Mental Disorders in a Synthetic World

I like the perspective you place on causative disorder...

It is interesting that my mother was quite upset when she heard about my diagnosis as a Bi Polar because I was first diagnosed as having Psychotic Disorder at the age of 16 and had subsequent nervous breakdowns during the following 10 years...

Between my first Psychotic Break at 16 and my Bi Polar Diagnosis, there were over 4 hospitalizations and several identity reconstructions...

On a whole other level, I can testify that by the age of 15, I had sent morse code transmissions into outer space with my flashlight asking to be taken "home" or "to come and visit." Most of my prayers were to recieve shamanic revelations...However, not being from a formal cultural group with such a legacy, i had no access to this knowledge farther than books, creativity and imagination.

SO....

as my "Psychotic Episode" began, I was under the impression that I was becoming initiated, even though this language would not be available to me until almost a year later when I began seeing a psychiatrist, who specialized in Male Rites of Passage and was rooted in an afro-based spirituality. He did, however, prescribe haldol and cogentin at the time, which would not have been appropriate for a Bi Polar....

This, I would not learn until later, much later...but the relevant parts of my becoming, my identity-building, my personal unfolding and fulfillment has come from psychotherapy and psychology.

Why?

...because I am my best psychologist who needs to share with other psychologists who are their own best psychologists.

This is not about who is right or wrong...it is about exploration of psyche at all...

I guess that medications are useful to help people maintain a certain funcionality, but not helpful in integrating the emergent information spewing from both the subconscious and unconscious mind.

It has been my experience that medications tend to suppress the reality of the experience and deny the patient from truly coming to a point of understanding where the schism is between the inner and outer worlds....

In many cultures even today, such "episodes" appear during rites where a period of time is allotted for such discovery with no social pressures or social responsibilities outside of self-fulfillment and discovery...A genuine memeber of such a society or community is one who is fully responsible to their own intrinsic nature and is able to share their knowledge with others.

This may also point a way towards the over-population issue. One human being even 200 years ago had the knowledge and capability, emotive and communicative capacity of perhaps 300 or more people today. We need to keep in mind that this individual would have known how to hunt, gather food, make tools, build, and travel without a passport, with no boundaries, save intuition and curiousity. Everything else would have been taken on faith..but a faith in SELF as part of the Nature that supported their life experience.

This has changed drastically and dynamically. i sense that the majority of mental disorders are an allergy to this separation from Nature and psyche-natural phenomenon and communicative learning.

We must remember that this particular version of reality, the society and its structure, at best, from a systemic and technological point of view...is barely 200 years old...and the human mind is far older...

Even one hundred years ago the majority of people walked and moved as fast as their mind moved and their brain could percieve. (i.e. no cars). One hundred years ago, the majority of people on the planet, even those living in cities, ate fresh foods picked that very same week and grown locally.

The history of the United States or even Britain is not the world..and now we truly are living in a global community, so the dynamic has changed... the disorders are appearing because the methods of cognitive formation in many societies lacks dynamic interaction and developmental capability.

We are still monkeys with cellphones trying to use the phones as sticks to catch bugs....

The frustrations we experience have to do with a disequilibrium...but it may not necessarily be based on racial or cultural lines as much as it is pedagogic and formative, the manner by which we raise our children, and are or are not attentive to their needs or on their terms...

We are one humanity made up of different species of human sapiens sapiens mutating and evolving in many different ways.. We cannot assume that one treatment is universal for all, nor that the ailments are "the same."

This is what I liked about the shaman who once said to the doctor..."How can you know what ails your patient if you do not live amongst your patients? While you see many patients each day, I spend many days with each patient. The process of true healing comes from not only observing, but learning from how others live."

The value of modern medicine is a value that condemns it. It is slavery for everyone involved, creating more fear than security, harboring more dis-ease than finding ease through suffering....and eventually makes us weaker, and less able to cope in a dynamic Cosmos necessitating adaptive skills and the capability to assimilate new information...

My Bi Polar episodes are like Microsoft upgrades...where I can uplink and "God" downlinks...either way I have not otherwise felt more synchronous or in harmony despite the social and physical discomfort.