Science Without a Soul

MahoganySouls

angelica wrote:

"Recovery:

Myth: Rehabilitation can be provided only after stabilization.
Reality: Rehabilitation should begin on Day One.
-- Dr. Courtenay Harding, University of Colorado School of Medicine

Some of the most recent and hopeful news in schizophrenia research is emerging from studies in the field of psychosocial “rehab.” New studies challenge several long-held myths in psychiatry about the inability of people with schizophrenia to recover from their illness. It now appears that such myths, by maintaining an overall pessimism about outcomes, may significantly reduce patients' opportunities for improvement and/or recovery.

In fact, the long-term perspective on schizophrenia should give everyone a renewed sense of hope and optimism. According to Dr. G. Gross, author of a 22-year study of 508 patients with schizophrenia:

“ ...schizophrenia does not seem to be a disease of slow, progressive deterioration. Even in the second and third decades of illness, there is still potential for full or partial recovery.”
After three decades of empirical study, it is now clear that good rehabilitation programs are an important part of treatment strategy. In addition, where family input is solicited and families are included as part of the treatment "team", patient outcomes are greatly improved.

Families need and want education, information, coping and communication skills, emotional support, and to be treated as collaborators. For this reason, knowledgeable clinicians will make a special effort to involve family members. Once a relationship is established, clinician, patient and family can work together to identify needs and appropriate interventions. Everyone should be able to have realistic yet optimistic expectations about improvement and possible recovery.

Studies show that families who are supportive, non-judgmental, and, most especially, non-critical-can do much to help patients recover. On the other hand, patients who are around chaotic or volatile family members usually have a more difficult time, and have to return to hospital more often.

Since we now know this, it is important for family members to assess their own coping skills and try to anticipate and adapt to the ups and downs of the illness. Calm assurance, assistance, and support from family members can make a difference to the person with schizophrenia."
http://www.mentalhealth.com/book/p40-sc02.html#Head_3

Yes Angelica, the key word here being "TREATMENT". Both medicinal and theraputic. The term recovery does not indicate absense of treatment. It means getting the patient to a position of management of their disease.

angelica

MahoganySouls wrote:

Yes Angelica, the key word here being "TREATMENT". Both medicinal and theraputic. The term recovery does not indicate absense of treatment. It means getting the patient to a position of management of their disease.

Throughout this thread I have advocated treatment. I have advocated patient-centred recovery-based treatment.

Remember, you assumed I was advocating non-treatment. You were not able to back that up because it was an inaccurate assumption.

MahoganySouls

angelica wrote:

Throughout this thread I have advocated treatment. I have advocated patient-centred recovery-based treatment.

Remember, you assumed I was advocating non-treatment. You were not able to back that up because it was an inaccurate assumption.

What you advocated by posting the videos is that Psychiatry is detrimental to the health of humans. That it is a conspiracy of "power". What you advocated by posting your comments is that because you "recovered" and found a way to live without meds that it is something all patients should strive for. You sprinkled in there the "of course I support all choices" however you have to remember, a person in the throws of mental illness CANNOT make reasonable choices. Their thinking is skewed and their ability to process realitly is tainted. Therefore, putting them in a position to say "hey, I don't HAVE to take meds. I can control this on my own. Doctors have a negative agenda." is irresponsible and dangerous.

Would you advocate for a cancer patient who goes into remission to forego further maintenance of their disease because "hey they're cured"?

What about the diabetic who got their blood sugar under control by changing their diet? WOuld you advocate that they no longer have to worry about needing insulin at a future date because to do so would undermine their recovery?

So again, why should the disease of the brain be treated any differently?

This said, I am not going to argue this point with you any further. I feel sad that this type of ignorance is perpetuated among mental health patients. I deal with it routinely and can assure you that very very VERY few patients ever find that their disease simply disappears as you are claiming. Until it happens on a regular basis, I will continue to advise people that this illness is no different from any other. Once you have it, it will require lifelong maintanence in order to cope and survive. Certainly each person is different and some may require a lifetime of meds and therapy, while others may simply need a tweek here and there. But overall, it will not completely go away and it will need to be kept at the forefront of their health care.

angelica

MahoganySouls wrote:

It means getting the patient to a position of management of their disease.

