This article makes a lot of assumptions or claims with nothing to back them up, mostly the parts about a system built to traumatize, Charlottesville as an example, etc. It seems to be entirely lacking any context of what life was like in preindustrial times vs modern times. Death was way more common back then, including losing your children. Let's not forget the impacts of religions and superstitions as societal frameworks and how those tended to handle anything different. Even punishments like stoning, flogging, or crucifixion were much more brutal.
One of the main premises of this article is that society today is more traumatic than in the past, which I find to be laughably incorrect. They took what could have been a good article simply exploring modern drug use and ruined it with all these tangential and unfounded claims.
There's been an attempt to redefine "trauma" broadly. Technically trauma is acute stress. That is, a great deal of stress delivered all at one time. There's been an attempt to redefine it to include chronic stress. That is, generally living under stressful conditions.
I don't know why people are doing this, but it's almost always closely bound to politics. For example, the commenter below mentioning the political commentators Will Self and Dan Carlin as evidence for the theory.
I've noticed generally that people who talk about trauma being broad in this sense also tend to have a confused understanding of psychology in general.
> One of the main premises of this article is that society today is more traumatic than in the past, which I find to be laughably incorrect.
They are definitely incorrect. One pop culture way of looking at this is fairy tales. Not too long ago we used to tell children that if they went into the woods they could get eaten by people who lived there and lured children into their houses.
Do you think another term is more appropriate to describe the experiences underlying CPTSD? It's now quite broadly recognized that its effect on the psyche is severe and if anything broader in impact and more difficult to heal than acute trauma.
> Do you think another term is more appropriate to describe the experiences underlying CPTSD?
True CPTSD as diagnosed over time by a clinician is the result of complex traumas (complex, specifically, as that’s part of the definition. It’s what the C is for). The term is valid in that context.
In common social media language, even the term CPTSD has become diluted. It was intended to represent complex cases of PTSD which were edge cases, and correspondingly rare.
At some point the social media version of CPTSD emerged as a generic term and nearly everyone who self-diagnosed as having PTSD started upgrading themselves to CPTSD.
The comment above is right that “trauma” has become so generic as to cover everything stressful or saddening in common vernacular. The concept of CPTSD was supposed to be a step above even normal trauma, but now even CPTSD is being brought out as a generic term for any post-trauma response, which was never the definition of CPTSD.
A similar trend is happening on social media with the ADHD influencers now upgrading themselves to “AuDHD” which they say is a special more difficult variant of ADHD combined with Autism. My friends in psychiatry are at their wits end with all of the people coming in and demanding Autism diagnoses or “AuDHD” diagnoses despite not showing Autistic traits at all.
There’s an arms race going on where some people try to amplify experiences into something much more dramatic. These therapy and psychiatry terms start to lose their meaning when they get adopted by social media.
> Is there such a thing as being fashionably disordered?
Anecdotally, absolutely yes. Based on what the Instagram and YouTube feeds have sent me over the last couple of years, ADHD in particular (Autism less so, but as the parent notes, "AuDHD" is becoming very popular) is totally glamourised at this point, much to the detriment of people who actually have to manage ADHD and Autism, I assume.
There is an enormous amount of monetised content around it.
The ADHD culture is particularly dangerous because it is a license to get dangerous addictive drugs that frequently get diverted. Used as directed people don't have trouble in the short term but I know a lot of 50-somethings who were in school districts that were early adopters of the ADHD construct and a lot of them are in terrible shape. When people save up a week worth of meds and take them at once they often wind up in the psych ward.
When you see the drugged out people who drive people out of cities into the suburbs or give you another reason to order a private taxi for your burrito [1], note that psychosis is frequently caused or exacerbated by amphetamines. Plenty of people who get a prescription and who feel poor and that the world is unfair develop a "tolerance" for their meds because they are keeping 1 and selling 2 and they're contributing to that visible disorder you see.
is ignored which is that by being a developmental disability "autism" avoids the stigma that a diagnosis of severe mental ilness would bring (e.g. confirmed bipolar Kanye West thinks he is autistic, Elon Musk who sure acts like he's bipolar but is not diagnosed also thinks he is autistic) If you told the parents of the kid who's being bullied in first grade who shows some signs of anxiety and seems to be dressed oddly that he has a 10% chance of losing his mind completely as a young adult they'd be horrified. Tell them that he has autism and they can get more resources.
This phenomenon is not new; the love of drama that even common and routine trauma leaves many people with makes these sorts of attractions to diagnoses very appealing. I once hung out a lot with a class of masters students in experimental psychology and they all went thru evaluating their own minds thru the lens of various pathologies.
My own childhood included the relatively common experience of being sexually assaulted by a relative and being threatened with death if I talked about it, and as a young adult, while I never quite believed I had MPD, I read so many books by and on multiple personality disorder, and took both comfort and inspiration from the stories.
Like so many other things in our human society, networked technology is making this part of society more visible.
> I once hung out a lot with a class of masters students in experimental psychology and they all went thru evaluating their own minds thru the lens of various pathologies.
Something similar happens with medical students. They kind of start to recognize themselves in all kinds of physical conditions. It is fairly common phase they go through.
It looks to me like many of the psych diagnoses come down to how much trouble we have with the situation.
And, personally, I look at the world, do I meet the criteria for Asperger's? Probably, although without a time machine there doe not appear to be any way to be certain. But it's a so-what I have had no reason to ever talk to a psychiatrist about. A label won't change reality, it won't provide any solutions, why should I bother?
Your friends in psychiartry...are they acknowledging the impact of living under oppression as a direct cause of issues & advocating for an end to oppression?
Because that's what many healers outside of western medicine are touting.
People are amplifying because the western medicine approach isn't addressing underlying issues & so people are trying to explain the compounding of their issues in the language of western medicine. The dismissiveness in these comments is a direct driver of this culture.
I'll be honest, I don't think I would've interpreted "demanding an AuDHD diagnosis" as "explaining the compounding of their issues in the language of western medicine". Especially if their issues are just oppression. Perhaps I'm just misunderstanding.
Western medicine is well aware of the fact that they can't treat the underlying cause of things like autism and ADHD. If you're a real patient with one of these diagnoses (or even depression), they will tell you that upfront. They're not pretending to fix anything with pills.
"True CPTSD" doesn't exist as a diagnosis yet in the DSM. Referring to it that way is highly disingenuous.
I was recently diagnosed as "AuDHD". I noticed that doctors who don't understand anything outside of depression and anxiety were more likely to refer to autism as a "fad".
> One of the strangest fixations of AWFL metaphysics is on a substance called 'trauma' that they believe is 'stored in the body' in small saclike organs where it constantly threatens to be 'triggered' and erupt out of its ducts. They assert life itself is about 'processing trauma'
> There's been an attempt to redefine "trauma" broadly. Technically trauma is acute stress. That is, a great deal of stress delivered all at one time. There's been an attempt to redefine it to include chronic stress. That is, generally living under stressful conditions.
>
Do you have any references for trauma being tide to short acute stress? Looking at Wikipedia does not include acute stress and even talks about the difference between short trauma and long term trauma.
Also I definitely recall that even when I was young (>30 years ago) we would talk about e.g. the trauma of child abuse or sexual abuse, which is often not acute.
Acute in the sense that it's delivered all at once, not that its effects are short-lived. For example, the DSM defines PTSD, which is post-traumatic stess disorder. I.e. a trauma occurred (acute stess) and the lingering disorder is a stess disorder rather than a trauma disorder. You might colloquially say you have been living with the trauma of PTSD, but that doesn't make sense; you're really living with the stress of PTSD after having experienced the initial trauma.
They don't use the words "acute" or "chronic", that was my attempt to explain it to a lay audience. The first paragraph of Wikipedia describes it as "caused by severe distressing events, such as bodily injury, sexual violence, or other threats to the life of the subject or their loved ones." The DSM-V diagnosis requires "exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence." I.e. a traumatic event.
You can experience multiple traumatic events. But, medically, the distinction seems to be that delivering stress chemicals to your body all at once produces a different response than delivering them consistently over time.
> the trauma of child abuse or sexual abuse, which is often not acute.
People talk this way. Dictionary.com also mentions the "trauma of divorce." The trauma of divorce is clearly metaphorical rather than actual trauma. Sexual violence does count as a traumatic event. Violence toward children would also count as a traumatic event. Whether a child (or even adult) that has been abused has PTSD depends on the facts of the case.
One should not assume that trauma is better or more severe than stress delivered over a longer period. Imprisonment, child abuse, and working in a military hospital are all things that come to mind as experiences that would leave a lasting impression. But those symptoms would generally not be the same as trauma symptoms.
You do have to be careful on Wikipedia with this topic because they mention unconscious suppression of child abuse, which is not a thing that happens. It also says awareness of climate change causes trauma, which it does not. The article needs a pass from someone with a professional background.
> they mention unconscious suppression of child abuse, which is not a thing that happens
Chu, J. A., Frey, L. M., Ganzel, B. L., & Matthews, J. A. (1999). Memories of childhood abuse: dissociation, amnesia, and corroboration. The American journal of psychiatry, 156(5), 749–755. https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.156.5.749
"Higher dissociative symptoms were correlated with early age at onset of physical and sexual abuse and more frequent sexual abuse. A substantial proportion of participants with all types of abuse reported partial or complete amnesia for abuse memories. For physical and sexual abuse, early age at onset was correlated with greater levels of amnesia."
Boyer, S. M., Caplan, J. E., & Edwards, L. K. (2022). Trauma-Related Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders:: Neglected Symptoms with Severe Public Health Consequences. Delaware journal of public health, 8(2), 78–84. https://doi.org/10.32481/djph.2022.05.010
"Dissociative amnesia is characterized by gaps in autobiographical memory beyond normal forgetting, that may range from one experience to several years."
