Merged Psychological conditions are illusory

[Jonesboy]

Jonesboy, here's to hoping you are never going to need medical science.
Don't bother to answer, I have added you to my ignore list.

Hans

I can't imagine any circumstances, barring threats, in which I would submit myself to a reductionist "diagnosis", whether PTSD or any of the others.

 

[Jonesboy]

The other sentences made no sense, so no comment. This however is at least parseable. Of course I am affected by my brain, I am my bloody brain. Btw what's it like, living as someone not affected by your brain?

You believe that we are affected by our brains only when we feel bad or can't do things as well as others. So we say things like "dyslexia" is caused by the brain. This belief is, I hope, obviously irrational.

 

[Wudang]

You believe that we are affected by our brains only when we feel bad or can't do things as well as others. So we say things like "dyslexia" is caused by the brain. This belief is, I hope, obviously irrational.

No, please try to be affected by your brain, especially the visual cortex and the areas associated with processing written language and read the bit that says that "I am my brain". Now try to be affected by the parts of your brain (it's a struggle, I know, work with me here) dealing with logic and try to work out what that means.

 

[DevilsAdvocate]

There is no such thing as a panic "attack". There is only panic. Why rationalize it?

There is no such thing as a heart "attack". There is only a heart. Why rationalize it?

The heart simply acts and performs the way the heart does.

Tell me that again after you have had a heart attack.
Tell me that again after you have had a panic attack.

Yes, these things are easily worked with in a positive, optimistic way, without seeing them as destructive, but liberating. The first step is to reject the pathology model of experience and instead see experiences as gateways. At the moment we are taught that bad experiences are destructive. So it's hard to see it any other way.
But by allowing it and encouraging it, there comes a transition point. We see such transition points in our every day life, in crying and laughing for example. Hyperventilation is another breath change that lets us get rid of junk. We must unlearn its pathologisation. I used to run workshops.

I have had panic attacks. In what way can I see that experience as liberating? In what way can I see that experience as a gateway? Liberating from what? A gateway to what? The only thing I wanted liberated from, or a gateway to, was liberation from panic and a gateway away from panic.

It was a bad experience. It was destructive. Yes, it is hard to see it any other way.

Similarly, a heart attack is not liberating or a gateway (to anything good). It is a bad experience and destructive.

Unlearning it’s “pathologisation”, whatever that is, does not change that the panic attack, or the heart attack, is still there. Allowing and encouraging a panic attack does not lead to some transition point any more than allowing and encouraging a heart attack does.

The best approach, for both types of attacks, is to find means to mitigate the chances and severity of such attacks.

 

[Roboramma]

You are disempowered because you are thought of as fundamentally damaged goods - a pateint, under the doctor for life, rather than simply as a whole person who cannot read as well as someone else.

No, actually, I'm not thought of as "fundamentally damaged goods" nor was I ever treated as such.

The sum of my diagnosis was that I was taught to read using a different methodology than was in use for the other kids in my class, and in later years I had the option to use a computer for some of my english exams.

I don't see how that is being treated or thought of as "fundamentally damaged goods".

You don't need a pseudo diagnosis of "dyslexia" (whatever that is) to get help in reading.

Well, I did. Once I was given that diagnosis I was given help in reading, specifically being taught with a methodology specific to the condition, and it worked very well. I never had any real problems thereafter, in spite of the diagnosis showing the I was severely dyslexic. (I was also re-diagnosed twice, once in fourth grade and another in sixth.)

 

[Pup]

I can't see how you can find panic uncomfortable. What does panic feel like when you are not uncomfortable with it?

Panic, like pain, by definition feels uncomfortable, because people who felt it and didn't try to do something to make it stop and avoid it in the future, were the ones who got eaten by the tiger or fell off the cliff or drowned and didn't pass on their genes.

There may be some people who like panic, just as there are some people who like pain, but we're not typically bred that way, for a reason.

 

[Drachasor]

I'm not impressed at all. We ae looking at the reasoning behind supposed facts. You only want referenced facts.

Except you clearly don't know the reasoning behind the facts. It isn't like they just made all this up. There was a lot of careful gathering of evidence, testing of theories, and general science put into it. You're dismissing it without even examining anything.

For instance (and I'll be making up numbers), suppose say 50% of people with reading trouble are classified as "Type A", and this is judged based on how they respond to certain diagnostic tests. Further, suppose studies show certain skills and practices help Type A's read and aren't particular helpful for non-Type-A's. Further, Type A's can then be separated into sub-categories related to some particular problems they might have.

Would you say that having a medical term to call Type A's is out of line? Let's say that term is "dyslexic." This is how psychology is done.

You are grossly wrong when you claim all reading troubles are caused by dyslexia. This is simple not the case. Someone having trouble reading could have ADHD or any number of other issues going on which causes the reading trouble as a side effect. Each of these is diagnosed and resolved in a different way.

