Insulin shock therapy??? Let's bring this profession to account.

Lobotomies???
The medication protocol of today is no better.

↪Mark Nyquist If hunches are being accepted, here's one of mine: 60% of the US population, including philosophers, are under some kind of psychiatric medication for disorders ranging from insomnia to schizophrenia. With so many mad people, it's amazing how we can get anything done at all! — Agent Smith

This is PECISELY why the rest of the 40 percent of the US population carries a loaded gun.

I have a much more relaxed view of psychiatry than Introbert, Mark Nyquist, et al.

I think psychiatry has a bad rep because (true premises according to my belief):
1. Pscyiatrists have no clue where psychiatric illnesses get generated an how. Truly.
2. Symptomology has demarked quite a few conditions, but they have huge overlaps.
3. They can't use symptomology to treat patients effectively.
4. The only drugs that do anything positive to a psychiatric patient are antipsychotics.
These include schizophrenia, schizotypal everything, manic depression, OCD.
5. Some biochemical functionalities of these drugs are known, some are not.
ON the other hand:
- psychiatry, like all branches of medicine, is an empirical science. Not theoretical like QA or Chemistry.
- the expectations compared to the results have poor performance ratio.
- there is no direction for developement; only a hope that some drugs that are discovered in the future
will perfom better than the present ones. This is an expectation by the profession.
- the expectation of the populus is wholly different from that of the profession, and it expects nothing
less of miracle. Much like with the physical medicine.
- both the lay population and the patient population has larger proportions who have no faith in
the profession's viability, and most psychiatric patients live in state of denial of their own conditions.
- there is stigma attached to the madness.
- the stigma is warranted, as psychiatric patients are very hard to get along with.
- but psychiatric patients suffer as well as they present a set of symptoms.

This is a difficult situation, and without much further development, it remains very much a difficult
situation.

So I brought up a few things in psychiatry's past that have been discredited like lobotomies and insulin shock therapy. Ice baths are still around so maybe haven't been discredited yet. Electro shock therapy is making a comeback according to some in the profession.

The bedrock belief in psychiatry that psychosis cases have their origin in failed biology seems destined to fail if you know the fundamentals. All psychosis cases involve information and mental content can be the entire cause and origin.

The fact that no medical test can identify a physical cause points in the direction of mental content as the cause.

There is also a problem of how professionals and the general population understand information. They have a dumbed down view of it like the information icon...you know the circle with the lower case ' i ' in it.

- psychiatry, like all branches of medicine, is an empirical science. Not theoretical like QA or Chemistry. — god must be atheist

Chemistry is an extremely empirical science. Also medicine is not a science it's a set of applications of science. What's QA? Did you mean QM? which is also empirical.

Psychiatry in part follows pharmacological companies and there's a lot of pr, manipulation and sales/marketing involved in treatment. And these are not empirical sciences.

- the stigma is warranted, as psychiatric patients are very hard to get along with. — god must be atheist

Some are. But pretty much anyone can be a psychiatry patient.

To understand psychosis we should remind ourselves that our brains have the capability to do what can't be done physically. For example the square root of two is an irrational number extending to infinity so it's a physical impossibility for our brains to hold this number. But since we understand what parameters the square root of two has (as mental content) we know that if we square it we will get two.

In psychosis, numerology, secret code and things like double messaging from media, advertising or news stories are held as mental content and have completely different parameters from what you find in physical systems. Content can appear and vanish at a whim for example. Unexpected content can cause surprise or panic. If the reaction is to process harder and faster the problems can accumulate faster than corrections can be made.

So this mental content running out of control is the cause of psychosis and not a problem of the underlying biology. No wonder these patients don't get along with their doctors. The doctors are clueless and the patients don't understand what is happening to them but have a sense that the problem is not in their biology.

For a person experiencing psychosis, song lyrics can take on overwhelming personal significance and is often present with other symptoms. This should be an easy one to troubleshoot. It involves information internalization and is basic information mechanics.

Information internalization is used in education purposely because personalized information is easier to learn, because some of the content is already in place.

