Dinkaltranen

Psychology as a field is one that moves very rapidly due to rapid changes in people as a whole, even beyond the speed of the intergenerational level. A lot of people have pointed to the replication crisis as being a demonstration that the field of psychology is total bunk, and though I might agree a little more on the social psychology side of things due to personal bias’, a larger part of the reason is that we have gone through effectively 4 or 5 revolutionary changes in the past 30 years that have accelerated this change in culture, people, and their behaviours massively.

Whilst mental illness has a long and far recorded history, its expression has changed throughout history with it. For example, many point to the self-obsessed social-media behaviour as an embodiment of narcissism, but if we took away access to that expression how would that narcissism manifest? This is why diagnostics is effectively a struggling arms race against to keep up with the symptomology of disease, whilst simultaneously trying to avoid the more significant cultural manifestations of it. They largely gave up on this around the DSM-3, and or the earlier editions of DSM-4 where psychopharmacology provided psychiatrists and psychologists with an option to be seen as ‘real scientists’, and now had to apply a rigid scientific model to something that is ultimately often abstract. But anyway.

As a result, the DSM is now filled with dozens of mental illnesses that are most likely actually not what they are listed as, but cultural manifestations of earlier and more rigidly previously described diseases. It has become obsessed with popularising, renaming, and renewing old, reliable ideas and psychological mechanisms in an attempt to stay relevant, when it is effectively rebranding, and in this often a very important element of this original idea is lost.

Every psychopathology, psychodynamically speaking, has a purpose. How would pornography, social media, or video game addiction be diagnosed previously? We understood and acknowledge with alcoholism and drug addiction that these are not just addictions to the substances themselves, but that there is a benefit to the behaviour that drives and enables it. So tell me, dear reader, what is the true motivation behind those with these new diagnoses? What pathology drives this behaviour? If we strip away the names, the capacity of culture to enable this, what are these disorders really?

I could tell you, but you probably wouldn’t like it.

Oh, right, I was meant to go back to semantic shift in Psychology and Psychiatry at large. I have been a very vocal critic of mindfulness. Not as an actual tool; I wouldn’t criticise a bandaid as a tool for a scratch. I criticise he perpetuation of the myth that it is a cure for clinically significant mental illnesses, a golden bullet, even with the literature repeatedly trying to push it as such.

My theory is that in the, I don’t know, 80’s, when Psychiatry was beyond coming into its own, and it became more commonplace and less taboo, more and more people sought out mental help for their perceived issues. I believe that many clinicians were baffled by this, not that the patient didn’t have issues, but that they were symptoms of frequently sub-clinical severity. Thus out of this was born CBT, a system model that effectively attempts to train the patient to recognise and – yeah I’ve lost you. You know that famous meme video where the woman tells people with drug addiction to just stop thinking about it and change their mindset? And someone edited in a segment afterwards where they go:

"Oi mate, I'm addicted to heroin."

"Oh, I'm sorry, have you tried changing your thinking about it?"

*they stare into the ceiling in stupor."Yeah, let me try that." *he holds up a torch to a spoon.* "Nah I’m still fucked.”

That’s what CBT is. It does not help those with driven compulsions. It really is that absurd that it has somehow become normalised as a treatment for depression, or rather what we now consider depression, which CBT will actually treat, but that’s because what it’s treating isn’t actually depression.

Thank God we spent hundreds of millions of dollars over decades funding studies researching and finding out that if you try just not thinking about it you will stop being mentally ill but only if you're not actually mentally ill. Go on, try and recreate that effect with pedophiles. I dare you. Tell them the solution to stop having sexual fantasies about children is to reframe their thinking about it and just not do it.

Oh, but it gets worse. Now we have mindfulness. Which is, *gasp*, actually just very fancy and methodised meditation. I don’t care how much jargon you write, what guide you use, what you are doing is meditation. A hermit invented it over ten thousand years ago and now people are selling it to you in a $500 course that was written by AI. Congratulations, you have been conned. If you’re interested, there are hundreds of thousands of articles by doctors, real, trained, veteran doctors telling you for free that to improve your life you shouldn’t drink too much, eat healthy food, get enough sleep, exercise, have friends, and have a schedule. It's almost all accurate, verified, and free.

That’ll be $10,000 dollars, thank you.

