Discussion The werther effect

[Nova]

"Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James's claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?" Mark Fisher- Capitalist realism, is there no alternative?
I wish people would read some before mouthing off about things they haven't a clue about.

I agree. But the prevalent fake dialog of mental health is one tool that serves the true powers of society. They have no motivation to "reframe the growing problem of stress..." On the contrary, it's to their benefit to displace as much responsibility for the so-called problem onto the shoulders of the masses. I also agree people should do far more research into the history and methodology of psychiatry, clinical psychology and the politics of mental health, but judging from how vehemently many support these scientifically illegitimate disciplines, they're happier to believe the convenient story fed to them even at the expense of their own autonomy. But if you ask them for the biomedical evidence that corroborates the general thesis of mental health disease, they never do.

I wouldn't be so quick to frame mental health as only a societal problem. The problem is that we often assume that an effect can only have one and only one cause, therefore when one cause seems to have solid backing, it must displace all other potential causes. But various causes can be the precursor to the one effect ( without happening simultaneously), and sometimes one effect can have multiple causes simultaneously.
The fact that psychiatry is still very unreliable doesn't invalidate the biological aspects of mental health, the same way that the unreliability of general medicine in say, the 1920's doesn't invalidate medicine or science in general. At one point doctors didn't even wash their hands because no one believed in microbes until Pasteur came with his discovery. We simply don't know much yet, and every year that passes brings new advances in knowledge in science.
We know today more than yesterday, and we will know tomorrow more than today.

I've had enough encounters with psychiatry ( and probably went thru almost all meds available on the market for anxiety/depression, as well as natural herbs ) in the last 20 years to know that they absolutely can help some aspects of mental suffering, for some people. Big emphasis on the word some.
Rejecting the vast sum of scientific knowledge of the biological basis on mental heatlh today is like rejecting the knowledge that the earth is round and not flat. The fact that a body of scientific knowledge is still incomplete , or worse : that it may be corrupted in some parts by the non-scientific financial interests of some pharmaceutical companies ( that may try to skew the results of a med to prove its benefits, or push its prescription for all sorts of mental issues even if that med is not adequate) doesn't invalidate an entire field of science. It just says that science is a perpetual process of discovery, and that it should not be parasited by corporate and financial interests.

All the while, the purely societal ( as discusses in this thread), political and even philosophical basis of mental health are also absolutely real. Their existence and impact doesn't invalidate the biological aspect, and vice versa. While some meds did help with some aspects of my anxiety/depression issues, they didn't do anything for my philosophical views on life. There is an aspect of my desire to CTB that is purely rational, and I'm able to solidly argument it in front of anyone in a rational discussion ( and I did once, a long time ago with a previous therapist, and she ended up admitting that I had solid rational arguments). There is probably BOTH a chemical and a philosophical/rational cause to the effect (my desire to CTB). Other people may have only one or the other of these precursor causes, others may have a combination of both in various ratios of impact.

The human mind is incredibly complex because it is a web of biological and chemical components at the lowest level, crossed with mental components at a highest cognitive level. We are made of chemical reactions within neurons that give rise to this thing we call "thought". A chemical reaction gives rise to a "thought" , while a "thought" can modify a chemical reaction and the way neurons interconnect in return. It's a feedback loop. There is no contradiction between the societal and biological. They influence and impact each other in a loop, and these old chapel wars between psychoanalytical theorists and biologists/scientists are now outdated and unproductive. The best in the fields of mental health knowledge are starting to acknowledge that it's a whole, it's holistic.

We just have to accept that the biological/chemical aspects of mental health can be dealt with , but the purely philosophical/rational aspects can't. There is no one-size-fits-all explaination for suicide. Some people with a desire to CTB do change completely their mind about it after going thru some meds, some don't but could if the right meds existed, and some will never change their mind because it is based on purely rational arguments and no amount of meds or talk therapy can change that.

 

[Divine Trinity]

"Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James's claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?" Mark Fisher- Capitalist realism, is there no alternative?
I wish people would read some before mouthing off about things they haven't a clue about.

Compare the alleged symptoms, causes, and treatment of depression today with Emile Durkheim's description of anomie. It just goes to show how nutered the sciences have become after industrialization.

The focus on the human mind itself, seperated from the forces that governs it, I think makes all of psychiatry and most of psychology's discipline pseudo-science. The field's philosophy starts with the assumption that the mind and nature are seperate concepts, yet lacks a definition of mind, people, or individual. It also fails to make any developement on the "Ghost in a Machine" dilenma.

