosophical distinction among mental illness [Re: redgreenvines]
#6597797 - 02/22/07 03:26 PM (17 years, 29 days ago) |
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Quote:
It seems to me that our emotions have to be either solely dictated by biological/genetic factors, or they have to be dictated by environment/self/ego.
I disagree here. In the case of a depressed individual, psychotherapy as well as anti-depressant medication may be utilized. Depression is a perfect example a disorder that may require cognitive revolution (changing of one's thinking) and/or pharmacological intervention.
There are indeed some depressives that are predisposed to the condition biologically while others' depression can be attributed solely to environmental stimuli.
As a general rule (I emphasize general since this is not for certain), most psychological disorders are initially treated by psychotherapy. This is the safest route since there are no permanent changes in neurological structure or function induced by psychotherapy, whereas with most medications there can be terrible side effects-- just think about schizophrenics who acquire tardive dyskinesia from neuroleptic treatment. But, of course, there are some patients who fail to respond to psychotherapy, and in such a case, psychopharmacological intervention may be necessary.
But these are just the thoughts of a layman (me). After all, I'm not a psychologist; I'm a teenager.
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SneezingPenis
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Re: philosophical distinction among mental illness [Re: vigilant_mind]
#6598344 - 02/22/07 05:04 PM (17 years, 29 days ago) |
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Quote:
There are indeed some depressives that are predisposed to the condition biologically while others' depression can be attributed solely to environmental stimuli.
genetically predisposed to enjoying life less than others...... any empirical data to back this? or are you deriving this statement from the basis that psychiatry/pharmaceuticals are both real cures and when one fails it means that it has to be the other?
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MushroomTrip
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Re: philosophical distinction among mental illness [Re: SneezingPenis]
#6598604 - 02/22/07 05:49 PM (17 years, 29 days ago) |
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Quote:
psilocyberin said: genetically predisposed to enjoying life less than others...... any empirical data to back this? or are you deriving this statement from the basis that psychiatry/pharmaceuticals are both real cures and when one fails it means that it has to be the other?
Pharmaceutical cures could help in some circumstances, but along with lots of psychotherapy, though in most cases, even on what you refer to as genetically predisposed to enjoying life less pharmaceuticals could be easily avoided. I must admit that I believe that because I'm sure that those chemical unbalance in the brain can be turned into balance through so many other meas, and that one of the strongest means is the power of suggestion... a domain that needs LOTS of new research.
-------------------- All this time I've loved you And never known your face All this time I've missed you And searched this human race Here is true peace Here my heart knows calm Safe in your soul Bathed in your sighs
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MarkostheGnostic
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Re: philosophical distinction among mental illness [Re: SneezingPenis]
#6598621 - 02/22/07 05:51 PM (17 years, 29 days ago) |
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I am a psychotherapist. I have gotten rid of a 20 year phobia about hypodermic needles in a one-hour hypnotherapy session. Prior to this session, my 23 year old client would faint at the sight of a syringe because of a traumatic event that she remembered which occurred at age 3. I took her word for it since it is not ethical to cause her to pass out just so I could witness it. By the end of the session, she was assembling one of those 10cc PF syringes with a sharpened 18 gauge X 1 1/2" needle and saying "I can't wait until my first injection!" See, she wanted to have a baby yet she knew there would be blood work and other injections, which she could not tolerate until that session.
I wish that I could treat clinical depression, schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder or any of the other non-psychogenically caused mental illnesses. Unfortunately, mental illnesses are rooted in different levels of phenomena. Beneath the ones rooted in psychic processes, there are the ones rooted in neurochemical imbalances, some of which are very treatable with medications (like clinical depression and bi-polar disorder). Other illnesses like schizophrenia are not touched by meds, but many of their symptoms can be controlled by meds (voices and other hallucinations and delusions).
Then there are forms of mental illness that are rooted in organicity, in damage or lesions to the very brain, like Alzheimer's or the growth of cancers, or tertiary syphyllis. Between the second and third types of mental illness there is a category that partakes a little of both, like Korsakoff's Syndrome which is caused by alcohol abuse. One 'confabulates' stories and one might walk with the shuffling gait of a 'stumble-bum.' If there isn't too much actual shrinkage of the brain, one can treat Korsakoff's with high amounts of B vitamins.
