A new approach to mental illness

Just a second thought on ADHD. It has been suggested that up to 2 million Americans suffer what s commonly refered to as emotional intensity disorder.

It has been described as a disorder that keeps a person in an emotionally intense state at most times.

Some people may consider it as an intense desirer to live always in the NOW and not be overly concerned about teh next moment or tomorrow.

ADHD I once thought is a child who is intensly experienceing every moment and is sensing that moment too intensly thus behaving as if "there is no tomorrow.....rapidity of movement and distractions.....

I am sure if appropriate sensory training was generated great help is possible.....I suggested to one parent that she teach her "ADHD" child to touch his nose before he did anything new. Training the child to look into the future more and more so that the child can learn to plan as many as 4 or 5 things ahead.{ instead of only one ] The nose is our most sensitive sensory organ system and by stimulating it by touching it with deliberation can effect the future of that person.

Any way, I have not followed up on the parents actions to see what has transpired with her child.

I just don't think it is appropriate to give up on people just becasue a medication seems to give other people other than the sufferer relief.

 

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I see the problem thus.....it is a specifically white middle class problem. THEIR problem!
they are emotionally epressed themselves (not all but generally more so than 'working class', Indigenous people, Bohemians etc).....they cant now HIT children in school like they could when i was there---i was strapped, slapped, had chalk dusters thrown at my head, knuckles rapped with ruleers etc......SO. thy invent a fukin yet NOTHER 'disorder' and enofrcibly drug it/ so like you say. THAt doesn't sove no problem, but appaently thiers. though it doesn't really cause they were and stay, DEAD ignorant

now. meanwhile. in out press the other day i read that food maufacturers put cutesi wootsie cartoon images of kids fave programme characters on the front of foods SO much saturated with sugar, salt and fat that they are wholly detrimental to the child's well-being, and would create high blood sugar leves....ie., socalled 'hyperactivity'!....yeah? following this?

when these arseholes are challenged they deny fabricate and say silly things like 'well if their moms dont want them to have it the kids wont have it'...this is after spending thousands on advertizing cynically manpululated to make fruggin sure the kids DO have it

so all of this problem is complex. a child is a very complex being. and what 'we' do is put them in a clinically hostile environemnt--school. far far away from meandering brroks, rivers, all the wonders of Nature, and drill them to be a 'success'...sos they enentually will maybe get kids and put theirs thought the nightmare of school

in other words the whole thing is a complete shamn that people have accepted on the whole and darent challenge it for what it is. i WILL

 

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Lucysnow , Was your post directed at me ?

Wouldn't environmental factors also contribute to and increase the likelyhood of irrational thought processes ? Saying it's "biochemical" may be a part , but may also be an incomplete assessment as to causation .

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What is your opinion regarding The University of Pennsylvania's covert research ?

 

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I'm only up to November 2003 in this thread and I HAVE to reply to this.

This SO gives me an idea for a book that needs to be written. To me, schizophrenia is largely a phenomenon of mass hysteria and the tendency of a society to isolate exceptional individuals and drive them crazy. I happen to believe that the histories of oppression of intellectuals, homosexuals, blacks, witches, and other perceived social deviants exist on the same planet that I do. "Post traumatic stress disorder" was first defined as something that happened to adults who spent a few months on a battle field. What about the child who spends most of the first 18 years of his life there, starting as an impressional and trusting infant?

In my life the people who governed my existence, and I could go on about them, were violent, insane, motivated by drives that were so strange as to make them even smell bad. They put my reality in such a state that no sane person could think that this was real. They have even told me that certain things didn't happen. People who sexually molest children aren't the only ones who do this.

Take some of the basic lessons of life in order. Mother rules your life with an iron fist. School authorities rule your life with an iron fist. You have to not only submit but believe everything they tell you. Then, they repeatedly threaten you with death for offenses that you cannot see as being such major offenses, or even offenses at all. They play headgames that make you look for invisible beings staring at you from the wall or from other dimensions of reality, like "if you don't stop pounding on that the Baby Jesus is going to come up here and drag you down into eternal burning hell" or something even more inane. That's not an accurate quote from Dilbert, but close.

A schizophrenic may be nothing more than someone who has lost the capacity to tell people to take their insanity and stuff it. That ability may have been beaten out of him by people who get into his mind and tear his beliefs from him. Never you mind about the validity of the idea of mental telepathy. The stage magicians who used mentalist acts had to have learned at least some of their tricks from their mothers. One trick is to yell something in a child's face, and if he looks like he's trying to understand what that adult yelled at him, haul off and dislocate his cervical vertebrae. Another trick is to get the victim into casual conversation, pretend to be his best friend, and get him to talk about himself. Another is to simply threaten the child with death if he gives the wrong answer, and let him feel the intense relief that he survived the interrogation at all.

