146 points | by sandebert16 小时前
Never do anything to confirm a paranoid person's psychosis unless you have total control of the situation and a psychiatrist supervision. Never try to peace them by saying unrealistic things, you never know what's going on in their head that you just confirmed. My GF tried to reassure me by saying she will be with me in 15 minutes, but she was 100km away and I thought "okay well that makes all of this real, let's do it".
Turns out the reason was that she saw an hallucination in that direction. So she looked away, she explains, in a follow up video 5 years later: (I found via the YouTube comments section)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n7Wzb6esnpU
Here she's much better, and explains how she got better (in the beginning of the video)
https://www.mhfa.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/MHFA_Psyc...
We were shown this video in our MHFA certification class for discussion:
Or do you mean you called her becouse you kinda knew you were mad and wanted her to also say it?
So it didn't postpone anything, maybe if she had given a realistic ETA (or just said "I'm coming, wait for me") it would have worked though.
It's very difficult to know what to do in these situations though, I've been on the side of that girlfriend and you just can't have a full understand of what's going on in the head of the other person, everything is just walking on eggs, except the eggs are actually landmines.
It wasn't especially anxiety inducing for the most part and was quite fun, but I feel as if I just got lucky and that in a slightly different circumstance I could just have convinced myself that my apartment window was in fact the front door and fall out of it.
The problem here in my opinion is rather that most people are used to lie, manipulate and betray (in society this behaviour is actually euphemized via the term "white lies"). In this particular case, such a behaviour does have consequences. See the example of this thread where the girlfriend claims she will be there in 15 minutes, despite being 100 km away.
Since most people are not used to being honest (or, I assume, actually never were), they give similar descriptions of their difficulties when their lies do have consequences like your "everything is just walking on eggs, except the eggs are actually landmines".
Being 100% honest and not hiding anything doesn't work either, so it's a constant balancing act between telling them the truth, reassuring them and sometimes indeed shielding from the harsh truth by avoiding from mentioning something, which I do believe is different from lying. Lying is out of question though and I think the people who resort to that do it out of laziness more than anything, or maybe well-intentioned wishful thinking in the case of the aforementioned girlfriend. But this is always harmful, not just with psychotic persons.
In the particular example, the girlfriend did lie to him by telling him she'll be there in 15 minutes despite being 100 km away. This exactly lead to the strange chain of thoughts.
This statement exactly proves my point concerning how dishonest and betraying most people are.
To take a concrete example, consider the classic white lie "no, that dress doesn't make you look fat". It is possible that this could cause someone to wear an ugly dress, but the person probably looked at themselves in the mirror too, so they probably will end up choosing a dress that doesn't look awful. In this case there is no negative consequence associated with the white lie unless person wearing the dress is unable to accurately self assess. (which is something the speaker hopefully would know about the dress wearer)
You could define being lied to as a violation of your trust. In particular, I think autistic people often can't pick up on social cues, and so rely more on people speaking the truth to them. However, that doesn't mean white lies are betrayal for everyone. If you in particular feel like white lies are betrayal, you might want to tell people in your life that so they know it's important to you. They won't automatically know and it isn't automatically important to them.
Which white lies do.
I can understand where GP is coming from. A lot of my professional career even exists because someone has to cut through the massive layer of bullshit and distortion people generate in an org to be able to make substantive statements about what is the truth, born out by quantitative data and observation.
After a while in the field, you really start to lose your appreciation for other people walking around "sparing" one another from the Truth.
Back to the dress example. Let's say the dress wearer is my girlfriend, and I have been asked the question "does this dress make me look fat?". Let's also assume I do think this particular dress makes her look fat, but generally find her attractive, and know that she has body image issues. If I answer "yes", or even "that dress isn't particularly flattering on you", she might interpret that as "He thinks the dress makes me look fat" -> "I am fat" -> "I am ugly", which is not actually what I think and not what I want her to think of herself. Even if I try to reassure her that I don't think she's ugly, she might think that my reassurance is a lie. People with insecurities don't always think logically about them. I think "You look beautiful" would probably be the most ideal response, (in that is both true and doesn't cause her to spiral) but if I didn't have time to think about my response, "No, it doesn't make you look fat" feels like a better response than something else which would cause her to spiral.
