is_psychology_psycho andru235 did nature evolve 'wings' because it seemed like it would be fun to do? was it a spontaneous creation? or was there a 'reason' for having wings? did evolution provide chameleons with color-shifting abilities because chameleons are particularily vain? or was there a reason for having color-shifting? did the goddess give male seahorses the birthing privilege because she thought it would be funny? or was there a reason for the anomaly of male birthing? did the brain, as it evolved over millions (billions? there is disagreement, as if that is a surprise) of years, suddenly produce the conditions of manic depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, etc., simply to harangue those in possession a brain? or was there a reason for these 'afflictions'? if everyone has all the disorders, as most psychologists now contend, then PERHAPS THEY AREN'T DISORDERS person A has a chemical imbalance and is always sad, while person B is always sad because they desire a soulmate they cannot find. psychology may say they are both manic depressive, but it will also declare person B co-dependent! is sadness because of a strong desire for companionship invalid sadness? is the humane solution to eliminate their desire for companionship, or to help them find a companion? person C is happy then sad then happy then sad, ad infinitum, because of a chemical disorder. person D experiences the same cycle because the gods are training person D to understand both sides of things (*gasp*! that could never be! i, mortal, am certain!). psychologists may assess them both as being bipolar, but person D will be declared delusional! now, if the scenario of person D is in fact a possibility, and it is, because we can never proove it false, psychology will never be able to see this because psychology refutes such possibilities for lack of biological evidence. person E sees a ghost because they are hallucinating. person F sees a ghost because a ghost actually passes in front of them (i, for my part, do not believe in 'ghosts', but i do not arrogantly presume de facto proof, for there is no de facto proof to be had!!!). psychology will declare them both to be hallucinating. psychology is unprepared to make a single concession to paranormality. person G speaks in a rushed, fragmentary manner, because they are schizophrenic. person H speaks in a rushed, fragmentary manner, because they have a lot to say on an abstract matter that is difficult to express. if person H makes a regular habit of trying to express such abstract matters, instead of gossiping at a relaxed pace, psychology will declare the hyper, non-sequitur procession to be evidence of schizophrenia. perhaps it is evidence of a mind that has conceptually advanced beyond its known vocabulary (or whatever) person I marries someone like their parent because of an oedipal/electra complex. person J marries someone resembling their parent because - no, could it be? - it is their soul mate. psychology does not make concessions for soul mates and decides both have oedipal/electra complexes, and then TRIES TO HELP THEM PAST IT!!! person K believes the world is 6000 years old because it says so in an old book. person L believes that they are a from another dimension. psychology ignores person K, but suspects person L of dementia. person M regularly steals because they are a kleptomaniac. person N regularly steals because they consider the concept of property to be childish. psychology says person N has created a rationalization to reduce the cognitive dissonance generated by a condition which conflicts with the surrounding society. person O recalls their previous life because doing so is their defense-mechanism against the concept of death, which scares them. person P recalls their previous life because person P had a previous life which they are still able to recall. (most) psychology says the mind cannot carry knowledge from sources not experienced during ones life. person Q hears voices because they are crazy. person R hears voices because they have a strong connection to their guardian angel. psychology can't find any evidence of a guardian angel so clearly, they have a disorder. person S tries to please others because they are codependent. person T tries to please others because they are charitable and selfless. psychology suggests they are only charitable because they are scared to not be. person U cannot stop thinking about the book they are writing because they are obsessive. person V cannot stop thinking about the book because they are extremely, extremely focused on whatever they do. psychology only lets person V off the hook until a problem arises because of their focusedness (inevitable), and then they are obsessive, which ought be treated, no? person W is experiencing life because they are a giant pile of sub-atomic particles. person X is experiencing life because they are a spirit whose physical form is a giant pile of sub-atomic particles. since spirits cannot be found anywhere, but sub-atomic particles seem to be everywhere, psychology decides to make every single assessment of the subject's mind, persona and behavior based on chemistry. person Y dies and sees the light (and the next world), because the pineal gland released its dimethytryptamine, a