The idea that a schizophrenic might kill off his parents or shoot up a school comes from some real incidents, but overall, are unmedicated and untreated schizophrenics more or less violent or likely to kill? When I was young I did not seek violent forms of entertainment. Other boys, who weren't accused of being mentally ill, sought me out and made me their violent form of entertainment. At least some of my "paranoid delusions" had something to do with the idea that I expected particular people to hurt me, who did this at least once a week. Is it or is it not reasonable to expect "paranoid" thoughts from someone who takes a beating almost every day at or near school?

Then they confine the victim in a place that takes away his freedom, at least a portion of his academic achievement, and tell him that this is because there is something wrong with him that has to be fixed. Isn't this the fulfillment of a paranoid's fantasies? At what point are these no longer fantasies? People who act literally like alien beings judge a young man without his participation. They fail to do it in any way that would reasonably convince him that they are right, competent, or have any of his best interests at heart. They contrive a situation that takes him from the frying pan and into the fire. Then they tell him that if he doesn't believe they are good people with good intentions, and even able to deliver on their promises, he is crazy. He is even crazier if he can bring in evidence and bear accurate witnesses that these people are worse than the worst enemies he has ever encountered before. Crazier still if he witnesses misconduct on the part of the staff and reports it.

The worst part of "schizophrenia" is being right, all the way down the line, about every possible worst case scenario, and knowing that one has been forced into a life that is a fate far worse than death. What in the nine billion names of God is wrong with this picture? Schizophrenics are crazy, broken, must be restrained and forced to take drugs, but their paranoid fantasies actually control the fabric of reality?

No, the schizophrenic is manufactured by society as a scapegoat for its own ills. Any human can be driven into a violent and hysterical mental state and then have his head rammed into a wall for it. The definition of sanity seems to me to hinge largely on whether the actor dares to do it to him or her. It's very possible to put a normal person into a state where he can't fill out paperwork, and for a lot of "normal" people it's not that long a drive anyway.

Again, what causes the violence that is characteristic of some schizophrenics? Many people I have known have been trapped in situations in which they have at least one tormentor who keeps them afraid. This tormentor makes them feel that their life will come to a brutal end if they leave the relationship (work, school, being the child of a disfunctional parent), and that it will eventually come to an even more painful and brutal end when that tormentor finally "gets tired" of them. Any time my mother "got tired" of me, I was in for pain somewhere between that of a nasty automobile accident and that of being dipped in molten lava. What you have when you have a violent schizophrenic is a punching bag who has awakened to his reality and decided that dishing it back is the way to deal with it. Obviously that has to be suppressed at all costs.

Mental health professionals would do well to look a lot closer to reality for the answer to the problem of schizophrenics. Simple systematic abuse of the victim's senses, sensibilities, and murder of his soul are more than enough to account for it. We don't have to write a new version of an upgraded and renamed Malleus Maleficarum and look into imaginary realms. We just have to write out the patient's personal history.

So that's my first message on this forum. New alias, sounds kind of cool even if it is pasted together from parts of two different buzzwords from B grade science fiction.

 

Why do medications seem to work? The placebo effect is at least as effective on the mother who sees hope for her child as it is on her child. It also benefits from a feedback effect. The child sees his mother behaving as if all is well, or at least better. His emotions reflect hers. The placebo effect plus the emotional support makes his world a better place to live.

I don't understand why physicians and psychiatrists see this as a big mystery. All of this ground has been covered before. The fact of the emotional agitation of a fearful mother is not one that anyone will seriously contest. The fact that she can gain comfort when someone "does something about it" is not easily contestable either. Then the child's mood follows the mother's.

 

metakron,
thanks so much for your intelligent post. I find it heartening to see people thinking beyond the "box of fear" that we are all put in.

In my studies I have found that it is essentially fear with a big "F" that seems to drive not only the societal reactions to unusual behaviours but also the sufferers reactions to the intense fear of loss of self so common with this affliction.
Paranoia is not just the turf of a schizophrenic but society as a whole is stepped in paranoia. In fact recent world events demonstrates this quite clearly.
So we have a person that is hyper-sensitive to fear. Is it no wonder that his behaviour reflects the intense fear of being told you are loosing your mind?

