Is anything really psychological?

[Peterson]

This question was partially inspired by "Obesity, ADD, Alcoholism, are they really diseases".

I was having a debate with my dad recently about psychiatric drugs. He feels that we are reaching a point where we are finding chemical causes for things that were previously thought to be psychological. He felt that things like Psychotherapy will be a thing of the past. He also felt that traditional therapy is out of the reach of your average income family, and drugs are an affordable way for people to get relief. I agreed with him to a point (depression, schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive), but brought up eating disorders as an example of something which I felt was purely environmental and can only be cured/treated with therapy. For instance the Rader Programs found that over 80% of the people they treat had some sort of abusive experience
( http://www.raderprograms.com/abuse.htm ) , this would suggest that it is environmental.

Here is another link that I found on a pro anorexia site. (Warning: Some of this stuff is very disturbing/depressing. No photos just text. Click at your own risk.) This thread is interesting because these girls are truthfully stating why they feel they have an eating disorder, all of which seems environmental.

http://pub82.ezboard.com/fproanasuicidesocietyfrm3.showMessage?topicID=231. topic

Then I found this article:
http://www.eating-disorder.com/Eating-Treatment/Eating-Disorders/brain-activity.htm

The researchers found that the bulimic patients' brains showed a reduction in the ability of the chemical serotonin to bind to receptors in certain brain regions. They also found that these women did not show the normal decline in serotonin binding that comes with aging.
This would lead you to believe that there is a physiological cause as well.

My focus on eating disorders aside, are we going to reach a point where any psychological ailment will be cured/treated w/ drugs? In the future, are we going to be able to manipulate our brain chemistry to the point where therapy will be obsolete?

[jj]

Well, unless you're going to propose a supernatural explaination for conciousness, it's all chemical at some level.

The question might be "which can be modified with will, which are difficult to modify with will, and which can not be modified with will".

And please don't ask me to define "will" :)

[Dancing David]

Survey says: The best treatment involves both medication and cognitive therapy.

Bio-psycho-social

[AmateurScientist]

Wow. I actually agree with all three posts in this thread so far.

JJ, you are right on. At some level it is indeed all chemical.

I suspect the notion of psychological disorder may one day go the way of miasma. Doctors used to think illnesses were the result of bad air and bad blood.

AS

[Earthborn]

Peterson, you fell for the common false dichomotomy falacy called 'nature versus nurture', 'genes versus enviroment'... No biggy, it can happen to the brightest of people.

There is no doubt that the environment plays a large role in the development of many psychiatric ailments. There is also no doubt neurology plays a large role. The two are not mutually exclusive, they are not even two sides of the same coin. In fact they are intertwined, and cannot be seperated. You should not even try to seperate them... (it's an illusion :) )

You also fell for the common falsehood that when something is 'environmental' it should be treated environmentally, and when someting is 'biological' it should be treated 'biologically'.

Suppose someone suffers from a depression because s/he lost a loved one, and suffers badly. This is an environmental cause: would it mean that it is wrong to treat someone with antidepressants if this is likely to help?

Suppose someone suffer from depression because it is genetically predisposed. This is a biological cause: does it mean that a supportive talk does no good?

Of course not!

Anorexia/bulemia has strong neurological causes which are quite similar to depression. It is often treated with medication, antidepressants similar to prozac.

On the other end, there is some evidence that it is often caused by the hungering itself: someone starts extreme dieting which causes the neurological damage.

Just like when someone because depressed because they experienced something awful in their lives, can anorexia/bulemia be caused by environmental factors. But this not mean in all instances an environmental cure is easiest or most effective way to deal with it. The damage it did is neurological.My focus on eating disorders aside, are we going to reach a point where any psychological ailment will be cured/treated w/ drugs?It reminds my of an interview with an old psychiatrist I once heard on the radio. He remembered how he as a student in the fifties got a tour through a psychiatric ward full of people suffering from hallucinations, voices and compulsive behaviors. On of the students asked the professor: "Will there ever be a pill to cure these people of their horrible ailments?"
The professor answered: "A pill? No. We will however learn how to better handle these patients, so they won't suffer as much as they do now. Teach them how to cope with their lives."
A few years later, chlorpromazine was introduced, and almost all patients could be send home with little symptoms.

We pretty much reached that point.In the future, are we going to be able to manipulate our brain chemistry to the point where therapy will be obsolete?No, therapy is a way to manipulate brain chemistry. I think therapy will increase in importance, only it will consider the actual workings of the brain instead of using unproven assumptions about how the mind works.For instance the Rader Programs found that over 80% of the people they treat had some sort of abusive experienceHow did they found out that these people had abusive experiences? In a similar way as some therapists discover the abuse of people suffering from 'multiple personality syndrome' ?