Someone once asked me, since I'm so critical of psychology, how long do I think it'd take for the field to achieve some sort of breakthough, I said maybe 500 years.

I wouldn't be so quick to frame mental health as only a societal problem. The problem is that we often assume that an effect can only have one and only one cause, therefore when one cause seems to have solid backing, it must displace all other potential causes. But various causes can be the precursor to the one effect ( without happening simultaneously), and sometimes one effect can have multiple causes simultaneously.
The fact that psychiatry is still very unreliable doesn't invalidate the biological aspects of mental health, the same way that the unreliability of general medicine in say, the 1920's doesn't invalidate medicine or science in general. At one point doctors didn't even wash their hands because no one believed in microbes until Pasteur came with his discovery. We simply don't know much yet, and every year that passes brings new advances in knowledge in science.
We know today more than yesterday, and we will know tomorrow more than today.

I've had enough encounters with psychiatry ( and probably went thru almost all meds available on the market for anxiety/depression, as well as natural herbs ) in the last 20 years to know that they absolutely can help some aspects of mental suffering, for some people. Big emphasis on the word some.
Rejecting the vast sum of scientific knowledge of the biological basis on mental heatlh today is like rejecting the knowledge that the earth is round and not flat. The fact that a body of scientific knowledge is still incomplete , or worse : that it may be corrupted in some parts by the non-scientific financial interests of some pharmaceutical companies ( that may try to skew the results of a med to prove its benefits, or push its prescription for all sorts of mental issues even if that med is not adequate) doesn't invalidate an entire field of science. It just says that science is a perpetual process of discovery, and that it should not be parasited by corporate and financial interests.

All the while, the purely societal ( as discusses in this thread), political and even philosophical basis of mental health are also absolutely real. Their existence and impact doesn't invalidate the biological aspect, and vice versa. While some meds did help with some aspects of my anxiety/depression issues, they didn't do anything for my philosophical views on life. There is an aspect of my desire to CTB that is purely rational, and I'm able to solidly argument it in front of anyone in a rational discussion ( and I did once, a long time ago with a previous therapist, and she ended up admitting that I had solid rational arguments). There is probably BOTH a chemical and a philosophical/rational cause to the effect (my desire to CTB). Other people may have only one or the other of these precursor causes, others may have a combination of both in various ratios of impact.

The human mind is incredibly complex because it is a web of biological and chemical components at the lowest level, crossed with mental components at a highest cognitive level. We are made of chemical reactions within neurons that give rise to this thing we call "thought". A chemical reaction gives rise to a "thought" , while a "thought" can modify a chemical reaction and the way neurons interconnect in return. It's a feedback loop. There is no contradiction between the societal and biological. They influence and impact each other in a loop, and these old chapel wars between psychoanalytical theorists and biologists/scientists are now outdated and unproductive. The best in the fields of mental health knowledge are starting to acknowledge that it's a whole, it's holistic.

We just have to accept that the biological/chemical aspects of mental health can be dealt with , but the purely philosophical/rational aspects can't. There is no one-size-fits-all explaination for suicide. Some people with a desire to CTB do change completely their mind about it after going thru some meds, some don't but could if the right meds existed, and some will never change their mind because it is based on purely rational arguments and no amount of meds or talk therapy can change that.

You should understand the argument before jumping to conclusions. Nobody ever says "there's no biological component to 'mental illness'."

What psychologist have done is take a happy person and a sad person, take a picture of their brains, and deduce that for some reason their not the same (I'm simplifying). Then they decided that everyone's brain should look like the happy person's (cause everyone should be happy right?) and that there is something wrong with the sad person. They then try a plethora of surgeries, therapies, drugs, etc. to make sad people's brain look more like the happy person's brain.

A sociologist looks at the same two people, and learns the happy person is the child of two well-off parents, in a small suburban city. While the sad person is a war orphan who's been homeless for the last 5 years...

 

[NoOneKnows]

Compare the alleged symptoms, causes, and treatment of depression today with Emile Durkheim's description of anomie. It just goes to show how nutered the sciences have become after industrialization.

The focus on the human mind itself, seperated from the forces that governs it, I think makes all of psychiatry and most of psychology's discipline pseudo-science. The field's philosophy starts with the assumption that the mind and nature are seperate concepts, yet lacks a definition of mind, people, or individual. It also fails to make any developement on the "Ghost in a Machine" dilenma.

