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Trends for 2018

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Re: Trends for 2018

Postby DoomYoshi on Tue Dec 12, 2017 8:48 pm

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Re: Trends for 2018

Postby mookiemcgee on Wed Dec 13, 2017 12:15 am

DoomYoshi wrote:http://nautil.us/issue/55/trust/why-garbage-science-gets-published

@mookie: what was the subject, stats?


Yes basically...How numbers in statistical surveys can be used to deceive and how one can be scammed.

Season 4 episode 9 'Penn and Teller's Bullshit'
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Re: Trends for 2018

Postby Symmetry on Wed Dec 13, 2017 4:20 pm

Sure, but I don't think this is anything like a new trend for 2018. If anything, I would say that rather than statistical analysis being treated as garbage, there's a heightened awareness of its methods and how they are applied.

That's not a dismissal of statistics- it's more a kind of scrutiny and acceptance of it as a science.
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Re: Trends for 2018

Postby DoomYoshi on Wed Dec 20, 2017 5:07 pm

waauw wrote:coming trend for 2018:
every dictionnary ever wrote:Doomyoshism
Noun

[mass noun]
1. Starting a philosophical thread nobody cares about
1.1 sophistry that leads nowhere
'A certain special one was infecting the forum with doomyoshisms.'


So, actually next year DoomYoshi does go mainstream. I just found this article, that's one of the best reads this year. Finally I found someone who can explain my own thoughts better than I can:
Here's the heavily abridged edition:
Reading philosophy helped Jones think. It helped order the disorderly. Yet later, in college, she lit up when she discovered the writers who laid the philosophical foundation for late 20-century critical psychiatry and madness studies: Michel Foucault, for instance, who wrote about how Western culture, by medicalizing madness, brands the mad as strangers to human nature. Foucault described both the process and the alienating effect of this exclusion-by-definition, or "othering," as it soon came to be known, and how the mad were cut out and cast away, flung into pits of despair and confusion, leaving ghosts of their presence behind.

Jones has since made a larger version of this question—of how we think of and treat the mad, and why in the West we usually shunt them aside—her life's work. Most of this work radiates from a single idea: Culture shapes the experience, expression, and outcome of madness. The idea is not that culture makes one mad. It's that culture profoundly influences every aspect about how madness develops and expresses itself, from its onset to its full-blown state, from how the afflicted experience it to how others respond to it, whether it destroys you or leaves you whole.

This idea is not original to Jones. It rose from the observation, first made at least a century ago and well-documented now, that Western cultures tend to send the afflicted into a downward spiral rarely seen in less modernized cultures. Schizophrenia actually has a poorer prognosis for people in the West than for those in less urbanized, non-Eurocentric societies. When the director of the World Health Organization's mental-health unit, Shekhar Saxena, was asked last year where he'd prefer to be if he were diagnosed with schizophrenia, he said for big cities he'd prefer a city in Ethiopia or Sri Lanka, like Colombo or Addis Ababa, rather than New York or London, because in the former he could expect to be seen as a productive if eccentric citizen rather than a reject and an outcast.

Over the past 25 years or so, the study of culture's effect on schizophrenia has received increasing attention from philosophers, historians, psychiatrists, anthropologists, and epidemiologists, and it is now edging into the mainstream. In the past five years, Nev Jones has made herself one of this view's most forceful proponents and one of the most effective advocates for changing how Western culture and psychiatry respond to people with psychosis. While still a graduate student at DePaul she founded three different groups to help students with psychosis continue their studies. After graduating in 2014, she expanded her reach first into the highest halls of academe, as a scholar at Stanford University, and then into policy, working with state and private agencies in California and elsewhere on programs for people with psychosis, and with federal agencies to produce toolkits for universities, students, and families about dealing with psychosis emerging during college or graduate study. Now in a new position as an assistant professor at the University of South Florida, she continues to examine—and ask the rest of us to see—how culture shapes madness.

