So many ideas, so little time.
While only a little of this has seeped into my posting, I've spent a great deal of time over the past few months reading up on neuroscience, genetics and psychiatry. It takes time to digest all of that into something meaningful. Some of the topics I'm exploring include the aggregate prevelance of mental conditions, the weaknesses and strengths of the status quo nomenclature and classification system for mental conditions, the artificial and fundamental reasons for the rareness of infectious mental health conditions, the relative importance of different genetic factors, early childhood exposures and childhood and later instruction in mental health, the prospects for some sort of "periodic table" to classify mental conditions by cause and create some overall list of categories that all condition can be comfortably and meaningfully fit into, the relationships between personality and pathology, the number of independent dimensions that are necessary to get a useful and fairly comprehensive description of an individual's psyche, commonalities and differences in mental health etiology, neurodiverse ecological niches and evolutionary advantages, links between sociological phenomena and individual psychology, and questions like co-morbidity of fairly simple conditions v. a much larger number of more complex conditions.
Ferment long enough and you get cider or beer or brandy or something else good.
1 comment:
Interesting article, Why so many Americans, today, are "Mentally ill" (click here).
While the article focuses on the purported nexus between psychotropic medications and psychosis, I think the more salient point is that psychiatry and psychology are junk-sciences, where both diagnosis and medications are handed out like candy in lieu of discipline during early upbringing and personal accountability during adulthood.
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