I'm afraid we should be very careful if therapists start claiming specific psychiatric disorders are primarily caused by abuse.

[Dymanic]

Originally posted by Earthborn

I think therapy will increase in importance, only it will consider the actual workings of the brain instead of using unproven assumptions about how the mind works.
That seems optimistic. I wonder if we will ever know enough about the brain to allow us to abandon the unproven assumption and deal strictly in the currency of 'what we know for sure'.

[SquishyDave]

Originally posted by Dymanic

That seems optimistic. I wonder if we will ever know enough about the brain to allow us to abandon the unproven assumption and deal strictly in the currency of 'what we know for sure'.
Ever is a long time, I suspect we will eventually figure it all out. Like any complex system it will just take time, how much time is anyones guess.

But barring an unforseen total obliteration of mankind, I think there will come a time when we do know how our brains work. If you just look at brain scanning technology alone, it keeps improving and rapidly, which in turn keeps improving our understanding of the brain.

[Yahweh]

Originally posted by Peterson
This question was partially inspired by "Obesity, ADD, Alcoholism, are they really diseases".

I was having a debate with my dad recently about psychiatric drugs. He feels that we are reaching a point where we are finding chemical causes for things that were previously thought to be psychological. He felt that things like Psychotherapy will be a thing of the past. He also felt that traditional therapy is out of the reach of your average income family, and drugs are an affordable way for people to get relief. I agreed with him to a point (depression, schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive), but brought up eating disorders as an example of something which I felt was purely environmental and can only be cured/treated with therapy. For instance the Rader Programs found that over 80% of the people they treat had some sort of abusive experience
( http://www.raderprograms.com/abuse.htm ) , this would suggest that it is environmental.

Here is another link that I found on a pro anorexia site. (Warning: Some of this stuff is very disturbing/depressing. No photos just text. Click at your own risk.) This thread is interesting because these girls are truthfully stating why they feel they have an eating disorder, all of which seems environmental.

http://pub82.ezboard.com/fproanasuicidesocietyfrm3.showMessage?topicID=231. topic

Then I found this article:
http://www.eating-disorder.com/Eating-Treatment/Eating-Disorders/brain-activity.htm


This would lead you to believe that there is a physiological cause as well.

My focus on eating disorders aside, are we going to reach a point where any psychological ailment will be cured/treated w/ drugs? In the future, are we going to be able to manipulate our brain chemistry to the point where therapy will be obsolete?
Hey look, one of my posts inspired another. I feel happy.

I always thought of Eating disorders as a form obsessive compulsive behavior. Just like people who constantly count the number of words in sentence (I dont know why they do that), there are quite a number of girls between 12 and 18 who are obsessed with looking thin. Maybe its and OCD, most likely not but something in my head wants to link the two together.

I dont know if Eating Disorders are diseases or not. I dont know if its hereditary. There could be a lack of a brain chemical chemical that involves satistfaction with ones appearence. If so, we could possibly make pills to deal with them.

For now, the best way to deal with eating disorders is to treat them like other psychological diseases and work with therapy. I am unaware of the success to failure ratio of therapy.

It unlikely that we will ever create pills that can cure all psychological disorders. We've been working for years to cure depression and schizophrenia and the best we've done is temporary pick-me-up pills that dont offer much cure at all.

My favorite form of therapy is inspired from the movie Clockwork Orange (I'm sure its a completely fictional therapy). If you havent seen the movie heres the therapy: A guy who fancies "ultraviolence" is involved in a new therapy. It involves injecting him with a drug that induces feeling of depression, anxiety, and pain. Then they would sit the guy infront of a movie screen and force him to watch scenes of rape, war, violence, disastor with the intention that watching those scenes while feeling pain at the same time would turn him off to committing any more crime. It was a form of brainwashing. It was interesting because in the background of all the movies was Beethovens 9th Symphony... dont watch the movie if you expect to be tastefully entertained.

[Dymanic]

Originally posted by SquishyDave

I suspect we will eventually figure it all out. Like any complex system it will just take time, how much time is anyones guess.
...If you just look at brain scanning technology alone, it keeps improving and rapidly, which in turn keeps improving our understanding of the brain.
Well, Windows XP is said to have something like 45 million lines of source code, and has already reached a level of complexity that places it essentially beyond human understanding. I feel quite confident in speculating that whatever work is being done toward the next version involves considerable reliance on unproven assumptions. Now suppose that the source code was all lost -- is Windows XP something that could be figured out by looking only at the compiled code? ...given enough time?