powerful psychotropic released only near death (and one of the only uses for the pineal gland), which nature evolved into the brain for no reason whatsoever. person Z dies and sees the light (and the next world), because they have died, and are seeing the light (and the next world), a spiritual experience whose physical expression is the release of dimethyltryptamine into the near-death brain. psychology has little to say about this. 050425 ... oldephebe 'Kay. Fine. But are you suggesting on the basis of a few insights and apt points of delineation that the field or the practise of psychiatric medicine (including pharmacolgical intervention and psycho-analysis) is uneccessary? Are you saying that the commonality and pervasiveness of psychic suffering should not or cannot be alleviated in any meaningful way by the field of psychiatry? Are you saying that there is something insidious, deleterious and fraudulent about a field of medicine that treats the mind? I agree with most of your points and yet I cannot help but be troubled by your conclusion. It's like saying because everyone whose had an accident and broken thier arm or leg renders traditional orthopedics or general medicine uneccessary. This is a reductionist analogy, perhaps you could give us a little more exposition. Help me understand the basis of your position w/r/t the whole question: Is psychiatry a viable field of medicine that is able to treat in any meaningful and lasting way psychological disorders or states of mind that are fairly common and are perhaps pejoratively classified as a "disorder" ... ... 050426 ... slippery psychology is synonymous with manipulation. they are one and the same. there is an invisible line between the mentally insane and the incompetent, and every day i hear more and more self-prescribed cases of "bi-polarism" and "manic depressants" .. almost 90 percent of the people at my school are on one kind of anti-depressant or another -- (maryland institute college of art), all depressed for one reason or another.. all working it out with pills and psychologists .. it is like another phantastic american epidemic, as bad as starbux. although i cannot say that is is completely useless-- that is far from the truth. psychology, approached correctly, can be therapuetic, and necessary in a lot of instances. but when applied on a daily , realistic basis, it's methods are widely over-use.. abused actually.. 050426 ... The Heretic GENERALLY A GENERALIZATION 050426 ... andru235 the reason i used the person A / person B scenario was to illustrate the (often simultaneous) validity and invalidity of psychology. certainly there are many persons who have benefitted from psychoanalysis and psychiatric medicine; especially the psychologists charging laymen $60+/hour, the psychiatrists receiving incentive checks for filling prescription quotas, the big pharmaceutical companies who increasingly create drugs and only *afterward* find a market, and the people who enjoy messing with the minds of those who are too easily led. my parents recall several classmates in their youth who were clearly affected by something and suffered as a result, but there was no support system in that small town. on the other hand, my school had several psychologists on at all times and there were as many problems as anywhere else, this decade or last century. i hated high school; several visits to the high school psychologist did absolutely nothing to alleviate this. (and observe from my postings the rarity with which i invoke the word 'hate'.) indeed i did not intend to come off as reductionist, for this is my very argument *against* psychology. there are six-billion humans; and as anyone who has ever seen identical twins arguing surely knows, no two minds think alike. yes, there are trends, but the details often differ so greatly as to render trend-based-observation ridiculous. (even every hydrogen atom has a slightly different weight!!!) if you looked down upon earth from the heavens, and saw that at any given moment the most common activity was 'sleeping', would one conclude that those where were not sleeping had an imbalance? well, this is of course ridiculous. but one might observe that only %.00001 of the people were currently playing music on a harpsichord, and since some of them would be music students exhibiting frustration and anger whilst learning difficult passages, trend-based decision making would perhaps incline one to replace the harpsichord with a tambourine. "but that's not the same!" no, but it is analogous. fifty people have schizophrenia. ten enjoy it, thirty don't mind it, nine have problems and one has severe problems because of it. i do not know of any cases where a schizophrenic diagnosis did not come with a suggestion of treatment; but then, i am not a psychologist/psychiatrist. more what i suspect is that there are mystical purposes for many of the "disorders" and by running around trying to cure everyone, we are missing something. if socrates *was* schizophrenic, and had been treated early on but as a result didn't leave a legacy behind, would the world be better off?!? (i do realize this is an absurd example, but the concept behind it is most important) what if da-vinci's obsessiveness had been cured? beethoven's obsessiveness? mozart's