The Dark Side Of Psychic Enlightenment, Or "You Are Not Like That, Do Not Believe Them!"

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Take away from the screens delicate violets, fighters against punitive psychiatry, people living in the world of pink ponies, or who believe everything they write on the Internet (haha). It will be a professional burning longread (the version is as decent as possible, indecent on Patreon). The sponsor of this burning is all those kind and caring people who, after reading these internet networks and posts of psychology popularizers, begin to tell a person with a mental diagnosis that he is not like that, that everything is fine with him, and that doctors would only be hooked on the farm.

So. Let's start by defining the area of responsibility. For me personally (yes, yeah) I divide mental diagnoses into "big psychiatry" (depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, OCD, psychosis and other things that can be easily stopped with pills) and personality disorders. I will now talk about personality disorders. There are more than a dozen of them, and of those that are heard: antisocial, narcissistic, borderline, schizoid. Since this post was sponsored by the discussion under the BPD post, I will mainly talk about borderline personality disorder (F60.31).

I will not list the hell that befalls the unlucky reader who has tried to Google any of the personality disorders. In short, it is * cut by the censorship *: "a person with a personality disorder has only a coffin-coffin-graveyard from the perspectives, it cannot be cured, all people with a personality disorder are deeply antisocial elements that must be … isolated immediately." And yes, if suddenly you find out that your loved one has a personality disorder - "run immediately, losing your sneakers, because you, too, are obligatory and inevitable * censored *, because personality disorders are not cured!" Impressed? I, too … was very frappy. Now we are going to try to phrase it together.

First. What is personality disorder? These are certain stereotypes of behavior, thinking, outlook on the world, oneself and others, which interfere with the adaptation of the individual in society. Too hard? Okay, it's even easier. Certain ways a person behaves, react, think and communicate that hurt him when interacting with the outside world: he regularly quits (gets fired) from his job (and has financial problems); he cannot build a reliable close relationship (and suffers from this); he communicates inadequately with others (he gives out emotional overreactions to ordinary workers or friendly remarks, or vice versa, does not give out any reactions at all, suppresses anger, discontent, in general any emotions); he has inadequate self-esteem ("I am a nonentity", or "I am infallible", or a swing from this); he has problems with focus, motivation, achievement of goals (any). Now I must note (that this is not easy at all) that all this can be both the result of a personality disorder and conditions such as bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD (which, see above, can be relieved with pills). And, since I will write the entire further wall of the text based on BPD (only narcissists got more "love"), I should note that with BPD most of this wonderful set is attached to the load, and it can be extremely difficult to figure out what is where. But we're talking about personality disorders now.

Second. Yes, personality disorder is NOT treated with TABLETS! Personality disorders are certain … if I write reflexes right now, they will shower me with tomatoes, but in fact this is exactly the case: certain patterns of behavior are literally fixed on the "spinal" level and are almost uncontrollable (I'm not talking about suppressing emotions right now, there are often people there is no equal just with personality disorders). "Stimulus - reaction" occurs almost instantly, unconsciously, and this reaction is stable and does not depend (or very little depends) on the context. Suddenly, yeah. A person with a personality disorder will give almost the same reaction to the news that his partner is leaving and to the words of the boss "your performance indicators have dropped dramatically."

Not conducive to social adaptation, right? The main problem of a person with a personality disorder is that he has a very meager arsenal of coping strategies (ways to deal with a particular situation). It is like a horse that can only move at a gallop. Or a dog barking at any sound, regardless of whether it is climbing through the window of a house, or a car passed on the next street, or your friend came. With personality disorder, the pattern is the same: a person with personality disorder knows 1 or 2 ways to act, and he uses them EVERYWHERE. Regardless of faces and circumstances. The reflex mastered from childhood is perfectly adapted for life in an environment that is sick in the head, but has never been adapted to a conditionally normal environment. Therefore, getting into a more or less calm environment, a person with RL suddenly gets lost, stresses ("well, there must be some catch, where is he ?!") and begins to give out his usual behavioral reactions, causing bewilderment and a desire to move away from this strange type …