Ehlers, A., & Clark, D. M. (2000). A cognitive model of posttraumatic stress disorder. Behaviour research and therapy, 38(4), 319-345. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7967(99)00123-0
etc
> also says awareness of climate change causes trauma, which it does not
Albrecht, G., Sartore, G.-M., Connor, L., Higginbotham, N., Freeman, S., Kelly, B., Stain, H., Tonna, A., & Pollard, G. (2007). Solastalgia: the distress caused by environmental change. Australasian Psychiatry, 15(Suppl 1), S95–S98. https://doi.org/10.1080/10398560701701288.
Cunsolo, A., & Ellis, N. R. (2018). Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss. Nature Climate Change, 8, 275–281. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0092-2.
Usher, K., Durkin, J., & Bhullar, N. (2019). Eco-anxiety: How thinking about climate change-related environmental decline is affecting our mental health. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 28(6), 1233–1234. https://doi.org/10.1111/inm.12673.
Coffey, Y., Bhullar, N., Durkin, J., Islam, S., Usher, K. (2021). Understanding Eco-anxiety: A Systematic Scoping Review of Current Literature and Identified Knowledge Gaps, The Journal of Climate Change and Health, Volume 3, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joclim.2021.100047.
Walinski, A., Sander, J., Gerlinger, G., Clemens, V., Meyer-Lindenberg, A., & Heinz, A. (2023). The Effects of Climate Change on Mental Health. Deutsches Arzteblatt international, 120(8), 117–124. https://doi.org/10.3238/arztebl.m2022.0403
"The available evidence shows that traumatic experiences due to extreme weather events increase the risk of affective and anxiety disorders, *especially the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder*. Heat significantly increases the morbidity and mortality attributable to mental illness, as well as the frequency of psychiatric emergencies. Persistent stressors such as drought, food insecurity, and migration owing to climate change can also be major risk factors for mental illness."
With due respect I assume you believe these papers are somehow relevant and that you're making a point, but these papers aren't the evidence you think they are. You are also promoting outright cranks in other comments.
Psychohistory, Freudianism, repressed memories, and multiple personalities are all debunked ideas. Dissociative amnesia is just the rebranding of the repressed memory hypothesis. Anxiety and grief are not trauma.
I don't see how "outright cranks", "debunked ideas", are a constructive way to engage in such discussions. You asked for professional opinions, I provided professional opinions. You provided nothing.
I have a hard rule that I don't provide citations to people who don't know the field and seem motivated primarily by politics. This cuts down on sealioning.
But if you're interested in the topic, most of what I've said is covered in a university intro to psych course. I think they may also be covered in AP psych courses. I recommend looking up some of the top psych programs and seeing what they use for their intro undergrad course. That will go over the rejection of Freud and psychoanalysis, the difference between things like anxiety and trauma, and most likely the repressed memory fiasco in the 80s and 90s.
Wikipedia has references for dissociative amnesia under the controversy section. Also check out the repressed memory article.
For the basics of science and pseudoscience you'd have to take a course in scientific methods.
You add another ad hominem, great. You know nothing about me and my educational background. You are not required to engage in a discussion, but my point stands: You provide no supporting evidence whatsoever for your perspective.
"Prolonged trauma in childhood, however, can produce severe identity disturbances that may interfere with the encoding and later retrieval of personal semantic and autobiographical event information. […] In light of our accumulating empirical and theoretical understanding, genuine recovered memory experiences no longer appear as bizarre or counter-intuitive as they have been painted by those who are skeptical of their occurrence. The field has not been well-served by much of the existing literature, which has uncritically embraced a variety of myths, logical errors, and false assumptions, and adopted a simplistic approach to what are complex and fascinating memory phenomena […]"
Brewin, C.R. (2012). A Theoretical Framework for Understanding Recovered Memory Experiences. In: Belli, R. (eds) True and False Recovered Memories. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, vol 58. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1195-6_5
The Rise and Fall of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (2020)
"Debates are frequently characterised by people hunkering down with theoretical rigidity and engaging in ad hominin attack, rather than using scientific debate to further knowledge"
Yes we are all familiar with the repressed memory cranks like Chris Brewin. He's been at it since the 1990s.
You are not my child and it's not my job to educate you. I'm not going to explain physics to everyone who thinks he has a perpetual motion device either.
You are totally right. Nobody asked you to respond to my contributions in this thread. You decided to talk down on me and other people with zero arguments other than personal attacks. That's fully on you. "We are all familiar" with that pattern.
Have you listened to his Common Sense podcast? He doesnt produce many episodes anymore (he talks about why in some of his most revent ones) but it used to be far more regular than Hardcore History.
A completely underrated author on trauma is C. Fred Alford. PTSD morphed from a diagnosis for soldiers returning from Vietnam to encompass everything. Life is traumatic. Everyone you know and love will die, and you will die. We also individually react differently to traumatic experiences, and a life changing positive moment for one person could destroy another.
in that it describes the interaction of poverty and mental illness which can well be interpreted in a left-wing frame (these people are victims of the system, they need to get some more resources to get their footing) or a right-wing frame (these people don't take responsibility, they drive away, squander or destroy resources)
At times theories of broad trauma were respectable such as Freud's Oedipus theory and even today I think certain kinds of organizations such as the U.S. Marines and the medical profession can be seen as transmitting their culture through traumatic experiences.
Right-wing trauma gets misdiagnosed (as autism, moral injury eg etc) because that setting is way less gauche.
Adding to your examples, there's tiger-mom type trauma (+Jewish variants of that) which has inherited the superficial respectability of Oedipal (neo-Bronze? Neo-aetic? Neo-chalcic?) myths
> They are definitely incorrect. One pop culture way of looking at this is fairy tales. Not too long ago we used to tell children that if they went into the woods they could get eaten by people who lived there and lured children into their houses.
You're probably right that in the past there were more messed up events, which had high chance of being traumatic.
But you're forgetting the role that Perception has in that equation - from the perspective of a human, a traumatic event isn't a comparison exercise to all possible events, or to past events on previous generations.
Your subjective experience is bound to your context.
In that sense, I wouldn't be shocked if there was more trauma now from the amount of stimulus were getting throughout our life, and the volume of dramatic changes we go through, and the amount of people and chaos that comes with it.
For example, we have way more accidents, and we also have higher survival rates from accidents due to safety measures, and a advanced medical care. So, many deadly events in the past became accidents now, and by consequence, a high chance of it being a traumatic event, sometimes for the victim and the family (directly or indirectly).
Not to mention that our life styles don't even allow us to process traumatic events properly.
Language constantly evolves. So it’s a little unfair to say anybody is trying to change a definition. In specific professional contexts, definitions are necessarily much more precise. Because in these contexts definitions have consequences. But in general dialogue being pedantic and sticking to a strict definition generally just makes you an ass.
In psychiatry trauma has long been defined much more narrowly than just acute stress. Specifically exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence. So not just any acute stress but stress associated with real life violence. That’s the DSM definition of trauma for PTSD and you’ll sometimes find nitpicky professionals sticking to this narrow definition. But it’s not how most people use the word.
I think it's understandable that someone with the experiences to give them "real" DSM-defined PTSD might look sideways or roll their eyes at someone claiming PTSD because they had strict parents who made them go to church or didn't let them play video games. Doesn't make them an ass.
I don't believe the person with PTSD of your definition benefits from gatekeeping an understanding of ptsd.
It also just flatly does not correspond to the research. Modern PTSD and cptsd concepts exist because the existing concepts didn't work, and the patients fit classic outcomes.
Put another way,
If someone was assaulted in church, maybe they had a more "real" PTSD
If someone was different in their head and felt constrained at church everyday and their heart rate goes up every time they enter a church to the same degree as the assaulted persons does too....that's the outcome being similar (with some simplifications).
Trauma is the bad thing and being unable to do anything about it, and what that can do to your psyche.
People develop trauma not just because of how bad the experience was, but the circumstances before and after.
The article is tailing off a well-established historiographic narrative that it cites at the beginning (Will Self) but doesn’t dwell on much.
Basically, the common argument is that life WAS emphatically much more brutal in the preindustrial past, and people felt the same grief that we do today — however, such events were less likely to serve as an etiology of chronic anxiety-centered conditions like PTSD for a multitude of reasons. E.g. you can’t lay around depressed in bed all day if you rely on subsistence agriculture because you’re going to slowly and painfully starve, or you’re exposed and desensitized to brutality from a younger age, or you have less strict social requirements/expectations than a modern 9-5 would impose so you can grieve and act out on your own terms, etc.
Dan Carlin’s “Painfotainment” is a good self-contained intro to these ideas for a casual audience, if it seems up your alley.
it's not only that. trauma also hits differently if you are the only one experiencing it vs everyone around you. the group experience itself makes trauma easier to handle.
i believe (i don't know enough about this) a big factor is also how your peers treat you after you experience trauma. think about veterans coming home, friends and family don't understands what they went through. they can't talk to anyone because nobody takes them seriously, even to the point of disbelief, or they blow things out of proportion, make them into bigger thing than what the person actually experienced. maybe the veteran doesn't feel any pain, but they tell him that he should. either way, the veteran is completely misunderstood. (again, this is not backed by any knowledge of psychology, just a guess based on some personal experience)
so because in the past everyone experienced the same brutal life (except the land lords or otherwise well off), it wasn't as traumatic as it would be today.
I think you touch upon something sound, there - while societal and group trauma is certainly a thing, we generally call it culture.
On the individual level… for me, certainly, the hardest part of dealing with my particular flavour of living nightmare was that literally nobody could relate to it, and the others who went through it are scattered to the winds. When you explain something painful and the response is “I would have considered myself lucky to be in your situation” or words to the effect, it’s a rather lonely thing.
In the past, if you said “the baron came and murdered my child on a whim”, people would likely sympathise - in today’s society… well. We have such a buffet of lives and possibilities that comprehension of the worlds of others is increasingly challenging.
Solzhenitsyn put it well - can a man who is freezing understand one who is starving?
Well, I remember reading an article some time after 9/11 where they studied the incidence of PTSD in New York following that event.
Even in areas that were some distance from the towers there was a relatively high incidence. They put it down to a background level of stress including sources like violence on TV.