attention deficit? van gogh's schizophrenia? in all four cases, one of the main motors on which their creative engines ran was questionably 'imbalanced'; while their inspiration came from an endless variety of sources, their manners of production were not paragons of moderation! what if the chronic anger and sadness aroused in enslaved peoples was sloughed off as a chemical disorder, treated, and they were left stranded in the same strata, their resentment medicated away? the vast majority of funding for psychologic research over the past 100 years has come NOT from human-interests/rights groups, but from groups who in one arena or another are seeking power and riches. a rudimentary investigation will reveal this; but of course, such wolves always don sheep's clothing and claim 'public interest'. we don't know what we are doing. and the surest sign of it is the certainty that we do! in this world, living amidst this strata, i am inclined towards a solipsistic philosophy; but maybe that makes me a megalomaniac! (indeed, the first megalomaniac to deliberately avoid power, wealth and fame) 050426 ... andru235 in having had this discussion many times, i must state that my overall impression is that amongst people who feel personally well-represented/explained by psychology assume its tenets to hold true for all people. and people who don't feel well-represented/explained by psychology are usually inclined to suspect it to be shortsighted, blind as a bat, looking in the wrong places, or a complete sham. its like the rich, who say, "well, or course this economic is completely fair!", when confronted by the poor who say "this economic system is completely unfair!" like with so many things, the truth is somewhere in between. but! if the truth is somewhere in between, and psychology continues to insist that it is properly founded, it is as foolish as if had no foundation at all! for psychology does not make concessions to paranormality! and though chemistry can explain a body just like you, that says and acts like you, no science even approaches the explaination as to why you are *you*, sentient, and within yourself. there is clearly more going on here than the physical. sleepers, awake! 050510 ... DannyH Psychology does not "say" anything. Psychology is a discourse, not a set of judgements. Individual psychologists say a number of contradictory things, many of which are almost certainly short-sighted, inaccurate and inadequate but no one of them speaks for psychology as a whole. What you say is akin to saying "Baseball hits a home run in the third innings." Perhaps you are thinking of psychiatry or psychotherapy which are practices devised from the findings of psychologists but I doubt you'll find much universal agreement there either. 050831 ... andru235 what you're saying, then, is that it isn't 'psycho-metry'? basically i'd like to agree with you. it *should* be a form of discourse. perhaps it is usually conducted as such, but that side of it has eluded my experiences. certainly i've read myriad conflicting psychologies. i'm not under the impression that there is a singular take on psychology. but to say that psychology does not 'say' anything is to plug one's ears and yell "la la la la la". psychology says "books and books and books and books and books." and if the discourse is so open and inviting, may i suggest trying to incorporate one of the thousands of books on various psi phenomenah into the discussion? face the mocking laughter! chicago contemplates testing every kindergartner for 'mental illness' (including ADHD, etc.) and requiring treatment to attend school. granted, pills are psychiatry. but psychiatry derives its entire reasoning for doing what it does from psychology. after all, without psychology, who cares if norepinephrine levels are out of whack. now, would chicago schools even discuss this if psychology wasn't making grandiose pronouncements like i am? why, i learned the art of grandiose pronouncements from the same teacher as did psychology: lady murasaki, authoress of the_tale_of_genji. seriously. we are both hopelessly indebted to her work. but i was the evil student, and psychology was the good student, so i must do everything in my power to smear psychology, for no reason at all. or is it i who was the good student? who knows anymore. heian japan was long dead before the bombs hit. i agree that psychologists vary from person to person. but it's not like any psychologists say, "well, he's schizo, but there might be a spiritual reason for it which we oughtn't tamper with," would they? maybe, i guess... 050831 ... DannyH I recommend reading psychologists who end in ng 050831 ... andru235 such as freung? or adlerng? oh, you're right, of course. jung addresses such stuff. 050920 ... DannyH Try Laing too. 050921 ... no reason just ask tom cruise. he has all the answers. 