201–210 of 272 posts
The money quote: > Study author Kristen Syme, a recent WSU Ph.D. graduate, compares treating anxiety, depression, or PTSD with antidepressants to medicating someone for a broken bone without setting the bone itself. She believes that these problems “look more like sociocultural phenomena, so the solution is not necessarily fixing a dysfunction in the person's brain but fixing dysfunctions in the social world ." This…
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> until then we all just assume that the information I'm giving is good. Fallacy of the excluded middle. There's other alternatives to a) saying it's outright false and b) saying it's outright true. I'm saying it shouldn't be labeled "misinformation" without extensive evidence to back it up, just as you're saying it shouldn't be labeled "truth" without the same level of evidence. Instead, it's actually possible that…
Ok, so misinformation may be too strong a word - really it's just unfounded, so that labeling IS wrong. I still think we need to treat it as false until we have evidence it works. I'm sure you wouldn't treat my farts as curing cancer if I made the claim unless there was proof.
A conversation is a prelude to an exploration, and an exploration is a prelude to a hypothesis, which is the beginning of an experiment. An experiment is where we obtain the evidence to begin to say that it might be true, or false.
It's entirely possible to think about something and even discuss it without labeling it as either true or false - to be simply agnostic. We don't need to jump to conclusions. If we aren't jumping to conclusions, then it would be incorrect to say that we treat it as false, just as it would be incorrect to say that we treat it as true.
I'm most surprised to learn that this _isn't_ the current prevailing view in the medical profession. I am not a doctor, but it's always seemed more natural to me to view depression and anxiety as adaptive behaviours - albeit perhaps ones that can end up being triggered too far. I read an article once (wish I could find it) that one advantage of mild depression was as sort a "call for help and support" from other embe…
He's an endocrinologist/anthropologist by profession I think, but his books are sort of more about anthropology and psychology.
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There are no diseases, only symptoms. We can name diseases forever but that gets us nowhere. They just have more depression, or are more depressed. By the way, why don't people get SSRI's when they are depressed with a flu? I mean that is caused my lower serotonin as well. So for some reason we accept that depression because we have a reason for it? https://www.inverse.com/article/40843-what-f-lu-do-es-t-o-yo... You…
> You see, depression is fundamentally and immune disorder. We react negatively to something in the environment, like a bad job or marriage. This is an atrociously overly simplistic statement. There are plenty of people who suffer from depression despite having everything going for them. A person can have not a single thing in the world to complain about and still have depression.
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>an approach that involves identifying and releasing traumas, attitudes, behavioural patterns, self-perceptions and defense mechanisms that are held in the subconscious mind Could you elaborate on this part? What does "identifying and releasing" look like, in practice?
This is where discussions about this stuff can go off the rails, as the main modality I've used has links to the chiropractic profession (even though I think that profession is highly dysfunctional and many or even most of its practitioners are quacks at best and frauds at worst). Anyway, the modality I've most used is a technique called NET (neuro-emotional technique), which (I believe) is similar to a practice call…
The money quote: > Study author Kristen Syme, a recent WSU Ph.D. graduate, compares treating anxiety, depression, or PTSD with antidepressants to medicating someone for a broken bone without setting the bone itself. She believes that these problems “look more like sociocultural phenomena, so the solution is not necessarily fixing a dysfunction in the person's brain but fixing dysfunctions in the social world ." This…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The viewpoint that bipolar (and other brain differences) is a difference rather than a disorder can enable a person to have self compassion, and find peace and self acceptance, even though the condition will continue to affect them. The idea that it’s a disorder and can be treated as such is a reasonable hypothesis for medical science to pursue, but that is all it is. Outside of that it’s just a source of stigma and…
The viewpoint is based in the reality we live in where we stigmatize abnormality. The correct response isn't to try and normalize abnormality, but to try and remove the stigma surrounding it. Suggesting that it is normal actually creates a stigma for those who are suffering from it from pursuing treatment because they're supposed to feel that way because it's "normal."
If by abnormality, you mean traits that are far from the center of a population normal distribution, then I agree that this is essential information for a person to have about themselves. Nobody is encouraging people to think they aren’t different from the norm, when they in fact are.
Abnormal, disordered, or diseased are very different things, and should not be confused.
As for treatment - nobody should seek treatment because someone else has told them they are abnormal, or because they are not close to the center of the bell curve for a given trait. This is simply a bad reason.
People should seek treatment if it will help improve their quality of life, and they are willing to accept the trade-offs that come with it. Whether they are ‘normal’ or not is irrelevant.
I'm most surprised to learn that this _isn't_ the current prevailing view in the medical profession. I am not a doctor, but it's always seemed more natural to me to view depression and anxiety as adaptive behaviours - albeit perhaps ones that can end up being triggered too far. I read an article once (wish I could find it) that one advantage of mild depression was as sort a "call for help and support" from other embe…
One thing that I learned during my psychology degrees that always stuck with me was that mildly depressed people are measurably better at judging probabilities of things happening. (Unfortunately I can't remember off the top of my head the structure of the study, or how much better they were). I wonder if that might fit into this, in that if you're mildly depressed presumably bad things are happening to you, so perha…
Those who call themselves a realist, who believe it will fail, shoot themselves in the foot, because they do not get to learn the valuable lesson that comes from that failure. Without trying and failing growth is stunted. Trying is a win-win. You either get what you aimed for, or you learn and grow.
One scenario is if one grows up in a dangerous situation, you're shut down from risk taking, because taking a risk in a situation like that could seriously harm you. Meanwhile those who grew up in a safe environment could safely explore and open themselves up to positive hypotheticals worth attempting.
Another scenario is that when one fails instead of learning how to do better next time they create an assumption that any remotely close scenario in the future will end in failure. When one believes a negative dangerous outcome will happen, and they're thrown into that situation, it creates anxiety. This is why anxiety and depression often go hand in hand.
I'm most surprised to learn that this _isn't_ the current prevailing view in the medical profession. I am not a doctor, but it's always seemed more natural to me to view depression and anxiety as adaptive behaviours - albeit perhaps ones that can end up being triggered too far. I read an article once (wish I could find it) that one advantage of mild depression was as sort a "call for help and support" from other embe…
Also of course there was some kind of homework after each session. Usually the therapist then asked me how I could accomplish that goal. Then I came up with something and the therapist also told me "you are an expert for yourself, you know this best". That was both really surprising and encouraging. The therapy actually really improved my quality of life tenfold. I'm still wondering whether it was the method (Systemic therapy) or just the overall setup that made it so successful.