This was in comparison to other parts of the world that were less modern and less busy than experienced more traumatic events but had less PTSD. The conclusion was that if you generally have a more boring/ quiet life you will be better able to absorb trauma if it occurs.
Yes, and the article explores none of that. Complaining about stress from rent being high would be much more palatable if they explored those types of things, or simply didn't mention it at all. Instead they focus on the stress being from high rent vs from the reasons you point out. The way they use that quote makes it seem like they didn't read or understand the larger text, but just cherrypicked what fit with their narrative.
It can be read charitably as claiming that society is traumatic in different ways, maybe, and in a wider variety of ways. Which is much more defensible. A rapid change in everyday psychological or physiological reality is traumatic, by definition, as one must adapt to it or bear the consequences. There may be less instances of stoning and flogging but many more of subtle conditioning, for instance.
Quantity comparisons are challenging when there are big differences in kind
I think it would have been more interesting if they spent any amount of time exploring the causes. Such as basic life sustaining tasks being easier so there are fewer distractions from trauma. Or feedback mechanisms around effort, success, struggles, and triumph are reduced compared to a hunter gatherer. Etc
And our being adapted to many of those struggles - it's a rare person that won't be happier walking 10 kilometers a day compars to walking less than 1. Or happier seeing 1000 trees a day rather than just walls.
The social media definition of trauma has diverged from the clinician definition. The social media version of “trauma” is used to define anything stressful.
When we start redefining trauma to cover everything down to the basic realities of life like having to pay for rent to live somewhere, the term loses meaning. With a definition this broad, where do we draw the line between stress and trauma? Is there a line between basic inconvenience and trauma, if the person suffering the inconvenience doesn’t handle it well?
The less discussed problem is that some people have a problem of exaggerating everything into catastrophic stressors, thereby turning common experiences into traumas. This itself is a problem that is addressed through therapy, but it’s not as amenable to garnering sympathy on social media. It’s not appealing to read someone whine about having to work a job to eat food in a first world country, because that’s life and it’s a hundred times easier than it was for our ancestors. However, reframe that as a high-brow article about the perils of capitalism and how it inflicts trauma on us and causes PTSD and now it feels like we are the victims who deserve sympathy.
Modern life can simultaneously be full of subtle stresses not inflicted on an inhabitant of a previous era and free of many of the worst traumas possible in that era.
Catastrophizing is unhealthy, yes, and is amenable to therapy. It's also true that social control in a modern world functions through a thousand channels all woven into an apparently gentler but no less effective apparatus than old fashioned methods.
The apparent conflict of narratives here serves to divide. These points of view can in truth be reconciled. What is needed is to try to illuminate the issue from whichever perspective is most appropriate for a given context. It is wise to council resilience and fortitude to someone who is leaning into a self indulgent tendency, in one situation. Equally important in another situation is to refuse the malevolent or careless the freedom to blame the victims of their schemes for inadequate capacity to acclimate to an environment engineered against them.
The idea that you can draw a line between stress and trauma is an attempt to generalize something experienced on a personal level.
That's not how to handle any complex system with accuracy and effectiveness.
Therapy doesn't address systemic oppression, which does lead to more incidents resulting in PTSD & is a generator of CPTSD (which isn't just for edge cases, but for recurrent stressor that don't allow the body time to recover from past events).
Western therapy is failing. The therapists attending to what's going on are speaking out and some are abandoning their practices because they realize they've been co-opted in systemic harm.
So you know of any personal blogs or articles or other writings from therapists who feel this way and left the profession? It sounds fascinating, but I wouldn't know where to start.
My experience matches very much with this thread. After years of therapy I hit a limit to what conventional psychology could explain or understand or “treat”, and the only thing that worked after that was going deeper into my own psyche with meditation.
The whole psyche is available for exploration when you stop believing that you are made of thoughts. It becomes extremely clear where all the anxiety and depression and addiction comes from, and that almost all conventional approaches merely treat the symptoms.
I also took some intro psych at university and remember that in general Freud’s was sort of accepted by mainstream psych as the de facto most “correct” and logical view of psychotherapy while Jung was considered a bit of a weirdo, and I accepted this at the time. However through my own experiences now I think Jung was much closer to the truth, particularly around what he calls the “shadow”.
Other writings: For example the books by Vivian Broughton, a UK therapist: https://www.vivianbroughton.com/my-books/ Her latest book ("You were just a child...") contains critical essays, which you might enjoy.
Essential reading: The books by Judith Herman, who coined the term "Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" and lobbied to get it added to the DSM. Her latest book is all about justice for victims (and how the system is failing them).
The most famous critical essays about modern society from a therapist are by Sigmund Freud. You may want to start with "Civilization and Its Discontents" (1929). Quote:
"The present cultural state of America would give us a good opportunity for studying the damage to civilization which is thus to be feared. But I shall avoid the temptation of entering upon a critique of American civilization; I do not wish to give an impression of wanting myself to employ American methods."
I read the article and said “so, what was that about?”
Felt more like a journal entry.
Anecdote: try everything but the drugs if you can. What helps me: regular exercise, cut alcohol, do my best to sleep/wake up with a schedule. Make a list of what I need to do every day that isn’t insane.
Not going to solve everyone’s problems. But I’ve consumed clonapen here and there for very specific reasons and otherwise don’t need it when I keep all of the above as top life priorities.
I like the fact that it attempts to provide an alternative narrative to the artificial medicalisation of 'mental illness'.
Maybe it isn't totally factually accurate but it has enough truth to me that it represents a small flicker of hope in what is too often a chronically invalidating world.
Counterpoint: The instance at the cheerleading convention here in Dallas where a knocked over piece of equipment prompted a panic and viral news spread with incorrect assumptions.
The "ripple effect" of trauma is magnified more than ever. You don't even have to go out of your way to get the news, as with the past, oh, before 30 years ago...now it's in our pockets. I think the assumption passes the intuition prima face test in my world, too bad not yours. Equipment may need better calibration.
I recently read the paper "Opioid Crisis: No Easy Fix to Its Social and Economic Determinants" which argues that the opioid epidemic isn't as supply driven as we tend to think and that places with weaker social ties and economies recently changed for the worse tend to see more overdoses.
Yeah. Drug use is mostly a result of something horrible about your life. The drugs might legitimately help (such as opiods for pain), or they might just provide a temporary escape. The only real fix is to remove the source of the problem, then dealing with the habituation can actually work.
Re ending - while it probably alludes to the fact that we need community to feel better - expecting another person to be able to help you with your emotional state (or expecting from yourself that you might be able to fix someone's emotional state) is a slippery slope.
One might argue that if someone is appreciated on the basis of whether that person makes one feel good in the moment - they are being treated no different than a drug (alcohol, etc). Some argue that such unhealthy dependencies on soothing agents (drugs or people) stems from lack of self soothing skills. Apparently, most "happy healthy people" (there are ofc caveats with this definition but for arguments sake let's assume that we share some understanding of what that means) have an intuitive understanding of how to take care of themselves both physically and emotionally in ways that return them to a baseline state of sorts. If you lack such skills, you often resort to less healthy coping strategies to draw yourself towards this baseline state.
Funny quote from sir Terry Pratchett:
Death: "THERE ARE BETTER THINGS IN THE WORLD THAN ALCOHOL, ALBERT."
Albert: "Oh, yes, sir. But alcohol sort of compensates for not getting them."
> One might argue that if someone is appreciated on the basis of whether that person makes one feel good in the moment - they are being treated no different than a drug (alcohol, etc).
I think this is a very consumer-centric reductionist way to look at human interaction.
We are a social species and have been so for millions of years. Social connection and interaction is deeply encoded into our genes. We have dedicated cranial hardware for recognizing faces and emotions in others. We have a complex larynx and tongue entirely so that we can make sounds that convey meaning to other humans.
Given that, it's entirely reasonable to state that we need human connection not as a drug-like balm to cover a failure to be a sufficiently hardcore individualist, but because that as what it means to be human. You wouldn't say a worker ant dying on its own is a failed ant. Ants need their colonies to be ants. We need our tribes to be people.
I don't think these two are exclusive. The Terry Pratchett quote there at the end of that reads like it's a tounge-in-cheek reduction, with a sense of humor. Obviously we're more complex than that, but sometimes we really are that simple and that's ok too.
I do wholeheartedly agree - personal anegdote: regular live improv comedy has done wonders for my well-being. And one could say this format of spending time with other humans has opened new very personal techniques for self-soothing to me. But it's also assumed this rather consumerist form, almost drug-like, repetitive, formatted, scheduled. It's not, like, a real tribe or anything serious like that. And as it turns out a lot of wonderful human interactions really can be reduced.
Having had earlier personal experiences with substance abuse, and seeing good people go down a lethal path, it's been a discovery to me that adults do this whole self-soothing thing and that it is a skill that they pick up from family and society. All these folks I meet doing improv seem to be getting something similar out of it.
> One might argue that if someone is appreciated on the basis of whether that person makes one feel good in the moment - they are being treated no different than a drug
The efficacy of psychology can vary widely with each party - both the patient and the helper.
While mood-altering drugs are more consistent in general, their effects degrade, depending where one is on the usage timeline (1st use, 10th, 100th).
I use Kratom to somewhat dull the effects of mild anxiety. It is enough to preserve general functionality - and that, in-turn, makes causes (of anxiety) less forbidding to consider.
Doing this means I tend to live in a '10th use' space. To preserve that benefit, I don't try to increase dosage if I venture into distress territory. My current regimen is helpful or it isn't.
It remains one of the minor curiosities of digital modernity that every recipe blog insists on beginning with a 5,000 word ethnography of the Hugo Spritz, SEO-optimized invocations of Tuscan terraces, grandmotherly hand-gestures, and the precise terracotta shade of sunset, only to resolve in instructions amounting to little more than "insert beverage into rectum."
Meanwhile, I occupy a less celebrated corner of culinary praxis: crouched in the dirt, literally on my hands and knees, begging the search bar to reveal how many meprobamate tablets one is meant to dissolve into a lukewarm gin glass to properly constitute a Miltini.
