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It is time for more holistic practices in mental health

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Re: It is time for more holistic practices in mental health

#71

Post by smokel »

benterix wrote: post #49

Religion would like to have a word with you. Yes, I'm very serious here. Apart from crooks, fanatics and other vocal minorities, the religious people I met have several advantages. One, more mundane, is a sense of community which works best in smaller groups. Second, a sense of purpose in life and a kind of reference point. Third, when a darker period comes, a source of strength to go through it.

It is very unfortunate that religion associated itself with miracles a lot, which are perfectly incompatible with science.

It turns out to be pretty hard to come up with a religion that has your listed advantages, and which does not break down under the critical views of science. Ironically, the “God” concept is in the clear, but the bible needs a serious overhaul to be trustworthy again.

Re: It is time for more holistic practices in mental health

#72

Post by kombookcha »

huijzer wrote: post #70
kombookcha wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I personally think it's fair to compare social science research with monks researching a religious text. They can work hard for years without ever coming up with a new idea." Based on my own experiences, I really don't think this applies to other social sciences very well at all. I'm not particularly familiar with psych papers, which may well be mostly based on text-on-text, but in all the social science disciplines…

> but in all the social science disciplines I am familiar with there's a great deal of focus on fieldwork and diving into the messy nitty-gritty of the actual world. Can you give examples? What I've seen is that questionnaires with high "validity" and "reliability" are put out to participants and then statistical tests are conducted to re-confirm significant results. However, these significant results typically do no…

Certainly. I'm an anthropologist by training, where extensive fieldwork is the gold standard. Second to this comes a great deal of methodological nerd stuff (IE how to make sure you get good data from all that fieldwork). 'Theory' is mostly subsumed into this, and essentially comes in the form of securing the epistemic quality of the method.

I'm passingly familiar with sociology, area studies, cultural studies and linguistics - all of which seem to me, like they also value real world observations in their respective areas much more highly than it sounds like psych does.

From your description of these questionaires, it sounds like a methodology issue to me. If your baseline is a questionaire, then the questions you would think to ask are going to be informed by your preconceived notions of the issue, and you're forcing the raw data out there to conform to these formats you've set for it. If your chosen method for collecting the data is already distorting the field, then you're injecting a major risk of just confirming your own bias.

I appreciate that psych is trying to get at a different type of knowledge, but from where I'm at this sounds like an "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" type of problem. I'm very much not trained to do statistical analysis though, which I believe is part of the toolkit for psych phds - so maybe it actually is the best tool for what they're trying to do.

Re: It is time for more holistic practices in mental health

#73

Post by smokel »

NotGMan wrote: post #63

The son of Roblox CEO had serious mental issues which were cured by going on a low carb diet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQWh_ofvziE Diet is extremely underrated, if not probably one of the main causes of mental illness (aside from severe chronic life stress). You can also check Chris Palmer on twitter.

> Diet is extremely underrated

According to your comment, it is also extremely overrated.

Diet is very complex, and the behaviours associated with it are very complex as well. It is very hard to tell causality from correlation in this context. If someone’s temporary mental problems are clearing up, there may be more room to improve eating habits, and if someone is riding a negative spiral, there might be just a little comfort in eating junk food.

Of course we should study the relation between food and mental health more, but I sincerely doubt that reducing sugar intake will cure depression.

Re: It is time for more holistic practices in mental health

#74

Post by reverius42 »

zer00eyz wrote: post #61
tsobral wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. In the past few decades we changed completely how we are supposed to live. Our bodies and brains evolved and adapted through thousands and thousands of years. With plenty of outdoor activity, sunlight, bonding in close communities, quiet time to exercise creativity and arts, and specially, the lack of continuous stimuli and artificially induced anxiety and stress of modern world.

> In the past few decades we changed completely how we are supposed to live... outdoor activity, sunlight, bonding in close communities, quiet time It's more like 100 years for this division. > continuous stimuli and artificially induced anxiety and stress of modern world Is anxiety artificial? 400k years ago, humanity emerges. 40k years ago we finish raping and murdering the last of our close ancestors off the face…

> 2 generations ago you were lucky to make it out of a major war... the ones we have had since have been mild and voluntary.

That's only true if you're talking specifically about US-involved wars, from the US side of things. For a lot of people, the Iraq War (for instance) was neither mild nor voluntary.

Re: It is time for more holistic practices in mental health

#75

Post by Revery42 »

benterix wrote: post #49

Religion would like to have a word with you. Yes, I'm very serious here. Apart from crooks, fanatics and other vocal minorities, the religious people I met have several advantages. One, more mundane, is a sense of community which works best in smaller groups. Second, a sense of purpose in life and a kind of reference point. Third, when a darker period comes, a source of strength to go through it.

Religion is a payday loan against reality. As someone that grew up in a religious household, I am certain that no matter how well-intentioned people are, someone is going to have to foot the bill.