In the United States, the culture's initial reaction to a person's first psychotic episode, embedded most officially in a medical system that sees psychosis and schizophrenia as essentially biological, tends to cut the person off instantly from friends, social networks, work, and their sense of identity. This harm can be greatly reduced, however, when a person's first care comes from the kind of comprehensive, early intervention programs, or EIPs, that Jones works on. These programs emphasize truly early intervention, rather than the usual months-long lag between first symptoms and any help; high, sustained levels of social, educational, and vocational support; and building on the person's experience, ambitions, and strengths to keep them as functional and engaged as possible. Compared to treatment as usual, EIPs lead to markedly better outcomes across the board, create more independence, and seem to create far less trauma for patients and their family and social circles.

Work on such programs is especially important right now, as officials of the U.S. mental health-care system, responding to protocols and incentives established by the federal government under the Obama administration, have rushed to change their standard response to first episodes of psychosis. Jones stands to wield a transformative influence on these efforts, both directly through her work at USF and indirectly through her growing renown. Jones talks to anyone she can about why and how we should change our response to the mad. In the past five years she has talked to thousands of individuals touched by madness, scores of public, academic, and policy audiences, and policymakers and mental-health program designers both abroad and all over the U.S., from tiny Vermont non-profits to the City of Los Angeles. Her push to change the wider culture is working. As clinical psychologist Vaughan Bell, of University College, London, and London's famed Maudsley Hospital, puts it, "She is shaking things up."

Bell, who met Jones when she gave a series of talks in the United Kingdom in 2012, is one of many who feel Jones brings something unique to the forces of reform. To hear Jones talk, whether to a crowd or one-on-one, is to understand why. When she speaks you get all of her. She leans forward, she locks her eyes on yours in seemingly unbreakable contact, she bores into your thoughts. She gestures almost constantly. Sometimes she holds both palms up, as in an open plea. More often she holds her left hand out, as if offering the audience something, while her right, closed as if holding a pen or a conductor's baton, drives the point gently but persistently home. Sometimes she enters a preacherly rhythm. "What would it look like," she asks, "if we focused on the social obstacles people face, instead of just their symptoms? How would it change things if we put people through school instead of telling them to settle for jobs shelving books? What if we listened to what it feels like to be mad, instead of telling people their experiences are just sound and fury meaning nothing?"

One of the first scholars to note culture's profound effect on madness was Emil Kraepelin, the German neuropsychiatrist whose 1883 Compendium der Psychiatrie (later the Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie) became a widely used guide for psychiatric diagnosis. In the Lehrbuch's early editions, Kraepelin described madness and most other mental illness as products of faulty brains and biology. He defined what he originally called dementia praecox, or "precocious madness," as a condition distinguished by hallucinations, paranoia, detachment from reality, sometimes profoundly disordered thinking, and what Kraepelin then saw as an inescapable neural decline. In 1908, another psychiatrist, Paul Eugen Bleuler, recast dementia praecox as schizophrenia, or "split mind," to connote a mind divided between reality and delusion.

By that time, 25 years after Kraepelin first called it dementia praecox, both Bleuler and Kraepelin saw schizophrenia as less hard-wired and more variable than Kraepelin originally had. Despite that, Western culture today continues to view schizophrenia as something essentially biologically fixed, invariably progressive, and, with rare exception, permanent. Today's psychiatry remains largely the biocentric psychiatry of Kraepelin's Lehrbuch—and schizophrenia its most confounding problem.

Most historians rightly cast Kraepelin as the founder of biological psychiatry—the psychiatry of brains, genes, and drugs, which still dominates today. Yet Kraepelin can also be seen as the founder of cultural psychiatry. Kraepelin eventually found that culture plays a primary role in shaping psychosis and schizophrenia. In Java, for instance, he saw schizophrenia patients whose symptoms, while similar to those he had observed in Europeans, differed in their combinations, intensities, frequency, and duration. Fewer of the Javanese patients heard voices or felt other people influencing their thoughts. They felt less initial depression but more agitation. Most strikingly, Kraepelin observed, the most severe cases, of the sort that in Europe filled asylums with permanent residents, were seldom found and did far better than those in Europe.