You are disempowered because you are thought of as fundamentally damaged goods - a pateint, under the doctor for life, rather than simply as a whole person who cannot read as well as someone else.

Oh, and I suppose if someone is blind or has a heart condition then they are dis-empowered too?

In actual fact, not knowing what is causing a problem is what is actually dis-empowering. Knowing what you have and how to deal with it empowers you.

You are advocating telling such people to "deal with it" and suffer in silence rather than being given the knowledge and if necessary treatment they need to manage whatever unique challenges they face in life. That's what is truly diminishing of people, because it makes them suffer needlessly.

 

[bruto]

There are NO efforts to address "dyslexia" anywhere in the world.
There are efforts to address difficulties in reading.

You are trying to say that we are treating a cause of that difficulty. But it isn't some cause that is the problem, it's the dificulty.

No, that is not what I am saying. I am saying that the treatment is addressed to difficulty in reading. The diagnosis of dyslexia is simply the convenient term for identifying who needs that help and what kind of help is needed. There may be people trying to find the causes of dyslexia but at the educational level it's not the point. The point is to help people learn to read and write when conventional teaching methods have failed. You have yet to explain adequately why you think substituting special education for failure disempowers a student.

 

[quadraginta]

i think i see Tracy's point.

if we went back in time, say, 10,000 years...

We would be unaware of lots of modern vague diseases or conditions.

Being nomadic, hunter gatherers, everyone had addh, and no one could read.
We hadn't yet invented a back-drop; a reference point; from which to judge the mental health of individuals with subtle problems.

Back then, health was different. Life-expectancy was short.
We didn't need to sit still in school and learn math.
If we were incapable of doing that, it wouldn't have raised a blip on the collective radar.

Even color blindness would likely have been mostly irrelevant.
Everyone would have been suffering post traumatic stress.
Saber-toothed tigers would show up at night and eat your baby.

Some of the modern 'ailments' are vague, biologically speaking...
In a way, they are a side-effect of luxury.

This may come as a surprise, but we aren't back in time 10,000 years. Things have changed since then. Among them our ability to understand and address the ways people function and interact with their environment.

Far fewer than 10,000 years ago (as in only a few generations ago) it was commonly believed that congenitally deaf people who did not speak as well as everyone else must be stupid, because they didn't speak as well as everyone else. It is no accident that the "dumb" part of the expression "deaf and dumb" became a synonym for unintelligent. Many still hang on to that prejudice.

I guess that Tracy would dismiss that as being merely part of a continuum, and Jonesboy would attack methods of helping the deaf communicate more easily as "dis-empowering", but I wouldn't agree with that, either.

 

[Wowbagger]

Your definition is too broad. You seem to be arguing that anything that stops us from feeling bad shows us that feeling bad is a treatable medical condition.

It's NOT "feeling bad" that is the medical condition. And, no, "feeling bad" is NOT taboo.

Treatment for PTSD does NOT focus on making people stop feeling bad. It focuses mostly on preventing those suffering from horrible stress from doing dangerous things.

Sometimes drugs are necessary, though not always. Sometimes finding ways to "feel good" are found, but not always.

In either case: The danger from PTSD is NOT merely from "feeling bad". It is from the neglecting of responsabilities and other aspects of their lives, and from seeking potentially dangerous ways of dealing with their stress.

THAT is the important thing that renders your arguments invalid.

 

[quadraginta]

I can't multiquote. There is also no thread view. That is why things are getting complicated. It's hard to post thinmgs here.

Look at the array of buttons on the bottom right of each post window. Just beside the one labelled "Quote" that you've been using to quote people's posts with is one which looks like this.



If you hover your cursor over it you get a message pop-up. "Multi-quote this message." That's the button you use to multi-quote. Click on it and that message will be selected to add to your next post in this thread. Click again and it will be unselected. You can select as many as you want, and they will all be automagically added to the next post you make in this thread.

Maybe you just didn't notice it. OTOH, maybe you have a reading problem.

(For bonus points, if you do not post in the same thread after you select one or more multi-quotes there will even be an option to add those selections to the next post you make in a different thread. That option is cleverly hidden in plain sight.)

 

[Rrose Selavy]

I can't multiquote. There is also no thread view. That is why things are getting complicated. It's hard to post thinmgs here.

Nonsense. You clearly have formulexia ignoramia.
The more you post, the more the condition reveals itself.

 

[Dancing David]

I can't see how you can find panic uncomfortable. What does panic feel like when you are not uncomfortable with it?

I know that, duh. However the context dependant nature of the anxious thoughts, humiliation, shame, guilt and associated pain of being raped were also coupled with the panic and flash backs. So while teh physical sensations may be the same as 'extreme excitement', it is the cluster that is teh issue. It took many years of relaxation traing and decoupling to do that and accept what happened.