Someone once asked me, since I'm so critical of psychology, how long do I think it'd take for the field to achieve some sort of breakthough, I said maybe 500 years.

You should understand the argument before jumping to conclusions. Nobody ever says "there's no biological component to 'mental illness'."

What psychologist have done is take a happy person and a sad person, take a picture of their brains, and deduce that for some reason their not the same (I'm simplifying). Then they decided that everyone's brain should look like the happy person's (cause everyone should be happy right?) and that there is something wrong with the sad person. They then try a plethora of surgeries, therapies, drugs, etc. to make sad people's brain look more like the happy person's brain.

A sociologist looks at the same two people, and learns the happy person is the child of two well-off parents, in a small suburban city. While the sad person is a war orphan who's been homeless for the last 5 years...

I have a bad feeling that sooner or later, if not already, Big Pharma s employee or just anyone who s business can be threatened will invade this site and be a psychiatric practise apologist and defender. By twisting what users said, invalidating or making their experience a rarity etc using big smart words to impress
Most ordinary people think its far too fetched, the professionals wouldnt bother to check internet to influence public opinion, well actually they do, its a common practice.
Its not that difficult to spot them though, they are completely biased in their narrative, they try to sound intelligent to give their points more credibility, they seem to care way too much for maintaining the image of the issue = there s have money in it.

 

[Divine Trinity]

I have a bad feeling that sooner or later, if not already, Big Pharma s employee or just anyone who s business can be threatened will invade this site and be a psychiatric practise apologist and defender. By twisting what users said, invalidating or making their experience a rarity etc using big smart words to impress
Most ordinary people think its far too fetched, the professionals wouldnt bother to check internet to influence public opinion, well actually they do, its a common practice.
Its not that difficult to spot them though, they are completely biased in their narrative, they try to sound intelligent to give their points more credibility, they seem to care way too much for maintaining the image of the issue = there s have money in it.

i think that's an oversimplification, if you look at college majors of graduates (undergraduates) psychology is in the top 5 (last I checked within the top 3). Young people who are interested and want to learn more about the field get their head filled with quacks like Freud and Jung, and never hear of a counter argument to their theories until graduate school by a professor old enough to know it. People genuinely believe this shit because the institutions (Schools, doctors, social workers, NGO's, the DSM, etc) tell them to.

"The best propaganda is that which, as it were, works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without the public having any knowledge of the propagandistic initiative." - Joseph Goebbels

Note: Never would I have thought that one day I'd be quoting nazis on a suicide forum...

 

[Nova]

What psychologist have done is take a happy person and a sad person, take a picture of their brains, and deduce that for some reason their not the same (I'm simplifying). Then they decided that everyone's brain should look like the happy person's (cause everyone should be happy right?) and that there is something wrong with the sad person. They then try a plethora of surgeries, therapies, drugs, etc. to make sad people's brain look more like the happy person's brain.

A sociologist looks at the same two people, and learns the happy person is the child of two well-off parents, in a small suburban city. While the sad person is a war orphan who's been homeless for the last 5 years...

By "psychologist" , you meant psychiatrist, right ? Psychologists usually have no biology or medical training, and do not ( and cannot) conduct biological experiments on the brain. They are usually trained out of the works of Freud and Jung , to which I agree that it is 90% quackery, but I didn't dare say that in my post :-) ). Although I don't think it's quackery in the sense that they were doing it in a malicious way: they were probably sincere, it's just that most of their theories are outdated by now and contradicted by recent scientific discoveries. More modern cognitive therapy fairs a little better than psychoanalysis though.

I don't actually disagree with the fact that most of what is considered a "sad brain" is simply in comparison to the physiological state of a "happy brain". I've been suffering ( and still do) from insomnia for a very long time, and ended up doing a polysomnography in a hospital. Much to my dismay, the neurologist couldn't deduct anything from the resulting graphs, explaining that the way they identify what may be triggering insomnia is just done by comparing the patterns in the graphs of one identifiable group ( say epileptics, or schizophrenics ) to the pattern of those with normal sleep. And the patterns in my graphs didn't look like those of any group he knows, and therefore he couldn't make any conclusion. Perhaps I am an alien or a mutant :-))

On the whole, a "normal happy" brain is simply what millions of years of evolution resulted in : a bunch of living creatures genetically programmed to survive and reproduce. All animals ( including humans ) are programmed for that. If you have no desire to survive and reproduce, then you are not considered "normal and happy", because it is what evolution aims for. I consider consciousness as a curse, as I'm at odds with what evolution wants me to do ( to survive and reproduce ) and I'm aware of it. My genes want one thing, and my mind wants the opposite.

