Does anyone have any experience or understanding of the examples of mind games and stories psychs tell their patients?
In one particular post, I mentioned my experience with my own psychiatrist which seemed suspicious. When arguing with me about the science of some things, he said they already know everything about the brain already, and that it 'wasn't that complex' and that virtually every neuroscientist in the public is lying that we still have a lot to understand to fool people. He said, "Yeah, we get all this stuff years before it comes out to the media. Everybody in the field knows this. You know when they say, "We're in the process of a scientific breakthrough? Yeah, that's the stuff. Some of this stuff isn't public because it's too controversial."
There were some very suspicious things about his story though. He was mostly trying to argue that they could change or control your beliefs. He seemed to suggest it was based on some 'secret research' and said, "I think they can change them. Well, they could make you less religious. Hm, yeah, I think they can change them." But, he seemed to be alluding to a (public) article by Kathleen Taylor that says something more along the lines of 'maybe, because certain regions light up in the brain during processing certain facts and beliefs, we can either make people believe things less or stop it, but we don't really know, and it could be possible perhaps in 60 years." He also had a colleague who worked with him. When I asked him about it, he denied the claim that it was common knowledge among anyone that this degree of neuroscience or brain knowledge existed, and that it was from my doctor that he had heard about it and said, "Man, this guy must have some secret information that most people don't know. We shouldn't even be talking about this!" But, he still seemed to take the claims as legit, ignoring the fact that the doctor stated it as widely known. So now it is no longer the collective "We" it is just him (my doctor) that knows this stuff. He claimed that many retracted fraudulent papers on science were often done because they were actually true and that the Korean scientist who claimed to clone a human was telling the truth. However, that was not a private matter. The public did admit that he was a fraud, that he had only partially cloned a human cell which never went far, and that his real success came from cloning a dog. I think my doctor may have admitted this was a faulty example of conspiracy, but I can't remember. He may have said they secretly kept the human embryo for further experiments because they never said what happened to it.
Since he had mentioned brain stimulator devices like the Jose Delgado experiments, I was under the impression that they must have some technology by now to scan alignments of neurons in the brain, and then inject them back in by manipulating neurons remotely through a helmet or device or something. So I asked: "Since memories and beliefs and the like manifest a bit differently each time they are recalled or expressed, and are intermingled with a lot of complicated beliefs which express a similar fluid form, if they use a brain scanner to see and record the pattern of those beliefs (provided they can even separate them from the rest), and then remotely manipulate the neurons back into the brain into the same shape or whatever, they have to reinsert them with the same harmony as every other belief connected with it or they could potentially harm the patient, because the trial and error behind it would be very high risk and I am skeptical that they would do that." Then he said, "Uhm, yeah, ok, I see. But what do you think about the fact that people's beliefs and identity change when they get mentally ill?" And I thought about it for a while. I cannot recall whether it was then or another session in which I attempted to express my thoughts on the matter. The most competent argument I am going to make may or may not have even been presented to him during any of the sessions, because my memory is cloudy on that.
My doctor later admitted in another session that he had actually never seen a lot of these things such as belief changing, but he then on began to say that he only heard it from colleagues who were supposedly a secret group of researchers but from where, I can't remember. I think the story peaks when he reveals that the way they changed beliefs was not by a helmet or whatever, but by injecting some dye that they could remotely manipulate with some imaging and turn beliefs on and off. He claimed some doctor he knew was involved in this experiment and that the guy who was the subject was scared by it and they didn't tell anyone because it was too creepy. But, it sounded like a modified version of the research online which talks about optigenetics (which requires modified cells to make them respond to the outside triggers) and brain implants that can be inserted then remotely controlled (only tested in mice so far and mostly for emotions). There are also known problems with dyes. Funny thing about beliefs, is that, when people do go crazy when under the influence of some brain problems, rather than accumulating successive and permanent changes in previous beliefs that occur during the delusion, their original beliefs and identity are retained, and then reassumed once the problem is corrected, thus the problems treated by medicine are more complicated and related to something else entirely. If I had even told my doctor about this in response to his original question, he most likely said, "Yeah, but they can, and that's that." I guess, truth being stranger than fiction, and knowing some things turn out different than you'd expect, it seems probable, but in that case, so can the idea of a delusional manipulative psychiatrist who was smart in some ways, but in the sense of the psychopath, or sociopath, or whatever, especially considering some of the other insidious things he said and the way he acted which was bad enough to make me leave him, as I am now seeing another doctor.
It's a curious case for sure, but I am skeptical because of the way it evolved and changed, and believe it is possibly a lie. I've heard psychiatrists will do things like this to give their profession an all-encompassing authority, though I'm not sure if most of them have such convoluted explanations as this doctor did.
This case is probably too elaborate for most, but if you have any experiences or know cases of such, let me know. Whether you ever found out that what the doctors said was true or false.