What Are Mental Disorders?

[ExploringReality]

@Leo Gura will you make a video on this topic in the future? The world of Mental health and Disorders is so important and fascinating, what is schizophrenia, ect??? It makes me question my own mental health and my own experiences when trying to look at what's going on with someone that has a disorder. It goes back to the question, what is consciousness? This question goes so deep especially in the world of understanding Mind.

Also psychedelics, they produce these mental states or do they merely draw out what is already there? Hallucinations, and psychosis, why do psychedelics put one in states that can be interpreted as mental disorders? It can be frightening for someone having a strong trip that feels psychotic but an extremely expanded state of consciousness but you know you can't tell someone, especially a psychiatrist because they will tell you that you are having a episode and put you on drugs ironically.

Edited April 15 by ExploringReality

[TheCloud]

I prefer coming from the perspective of a psychological model called Internal Family Systems (IFS), which has the basic assertion that we are not unified individuals, but rather a collective or family of coexisting systems.  When a particular system with a particular responsibility gets overwhelmed by an external circumstance that it lacks the capacity to organically respond to, it forms a trauma which sort of buds off into a separate persistent unit (Part).

This Part maintains the memory of that trauma, with another Part forming to remember whatever forced solution you arrived at for the time;  in IFS, these are called Exiles and Protectors.  These Parts then become persistent throughout your life, taking note of situations that resemble the original trauma and confronting or avoiding them according to the original forced solution.  They are generally stagnant and inflexible, never learning or growing unless directly addressed and healed, either by accident or intention.

If enough of these Parts form, and the traumas and/or responses are extreme enough, this manifests as mental illness, whether it be depression, anxiety, dissociation, addiction, etc.  These Parts always have the intention to do good, but they tend to be completely myopic and ignore all kinds of collateral damage as long as they can achieve their principle objective of avoiding or assuaging their formative trauma.

For example, if you have an Exile who feels depressed, its Protector may come in and pour you a drink or ten.  You might end up an alcoholic with liver cirrhosis, but as long as you're too drunk to feel depressed, the Protector considers it a job well done.  It's only when you go in there to the depressed Exile and resolve it that the Protector will start looking for other ways to behave.

Anyway, that's my understanding of mental illness.  Other than strictly physical issues, I believe its possible that IFS explains most psychological issues, possibly even including things like schizophrenia and sociopathy (though I wouldn't dare say that's a certainty).

[Hojo]

The entirety of mental disorders is schizophrenia. Its just someone who thinks the voice in their head is them and is real. And reacting to it. Wanting something to change or wanting something different on the single frame of reality.

The only reason we think is because we want something else reality is giving us.

Psychedelics is getting it.

When thinking frontal lobe is on, thinking and describing reality differently than what it is. (This is the wanting someting else part)

Psychedelics turn that off and you get something else. Contradictively wanting whats there gives you something else.

Edited 23 hours ago by Hojo

[Jirh]

2 hours ago, Hojo said:

The entirety of mental disorders is schizophrenia. Its just someone who thinks the voice in their head is them and is real.

That doesn't really explain a disorder.

You can have a voice in your head, and you can believe it, and remain mentally stable and healthy.

Disorders happen when that voice says things that are out of touch with the lived reality, and you have no other choice but to believe it.

[Hojo]

@JirhThe only reason you are thinking is because you are unconsciously reacting to thought patterns you deem out of touch with your lived in reality.

Out of touch, you arent touching it. You are thinking about it, making plans, having wants and needs, contemplating it.

Reality is disordered without truth.

Truth is nothing is happening to think about, describe, measure.

Edited 21 hours ago by Hojo

[Jirh]

1 minute ago, Hojo said:

@JirhThe only reason you are thinking is because you are unconsciously reacting to thought patterns you deem out of touch with your lived in reality.

Out of touch, you arent touching it. You are thinking about it.

So in your opinion, every thought is a problem and a symptom of illness?

Then every single human, including the great geniuses are all mentally ill too.

[Hojo]

@JirhNo they arent thinking, they are watching a movie.

The geniuses are mentally ill, compared to norm. The real norm is insanity. That means watching and no thinking.

Simply expressing with no words, limits.

If einstein was enlightened he wasnt there to be enlightened. He wasnt even doing it.

If einstein was enlightened he wouldnt have done anything himself.

He was just looking at a screen and the screen was doing it.

When one calms down they can become a genius because God is a genius.

Even when you think you are fucking up you are actually being a genius and you thinking you are fucking up is actually fucking with your genius.

God is like a thing that can do infinite calculations per second if it lets itself do it. But there is itself thats trying to get it not to do infinite calculations, that thing is society and collective ego programming. 

If we can see past ego programming we would be moving around like this thing but hyper intelligently. way more intelligent than this thing. But we are under societal programming. We can be running at 100 miles per hour. Because we are just watching and limiting ourselves. Hercules was real.