Once his eye was caught, Kraepelin started seeing culture's effects everywhere. In his native Germany, for instance, schizophrenic Saxons were more likely to kill themselves than were Bavarians, who were, in turn, more apt to do violence to others. In a 1925 trip to North America, Kraepelin found that Native Americans with schizophrenia, like Indonesians, didn't build in their heads the elaborate delusional worlds that schizophrenic Europeans did, and hallucinated less.

Kraepelin died in 1926, before he could publish a scholarly version of those findings. Late in his life, he embraced some widely held but horrific ideas about scientific racism and eugenics. Yet he had clearly seen that culture exerted a powerful, even fundamental, effect on the intensity, nature, and duration of symptoms in schizophrenia, and in bipolar disorder and depression. He urged psychiatrists to explore just how culture created such changes.

Even today, few in medicine have heeded this call. Anthropologists, on the other hand, have answered it vigorously over the last couple of decades. To a cultural anthropologist, culture includes the things most of us would expect—movies, music, literature, law, tools, technologies, institutions, and traditions. It also includes a society's predominant ideas, values, stories, interpretations, beliefs, symbols, and framings—everything from how we should dress, greet one another, and prepare and eat food, to what it means to be insane. Madness, in other words, is just one more thing about which a culture constructs and applies ideas that guide thought and behavior.

By this [Cultural schizophrenia] view, when people in mental distress are shunned and relegated to a class of others needing care away from the rest of us, they are pushed outside of culture precisely when they need it most. They may seem utterly detached from reality. But they will keenly comprehend their exile.

Irene Hurford, a psychiatrist and psychosis-response expert at the University of Pennsylvania, says it's easy to see why. The initial admission to an emergency room or hospital, she says, is far too often traumatic. Many ERs, overwhelmed to start with and facing patients long distressed and long neglected, routinely resort to physical and chemical restraints. Many staff, reflecting the culture around them, see first-episode psychosis as a gate to doom—and convey that to the patients. "They are told all sorts of nonsense," Hurford says. "'You'll be on medicine the rest of your life. You have to accept you have a brain illness.'" In reality, early symptoms of schizophrenia may indicate anything from a one-time event to the beginning of either an occasional episodic struggle or something deep and chronic. It runs the gamut. This is why best practice, as one 2001 study puts it, involves not a rush to judgment but "an embracing of diagnostic uncertainty.”

Yet many patients encounter not uncertainty but a view of schizophrenia as biologically hard-wired and inevitably progressive—"the terminal cancer of mental health," as Richard Noll described the conventional wisdom from Kraepelin's time, in his book American Madness: The Rise and Fall of Dementia Praecox. In patients, this view encourages hopelessness and despair; in friends, acquaintances, and family, a rush to the exits. In the West, the mere word schizophrenia can be enough to make people feel crazy and alone.

By contrast, multiple lines of research find schizophrenia is less crippling in developing countries. This is partly because, in many of these countries, people are likely to attribute madness not to a broken brain but to more normalized disturbances, such as temporary infestations of bad spirits. In his book Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, Ethan Watters describes how, in Zanzibar, schizophrenia is seen as an unusually intense inhabitation of spirits, and psychotic episodes as passing phenomena. In one household Watters came to know well, a woman with schizophrenia, Kimwana, was allowed to drift back and forth from illness to relative health without much monitoring or comment by the rest of the family. Because her swings from psychosis to wellness and back were not treated as the disappearance and return of her "self," as is common in the West, Kimwana, Watters writes, "felt little pressure to self-identify as someone with a permanent mental illness."

Kimwana's case resembles some of those that Kraepelin saw in Indonesia in the 1920s. In 1967, the transcultural psychiatrist Wolfgang Pfeiffer followed Kraepelin's tracks there and found the same thing. In Indonesia, as the comparative psychiatry scholar Wolfgang Jilek later described, Pfeiffer found that "hallucinations ... were accepted by the tradition-directed patient with equanimity and not reflected upon with delusional elaboration. Chronic residual states were well integrated into traditional society." Madness was still madness. But when accepted as something that would pass, it often did.