050921 ... oldephebe Danny H! Right. THAT was dudes name. Cool. ... Many psychiatrists and psychologists openly engage in subtle and overt mediums and tactics of manipulation under the altruistic and or clinical guise of behavior modification. But afterall, if the mind is thier field of expertise then I guesss as well as learning to "help" people, how 'bout plying the same "craft" to establish dominance over a "client" who has the impudence to challenge you that your fatuouse and facile assertion or application of an inapt and obscolescent Oedipal Complex to address overt manifestations of grief for the loss of a FATHER? How about this learned man of science instead of "EARNING" his $150.00 an hour over the course of several months -deciding to becoming belligerant and advesarial and articulate every utterance in the dense and if possible patriarchical putresence of clinical speak? As a 16 year old reeling in the aftermath of my fathers death I found myself confronted with this Mainline Ivy League bespectacled doughboy who was a staunch freudian. I mean this guy was so reductive or myopic that he sifted everything through this Oedipal abacus of reasoning - another indice of the uber-rationalist approach where meaning and mediation is constructed through a singularly unwavering fidelty, a fieceness that by all observable artifacts would be consistant with being derivative of several personality disorders themselves-so...said dynamics of clinical inculcation/ego motivate the interist to go through some pretty wild gyrations of reasoning and with the attendant animated gesticulations in order to reconsctruct the clients (ME!)reality (deviant though it may be-and like andru has said-what is really deviant if so many people appear to manifest similiar states of mind and being) and the meaning attached to it. This kind of deliberation, a one rubric fits all kind of a thing niether represts a substantive and innovative and ameliorating intervention but instead a Frankenstiens Monster kind of blindly and faithfully plodding forward in this kind of Teutonic observance and application and enforcement of "treatment" over "the client", some who ieither because of societal and or psychological and cognitive impediments cannot smell the buckets of forensic fecal matter being thrown into thier face and down thier throats and even if they can smell it and feel it, they are incapable of adequately responing to it in any meaningful manner. Their dimly apprehended sense of violation and abnegation and thier sadly often illiterate or impaired speech merely inflates the "clinicians" already arrogant sense of him/herself and the attendant disregard of the "client."--This kind of like i said Teutonic goostepping over the ramparts of peoples sense of dignity and worth and thier very being contributes NOTHING to the field of pscychiatric and municipal medicine but the divestiture of self-hood from those writhing in fire, drained and beated and wounded just from surviving the crucibles of thier existence and there in the substrata of the soul, thier pain, thier argument, thier personhood is alive and eloquent and equal to the clinicians - but the psychiatric internist innured to suffering can no longer see it, or never has heard and seen beyond his external constructions and clinical orthodoxies - he/she has never DARED to peer into the cauldron within the substrata of the human soul. I've still gotta read what you guys wrote - I just meant to give props to the "H"man and i as usually digressed, i paddled my rhetorical canoe down yet another long winding and conveluted narcissistic stream. And so we are here again, lost amidst the darkness, the bramble and dense thicket of my own rumination upon my own damaged life. *spits a great big gob of dense mucoidal goo upon the pavement* ... 050922 ... dipperwell I'm studying to be a psychologist, and I don't think I have any cleverly manipulative evil intentions tucked up my sleeve, nor do I intend to (nor would any of my psychology professors endorse) apply one theory to all humankind, as psychology majors are taught research methods, bias, and critical thinking quite rigorously. What I am seeing here is the same unfairness, stereotyping and generalizations which we, Psychology, apparently invoke whenever possible. I am not doing this for the money, and I am not doing this to become a whore of pharmaceutical companies, and I am not doing this to repeat whatever bad experiences you had with therapists. I don't ask you to assume that all therapists have altruistic, or at the very least, compassionate motives. I simply ask you to be cautious before applying a great whopping judgement to an entire subject, and to all its people. This is to those who feel they know what all psychologists, and what Psychology itself, believes. 050922 ... z see: evolutionary_psychology 050922 ... oE hey what about neuropsychology - you know to treat folds that have serious chronic pain issues and the depression and perhaps anxiety disorders that are spawned out of that--? ... i gotta say most of my encounters with virtuosic salesmen who have achieved the perfect state of consciencelessness - they will fabricate a lie and an emotion and have the mystic aura of master-hypnostists sometimes and the ruthless egos of tyrants as well..but really most of my experiences with brilliant salespeople and psychiatrists and psychologists and conselors seem to oscillate with a kind of practised and multifarious modes of manipulation to sometimes surreptitiously guide the "mark" towards a preferable state of mind - to make him/her receptive to one influence. i cannot from this vantage point at this time forward any statement that could aptly and with any authority speak to your character and or motives and if you were inadvertantly offended--then i regret that you were unfortunately the repostory of those emotional responses--in a word man m'bad. ... 