It looks like you are still unable to grasp the idea of full recovery:

Here's a recap:

"there is still potential for full or partial recovery"


"Some people may have only one episode of schizophrenia in their lifetime."


"Also, the wonderful and mysterious healing mechanisms of the body can correct the imbalance without drugs, in response to psychotherapy, and a change in the life events that led to the problem in the first place"


When we have the presence of dis-ease it indicates dis-ease. And conversely, when we have an ongoing presence of lack of disease, it indicates lack of disease. That's different than management of existing disease.

gue_barium

mmhmmm. i sease.

angelica

MahoganySouls wrote:

I deal with it routinely and can assure you that very very VERY few patients ever find that their disease simply disappears....

It's not a wonder, and this is exactly why I advocate for the mental health professionals to be held to account for their failures, as well.

MahoganySouls

angelica wrote:

It looks like you are still unable to grasp the idea of full recovery:

Here's a recap:

"there is still potential for full or partial recovery"


"Some people may have only one episode of schizophrenia in their lifetime."


"Also, the wonderful and mysterious healing mechanisms of the body can correct the imbalance without drugs, in response to psychotherapy, and a change in the life events that led to the problem in the first place"


When we have the presence of dis-ease it indicates dis-ease. And conversely, when we have an ongoing presence of lack of disease, it indicates lack of disease. That's different than management of existing disease.

Angelica what you are doing is managing your disease. You have found that lifestyle changes was what YOU required to feel healthy. That is great.

However certain triggers related to your experience could very well cause a relapse. This is a fact of life that you would be remiss to ignore.

MahoganySouls

angelica wrote:

It's not a wonder, and this is exactly why I advocate for the mental health professionals to be held to account for their failures, as well.

It is not mental health professionals who fail when a patient refuses treatment.

angelica

MahoganySouls wrote:

Angelica what you are doing is managing your disease. You have found that lifestyle changes was what YOU required to feel healthy. That is great.

However certain triggers related to your experience could very well cause a relapse. This is a fact of life that you would be remiss to ignore.

What you have said here is the exact point of this entire thread.
It's interesting how you need to make it personal. And how you need to make me ill, even though I show no signs of dis-ease. You are imagining disease where none is manifest. This dis-ease you see is in your imagination.


For the record, you could easily manifest mental dis-ease tomorrow, or the day after, so it looks to me like we're on the even playing field. Repressed trauma can resurface for you, too.

gue_barium

MahoganySouls wrote:

Angelica what you are doing is managing your disease. You have found that lifestyle changes was what YOU required to feel healthy. That is great.

However certain triggers related to your experience could very well cause a relapse. This is a fact of life that you would be remiss to ignore.

Actually, she's just posting on an internet message board.

angelica

MahoganySouls wrote:

It is not mental health professionals who fail when a patient refuses treatment.

you referred to the patients you deal with routinely, that you assured us don't have their diseases disappear. You did not refer to ones who refuse treatment. It's my impression that generally the ones who refuse treatment are not routinely seeking out mental health professionals.

MahoganySouls wrote:

I deal with it routinely and can assure you that very very VERY few patients ever find that their disease simply disappears

angelica

Unfortunately, the psychiatric model is not set up so that "dis-eases" disappear. Especially the "dis-eases" that exist only in the mind of the mental health professionals themselves. Patients cannot make those "dis-eases" disappear. Patients have no control over what the "professionals" think.

soulsinging

angelica wrote:

I'm not sure what she thinks...I only know what she said, which regarded the idea that forced commitment happens for a grounded reasons.

