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The Meanings of Psychotherapy |
29th October 2009, 02:49 |
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 How we arrived at a situation in which healthy human responses are considered illnesses, subjected to psychotherapy, blunted with medications, and considered worthy topics for research on means to regulate or eliminate them all begins to be understandable when we consider basic premises of the mental health field. A crucial, little-regarded problem arises from the use of mental health theory organized around psychopathology. Because the field has always been in the hands of those who treat illnesses, the field of study we have is really the field of mental illness, but it has acquired the more accep optimistically euphemistic title of its very opposite--mental health. The detrimental consequences of this distortion are vastly greater than the public and most professionals have realized. How human health and illness are viewed, what is accep, what is treated, what is deemed an appropriate basis for confinement in treatment centers, and what is seen as normal development are very different when we take our orientation from a core of understanding of processes and conditions of health rather than illness.
How strange that the mental health field is mainly in the hands of professionals who are trained in and think of themselves as experts in mental illness--the opposite of the field in which they are positioned as authorities. Certainly that developed in response to the horrifying disturbances of deranged people. For millennia the deranged "mad" were disparaged, feared, abused, left to die, and in the last centuries placed in madhouses. Their miserable conditions resonated within puzzled sympathic persons as insistently demanding some kind of solution. Many people were moved to attempt to understand and help those hapless folk. From that beginning we now have a field in which mental health workers declare what mental illness is, but have never produced convincing, organized descriptions of what mental health is.
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What Are Symptom Disorders? |
29th October 2009, 02:48 |
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 Symptom disorders are disorders of preconscious awareness. This brings a possibility that those who are quite oblivious of thought about feeling and feeling about thought, thought about thought and feeling about feeling are, in their simplicity, free of the likelihood of storm disorders, although often fragile in other ways. They suffer problems related to insensivity through lack of awareness and are more often perplexed by those around them. Those who are highly self-observant are typically able to notice the feeling sequence in process and free themselves of potentiation, or can usually do so with minimal guidance. Those in the middle of this sequence--people who are not self-observing but who are introspective--suffer symptom disorders most often. Whether they are constitutionally incapable of observation or have somehow been forced to restrict their observation, the impossibility of disassembling their storms or capping their potentiation of emotion makes them vulnerable. Thus, symptom disorders seem to be preconscious disorders of introspective people.
Many people are being treated for illnesses that have become popular to have or are popular diagnostic choices among professionals. Therapists find such disorders as "multiple personality" exotic and such disorders as "panic disorder" (which is dramatic and painful) to be interesting and trea, but unfortunately incurable. Both are overused diagnoses. Anorexia's former popularity has given way to bulimia. Currently the most common diagnosis appears to be depression. Anyone who has a downspirited moment, or a time of sadness or grief is liable to be categorized wrongly as depressed. Additionally, high-incidence unrecognized, muted emotion is very often mistaken for depression. A few decades ago a common diagnostic choice was psychosomatic organ neurosis, which we now know is not a psychological disorder. A hundred years ago, hysteric ritualistic dramatizations were quite common. Patients rarely produce that form of storm disorder currently. It is not accep to most persons.
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Illness of Reactive Depression |
29th October 2009, 02:43 |
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 The self-observations of this man give us the opportunity to notice the buildup of painful emotions on top of the underlay of painful emotions that are a part of healthy mourning process. To carry on our daily activities, we need to pick and choose, and suppress some mental contents or our minds would bog down. When we are already busy with our sadness and begin feeling guilty about fear for someone else, and then both afraid and guilty about our limited capacities, and finally angry about the situation evoking the guilt (in this world everyone's situation is unfair in some ways), we are already well into a storm process. Especially when we are weary we may want to push the whole thing away, and we do so. Suddenly the storm is unconscious. That not only does not reduce the storm or its effects, but instead gives it a free rein. The reduced intellectual capacity during the unconscious storm made it plausible that the coincidence of the name in the headlines turned similarity into identity. He combined his guilt about protecting the tiny tots, the guilt about failing to protect his wife, the grief over her loss, anger at the world, fate, the careless driver who killed the dog, and guilt about not being able to protect his friend from her loss. He suffered both emotion storm and a dystonic emotion chord. All went into the whirl of his unconscious emotion storm. Reaching into the unconscious by reviewing the events of the evening and the reactions to those events allowed him tov bring the storm back into consciousness and instantly disassemble that storm.
