Tuesday 27 August 2013
We will never know how others perceive the world. My good freinds who have a particular visual world; gareth, Fred, paul, all see much more clearly than me. They catch connections that I don't. Recognise patterns that have to be pointed out to me. Surface is often lost on me. I am more inclined to disregard it and look beneath, to try to see what is "really going on." It is almost a distrust of what can be seen. As though it is a distraction. This does have its benefits. I am less easily fooled, more inclined to wait to see what lies beneath. But it is a blindness too. Something that hinders participation.
Monday 26 August 2013
Sunday 25 August 2013
Saturday 24 August 2013
Mental health, the soul and the superstition of psychiatry
Having lived through periods where the darkest of moods dominated. Where thoughts of self destruction seemed preferable to the decay, the organic deterioration that ultimately led to the same place. The deepest change in outlook came from the simplest of realisations. That my problems, that anyone's mental health problems are not existential but physical. The cause maybe beyond our present level of science. The causes may never be fully understood. But they have a physical origin. Human or animal consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, body and environment. There is no soul. No supernatural qualities. Knowing that chemicals can alter mood runs in opposition to our experience of life. We may know it on a theoretical level yet we still operate, in general, using the framework of understanding that depended on the supernatural. A common habit of the human is to create an explanatory narrative where true understanding fails us. Superstition was the basis of our knowledge throughout history, and still is in many areas. Incorrect connections, assumed reasons fill in the gaps, from walked under ladders to black cats. but in psychiatry, where next to nothing is fully understood superstition becomes a science.
We would all prefer to think our problems were complicated and existential. The mundane reality may be drinking too much alcohol, too high a sugar intake, or other dull physiological, material based causes. The religious origins of our culture have set patterns we still subscribe to , even in our current secular society. One has to wonder, how much suffering, how many suicides occur purely down to a failure to fully accept the material nature of our being.
Because the problem of how meat can think and feel was so far beyond the possibility of human understanding, rather than ignore the problems, we invented 'sciences' like psychiatry. Still our understanding of how consciousness can happen from organic matter is not within human grasp. Some think that we will never work it out. But this does not make the problem a supernatural one. According to our understood laws of physics there is no way a thing none existent in space,a thing with no physical properties can move a physical body. Yet each day our minds appear to move our bodies. Illnesses of the mind continue to be beyond human science. Crude attempts at medicine include drugs, talking treatments and electrical shocks being applied to the head. Statistically some of these treatments do some small good. A few breakthroughs include mild depressives benefiting from the SSRIs and bi polar patients often benefit from lithium. Despite our knowing this we still hand ourselves in to psychiatrists who experiment with their witch doctor like methods. In time there seems no doubt that some of the secrets of mental illness will be revealed. There is no way I can imagine that a real science of mental health could be established without an understanding of the hard problem, the understanding of how meat can think and feel . The two are surely tied together, if not one and the same thing.
But the start we can make centres on Francis cricks 'astonishing hypothesis', something Hypocrates knew, that all our thoughts, all our dreams, all our loves and hates, are the result of the electrical and chemical activities taking place within our brain and body. A large part is to recognise that
, just as the heroin addicts body can deteriorate without them being aware of it, so too all our mental health can deteriorate through neglect. Much the same as the body, the mind requires a healthy regime. Mental fitness does not occur naturally to all of us. In the same way some people have specific dietary requirements, specific exercise regimes. So too some people require stricter mental health routines.
The idea of the soul is the root of many human problems. Firstly, rendering our lives but a brief period in our whole eternal existence deprives them of value. Suicide bombers carry out their atrocities in the belief of an afterlife. Once we accept that this is it, the value of life increases by an infinite amount. Secondly, as this posting attempts to point out, the idea of mental illness being a disease of the soul lingers. This leads to the common downright nasty habit of blaming the mentally ill for their own problems. More than this it hinders any progress in looking for cures.
We would all prefer to think our problems were complicated and existential. The mundane reality may be drinking too much alcohol, too high a sugar intake, or other dull physiological, material based causes. The religious origins of our culture have set patterns we still subscribe to , even in our current secular society. One has to wonder, how much suffering, how many suicides occur purely down to a failure to fully accept the material nature of our being.
Because the problem of how meat can think and feel was so far beyond the possibility of human understanding, rather than ignore the problems, we invented 'sciences' like psychiatry. Still our understanding of how consciousness can happen from organic matter is not within human grasp. Some think that we will never work it out. But this does not make the problem a supernatural one. According to our understood laws of physics there is no way a thing none existent in space,a thing with no physical properties can move a physical body. Yet each day our minds appear to move our bodies. Illnesses of the mind continue to be beyond human science. Crude attempts at medicine include drugs, talking treatments and electrical shocks being applied to the head. Statistically some of these treatments do some small good. A few breakthroughs include mild depressives benefiting from the SSRIs and bi polar patients often benefit from lithium. Despite our knowing this we still hand ourselves in to psychiatrists who experiment with their witch doctor like methods. In time there seems no doubt that some of the secrets of mental illness will be revealed. There is no way I can imagine that a real science of mental health could be established without an understanding of the hard problem, the understanding of how meat can think and feel . The two are surely tied together, if not one and the same thing.
But the start we can make centres on Francis cricks 'astonishing hypothesis', something Hypocrates knew, that all our thoughts, all our dreams, all our loves and hates, are the result of the electrical and chemical activities taking place within our brain and body. A large part is to recognise that
, just as the heroin addicts body can deteriorate without them being aware of it, so too all our mental health can deteriorate through neglect. Much the same as the body, the mind requires a healthy regime. Mental fitness does not occur naturally to all of us. In the same way some people have specific dietary requirements, specific exercise regimes. So too some people require stricter mental health routines.
The idea of the soul is the root of many human problems. Firstly, rendering our lives but a brief period in our whole eternal existence deprives them of value. Suicide bombers carry out their atrocities in the belief of an afterlife. Once we accept that this is it, the value of life increases by an infinite amount. Secondly, as this posting attempts to point out, the idea of mental illness being a disease of the soul lingers. This leads to the common downright nasty habit of blaming the mentally ill for their own problems. More than this it hinders any progress in looking for cures.
Saturday 17 August 2013
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