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I agree completely.
It seems that the ability to think about thinking and having an outside view of yourself is the big difference between sanity and insanity.
The sane man knows himself to be a fool while the insane man believes himself to be sane.
I've recently spent some time within the burner community where polyamory seems to be common.
Some people seem to be having wonderful polyamorous relationships while other seems to suffer in terrible relationships where they insists on being polyamorous.
For me this seems unrelated to polyamory. It seems more to be the case that the people who are emotionally stable have good relationships and the people who are unstable struggle to form good relationships.
At the same time it seems that polyamory might be appealing to many who can't make "normal" relationships work. So my guess would be there are two distinct groups who are drawn to polyamory.
Highly emotionally intelligent people who communicate their needs and function well within relationships who wants more relationships and people who struggle with relationships who sees polyamory as the solution and monogamy as the reason for their previous problems in relationships.
The idea of a divide between mind and body is strange.
It seems like our consciousness is constructed in such a way that it's very easy for people to forget that we actually have a body connected to our head.
Another interesting idea would be to think that mental health problems in part are caused by the systems inside our body that are outside of our conscious control not working properly communicating their discomfort as mental health problems.
I'm a clinical psychologist and I don't think I've had a patient in therapy who had
1. Sleep 2. Exercise 3. Stress 4. Food
Figured out.
What I mostly notice is that once these things are improved the need for therapy diminish significantly.
I'm a clinical psychologist who was in charge of the largest randomized controlled trial of online cognitive behavioral therapy for depression (n=500).
There is nothing that annoys me more then the every person is a special snowflake argument for why we can't use standardized treatment for mental health problem.
Exercise works really well for curing depression. I talked to a depressed patient yesterday who had no idea what he could do to combat his depression. I finally convinced him that if he couldn't think of anything else to do he should just try going for a walk and he told me later that it really helped.
I've had that exact conversation a hundred times.
Almost all patients I meet have the faulty belief that they are special. That they function in a way that is different from others and that often make them resist treatment.
Your head is connected to your physical body and therefore we can figure out what helps for everyone in the same way a doctor knows what to do about a broken foot.
Did you know that almost half off patients who suffer from anxiety take too shallow breaths and this creates respiratory alkalosis that creates a lot of the anxiety symptoms.
Did you know that by breathing calmly you will cure yourself from panic attacks? Forever.
Did you know that psychologists know how to cure insomnia in a single session?
The biggest hurdle to overcome is the idea that there exists a magic barrier where your disorder goes from being something that you can cure yourself to something you need a professional for. The barrier is an illusion.
You always have the power to change your mood for the better.
I'm not saying that therapy isn't useful. It is extremely useful and helps people tremendously.
I'm saying that every single individual can make a conscious effort to focus on improving their mental health irregardless of the fact that they are seeing a therapist.
Also. Almost every single person is illiterate about how to treat mental health problems.
I've been a fairly happy person all my life and I believe I owe it to the fact that I developed excellent coping mechanisms.
If you haven't got those you need to learn them. Once you have them it gets much easier to have good mental health.
I'm actually working on building free online treatment for depression right now. It is a work in progress but if anyone is interested they can check it out here.
People like building their own solutions because it is way more fun then just installing Wordpress and adding some plugins. But sometimes Wordpress is more effective.
I've learned a lot about programming from a friend I worked on a startup with. But the business part suffered since the focus was on coding instead of the experience for the end user.
I have friends who are brilliant programmers who made excellent startup employees and friends who know little about programming who are excellent startup founders. I’m not even sure the best programmers make the best startup founders. A friend of mine was amazed when I showed him how to view source code on a website. His startup just raised a million dollars.
I think this has to do with the fact that people who don't program can't focus on the code. They focus on solving the problem.
Sometimes the right solution might be to build my own solutions but since thousands of people are constantly telling me that I'm not a real programmer I doubt my own ability to do it.
People complaining that web developers aren't real programmers keeps web developers from learning programming. The thought that web developers aren't programmers paradoxically keeps me from becoming "a real programmer".