If I feel the need to actually help her choose the right dress, I can back that up by pointing out exactly how some other dress that looks better on her actually looks good.
Of course, if I feel like she could take it well, then pointing out exactly how the bad dress is bad might be helpful to her. However, I feel like keeping her from spiraling is more important then informing her of every detail of my taste in dresses.
Obviously, I made this scenario very concrete, but I feel like you can't really decide if it is a good idea without that very concrete knowledge. Which is one reason why white lies might be a bad idea in professional settings, where you don't necessarily know how people will respond to things in the first place. (Because you might not know them well)
And you're right. It'll feel like the better response; because all of our social circuitry heuristics honed over our lives by a biological imperative to minimize energy expenditure will happily present that as a quick, harmony preserving fix. However, in that case, are you not doing an injustice to your partner with self-image issues by A) bearing false witness to your true feelings on the matter (dress does not fo you any favors, darling) and B) not addressing the pathological denigratory self-image with active confrontation and refutation of the validity thereof, with an accurate accounting of your own reasoning?
Example: I've had that question asked of me while my partnner and I were trying to shopping for wear to attend a wedding in. My partner loves blue. Like BSOD blue. Cobalt electric blue. She was drawn to a dress in that color. She had a friend along that was already giving the customary platitudes, but asked me my thoughts on it. That color, unfortunately, in my eyes, does not love her back. Her skin/complexion tends toward the rosey and warm; a combo which strongly clashes with and fights with said the coolness of the blue, and which would tend to cause the eye to pick out the paler aspects of her instead of accentuating the her livelier parts. The cut, and just how it laid on her body didn't complement her. It hid her best parts, and accentuated the parts I knew she was ultimately more self-conscious about because there wasn't a damn thing to do about them, and the baggage that came with it. The strong blue just visually overwhelmed the visual experience to the point where all you saw was the dress, and how it dominated the image of her; not the person wearing it, with their actions and body being accentuated and emphasized by the dress. I told her if that was what she really wanted, and if it made her feel good, then what does it matter? However, I thought she'd look better either in a purple, or perhaps more importantly a dress of a different cut. One that instead of looking like a wrapper, would actually lay on her body in a way that would naturally draw the eye to her, and what she was doing.
End result? She kept looking. She ended up picking out a pattern and cut that she felt was more befitting for her role/relation to the two getting married (deep or high saturation colors are apparently reserved for the bridesmaids per her thoughts on the subject, and something a bit more matronly made her feel more comfortable at the event). She also picked up a dress I thought really made her look gorgeous, and I adore seeing her looking regal af in, and wouldn't be out of place at about any event.
I acknowledged, and reaffirmed that ultimately, the most important thing was how she felt. I also provided a truthful evaluation about the answer to the question, giving her more insight about how I see things,the things I look at, and the affect they have on me; and as it turned out, she's gotten way more use out of the dress she ultimately picked than she'd ever have been comfortable getting out of the blue one. So by taking the path of truth, I opened a door to a novel experience for her, and she says she's happier for having done so.
Not to mention, you're kind of doing yourself an injustice by not really valuing your own feelings on the matter. I'm not saying that it's okay to tell someone the dress looks them look like they're wearing a trash bag; but it's absolutely okay to express your feelings on something in that type of circumstance, even if your rational side tells you that maybe you should be silent. The only way to help someone through the healing process is to acknowledge there is something there, and to be supportive and truthful. Placing care about everyone else above your own care for yourself is as sure a recipe for a bad time as any. One can't wholely and truly give for others what one does not yet possess for themselves have.
It may not necessarily win one many invites to fancy parties, but I've found that getting into the habit of twisting things makes the process of growth, healing, or recovery so ruinously complicated as to present an overall harm in comparison to the brief cauterizing application of truthful, sincere communication. See the cleverest code as compared to the most straightforward as applied to social dynamics. Many of the same principles transfer.
I'm pretty curious about what you think white lies do in a social dynamic though. I'd appreciate it if you could elaborate.
EDIT: My post is literally your GP, but based on your stance earlier in this thread, I think you were talking about aleph_minus_one's post I was responding to. In which case I think our opinions are similar?