050922 ... oldephebe Against our will we are born. Against our will we live. Against our will we die. This perceptual idea of being at the mercy of the currents f creation kind of precipitate this feeling of helplessness outside of an idea of being sigularly self-possessed such as a Joan of Arc or Napolean or MLK or Bill Clinton or Ghandi or Martha Stewart etc. But most of us allow ourselves to feel as if we are in the thrall of forces and powers in our plane of existence and those that exist mostly out of our preceptual and phased plane. So the construct of belief systems and coping mechanisms become the temples of healing and union with the creator and the theaters of therapy for the human mind and soul--the rational and intuitive unite across the corpus collossum--because perhaps we choose to see oursleves only in terms of "I" ... I will speak no more of this here. This is a page about psychiatry. ... 050922 ... oldephebe "Becsue we choose to see ourselves, our suffering as only mediums of expression and receptors and not as forces that we can once we stop being afraid of the silences perhaps begin to alter. We suffer because we only percieve our existence--our inner and outer selves in terms of "I" ... sorry...needed to clarify that. ... 050922 ... dipperwell grins 050922 ... dipperwell When I was a little kid, my mother took me to a Psychologist to make sure that I had not been too badly damaged by my father's various shortcomings. They asked me to tell them about my father, and because I was so intimidated, so tired and so reluctant, I began to cry. "Fel, you are crying," they said, as though I hadn't realized it and wasn't dying of embarrassment over it. I straightened. "I'm just thinking," I said very pointedly and distinctly. I already knew they were coming to all sorts of conclusions about my little display of emotion, all of it attributed to my father and none to my own discomfort. I want to be a psychologist, not a Psychologist, because I can treat people with dignity. We aren't all soulless, as you know. 050926 ... no pills religions or "audits" for grendel in my high-school, a beginner, entry-level psychologist was sicced upon a number of us based on the whims of a teacher with a messiah complex that no one has called him out for (as he is still teaching) who decided, in "Mr. Hand"-like fashion that a disproportionate percentage of the student body was either mentally ill, suicidal, or on drugs. I had the privilege of being the last one of the monkeys who had to dance for a diagnosis. As i was not the first, i was not the only one to approach her ham-fisted questions with an equally unsubtle response. but the long razor mark i sliced into my left arm was definitely the exclamation point. Funny enough, i would not have thought to do it in such a nearly lethal fashion if she hadn't kept dragging our conversation back to the subject of suicide As she sat there gaping incredulously over what i had done, i used my handkerchief to wipe up the drops that had fallen on the conference table surface, picked up my backpack from that week's student secretary and made my way nack to the last ten minutes of my Literature class. she never did come back for that follow up she wanted. I generally save negative behaviors for those moments immediately AFTER i have been accused of them it's like "Hey!... you want crazy?! I'll fucking give you crazy" 050926 ... oldephebe Man...um...I just have NO response to that...umm..How are you these days Grendel? 051014 ... . . 051015 ... Tirade Tirades_of_blather 060119 ... epitome of incomprehensibility The difference between psychologists and psychiatrists: (no, this isn't a joke) psychiatrists can prescribe medications for their patients and the other guys can't. And I think psychology as science makes sense... it's in the practical applications of it that things can get hazy. So, for you "psycho" people out there, what does my pseudonym "epitome of incomprehensibility" indicate about my state of mind? You don't have to answer that, aoiu oaiughah fiuaehf paugwepfugaepoufg yargopuyge argo oaug w87er e. There. That's what I call nonsense therapy. I feel a lot better now. 060120 ... Twitch I agree. Sometimes people really do have problems but it has gotten out of hand. It's like that southpark episode I've heard about where kids are diagnosed with ADD if they cannot pay attention while the whole novel of The Great Gatsby is read to them. 060121 ... Questions Questions. Is it possible that there are situations which may occur in a person's life wherein "depression" or even "suicide ideation" IS the healthy response? Are there situations where it would be unhealthy to not react as such? Can a scenario be envisioned in which a mania, neurosis or other abnormality might be both natural and perhaps even desirable? 060121 ... z that is an excellent question. 060121 ... Lets Split Hairs is Thank you "Z", I tend to feel like my questions are worthless and ignored. 060121 ... Lets Split Hairs is DRUNK Hit the "enter" key prematurely... 060121 what's it to you? who go blather from