---

Holland's message said to please call immediately. When Jones reached her, Holland told her she had just spoken with Tina Chanter, and that Chanter had asked her to tell Jones that she should not come to campus until further notice, and that, if she did, she risked being intercepted by security officers. When Jones asked why, Holland explained that Chanter said that someone on campus—possibly a student, possibly faculty—had apparently expressed concerns about Jones' behavior. (Chanter, when offered multiple chances to confirm or correct a detailed chronology of her role in this story, replied simply that her memory of the events does not match the version reconstructed here. She declined to be more specific.)

Jones was stunned. Her behavior? She thought she knew damn well what that was supposed to mean. Just two months before, about the time Jones' confusion was starting to be noticeable, a student at Northern Illinois University, an hour west, had shot 22 other students, killing five, before killing himself. Ten months before that, a mentally ill student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University had shot dead 27 fellow students and five professors. Both stories received massive media attention. A fear of such disasters spread across campuses all over the U.S. It was a bad time to act unhinged. To some around her, it seemed, Jones was a bomb waiting to blow.

Jones, furious, hung up on her therapist, sat beneath a magnolia tree and, between tears, furiously called people. She phoned and emailed Chanter but got no response. She got a message to Namita Goswami, the Asian studies professor who would later sue the university for being fired, who replied saying she'd speak to Chanter and get back; Jones doesn't recall hearing from her again. Jones next tried Frank Perkins, one of the few male faculty members she liked. Perkins and Jones were due to travel together to a conference that coming weekend. Perkins responded that Chanter had asked him not to take Jones to the conference, lest there be "catastrophic consequences." She called other faculty and friends, too, but no one answered. No one called back. She had become the unwanted mad. Every effort at contact seemed to isolate her further.

For hours she walked around "in a kind of blank, devastating reverie," as she recalled later, "not wanting to go home, not knowing what to do." She boarded the elevated train that ran north along the Lake Michigan shoreline. She would ride that train a lot that month, gazing at the landscape. The speed of everything passing by, she later wrote, "served as a kind of escape from what otherwise seemed a life that had just come to a full stop."

Sometime the next day, Jones believes it was, she walked to Chanter's office to ask what had happened. Chanter was out. Someone in the next office said Chanter was in class. She'd return soon. Jones sat in a chair down the hall.

"The minute she saw me," Jones says, "she races by me into her office, closes the door." Jones, choking back tears, knocked. As she remembers it, Chanter opened the door a crack and said: "I refuse to talk to you. Get out. Leave campus. Call your therapist."

"Tina, please talk to me," Jones recalls pleading, in tears. But as Jones recalls it, Chanter just repeated, "Call your therapist," and pushed the door shut. For Jones, the thump of that door closing still resounds.

To this day, Jones does not know why she was barred from campus. She struggled to make sense of it. What had she said or done to provoke it? Who had said something to Chanter—if anyone even had? And what on Earth had they said? For at least a week she was told almost nothing. The mad, found guilty of losing touch with reality, are the last to be told what's going on.


https://psmag.com/magazine/the-touch-of-madness-mental-health-schizophrenia

The only thing missing in this is a sense of malaise about medicine in general, which also applies to mental medicine.

A usual story is
a) we get sick
b) we go to a doctor
c) he does something

It's easy to see how many different scripts there could be, but aren't.

For example:
a) we go to a doctor
b) he does something
c) we don't get sick

or even better (more applicable to mental health):
a) we get sick
b) we go to a doctor
c) he does nothing

It's the process of expecting the doctor to do something that leads to pharmaceutical dominance. If when you go to your doctor, you instead assume he is an incompetent quack that is incapable of addressing your situation, we might start approaching a solution to mental health.
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Re: Trends for 2018

Postby waauw on Wed Dec 20, 2017 5:35 pm

DoomYoshi wrote:It's the process of expecting the doctor to do something that leads to pharmaceutical dominance. If when you go to your doctor, you instead assume he is an incompetent quack that is incapable of addressing your situation, we might start approaching a solution to mental health.

Oh, so does this mean you are backing off of your initial standpoint that mental health doesn't exist?

