Musings on Anti-Oedipus

According to Anti-Oedipus authors Guattari and Deleuze, "schizophrenia is an extreme mental state co-existent with the capitalist system itself and capitalism keeps enforcing neurosis as a way of maintaining normality."

The suggestion here is that enforcing neurosis is the path to maintaining normality, and capitalism is the enforcer.

As welll, the unconscious undercurrent played out through forces of capitalism (jobs) may have a pseudo-schizophregenic component, of which schizophrenia is an extreme outcome.

My question is, why can't the root cause and effect of the anxiety-insomnia-hypomania-mania-psychoses pathway be properly managed?

I'm referring to stress, which initially causes insomnia due to the effect of anxiety but later evolves into the indirect cause of hypomania, mania and ultimately psychoses.

However, it is stress that activates schizotypies, which are originally benign eccentricities of personality, that may evolve into one of several different forms of schizophrenia, due to the effects of extreme stress and resultant anxiety.

Depression and mania are just expressions of the extreme spectrum of bathos and pathos which both plague and inspire creativity on anyone of suitable fortitude to live with their neuroses.

Of course, the cheap preventative and/or solution for mental illness is to get regular exercise, sleep the optimal 9 hours, and if need be, take the medication suited to a person's personality type to reduce anxiety and/or promote sleep.

If necessary, a few people will respond to something as safe as prescribed medication, provided that the patient BELIEVES that medication works. He also has FAITH that they do work, which strongly implies a placebo effect facilitated by his belief and faith.

Please note that the patient does need to believe in what his psychiatrist or family doctor says regarding medication, and must be positive toward medication using drugs which do the least harm to the patient.

Additionally, the prudent mental health consumer may substitute meditation for medication if the use of stronger medication is counterindicated, be it for ethical, financial, moral, political and/or religious reasons, provide that his belief that meditation works reinforces his faith in meditation and vice versa.

YMMV

References:
Wikipedia article on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Oedipus

Are We Naturally Crazy? The Three Functional Psychoses

Are we born crazy?

The three functional psychoses are mood disorders, delusional disorders, and schizophrenia.

Depending on the level of functional behavior, people with these disorders are able to contribute to society, sometimes in a greater capacity when the rest of society treats them with the respect they do deserve.

And they deserve a lot, especially given the prejudice given a good psychotic.

For not all psychoses have a violent etiology (host of "symptoms" and behavior related to the psychosis).

Indeed, not all psychoses are bad, or disabling.

I suffer from borderline personality disorder, which is related to delayed development of the brain.

Under the age of one, I suffered anoxia for a brief period of time, so there is post-natal brain damage.

As well, I have had about 6 head trauma before I was 13.

So I have probably suffered post-concussive trauma and the etiology which arose consists of rebelliousness, insomnia, rages, and risky behavior.

One example of risky behavior: obsession about holding my breath until I passed out.

As a child, I remember learning to masturbate by age 6.

I remember several incidents when my mother used to punish me, but forgive her for it because my misbehaviour was real and did occur.

So naturally when I entered adulthood, the insomnia led to marked changes caused by neurological damage suffered as a child.

In adulthood, the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder was made circa 1990.

At first, my doctor decided to leave it untreated out of respect for my decision to muse non-pharmacological methods of controlling it using alternative health.

15 years later, I've "awakened" to discover that I am missing out on a family and a career due to borderline personality disorder.

Hence the delayed development issue.

As for schizophrenia, I know that that term describes etiology arising from a real chemical imbalance in the brain.

It has been controlled best by orthomolecular medicine, but seroquel is being used more and more to control schizophrenics.

For seroquel causes health problems in the doses needed to control violent forms of psychoses, and is an expensive sleeping aid in lower doses.

However, a combination of essential fatty acids and herbal anti-depressants are an alternative to the pharmacological medication.

EFAs help to stabilize mood, and take up to 3 weeks to work. I've experienced overnight relief, which lead to the healthy, happy mental state I now sustain.

Herbs such as valerian helps with sleep; St Johns wort helps with the depression; and gingko helps my brain get oxygenated.

As for kava, I'd recommend it as an alternative to recreational drinking. YMMV

IMHO we are all naturally crazy. Anyone can suffer a functional psychoses. Indeed, I would consider alcoholism as a functional psychoses with subclinical etiology.

So the ignorant can perpetuate their ignorance.

Madness is inherent to post-modern society in the 21st Century.

For the most sane of us all are on medication, be it pharmaceuticals or herbal supplements (health foods, herbs, vitamins and minerals).