Is it not true that the abuser whether parent, peer or society is able to do so only by playing the fear card. Is it not true that for many religions, fear is their guiding light in the management of the flock?

Look around you in a shopping center and see how peoples behaviour is goverened by their fear, and as you, metakron, have discussed earlier it is quite understandable that if a person is especially sensitive to fear his world will be chaotic to the extreme.

Unfortunately apart from heavy sedation there is no medication for fear as only proper nurturing will allow the sufferer to learn to live with a world that is goiverened by fear.

thanks again for your post, it was most enlightening.....

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You are welcome. Nurturing is the thing to do. The fearful person needs someone who will teach him or her not to be afraid. My mother used the excuse that I was "fearless" to pound on me until I feared almost everything. Sadistic crap passing itself off as good parenting.

"Rationalization" has become one of my weapons against fear. The fact is that I have less than one in a million chance in any given day of being struck down by the things that I have the most fear of. That chance is negligible. There is no point in buying trouble, especially when the fear thus inspired causes paralysis and then paralysis can get me killed. One of my recurrent fear dreams was very instructive. I would be on a railroad track and a train would be approaching. The train was not very close and all I had to do was step off the track and I would be safe. Instead I would be very heavy, as if the rails had a special magnetism, and I could barely move, frozen with fear. In real life I am conscious enough to understand that it is a simple step or two. When I sleep I'm a bit less likely to understand that.

But God, do I know about other people's fear. These people are jumpy about ghosts and extradimensional all-powerful beings who get terribly angry if someone sleeps with the wrong someone else. They've also projected a lot of their punishment anxiety off onto these phantoms. I suppose this practice makes them seem to be more able to function in society.

These fears are so bad that they inspire so-called normal people to destroy others.

 

I'm not even sure that I'm hyper-sensitive to fear, either. She simply tried harder.

 

I guess it is interesting psychology to realise that it is really easy to teach people to fear but incredibly difficult to teach people courage.....hmmmmm....

When I was responsible for my two young children my policy was never to play boogie man games and use fear based disciplines. Always using reason instead of paranoia as the tool for success.

Without beating my own drum too much it appears to have been a successful strategy as both children , both over 21 years old now, appear to have established strong personnas and self esteems......I am sure there have been studies into this issue that would support our contention.

 

Please forgive me for going on like this, everyone. I feel compelled to mention that various people in my life, especially my mother, considered freaking out with the worst kinds of fear to be a normal mode of, I guess the term is consciousness. They used the freaking out to domineer people, and I was one of those so domineered. If I acted like that myself, I was insane and criminal.

Quantum Quack, I think you're right about the telepathic abilities. There are some theories of things like that, versus errant or even "normal" brain functions, that are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The "God Module" of the brain probably supports both the functions of perceiving the real "God" and a virtual God. Every sensory area of the brain, and I think every motor area, supports both realized and virtual functioning. Dreaming and photographic memory actually activate the retina. I can usually hear sounds again by replaying them and it is a lot like hearing them through my ears. The point is that virtual functions, like the alleged God Module function that makes people imagine that they hear the word of God, are analogs of real functions and work on areas that have real functions. Dismissing the perceptions of God is making too much of an assumption.

This, by the way, doesn't mean that I do or am required to believe in any given religion.

I've pretty much shut down my own telepathic/empathic abilities because they do cause strange situations, some of them involving sex. My mouth says no, and my feet get me the heck out of there, but something in the contact puts some humans in a mode that is something like sexual, but not really. It's a lot like the way some people would just belt me when I was a child just because I looked at them. I'm tempted to say that this was because they realized that I was human and they weren't. That might even be true.

It is physically possible to make people hear voices in their heads by using radio transmissions. Patrick Flanagan experimented with this in the 1960s as an advanced hearing aid, and the Defense Department took it away from him, and from deaf people. It's not that any halfway decent technician or ham radio operator couldn't build one, and it takes just a few microwatts of RF power, comparable to having a fluorescent light in the house.

There are at least three possibilities that I believe in. One is deliberate use of radio to interfere with other people's thoughts. One is malicious use of a form of projective telepathy. Another is psyching a person so that he does it to himself. A fourth possibility combines telepathy/empathy with operant conditioning. The victim is trained to do it to himself on cues that are supplied through the accepted five senses, or through telepathy that triggers the conditioning. It is tremendously easier to do anything to someone, and it is possible to do things that are otherwise impossible, if you first train the victim to respond in predictable and consistent ways.

