Category: counseling

Psilocybin is a natural compound found in some mushrooms. While you just read about the promise of this psychedelic for the management of depression,…

Psychedelics and Depression

— The nature of reality, and thus our ability to perceive and conceive of it, is infinitely larger that our sciences will ever accommodate. Similarly, human consciousness functions by mechanisms which will always exceed current scientific physical models.

Mental health, or ill mental health, as opposed to physical health, is determined at all times by two asymmetrical components:

– Conventional-ideological norms

And

– universal affect

As a method of treatment, they are incompatible and non-reconcilable. But, they can be used together to find a way through. As well, conventional norms can be imposed beyond their proper dimensions.

Healing is not fixing. The attempt to fix someone who suffers from a mental health issue is an effort to reintegrate them into the conventional norms. Psychedelics, by their very nature, are healing medicine, not fixing, medicine.

I think a basic question for someone who would understand themselves as depressed, as opposed to being diagnosed, would be: do you feel that you need to be fixed?

Often, people who are suffering from “depression” feel that they need to be fixed. The help they seek is therefore often oriented towards other people who might understand what’s going on with them, and help to fix them. This really opens up the door for a whole population of people to be exploited — the helper by virtue of being misled, and the person needing help by having an only option of conventional helping — as indeed our healthcare system in America at least is indeed generated and based on exploitation. But we can have a discussion about that elsewhere; it is what it is, right?

We have to be careful about how we figure and designate cause of mental phenomena.

If we are truly interested and helping people that are having difficulties living their life, a basic question Hass to be whether we are trying to get them to return to being a normal human being, or whether we are trying to help that person come to terms with who and what they actually are.

In our current epistemological paradigm for health, the answer is routinely that we’re trying to get them back to normal. Despite what every day philosophical thinkers would want to criticize about the concept of being normal, nevertheless, often enough their criticism Appears more like an argument that there is a standard of normalcy. These Fein and dodge questions and answers bring in to light Mental health stigma and that’s how even the people who want to help the most are approaching it through an inherent bias which tends to refi that this person who might be depressed is actually wrong, that the person is incorrect, and that they need to return back to normal.

I have a deep skepticism about investigating psychedelics as a treatment for mental health issues through the conventional scientific apparatus.  This is because the nature of the psychedelic experience Opens knowledge and understanding to a universe that is exponentially larger than scientific reckoning would have it be. Scientific knowledge as we currently view it tends to shut things down, it reduces to itself and creates larger problems often enough in the effort to solve what was initially a very small problem.

I’m not saying that I dislike science or that I think that it’s not finding useful things. But I am saying that our blind reliance upon it, or unquestioning allegiance to its methods, might be miss placed.

Conventional Citizens

This means that we need to be careful about lumping individual instances of mental health issues into flat generalized categories of kind and type. Particularly, with each person that might be suffering, it would be prudent to get an understanding of whether this person is conventionally oriented, or not.

For example, if someone is Christian, I’m not going to try to heal their spiritual well-being by referring to Buddhist maxims or another religions beliefs system. It would cause more harm to approach the Christian by merely using Christian tropes while underneath implying that their belief system is superstitious and irrational.

Similarly, if a person is oriented upon the truths of ideological scientific fact, then we might not refer them to a healing of individual self, but might be more effective and helping to refer such people back to being a normal person, back into the social fold as an ideological congregant.

However, we might see that the more persistent depressions are actually a case where the individual is missing themselves for the sake of such ideological norms.x

How do you see yourself? w