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What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

nytimes.com

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Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#81

Post by arca_vorago »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #18

Shouldn't a distinction then be made between 'shell shock' and PTSD as experienced by people that haven't been in war zones? In other words what soldiers experience is not PTSD, it's a different physical ailment (probably in addition to PTSD actually).

USMC combat vet of OIF here, and very much this. I now have my "ptsd" under control and it is mild compared to many of my buddies, but if there is one thing I can impart is that "ptsd" is simply too broad a term. Combat vets have different kinds of trauma, from tbi to various psychological ones and more, and grouping them all up does them all a disservice.

I have done quite a bit of thinking on the subject, and I think many of the approaches for both treatment and diagnosis are wrong, but thats a thesis paper for another time.

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#82

Post by bcarlyle »

Madmallard wrote: post #35

Or, get this, and this is super radical of an idea I know: There is not much of a separation between physical and psychological in the first place. Every part of the body is interconnected--as people develop disease, often times mental symptoms develop secondarily so. Depression and anxiety are super common in all sorts of illness states. There are numerous studies showing cellular dysfunction and rampant oxidative s…

The idea of a divide between mind and body is strange.

It seems like our consciousness is constructed in such a way that it's very easy for people to forget that we actually have a body connected to our head.

Another interesting idea would be to think that mental health problems in part are caused by the systems inside our body that are outside of our conscious control not working properly communicating their discomfort as mental health problems.

I'm a clinical psychologist and I don't think I've had a patient in therapy who had

1. Sleep 2. Exercise 3. Stress 4. Food

Figured out.

What I mostly notice is that once these things are improved the need for therapy diminish significantly.

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#83

Post by prutschman »

naasking wrote: post #54
prutschman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A computer's behavior is no less emergent from its physical structure.

Except computer behaviour isn't emergent from its structure, it's emergent from its programming which happens after its structure is fully formed. And neural structure changes during its operation, which most computers don't. They aren't remotely the same thing. Certainly you can simulate this operation of neural structure, but to suggest they are effectively the same is to suggest that cars and mice are effectively…

In order to understand computation it's obviously useful to humans to think in an abstract way about what we're trying to accomplish with a computer, and how. The distinction we draw between computer hardware and computer software is obviously part of that understanding.

That said, programming is "merely" inducing specific alterations to the electrical charge distribution in the hardware of the computer. The computation we ascribe to the computer is the product of the physical changes induced in the structure of the computer by our act of programming it. As far as the physical artifact of the computer is concerned, as opposed to our mental model of it, there is no clear distinction to be made between hardware and software. That doesn't make the distinction we draw in practice an inappropriate metaphor.

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#84

Post by riprowan »

PeterisP wrote: post #68
riprowan wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it well-established that learning of any sort produces physical change in the brain? Why would experienced trauma be any different from any other extremely powerful (and repeated) (yet traumatic) learning experience, thus causing permanent change in the brain to "capture" and "remember" the incident like any other powerful learning experience?

Learning a fact physically "records" the fact in the brain, but is it well-established that powerful learning experiences can cause changes to the overall functioning of the brain? I mean, not the physical changes that amount to "now your motor neurons have changed so that they swing a golf club more accurately" but physical changes that are like "now your motor system or learning system or the regulation of somethin…

I'm sorry, I fail to see the distinction you are trying to draw.

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#85

Post by dunmalg »

bcarlyle wrote: post #82
Madmallard wrote: post #35

Or, get this, and this is super radical of an idea I know: There is not much of a separation between physical and psychological in the first place. Every part of the body is interconnected--as people develop disease, often times mental symptoms develop secondarily so. Depression and anxiety are super common in all sorts of illness states. There are numerous studies showing cellular dysfunction and rampant oxidative s…

The idea of a divide between mind and body is strange. It seems like our consciousness is constructed in such a way that it's very easy for people to forget that we actually have a body connected to our head. Another interesting idea would be to think that mental health problems in part are caused by the systems inside our body that are outside of our conscious control not working properly communicating their discomf…

"What I mostly notice is that once these things are improved the need for therapy diminish significantly."