There are no Medium posts, no Substack manifestos, no "Ultimate Guide to Recreational Tranquilizer Mixology (2024 Edition)." The epistemic silence is total. The Hugo Spritz has a cathedral; the Miltini does not even have a footnote.
And so we encounter, yet again, the asymmetry of knowledge production: the internet, glutted with spritz-bloggers optimizing for engagement, yet barren when it comes to cataloguing the rituals of genuine desperation. Borges, in his Library of Babel, anticipated this imbalance: an infinity of recipes for lining the pockets of the prosecco-producing class, but not a single one for escape.
You're wondering why you can't find a Miltini recipe online? One trick for finding out historical information is to search archive.org. That quickly turns up a 1956 article [1] with the recipe: a Miltini is a six or seven-to-one Martini [i.e. ratio of spirits to vermouth] with a Miltown substituted for the lemon peel or olive.
The dramatically overwrought article continues: "It is doubtful if any other creation of the mid-20th Century so typifies this frantic, uncertain era in which no man can know what the next hour will bring." and suggests that a hermetically-sealed shaker of Miltinis should be placed in time capsules "so that posterity can know what real cool cats we were and how extraordinary the civilzation we wrought."
Personally, it sounds a bit like an urban legend. As the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia said: "Unlike most drugs, its name was easily pronounceable and, better still, lent itself to punsters and jokesmiths on TV screens in the homes of millions of people. Example: 'Miltown Berle,' or 'The Government is giving out a Miltown with every income tax blank,' or 'Use a Miltown instead of an olive to make a Miltini'".
As a piece of generic advice, I suggest turning one's search to feel better into a search for feelbetter. Notice that how we feel is not stable, but changes constantly from moment to moment. Notice that moments of feelbetter and moments of feelworse basically even out over the longterm. Notice that feelings are causal, that everything is a consequence of something prior according to consistent and comprehensible rules. Notice this on anjimmediate moment-to-moment here-and-now emperical basis.
Notice that attributing feelings here and now to decade old stories and narratives is spooky action at a distance.
What I take from it is that feelings are elusive, that you can never "reach" them. Your mind is constantly popping into existence feelings, emotions, and thoughts. Rather than trying to force yourself to "feel" a certain way, just notice how your mind reacts to the world or environment. The grasping or aversion of mind states leads you to spirals of thoughts or suffering.
> attributing feelings here and now to decade old stories and narratives is spooky action at a distance.
Pattern recognition, recurrent excitation of particular stimulus chains, formative psychology, neuroplasticity, and extraordinary stimulus leading to categorical responses. There seems to be deep evolutionary roots and reasons for all those behaviours and their collective expression.
I was bitten on the face by a dog as a child. I attribute feelings around curious dogs now to that decades old experience. My nervous system seems to think it’s an obvious connection, not spooky.
Feel better is easier outside of fight/flight conditioning.
I advise a lot of caution when reading articles like this. This is more of an opinion piece or stream of consciousness writing style, even though it’s presented as if it was well researched authoritative material.
The article starts with buzzword bingo for topics that appeal to a certain group: Trauma, drugs, capitalism is to blame for our pain, and so on.
The sections describing the drugs will make anyone familiar with basic pharmacology groan. Meprobomate isn’t a drug with unknown action like he claims. It’s a GABA-A agonist with adenosine reuptake inhibition activity. When we say it isn’t fully understood we mean there’s more to it, but that’s the case for literally every drug. This person has misunderstood that as if don’t know how it works at all.
The sections about GABA are also full of similar mistakes. Benzos don’t “flood your brain with GABA”. They bind to part of the receptor that modulates its activity. We switched to them because they are much better in overdose relative to older drugs.
The author’s drug use is also in an unfortunate pattern. Modern prescribing practices only suggest benzos for short term situational use. They are not a primary treatment for chronic anxiety and they do not address psychological issues. SSRIs, buspirone, and therapy techniques are indicated for long term treatment, not benzos. Benzos are also not good for sleep quality even though a high dose can help someone get to sleep. The number of issues with the treatment described in this article is large, and I feel sorry for anyone who gets misled into thinking this is normal psychiatric practice. These days most doctors are hesitant to prescribe benzos at all because many patients want them and can start abandoning the better long-term treatments while they seek more benzos (a strategy that doesn’t work, as this author sadly discovered).
There is also an undertone of “America bad” in the article (not surprising for an article that opens by blaming capitalism for all of our suffering) but many would be surprised to learn that benzos are currently far easier to acquire in many other countries. France has some eye-popping numbers of benzo prescriptions across the population right now, whereas you’re going to have a hard time walking into an American doctor’s office and getting a benzo prescription (there are exceptions, of course).
Take a heavy dose of benzos and you will look superficially like you're asleep, someone might try to rouse you and be unable to do it.
My take on benzos is that by binding to the receptors it does it opens up ion channels that drain the electricity out of your associative networks, suppressing just about everything.
Sleep it turns out is a structured state of unconsciousness and the EEG will show the person "sleeping" under the influence of beznos isn't actually asleep but they're unresponsive and amnesiac so they think they slept and so did onlookers.
The frame on capitalism is classic Kool-Aid. The broader truth is that industrial modernity, regardless of system, generates trauma, and people reach for substances to cope. Others blame capitalism. Alcohol is endemic in communist societies for a reason. (China does not have alcoholics, don't ya know.)
Under socialism or communism, you still had/have factories, railways, 996 culture and regimented time. Trauma from pace of change, regimentation, and accidents still exists. Under socialism or communism, instead of gig work being bad, gig work is good. Patriotic even.
Under socialism or communism, profit is not the motive. It is chemical pacification of undesirable elements.
Under socialism or communism, instead of each generation of pills being marketed as desirable, they would be part of mandatory education as desirable or just given through Directly Observed Therapy.
On and on we can go. There is a direct translation of every point in this author's make-believe reality of capitalism. Also, a very weird, Hollywood picture of the 20th century.
A trick I learned a few years ago that has made writing like this and the entire web much more useful to me is this: Instead of asking myself "is this piece overall correct?", I ask myself "what can I take away from this piece that is useful to me?" Instead of striving to come to some sort of overall conclusion about a written work, I just treat it as a potential source of nuggets that I can choose to keep and use.
Do I agree with the overall premise that capitalism is an unbridled source of trauma and that a pre-capitalistic world was better? No, that's obviously silly leftist absolutism. Yes, being forced to work in a coal mine is traumatic. But watching your kid die of starvation because you don't have fertilizer is too. So what? No one cares what conclusion I come to about the author's worldview.
What I think this article does a good job of is pointing out that our modern physical and cultural environment, which is largely a product of capitalism, is structured in a way that creates new traumas that we aren't well-equipped to deal with.
I think of widespread psychological drug use as a social warning light, flashing to tell us that we aren't living right in some way. That doesn't mean we should throw out the entire capitalist baby with the bathwater. But if you don't think something is seriously off about the world today, maybe this article that help open your eyes to that.
physical exercise results in 2000 myokines active throughout the body which have many actions, including anti-anxiety, and better sleep. But the pharma industry can't put it in a pill form. So it's not advertised like the pills are.
So capitalism bad bad ptsd and communism good? What's the point of mentioning economic regimes every two sentences as if it makes a lick of difference in how much suffering people can inflict on each other and what people use to cope with that? What is the revelation that I am missing here?
If this is a guy and he says things like a platonic snuggling with a lesbian made him feel good, then it’s an automatic disqualification. I can’t look up to this person. Being staunchly leftist, as a man, I hate this and the exact opposite of what I want a man to represent. You can ask any follow up questions you want but the baseline assumption is someone that acts like this is an automatic, baseline, fundamental opposite of a role model.
We desperately need a centrist party that is contemporarily “sexist” to pull men back from the brink. Honestly, thought most feminists are going to recoil from this paradigm, this is way better than the alternative where we essentially lose the men (of all races) to the far right void.
which part bothers you? that the woman was lesbian, or that the man enjoyed a platonic interaction with a woman? what exactly should he have done? demanded sex? or reject her because she is lesbian?
not allowing platonic interactions with the other gender is what is making life difficult, especially for men. this idea that any intimate interaction between different genders has to be sexual. that men and women can't just be friends. that being in the friendzone is bad...
This article makes a lot of assumptions or claims with nothing to back them up, mostly the parts about a system built to traumatize, Charlottesville as an example, etc. It seems to be entirely lacking any context of what life was like in preindustrial times vs modern times. Death was way more common back then, including losing your children. Let's not forget the impacts of religions and superstitions as societal frameworks and how those tended to handle anything different. Even punishments like stoning, flogging, or crucifixion were much more brutal.
One of the main premises of this article is that society today is more traumatic than in the past, which I find to be laughably incorrect. They took what could have been a good article simply exploring modern drug use and ruined it with all these tangential and unfounded claims.
There's been an attempt to redefine "trauma" broadly. Technically trauma is acute stress. That is, a great deal of stress delivered all at one time. There's been an attempt to redefine it to include chronic stress. That is, generally living under stressful conditions.
I don't know why people are doing this, but it's almost always closely bound to politics. For example, the commenter below mentioning the political commentators Will Self and Dan Carlin as evidence for the theory.
I've noticed generally that people who talk about trauma being broad in this sense also tend to have a confused understanding of psychology in general.
> One of the main premises of this article is that society today is more traumatic than in the past, which I find to be laughably incorrect.
They are definitely incorrect. One pop culture way of looking at this is fairy tales. Not too long ago we used to tell children that if they went into the woods they could get eaten by people who lived there and lured children into their houses.
Do you think another term is more appropriate to describe the experiences underlying CPTSD? It's now quite broadly recognized that its effect on the psyche is severe and if anything broader in impact and more difficult to heal than acute trauma.
> Do you think another term is more appropriate to describe the experiences underlying CPTSD?
True CPTSD as diagnosed over time by a clinician is the result of complex traumas (complex, specifically, as that’s part of the definition. It’s what the C is for). The term is valid in that context.