In terms of the social dynamic I agree with you, the "white lies" serve as a way to be considerate of the other person. And it's not just "lies" about them either, if someone is in a hurry or in some casual context and asks how I am and I've had a shitty day, I might say "I'm fine" to avoid them feeling the need to talk through my problems with me. If someone asks at dinner and I spent the morning having explosive diarrhea, I don't share that either. That is a classic white lie but to see that as a betrayal strikes me as extremely bizarre.
You mean lying by omission? A.k.a. not speaking the quiet part? It's still received and noted by the other person you know. Likely by the part of the psyche they haven't got consciously integrated, or are experiencing a connectivity problem with.
Remember, that part of them is still a very big chunk of human neural processor. It isn't stupid. It's also not terribly capable of straightforwardly communicating. What it is scarily good at is navigating the external world, which includes seeing the void of what one doesn't say. If it's already running amok, pouring more fuel in the form of duplicity on the fire is probably not the greatest idea.
But she lied to you - and this lead to your dangerous chain of thoughts.
It didn't postpone anything. I called her because I knew I'm going mad and wanted to confirm if it's true or not. Of course I didn't word it this way, though. What she said confirmed the delusion, nearly got me killed and even though I didn't jump, I got lost in the city, hurt myself, nearly hurt others, until someone called the police few hours later.
It is really hard for me to relate to, the feeling of believing I am Piccard.
Like do you want logical reasoning?
'I am Gandalf'
'So where is your beard?'
Or just reassurence?
'I am Gandalf'
'No you are not'
In my case, it went like this: Whoa, my crew is telepathically beaming me instructions and we are right in the middle of a mission. Where the fuck am I? Crew, give me my command protocols. Oh, I command a starship? Sure, sorry, the heat around here, I might be hit with something, I don't remember, help me! Oh, you're going to transport me? Sure, go ahead, let me just run away from this commando waiting on the hallway using the only other exit - the window... Now it makes sense that I'm a starship captain, why would a commando be waiting there otherwise...
(Your mileage may vary)
I didn't think it's the Star Trek from movies, I just thought we somehow made it work in secret and now I'm on it too. Paranoid people aren't paranoid just so, they are paranoid because there is a brutal mismatch between their perception of reality and what people tell them.
At one point, in a different situation, I knew I'm in the middle of psychosis - and my voices told me all about super-agent-psychiatrists who are trying to help me by doing James Bond-style interventions. So yeah, you can simultaneously know you're right in the middle of it, and discuss the situation with your delusions, while thinking the delusions are real.
I guess a better way to phrase it is, do you have compelling evidence that your beliefs are true that you have to force yourself to ignore, or does it just seem like nonsense when you aren't in a psychotic state?
For myself, my brain always knows what reality is because all of my senses work. Delusions are clearly internal. My self-awareness is firmly in reality but all I can do is watch myself react as if the delusions are reality.
Many people can’t grasp this. Awareness and control are always linked. “Blind rage” is just that. Awareness is gone.
I hope no one else ever has to experience being powerless in their own body and screaming uselessly in their head to make it stop.
As horrifying as this sounds, these experiences don’t haunt me. I thought they were just burnout from stress and carried on like nothing happened afterwards.
“Normalization of deviance” doesn’t even begin to describe my life experience. Eventually, I was convinced by my doctor to see a psychiatrist for ADHD. It wasn’t until my third visit she realized I had severe, high-functioning bipolar. Once I got over a month of denial, it was “Okay. That does explain a lot.” XD
All the voices, and the sense of urgency and danger go away immediately when you wake up after a dose of antipsychotic medication. Your first thoughts are that you lived through some weird things which are not happening at all anymore, and now there's a psychiatrist untying you from a hospital bed and handing you a cigarette, which puts stuff into context. You also probably feel the best you felt in weeks/months because it's your first night of sleep since forever.
I can easily imagine someone thinking "well, I had a psychosis, but there was shit going on". Fortunately that's not me.
So, rather than just having some false facts, they will make bizarre "inference" steps in thinking that can border on free-association. In the case of one of my relatives, this process would accompany something almost like amnesia. After a burst of this illogical reasoning that gets way out into the weeds for tens of minutes or hours, she would seem to lose track of it and "reset" in some way to start again.