"Success and Failure" are opposites on a continuum that accounted for the social psychological model as espoused by Alfred Adler, who broke with Sigmund Freud. Much of the later non-psychoanalytic Existential Psychotherapy based its premises on Adler's work, which also included "the Will-to-Power," a term Adler took from Nietszche and "social interest." Success and Failure or "accomplishment and failure" as you put it is something that I have and do treat with hypnotherapy. I have worked with probing what subconscious blockages prevent academic or athletic performance, or motivation to excell in some area. Weight loss is something that may fall under this rubric, especially with morbid obesity which is sabotaging one's entire life in all domains. These things also respond to hypnotherapy. I recently had an 8 year old girl as a client who, after 4 years of doing backward flips, suddenly developed a seeming inability or fear and stopped. The next session, she got out of her mommy's car and did a series of backward flips across my front yard! It was not inability, it was unwillingness (that Will-to-power thing). It simply was not fun anymore, but her mother was driving her to become one of those child athletes. Mom wanted her to compete in those cheerleader competitions. It was her mom's trip that she was unwilling to perform. So this kind of existential predicament was really not caused by fear (the girl's excuse) but she did not want to disappoint mom. The last session was counseling, not hypnosis - for mom!
I hope this helps with some clarification. All mental illness does not originate from the same 'strata' of existence.
-------------------- γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself
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vigilant_mind
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Re: philosophical distinction among mental illness [Re: SneezingPenis]
#6598635 - 02/22/07 05:54 PM (17 years, 29 days ago) |
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Quote:
genetically predisposed to enjoying life less than others...... any empirical data to back this? or are you deriving this statement from the basis that psychiatry/pharmaceuticals are both real cures and when one fails it means that it has to be the other?
At the moment, I do not have time to reference the exact pages from which I have built my statements upon. Cognitive Therapy of Depression by Aaron Beck is the title of the book that I have derived the majority of my ideas on depression from.
But to satisfy your question, read the following Wikipedia excerpt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_depression#Causes_of_depression) on depression etiology:
Quote:
Causes of depression
No specific cause for depression has been identified, but a number of factors are believed to be involved.
* Heredity – The tendency to develop depression may be inherited; there is some evidence that this disorder may run in families, though biological and environmental factors may both be responsible. A 2004 press release from the National Institute of Mental Health declares "major depression is thought to be 40–70 percent heritable, but likely involves an interaction of several genes with environmental events". [1]
Brain chemicals called neurotransmitters allow electrical signals to move from the axon of one nerve cell to the neuron of another. A shortage of neurotransmitters impairs brain communication. Brain chemicals called neurotransmitters allow electrical signals to move from the axon of one nerve cell to the neuron of another. A shortage of neurotransmitters impairs brain communication.
* Physiology – Many modern antidepressant drugs change levels of certain neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and norepinephrine (noradrenaline). However, the relationship between serotonin, SSRIs, and depression usually is typically greatly oversimplified when presented to the public (see here), and is not supported by the evidence, but may instead involve changes in neural plasticity[3]. Recent research has suggested that there may be a link between depression and neurogenesis of the hippocampus.[citation needed] This horseshoe-shaped structure is a center for both mood and memory. Loss of neurons in the hippocampus is found in depression and correlates with impaired memory and dysthemic mood. The hippocampus regains mass when exposed to treatments that increase brain serotonin, and when regrown, mood and memory tend to be restored.
* Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a type of depressive disorder that occurs in the winter when daylight hours are short. It is believed that the body's production of melatonin, which is produced at higher levels in the dark, plays a major part in the onset of SAD and that many sufferers respond well to bright light therapy, also known as phototherapy.[citation needed]
* Psychological factors – Low self-esteem and self-defeating or distorted thinking are connected with depression. Although it is not clear which is the cause and which is the effect, it is known that depressed persons who are able to make corrections in their thinking patterns can show improved mood and self-esteem.[citation needed] Psychological factors related to depression include the complex development of one's personality and how one has learned to cope with external environmental factors such as stress.[citation needed]
* Early experiences – Events such as the death of a parent, abandonment or rejection, neglect, chronic illness, and physical, psychological, or sexual abuse can also increase the likelihood of depression later in life. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) includes depression as one of its major symptoms.[citation needed]
* Life experiences – Job loss, poverty, financial difficulties, gambling addiction, long periods of unemployment, the loss of a spouse or other family member, divorce or the end of a committed relationship, involuntary celibacy, inability to have proper sex or premature ejaculation or other traumatic events may trigger depression. Long-term stress at home, work, or school can also be involved. Bullying in late adolescence is also thought to be a contributing factor.[citation needed]
* Medical conditions – Certain illnesses, including cardiovascular disease,[14] hepatitis, mononucleosis, hypothyroidism, and organic brain damage caused by degenerative conditions such as Parkinson disease, Multiple Sclerosis or by traumatic blunt force injury may contribute to depression, as may certain prescription drugs such as hormonal contraception methods and steroids. Gender dysphoria can also cause depression.