In common social media language, even the term CPTSD has become diluted. It was intended to represent complex cases of PTSD which were edge cases, and correspondingly rare.
At some point the social media version of CPTSD emerged as a generic term and nearly everyone who self-diagnosed as having PTSD started upgrading themselves to CPTSD.
The comment above is right that “trauma” has become so generic as to cover everything stressful or saddening in common vernacular. The concept of CPTSD was supposed to be a step above even normal trauma, but now even CPTSD is being brought out as a generic term for any post-trauma response, which was never the definition of CPTSD.
A similar trend is happening on social media with the ADHD influencers now upgrading themselves to “AuDHD” which they say is a special more difficult variant of ADHD combined with Autism. My friends in psychiatry are at their wits end with all of the people coming in and demanding Autism diagnoses or “AuDHD” diagnoses despite not showing Autistic traits at all.
There’s an arms race going on where some people try to amplify experiences into something much more dramatic. These therapy and psychiatry terms start to lose their meaning when they get adopted by social media.
> My friends in psychiatry are at their wits end with all of the people coming in and demanding Autism diagnoses
Why would you want, much less demand, to be diagnosed with any particular disorder? Is there such a thing as being fashionably disordered?
I think that if I felt something was wrong with me, I would want to be accurately diagnosed, not fashionably diagnosed.
> Is there such a thing as being fashionably disordered?
Anecdotally, absolutely yes. Based on what the Instagram and YouTube feeds have sent me over the last couple of years, ADHD in particular (Autism less so, but as the parent notes, "AuDHD" is becoming very popular) is totally glamourised at this point, much to the detriment of people who actually have to manage ADHD and Autism, I assume.
There is an enormous amount of monetised content around it.
The ADHD culture is particularly dangerous because it is a license to get dangerous addictive drugs that frequently get diverted. Used as directed people don't have trouble in the short term but I know a lot of 50-somethings who were in school districts that were early adopters of the ADHD construct and a lot of them are in terrible shape. When people save up a week worth of meds and take them at once they often wind up in the psych ward.
When you see the drugged out people who drive people out of cities into the suburbs or give you another reason to order a private taxi for your burrito [1], note that psychosis is frequently caused or exacerbated by amphetamines. Plenty of people who get a prescription and who feel poor and that the world is unfair develop a "tolerance" for their meds because they are keeping 1 and selling 2 and they're contributing to that visible disorder you see.
[1] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/good-cities-cant-exist-without...
There's a good discussion of this in the
https://www.amazon.com/Autism-Matrix-Gil-Eyal/dp/074564399X
and you can ask the question of why schizotypy
https://www.amazon.com/Schizotypy-Schizophrenia-View-Experim...
is ignored which is that by being a developmental disability "autism" avoids the stigma that a diagnosis of severe mental ilness would bring (e.g. confirmed bipolar Kanye West thinks he is autistic, Elon Musk who sure acts like he's bipolar but is not diagnosed also thinks he is autistic) If you told the parents of the kid who's being bullied in first grade who shows some signs of anxiety and seems to be dressed oddly that he has a 10% chance of losing his mind completely as a young adult they'd be horrified. Tell them that he has autism and they can get more resources.
Schizotypy is perceived to be left-wing :)
The less flippant rewording of that is that the schizotypal mindset prefers strong-link "positive-sum" problems
This phenomenon is not new; the love of drama that even common and routine trauma leaves many people with makes these sorts of attractions to diagnoses very appealing. I once hung out a lot with a class of masters students in experimental psychology and they all went thru evaluating their own minds thru the lens of various pathologies.
My own childhood included the relatively common experience of being sexually assaulted by a relative and being threatened with death if I talked about it, and as a young adult, while I never quite believed I had MPD, I read so many books by and on multiple personality disorder, and took both comfort and inspiration from the stories.
Like so many other things in our human society, networked technology is making this part of society more visible.
> I once hung out a lot with a class of masters students in experimental psychology and they all went thru evaluating their own minds thru the lens of various pathologies.
Something similar happens with medical students. They kind of start to recognize themselves in all kinds of physical conditions. It is fairly common phase they go through.
It looks to me like many of the psych diagnoses come down to how much trouble we have with the situation.
And, personally, I look at the world, do I meet the criteria for Asperger's? Probably, although without a time machine there doe not appear to be any way to be certain. But it's a so-what I have had no reason to ever talk to a psychiatrist about. A label won't change reality, it won't provide any solutions, why should I bother?
Your friends in psychiartry...are they acknowledging the impact of living under oppression as a direct cause of issues & advocating for an end to oppression?
Because that's what many healers outside of western medicine are touting.
People are amplifying because the western medicine approach isn't addressing underlying issues & so people are trying to explain the compounding of their issues in the language of western medicine. The dismissiveness in these comments is a direct driver of this culture.
I'll be honest, I don't think I would've interpreted "demanding an AuDHD diagnosis" as "explaining the compounding of their issues in the language of western medicine". Especially if their issues are just oppression. Perhaps I'm just misunderstanding.
Western medicine is well aware of the fact that they can't treat the underlying cause of things like autism and ADHD. If you're a real patient with one of these diagnoses (or even depression), they will tell you that upfront. They're not pretending to fix anything with pills.
"True CPTSD" doesn't exist as a diagnosis yet in the DSM. Referring to it that way is highly disingenuous.
I was recently diagnosed as "AuDHD". I noticed that doctors who don't understand anything outside of depression and anxiety were more likely to refer to autism as a "fad".
> One of the strangest fixations of AWFL metaphysics is on a substance called 'trauma' that they believe is 'stored in the body' in small saclike organs where it constantly threatens to be 'triggered' and erupt out of its ducts. They assert life itself is about 'processing trauma'
> There's been an attempt to redefine "trauma" broadly. Technically trauma is acute stress. That is, a great deal of stress delivered all at one time. There's been an attempt to redefine it to include chronic stress. That is, generally living under stressful conditions. >
Do you have any references for trauma being tide to short acute stress? Looking at Wikipedia does not include acute stress and even talks about the difference between short trauma and long term trauma.
Also I definitely recall that even when I was young (>30 years ago) we would talk about e.g. the trauma of child abuse or sexual abuse, which is often not acute.
Acute in the sense that it's delivered all at once, not that its effects are short-lived. For example, the DSM defines PTSD, which is post-traumatic stess disorder. I.e. a trauma occurred (acute stess) and the lingering disorder is a stess disorder rather than a trauma disorder. You might colloquially say you have been living with the trauma of PTSD, but that doesn't make sense; you're really living with the stress of PTSD after having experienced the initial trauma.
They don't use the words "acute" or "chronic", that was my attempt to explain it to a lay audience. The first paragraph of Wikipedia describes it as "caused by severe distressing events, such as bodily injury, sexual violence, or other threats to the life of the subject or their loved ones." The DSM-V diagnosis requires "exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence." I.e. a traumatic event.
You can experience multiple traumatic events. But, medically, the distinction seems to be that delivering stress chemicals to your body all at once produces a different response than delivering them consistently over time.
> the trauma of child abuse or sexual abuse, which is often not acute.
People talk this way. Dictionary.com also mentions the "trauma of divorce." The trauma of divorce is clearly metaphorical rather than actual trauma. Sexual violence does count as a traumatic event. Violence toward children would also count as a traumatic event. Whether a child (or even adult) that has been abused has PTSD depends on the facts of the case.
One should not assume that trauma is better or more severe than stress delivered over a longer period. Imprisonment, child abuse, and working in a military hospital are all things that come to mind as experiences that would leave a lasting impression. But those symptoms would generally not be the same as trauma symptoms.
You do have to be careful on Wikipedia with this topic because they mention unconscious suppression of child abuse, which is not a thing that happens. It also says awareness of climate change causes trauma, which it does not. The article needs a pass from someone with a professional background.
Considering that psychiatry is in its infancy, your statements have a level of finality that isn't warranted at all.
> they mention unconscious suppression of child abuse, which is not a thing that happens
Chu, J. A., Frey, L. M., Ganzel, B. L., & Matthews, J. A. (1999). Memories of childhood abuse: dissociation, amnesia, and corroboration. The American journal of psychiatry, 156(5), 749–755. https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.156.5.749
"Higher dissociative symptoms were correlated with early age at onset of physical and sexual abuse and more frequent sexual abuse. A substantial proportion of participants with all types of abuse reported partial or complete amnesia for abuse memories. For physical and sexual abuse, early age at onset was correlated with greater levels of amnesia."
Boyer, S. M., Caplan, J. E., & Edwards, L. K. (2022). Trauma-Related Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders:: Neglected Symptoms with Severe Public Health Consequences. Delaware journal of public health, 8(2), 78–84. https://doi.org/10.32481/djph.2022.05.010
"Dissociative amnesia is characterized by gaps in autobiographical memory beyond normal forgetting, that may range from one experience to several years."
Ehlers, A., & Clark, D. M. (2000). A cognitive model of posttraumatic stress disorder. Behaviour research and therapy, 38(4), 319-345. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7967(99)00123-0
etc
> also says awareness of climate change causes trauma, which it does not
Albrecht, G., Sartore, G.-M., Connor, L., Higginbotham, N., Freeman, S., Kelly, B., Stain, H., Tonna, A., & Pollard, G. (2007). Solastalgia: the distress caused by environmental change. Australasian Psychiatry, 15(Suppl 1), S95–S98. https://doi.org/10.1080/10398560701701288.
Cunsolo, A., & Ellis, N. R. (2018). Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss. Nature Climate Change, 8, 275–281. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0092-2.
Usher, K., Durkin, J., & Bhullar, N. (2019). Eco-anxiety: How thinking about climate change-related environmental decline is affecting our mental health. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 28(6), 1233–1234. https://doi.org/10.1111/inm.12673.
Coffey, Y., Bhullar, N., Durkin, J., Islam, S., Usher, K. (2021). Understanding Eco-anxiety: A Systematic Scoping Review of Current Literature and Identified Knowledge Gaps, The Journal of Climate Change and Health, Volume 3, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joclim.2021.100047.