Metallic hats may well be a useful tool. Maybe all they will do is protect the brain from cell phones and other transmitters. (News from a few weeks ago was that cell phones actually did cause holes in rat brains.) Maybe they also can work to make a person feel protected. Feeling protected is a powerful thing. If nothing else, the placebo effect could cancel out the nocebo effect. That's a double benefit.

Whatever the deal is, it was proven long ago that the brain receives, even demodulates radio signals and can send modulated radio signals and unmodulated carrier waves. It is physically possible to receive voices that way. American and Soviet experiments proved it conclusively forty years ago. It is also possible to change brain rhythms. Once you can induce sound, you can also induce all sorts of things.

Part of the rational approach to treating something like this would have to be the rational idea that we can't assume anything. We can't assume that the victim of whatever it is is wrong any more than we can assume that he is right without undergoing the testing. Too many assume that there is only one answer. If the patient "hears voices" he is crazy. The patient is often unaware, also, that he will bring things up to please the person who is questioning him, so to answer the question "do you hear voices" he could very well bring up the fact of his own verbal stream of consciousness. When I found out what a lot of that stuff translates into when the psychologist makes a report, I was stunned by the sheer nastiness of it.

It drove me crazy to be deceived and treated to an irrational and violent program. One thing that a patient needs to see is that he is being treated by competent people, not by idiots who screw with him. A man who is in a mental hospital surrounded by idiots, jerks, bullies, and what have you has as much right to be frightened as someone who sees his brain surgeon arrive drunk on his butt. The issue is a lot more than whether I believe I could use a metal hat. What I needed when I was there was a transfer to another dimension, because it just couldn't be real. I had to see their treatment of my concerns as both incompetent and malicious.

 

I think you got something here Quantum Quack.

Instead of alienating the patient, we give advice on how to deal with the new phenomena. By saying it is unreal we give to them confusion about what is real and what is unreal. They have to keep both until they can decide for themselves what is real and what is not. Ultimatly I think that the real delusion will become more absurd and not change according to reality while reality will stay the same...do you think there may be something to this? That the sorting process will happen naturally if it is just left alone (though with support and love from people around)?

 

Cyperium, thanks for your post. Yes I agree. Support the patient as he or she attempts to reconstruct their mental tapestry.

It has been a few years since i wrote that discussion paper and posted it here at sciforums.
it is due for a re-write.
What has become more and more obvious to me since writing it is that our primary instinct of Fear is the major player in anything to do with mental health issues. it seems to me that it is how we cope and deal with fear that determines our success at maintaining our sanity.

I have come to believe that the experience of fear and how our minds react to it is like the bottom card in a "house of cards" and when dealt with properly the insanity that it tends to create diminishes and the house of cards [insanity] collapses

To offer calming therapies that allow the patient to learn about his fear and how his mind responds to that fear would generate very positive outcomes I feel.

For example:
There is no problem with the belief in aliens and telepathy etc it is only the paranoid reaction to the fear that these beliefs generate that is the problem.

Again thanks for your post and support Cyperium.

btw whilst the paper claims a New approach it is actually not all that original in that there are others out there [i have since realised ] that share a similar philosophy

 

I think the best approach to mental illness is crawling up to it from the left side, while it listens to those voices in its head and think about the germs that are surrounding its cleanliness, and as it thinks about suicide and imagines that he’s talking to the ghost of his long dead dog, you pound him over the head with a sledgehammer and let the disease seep out of the wound and onto the welcoming earth.

 

Satyr you have just proven how contagious fear is

 

Quantum Quack

That’s only to be expected.
I have been, after all, breathing in reality for so long so some disease from the expulsions of your healthy respirations is to be expected.

I could quarantine myself from your vigorous, wellness but there is no land far enough and no fabric thick enough to keep the vibrations of your vocal excrement from reaching me.
Besides, where would the fun be in that?

 

ha.........

 

Wondreful comeback.

 

Quantum Quack, I've tried to explain my problems numerous ways. One way to explain it is that I continually receive bashing, "adjustment" and recommendations for therapy when I feel fear or anger about problems that actually exist. Then someone who is "mainstream" gets to go on a tear any time they want for reasons of superstition, social anxiety, or just plain meanness, without good reason, and anyone who complains about that anger and violence is judged insane.

I don't know that a schizophrenic is anything but someone has been the focus of negative emotions, bullying, and head games for so long that even when he is "in touch with reality", he has been trained to see it a certain way. Being in touch with reality for some people means that you remember how many times your mother threatened to murder you, how many times she made you feel yourself endlessly dying, how many times she beat you down for stupid little stuff. It means remembering how many times the teacher screamed at you, beat you, and did nasty things to you for "misbehaving" when the class bully poked you until you couldn't keep from responding.