I can't blame whether psychiatrists, psychologists, or even social workers to want to get you to that state of "happy-normal" brain because, well, what else can they do ? They are also genetically programmed to survive and reproduce and therefore consider that everyone should be "normal-happy". It's genetic and evolution talking.

i think evolution did a terrible hack job on us, and we probably should never have developped self-awareness this early on. To be aware of our own existence while we are inhabiting these badly designed bodies and brains of ours is truly a curse. A tiny stupid creature like an Ebola virus will destroy us in a matter of minutes, and we KNOW it. How stupid is that ?

 

[Divine Trinity]

By "psychologist" , you meant psychiatrist, right ? Psychologists usually have no biology or medical training, and do not ( and cannot) conduct biological experiments on the brain. They are usually trained out of the works of Freud and Jung , to which I agree that it is 90% quackery, but I didn't dare say that in my post :-) ). Although I don't think it's quackery in the sense that they were doing it in a malicious way: they were probably sincere, it's just that most of their theories are outdated by now and contradicted by recent scientific discoveries. More modern cognitive therapy fairs a little better than psychoanalysis though.

I don't actually disagree with the fact that most of what is considered a "sad brain" is simply in comparison to the physiological state of a "happy brain". I've been suffering ( and still do) from insomnia for a very long time, and ended up doing a polysomnography in a hospital. Much to my dismay, the neurologist couldn't deduct anything from the resulting graphs, explaining that the way they identify what may be triggering insomnia is just done by comparing the patterns in the graphs of one identifiable group ( say epileptics, or schizophrenics ) to the pattern of those with normal sleep. And the patterns in my graphs didn't look like those of any group he knows, and therefore he couldn't make any conclusion. Perhaps I am an alien or a mutant :-))

On the whole, a "normal happy" brain is simply what millions of years of evolution resulted in : a bunch of living creatures genetically programmed to survive and reproduce. All animals ( including humans ) are programmed for that. If you have no desire to survive and reproduce, then you are not considered "normal and happy", because it is what evolution aims for. I consider consciousness as a curse, as I'm at odds with what evolution wants me to do ( to survive and reproduce ) and I'm aware of it. My genes want one thing, and my mind wants the opposite.

I can't blame whether psychiatrists, psychologists, or even social workers to want to get you to that state of "happy-normal" brain because, well, what else can they do ? They are also genetically programmed to survive and reproduce and therefore consider that everyone should be "normal-happy". It's genetic and evolution talking.

i think evolution did a terrible hack job on us, and we probably should never have developped self-awareness this early on. To be aware of our own existence while we are inhabiting these badly designed bodies and brains of ours is truly a curse. A tiny stupid creature like an Ebola virus will destroy us in a matter of minutes, and we KNOW it. How stupid is that ?

Social darwinism and human-centrism, I don't subscribe to either beliefs. As for psychi vs psycho, same difference honestly, they're so useless they actually care about being disinguished from everyone. They learn from the same body of literature to do different things ie; experiment on people for money, and state the obvious that adds nothing useful to the table. Psychologist ig serve a role in developing propaganda to the masses, if you consider that a benefit to society. Psychiatrist are barbarians and glorified drug dealers. I have no respect for either field.

As for the "standard brain" it doesn't exist, we are products of our environment. No 2 people are the exact same, but that's the goal of psychiatry: strip away our humanity and turn us into lifeless automata for the corporate overlords. I think the "final stage" of capitalism is the complete commodification of people, to where the system has no use for workers. We all know what happens if you can't compete in capitalist societies... (assuming you aren't "too big to fail")

Smart enough to build, consume, and take orders. But "soul-less" so we don't seek a purpose in life, organize communities, or disrupt the status quo. Then climate change wipes out a large part of the population, or cause outright extinction. By then the wealthy won't need us because industrial manufacturing will be near full automation.

Homo S. Sapiens (modern humans) have existed for 200k years, civilization 10k years, capitalism 400 years, industrialization 150. Biological evolution has nothing to do with it, I don't believe in genetic determinism either.

I find it funny how effective WW2 propaganda is, it's still effective to this day. People in the US have no clue how much their culture is shaped by Nazi Germany, or vice-versa. But hardly anyone does because: "they're evil lunatics we should actively censor and white-wash from history. We won, they lost, that's all you need to know"

 

[Walilamdzi]