DoomYoshi wrote:I'm pretty sure Descartes isn't a part of the American Constitution, so to even say that there is such a thing as mental health is an inflammatory statement. Until you can prove that minds exist, you can't argue for mental healthcare. Richard Nixon got rid of Project Blue Book for the same reason.

http://www.conquerclub.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=225376&start=75
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Re: Trends for 2018

Postby DoomYoshi on Wed Dec 20, 2017 5:43 pm

No. Mental health as understood by Psychiatrists doesn't exist. More specifically I mean it's not a biological/pharmacological thing. It's a cultural thing, and culture doesn't exist in a tangible sense.
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Re: Trends for 2018

Postby mrswdk on Wed Dec 20, 2017 5:49 pm

@DY's enormous article

Obviously treating people as fundementally different is detrimental to them in that it leads them to feel distanced from society and makes reintegrating them into a stable way of life harded, but diagnosing someone as having a mental health condition doesn't have to lead to them becoming an outsider. Or does diagnosing someone with the flu, kidney stones or high cholesterol also cause them to become an outsider?

DoomYoshi wrote:in Zanzibar, schizophrenia is seen as an unusually intense inhabitation of spirits, and psychotic episodes as passing phenomena. In one household Watters came to know well, a woman with schizophrenia, Kimwana, was allowed to drift back and forth from illness to relative health without much monitoring or comment by the rest of the family. Because her swings from psychosis to wellness and back were not treated as the disappearance and return of her "self"


That is exactly what they were treated as. Her episodes were not 'her', they were the demons inhabiting her who eventually left and enabled 'her' to return. Just because people in Zanzibar apparently kick back and let her wriggle around instead of executing her as a witch doesn't mean that during her episodes she wasn't being treated as different.
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Re: Trends for 2018

Postby mrswdk on Wed Dec 20, 2017 5:53 pm

DoomYoshi wrote:No. Mental health as understood by Psychiatrists doesn't exist. More specifically I mean it's not a biological/pharmacological thing. It's a cultural thing, and culture doesn't exist in a tangible sense.


'Health' is a social construct, regardless of whether you're talking about mental or physical health. Illness/injury/ill health/health etc. are all terms with circular definitions in just the same way as good/right/moral/virtuous are terms with circular definitions.

If you're going to start arguing that mental health doesn't exist and that mental illnesses are just made up, then for consistency's sake you're going to have to start also arguing that broken legs aren't really injuries and the flu is just a social construct.
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Re: Trends for 2018

Postby DoomYoshi on Wed Dec 20, 2017 5:58 pm

mrswdk wrote:
DoomYoshi wrote:No. Mental health as understood by Psychiatrists doesn't exist. More specifically I mean it's not a biological/pharmacological thing. It's a cultural thing, and culture doesn't exist in a tangible sense.


'Health' is a social construct, regardless of whether you're talking about mental or physical health. Illness/injury/ill health/health etc. are all terms with circular definitions in just the same way as good/right/moral/virtuous are terms with circular definitions.

If you're going to start arguing that mental health doesn't exist and that mental illnesses are just made up, then for consistency's sake you're going to have to start also arguing that broken legs aren't really injuries and the flu is just a social construct.


Your momma is a social construct. Obviously I'm just trolling the boundaries of definitions here.

mrswdk wrote:@DY's enormous article

Obviously treating people as fundementally different is detrimental to them in that it leads them to feel distanced from society and makes reintegrating them into a stable way of life harded, but diagnosing someone as having a mental health condition doesn't have to lead to them becoming an outsider. Or does diagnosing someone with the flu, kidney stones or high cholesterol also cause them to become an outsider?


This treatment isn't only as a response to schizophrenia, it's a built in cultural thing that happens before the schizophrenia even hits.

Individualism is the key component of modern culture. You can do it yourself. God helps those who help themselves. The people who are in credit card debt are stupid and deserve it. Be a man, get a job, support your family. This influences so deeply every part of our society. It's the mythos that you are in control of your own destiny. It's easy to say after someone becomes schizophrenic "it's ok, I'm here to help". You might even believe that. However, that's still treating them as someone who needs help (i.e. someone who wasn't able to do it by themselves and is therefore a failure).