Again, I have not dismissed all psychiatry as a hoax. I look at it as a valid tool for the empowerment of the patient, which puts the patient on an even playing field as any self-respecting adult. When the patient is empowered and supported, they can make decisions in their best interests, as empowered individuals do. Any idea of having to convince patients of the chronicity of their symptoms to get them to take med they don't feel comfortable with is a control-play/power-struggle which adds the "professional" into the equation of imbalance, worsening the situation, and perpetuating imbalance.

well i'd be shocked if anyone advocated other than this. in my understanding, psychiatrists behave just like doctors... offering their best medical opinion of the condition, their views on the most effective treatments, and then other alternatives and the risks associated with all. is this not how it is done (forced commitment due to emergency aside, in the same sense that a doctor doesn't wait for an unconscious gunshot victim to come round before operating).

soulsinging

angelica wrote:

What you have said here is the exact point of this entire thread.
It's interesting how you need to make it personal. And how you need to make me ill, even though I show no signs of dis-ease. You are imagining disease where none is manifest. This dis-ease you see is in your imagination.


For the record, you could easily manifest mental dis-ease tomorrow, or the day after, so it looks to me like we're on the even playing field. Repressed trauma can resurface for you, too.

im on her side in this one. i have mental health issues of my own. i have recovered sans medicine due to lifestyle and thinking changes. nonetheless, i know that if certain triggers hit me at the right time, i could revert back to previous behaviors very quickly. i find it hard to believe it is not a possibility for anyone. just as a totally healthy person can develop sudden and powerful psychological problems through traumatic experiences.

angelica

soulsinging wrote:

im on her side in this one. i have mental health issues of my own. i have recovered sans medicine due to lifestyle and thinking changes. nonetheless, i know that if certain triggers hit me at the right time, i could revert back to previous behaviors very quickly. i find it hard to believe it is not a possibility for anyone. just as a totally healthy person can develop sudden and powerful psychological problems through traumatic experiences.

The idea of sides here is an illusion. We're all humans, hopefully evolving.

Mental health is a continuum and any one of us can be hit tomorrow or the next day. We have no way of knowing.

When someone has never experienced a mental health crisis and it happens, they are much less prepared and can be much more lost than one who has previously experienced a mental health crisis and has developed all kinds of resources.

Ahnimus

Obviously this video is skewed, a conspiracy theory like any other. It makes Wundt out to be a terrible person along side Skinner. But Wundt was the father of psychology and did many productive things.

This video simply ignores the positive history of psychiatry. They mention the growing number of asylums, but this is incorrect. Most asylums in the United States have been closed down. The patients are either functioning in society with pharmacological treatment, or they are in prison now.

Schizophrenia is a very real disease that is affected by SSRI's. It's not clear why, but blocking reuptake of seratonin (HT-5) in the synaptic cleft reduces the symptoms of schizophrenia. Similarly Fluoxetine (Prozac) works for OCD patients. The causes aren't known, but the treatments are effective, generally speaking.

Currently, psychiatry is mostly non-invasive, with the occasional use of PET (positron emission tomography) where patients are required to drink a radioactive agent. This technology is being replaced by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) which are higher spatial and temporal resolution, non-invasive, brain imaging techniques.

The diagnosticians job is a difficult one, hard for many to appreciate. Many disorders share symptoms. It can come down to determining between 100 different cases, and one unknown symptom or patient history can change the diagnosis. The popular television show House, is about a diagnostician with just these complaints. In the show, patients frequently mislead House by witholding information or lying, in which cases House tends to misdiagnose them. Although, House is a great diagnostician with a lifetime of experience, he's also a fictional character. Many doctors do not have that level of diagnostic expertise. Which is why Paul Churchland proposes a recurrent vector-coded artificial neural network to be trained on all medical knowledge and used as a diagnostician. Similar to the one in the video, but that one was linear processing, drastically different from recurrent vector processing which is an imitation of the human brain.

Science doesn't consider souls for a good reason. There is no evidence of souls. "Science without bigfoot" might sound silly, but bigfoot shares the same objective properties as souls do. Similar statements "Science without fairies", "Science without aliens", "Science without Ki", "Science without Ghosts", etc..

Try reading on recurrent vector processing neural networks. They aren't fictitious things made up by wacky doctors to make money. They are largely how the brain works. The intralaminar nucleus for example, has recurrent connections with most parts of the brain, and is implicated in the function of consciousness.