Re: It is time for more holistic practices in mental health

#76

Post by konschubert »

JR1427 wrote: post #66
konschubert wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it helps you that’s good and I might do the same. But two things: a) this is a luxury you can afford because you live in a country where you can trust that your house isn’t going to explode tomorrow. b) If everybody did this, a) would quickly no longer be true…

To clarify, I don't close my ears to everything going on in the outside world. I just don't get my information from news websites or tv stations etc. I still like to talk to people about what is going on. I find that less stressful, maybe because when talking with friends, family, colleagues, we don't tend to use such alarmist language (at least the people I talk to don't). As for point b), I can imagine this might n…

> As for point b), I can imagine this might not be true, as long as it really was the case that no-one was informed. Hard to plan and orchestrate bad things without information!

Sorry, yes. My assumption was that the bad guys will still stay informed, just like the bad guys don't put down their guns because I would prefer us all to be pacifists.

Re: It is time for more holistic practices in mental health

#77

Post by krapp »

benterix wrote: post #49

Religion would like to have a word with you. Yes, I'm very serious here. Apart from crooks, fanatics and other vocal minorities, the religious people I met have several advantages. One, more mundane, is a sense of community which works best in smaller groups. Second, a sense of purpose in life and a kind of reference point. Third, when a darker period comes, a source of strength to go through it.

None of the advantages you list require belief in the supernatural, or the absolute truth of some sacred thousand-year old text. It's only due to deep cultural conditioning that people assume religion is necessary for community, a sense of purpose or resilience. However, the world is filled with religious people who lack these qualities and non-religious people who possess them.

The absolute last thing we need for mental health care is a paradigm that considers demon possession or the wrath of an angry God to be legitimate concerns.

Re: It is time for more holistic practices in mental health

#78

Post by NotGMan »

smokel wrote: post #73
NotGMan wrote: post #63

The son of Roblox CEO had serious mental issues which were cured by going on a low carb diet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQWh_ofvziE Diet is extremely underrated, if not probably one of the main causes of mental illness (aside from severe chronic life stress). You can also check Chris Palmer on twitter.

> Diet is extremely underrated According to your comment, it is also extremely overrated. Diet is very complex, and the behaviours associated with it are very complex as well. It is very hard to tell causality from correlation in this context. If someone’s temporary mental problems are clearing up, there may be more room to improve eating habits, and if someone is riding a negative spiral, there might be just a littl…

>> but I sincerely doubt that reducing sugar intake will cure depression

And yet you can find people whose depression went away after going low carb, search twitter and youtube.

Re: It is time for more holistic practices in mental health

#79

Post by konschubert »

knallfrosch wrote: post #30
can16358p wrote: post #25

I strongly believe we don't have "mental health problems", yet we have a global style of living in "modern society" that is inherently incompatible with the way we evolved: e.g. office-based daily tasks instead of walking and hunting, foods fabricated to stimulate us instead of what we could find in nature, high buildings and cities with sound/light/air pollution instead of a calm, clean nature, always trying to "opt…

100% agree. You need to cook your food. You need to exert energy to move (walk, run, or cycle instead of car.) You need to communicate face-to-face, instead of with a screen. Swimming is such a great feeling that I've never seen someone worry about an email while doing it. If you drive your car to a desk job where you sit in a zoom meeting all day and then stuff your face with food you bought, you're going to crash a…

Counterpoint:

I have worried about emails while swimming.

Re: It is time for more holistic practices in mental health

#80

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

kombookcha wrote: post #72
huijzer wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but in all the social science disciplines I am familiar with there's a great deal of focus on fieldwork and diving into the messy nitty-gritty of the actual world. Can you give examples? What I've seen is that questionnaires with high "validity" and "reliability" are put out to participants and then statistical tests are conducted to re-confirm significant results. However, these significant results typically do no…

Certainly. I'm an anthropologist by training, where extensive fieldwork is the gold standard. Second to this comes a great deal of methodological nerd stuff (IE how to make sure you get good data from all that fieldwork). 'Theory' is mostly subsumed into this, and essentially comes in the form of securing the epistemic quality of the method. I'm passingly familiar with sociology, area studies, cultural studies and li…

> If your baseline is a questionaire, then the questions you would think to ask are going to be informed by your preconceived notions of the issue, and you're forcing the raw data out there to conform to these formats you've set for it.

Generally, you'd run a bunch of interviews to develop a question bank, and then run a bunch of pilots to figure out which set of questions work best.

I do agree that there's a big problem in that you base your new measure on how it performs on the old measures, which is problematic if both measures are survey based.

This is a real problem in a bunch of psychology research.

That being said, the actual problem is the culture. You are required to spout out theory if you want to be taken seriously. I only put a theory chapter into my PhD because I was forced to. Like, I think theory can be useful, but it's putting the cart before the horse, given that we're mostly in the stamp collecting phase of psychology as a science.

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