DoomYoshi wrote:in Zanzibar, schizophrenia is seen as an unusually intense inhabitation of spirits, and psychotic episodes as passing phenomena. In one household Watters came to know well, a woman with schizophrenia, Kimwana, was allowed to drift back and forth from illness to relative health without much monitoring or comment by the rest of the family. Because her swings from psychosis to wellness and back were not treated as the disappearance and return of her "self"


That is exactly what they were treated as. Her episodes were not 'her', they were the demons inhabiting her who eventually left and enabled 'her' to return. Just because people in Zanzibar apparently kick back and let her wriggle around instead of executing her as a witch doesn't mean that during her episodes she wasn't being treated as different.


That's speculation.
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Re: Trends for 2018

Postby waauw on Wed Dec 20, 2017 5:58 pm

DoomYoshi wrote:No. Mental health as understood by Psychiatrists doesn't exist. More specifically I mean it's not a biological/pharmacological thing. It's a cultural thing, and culture doesn't exist in a tangible sense.


It does exist as a tangible. The information is imprinted in your brain, just like data is stored on a hard-drive. Stating a mind, culture and psychiatry don't exist is like stating software, data and programming don't exist, and that only the physical computers are real.
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Re: Trends for 2018

Postby DoomYoshi on Wed Dec 20, 2017 6:00 pm

waauw wrote:
DoomYoshi wrote:No. Mental health as understood by Psychiatrists doesn't exist. More specifically I mean it's not a biological/pharmacological thing. It's a cultural thing, and culture doesn't exist in a tangible sense.


It does exist as a tangible. The information is imprinted in your brain, just like data is stored on a hard-drive. Stating a mind and psychiatry doesn't exist is like stating software and programming don't exist, and that only the physical computers are real.


The PC, mind metaphor is way overworked today. It's a point I'm not even willing to discuss on.

https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer

No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.

Our shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused. For more than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and other experts on human behaviour have been asserting that the human brain works like a computer.
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Re: Trends for 2018

Postby waauw on Wed Dec 20, 2017 6:06 pm

DoomYoshi wrote:
waauw wrote:
DoomYoshi wrote:No. Mental health as understood by Psychiatrists doesn't exist. More specifically I mean it's not a biological/pharmacological thing. It's a cultural thing, and culture doesn't exist in a tangible sense.


It does exist as a tangible. The information is imprinted in your brain, just like data is stored on a hard-drive. Stating a mind and psychiatry doesn't exist is like stating software and programming don't exist, and that only the physical computers are real.


The PC, mind metaphor is way overworked today. It's a point I'm not even willing to discuss on.

You understand my point full well. The information is in the brain in some sort of physical form.
Nevertheless, seems like an interesting article. Will read it tomorrow, thanks.
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Re: Trends for 2018

Postby DoomYoshi on Wed Dec 20, 2017 6:09 pm

I'm not so sure it is in some physical form. It's nice to think that we can upload our brains to a computer, but it just doesn't seem feasible. Basically, here's how I imagine it - we know that neuron connections are made and they become harder as you get older. Memories might take the form of these neuron pathways (several connections). Every time you think about it, your brain just retraces its path. That's why memory is so easily fallible, because those pathways can become confused. So it's the path, not the content. Instead of the message being the messenger, the road is the message.

That's the difference between brains and computers. Computers have one message and that is it. Brains have a pathway and there's several paths that can be taken (simultaneously?)
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Re: Trends for 2018

Postby mrswdk on Wed Dec 20, 2017 6:24 pm

DoomYoshi wrote:Individualism is the key component of modern culture. You can do it yourself. God helps those who help themselves. The people who are in credit card debt are stupid and deserve it. Be a man, get a job, support your family. This influences so deeply every part of our society. It's the mythos that you are in control of your own destiny. It's easy to say after someone becomes schizophrenic "it's ok, I'm here to help". You might even believe that. However, that's still treating them as someone who needs help (i.e. someone who wasn't able to do it by themselves and is therefore a failure).


i thought your thesis was that mental illness gets worse because diagnosis and treatment makes someone feel different and not part of society. Now it’s because it makes them feel like a failure? Because that’s a different argument.