I appreciate your effort to transcend conventional understanding, but my position is to focus on the analogy between detachment of reality in psychosis and detachment of reality in understanding it. In both cases the result is absurd, potentially harmful; however, the difference is one is negative sanctioned individual behavior/ thought and the other is positive sanctioned collective behaviour/ thought. My position is there will always be some discrepancy epistemologically especially when the mode is objective.

From my perspective, and I suppose a dialectical one, psychiatry represents a host of things that to formulate arguments against it situates you within irrational, individualistic, nihilistic, antiestablishment, antifascist, transcendent, ironic, subjective, skeptical, contrarian, critical, analytical, anarchist, primitivist etc. If any of these are aligned with your own interests psychiatry is a good dummy to beat up on.

You are too easy on psychiatry. This profession has no one to blame but themselves for their bad reputation especially in the areas of psychosis and schizophrenia. For decades they have been predicting breakthroughs and proof of biological origin and consistently fail to produce it. More drugs? That's predictable as the research is drug company funded.

What they should be looking into are anomolies involving mental content and basic theory of information specific to human brain function.
I'm much more critical of this profession at the university and research levels as these are the ones responsible for the basic science and education of the practicing psychiatrists.

The Dan Markingson suicide case at the University of Minnesota is a prime example of how badly psychiatric research has failed. It's become a landmark case in medical research ethics if you are not familiar with the case. Most all of his symptoms were common mental content driven such as pattern recognition, code, perceived contact with unknown entities and so on. All well documented.

A two minute search will show that dopamine levels in psychosis patients will be elevated...and dopamine levels during and after normal test taking will be elevated. This is evidence for what? Active brains have higher dopamine levels.

Do you see why the competence of psychiatry should be questioned?

This is a scary thread. :shade:

My concern is not to revolutionize psychiatry, therefore I do not intend to create new ways of understanding the etiology of disorder. My concern is the fundamental irrational nature that underlies all human activity, and express disgust at the denial and persecution of this in the practice of psychiatry. In my view it represents an encroaching modernity in an increasingly rational but insensible world. This type of argumentation that psychiatry is irrational and the world is increasingly rational but insensible is an ironical mode of thought.

I here you complaining about the fundamental irrational nature of human activity and somewhat agree so what is your take on that and why does it exist? No doubt it brings in some business for psychiatry.

Well, there is probably a few ways of looking at it, but I like using the ironical lens. Looking at irrationality this way, you see a contradictory dual nature in people's actions. For instance it is rational for people to have adaptive thoughts and behaviors to participate in the economy and be good workers, but ironically they need to do so because they are too irrational to do things to become independently wealthy. In this example a fundamental irony underlies a common rational behavior. In psychiatry a practitioner will look at someone's mental capacity and ability to function at work *unironically*. The irrational nature of people is subverted in their assessment by normality, and does not have power to subvert this normality as it is considered marginal. However, to someone like me who has an irrational, ironic mode of thinking, I mitigate the offensiveness of disorderliness and amplify offensiveness of orderliness. This itself is ironic, but to me is justified by the aforementioned unironic mode of analysis of the psychiatric profession. There are other ironies that I am loathe to look at unironically as psychiatrists do: They persecute those for the speculation they could cause harm to themselves and others, but psychiatric practices cause harm to others and themselves(reputation); detachment from reality is considered a pathology they try to treat, however, they are detached from the reality of the pathology they try to treat; the profession claims to be scientific in method, but their most significant discoveries have been serendipitous; they claim that delusions and hallucinations are not reality, but false theories and misperceptions of phenomena as mental disorder have been the reality of psychiatry for hundreds of years. You'll find these examples are not only ironic, but underline the rational/irrational dual nature.

Interesting.
I see people in general as feeling oppressed and not knowing why, but to me it seems the world's central banks have a lot to do with it and they always become weaponized to fight wars along with covert programs to bring in war resources. The result is it's hard to capture the value of your own efforts because of this smoke and mirrors economy. So that's a short version of geopolitics as it exists and the people running things haven't been great at solving the problems.

Psychiatry itself has been weaponized to serve the interests of these same governments.

I just had to look up the lyrics to the Dire Straits song Industrial Disease. They seem to fit the discussion.