Out of this recurrence, you could start to sense an overall theme that was evolving at a different time scale, beneath all the illogical tangents. Even through different phases of treatment and remission, those themes would resurface as a sort of barometer of her illness. There wasn't always as stark of a difference between normal days and psychotic break days.
Then again, I treat my whole life is a fascinating science experiment and people have to beg me to stop talking about it.
I think probably that on balance you've got away with it though because the people commenting seem to be safely outside the other side of their psychosis and are able to answer interestingly without being harmed by the question.
That was enough to slap a prescription on me for years to come.
Eventually I began to question why they kept wanting to prescribe this stuff and why one of the standard questions was always "do you hear voices?" and I also began to question their terminology. "What do you mean, by hearing voices?" "Oh, well, hallucinations." and I drilled down into their definitions and epistemology for a while.
I told them that I am a Christian, and of course I hear voices. People of faith, who are quite sane, discuss this openly all the time. We are always encouraged to listen to the voice of Jesus, the voice of the Holy Spirit, to listen to the voices of those who wrote Sacred Scripture. I told the doc that I'd be crazy (and lost, and significantly more troubled) if I didn't hear anyone's voice.
Of course they're probing for stuff to medicate, they're probing for irrationality, and they're probing for evil voices who goad us to do harm to ourselves or to others. And of course I was troubled by those types too.
But they weren't unreal. They weren't hallucinations because the sources exist in reality. They don't come from human bodies, but spirits are real to Christians.
The solution is not to medicate the voices or deny that the voices exist or to ignore the voices, it's to form our consciences so that we can stand up to lies, stand up to temptation, and resist evil. It's as simple as that. Whether the voices come from Mom and Dad, or social media, or television, or they're 100% in our heads, we need to discern their spirits, and deal with them according to our conscience.
It was so jarring that the doctors would be goading me to deny my faith in this way and to claim that if I heard a voice encouraging me in a moral direction, that it was fake, a hallucination, a disease. I have been so profoundly insulted. This is one of the many reasons I lost trust in them.
The illnesses simultaneously cause hallucinations that enforce delusions, and twist your belief systems so you pick up on the most insignificant details to support your delusions. Almost all patients end up believing that they are god, Star Trek captains, or stalked by a government agency, because this best explains their (hallucinatory) experiences. For example, if you hear voices in your head, the patient can't usually understand it as an illness, but has to explain it in some other way, so you end up with CIA/god/whatever beaming voices into your head.
I was aware that my senses didn’t match what I was processing. It didn’t matter.
The real awakening for me was when it finally clicked that we are always hallucinating everything. The mind separates our conscious awareness from the 3D world, like in Plato's Allegory of the Cave. So what we see and hear isn't what's objectively real, but what our mind interprets it to be. Even though everything is real in our subjective reality, based on the contextual state that we've built up from the sum of our experiences.
Some examples of mass psychosis:
* Many people don't know that their boss charges more than they're paid in wages.
* Many people work administrative and loss-leader jobs and perceive their work as a cost on the organization (programmers, engineers, most people outside of sales).
* Many people think that those around them are more knowledgeable and/or experienced than they are, and don't realize that their manager or boss is mostly winging it based on a probabilistic estimate of the best course of action.
* Many people think that they are more knowledgeable and/or experienced than everyone around them (egocentric people working in IT/tech, doctors, lawyers, billionaires, etc).
* Many people think that everyone else shares their spiritual worldview, everything from a man in the sky to we're all one in universal consciousness.
* Many people think that others don't share their spiritual worldview (Christianity and Judaism may not see parents giving up their meals for their starving children in a bombed out Islamic community).
My personal feeling is that western culture can't really endure spiritual awakening. And that we are seeing the breakdown of western society under late-stage capitalism with societal psychoses like much of the working class having to pay 50% of its income in rents. And corporate-greed-driven inflation rising unchecked without updated tax brackets for progressive taxation. And social safety nets being shredded to create a desperate working class dependent on service work while corporate profits are at an all-time high.
I just wish I knew how to wake up from The Matrix, whatever all this is. The points above have concrete solutions like a national tenant union, enforcing antitrust laws, taxing unrealized stock gains the same way as property taxes on homes, etc. But those obvious solutions assume a level of lucidity that will probably never exist while the powers that be lobby the government and engage in regulatory capture while handing out million dollar checks at random to voters who selected the candidate that promises to cut rich people's taxes. All to keep most people worried about the price of groceries and immigrants stealing their jobs.