Anyone with self-observing capacity equivalent to this man can begin to disassemble the depressions, phobias, compulsions, anorexias, etc., on their own. Anyone with introspective capacities can be helped by a therapist to disassemble such disorders. On the other hand, for those who may have been born with no potential for capacity to view within themselves, adoption of a framework of comprehension or acceptance of emotion is likely to exist only if they have grown up with that view within a family that teaches the uses of emotions. The childhood training can provide an unconscious frame of reference that they use automatically, without insight. In that way they too can be immune to affective disorders.
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Phobia versus Obsessive Disorder |
29th October 2009, 02:42 |
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 While there is a great deal more that goes into the selection of phobia versus obsessive disorder, and, within the category of phobia, the selection of spider as object, instead of air travel, the major element in phobia is the potentiation of emotion due to the person's affect phobia. That is the major element in the several storm disorders. The various anorexias (in the assorted subcategories of eating disorders) have the same potentiation and storm processes at work. It is consistently the loss of judgment and reduction of intellect from the impoverishment of energy that is at the root of the problem. In some disorders, such as paranoias, the manifest distortions appear as if psychotic and not merely temporary idiocy. As we think about it, however, we can recognize that the distortions in paranoid episodes are no greater than the distortions in anorexia or phobia. They are all matters that can be considered stupid beliefs (delusions) rather than beliefs due to disordered thinking. The difference between psychosis and temporal stupidity is the difference between thought process breaking down and thought process momentarily not being sufficiently energized to operate. Psychosis is a proper diagnostic category for energized thought that is chaotic. That is different from unenergized and underpowered thought that is therefore currently inadequate. When diagnosticians become confused about this distinction, they make errors.
Most of the times when people say "I feel depressed" they have confused both endogenous and reactive depression with emotion and really mean they are sad, lonely, dispirited, down-hearted, or disappointed. Reactive and endogenous depression are, nevertheless, a frequent disorder of the normal population. In reactive depression, an untoward event in the person's life serves as a trigger. (Self-observing persons usually recover memory of a cluster of untoward events rather than merely a single triggering event. It can be argued that such multiple causation is the rule rather than the exception.) The process of repression is an additional step that plays a more important part, especially in reactive depression and paranoia and somewhat in obsession than in phobia and compulsion.
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Bug-phobic Person and Phobia |
29th October 2009, 02:41 |
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 The bug-phobic person is reduced to a nonfunctional state when confronted with the idea of bugs, photos of bugs, the expectation of seeing bugs, or the actual presence of bugs. At its extreme, the terror reaches the maximum possible for any person. Confrontation with a bug is experienced as so threatening that it compares with the threat any of us would experience if given credible information that we are in the target area of a nuclear attack due to occur in three minutes. The emotion is real. It does not matter that the danger from a bug is infinitesimal. The feeling reaction is appropriate to the perception, not to the reality of the danger. For whatever reasons any particular emotion has become anathematized, the arousal of that emotion to some critical level may be automatically subject to potentiation. The potentiation may occur in a chained straight line sequence, as in fear of fear of fear, or the potentiation may occur as a variegated emotion sequence, as from fear to shame to anger to guilt. At some point in that sequence, the potentiation is to such a degree that for a time it is self-sustaining and continues as a storm of emotion for minutes, hours, or even days.
It is during such storms that the energy necessary to drive our mental functions of affect and intellect is insufficient to power the increased affective energy needs. In all storms energy appears to be diverted from intellect to affect to sustain the storm, thereby depriving intellectual processes of sufficient energy to function well. The capacity to critique or evaluate the thoughts that arrive from our ever-flowing memory, ever-flowing sensory processes, and ever-flowing associational processes is reduced. The data are received without evaluation. It is as if we are inundated by a flood of ideation, for with our decreased energizing of intellect there is far too much to be processed or set aside as it ordinarily would be. During a storm the ideation is uncritically accepted or uncritically rejected and the consequence is a disordered state. That is why in bug phobia, the tiny bug is accepted as being as dangerous as a nuclear attack. In paranoia, whatever occurs is readily, uncritically accepted by suspicious persons as part of an overall plot against them. In agoraphobia, the unenclosed is accepted as immensely dangerous. For these disorders the temporary loss of intellect makes us not gullible, but absolutely suggestible to our own misunderstandings.
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