* Diet – The increase in depression in industrialised societies has been linked to diet, particularly to reduced levels of omega-3 fatty acids in intensively farmed food and processed foods.[15] This link has been at least partly validated by studies using dietary supplements in schools[16] and by a double-blind test in a prison. An excess of omega-6 fatty acids in the diet was shown to cause depression in rats.[17]
* Alcohol and other drugs – Alcohol can have a negative effect on mood, and misuse of alcohol, benzodiazepine-based tranquilizers, and sleeping medications can all play a major role in the length and severity of depression.[citation needed]
* Postpartum depression (also known as postnatal depression) – Dr. Ruta M Nonacs writes that while many women experience some mood changes after giving birth, "10-15% of women experience a more disabling and persistent form of mood disturbance (e.g., postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis)".[2] When it occurs, the onset typically is within three months after delivery, and it may last for several months. About two new mothers out of a thousand experience the more serious depressive disorder Postnatal Psychosis which includes hallucinations and/or delusions.
* Living with a depressed person – Those living with someone suffering from depression experience increased anxiety and life disruption, increasing the possibility of also becoming depressed.[citation needed]
* Evolutionary biological hypotheses of depression – Evolutionary analyses usually consider possible functions for depressed mood as well as clinical depression.[citation needed]
* The psychic pain hypothesis: psychic pain, such as depression, is analogous to physical pain. The function of physical pain is to inform the organism that it is suffering damage, to motivate it to withdraw from the source of damage, and to learn to avoid such damage-causing circumstances in the future. Analogously, depression informs the sufferer that current circumstances, such as the loss of a mate, are imposing a threat to biological fitness, it motivates the sufferer to cease activities that led to the costly situation, if possible, and it causes him or her to learn to avoid similar circumstances in the future. Proponents of this view tend to focus on low mood, and regard clinical depression as a dysfunctional extreme of low mood. See, e.g., Nesse 2000 and Keller and Nesse 2005; see also Hagen and Barrett n.d..
* Rank theory: If an individual is involved in a lengthy fight for dominance in a social group and is clearly losing, depression causes the individual to back down and accept the submissive role. In doing so, the individual is protected from unnecessary harm. In this way, depression helps maintain a social hierarchy. This theory is a special case of a more general theory derived from the psychic pain hypothesis: that the cognitive response that produces modern-day depression evolved as a mechanism that allows people to assess whether they are in pursuit of an unreachable goal, and if they are, to motivate them to desist. See, e.g., Nesse 2000.
* Honest signaling theory: When social partners have conflicts of interest, 'cheap' signals of need, such as crying, might not be believed. Biologists and economists have proposed that signals with inherent costs can credibly signal information when there are conflicts of interest. The symptoms of major depression, such as loss of interest in virtually all activities and suicidality, are inherently costly, but, as costly signaling theory requires, the costs differ for individuals in different states. For individuals who are not genuinely in need, the fitness cost of major depression is very high because it threatens the flow of fitness benefits. For individuals who are in genuine need, however, the fitness cost of major depression is low because the individual is not generating many fitness benefits. Thus, only an individual in genuine need can afford to suffer major depression. Major depression therefore serves as an honest, or credible, signal of need. See, e.g., Hagen 2003, Watson and Andrews 2002.
* Social navigation or niche change theory: The social navigation, bargaining, or niche change hypothesis [3] suggests that depression, operationally defined as a combination of prolonged anhedonia and psychomotor retardation or agitation, provides a focused sober perspective on socially imposed constraints hindering a person’s pursuit of major fitness enhancing projects. Simultaneously, publicly displayed symptoms, which reduce the depressive's ability to conduct basic life activities, serve as a social signal of need; the signal's costliness for the depressive certifies its honesty. Finally, for social partners who find it uneconomical to respond helpfully to an honest signal of need, the same depressive symptoms also have the potential to extort relevant concessions and compromises. Depression’s extortionary power comes from the fact that it retards the flow of just those goods and services such partners have come to expect from the depressive under status quo socioeconomic arrangements.