But hey, I'm the delusional one.
Edit: the best answer I've come up with so far, after suffering for a lifetime under self-imposed limitations driven by many of the psychoses above, was to quiet my internal monologue entirely, acknowledging each thought but not indulging it, just being consciously aware of the process of living, without attachment or expectation on outcomes.
I've had several full blown psychotic episodes and been hospitalised several times.
Fortunately there was one medication - Amisulpride - that kept me stable enough to be able to have a professional career, though not without a lot of struggling and sacrifice.
I know what psychosis is and honestly, this avatar therapy feels a bit like bullshit to me.
When in psychosis, you are not listening to your voices - you are your voices and they can command you to do things you do not want to do. You are not in control of you consciousness.
There is hope though. A revolution in mental illnessis going on - check the metabolic mind site for more info - https://metabolicmind.org
I talk about my experience in my blog - https://www.feelingbuggy.com/p/finding-hope-after-decades-of...
Many other people have substantially improved because of metabolic therapy and there are dozens of random control trials going on with very promising early results.
There are ever more cases of successful treatment via metabolic therapy
Under the risk of being unpopular, it's my responsibility to let people know about this treatment option and bring hope to those who suffer from this terrible illness.
I take back the bullshit qualification though - it was a mistake on my part.
I asked her once, decades later, how she coped with it all, and her answer still freaks me out sometimes.
She said she didn’t know she was a person who had choices, or could think about the situation she was in. She just did as she was expected to.
She’s in her 60s now and is far more in tune with her emotions, thoughts and feelings than I remember her when I was a kid.
She was virtually in catatonic autopilot most of her life, because no one encouraged her to think.
There's a quote from Helen Keller in this vein, after she was taught to communicate, though I can't find the full text:
"When the sun of consciousness first shone upon me, behold a miracle!"
In buddhism (I'm not a specialist by any means), I think awareness and consciousness is a central concept too. "The light of awareness", "awakening" is seen as holy. I really think that awareness is essential to enabling us to have hope to improve and specially understand our life and our problems; besides making us more connected, participating in reality. I like Thich Nhat Hanh's saying of a "serene encounter with reality" he finds through meditation. Different, each in its own poetry, ways of saying the similar things.
And I think the profound realization and awareness of the reality of others can bring no other outcome than compassion. That's why I think awareness is extremely important too for living in a society and enable living in a civilization.
I think you should read the above book.
https://selfdefinition.org/hearing-voices/Barbara-O'Brien-Op...
Neurologically Jaynes locates these voices, and even defines gods to be those particular neurological phenomena located in the right hemisphere of the brain, that communicated its preverbal judgements to "man," located in the left hemisphere, which interpreted such judgments as speech:
The gods were in no sense "figments of the imagination" of anyone. They *were* man's volition. They occupied his nervous system,
probably his right hemisphere, and from stores of admonitory and preceptive experience, transmuted this experience into articulated
speech which then "told" the man what to do.
Genuinely unexploited niches and entirely novel strategies exist, but they are extraordinarily rare.
Do other primates show strong bicameral connectivity in terms of physical brain structures?
Before that, who knows?
0: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmhe... 1: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-alcohol-1890
A lot of people have been taught to read that as "therefore it's false" or "therefore it's true" or "therefore it's unimportant", but really all it means is that it is not amenable to scientific confirmation or debunking. That, and nothing more. Many things are not amenable to scientific confirmation or debunking that are true and false and important and unimportant and everything else.
Thus reality is carved away, leaving only the important part. Which we call "reality" of course.
You have an opinion that the hypothesis is false. I share that opinion. We probably have fairly radically different reasons for our opinions, though. Either way, they are just opinions, however well informed. We don't have proof.
(Gotta underline everything for you people, I swear.)
Aquatic ape hypothesis is similar. It's a initially a great theory and explains many things. Only when you start to investigate other explanations, the theory starts to fall a apart. Endurance running hypothesis on the other hand seems to hold. Incidentally it explains many of the same things as aquatic ape hypothesis, and there is more supporting evidence.