You talked about basically, hypersensitivity. Mister, there is nothing hypersensitive about throwing a screaming fit because the school bully has cut open your ear with a paper clip that he has fired from a rubber band. There is nothing hypersensitive about being the victim of an attack by your mother that is so severe that you lose any sense of who or where you are. There is nothing hypersensitive about knowing what a royal bastard the principal of your school is when he has spent a large part of your life screwing you over because you are the target of bullying. There is nothing crazy about seeing your life as a prison in which people torture you for their own amusement and laugh at your pain.

 

Interesting stuff Ive read here. I mostly agree with what youre saying about about hightened senses being driven badly by fear. There is really no such thing as crazy or losing your mind. Not in those terms. Those expressions leave a person without hope, and without a comfortable place to ever have a hope of getting thier thoughts and neuro-functioning back in order. Frighten an already agitated person into thinking they cant be reached or recover, give them to people they cant trust in put them in places they dont recognize as home and you are absolutely fortifying the world they only suggested, that is ultimately created by those pledged to help them. Jesus what a twisted web the "sane" people weave for the "insane".
The way I relate to this mostly, is in that Ive used psychotropic drugs of all sorts in a very productive way over 20 years. It was only after a short time, that I became aware that one could experience all manner of unusual, and unexplained mental phenomena, with or without specific drugs encouraging them. Having this knowledge with me has helped me through times of unusual mental phenomena arising in times when Id been long without using psychotropics. Ive been exposed to some awful shit, and we all have higher mental functioning ALL THE TIME, but when youre put in extreme situations one or more of those higher senses can light up. This sort of thing is generally initiated by the fact of something so unusual occuring that fear is a naturall part of the experience.,(fear of the unknown) I believe that since fear stimulates histimine pathways and adrenaline, those chemicals give extra raw energy to the senses in question. Doing anything to enhance this chemistry just further antagonizes the problem! As for me, I have almost no fear of these kinds of mental experiences. They come and they go, but they always go, because I know they will, I dont over react, I am patient..
And I agree with the therapy potential. Ive lived that to some extent. I used to be the person who always talked people down from their bad trips. Id be calm and easy with them. Id let them know I knew what they were experiencing by describing what they were experiencing. It was comforting to them because they knew I couldnt know, unless I knew, you see? and I did. Id been there myself. So now their condition isnt unique. Now they see that I saw, and I returned to myself. Then theyd relax. A lot of the time Id point out interesting non-threatening elements of their experience they could focus on. Focusing on ANYTHING that is not fear based or fear causing relieves adrenaline.. and that is a key factor. In my experience people who were prone to bad trips, psychosis, schizophrenia, and horrible anxiety had a hypersensitivity to adrenaline. I know what thats like too. Im like that. I know how to avoid it for the most part. I know what slight to massive releases of adrenaline can do to my reality and to the reality of others. I think pharmacology in coordination with psychology would do well to really examine the hypersensitivity to adrenaline, or maybe its in the histimine reflexes I dont know. Im not a scientist or a doctor just a regular person who is observant. I have had absolute success with helping people in this condition who are there as a result of the use of psychotropics ( with fear for whatever reason). Ive had reasonable success with the schizophrenic people ive known and have been close to in my life too.

So follow your idea. Its on track. Im sure of it.

 

I guess, from what you have written I would suggest that the conditioning you have recieved has made you very alert and vigilent when it comes to the bastardisation you recieved and see around you today and tomorrow. The point that I would add though is that the sensitivity you have acquired due to your earier life does not dissappear as it exists in your mental and emotional tapestry at all times. Thus your sentitivity extends to everything you are aware of.

Just because you see no reason for concern at any imediate moment doesn't mean your mind is at rest on the issue. Thus you could be deemed to be hypersensitive to anything that resembles abuse. The fear of such providing the energy [adrenalin] to maintain that sensitivity. [ as suggested by Vossisarts]

BTW this is not news as old fashioned psycho therapy is designed to deal with hypersensitivities due to conditioning. However in extreme cases, which is the topic of our discussion, simple psycho therapy is not suffucient as once a hypersensitivity is learned it is extremely difficult to unlearn. what would be more beneficial is to learn to capitalise on the sensitivity and allow it to be productive instead of counter productive and this is where I am heading in my proposals.

So by learning to live comfortably and functionally with your hypersensitivity means that it is in effect no longer a hyper problem but allows you other benefits apart from anger and other relatively negative fear based reactions.