Comments on: Is Madness an Evolved Signal? Justin Garson on Strategy Versus Dysfunction

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 01:27:19 +0000

I think it’s pretty easy to define the function of these things. Primates are known to develop compulsions as a way of discharging extreme distress, and if the stress is chronic and there’s no regulating element the strategy will become habituated and generalized as a way of dealing with uncomfortable feelings: OCD. Primates kept in cages are also known to self mutilate after being repeatedly taunted, and to rely on drugs to self soothe when they’re available. Hyper vigilance has been observed in virtually all animal species as a response to existing within a punishing and unpredictable environment, and if this environment is early or chronic it will also be carried into other contexts: anxiety. Learned helplessness has been observed as well across animal species in punitive contexts with no possibility of escape: depression is an adaptation. Dissociation or tuning out is also adaptive as a response to stress that one can’t do anything about, and the same principles I’ve described above will net you adhd as adaptive. Psychosis takes a little more empathy to understand but talk to anyone who has understood their psychosis in context and they’ll tell you what it meant. We need to look for how these things are adaptive and learned in context and if not how they WERE adaptive and learned in context. And intuitive and empirically validated explanations exist. Except, NOT for the disfunction narratives.

Report comment

By: Kevin Francis Burke

Kevin Francis Burke — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 15:05:50 +0000

‘Madness’ as in something not functioning according to the bare faced greed philosophy of neoliberal capitalism: don’t make me laugh.

Report comment

By: Walter

Walter — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 16:10:58 +0000

Who woke up, fill out this clawo form,

Oh no they woke up and left is that right?
It’s all a lot of weird science from the nose
bleed section, any one have any more of that
punch? Testing for mental illness with over
9000 screens

Report comment

By: Birdsong

Birdsong — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 21:27:43 +0000

Really good interview. I particularly appreciate the way Justin characterizes psychiatry’s use of the term “biopsychosocial” as “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”. I see this as lip service, a way of fooling people into thinking psychiatry has evolved when it clearly has not.

Report comment

By: Greg Shankland

Greg Shankland — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 19:11:49 +0000

It fascinates me how ‘psychiatry’… the ‘organized’ version that sets standards and reins strays in…

Appears to be incapable os seeing the effect of their assumptions and framing of ‘the problem’ on their own thinking. And from that, how they relate to people experiencing the problem.

The only approach they ‘can’ adopt is to convert the client / patient perspective to their own, else they will have failed the profession.

Justin points out some really clear examples here… having adopted an assumption (dys-function) and framing (medical… or explained by something physiological, rather than say information or reality)… every byte of information from the patient / client is seen and attributed in that light. The framing closes off other options that may actually work better for the individual patient / client, especially when it comes to ‘mind’, which is a much more fungible functionality of the brain.

We see in madness or hearing voices in partucular… the ‘symptomization’ of legitimate, even expected responses to the situation or phenomenology being experienced. I can easily explain my responses to voices as expected responses to the weird nature of the stimuli (labeled hallucinations), as the functionality ‘perception’ modeling an experience exactly as expected.

I would not go so far as to call madness a strategy (at least not a viable one) though I very much support Justin’s positions taken here and appreciate the clarity, simplicity and insights in this interview.

Report comment

By: Someone Else

Someone Else — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 04:14:02 +0000

“And it’s almost impossible to describe madness-as-strategy in the abstract.”

Well, I must confess, I did use “madness-as-strategy” in real life. So I can give a real life example.

I had a boyfriend who kept following me, when I repeatedly moved, in part, to get away from him, in my college years. And he didn’t want to let me break up with him, after I’d settled in Chicago. So I did eventually lie, and tell him I was going to jump off my 17th floor balcony, to get rid of him.

He called the police, who did call me. And I told them the truth, that I was just trying to break up with him, and I was not actually suicidal. So they understood the truth, and didn’t bother showing up.

But, it was almost a decade later, when a suburban Lutheran pastor had his psychological “partner,” misdiagnose the common symptoms of antidepressant discontinuation syndrome as “bipolar,” based upon lies from his “cocaine dealing,” local pedophile, “soul mate” friend’s wife … according to my medical records.

But my point is, it not so “impossible to describe madness-as-strategy,” in reality.

Report comment

By: Dogworld

Dogworld — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 19:19:23 +0000

I have tremendously enjoyed this interview, but the repeated use of words such as “scientifically credible” is starting to sound like a dog whistle! People DO NOT make up pain stories…pleasure perhaps but most human and animals do not create false pain in a doctor’s office. Just let us stop for a second to think of that.

People’s experiences do not need to be scientifically credible and this sort of cultural paradigm causes so much pain in most easily impressed young people. Anyone and everyone should be able to express what ails them and what has worked for them without any authority to say so. Only then, as you noted, can we “clog out the market” with diverse ways of looking at our bodies and lives.
This type of gatekeeping language is exactly what causes stigma and nourishes it.

Report comment

By: Miranda Spencer

Miranda Spencer — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 15:19:53 +0000

Great interview; I really appreciate this way of looking at things. But it seems to me, from my own early experience in the mental health system in the mid-70s, that back then psychiatric “symptoms” were framed as a response to negative circumstances, a “defense mechanism.”

That made sense to me as a young service user, was much easier to accept than the idea that my brain was broken, and gave me a sense of empowerment: I could work on these things, create change, and hopefully feel better.

So madness-as-strategy has always existed as an idea, but has fallen out of favor. I’m glad that Justin is putting that conversation out there again.

Report comment