No? That’s because these people aren’t selling you things you don’t actually know. They’re selling you the idea that if you give them money, you will feel obligated to follow through with these behaviours you already know you should be doing. They’re selling you the confidence that you can do it, that if someone affirms what you already know you should be doing, you can do it. Which you can’t. Otherwise you'd already be doing it. You’ve been conned. The only reason that you think you can do it is because they made you think you can do it, and you wanted to believe that, and that’s why you gave them $500. This is why self-help books are some of the most popular and best-selling books of all time. and why people keep making them despite them all saying almost precisely the same thing as one another with mild variation. They are effectively a temporary confidence booster, and this is also why they’re extremely popular as audio books. You can now walk around with your own personal cheerleader! You can do your dishes when you have a cheerleader. The second they are gone, the confidence does too. Maybe you don’t have depression. Maybe you’re a lazy piece of shit who never learned discipline. And maybe that is because you had terrible parental figures growing up, but maybe it also doesn’t mean that you need to go around and tell everyone that you have depression, because you probably just have what we have remade depression as, which is an inability to regulate despite having not having any of these important factors in check.

You will never know the most depressed person you know, because the most depressed people in the world are often extremely intelligent schizoids (see Wittgenstein) or people so smart they come across as schizoid, those who are so introspective with such an expansive internal world with a comprehension of the mechanics of the world that you cannot understand let alone the importance of them. And these are often the people who feel so disconnected, so isolated, so alien from those around them, so aware of the important of everything, that it is impossible to not be pessimistic. They will probably not tell you they are struggling, because it is literally impossible for you to understand why they are struggling.

Enter “Girl, Interrupted”, something that I'd guess drove Psychologists and Psychiatrists mad because of the amount of asinine and neurotics it drove to therapy.

“How do you feel?”

“I feel ambivalent.”

Wow, congratulations. That’s the least helpful statement in the world, but again young people, emotionally distressed people, most new patients lack the terminology to explain how actually feel, they lack the words to further describe the internal conflicts. But now every patient would come in and tell their doctors that they were feeling ambivalent. About what? Well, this character in a movie said it, and I feel that way, therefore I must have what they have: mental illness. But that's not what Kaysen suffers from in that film, she had a psychotic episode that resulted in a suicide attempt. Whilst very serious, mental illness is defined by patterns of behaviours over extended periods, not isolated incidents, though in fairness this could simply just be the first incident of many. Right now I feel like McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest where he comes to the realisation that his fellow patients are not forced to be there, and are mostly suffering from a fear of living. But there it was their treatment along with this unwillingness that was actually inhibiting their ability to get better to a significant extent, not just Nurse Ratched's tyranny. What I am trying to say is that many of these people seeking mental health support are in a way trapping themselves by avoiding what they need: which is to live, and therapy for issues that are not of major clinical significance conveniently allows them to escape this responsibility. I digress.

“There is a part of me that wants this one thing, but another part of me wants something else. And I can’t decide between which each of these things to do, or act and, and as a result I gain the benefits of neither, and receive the consequences of both.

It is the clinician’s job to help the patient understand this internal conflict so that the patient can resolve it.

Emotional prostitution for the subclinical is a job that should largely be left to counsellors. The reason there is such a shortage of mental health professionals, psychologists, psychiatrists, and otherwise, is that we’ve convinced the entirety of society that almost any and all behaviour is pathological. Which, yes, I might say to some degree that we have become more pathological as a society. But it is not these pathologies for which people are seeking out mental health professionals.

Also Psychologists, clinicians included, are horribly underpaid with stagnant income growth, have large workloads, and require a high level of training and competence with rigorous supervision. Sort of like nurses.

Anyway. The word ‘part’ now has also become conflated, for example in the quote a few lines up, with dissociation. To mention that there are parts of your psyche in conflict is now seen as an indication of dissociative psychology. It means we’ve got to use the Internal Family Systems model, IFS! Which contains even worse jargon than mindfulness ever could possibly manage, which means, of course, we now have to have qualifications to indicate we understand this jargon, which means we can sell you something. Something we already have models and terms for.

Look, I’ve run out of steam for this. I’m stone cold sober, hungover, and the 25mg of diazepam I took yesterday either did absolutely nothing or has made me so retarded that I don’t even realise I’m retarded. I’m not intellectually able to continue this, not that I’m intellectually capable of anything even at the top of my form. I might edit this later and continue. But this just reminds me again of IP farming and remakes and remakes of ideas that have already been done previously, and better, and it demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of what made these things. The masses are being sold and conned, and probably have been for the entirety of history, but I at least have to point it out and hopefully someone will read this and realise that the only person who can save you in therapy is yourself. To get better you don’t need to buy a self-help book, listen to a podcast, go to some new age-guru, someone trained in the latest fad, someone “trauma informed” (as though all psychiatrists are not), or whatever other marketing acronym that people put on their fancy soulless corporate profile page to sell you something, to turn your identity, your self obsession, your narcissism and refusal for agency into a product.

Oh yeah my new book might be coming out early next year. Buy it, give me money, it'll SURELY change your life, I promise!