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'I was bullied and beaten every day. Programming saved my life'

theguardian.com

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Re: 'I was bullied and beaten every day. Programming saved my life'

#91

Post by gregors »

Aggression solves this problem. Pure and simple. You can't reason and talk things over - fight or leave.

Humans are unique in that we place a weaker person into a group of more aggressive people day after day with no escape. In the wild the weaker animal usually retreats.

It's basically an aquarium of aggressive fish and you throw in a guppy. The aggressive fish nip and bite off the guppy's fins. Instead of taking the guppy out and placing it into a tank better suited we keep the guppy in the tank. That's basically what happens in the US school system and then we're shocked when bad things happen.

Re: 'I was bullied and beaten every day. Programming saved my life'

#92

Post by Dewie »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #84
Dewie wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is therapy necessarily the only, or the best solution? Maybe therapy has an undeserved reputation. Maybe people who should og to it but don't are just prideful. But maybe conventional therapy just isn't the best way for people to deal with their problems? Maybe therapy, as a field, just hasn't lived up to its aspirations? I'd agree that the GP has to do something about it. But I'm not sure about what, specificall…

What are other modes of treatment? Genuinely curious.

I don't know about treatment specifically. But outside of therapy and psychology, there are a lot of schools of thought, methods, authors, etc. that have to do with this kind of thing. You might dismiss this as no good because there is no science behind, perhaps nothing scholarly, or no professional accountability. But even so - is there necessarily anything better? Therapy has failed to convince the public of its utility. Self-help also has a bad reputation, but that might only cost you the price of some books, as opposed to expensive sessions with a licensed professional.

Self help might be a farce. There might be no viable alternative to therapy. But most don't have any grounds to judge these kinds of things. We think that people know too little about physical health, but holy shit we laymen don't know anything about mental health. The only (false) dichotomy we often see is "talk about it" vs "don't and let it fester".

I don't know much myself. But I've preferred - so far - to keep it a private matter, between me and my diary or various other techniques I use for processing things and self-reflection.

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