British PM in favour of more talking therapies

David Cameron being interviewed about new proposals for mental health:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJjwAMr_BEE

He doesn't mention drugs at all.

David Cameron: 'We need to end stigma of mental health' - BBC News

I can't help end it till someone tells me what exactly "the stigma" is.

He means stigma in the sense that ignorant people treat you like you're a leper or not a human being deserving of respect. That sort of thing. There's a lot of campaigning by people in Britain about this just now. People are talking about it and there's a story on one of the big soaps over hear about a girl with bipolar disorder having a psychotic episode and having to be hospitalised.

NoM8s wrote:He means stigma in the sense that ignorant people treat you like you're a leper or not a human being deserving of respect.

The real stigma of mental illness is created by the mental health industry itself because people accused of mental illness are also accused of having "broken brains" that need to be on drugs because they different than everyone else.

Enough stress and bad breaks in life will cause ANYONE to become mentally ill.

They never mention that are no lab tests, brain scans, X-rays or chemical imbalance tests that can verify any mental disorder is a physical condition. There is no DNA test even though they insist mental illness runs in families. Alot of things run in families like what party people vote for or what sports teams they like, that doesn't make it genetic. Scientific evidence does and they have none.

NoM8s wrote:People are talking about it and there's a story on one of the big soaps over hear about a girl with bipolar disorder having a psychotic episode and having to be hospitalised.

How does this TV show portray it ?

And whats the name of it ?

The video states: Worsening outcomes... increasing suicides... As drugging increased so did bad outcomes.



Thats because the system of forever labels and pills for life isn't working. All the scientific evidence shows its creating more chronic mental patients.

If psychiatric system of forever labels and pills was effective the number of suicides and worsening outcomes would go down as the number of people on drugs goes up.

Actually there was a feature about this new brain scanning technology that can show how it's all wired up and they've identified genes asociated with schizophrenia. They think that what they call junctions are important and schizophrenic brains have less of them apparently. These are parts of the brain where a lot of nerves are connected and the theory is that fewer of these junctions makes it harder for their brains to process "information". They are hoping that this research is going to lead to a better understanding of what's going on so that more effective drugs can be designed, yes.

I think that people recognise that anxiety and depression are what you say but that some of it must be genetic. Dyslexia can run in families. It could be seen as a fault with the brain but a lot of artists are dyslexic, so it seems to be linked with talents. They even claim to have identified alcoholism genes. Some monkeys love getting drunk on fermented fruit and some don't.

It's a character called Stacy on Eastenders that's bipolar. It's a sympathetic portrayal I would say. She came off her medication when she got pregnant because of the risk to the baby and her partner was worried but really tried his best to support her. It's not actually his kid but he doesn't know that yet. The baby was born at Christmas and she started thinking that the devil was after the kid because he was the second coming of Christ. Her mother in the show is also bipolar and they're both good actresses. They always give a helpline at the end of the show if it's something like that and if you've been effected by it. It's a show that deals with a lot of sensitive issues and gets people talking about them. It's drama obviously but people can identify with these soap characters because these shows have been running for so long and British soaps are usually set in working class places like the east end of London.

NoM8s wrote:run in families

Meanwhile, more than 80 candidate genes for alcoholism have been identified—in the fruit fly. Likewise, hundreds of genes have been "implicated" in schizophrenia (the database at http://www.szgene.org currently contains 8,788 polymorphisms pertaining to 1,008 genes). But we are no closer to having reliable genetic markers for schizophrenia (much less depression) than we were in the 1930s, when the "feeble minded" were compulsorily sterilized (not just in Nazi Germany but in the U.S. and most western countries) to keep their inferior genes from propagating.


Mental Illness: It's Not in Your Genes http://bigthink.com/devil-in-the-data/mental-illness-its-not-in-your-genes

I don't think a genetic cause of so called mental illness will ever be found because the brain and the mind are different things.

Your brain is part of the visible, tangible world of the body. Your mind is part of the invisible, transcendent world of thought, feeling, attitude, belief and imagination. The brain is the physical organ most associated with mind and consciousness, but the mind is not confined to the brain. The intelligence of your mind permeates every cell of your body, not just brain cells. Your mind has tremendous power over all bodily systems. https://www.sharecare.com/health/teen-p ... mind-brain


Then we could consider the soul to wile we are at it too. I don't believe I am just a DNA and chemical robot.

Well, that's philosophy and scientists do broadly accept the metaphysical theory that everything is basically "matter". There is a lot of interesting work done in the philosophy of mind but an immaterial soul that isn't just what we think of as the mind is such a vague and indemonstrable thing that it is just a matter of faith and too otherworldly to have much relevance to our understanding of this world.

Personally, I'm a Heideggerian and I don't think in terms of there being a mind seperated from an external world. You can think of the brain as a physical system that is part of the body and the body is in the world and conciousness plays very little part in most of what we actually do in the world. There's so much that we don't really think about unless there's a problem that we become concious of. Like you could drive for hours hardly thinking about what you're doing. You can think of the mind being extended into the world. We organise our thoughts by writing them down and language lets us symbolically represent things and computers work by symbolic representation but the mind or brain itself isn't necessarily like that, so the idea of an external world that we can never directly experience but just make a copy of in our minds is a fiction or oversimplistic.

I do think that there is something to the notion that psychiatric disorders to a certain extent are social constructs. Construct is a very poor term though and phenomena is better. Being a father is both a biological fact and a role that someone has in society. The role of father can be different in different cultures.