Hearing voices may be a symptom of something serious, but not always. As long as a person's grasp of reality is not in danger and voices don't stress out people, they can live with them and not even seek help. Not all people hear negative voices. Older lonely people have been known to say that voices keep them company.
> voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the U.S., the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful. https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2014/07/voices-culture-luh...
Maybe the most famous case of a high-functioning outlier was Carl Jung. He hallucinated complete persons since childhood ,visually and everything. He discussed matters with them. In the end, he was able to get rid of them when he decided that they were not helpful anymore. It's easier to understand his weird theories and spirituality when you have read his autobiography. The guy was off the charts but not disabled by it.
It's maybe easier to understand his focus on individuation, or integration of the component parts of the psyche into a cohesive whole, in light of this. Jung draws from esoteric alchemy and other related traditions (see his work: Psychology and Alchemy) which, instead of viewing the mind as a singular, monolithic entity, prefer conceiving of it as an organism comprised of many parts - Hermetic Qabalah being one such example.
The core discovery of the therapy is that the human mind has an inherent multiplicity. Once you accept that and go from there, the rest of the technique emerges naturally. It's really quite amazing. I highly recommend the book "No bad parts" by Dr Richard Schwartz, the discoverer of the technique.
What really excites me here is the use of a virtual avatar that personifies the voice. That is really new to me and I can see all sorts of possibilities to link with IFS.
Perhaps just as some but not all of us are aphantasic, some but not all of us may think in the IFS way, or Jungian, or Freudian.
* from my comfortable armchair, don't read too much into this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict
https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.psychotherapy....
1. Most therapies have not received the number of RCTs as CBT so it's not possible to make statements like the one you made.
2. There is wildly varying quality in therapists and the quality of the therapeutic relationship is widely accepted to be centrally important to treatment outcomes. It is thus much more likely that a good therapist with a shitty tool is better than a bad therapist with a good tool. Averaged out, this would explain the same effect.
All these theories are describing the same underlying phenomenon so there is a "blind men and the elephant" effect. They also substantially build on one another
The caveat is that what really sets these models apart is how they propose to navigate the mind. This is where I believe IFS stands out. But it would take a much longer comment to explain that. Maybe it's worth writing an article about.
I wish there was a triage psychiatrist I could see that would help me identify the most effective type of therapy for my situation and then help me find a therapist.
Looks like a really promising approach to therapy as well.. right up until they said they'd stop voicing it by a skilled psychologist and get an AI to do it, while putting the psychotic person into VR instead of over a screen.. that was a big 'fuck no'.
I would definitely want a professional to be in charge but, as the article itself points out, "Joe recently went back to his GP in search of help with his anxiety (...) The GP put him on a waiting list for NHS talking therapy, and warned that he could be in for a very long wait". Given how bad access to mental health resources is I may be willing to take "a community nurse, or a nursing assistant" now over "wait several months for a chance at a doctor who may not be the right fit for you".
I wouldn't dream of allowing an AI to roam free - as the article says patients can get more psychotic and arguably "you should end it" could very well be part of the training data. But if the AI suggests lines that a trained human can oversee... then maybe?
Without that control, what would inevitably happen would be that the highly-scalable part of the system (the AI) would be scaled, and the difficult-to-scale part of the system (the human) would not. We would fairly quickly end up with a situation where a single human was "overseeing" hundreds or thousands of AI conversations, at which point the oversight would become ineffective.
I don't know how to metricate and monitor human oversight of AI systems, but it feels like there are already other systems (like Air Traffic Control) where we manage to do similar things.
I have never heard voices, but experienced two forms of dissociation for a while after a trauma. Nothing was real, was one of them. Couldn’t trust any scene I was in or the chair I was going to sit on. Unending vertigo and feelings of experiencing a fiction.
As a famous ex-newt once said: “I got better!”
I’m imagining some Unreal Engine Skyrim deity on screen being voiced by my therapist, acting with a vocoder. Like, c’mon.
Definitely train a computer to do this part, generate your psychosis demon and have it really say the abstractions you described. Theyre already shockingly scary in realism when theyre not prompted to be.
A VR headset might be a little too immersive and triggering
But as long as its supervised I think its better
And your criticism was the exact reason the article’s therapist puppet master technique was avoided. So we are already passed that point, lets get the roleplaying puppet master out the way. I dont want some therapist that gets off on dissing me as a ventriloquist.
