medicine – Unexpected Objects

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

From “Mental Automatisms“. commentaries and translation of the work of Gaetan Gatian de Clerambault. by Paul Hriso, M.D.

Used without permission.

There is ample evidence that shows that medication for mental illness is not as much based in science as it is in an ideology that medicine might have a beneficial effect upon mental issues.

Despite what might be said of why psych meds work, Psychologists do not really know why they indeed do, and in fact, even though some sort of effect has and does occur in many people with mental health issues. What that effect actually is is so vague, and the numbers generally so statistically insignificant given the ever so fast growing number of people with such issues, that it is almost enough to say that they do not do much physiologically, and indeed, their noted effectiveness is the product of an ideological enforcement not very unlike early Catholic ideals, supported arguments and enforcements about the Earth being the center the universe.
x

From quite near the beginning of what we know now at psychology there has been a concerted effort of career professionals to mold the ideas about the psyche toward what we know as empirical physiology and science. This is to say that even the word science It’s self has been commandeered by a project, a clumping together of empirical observations, that if it were not for the career motive, psychology As an effort to help people With their mental health would probably be a name for a loose set of differentiators, different groups of causal associations from empirical observation andlikely would not be associated under a common theme of physiology.x

The money motive seems to inform and be a sort of gravitas for anyone that enters the mental health field, whether they be counselors, social workers, psychologist psychiatrist neurologist — Anyone who enters the any of those fields is immediately keelhauled into this “empirical science paradigm” were medicine, psychiatry and psychology and the medical model are the pinnacle aspiration for truth, and is where everyone should be properly headed if they are trying to help this person in front of them, or get help themselves.

I question this assumption deeply. For it is really the love of money that is the root of all evil, and if we follow some of my philosophical explorations in this blog, most of the time people are not choosing what they love. So I say responsibility has to do with a self reflection that might not be occurring in this axiomatic reflection of empirical physiological scientific human being. It is as though psyche-science is a kind of sleepwalking.

My position on this, though, is not that psych meds do not work or are working due to some sort of mass hysteria. The issue is more that ideological constraint might shape investigators to view the situation along certain lines of causality and connection, and thus motivation and constraint may be due to the supreme importance money and career grant to our sense of the righteous world.x

It is as though clumping of psychology and physiology has become such a religious cosmological identity thatpeople just blindly move along a line of conclusions which merely verifies and confirms that their Nightwatch discovers facts.

The philosophical responsibility is what to do. For the psychological and emotional reactivity that ensues whenever a deeply held an axiomatic truth is confronted, more often prevents change were change is needed. And this is because the emotional activity which informs and it’s connected to subjective empirical truths, as a defense yield and violence appropriate to maintaining that ideological constant, despite what might be true.

To be responsible, then, is to realize that mental health is found through strategies of confronting this bias, rather than pure philosophical argumentation. For, the argumentation more often yields antagonisms which confirm the ideological bias then it does actual progress for human benefit.

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Psychology and Ideology