Walinski, A., Sander, J., Gerlinger, G., Clemens, V., Meyer-Lindenberg, A., & Heinz, A. (2023). The Effects of Climate Change on Mental Health. Deutsches Arzteblatt international, 120(8), 117–124. https://doi.org/10.3238/arztebl.m2022.0403
"The available evidence shows that traumatic experiences due to extreme weather events increase the risk of affective and anxiety disorders, *especially the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder*. Heat significantly increases the morbidity and mortality attributable to mental illness, as well as the frequency of psychiatric emergencies. Persistent stressors such as drought, food insecurity, and migration owing to climate change can also be major risk factors for mental illness."
etc
With due respect I assume you believe these papers are somehow relevant and that you're making a point, but these papers aren't the evidence you think they are. You are also promoting outright cranks in other comments.
Psychohistory, Freudianism, repressed memories, and multiple personalities are all debunked ideas. Dissociative amnesia is just the rebranding of the repressed memory hypothesis. Anxiety and grief are not trauma.
Citations needed.
I don't see how "outright cranks", "debunked ideas", are a constructive way to engage in such discussions. You asked for professional opinions, I provided professional opinions. You provided nothing.
I have a hard rule that I don't provide citations to people who don't know the field and seem motivated primarily by politics. This cuts down on sealioning.
But if you're interested in the topic, most of what I've said is covered in a university intro to psych course. I think they may also be covered in AP psych courses. I recommend looking up some of the top psych programs and seeing what they use for their intro undergrad course. That will go over the rejection of Freud and psychoanalysis, the difference between things like anxiety and trauma, and most likely the repressed memory fiasco in the 80s and 90s.
Wikipedia has references for dissociative amnesia under the controversy section. Also check out the repressed memory article.
For the basics of science and pseudoscience you'd have to take a course in scientific methods.
You add another ad hominem, great. You know nothing about me and my educational background. You are not required to engage in a discussion, but my point stands: You provide no supporting evidence whatsoever for your perspective.
"Prolonged trauma in childhood, however, can produce severe identity disturbances that may interfere with the encoding and later retrieval of personal semantic and autobiographical event information. […] In light of our accumulating empirical and theoretical understanding, genuine recovered memory experiences no longer appear as bizarre or counter-intuitive as they have been painted by those who are skeptical of their occurrence. The field has not been well-served by much of the existing literature, which has uncritically embraced a variety of myths, logical errors, and false assumptions, and adopted a simplistic approach to what are complex and fascinating memory phenomena […]"
Brewin, C.R. (2012). A Theoretical Framework for Understanding Recovered Memory Experiences. In: Belli, R. (eds) True and False Recovered Memories. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, vol 58. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1195-6_5
The Rise and Fall of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (2020)
https://news.isst-d.org/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-false-memor...
"Debates are frequently characterised by people hunkering down with theoretical rigidity and engaging in ad hominin attack, rather than using scientific debate to further knowledge"
Yes we are all familiar with the repressed memory cranks like Chris Brewin. He's been at it since the 1990s.
You are not my child and it's not my job to educate you. I'm not going to explain physics to everyone who thinks he has a perpetual motion device either.
You are totally right. Nobody asked you to respond to my contributions in this thread. You decided to talk down on me and other people with zero arguments other than personal attacks. That's fully on you. "We are all familiar" with that pattern.
I responded because I care about science education and psychology education and wanted to correct the record.
When someone comes in with a bunch of links that can be confusing to people who don't know the field.
If you have motivation and strong enough confirmation bias you can find papers that claim to support anything. Even the existence of telepathy https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=extrasensory+perception
That's why it's hard to have good judgment about a field unless you've studied it formally.
Dan Carlin as a political commenter? Definitely a historian (tons of works).
Have you listened to his Common Sense podcast? He doesnt produce many episodes anymore (he talks about why in some of his most revent ones) but it used to be far more regular than Hardcore History.
No, have not. Have listened to quite a few HH segments though.
A completely underrated author on trauma is C. Fred Alford. PTSD morphed from a diagnosis for soldiers returning from Vietnam to encompass everything. Life is traumatic. Everyone you know and love will die, and you will die. We also individually react differently to traumatic experiences, and a life changing positive moment for one person could destroy another.
https://traumatheory.com/time-to-drop-ptsd/
The really interesting discovery made about trauma in veterans is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_injury
I like this concept
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shit_life_syndrome
in that it describes the interaction of poverty and mental illness which can well be interpreted in a left-wing frame (these people are victims of the system, they need to get some more resources to get their footing) or a right-wing frame (these people don't take responsibility, they drive away, squander or destroy resources)
At times theories of broad trauma were respectable such as Freud's Oedipus theory and even today I think certain kinds of organizations such as the U.S. Marines and the medical profession can be seen as transmitting their culture through traumatic experiences.
Right-wing trauma gets misdiagnosed (as autism, moral injury eg etc) because that setting is way less gauche.
Adding to your examples, there's tiger-mom type trauma (+Jewish variants of that) which has inherited the superficial respectability of Oedipal (neo-Bronze? Neo-aetic? Neo-chalcic?) myths
Tying back to GP's fairytales, obviously
> They are definitely incorrect. One pop culture way of looking at this is fairy tales. Not too long ago we used to tell children that if they went into the woods they could get eaten by people who lived there and lured children into their houses.
You're probably right that in the past there were more messed up events, which had high chance of being traumatic.
But you're forgetting the role that Perception has in that equation - from the perspective of a human, a traumatic event isn't a comparison exercise to all possible events, or to past events on previous generations.
Your subjective experience is bound to your context.
In that sense, I wouldn't be shocked if there was more trauma now from the amount of stimulus were getting throughout our life, and the volume of dramatic changes we go through, and the amount of people and chaos that comes with it.
For example, we have way more accidents, and we also have higher survival rates from accidents due to safety measures, and a advanced medical care. So, many deadly events in the past became accidents now, and by consequence, a high chance of it being a traumatic event, sometimes for the victim and the family (directly or indirectly).
Not to mention that our life styles don't even allow us to process traumatic events properly.
Language constantly evolves. So it’s a little unfair to say anybody is trying to change a definition. In specific professional contexts, definitions are necessarily much more precise. Because in these contexts definitions have consequences. But in general dialogue being pedantic and sticking to a strict definition generally just makes you an ass.
In psychiatry trauma has long been defined much more narrowly than just acute stress. Specifically exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence. So not just any acute stress but stress associated with real life violence. That’s the DSM definition of trauma for PTSD and you’ll sometimes find nitpicky professionals sticking to this narrow definition. But it’s not how most people use the word.
I think it's understandable that someone with the experiences to give them "real" DSM-defined PTSD might look sideways or roll their eyes at someone claiming PTSD because they had strict parents who made them go to church or didn't let them play video games. Doesn't make them an ass.
No, it's not actually understandable to me.
I don't believe the person with PTSD of your definition benefits from gatekeeping an understanding of ptsd.
It also just flatly does not correspond to the research. Modern PTSD and cptsd concepts exist because the existing concepts didn't work, and the patients fit classic outcomes.
Put another way,
If someone was assaulted in church, maybe they had a more "real" PTSD If someone was different in their head and felt constrained at church everyday and their heart rate goes up every time they enter a church to the same degree as the assaulted persons does too....that's the outcome being similar (with some simplifications).
Trauma is the bad thing and being unable to do anything about it, and what that can do to your psyche.
People develop trauma not just because of how bad the experience was, but the circumstances before and after.
The article is tailing off a well-established historiographic narrative that it cites at the beginning (Will Self) but doesn’t dwell on much.
Basically, the common argument is that life WAS emphatically much more brutal in the preindustrial past, and people felt the same grief that we do today — however, such events were less likely to serve as an etiology of chronic anxiety-centered conditions like PTSD for a multitude of reasons. E.g. you can’t lay around depressed in bed all day if you rely on subsistence agriculture because you’re going to slowly and painfully starve, or you’re exposed and desensitized to brutality from a younger age, or you have less strict social requirements/expectations than a modern 9-5 would impose so you can grieve and act out on your own terms, etc.
Dan Carlin’s “Painfotainment” is a good self-contained intro to these ideas for a casual audience, if it seems up your alley.
it's not only that. trauma also hits differently if you are the only one experiencing it vs everyone around you. the group experience itself makes trauma easier to handle.
i believe (i don't know enough about this) a big factor is also how your peers treat you after you experience trauma. think about veterans coming home, friends and family don't understands what they went through. they can't talk to anyone because nobody takes them seriously, even to the point of disbelief, or they blow things out of proportion, make them into bigger thing than what the person actually experienced. maybe the veteran doesn't feel any pain, but they tell him that he should. either way, the veteran is completely misunderstood. (again, this is not backed by any knowledge of psychology, just a guess based on some personal experience)
so because in the past everyone experienced the same brutal life (except the land lords or otherwise well off), it wasn't as traumatic as it would be today.
I think you touch upon something sound, there - while societal and group trauma is certainly a thing, we generally call it culture.
On the individual level… for me, certainly, the hardest part of dealing with my particular flavour of living nightmare was that literally nobody could relate to it, and the others who went through it are scattered to the winds. When you explain something painful and the response is “I would have considered myself lucky to be in your situation” or words to the effect, it’s a rather lonely thing.
In the past, if you said “the baron came and murdered my child on a whim”, people would likely sympathise - in today’s society… well. We have such a buffet of lives and possibilities that comprehension of the worlds of others is increasingly challenging.
Solzhenitsyn put it well - can a man who is freezing understand one who is starving?
Well, I remember reading an article some time after 9/11 where they studied the incidence of PTSD in New York following that event.
Even in areas that were some distance from the towers there was a relatively high incidence. They put it down to a background level of stress including sources like violence on TV.
This was in comparison to other parts of the world that were less modern and less busy than experienced more traumatic events but had less PTSD. The conclusion was that if you generally have a more boring/ quiet life you will be better able to absorb trauma if it occurs.