Here is a short primer on recurrent neural networks, called Elman Network, also check out the following article on Hopfield Network

The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul is an excellent book on all this stuff by prof. Paul Churchland. It will explain better the system of recurrent networks, how they have been observed in the brain, how they have been modelled by NETTalk, Speak.Net, Gary Cottrell's face recognition and the silicon retina that functions exactly like a human retina!

Good luck in your pursuit to discredit science.

soulsinging

angelica wrote:

The idea of sides here is an illusion. We're all humans, hopefully evolving.

Mental health is a continuum and any one of us can be hit tomorrow or the next day. We have no way of knowing.

When someone has never experienced a mental health crisis and it happens, they are much less prepared and can be much more lost than one who has previously experienced a mental health crisis and has developed all kinds of resources.

but that does not mean the experienced one should be reckless or careless with respect to it.

angelica

soulsinging wrote:

but that does not mean the experienced one should be reckless or careless with respect to it.

No one has advocated being careless or reckless.

gue_barium

Ahnimus wrote:

Obviously this video is skewed, a conspiracy theory like any other. It makes Wundt out to be a terrible person along side Skinner. But Wundt was the father of psychology and did many productive things.

This video simply ignores the positive history of psychiatry. They mention the growing number of asylums, but this is incorrect. Most asylums in the United States have been closed down. The patients are either functioning in society with pharmacological treatment, or they are in prison now.

Schizophrenia is a very real disease that is affected by SSRI's. It's not clear why, but blocking reuptake of seratonin (HT-5) in the synaptic cleft reduces the symptoms of schizophrenia. Similarly Fluoxetine (Prozac) works for OCD patients. The causes aren't known, but the treatments are effective, generally speaking.

Currently, psychiatry is mostly non-invasive, with the occasional use of PET (positron emission tomography) where patients are required to drink a radioactive agent. This technology is being replaced by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) which are higher spatial and temporal resolution, non-invasive, brain imaging techniques.

The diagnosticians job is a difficult one, hard for many to appreciate. Many disorders share symptoms. It can come down to determining between 100 different cases, and one unknown symptom or patient history can change the diagnosis. The popular television show House, is about a diagnostician with just these complaints. In the show, patients frequently mislead House by witholding information or lying, in which cases House tends to misdiagnose them. Although, House is a great diagnostician with a lifetime of experience, he's also a fictional character. Many doctors do not have that level of diagnostic expertise. Which is why Paul Churchland proposes a recurrent vector-coded artificial neural network to be trained on all medical knowledge and used as a diagnostician. Similar to the one in the video, but that one was linear processing, drastically different from recurrent vector processing which is an imitation of the human brain.

Science doesn't consider souls for a good reason. There is no evidence of souls. "Science without bigfoot" might sound silly, but bigfoot shares the same objective properties as souls do. Similar statements "Science without fairies", "Science without aliens", "Science without Ki", "Science without Ghosts", etc..

Try reading on recurrent vector processing neural networks. They aren't fictitious things made up by wacky doctors to make money. They are largely how the brain works. The intralaminar nucleus for example, has recurrent connections with most parts of the brain, and is implicated in the function of consciousness.

Here is a short primer on recurrent neural networks, called Elman Network, also check out the following article on Hopfield Network

The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul is an excellent book on all this stuff by prof. Paul Churchland. It will explain better the system of recurrent networks, how they have been observed in the brain, how they have been modelled by NETTalk, Speak.Net, Gary Cottrell's face recognition and the silicon retina that functions exactly like a human retina!

Good luck in your pursuit to discredit science.

Way to go off-topic.

Ahnimus

gue_barium wrote:

Way to go off-topic.

How is it off-topic?

The point is that psychiatry is not using invasive techniques like the old frontal lobotomy and there are real reasons to use pharmacological treatments. New more humane developments and more efficient technology is coming down the pipeline. It costs millions of dollars to build an MEG, the mental health field isn't all about taking your money.