Thus depression may be a social adaptation especially useful in motivating a variety of social partners, all at once, to help the depressive initiate major fitness-enhancing changes in their socioeconomic life. There are extraordinarily diverse circumstances under which this may become necessary in human social life, ranging from loss of rank or a key social ally which makes the current social niche uneconomic to having a set of creative new ideas about how to make a livelihood which begs for a new niche. The social navigation hypothesis emphasizes that an individual can become tightly ensnared in an overly restrictive matrix of social exchange contracts, and that this situation sometimes necessitates a radical contractual upheaval that is beyond conventional methods of negotiation. Regarding the treatment of depression, this hypothesis calls into question any assumptions by the clinician that the typical cause of depression is related to maladaptive perverted thinking processes or other purely endogenous sources. The social navigation hypothesis calls instead for a penetrating analysis of the depressive’s talents and dreams, identification of relevant social constraints (especially those with a relatively diffuse non-point source within the social network of the depressive), and practical social problem-solving therapy designed to relax those constraints enough to allow the depressive to move forward with their life under an improved set of social contracts.[18]
* Bargaining theory: This theory is similar to the honest signaling, niche change, and social navigation theory. It basically adds one additional element to honest signaling theory. The fitness of social partners is generally correlated. When a wife suffers depression and reduces her investment in offspring, for example, the husband's fitness is also put at risk. Thus, not only do the symptoms of major depression serve as costly and therefore honest signals of need, they also compel social partners to respond to that need in order to prevent their own fitness from being reduced. See, e.g., Hagen 1999, Hagen 2003.
* Darwinian Psychiatry: This "failure of model-integration" theory is focused on behavioral systems (i.e., reproduction, survival, kin-investment, reciprocation), in which individuals have a marked functional consequences due to both ultimate and proximate condition-producing causes (plural). Using the 15% Principle, it distinguishes between (and incorporates) physiological, phenotpyical, trait variational, dysfunctional algorithms, dysfunctional automatic, and adverse environmental systems, wherein individuals act adaptively, albeit suboptimally, even with dysregulation, and is then assigned a ratio to each of the manifold contributing factors, creating a profile of both proximate and ultimate causal factors for which depressive features are locked-in adaptations. Joining "evolved capacities" and "adequate functioning," it argues that many features of clinical depression are adaptive, albeit suboptimally and dysfunctionally. Using "homeostasis" as a benchmark of healthy life-strategies, depressions are regarded as minimally conservative of individual energies in which the failure to adapt, or precipitating incidents, rapid resolutions, creative capacities, physiological responses, trait variation, interpersonal conflicts, maturational disruptions, and suboptimal information-processing trigger depressive responses in individuals in order to achieve more modest goals within each of the four major behavioral systems. (Reactive depressions, or "response-to-loss" models, are a separate adaptive responses to functioning, usually transient and self-correcting.) The depressive's cost-benefit analyses are also incorporated in the final assessment, and then psychiatric treatment strategies are designed to treat all the multi-causal factors together as a holistic phenomenon through empirically-validated modalities. See, [19]
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SneezingPenis
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Re: philosophical distinction among mental illness [Re: vigilant_mind]
#6600462 - 02/23/07 12:54 AM (17 years, 29 days ago) |
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since there is a lot here, I will kind of respond globally.
1) Quote:
No specific cause for depression has been identified, but a number of factors are believed to be involved.
There is a huge differrence between stating something as factual and prefacing it with "I believe" or "it is widely accepted, but not proven".
2) I am not debating the efficacy of psychopharmaceuticals or psychotherapy. How can a "scientific" community ultimately claim, and then act upon a conclusion that states the cause of a problem is a result of biological and/or environmental factors (IOW, life/existence)? It is like me having a dime in one of my closed fists, and I ask you to choose which one the dime is in, and you answer "It is in either the left or the right, or both".
3) it seems to me that the psychiatric community bounces between these two philosophies to make itself seem more competent (and ultimately give itself more income).
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vigilant_mind
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Re: philosophical distinction among mental illness [Re: SneezingPenis]
#6600491 - 02/23/07 01:01 AM (17 years, 29 days ago) |
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Quote:
There is a huge differrence between stating something as factual and prefacing it with "I believe" or "it is widely accepted, but not proven".
I just wanted to point out that what I have said here are ideas, not facts. My first post was none other than a quick synthesis of my thoughts. Hopefully you read the last two sentences of that post:
Quote:
But these are just the thoughts of a layman (me). After all, I'm not a psychologist; I'm a teenager.
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SneezingPenis
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Re: philosophical distinction among mental illness [Re: vigilant_mind]
#6600519 - 02/23/07 01:06 AM (17 years, 29 days ago) |
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I dont want to derail into semantics, but that is why I said "preface".
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vigilant_mind
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Re: philosophical distinction among mental illness [Re: SneezingPenis]
#6600553 - 02/23/07 01:15 AM (17 years, 29 days ago) |
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Quote:
I dont want to derail into semantics, but that is why I said "preface".
Simply because I did not preface my post with "I believe" does not mean that I neglected to state the ideology associated with my statement nor does it void the entire point being conveyed.
You questioned my post as if I stated it as fact, I honestly stated that it was not.
Lets move on.
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