Yes, and the article explores none of that. Complaining about stress from rent being high would be much more palatable if they explored those types of things, or simply didn't mention it at all. Instead they focus on the stress being from high rent vs from the reasons you point out. The way they use that quote makes it seem like they didn't read or understand the larger text, but just cherrypicked what fit with their narrative.
> you can’t lay around depressed in bed all day if you rely on subsistence agriculture because you’re going to slowly and painfully starve
What makes you think this wasn't common?
It can be read charitably as claiming that society is traumatic in different ways, maybe, and in a wider variety of ways. Which is much more defensible. A rapid change in everyday psychological or physiological reality is traumatic, by definition, as one must adapt to it or bear the consequences. There may be less instances of stoning and flogging but many more of subtle conditioning, for instance.
Quantity comparisons are challenging when there are big differences in kind
I think it would have been more interesting if they spent any amount of time exploring the causes. Such as basic life sustaining tasks being easier so there are fewer distractions from trauma. Or feedback mechanisms around effort, success, struggles, and triumph are reduced compared to a hunter gatherer. Etc
And our being adapted to many of those struggles - it's a rare person that won't be happier walking 10 kilometers a day compars to walking less than 1. Or happier seeing 1000 trees a day rather than just walls.
I agree with you.
The social media definition of trauma has diverged from the clinician definition. The social media version of “trauma” is used to define anything stressful.
When we start redefining trauma to cover everything down to the basic realities of life like having to pay for rent to live somewhere, the term loses meaning. With a definition this broad, where do we draw the line between stress and trauma? Is there a line between basic inconvenience and trauma, if the person suffering the inconvenience doesn’t handle it well?
The less discussed problem is that some people have a problem of exaggerating everything into catastrophic stressors, thereby turning common experiences into traumas. This itself is a problem that is addressed through therapy, but it’s not as amenable to garnering sympathy on social media. It’s not appealing to read someone whine about having to work a job to eat food in a first world country, because that’s life and it’s a hundred times easier than it was for our ancestors. However, reframe that as a high-brow article about the perils of capitalism and how it inflicts trauma on us and causes PTSD and now it feels like we are the victims who deserve sympathy.
Modern life can simultaneously be full of subtle stresses not inflicted on an inhabitant of a previous era and free of many of the worst traumas possible in that era.
Catastrophizing is unhealthy, yes, and is amenable to therapy. It's also true that social control in a modern world functions through a thousand channels all woven into an apparently gentler but no less effective apparatus than old fashioned methods.
The apparent conflict of narratives here serves to divide. These points of view can in truth be reconciled. What is needed is to try to illuminate the issue from whichever perspective is most appropriate for a given context. It is wise to council resilience and fortitude to someone who is leaning into a self indulgent tendency, in one situation. Equally important in another situation is to refuse the malevolent or careless the freedom to blame the victims of their schemes for inadequate capacity to acclimate to an environment engineered against them.
The idea that you can draw a line between stress and trauma is an attempt to generalize something experienced on a personal level.
That's not how to handle any complex system with accuracy and effectiveness.
Therapy doesn't address systemic oppression, which does lead to more incidents resulting in PTSD & is a generator of CPTSD (which isn't just for edge cases, but for recurrent stressor that don't allow the body time to recover from past events).
Western therapy is failing. The therapists attending to what's going on are speaking out and some are abandoning their practices because they realize they've been co-opted in systemic harm.
So you know of any personal blogs or articles or other writings from therapists who feel this way and left the profession? It sounds fascinating, but I wouldn't know where to start.
Daniel Mackler has a whole YouTube channel about this
https://youtu.be/eBRNIvK3HqA
My experience matches very much with this thread. After years of therapy I hit a limit to what conventional psychology could explain or understand or “treat”, and the only thing that worked after that was going deeper into my own psyche with meditation.
The whole psyche is available for exploration when you stop believing that you are made of thoughts. It becomes extremely clear where all the anxiety and depression and addiction comes from, and that almost all conventional approaches merely treat the symptoms.
I also took some intro psych at university and remember that in general Freud’s was sort of accepted by mainstream psych as the de facto most “correct” and logical view of psychotherapy while Jung was considered a bit of a weirdo, and I accepted this at the time. However through my own experiences now I think Jung was much closer to the truth, particularly around what he calls the “shadow”.
Maybe not exactly what you're after, but you might like
https://www.traumaandphilosophy.com/ and https://traumatheory.com/
Other writings: For example the books by Vivian Broughton, a UK therapist: https://www.vivianbroughton.com/my-books/ Her latest book ("You were just a child...") contains critical essays, which you might enjoy.
Essential reading: The books by Judith Herman, who coined the term "Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" and lobbied to get it added to the DSM. Her latest book is all about justice for victims (and how the system is failing them).
The most famous critical essays about modern society from a therapist are by Sigmund Freud. You may want to start with "Civilization and Its Discontents" (1929). Quote:
"The present cultural state of America would give us a good opportunity for studying the damage to civilization which is thus to be feared. But I shall avoid the temptation of entering upon a critique of American civilization; I do not wish to give an impression of wanting myself to employ American methods."
You might also like the essays by Dr. Janus, a German psychotherapist and co-founder of the Society for Psychohistory and Political Psychology.
https://www.ludwig-janus.de/downloads-in-english.html
Various texts by other psychologists linked to at the bottom of that page.
I read the article and said “so, what was that about?”
Felt more like a journal entry.
Anecdote: try everything but the drugs if you can. What helps me: regular exercise, cut alcohol, do my best to sleep/wake up with a schedule. Make a list of what I need to do every day that isn’t insane.
Not going to solve everyone’s problems. But I’ve consumed clonapen here and there for very specific reasons and otherwise don’t need it when I keep all of the above as top life priorities.
Sure, but if alcohol and clonopin are not drugs, neither are any of the others.
I like the fact that it attempts to provide an alternative narrative to the artificial medicalisation of 'mental illness'.
Maybe it isn't totally factually accurate but it has enough truth to me that it represents a small flicker of hope in what is too often a chronically invalidating world.
Counterpoint: The instance at the cheerleading convention here in Dallas where a knocked over piece of equipment prompted a panic and viral news spread with incorrect assumptions.
The "ripple effect" of trauma is magnified more than ever. You don't even have to go out of your way to get the news, as with the past, oh, before 30 years ago...now it's in our pockets. I think the assumption passes the intuition prima face test in my world, too bad not yours. Equipment may need better calibration.
I recently read the paper "Opioid Crisis: No Easy Fix to Its Social and Economic Determinants" which argues that the opioid epidemic isn't as supply driven as we tend to think and that places with weaker social ties and economies recently changed for the worse tend to see more overdoses.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5846593/
Yeah. Drug use is mostly a result of something horrible about your life. The drugs might legitimately help (such as opiods for pain), or they might just provide a temporary escape. The only real fix is to remove the source of the problem, then dealing with the habituation can actually work.
The Sacklers did nothing wrong (?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family#Reputation_laun...
Re ending - while it probably alludes to the fact that we need community to feel better - expecting another person to be able to help you with your emotional state (or expecting from yourself that you might be able to fix someone's emotional state) is a slippery slope.
One might argue that if someone is appreciated on the basis of whether that person makes one feel good in the moment - they are being treated no different than a drug (alcohol, etc). Some argue that such unhealthy dependencies on soothing agents (drugs or people) stems from lack of self soothing skills. Apparently, most "happy healthy people" (there are ofc caveats with this definition but for arguments sake let's assume that we share some understanding of what that means) have an intuitive understanding of how to take care of themselves both physically and emotionally in ways that return them to a baseline state of sorts. If you lack such skills, you often resort to less healthy coping strategies to draw yourself towards this baseline state.
Funny quote from sir Terry Pratchett: Death: "THERE ARE BETTER THINGS IN THE WORLD THAN ALCOHOL, ALBERT." Albert: "Oh, yes, sir. But alcohol sort of compensates for not getting them."
> One might argue that if someone is appreciated on the basis of whether that person makes one feel good in the moment - they are being treated no different than a drug (alcohol, etc).
I think this is a very consumer-centric reductionist way to look at human interaction.
We are a social species and have been so for millions of years. Social connection and interaction is deeply encoded into our genes. We have dedicated cranial hardware for recognizing faces and emotions in others. We have a complex larynx and tongue entirely so that we can make sounds that convey meaning to other humans.
Given that, it's entirely reasonable to state that we need human connection not as a drug-like balm to cover a failure to be a sufficiently hardcore individualist, but because that as what it means to be human. You wouldn't say a worker ant dying on its own is a failed ant. Ants need their colonies to be ants. We need our tribes to be people.
I don't think these two are exclusive. The Terry Pratchett quote there at the end of that reads like it's a tounge-in-cheek reduction, with a sense of humor. Obviously we're more complex than that, but sometimes we really are that simple and that's ok too.
I do wholeheartedly agree - personal anegdote: regular live improv comedy has done wonders for my well-being. And one could say this format of spending time with other humans has opened new very personal techniques for self-soothing to me. But it's also assumed this rather consumerist form, almost drug-like, repetitive, formatted, scheduled. It's not, like, a real tribe or anything serious like that. And as it turns out a lot of wonderful human interactions really can be reduced.
Having had earlier personal experiences with substance abuse, and seeing good people go down a lethal path, it's been a discovery to me that adults do this whole self-soothing thing and that it is a skill that they pick up from family and society. All these folks I meet doing improv seem to be getting something similar out of it.
> One might argue that if someone is appreciated on the basis of whether that person makes one feel good in the moment - they are being treated no different than a drug
The efficacy of psychology can vary widely with each party - both the patient and the helper.
While mood-altering drugs are more consistent in general, their effects degrade, depending where one is on the usage timeline (1st use, 10th, 100th).
I use Kratom to somewhat dull the effects of mild anxiety. It is enough to preserve general functionality - and that, in-turn, makes causes (of anxiety) less forbidding to consider.
Doing this means I tend to live in a '10th use' space. To preserve that benefit, I don't try to increase dosage if I venture into distress territory. My current regimen is helpful or it isn't.
