TREAT SOCIETY
Doctors and other helping professionals treat society, not you. If you are high in society you generally get medication to treat anxiety and pain (this Atlantic Monthly writer doesn’t have any trouble getting anxiety medication). If you are not, you don’t. The most extreme example can be found with people dependent on the VA being told to play mind games and seek eastern medicine instead of getting pain medication. If you’re bipolar you might not get pain medication at all. This brings up an interesting thought experiment, the mental health medications are prescribed to keep the patient from being a danger to society but society doesn’t accrue any benefit for treating people’s pain. In fact pain medication can make people function more poorly in society.
Virtue
Virtue gets punished because it’s non-conforming:
People punish generous group members by rejecting them socially — even when the generosity benefits everyone — because the “big givers” are nonconformists, according to a Baylor University study.
Colors
I don’t have Synthesia but I do associate decades, months, and weekdays with colors. I have had access to paint programs since the age of 13 but never thought to map them out until a couple weeks ago. In a psychotic break I did a lot with colors as well so when I do anything on the computer with colors I have to hide it from my parents.
Advantages Christianity Confers Specifically to Males
Being Christian and male is a winning combination and not just because women like it!
The ability to shift between magical and logical thinking at will shows mental fitness. At the bottom of the fitness ladder we have the person with the mental illness whose magical thinking whips him around and dashes him against the rocks. In the middle we have the atheist who can’t turn off his rational thought processes when running against illogic. Then you have the Christian who has the shape-shifting power to transition in and out of magical thinking at will. Specifically the feat of “experiencing God’s leading” is a one of mental strength that not everyone is born with or can cultivate (because you have to act between certain parameters, none of which you are told; and if you go outside of them you are shot down and in some cases are up for the loony house).
The ability to compartmentalize Christianity generally requires is useful other places. Most versions of Christianity require you to compartmentalize, believe in a lot of ridiculous things like people burning for eternity for disagreeing with you, but really just believing these things on paper (because if you really believed in a literal hell you’d probably be going door to door trying to keep people form going there). Of course compartmentalization is extremely useful other places, like giving you the ability to keep your work life separate from your home life. Also having the ability to check your brain at the door (which you need to do in a lot of church services) serves one well in other situations where it would come in handy, like a board meeting where those higher up are presenting idiotic ideas.
A mark of a Christian man is getting along with other Christian men. It takes a special set of social skills and attributes to get included in Christian culture and these same things are also in demand in the corporate world. Things like having a car (because churches are usually only reachable by car), cultivating wide-breadth social networks, looking clean-cut, giving people the benefit of the doubt, and being opportunistic and passive-aggressive are all skills one needs to function in the corporate world.
Mind Games, Authority Figures, and Authority Narratives
Want to play mind games? Then you need to buy into a figure of authority who are trying to get you to play them. Until then trying to play their mind games is a fruitless exercise. I say you must buy in to figures of authority, this is different than mere respect. One can respect someone simply because of the threat of corporal punishment or abuse, but this doesn’t mean one buys into the authority of said person. Buying is an act of will in some respects and not one in others. Conditions need to be ripe for buying in but the actual act is often outside of one’s conscious awareness. Said authority figure provides you with an authority narrative. The question of whether or not you can play mind games with said narrative is very similar to the question of whether or not you get the placebo response from having faith in something. It’s something that happens naturally, almost magically.
For example the NY Times ran an article on sleep therapy. Basically one needs someone in authority (a therapist) to tell one to play mind games to get them to sleep. But these games only work if one buys into the authority of the therapist. I don’t buy into the authority of therapists because I had one that led me away from Christianity (not that I wouldn’t have gotten away from it on my own). I am forced to see them because of my mental illness and recognize their authority through coercion but I don’t buy in to it.
not to tell the government what to do but…
If I were the government I would be putting forth massive effort in financing research on antipsychotic drugs. I’ve been on various dosages of these things and let me tell you they destroy your drive and lucidity. And that’s exactly what the government wants in a population. The trick is getting something to market that has less less side effects and can produce a more targeted effect, quelling dissent while leaving one’s personality mostly intact.
Heck maybe that will be next month’s Snowden reveal.
about myself
The therapeutic-industrial complex expects me to believe that what I think about myself has a drastic impact on what others think of me. The reasoning goes that when I looked better and the fact that I was broke mattered a lot less it was because of my self-confidence that people treated me better… instead of the obvious that I was treated better because I had more to offer. This theory can be tested because I’ve been manic (and thus self-confident) since being broke and looking like a retard.. and people didn’t treat me any better. Of course this didn’t fit with the dominant narrative so was dismissed.
I think there is this whole culture of deception where if you think good things about yourself you can get others to believe you have more to offer than you really do. Thing is, it only really works when you’re young because as you get older the thing that gives you value as a guy (money) becomes more important. You can’t fake a W2.
juice
As you may know negative symptoms are parts of yourself the mental illness erases. The way I illustrate this is a Slurpee at Seven Eleven. You get to the bottom of it and you have sucked most of the juice out of it. Now all that remains is flavorless ice. That’s what mental illness does, sucks the juice out of you.
Letter to the NYTimes
Concerning the article: A Soldier’s War on Pain
There’s only one way to change the dynamic so that pain treatment happens fairly. It’s to have a viable, available way to end one’s life. Right to die advocates have been pushing for this for years. When this is in place the patient is on level footing with the doctor for pain treatment decisions.
I also find it funny that nobody suggests acupuncture and natural remedies for treating schizophrenia. This is because in schizophrenia’s case a lot of the pathology’s fallout happens to society (ie behavior that makes society uncomfortable, sometimes violence) where with chronic pain the sufferer bears the brunt.
One can do an interesting thought experiment along these lines. When someone cuts them self do they get hospitalized for the pain it causes or because the behavior itself makes society uncomfortable?
ADDITIONAL COMMENTARY NOT IN LETTER:
People like to say that suicide is a selfish act. This is undoubtedly true. But so is wanting someone to keep on existing who would rather not. The thing is, the people who have the least power (in this case the chronic pain sufferer) are the ones expected to be selfless (it is obvious in religion but harder to spot in these new situations).
Ironies of Modern Society
Irony 1: Hyperindividualism results in many of the more socially needy of us having less autonomy. This is because we need people (hey we’re social animals) but the way society is set up less and less (and sometimes no) people are willing to befriend us. What this results in is when someone does decide to befriend us they have an inordinate amount of power over us.
Irony 2: Consumeristic society just consolidates power at the top away from the actors it’s acting upon. “Finding and expressing one self” is just a ruse to cajole people into conformity. The church might have told us to do things directly but Madison Avenue, mediated by our peers, does the exact same thing, it just takes a more circuitous route so it seems like we’re the ones actually making the decisions. And while pastors, teachers, and parents were local and thus power took into account locale, the gods of consumerism come from the power centers, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and San Francisco.