In this therapy a combination of visual and audio input as well as external control over the behavior of the Voice allows for a feedback mechanism which does not exist otherwise.
"A doctor uses a virtual reality A.I. device that gives him direct access inside the human mind to enter the mind of a colleague he deeply cares about and help her after she's hit by a car and slips into a coma. Things go horribly wrong."
I have successfully used this in therapy, i.e. helping friends on many, many occasions.
Strange that this is news in the psychiatric world: we "discovered" it by caring, and listening, and trying stuff out.
If psychiatric community is not listening to patients and conversing with them and their demons, and trying pills as a solution while knowing this doesn't work, it should be considered malpractice.
No wonder everyone hates psychiatrists.
Calling themselves doctors and the humans in front of them patients, is probably the root cause.
Avatar therapy could have implications far beyond psychosis, I think. My “round tables” have helped me begin piecing together why certain behaviors follow seemingly unrelated events (e.g., why going for a walk often ends with my coming home with candy), and untangle the automatic decision-making processes of my own brain. It’s also helped me identify what I actually desire in my own life, as opposed to what I’m sold on during “autopilot”. Said revelations have steered me back towards therapy yet again, seeking professional guidance on my own observations, which I think is the best possible outcome for mental health quandaries.
All of which is to say, I hope to see more human to human research on this topic. The end part, where they want to place AI in command of the voices so it can scale, seems incredibly risky for all but the most “mainstream” of cases, and far too risky for those struggling with literal psychosis; then again, I’m not a Doctor, so I could be very wrong in my concerns. Guess we’ll see when the study wraps.
>“The problem,” [Intervoice founder Dr. Marius Romme] writes, “is not hearing voices, but the inability to cope with the experience.” In 1987, after two decades of clinical work, the Dutch psychiatrist began promoting a drug-free therapy in which patients were encouraged to accept and analyze their voices.
The article linked in this post has a similar sentiment from one of the patients:
>She hadn’t expected them to go. “My aim wasn’t to get rid of them – just to get along with them,” she told me. “I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to let go. I’d never really been on my own. As abusive as it was, it’s still a relationship.”
Hopefully the therapy takes off, and we don't keep re-discovering this every 10 years.
Shoulda just made a Jackie Chan tulpa instead
Validation therapy does exactly this, although I think the people are usually dealing with dementia, not schizophrenia.
It took billions of years for the seeds of the mind to flourish, and prayer is a slow reconciling with this property of the universe.
Does this also count as psychosis?
remember that the internal monologue is not (the whole of) you. I managed to get rid of of my imposter syndrome by getting rid of that constant internal voice
I call them "spirits".
They're friendly. Offer advice and such.
Also, there's old technology in the wild capable of doing this[1] and I'd not be surprised to see it eventually become more easily available as hardware decreases in cost. It's already on the 'table' for advertisment purposes, albeit not microwave based.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect
Edit, Various Links:
https://gizmodo.com/we-will-beam-advertisements-directly-int...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/futuristic-device-from-israeli...
https://phys.org/news/2008-02-pentagon-lasers-voices.html
There could be some seed of truth in there, but, sweeping statements about what schizophrenia is need to be delivered with more than assertion.
> This is what a animal hears all day- "They are out to get me, its one huge conspiracy"
Not even wild animals think like this all the time. I feel confident saying they live very different inner lives to what you describe.
> is the thought process of a mouse
Comparing people with schizophrenia to terrified mice is bad. Not all schizophrenic delusions are paranoid in nature, for one thing. And for another, even if the basic mechanism were fundamentally the same (totally unproven) the differences between mouse brains and human brains, mouse culture and human culture, etc, makes the comparison rather pointless.
Add to all this, the fact that no non-human animal has been definitively shown to have schizophrenia in the same way humans experience it.
And of the animals that might have schizophrenia, like mice with a disrupted DISC1 gene, wouldn't they be different to normal, healthily anxious mice?
... Please, consider trying not to make declarations about stuff like this when your domain knowledge isn't quite up to the task.
No wonder, then, if we are all depressed or terrified or generally mentally ill.
It’s directly caused by the lack of privacy controls and harm done by being online.