And also if needing help makes someone feel like a failure then again the same logic applies to people who need plaster casts and antibiotics.
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Re: Trends for 2018

Postby DoomYoshi on Wed Dec 20, 2017 6:30 pm

mrswdk wrote:
DoomYoshi wrote:Individualism is the key component of modern culture. You can do it yourself. God helps those who help themselves. The people who are in credit card debt are stupid and deserve it. Be a man, get a job, support your family. This influences so deeply every part of our society. It's the mythos that you are in control of your own destiny. It's easy to say after someone becomes schizophrenic "it's ok, I'm here to help". You might even believe that. However, that's still treating them as someone who needs help (i.e. someone who wasn't able to do it by themselves and is therefore a failure).


i thought your thesis was that mental illness gets worse because diagnosis and treatment makes someone feel different and not part of society. Now it’s because it makes them feel like a failure? Because that’s a different argument.

And also if needing help makes someone feel like a failure then again the same logic applies to people who need plaster casts and antibiotics.


Yet somehow it doesn't apply to people who need plaster casts. I'm not sure why, I just know that it doesn't.
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Re: Trends for 2018

Postby waauw on Wed Dec 20, 2017 6:33 pm

DoomYoshi wrote:I'm not so sure it is in some physical form. It's nice to think that we can upload our brains to a computer, but it just doesn't seem feasible. Basically, here's how I imagine it - we know that neuron connections are made and they become harder as you get older. Memories might take the form of these neuron pathways (several connections). Every time you think about it, your brain just retraces its path. That's why memory is so easily fallible, because those pathways can become confused. So it's the path, not the content. Instead of the message being the messenger, the road is the message.

That's the difference between brains and computers. Computers have one message and that is it. Brains have a pathway and there's several paths that can be taken (simultaneously?)


Sounds like the brain is an alphabet.
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Re: Trends for 2018

Postby DoomYoshi on Sat Jul 20, 2019 9:27 am

I suppose it's a year late and a dollar short, but:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 131152.htm
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Captain DoomYoshi
 
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Re: Trends for 2018

Postby DoomYoshi on Fri May 08, 2020 6:27 am

To continue on musing on this collection.

So far the stats are still mostly bogus. However, with some of the comments on psychiatry, I've been proved right, again and again.

This research started in 2018.

In 2018, psychiatrist Oleguer Plana-Ripoll was wrestling with a puzzling fact about mental disorders. He knew that many individuals have multiple conditions — anxiety and depression, say, or schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. He wanted to know how common it was to have more than one diagnosis, so he got his hands on a database containing the medical details of around 5.9 million Danish citizens.

He was taken aback by what he found. Every single mental disorder predisposed the patient to every other mental disorder — no matter how distinct the symptoms.


https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00922-8

How can you honestly make a pharmacological distinction when they are basically all the same? Mental disorders are not something that happens in the brain. They are something that happens in the culture. People are just describing what they don't like about a person. Something is going on in the brain but scientists still don't know what. Psychiatry is an anti-biology science.

Think of some implications of this: depression or anxiety are not diseases, just symptoms of something else. Addiction is not a disease, just a symptom.
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Re: Trends for 2018

Postby DoomYoshi on Wed May 13, 2020 10:32 am

So I've had some more time to muse on this data. I think for the first time in my life I agree with the psychology literature, because it finally says what I knew to be true all along (how's that for confirmation bias?). So here's a question - if every single mental disorder predisposes a patient to every other mental disorder, can we classify a mental disorder as something which predisposes a person to every other mental disorder? I think yes. Every type of LGBT etc. personality is strongly correlated with anxiety, depression, suicide, schizophrenia. Everyone knows that. Turns out, homosexuality is also strongly correlated with autism and anorexia. The only mental disorder I couldn't find evidence for strong correlation is Tourette's and other tic disorders. What does that say about homosexuality?

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Another trend has come around too. Preprint servers are now a big role in the Covid-19 research scene. So it took 2 extra years, but biology is now as good as math in that regard. What's curious is all the controversy and the downside to this preprint availability. That's something I did not anticipate.

xkcd:
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Re: Trends for 2018

Postby Lootifer on Wed May 13, 2020 4:49 pm

I like this thread.
I go to the gym to justify my mockery of fat people.
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