Human brain takes up 30 percent of its daily uses. Alot of it is ego monitoring, if you knew  you were dreaming you don't think you can die or even eixst. You are with reality.

 

Edited 21 hours ago by Hojo

[Jirh]

@Hojo I don't resonate with what you're saying. It doesn't make much sense honestly.

Everyone thinks. Everyone has an internal voice. And everyone believes that voice.

But not everyone is mentally ill.

And it's not possible to build a life without that voice. I would guess even animals have some sort of internal voice inside their heads that tells them what to do. That's how they live and organize themselves in groups.

[Hojo]

@JirhWithout the voice you would be 100 times better. Its a limiting factor on the dream. Its like Gods windows 1000, pretending to not be God windows 1000. You want to simulate how you used to be windows 11. You have to run a command over yourself in order to be windows 11. The command is the limitation. Your voice. Yourself in windows 1000 (as windows 11)

Its like windows 1000 is trying to understand how it became windows 1000. It has to learn how it grew to windows 11 via strict orders and monitoring and then it wakes up and says im actually just pretending I had to know all those parameters I can just be myself, windows 1000, non existent in windows 11, that means everything is done.

Windows 11 is there you arent doing it you are beyond windows 11. You arent thinking, its a a lesser version of you thinking.

You are dead. You are maxxed out already.

You dont like anything about your life you would give it up. If you didnt you would enjoy it. Thinking is separation from reality. A duality. You thinking some comparison is happening between you and reality is you disagreeing with it.

This is the burden of society. This is you and me and our selfish desires.

Life is hedonism, without wanting something thats not there. God limits itself but is a replica of itself in a smaller form. God wants all therefore it becomes selfless, All life is, is doing what you want without wanting more. If you can get it do it. If you cant get it dont want it. Thats selfish and against God.Satan is everything God want. Whats happening is what you want, God is everything it wants everything.. Even if you think it sucks, thats because you want something other than God, God being. that which is happening.

That which isnt hedonism, (you getting what you want when you want) is selfish (satan, the voice, that which is only thinking in order to disagree with reality; that its not a duality) its you, or 'a thought'.

If you disagree with your reality, which is your own mind you are satan, the seperator. Satan is God and you are Satan and Satan is you and God is you, and you are God.

Limit God and you become satan, a thinking non existent voice that thinks its real. Limitation is that which is not happening. Thinking is that which is not happening. 

Thinking = that which is not true.

Truth = God(that which is happening).

Satan = that which is not God(that which is not happening).

The only reason you dont get what you want, is because you are missing a peice of your reflection.

Reflection = a reaction towards yourself as reality.

Reaction = self reflection, that you think isnt you.

Edited 20 hours ago by Hojo

[Carl-Richard]

Mental disorder is normal human behavior pulled to such extremes that most people would like you locked up because they can't tolerate you, or you're just simply unable to function at a basic level such that your physical survival is threatened, or it's causing you or other people so much suffering that you want to change it.

Take schizophrenia for example. Everybody has probably at one point in time

• heard a voice they thought was real but was actually imagined (really search your memory, you will find something), i.e. hallucinations.
• had trouble thinking clearly or making themselves understood, i.e. thought disorder.
• thought somebody was out to harm them or that somebody was conspiring against them when it was actually not the case, i.e. persecutory delusions, paranoia, psychotic beliefs.

Schizophrenia is just drawing these things to the ultimate extremes. Same with anxiety, ADHD, autism, OCD. We only label it a disorder once the problem becomes so severe and obvious that most people want to do something about it.

And of course psychedelics can produce such states that appear as mental disorders, because they tend to make things more extreme, like a magnifying glass.

Edited 8 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[Jirh]

@Hojo I think you're onto something there.

However, I will reaffirm my position that the internal voice is a friend to understand, not not an enemy to fight or a symptom to cure.

You have nice non-duality ideas, that I myself like and entertain sometimes. But they don't apply in this case or in the way you're suggesting.

You've touched on the idea of being better without the internal voice. I think, in many cases, like this one, that it would be better to lose the idea of being better, paradoxically.

[Jirh]

@Carl-Richard

Mental disorders are not behavioural disorders necessarily. In fact, most of the times, people with a mental disorders  may seem normal on the surface. They behave like everyone else, suppressing their disorders and trying to fit in with the order.

Mental disorders are, first and foremost, mental disorders, as the name suggests, something to do with the intellect/psychology/cognition.

 

And I've never in my life was mistaken about the internal voice. I've always recognized it as it is. But I've experienced other disordered states.

[Carl-Richard]

7 hours ago, Jirh said:

@Carl-Richard

Mental disorders are not behavioural disorders necessarily. In fact, most of the times, people with a mental disorders  may seem normal on the surface. They behave like everyone else, suppressing their disorders and trying to fit in with the order.

