Posted by alexandra_k on January 27, 2019, at 14:52:46
In reply to Re: Has anyone read the book Lost Connections, posted by baseball55 on January 25, 2019, at 16:31:41
> Haven't read it. But I'm not sure how much capitalism has to do with mental illness. Sounds a little too Thomas Szasz for my taste.
I used to hate-on Szasz. But I read something of his a bit more recently, and I started to think that he was maybe on to something. That being said -- he was pretty prolific over his lifetime and he said really rather a lot of things. It might be that I found different things that he said the second time around.
I think he was NYU. I mean, I thought he was a bit of a crank to start with -- but I don't think you get to be a crank at NYU? Or maybe something about keeping your enemies even closer...
> But I do agree that depression/anxiety have strong psycho-social components better treated with therapy and self-care than with drugs. Social anxiety, in particular, seems to me entirely a psycho-social disorder (and I say this as someone who had very bad social anxiety). However, there is a biological component as well, at least in my experience. Sometimes there is no trauma, no unhappiness, no trigger that cause people's mood to plummet. That certainly is the case for me. Something just goes awry in whatever networks in the brain affect mood.
Yeah. Plenty of people say they find something like that. Or find something seasonal. And they don't find that trying to figure out inner psychology stuffs helps, at all.
Things were different for me. A lot of my early... Upset... Was a Harry Harlow monkey sort of an upset. I did engage in a lot of help-seeking behavior from psych services, I suppose. Because that was what was wrong and I guess that was obvious to them. Then, over time, I did have some good influences in my life (including supportive therapists) and I came to internalise a bunch of stuff that a lot of other people got more of earlier on. And then my struggle became mostly about lack of resources to attain the things I needed. Mostly - to get away from other people who were similarly lacking in and needy of good influences. Or to get away from other people who were living out their dysfunction. Space away from them so I could find my... Inner better self. Try and develop in positive ways. Study when I need / want / can bear it. Sleep when I am tired. Not be required to play mother to them.
And now I suppose I am struggling to try and integrate into something... I don't know. We will see...
> So drugs are needed to alter the dysfunction in the brain. Maybe not the drugs we have available today, but finding something that lifts depression reliably and in most people and is not addictive is the holy grail of psychiatry.
Yeah.
I wonder if it's like trying to find the cure for 'immune disorders' or 'enzyme disorders' or 'blood disorders'. I mean to say that there are so freaking many of them... With very different proximal causes.
I mean... Things to do with mood could be: Under-developed (mass) of a neural region, over-developed (mass) of a neural region, excess of receptor type 9758 subtype 84729583, lack of receptor 8574 subtype 7479245849... You get the idea.
The greatest progresses in treatments are ones that seem to fix things up pretty great for a really small number of people. That's partly why Med is hard. Lots and lots and lots of different disorders -- that could be (well, relatively) easily fixed with the right treatment. In certain countries where treatments are available, anyway.
But less of the en-masse cure-all.
I mean... Methamphetamine tends to make people immediately feel good. Or there is that brain stimulation of the pleasure centre that is so good all you will want to do it keep hitting the button for more of that over and over and over. But that isn't really the cure... Not 'feel good' but 'don't feel so gosh darned awful anymore'.
Or shock treatment.
Or lithium.
They were sort of en masse feel-goods. The shock treatment came from the observation that epileptics tended to have a boost in mood after their seizures so they got to wondering if inducing seizures intentionally might help other people too (at least that's what they said they were doing in shocking people).
Those sort of en-masse cure-alls.
But they don't seem to quite get at it...
poster:alexandra_k
thread:1102912
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20161002/msgs/1103005.html