The human brain is like a million channel wide parallel processor, with not only its 'software', but its 'hardware' in a constant state of flux. It is more complex than a computer running XP by many orders of magnitude, and there never was any source code. It is true (and wonderful!) that the tools we have for examining the brain grow more sophisticated with each passing day, but the real trick is in mapping what we learn about the low-level details of brain function to human behavior at its highest level -- progress toward this goal proceeds much more slowly.

It could be said that all the information needed to grasp the subtleties of a complicated chess position could be collected by sophisticated scanning of the molecular structures of the chess pieces, but for an alien intelligence unfamiliar with the game of chess, analysis of the data would pose a very challenging figure-to-ground problem.

I'm not saying that I don't think we are going to learn a lot more about what makes us tick in the next fifty years, or the next five hundred, just that I think there will be nuances that will continue to elude us. I also think that the top-down approach has produced and will continue to produce useful information about human behavior -- humans have been trying to figure out what makes humans tick for a long time, and while it has proven rather error prone (due to necessary reliance on the unproven assumption) I would expect it to hold its own against the bottom-up approach.

[Soapy Sam]

And then there's the bottleful of genies involved in defining mental illness. Where is the line to be drawn between "Politically unacceptable in this State, Antisocial, Eccentric, Odd, Quirky, Stupid, Delusional, Insane"? If "syndromes" are defined socially, as opposed to neurochemically, we have politicisation of disease.

Conversely, if "normality" is defined as a particular neurochemical state, and any deviation is treated chemically, we can bid "genius" farewell along with much useful variation.

I imagine a future state where racism, sexism etc are replaced by neurochemicism. ("You can pick out the people with intuitive 3-d math spatial skills in a bus queue just by looking at them. Now
I'm no neurochemicist, my dear, but would you want your clone to marry one?")

[AmateurScientist]

Originally posted by Yahweh

My favorite form of therapy is inspired from the movie Clockwork Orange (I'm sure its a completely fictional therapy). If you havent seen the movie heres the therapy: A guy who fancies "ultraviolence" is involved in a new therapy. It involves injecting him with a drug that induces feeling of depression, anxiety, and pain. Then they would sit the guy infront of a movie screen and force him to watch scenes of rape, war, violence, disastor with the intention that watching those scenes while feeling pain at the same time would turn him off to committing any more crime. It was a form of brainwashing. It was interesting because in the background of all the movies was Beethovens 9th Symphony... dont watch the movie if you expect to be tastefully entertained.

Of course, the delicious irony is that Ludwig Von's 9th was Alex's favorite piece of music before his treatment. Afterwards, he was physically unable to listen to or enjoy it.

They killed the good with the bad. And at the end, we find it just didn't take. He is just as evil and depraved as before.

AS

[SquishyDave]

Originally posted by Dymanic
...I'm not saying that I don't think we are going to learn a lot more about what makes us tick in the next fifty years, or the next five hundred, just that I think there will be nuances that will continue to elude us. I also think that the top-down approach has produced and will continue to produce useful information about human behavior -- humans have been trying to figure out what makes humans tick for a long time, and while it has proven rather error prone (due to necessary reliance on the unproven assumption) I would expect it to hold its own against the bottom-up approach.
All good pionts, I still reckon we have a chance to figure it all out one day, despite the amazing complexity. It won't be too long before we will be building computers that are complex enough to hold a human mind. Once we start being able to build a brain like that, we should be on the road to getting the nuances down (eventually).

Of course it won't be easy, and I agree there is a chance we won't be able to figure it out completely, we are still trying to pin down relatively simple things like weather and earthquakes. But given enough time we should get it. At the very least we should be able to eliminate all disorders of the brain, frankly I will be dissapointed if we don't get that far, and I would prefer to see it go further.

But we will just have to wait and see, only time will settle this debate. :)

[Dancing David]

There are a few theraputic techniques that use scientific analysis, this why I recomend cognitive therapies.

The treatment of depression and schizophrenia is more than a few 'pick me up pills' Yahweh, I assume you just don't know, so I won't call you out.

Diabetes is not cured by treatment either, but please don't call that a 'pick me up'.

[aggle_rithm]

Originally posted by Dancing David
There are a few theraputic techniques that use scientific analysis, this why I recomend cognitive therapies.



Cognitive therapy is awesome. Unlike most others, where you keep seeing the same person for years and years and never get any better, cognitive therapy simply teaches you how NOT to think yourself into depression, anxiety, etc. It requires you to apply critical thinking to your own internal monologue. Once this is done, you're on your own. No lifetime dependency on a quack therapist.