It remains one of the minor curiosities of digital modernity that every recipe blog insists on beginning with a 5,000 word ethnography of the Hugo Spritz, SEO-optimized invocations of Tuscan terraces, grandmotherly hand-gestures, and the precise terracotta shade of sunset, only to resolve in instructions amounting to little more than "insert beverage into rectum."
Meanwhile, I occupy a less celebrated corner of culinary praxis: crouched in the dirt, literally on my hands and knees, begging the search bar to reveal how many meprobamate tablets one is meant to dissolve into a lukewarm gin glass to properly constitute a Miltini.
There are no Medium posts, no Substack manifestos, no "Ultimate Guide to Recreational Tranquilizer Mixology (2024 Edition)." The epistemic silence is total. The Hugo Spritz has a cathedral; the Miltini does not even have a footnote.
And so we encounter, yet again, the asymmetry of knowledge production: the internet, glutted with spritz-bloggers optimizing for engagement, yet barren when it comes to cataloguing the rituals of genuine desperation. Borges, in his Library of Babel, anticipated this imbalance: an infinity of recipes for lining the pockets of the prosecco-producing class, but not a single one for escape.
You're wondering why you can't find a Miltini recipe online? One trick for finding out historical information is to search archive.org. That quickly turns up a 1956 article [1] with the recipe: a Miltini is a six or seven-to-one Martini [i.e. ratio of spirits to vermouth] with a Miltown substituted for the lemon peel or olive.
The dramatically overwrought article continues: "It is doubtful if any other creation of the mid-20th Century so typifies this frantic, uncertain era in which no man can know what the next hour will bring." and suggests that a hermetically-sealed shaker of Miltinis should be placed in time capsules "so that posterity can know what real cool cats we were and how extraordinary the civilzation we wrought."
Personally, it sounds a bit like an urban legend. As the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia said: "Unlike most drugs, its name was easily pronounceable and, better still, lent itself to punsters and jokesmiths on TV screens in the homes of millions of people. Example: 'Miltown Berle,' or 'The Government is giving out a Miltown with every income tax blank,' or 'Use a Miltown instead of an olive to make a Miltini'".
[1] https://archive.org/details/palm-springs-desert-sun-1956-11-...
[2] https://archive.org/details/sim_business-review-federal-rese...
As a piece of generic advice, I suggest turning one's search to feel better into a search for feelbetter. Notice that how we feel is not stable, but changes constantly from moment to moment. Notice that moments of feelbetter and moments of feelworse basically even out over the longterm. Notice that feelings are causal, that everything is a consequence of something prior according to consistent and comprehensible rules. Notice this on anjimmediate moment-to-moment here-and-now emperical basis.
Notice that attributing feelings here and now to decade old stories and narratives is spooky action at a distance.
You might have a real point here, but it is very hard for me to understand what you’re saying. Why is “feelbetter” preferred to “feel better”?
Your second paragraph is parseable imo
What I take from it is that feelings are elusive, that you can never "reach" them. Your mind is constantly popping into existence feelings, emotions, and thoughts. Rather than trying to force yourself to "feel" a certain way, just notice how your mind reacts to the world or environment. The grasping or aversion of mind states leads you to spirals of thoughts or suffering.
Using emotions as data rather than judging emotions as moral choices, clever.
Yes, was looking for the plain English version too.
> attributing feelings here and now to decade old stories and narratives is spooky action at a distance.
Pattern recognition, recurrent excitation of particular stimulus chains, formative psychology, neuroplasticity, and extraordinary stimulus leading to categorical responses. There seems to be deep evolutionary roots and reasons for all those behaviours and their collective expression.
I was bitten on the face by a dog as a child. I attribute feelings around curious dogs now to that decades old experience. My nervous system seems to think it’s an obvious connection, not spooky.
Feel better is easier outside of fight/flight conditioning.
I advise a lot of caution when reading articles like this. This is more of an opinion piece or stream of consciousness writing style, even though it’s presented as if it was well researched authoritative material.
The article starts with buzzword bingo for topics that appeal to a certain group: Trauma, drugs, capitalism is to blame for our pain, and so on.
The sections describing the drugs will make anyone familiar with basic pharmacology groan. Meprobomate isn’t a drug with unknown action like he claims. It’s a GABA-A agonist with adenosine reuptake inhibition activity. When we say it isn’t fully understood we mean there’s more to it, but that’s the case for literally every drug. This person has misunderstood that as if don’t know how it works at all.
The sections about GABA are also full of similar mistakes. Benzos don’t “flood your brain with GABA”. They bind to part of the receptor that modulates its activity. We switched to them because they are much better in overdose relative to older drugs.
The author’s drug use is also in an unfortunate pattern. Modern prescribing practices only suggest benzos for short term situational use. They are not a primary treatment for chronic anxiety and they do not address psychological issues. SSRIs, buspirone, and therapy techniques are indicated for long term treatment, not benzos. Benzos are also not good for sleep quality even though a high dose can help someone get to sleep. The number of issues with the treatment described in this article is large, and I feel sorry for anyone who gets misled into thinking this is normal psychiatric practice. These days most doctors are hesitant to prescribe benzos at all because many patients want them and can start abandoning the better long-term treatments while they seek more benzos (a strategy that doesn’t work, as this author sadly discovered).
There is also an undertone of “America bad” in the article (not surprising for an article that opens by blaming capitalism for all of our suffering) but many would be surprised to learn that benzos are currently far easier to acquire in many other countries. France has some eye-popping numbers of benzo prescriptions across the population right now, whereas you’re going to have a hard time walking into an American doctor’s office and getting a benzo prescription (there are exceptions, of course).
Take a heavy dose of benzos and you will look superficially like you're asleep, someone might try to rouse you and be unable to do it.
My take on benzos is that by binding to the receptors it does it opens up ion channels that drain the electricity out of your associative networks, suppressing just about everything.
Sleep it turns out is a structured state of unconsciousness and the EEG will show the person "sleeping" under the influence of beznos isn't actually asleep but they're unresponsive and amnesiac so they think they slept and so did onlookers.
Yo, what are your emotions towards investigating low-dose benzos and schizotypist "free energy" (E - TS)
The frame on capitalism is classic Kool-Aid. The broader truth is that industrial modernity, regardless of system, generates trauma, and people reach for substances to cope. Others blame capitalism. Alcohol is endemic in communist societies for a reason. (China does not have alcoholics, don't ya know.)
Under socialism or communism, you still had/have factories, railways, 996 culture and regimented time. Trauma from pace of change, regimentation, and accidents still exists. Under socialism or communism, instead of gig work being bad, gig work is good. Patriotic even.
Under socialism or communism, profit is not the motive. It is chemical pacification of undesirable elements.
Under socialism or communism, instead of each generation of pills being marketed as desirable, they would be part of mandatory education as desirable or just given through Directly Observed Therapy.
On and on we can go. There is a direct translation of every point in this author's make-believe reality of capitalism. Also, a very weird, Hollywood picture of the 20th century.
This matches my personal experience that people who feel some kind of emptiness inside are more likely to develop problems with drugs/alcohol.
A trick I learned a few years ago that has made writing like this and the entire web much more useful to me is this: Instead of asking myself "is this piece overall correct?", I ask myself "what can I take away from this piece that is useful to me?" Instead of striving to come to some sort of overall conclusion about a written work, I just treat it as a potential source of nuggets that I can choose to keep and use.
Do I agree with the overall premise that capitalism is an unbridled source of trauma and that a pre-capitalistic world was better? No, that's obviously silly leftist absolutism. Yes, being forced to work in a coal mine is traumatic. But watching your kid die of starvation because you don't have fertilizer is too. So what? No one cares what conclusion I come to about the author's worldview.
What I think this article does a good job of is pointing out that our modern physical and cultural environment, which is largely a product of capitalism, is structured in a way that creates new traumas that we aren't well-equipped to deal with.
I think of widespread psychological drug use as a social warning light, flashing to tell us that we aren't living right in some way. That doesn't mean we should throw out the entire capitalist baby with the bathwater. But if you don't think something is seriously off about the world today, maybe this article that help open your eyes to that.
physical exercise results in 2000 myokines active throughout the body which have many actions, including anti-anxiety, and better sleep. But the pharma industry can't put it in a pill form. So it's not advertised like the pills are.
I think we really ought to force patients to demonstrate a history of exercise before prescribing them anything in all but the more serious cases
good idea maybe even including those weight loss peptides
depression, anxiety, sleep issues for sure
speaking of depression and ocd, some guy is stalking me to downvote my posts. Dude get some exercise
"As capitalism has invented ever more ways to be miserable, so too has it invented ever more specific ways to ease that misery."
What? Is the author saying that misery didn't exist in socialism or communism?
Ignorance is bliss.
No. That's your bias injecting that interpretation.
So capitalism bad bad ptsd and communism good? What's the point of mentioning economic regimes every two sentences as if it makes a lick of difference in how much suffering people can inflict on each other and what people use to cope with that? What is the revelation that I am missing here?
If this is a guy and he says things like a platonic snuggling with a lesbian made him feel good, then it’s an automatic disqualification. I can’t look up to this person. Being staunchly leftist, as a man, I hate this and the exact opposite of what I want a man to represent. You can ask any follow up questions you want but the baseline assumption is someone that acts like this is an automatic, baseline, fundamental opposite of a role model.
We desperately need a centrist party that is contemporarily “sexist” to pull men back from the brink. Honestly, thought most feminists are going to recoil from this paradigm, this is way better than the alternative where we essentially lose the men (of all races) to the far right void.
which part bothers you? that the woman was lesbian, or that the man enjoyed a platonic interaction with a woman? what exactly should he have done? demanded sex? or reject her because she is lesbian?
not allowing platonic interactions with the other gender is what is making life difficult, especially for men. this idea that any intimate interaction between different genders has to be sexual. that men and women can't just be friends. that being in the friendzone is bad...
that's not the world i want to live in.
Platonic, lesbian, generally being weak and ineffective
"Man" is a dualistic made-up term devoid of connection with reality. Enjoy your fantasies. The world is nondual, not Boolean.