Third. Treating personality disorder with pills is about as effective as teaching a rat to run through a maze for sugar. No maze. But with sugar. Funny? Not really, but vital. So yes, personality disorder cannot be cured with pills (sugar). With medication, you can alleviate the symptoms of concomitant conditions such as depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, OCD, ADHD, etc., but that's all. But personality disorder lends itself well to correction through psychotherapy: a person gradually expands his arsenal of coping strategies to 4-5, learns to keep track of what is happening with himself and slow it down before everything collapses. Yes, it takes time, yes, it requires a conscious acceptance by a person of the fact that yes, I have this trouble, I have to do something about it. Getting an official diagnosis of BPD (like any other) can be the stepping stone from which a person will go in the right direction, because psychotherapy for BPD (like any other personality disorder) is a rather specific thing, and without realizing this fact of a person to a suitable specialist is not a fact that it will bring. But psychotherapy simply (“I feel bad, I don’t know what to do”) can be (and often turns out to be) less effective due to the specifics of the personality disorder. It is still effective (at least a person learns to hear himself and others, to test reality, that's all), but very slow, because you have to wade through the "spinal" reflexes. And it seems to me that this is where the myths about "I walked for 5 years, nothing helped!" And the last thing. That, for the sake of which all this movement was started. Without understanding what is wrong with him, a person with a personality disorder will continue to rush from one extreme to another, treat depression, OCD, anxiety and other accompanying, and not understand why all this does not help. It sympathetically helps, but the root cause - the curves of the coping strategy and the distorted view of the world - does not correct in any way, and the painful conditions return again and again. People with RL often listen very strongly to their immediate surroundings, and instead of "OK, let's say I have this thing, what can I try to do with it?" get stuck in denial and "it can't be, this is a coffin-coffin-cemetery."That is why all these "well-wishers" who bring their valuable opinions and believe that they can see more clearly from the side of what is actually happening can become the very sticks in wheels that a person with RL needs least of all.

Here, someone especially persistent may again cry out that "personality disorders CANNOT BE TREATED !!!" "Spinal reflexes" will remain, but a crowd of other ways to act will grow on top of them, and the person will no longer have to "pretend to be normal", he will, in fact, be normal. He will simply increase his entire arsenal for a normal life, not at 5-16 years old, like "normal people", but at 25+. Not because he is a sick idiot, but because it happened historically. People with PD are very often quick-witted, intelligent people. It's just that they were unlucky enough to be born and grow up in an unhealthy environment, the child's mind invented a working method to survive and froze in it, as in the only way to interact with the world. And then, when this method in a "normal" environment suddenly begins to bring pain and suffering, it is scary, unbearable to refuse it, it is like death, because this was the only way to survive! And all these screams "you are not like that, do not listen" - they only feed this hope "what if I just tried little, right now I will try again, and everything will work out" … And for the thousandth time on the same rake. Not because we want to, but because we carry these rakes with us everywhere, they are literally our part, and it seems that “if I lose them, how and with what will I shake off all this furry northern animal? !! No, this is my rake, I will never give it up !!! " At this point, I need to repeat once again that you should not worry, your dear rake will not go anywhere from you. You just wrap them in a convenient case, hang them so that they do not get tangled under your feet, and do not hit you on the forehead, you will get a shovel, crowbar, plow, horse, tractor and whatever you want to get, in addition to the rakes. soil and sow seeds of joy. And in order to brush aside the troubles that happen, you can always uncover the rake if you do not like the new sword and the shiny machine gun.

Do you know what are the most frequent phrases in my consultations? "And what, so it was possible?" and "Oh, I haven't looked at it that way yet." Yeah)

On this cheerful note, I want to end. I really hope that someone will get to the end of this opus and rethink their attitude to "punitive psychiatry", psychotherapy and mental diagnoses. And it will not interfere with your friends and relatives trying to change something in their life, even if this path seems to you from your basement something like a "coffin-coffin-cemetery" …

Shl. I do not want to make a srach under this post that "the pills do not help !!!" etc. Pills in the case of RL are crutches that help to stop the accompanying processes that interfere with normal thinking and functioning (depression, anxiety, etc.). But without working with the "rake" everything very quickly returns to square one. ZY2. A short summary: don't stop people who have received a mental diagnosis from figuring out on their own what they can get out of it. No, what is written on the Internet does not make you an expert.