Anybody would be crazy to subsist on only the average Canadian diet, since it has been implicated in the etiology of a host of functional psychoses due to subclinical malnutrition.

A host of homeless people may find relief in optimal nutrition, but won't find it at the meal lineup to the soup kitchens.

In today's society, the harmless psychotics are being manufactured and controlled by the neurotics in power.

It's time to realize this, and to get off Big Pharma's drive to cash in on the host of broken lives ruined by crappy food pushed by the food industry.

Indeed, health food is more nutritious and better for us than cheap food.

Sanity is found by supporting your local organic grocer.

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Originally posted: March 3, 2005 at 2:45 PM
Edited and redacted: October 6, 2010 at 5:32 PM
Edited: November 24, 2012 at 1:48 PM

For Mental Unrest, the Remedy is to "Know Thyself"

It has been said that most neuropharmaceutical drugs work by amplifying the placebo effect.

However, you can improve the placebo effect by choosing drugs and/or therapy and/or exercise to beat depression, provided you believe strongly in the power of the mind augmented by drugs, therapy or exercise will help you overcome mental unrest, specifically when expressed as anxiety and depression.

As for anxiety, all that one requires is the motivation and willingness to address a group of people in group therapy. Later, if one is willing, it is possible to abandon anxiety completely in a comedy club. Though, the preferred choice to resolve depression and anxiety would be daily exercise outside.

Sadly most morbidly anxious people tend towards social isolation which may lead to depression and attendant psychoses. However, most anxious people suffer needlessly.

Some of them have bought the propaganda that nothing works. They are so jaded about religion that they believe the myth that Buddhist meditation is primarily a religion and thus, is suspect.

Contrary to their suspicion about meditation, two of the new psychotherapies such as cognitive behavioral therapy and didactic behavioral therapy use mindfulness techniques, and even translate the basic teaching into language that is nonsectarian.

Thus the Four Noble Truths become:

1. Stress in Life causes mental unrest.
   
2. The cause of that mental unrest is an unhealthy ego i.e. clinging to a permanent self in a egoistic and selfish manner.
   
3. The solution is to detach oneself from such an idea through meditation.
   

Most new therapies basically teach one to control one's mind, of which most people are ignorant in regard to how it arises.

When applied to oneself, a book on basic psychology is useful to study, and one will learn to apply knowledge gained from reading it to study one's own mind.

Most anxiety and depression is due to the delusion that one's external environment is the cause of one's anxiety and depression.

The truth is, anxiety and depression is due to delusions one has chosen about oneself, and that contrary to one's assertion that the world is the cause of anxiety and depression, that each of us is both the cause of one's mental unrest and the solution to that unrest.

Hence, the adage, "Know thyself".

The Good Drug Guide : new mood-brighteners and antidepressants

THE RESPONSIBLE PARENT'S GUIDE TO HEALTHY MOOD-BOOSTERS FOR ALL THE FAMILY

INTRODUCTION
Could we live happily ever after? Perhaps. One's interest in the genetically pre-programmed states of sublimity sketched in The Hedonistic Imperative is tempered by the knowledge that one is unlikely to be around to enjoy them. It's all very well being told our descendants will experience every moment of their lives as a magical epiphany. For emotional primitives and our loved ones at present, most of life's moments bring nothing of the sort. In centuries to come, our baseline of emotional well-being may indeed surpass anything that human legacy wetware can even contemplate. Right now, however, any future Post-Darwinian Era of paradise-engineering can seem an awfully long way off. Mainstream society today has a desperately underdeveloped conception of mental health.

There's clearly a strong causal link between the raw biological capacity to experience happiness and the extent to which one's life is felt to be worthwhile. High-minded philosophy treatises should complicate but not confuse the primacy of the pleasure-pain axis. So one very practical method of life-enrichment consists in chemically engineering happier brains for all in the here-and-now. Yet how can this best be done?


Through natural method validated by effective use for over 2000 years, it is possible to enrich one's life.

To declare that only neuropsychopharmacology is the answer, one would have to study an area of pharmacology that treats the sick brain.

As well, the wise person has to detach from the delusion that one's life history made her this way.

In reality, a sick brain is not manufactured by sick thoughts. For such thoughts are the symptom of a sick brain.

While it appears reasonable to assume that a society's embrace of the culture of a sick soul may contribute to a sick mind, it cannot be concluded that such artificial constructs are manufactured by a sick brain.

Rather, it appears that quite possibly, the sick mind is a symptom of the sick brain.

Thus the negativity and pessimism of a depressed person with attendant anxiety and paranoia are all but symptoms of a very ill brain.