Flashbacks are a great sign. Change your perception of yourself as disordered,

And next Ali Bama will pull a rabbit from the hat...

and having an illness, and instead work with them. Find out about how tpo do that.

I am really tired of your assumptions about my process, it is rather arrogant and foolish of you. You keep making stupid assertions about the process I went through rather than asking questions. You assume that you know things that are not possible for you to know.

Your mental hammer and insistence on using it to communicate by smashing everything with your same idea is very frustrating.

I think it is within your capacity to actually engage in dialogue as opposed to presumptive monologue.

 

[Dancing David]

The people on the waiting list and the people being treated are both strongly affected by the belief that what they experience is an illness. By mistakenly disenfranchising their own experiences they can only hope for treatment, sedation, comforts and copings.

You really have no idea and just make up pejortaive appeals to emotions.

WTF do you think 'desensitization' is, and again the fact that you call ADs 'sedation' shows true ignorance, in fact calling low doses of anxiolytics 'sedation' is just as ignorant.

More straw there?

 

[Dancing David]

These are weak techniques because they are still defined by the emotional puritanism that accompanies all medical and scientific responses to so-called PTSD.

This seems to more of your infantile neorfreudian projection.

So...
What exactly is puritanical about desensitization?

I think you have shown that you are just wildly flailing at concepts you haven't even tried to understand.

And it is sort of ironic as it has exactly the goal state you have described in other posts. So not only do you appear to be ignorant of the current treatments for PTSD, you seem to flail against them with made up strawmen thata re entirely of your own construction, almost cult like ib your insistence that you know exactky what you are talking about.

 

[Multivac]

Flashbacks is a way ofcompleteing an experience that was truncated at the time.

Not quite. My understanding is that flashbacks generally relate to an experience that was so traumatic that the brain is still trying to process and make sense of the data. Instead of the memory being processed and moved from short-term memory to long-term memory it keeps recurring because the brain simply doesn't know how to process it.

Psychiatric treatments such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can often help people to process these memories, which will stop or reduce the flashbacks.

 

[Multivac]

Thankyou for your amazing insight! When I get home I shall inform my 17 year old daughter that she isn't dyslexic and that the medical establishment has been abusing her and disempowering her......on second thoughts lets look at your post in detail.

It is difficult to debunk dyslexia because the term doesn't mean anything.

Wrong. It is difficult to debunk because it is a real problem. There are quite clear definitions of the word.

Medics use "dyslexia" as a disempowering term of abuse, but by dressing it up as a meaningless "condition" they can get followers.

Dyslexics generally don't have contact with medics regarding their dyslexia. They will, however, see opticians and teachers. My daughter has seen a few medics over the years, for non dyslexic problems, but none of them have ever tried to disempower or abuse her.

Their willing victims, the so-called "dyslexics" enjoy the pseudo-scientific intrigue that now surrounds their quite ordinary difficulty in reading.

My daughter is far from a willing victim - she would love to be able to read as easily and fluently as other people. There is nothing ordinary about her reading difficulties, except in the sense that ~15% of the human race has similar problems. She can read large words easily, once she has learnt them, as they form a unique pattern. The words she has problems with are generally short words such as "this", "that", "then", "them" etc. because they all start with the same two letters and are the same length. Their patterns are similar.

Individuals have a range of reading skills: hardly unexpected.

Obviously true.

To make victims from these normal distribution patterns a scientist or medic will arbitrarily declare certain reading ranges as a "condition", as if it has some defining property that distinguishes it from the rest.

Complete and total crap. Dyslexic brains do not work in the same way as "normal" brains. Data is often lost on the way from short-term meory to long-term memory. Letters get confused, and some of them cannot associate the sound a letter makes with it's shape, so phonics and phonetics do not always help dyslexics to read. The font also can have a large effect on how well a dyslexic can read any particaular text. Plain fonts tend to be easier to read than curved or unusual fonts. Some dyslexics find that the colour of the font also makes a difference.

You are either trolling, or your opinions are ignorant or misinformed.

 

[Multivac]

You believe that we are affected by our brains only when we feel bad or can't do things as well as others. So we say things like "dyslexia" is caused by the brain. This belief is, I hope, obviously irrational.

As all sensory data, including words on a page, are processed by the brain it is obviously a problem with the brain.

Your statement is completely void of meaning.

 

[quadraginta]

<snip>

You are either trolling, or your opinions are ignorant or misinformed.

These options are not mutually exclusive.

Comorbidity is very possible. Even likely.

 

[I Ratant]

Nonsense. You clearly have formulexia ignoramia extremis.
The more you post, the more the condition reveals itself.

.
Just a little addition...