Mental disorders are, first and foremost, mental disorders, as the name suggests, something to do with the intellect/psychology/cognition.

 

9 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

or it's causing you or other people so much suffering that you want to change it.

The behavior doesn't have to be interpersonally evident. It can be mostly private or internal to ones own mind. You're assuming a behaviorist or objectively visible definition of behavior. I'm talking about behavior as in how something unfolds, e.g. behavior of the mind. If science is the study of the behavior of nature (how it unfolds), then psychology is the study of the behavior of mind.

 

7 hours ago, Jirh said:

And I've never in my life was mistaken about the internal voice. I've always recognized it as it is. But I've experienced other disordered states.

The example is not about the internal voice. It's about hallucinating. Now you just displayed signs of thought disorder.

Have you ever been at the verge of falling asleep (e.g. when reading something but being too tired and you start dozing off) and you start hearing things that sound external to you but as you drift in and out of sleep, you notice that the sounds were not in fact external to you? Or you think you heard somebody call your name in a public place but you're not sure if you even heard it correctly or if it was directed at you? That could be a hallucination or it could be a delusional belief or state (but it's less easy to know in that moment). Such subtle misattributions and confusion about perceptual content are the seeds of pathology seen in conditions like schizophrenia.

Edited 8 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[Jirh]

2 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

The example is not about the internal voice. It's about hallucinating. Now you just displayed signs of thought disorder.

Schizophrenia does not include hallucinations of a new voice, but rather a misidentification of one's own internal voice as something external. It happens in vulnerable mental states when cognitive capabilities are crippled.

The word 'hallucination' is misleading here, because it assumes new visuals and sounds, when it's the same as what was initially there, just misinterpreted.

This is easily seen when you talk to a schizophrenic. You will see that they are not making up some outlandish reality. It's the same reality we inhabit, just misinterpreted. They see the same things we see, but interpret them differently, often in a harmful way.

And this is also what distinguishes genius from madness. A genius is simply someone who interprets reality in a different way, and that interpretation is coming from higher cognitive functionality.

Quote

Have you ever been at the verge of falling asleep (e.g. when reading something but being too tired and you start dozing off) and you start hearing things that sound external to you but as you drift in and out of sleep, you notice that the sounds were not in fact external to you? Or you think you heard somebody call your name in a public place but you're not sure if you even heard it correctly or if it was directed at you? That could be a hallucination or it could be a delusional belief or state (but it's less easy to know in that moment). Such subtle misattributions and confusion about perceptual content are the seeds of pathology seen in conditions like schizophrenia.

I've never mistaken internal with external or vice versa.

Yes, I was mistaken about hearing someone calling my name, but it was just a momentary misperception that came from the environment and then immediately filtered out as meaningless noise that was misinterpreted. I was able to do that immediate filtering, because my cognitive functionality is intact. Someone with severed cognitive functionality loses this filtering ability.

And the pathology does not care about the seeds. Rather, it takes anything and turns it into seeds. Any input (sensory or otherwise) can be misinterpreted and turned pathologically.

Edited 6 hours ago by Jirh

[Carl-Richard]

2 hours ago, Jirh said:

Schizophrenia does not include hallucinations of a new voice, but rather a misidentification of one's own internal voice as something external. It happens in vulnerable mental states when cognitive capabilities are crippled.

It may involve that as a common feature but it's not limited to that. And "misidentification" is key here. Misidentifying whether something is your own internal voice or some external thing is on a spectrum of the human tendency to sometimes misidentify and misattribute the causes and sources of perceptions and events, where the types of experiences I described earlier exist somewhere on the normal part of that spectrum.

 

2 hours ago, Jirh said:

The word 'hallucination' is misleading here, because it assumes new visuals and sounds, when it's the same as what was initially there, just misinterpreted.

This is easily seen when you talk to a schizophrenic. You will see that they are not making up some outlandish reality. It's the same reality we inhabit, just misinterpreted. They see the same things we see, but interpret them differently, often in a harmful way.

And this is also what distinguishes genius from madness. A genius is simply someone who interprets reality in a different way, and that interpretation is coming from higher cognitive functionality.

A professor told me about a case where a person with schizophrenia described seeing a ghost and the ghost passing through them, and as it was passing through them, they could feel tactile sensations of the ghost and also smells of rotten fish. It's a pretty wide spectrum of possible experience.

There is a point where "misattribution" or "misidentifying" doesn't do the experiences justice, but indeed hallucination or simply dreaming. And you can experience this yourself if you've been very sleep deprived or stressed or ill. Suddenly the distinction between "reality" and dream becomes very foggy.

Or simply laying and taking a nap, you are floating on between "true external" and "generated external" (which really is only a distinction made for cultural convenience; modern cognitive neuroscience is all about prediction models or "controlled hallucination"; schizophrenia is sometimes conceptualized as a breakdown of the prediction machinery).

Edited 4 hours ago by Carl-Richard