Oppressed and not knowing why: C Wright Mills wrote of men feeling trapped in their lives. I do feel this way, maybe it has something to do with deleuzian societies of control. Could be the central banks, but my concern is if in a moment of weakness I told a Dr. that I feel the central banks are oppressing me and various other paranoid thoughts I would be given an antipsychotic which once I discontinue it due to weight gain, erectile dysfunction, and a host of other adverse effects I will suffer a rebound psychosis that will officially initiate me into confinement.

Red Rider, Lunatic Fringe is another one of my favorites and don't claim to be Jesus. Michael the Arc Angel is way better.

And aluminum foil hats are okay but copper foil is better if you can get it.

I agree on both points re Michael and copper

...psychiatry definitely does have an aura of evilness about it which is hard to define. — introbert

History is chock full of examples, whether fact or fiction, about people using other people's thoughts and beliefs against them. If there are experts, who know what makes people tick better than the people themselves, and those experts have ill will, well...

So, then an alternate strategy, perhaps. Good to write here, but what other social contacts can make a pharmaceuticalless life more livable? Do you know Johann Hai's Lost Connections?

My concern is not to reform psychiatry. I see this as purely a philosophical exercise. Psychiatry is like capitalism, by association yes, but also just by virtue of how economic, in the case of capitalism, and social institutional, in the case of psychiatry, practices and ideas have developed in relation to a natural state that is exploitable as a source of profit, manipulable by technique, and fundamentally in a state that is opposed to the rational and predictable demands of modern humans. My concern is to simply encourage a critical mode of thought that transcends the logic of capitalism/ psychiatry with the far-out intention of getting people to develop insight into collective madness.

My concern is not to reform psychiatry. — introbert

I wasn't thinking about reforming psychiatry. I was thinking about the individual who has real challenges but does not want the psychiatric/pharmacological approach. Often, in my experience of others, they shift between rejectinga and accepting the pp approach. Rather than replacing it.

My concern is to simply encourage a critical mode of thought that transcends the logic of capitalism/ psychiatry with the far-out intention of getting people to develop insight into collective madness. — introbert

OK, I hear that. And that's also different from what I focused on. And I agree. At least at this level of distraction. I see a lot of collective madness.

Has any one heard of psychosis showing up in advanced artificial intelligence? If that is the case it would be evidence that psychosis is algorithm based and not biology based.

It's not much of choice we have! Nobody save a fool would want to be cuckoo!

I think most people know cuckoo when they see it and we mostly would like to avoid being affected by the condition

The psychiatric profession would suggest a biological failure.

My alternative view is that the brain holds information in networks and under normal conditions most of the information is true or non problematic and we function normally. However, it's possible to have rapid outbreaks of false information on this network that can't self correct in real time. For a person experiencing this rapid onset, there would be a sense that his biology is acting normally but at extreme activity levels (in an attempt to self correct) but information seems to be scrambled and erratic, unpredictable compared to normal. And when he arrives for professional psychiatric treatment he will be told his biology is failing and requires medication.

To get a mental image of this, imagine a virus on a computer network. Agent Based Models are a way to computer model this and simple models can show progression of a virus moving from node to node on networks with some nodes affected and other nodes unaffected. In biological brains the biology can be functioning normally but the corrupted networks of mental content are the cause of the abnormal condition.

If this is the case then forced medication would be taken as a breach of trust by the patient and could exacerbated his condition.

To get a mental image of this, imagine a virus on a computer network. Agent Based Models are a way to computer model this and simple models can show progression of a virus moving from node to node on networks with some nodes affected and other nodes unaffected. In biological brains the biology can be functioning normally but the corrupted networks of mental content are the cause of the abnormal condition. — Mark Nyquist

Do you think your informational computerised view is much different? Are we machines? Are we infected by viruses? The very idea seems like a virus that has infected us.

I might have muddled that because the computer models I know ( not my thing ) are off the shelf for things like viruses on computer networks, the output being networks and nodes that spread computer viruses.

The analogy is to psychosis symptoms such as conspiracy theories. The specific reason I think this should be considered is an understanding that mental content is something emergent from physical brains but not the same thing.

This is likely not the only cause but should be considered especially in the young, healthy and sudden onset group. Drug use/abuse could make this more likely or unusual events or just bad luck.

The physical stuff has been looked at and looked at so no, not a physical virus or it could be detected. Often these patients volunteer descriptions of specific mental content that concerns them.