Isn't this sort of a chicken-egg problem? I have horrible sleep issues, but they're caused by PTSD related anxiety, and yes, the insomnia then exacerbates the anxiety. I sleep better when my anxiety is under control, but it's not the good sleep that reduces my anxiety--- it's stuff like Xanax and meditation.

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#86

Post by MarkPNeyer »

kordless wrote: post #80
SolaceQuantum wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a long medical history of treating things in isolation in order to understand fundamental aspects of biology and such. While the rest of science has more or less moved on from this mindset, the medical field hasn't fully yet.

It's called measuring things. It's what we do, after all.

Measurement is great. I'm all for it.

But there's a serious problem with scientism in the modern world. I think it's great to develop a way of looking at the world that 'takes people out' - we can predict the motion of the moon without regard to what people think or feel about how the moon will move. The moon's motion does not take our feelings into account.

It starts to get really silly, though, when you try to use those same techniques to look at people. "How do people behave, in the absense of people" is a very silly question to ask, but it seems like that's what we try to do when we look at people through the lens of modern scientific methods.

Every person is different and has a different personal history. The idea that you can formulate some 'general rule' for how people behave is as baseless as trying to come up with a 'general rule' for computers.

It makes much more sense to look at different software patterns and how they operate, rather than trying to snip a transistor and then see how the graphical output changes, which is effectively what we do in mental health medicine.

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#87

Post by jeffdavis »

adammunich wrote: post #39
Madmallard wrote: post #35

Or, get this, and this is super radical of an idea I know: There is not much of a separation between physical and psychological in the first place. Every part of the body is interconnected--as people develop disease, often times mental symptoms develop secondarily so. Depression and anxiety are super common in all sorts of illness states. There are numerous studies showing cellular dysfunction and rampant oxidative s…

I never understood why people rarely take this approach. It's not as if these things occur in isolation.

The more complex a theory is, the harder it is to draw useful conclusions that people can actually apply.

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#88

Post by dunmalg »

glibgil wrote: post #21
ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

I can certainly believe that there is more going on than just stress, and the argument that compression waves travelling through the brain can damage it is pretty compelling. The question then is how would you block it? How would you protect yourself from a compression (blast) wave such that it went "around" your head rather than through it. Is there some material that could conduct that energy preferentially?

Stop sending people to war would help

Thousands of years of violent human history suggest that designing a better helmet to mitigate TBI is likely to help more people than wishing war would go away.

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#89

Post by rdtsc »

bcarlyle wrote: post #82
Madmallard wrote: post #35

Or, get this, and this is super radical of an idea I know: There is not much of a separation between physical and psychological in the first place. Every part of the body is interconnected--as people develop disease, often times mental symptoms develop secondarily so. Depression and anxiety are super common in all sorts of illness states. There are numerous studies showing cellular dysfunction and rampant oxidative s…

The idea of a divide between mind and body is strange. It seems like our consciousness is constructed in such a way that it's very easy for people to forget that we actually have a body connected to our head. Another interesting idea would be to think that mental health problems in part are caused by the systems inside our body that are outside of our conscious control not working properly communicating their discomf…

> The idea of a divide between mind and body is strange.

I think that is an important construct. It allows us to abstract the notion of an individual and make it something well above a bag of bones and meat. By "above" I mean something superior, trancendant, more important.

A lot of religions have the concept of a soul, and due to Abrahahim religions, the West that concept persisted. Even if people don't believe in a soul there is still a concept of a mind as separate from the body.

In computer terms (because it is hacker news), there is a tempting analogy of software and hardware. The mind / self / personality / soul is the software. The body is the hardware. Of course, we know that software is stored by altering some parts of the hardware (electric charges, etc)). So there is a connection obviously, but we still talk about it as separate things.

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#90

Post by dvtv75 »

dunmalg wrote: post #88
glibgil wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop sending people to war would help

Thousands of years of violent human history suggest that designing a better helmet to mitigate TBI is likely to help more people than wishing war would go away.

In the article, if you read all of it, they suggest point to a study that suggests a better helmet may be of no use in preventing the injury. If you search for "animal" in the article, you should find it.

On the other hand, if the majority of people who want to join the army understand the dangers they face (in addition to death and dismemberment) then we might find that they held a war, and nobody came.

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