Because my work doesn't count as real programming I have to start every new "real programming" challenge thinking that I don't really know what I'm doing. This creates doubt that limits my ability.
I feel confident in my ability to build what I want on the web but I'm actively doubting if I'm a real programmer.
Most of the web development work I do involves building interactive programs for helping people cope with mental health problems. My clients only care if I solve their problems. Previously we had a super advanced custom built system that was a mess to deal with. I recently switched back to Wordpress because it is way more effective.
I also think another reason developers don't like Wordpress is that it levels the playing field between people who can and can't program. Suddenly anyone can do what it took you years to learn.
People telling me I can't program because I work on the web makes me a shittier programmer because it makes me nervous when I write code that is logical. It is harder for me mentally to write javascript for my application then for writing the css or html and it's not because the logic is harder. It is because I mentally fear that I don't know how to program because the internet keeps telling me I can't. But every time I do it it turns out that I can.
I can feel it in my body when I switch to the js file in Atom. The feeling is fear.
I don't have it for: setting up a new ubuntu server, building a responsive website, styling with css or working with Wordpress because I know this is web development.
I can't mentally figure out what to think about building apps in swift. There is a lot of logic so that is technically "real programming" but there is a lot of styling so that is technically not programming. So I guess I have a moderate fear for it.
My point is that this isn't about the fact that it is harder to write logic then html or css. This is about my own fear. And the idea that web developers can't code makes it worse.
I actually wrote something related to this on my website. https://birgermoell.com/2016/01/30/solve-your-problems-throu...
As a psychologist I get what the article is aiming at. But psychology is a science and clinical psychology has made remarkable progress in the way we treat mental health problems.
In the last 50 years clinical psychologists have figured out effective psychological treatments for almost all mental health problems and manualized them so a professional can know or easily look up the best way to treat a disorder.
It took us forever to get here was because psychologists keeps insisting that every single person is so special that we could never compare them to anyone else.
Which simply isn't true.
Most of my depressed patients share similar background and stress in their life. The same is true for patients suffering from social anxiety.
The biggest problem in therapy today is the lack of practitioners, not that we don't know how to treat disorders. We figured that out using empirical psychological research.
I'm a researcher on online cognitive behavioral therapy.
I spend a lot of time answering questions from patients through instant messages.
Most questions are similar in nature.
My first thought was, can we make this for humans?
Clinical psychologist here.
The doctors I work with prescribe cognitive behavioral therapy as the first hand treatment for depression and antidepressant when therapy is ineffective (which isn't all that common).
One of the reasons that antidepressant are so widespread is that doctors are usually in charge of treatment and seldom perform therapy but are very used to prescribing medication.
Also the fact that millions of people are depressed makes it hard to give everyone access to therapy.
In my opinion it is much harder to treat a patient on antidepressant since they respond worse to treatment then a depressed patient who is not on medication.
Depression is a devastating disease but it is astounding how effective therapy can be for a lot of patients.
I regularly meet patients who are very depressed when we first meet who manage to overcome their depression in a couple of weeks.
Physical activity is also very good at treating depression.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17437199.2015.102...
If everyone would exercise the demand for therapists would be much lower.
One mistake that many depressed patients make is holding a strong view that they are a person who suffers from depression.
This keeps the patient from realising that depression is a condition caused by their interaction with the environment and that it isn't personal.
I think one problem with the article is that it seems that the person still views herself in this way instead of fully realising whatever it is that is needed for keeping him/her from becoming depressed again.
I'm a clinical psychologists who work with ADHD patients and others who procrastinate.
Many believe their self-worth is tied to personal accomplishments.
This trips you up because procrastination creates a negative feedback loop where the lack of action creates anxiety that increases inaction.
If you can't follow the mantra that you should "forgive yourself" because it feels to corny it might be easier to think:
The most effective thing for me to do right now is to forgive myself because the time I spend beating myself up is energy wasted.
This might be less elegant then just simply forgiving yourself but it might work.