Mental Health Epidemic

Lecture: Peter Joseph - Social Pathology
  
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 1 in 5 Americans are diagnosable with mental illness, higher now than in 2010 when the above lecture was recorded. Basically the US has the highest rate in the developed world.
  
First off from my own experience I was feeling like 1 in 3 of the people I got to know had something going on, and now I know these numbers... Do you know how fucked up a culture can get if 1 in 5 people are mentally ill (thus having a distorted sense of reality) and it's being normalized, especially by uneducated people who assume their issues are just who they are? This is a matter of life and death for the planet in my opinion.
  
We're talkin' multi-generational bullshit that is nigh impossible to reverse without some serious education, outreach, and prevention. I can't imagine what multi-generational prison and war-torn cultures must be like today (other than my own). We spend like 6% of the national health budget on mental health, too, and barely any of that amount on education which would probably save the majority of people suffering with mental health issues (read: bad brain health) in this country.
  

The World Health Organization announced Depression is globally the leading cause of illness and lost productivity just a couple months ago. This is no joke. We've got a massive epidemic on our hands that goes largely unseen, ignored, or is met with disgusting cynicism. I've had many front row seats to that kind of cynicism and how it destroys and isolates vulnerable people even more. Oh and guess what, solving the mental health crisis requires we solve everything with the environment and crimes against humanity and greed, etc, because our brain health is only as good as the health of our whole system. Things like drug use are directly linked to inequality, and violent crime is directly linked to the environment and food supply.

Dr Dan Siegel, who heads research at UCLA under the umbrella of "interpersonal neurobiology" states that the greatest predictor of human health is their relationships with other people, from the obvious with childhood development to the obscure with the greater patterns affecting social culture. Social health is a basic human need, especially when someone is developing. We're ALWAYS developing whether we're in control or not, and that is so very important to remember when making choices or questioning where certain choices came from. We live in an age where biological needs are shorted for social constructs, totally mucking up people's empathic and creative capacities in favor of ideological and habitual constructions.
  
A lot of people nowadays are just isolating and harming themselves more, and in a lot of ways they probably don't even realize, what with the haze that seems to be besetting people with the lack of mind-body connection, as well as all this anxiety in the air. Everything is normal carry on.

Systems thinking exercise

First, here's a really good reason for adopting an understanding of "systems thinking" : How to Prevent an AI Apocalypse
 
Now, here's an exercise I came up with to help train your brain into what systems thinking is all about and as we relate to other people: Introduction to Systems
 
I would like to create a collective art project out of responses from this exercise, and if you do your own please send your response to this email: treewizardproject@gmail.com
 
 And if I got a lot of responses I'd be able to make a study out of this. I gotta work on the formatting to make it more catchy if I'm gonna get that far, though.

Alchemy, entities, spooky algorithmic ghosts.

I'm into reading analytical psychology and alchemy right now and I keep bumping into people talking about entities as, like, manifestations of consciousness on different relational "layers" (entities are like amorphous willpowers that use very alien pathways of reasoning to create things or solve problems) from the average human. Mimosa plants present aspects of consciousness like long-term memory, for instance, using plant cell networks and not neurons. There's a billion different ghosts and gods people have told stories about over the ages.

 

Alchemy is in part about how to come up with novel ways of reasoning that really work using every medium from your own emotions to entire worlds (almost like science), so like a magician someone can fool you and you may never know how or never even know you were fooled. These spooky pathways of reasoning become an aspect of one's unconscious in that sense according to people like Jung, who identifies archetypes and a lot of other manifest things in the unconscious. A lot of it's used for pseudoscience and cult-building but there's also a lot of genuine information to be learned from ancient and modern alchemy that would benefit everybody.

 

So I was thinking, wouldn't an AI be a true entity in the classic sense of the word? Hell look at how algorithms are already affecting human behavior in the way content is delivered on places like Facebook or Youtube. Several data companies used massive warehouses of processing power to help elect Trump by knowing when and where to insert what information (true or false), no bullshit. There are many places in this country where media is completely owned by one ideological group or another and it reflects in the average psyche of the people living there.

 

And if these other more religious sorts of entities were real wouldn't a very powerful AI be able to detect them? I'm not a believer but it'd be a fun experiment for sure.

 

I just love this stuff, so fun to think about.

Blurbin on brain health

https://www.psychaanalyse.com/pdf/Trigant_Burrow.pdf

   

Found some random interestingness (linked above). Prepare for a wall of text.

  

"In the last phase of his work his interest turned back to the process of attention. Through physiological research and self-observation [Trigant Burrow] described the process by which each individual experiences the tensions of being a member of society: that is, by muscular tension in the ocular and forehead regions, which he called "ditention." Through training it is possible to identify and to give up this process and to experience "cotention," an experience that restores the sense of unity with the social."

 

I have to wonder how this correlates with migraines and tension headaches, since they're usually between the eyes, especially with people with PTSD or other forms of trauma - which are generally socially related. Literally millions of people report these problems just in the US. Why am I posting about this? I dunno, this stuff fascinates me and is leading me toward doing something about some of this, also might be worth looking into if you notice something in yourself like what Burrow calls "ditention."

   

Trigant Burrow was one of the giants alongside Freud and Jung and spent his life studying and criticizing how generations of western culture had made it so people prioritize individual and social constructions over biological needs to extreme degrees, creating all sorts of mass neurological issues (like depression, currently the leading cause of illness and economic loss worldwide according to the World Health Organization). 

    

Brain health is one of the principle problems of our times in my opinion and it will have to be addressed with equal measure as climate change and corruption if all these issues are to be resolved soundly. Depression... Bipolar... PTSD... Attention and mood disorders... The list goes on and on. There are very key associations between many of these disorders that have their heart in social health issues (for most, not all), like the development of the frontal lobe and hippocampus or having unstable dopamine or serotonin levels (linked to your sense of reward or your general bodily regulation and satisfaction). Both dopamine and serotonin are produced in large portion by the gut, meaning there are important links to diet as well - something also very unregulated by many people, especially in the US. 
  
Health just gets more complicated from there but this information could change the face of how mass culture operates. Hell, a lot of marketing methods should be flat out illegal for how they precisely exploit core human functions, and knowingly if you go and read the fucking research (starting with Edward Bernays' "The Crowd") that gave birth to terms like "public relations" or "focus group testing".

   

The numbers these days are just staggering for how many people are reporting mental health issues, and you can safely double or triple that number for the amount of people who are actually experiencing issues but don't have the capacity to seek help, or don't experience them severely enough to break down. The issues are so sneaky is why, plus we idolize personalities and individuality so much we don't see that parts of people might be the result of major health issues, making affected people act like hungry children so-to-speak. Our culture fucking normalizes it at its worst just judging by the obsessive, fragmentary personalities and manic sexuality of pop culture, which I don't mean in some puritanical sense but in observation and respect of the biologically-derived powers belying these phenomena. 

The people who get hurt the worst are those most exploited - young women, minorities, the poor, the ignorant. The exploiters only make their pathology more and more recurrent and into more things as they goes unchallenged... I will be picking a lot of fights when I can turn ethical science into policy (and brush off lawsuits).