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Societies with Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness (2013)

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Re: Societies with Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness (2013)

#31

Post by andrei_says_ »

FreedomToCreate wrote: post #4

The evidence he supplies doesn't actually prove the coercion is the cause. There is no scientific data presented, just speculative statistics and linkages to possible causes. The neurobiologist D.F Swaab wrote a book called "We are our brains" that talks about the issues outlined in this article and provides scientific proof to show how various illnesses like schizophrenia can come about. Many of these illnesses have…

> as guiding them down a path that has been generally beneficial for the majority, like going to school.

Possibly unpopular opinion: school is not negotiable for children and so there's no guiding. It's pure coercion.

Also, there's no popular alternative to school so that we can compare enough data and prove that school is beneficial. Unschooling exists and seems to healthier, efficient and beneficial compared to school but there's just not enough data.

School was a great alternative at a time when it was the only place to get information. This is no longer true.

Re: Societies with Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness (2013)

#32

Post by Avshalom »

pasquinelli wrote: post #20
tunesmith wrote: post #5

Coercion and compliance are basically high-signal low-content terms. It's sort of dose-makes-the-poison in that you can't reasonably compare something like taxation (which is often described as coercion) to something like forced medication.

what do you mean by high-signal and low-content? i don't know about signal and content, but typically the word coercion is used to refer to forcing people to do something using violence and the threat of violence.

And you would think "forcing", "violence" and "the threat of violence" would all be clear. Right up until some one comes along and asserts that it's impossible to force people to do things because they can always choose to die instead. Or some one defines violence as "anything done to me specifically that I don't like at the moment for rhetorical purposes"

Re: Societies with Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness (2013)

#33

Post by rrggrr »

Identity is harder to come by in today's society than in the forests of New Guinea or in our own recent history. At the same time diagnosis of mental illness is easy to come by, as is anxiety provoking news media, and identity models of narcissistic, sociopathic and borderline celebrity personalities. Our young people, identities still forming, have many traps in which they can fall and most are alone with their thoughts. I think the author's hypothesis is the polar opposite of what is actually occurring... we've given our young people too little structure and not enough direction.

Re: Societies with Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness (2013)

#34

Post by krapp »

butterfinger wrote: post #30
krapp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In a traditional society, if you exhibited “schizophrenic” tendencies, you are immediately drawn out of the pack and put under the care and tutelage of master shamans. This is a form of coercion in and of itself. And as there's no such thing as prophecy, or magical cures, it turns out to be a profoundly unhelpful kind of coercion, both for the "shaman" and the society in general.

But is it any more coercive than putting those kids into psychiatric care and putting them on drugs that just make them not feel anything anymore? I'm schizotypal myself and I can say those methods of coping with this have not helped me at all. By now, I understand most of my paranormal thoughts are just windows into the unconcious mind. I think that having a centuries old tradition of identifying and using these tho…

>By now, I understand most of my paranormal thoughts are just windows into the unconcious mind.

Probably because a scientific framework of mind exists which you have access to, which allows you to accept that what goes on in your mind doesn't always correspond to reality. In a shamanistic society, you might still be led to believe you had magic powers, and that it was all real, and that you had to follow certain rituals to purify yourself or to interpret the signs from the gods, or whatever. Is that useful? Do shamans really know anything more about what's going on in a person's mind than doctors?

Both are coercive, though, which was my point. "Non-coercive" societies are still coercive, they just draw the lines in different places than modern societies do.

Re: Societies with Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness (2013)

#35

Post by tunesmith »

pasquinelli wrote: post #20
tunesmith wrote: post #5

Coercion and compliance are basically high-signal low-content terms. It's sort of dose-makes-the-poison in that you can't reasonably compare something like taxation (which is often described as coercion) to something like forced medication.

what do you mean by high-signal and low-content? i don't know about signal and content, but typically the word coercion is used to refer to forcing people to do something using violence and the threat of violence.

high-signal low-content... for example, if you say a term like "gun control" to a collection of people, and every person in the group has a clear idea of what it means, and yet the definition might be different for every person. So, the content of the term has low meaning overall, while as a signal it evokes a strong response.

Re: Societies with Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness (2013)

#36

Post by vannevar »

The societies described in the article have many dissimilarities with modern Western civilization. Why attribute the level of mental illness (a somewhat difficult thing to measure in a primitive society) to the "level of coercion" (an extremely difficult thing to measure in any society)? Why not correlate it with the number of cars, or the number of zoos, or the average diet? Such cherrypicking is generally a strong indicator of a pre-existing bias.

Re: Societies with Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness (2013)

#38

Post by dikdik »

api wrote: post #24
butterfinger wrote: post #14

Another point that this article does not discuss is that in many of the "less coercive" societies, schizophrenia or related diseases are not seen as a disease or problematic at all. McKenna writes: "A shaman is someone who swims in the same ocean as the schizophrenic, but the shaman has thousands and thousands of years of sanctioned technique and tradition to draw upon. In a traditional society, if you exhibited “sch…

I love McKenna's raps but I really disagree with him here. I doubt he had much experience with actual schizophrenia, which is horrific and debilitating, and I doubt shamans present or past actually had it. Psychedelic drugs induce a superficially schizophrenia-like state but it's transient and may not actually be much like schizophrenia at all. Visionary, trance, and highly imaginative states are not schizophrenia or…

There's some really interesting research out there on schizophrenia.

"Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the United States, the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful." http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/july/voices-culture-luhrm...

Re: Societies with Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness (2013)

#39

Post by zappo2938 »

krapp wrote: post #18
butterfinger wrote: post #14

Another point that this article does not discuss is that in many of the "less coercive" societies, schizophrenia or related diseases are not seen as a disease or problematic at all. McKenna writes: "A shaman is someone who swims in the same ocean as the schizophrenic, but the shaman has thousands and thousands of years of sanctioned technique and tradition to draw upon. In a traditional society, if you exhibited “sch…

>In a traditional society, if you exhibited “schizophrenic” tendencies, you are immediately drawn out of the pack and put under the care and tutelage of master shamans. This is a form of coercion in and of itself. And as there's no such thing as prophecy, or magical cures, it turns out to be a profoundly unhelpful kind of coercion, both for the "shaman" and the society in general.

This is the same with children who are ADHD. Also, in France children who had symptoms of ADHD and were disruptive were made apprentices in kitchens usually around the age of 14 or 15. This might have changed in the last 20 years. It's why a lot of French chefs are notoriously psychotic, many of them were troubled children given a chance to put their energy to good use in a kitchen. [citation needed]

Re: Societies with Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness (2013)

#40

Post by butterfinger »

krapp wrote: post #34
butterfinger wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is it any more coercive than putting those kids into psychiatric care and putting them on drugs that just make them not feel anything anymore? I'm schizotypal myself and I can say those methods of coping with this have not helped me at all. By now, I understand most of my paranormal thoughts are just windows into the unconcious mind. I think that having a centuries old tradition of identifying and using these tho…

>By now, I understand most of my paranormal thoughts are just windows into the unconcious mind. Probably because a scientific framework of mind exists which you have access to, which allows you to accept that what goes on in your mind doesn't always correspond to reality. In a shamanistic society, you might still be led to believe you had magic powers, and that it was all real, and that you had to follow certain ritu…

Yeah, you're right. We're probably on the same page about both of these methods being coercive.

My initial point was just that there's probably a big number of cases of mental illness in traditional societies that we can't diagnose because our ways of coping with these are so different that they manifest in completely different ways.

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