Category: counseling

Orientation and Route

New draft of a paper called Orientation and Route.

Any feedback is appreciated.

https://www.academia.edu/s/dabeb9278d?source=link

art from Revolutionary Misfit, used without permission

Philosophy is out of wack.

It obliviously promotes as it reifies a particular manner of coming upon the world which is, for a word, pathological.

This essay is an initial session of the work toward a diffracted awareness of the problem of reductive reflection.

Repost and comment of Psychedelics and Depression

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

High Functioning Anxiety? Some philosophical notes of the modern Aria

www.huffpost.com/entry/high-functioning-anxiety-signs_l_5cd42647e4b09f321bdcc6d0

I ponder why mental health as a topic has become so prominent in our experiential awareness, concern and vocabulary.

From a philosophical perspective, it seems sensible. For, the prominent 20th century philosophy was existentialism, and thus is based in the preponderant existential anxiety.

However, aside from the more obvious considerations where history makes sense in light of current issues, and the issues make sense from historical sense, could something else be happening?

Is it that we as human beings are becoming more aware of our situation?

Or could it be that we are but filling out the meaning that has been given us?

Or both?

Irony and history

The most substantial philosophical component of modern existence is irony. From a leading edge philosophical standpoint, Everything that we understand as knowledge falls into a weighted selective bias that we call subjectivity. Subjectivity, for a term, is that aspect of existence that rejects the truth of knowledge, of our situation, for the sake of having a real world, reality.

This then is known as phenomenological meaning, and it constitutes the epistemological position of any knowledge that is able to be posited and thus known. This was not a condition of all knowledge through history, rather, it is the particular condition by which and in which we are able to know anything presently.

Hence, the issues of our day of what constitutes the legitimacy for truth and the political polemics that do not seem to be resolvable through open critical discourse. All modern knowledge is ironic, when you begin to think about it openly, critically, and honestly.

High Functioning Anxiety

It would seem, then, that what we see and experience in ourselves to say that someone might ‘suffer’ from high anxiety and yet still be able to function well, could be just that we are expected to deal with life in this way. We function as we are supposed to, yet education brings about a self reflection that is epistemologically informed by rejection of what is true of ourselves as a de facto modern agent. We find this is Jean Paul Sartre. That is, faced with brute existence and the meaningless found therein, we revolt from it an assert our free will to create meaning.

It could very well be, though, that we are this way — anxious, as a society but as well an an individual — because we have been told how to see and understand ourselves and this manner thus fulfills its teleology, and we find thus a mental health pandemic and according ‘solutions’ to the ‘problem’.

Further, it may well be that Sartre, and his ilk, were wrong ethically, and from the Kierkegaardian standpoint in which those 20th century philosopher so uncritically saw themselves. They read our situation and perpetuated it, justified it, as opposed to taking a critical view of it. The problem with 20th century existential ism is that it posits that the universe is meaningless and that human beings are the ones that make meaning. This is the seminal statement of modern ideology and why we must say that to live in the modern world is to live as problem.

The essential and unavoidable problem can be stated as this: To say that existence has no meaning, and thus it is incumbent upon human beings to create for themselves purpose and meaning, is to say that purpose and meaning is nothing.

In other words, the formulation is incorrect.

Perhaps it is some sort of intuitive understanding that the method by which we are understanding ourselves in the universe is incorrect which constitutes the anxiety we know so well.

How could anyone have confidence in the meaning that they are making if amidst this meaning making the underlying knowledge of such activity is that it is pointless, useless, and means nothing? 

And yet, the modern problem can be extended to be formulated as such:

in so much as I might become aware of this paradox, my anxiety is only increased, and I am compelled to do more things to distract myself from this dreadful condition of knowing.

Truth versus Reality as a question of method Versus meaning

Rather than asking how to solve our anxiety and accorded social issues, The more effective question as to overcoming this self-justifying anxious philosophical reflection of society (ideology and spirituality) could thus be to ask how could this be the case. Why in the sense of logistics as opposed to why as is what is the historical cause.

In other words, The short of it is:

Are you able to understand your situation as a truth instead of a product ?

What do you say?

Trauma Informed Care

For those who may not know, trauma informed approach to mental issues understands that such issues are the individual’s natural response to traumatic events in the person’s life.

Whether it be a single traumatic event, like an act of violence or natural disaster, a series of events, such as abuse, or “a thousand bee stings” over an extended period of time. The response to trauma is the same. Mental health issues arise due to life trauma.

Systemic Abuse

The reason why this is important is because hardly anyone knows this outside of the mental health helpers.

Below is a part of a first-person typical example of an extreme case of a person encountering systemic bias and stigma, which I am sure most everyone adheres to, even as they would rather behave better:

From “Experiencing Psychosis” 2012 published by Routledge. used without permission.

Unfortunately, I fear this is still not an atypical example. I would say that probably most people who experience any form of acute mental issue, whether it be depressed suicidality to schizophrenia , are met in the general clinical setting with a sincere while good intentioned bias that functions to invalidate, as a category, the actuality of the mental health situation.

Just a thought.

How have you viewed someone you have encountered with a mental issue?

What was your reaction?

The Moment of Decisive Significance: Enlightenment and the Christ Moment

The moment of enlightenment is only initially an awareness of being. After that moment it is an awareness of how so few are aware. The real issue of enlightenment has to do with what comes after.

When we understand Christ in its proper scope, we see that ‘enlightenment’ is the attempt by the individual to uphold and maintain It as a prolonged state of being. The way it is maintained Is through the justification of the offense.

The Christ moment, and the ideal of enlightenment, is a moment of being conscious that when come upon represents a moment of decisive significance.

In this moment, the awesomeness and apprehensive feeling of dread might bring the individual to fall back into its history to thereby join and retain the consistency of what they know and knew to that state of fear and trembling. The coupling of the Christ moment with the fall back (revolt) into the fear of the awesomeness of the tremendous mystery that is come upon in that moment, yields righteousness, what some could call “ego inflation”. Enlightenment is the form of consciousness understanding itself and its view as something that everyone else is supposed to likewise know.

On The other hand, when the Christ moment, it’s awesomeness and the accompanying state of fear and trembling, is come upon in curiosity, then the motion is one of compassion instead of righteousness. For the self, it continues the motion of curiosity and acceptance, but this self is not the primary aim. The motion is into otherness. Difference.

For, instead of understanding how intellectually or ethically wrong and spiritually poor everyone is around, such that they need to be educated into the righteousness of proper knowledge, The Christ moment fades into just one moment in the potential of human consciousness. Enlightenment disappears as some thing that was never to be found. The meaning of awareness changes.

The awareness that remains is not enlightened awareness, neither is it Christ being; rather it is a true human compassion for those people Who have come upon and yet not followed through such a moment.

It is a true understanding of what it is to be human.

Read The Moment of Decisive Significance: A Heresy

…and much more affordable paperback!.

An object oriented journey through the Gospels.