Mental Illness, Etiology, and Criminalizing Thought Pt. 1
If we could scan brains for mental illness, would we need to? Pt. 2 here: https://youtu.be/cHcp7HH283w
Daniel Amen's Ted Talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLKj1puoWCg
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So this is one of those requested videos that requires a lot of unpacking because we're going to be talking about neurological brain imaging, psychiatric medicine, and morality and mental illness and crime and how they're all interrelated.
And it starts with this guy called Daniel Amen.
Now Amen is a, he's a psychiatrist that's begun employing neurological brain maps to try and discover if there's brain damage causing mental illness.
And supposedly he's been pretty successful.
There's a lot of critics saying he doesn't have enough data just yet, but it seems quite promising.
And it seems in some ways self-evident that yes, when you receive brain damage, physical damage to the structure of your brain, you will have aberrant behavior.
And that somebody that's behaving aberrantly, they don't necessarily have a psychosis or a mental illness.
What they have is brain damage.
Now, what is brain damage?
You know, obviously getting a rock to the head is brain damage, but it's more than just that.
If you've served in the military, the concussive force of firing heavyweight rounds, that many rounds, can have an impact on the soft tissues of the brain.
Then there's just the daily stress of living.
If you're in a high stress environment, if you're doing a lot of caffeine, a lot of nicotine, that is going to wear down your brain over time.
You have other stuff, temporary brain damage induced by drugs, alcohol, marijuana.
This is going to cause your brain to short circuit.
And you know, thinking about all of this, the way that drugs cause this temporary brain damage, I think this actually winds up being a very interesting critique of psychiatry as a whole.
Now, what does Amen do to fix the brain damage with his patients?
Well, most of what he does focuses on having a good diet, on supplying the body with the resources it needs to repair itself.
And this says he's supposedly had success with young people with brain tumors, but also people suffering Alzheimer's.
That if you are, if you're experiencing this degradation in the quality of your brain, what you need is a diet that provides the stuff that your brain needs to live.
You know, fish oil, having lots of fruits and vegetables, et cetera, as opposed to corn, syrup, and processed foods.
Allowing the brain to fix itself.
Now, what do we see psychiatry doing?
Psychiatry develops all of these psychoactive pharmaceuticals, right?
But these drugs are essentially doing the exact same thing as alcohol is.
You take drugs to reduce your anxiety, to numb you, to help you check out and be less aware, less cognizant of the universe.
The psychiatric solution to depression is to give you something that just zonks you out and turns you into a zombie because zombies aren't depressed.
And if any of this stuff, if these were cures, okay, if these were cures or if they were some sort of panacea that would help you heal yourself, what we would expect to see out of psychiatry is fewer and fewer people on medication as the medication got better.
It would fix the chemical imbalance, which doesn't exist, or it would help them get through the rough patch in their life.
Instead, what we're seeing is more and more people going onto these psychiatric meds, numbing themselves, becoming zombies, and the original problem, the original depression, the original anxiety, whatever it is, is never actually dealt with in the first place.
It's a lifelong non-cure.
Whereas what a men is doing, trying to provide the brain the stuff it needs to fix itself, that can help.
Listen, if you have a hangover because you drank too much, yeah, an aspirin will make the pain go away, but it won't help you.
What will help you is water and a really fatty breakfast and etc.
That's what will help you get rid of the hangover, is providing your body the stuff it needs.
Now, this request came in specifically addressing, is this going to be the future of criminal analysis, where we say that because somebody, look, we scanned his brain, we have this scientific proof that they're mentally ill, so now we're going to lock them up even though they haven't committed a crime?
Something straight out of that series psychopaths?
Is this the new future?
Well, brother, we're already living in that time.
Now here's the thing, what a men's doing, and he says he has good correlations, that he can identify the issues and correct them.
And let's take him on his word.
What he's doing is not defining the mental illness, but defining the treatment.
Okay, he's saying, like, look, there's these parts of your brain that aren't operating.
Let's get those operating at full efficiency.
You know, one of the pistons in your vehicle isn't firing.
Let's get all of them firing.
But he's not saying what that mental illness is.
You know, you have these symptoms.
And so because you have symptoms, we're going to scan you.
And then we're going to say this is the physical problem right here.
So I like what he's doing.
Whereas what is psychology doing?
What has it been doing for the past 30, 40 years?
See, what psychology does is they come up with a bunch of labels.
And then they come up with diagnostic criteria for each one of those labels.
So if somebody is borderline, they're going to have seven of the 12 following traits.
All of which is completely subjective.
It's completely arbitrary the way they make it up.
And if you actually start looking into the whole thing, supposedly they say that, you know, 80% of researchers all agree that this is the illness.
