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You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake, as the rant goes.
Neither am I, of course.
At least, I don't think I am. I have to operate under that principle; there's a scientific name for it that escapes me. Something along the lines of the mediocrity principle, which basically asserts that nothing is a beautiful and unique snowflake. Not even snowflakes.
Sure, an individual flake might be unlike any other flake in very minor details, but in general, it's close enough to identical that nobody will ever really give a shit about the differences.
So whenever my mind is seething with all kinds of nasty emotional turmoil, and Kirk/Bones are making themselves difficult (read this if the previous comment made no sense to you), I remind myself that at least some people out there deal with the same shit that I do.
And while that doesn't help at all, at least it keeps me from getting all pretentious about it.
No, your pain is not unique. Nor are your triumphs. There are people out there who understand you. There are people out there whose life sucks worse than yours, and/or whose life is better than yours.
While your precise melange of bullshit might not be duplicated anywhere else in the world, the fact of the matter remains that it stinks pretty much the same as anyone else's.
I've met a few people who are like me in some ways. Psychologically-speaking, of course. Physiologically is almost irrelevant, after all.
Which leads me to an abrupt tangent. This particular blog is being written in a rather stream-of-consciousness mode, for the record.
Psychology.
Is bullshit.
I speak not as someone who has received their doctorate in the subject, of course, but as someone who has taken some courses, done some independent reading, and spent quite a few years on the treatment end. So take my opinion with a grain of salt. But fuck you, I still think I'm right.
Talking with some folks, they'll admit that psychology, such as it is, is still a work in progress. They're making new discoveries all the time, finding out new principles, refining their models, etc etc. But on the whole, you get the impression that they consider psychology to be a science in... adolescence, so to speak.
If it were something like aeronautical engineering, they'd consider themselves to be, say, around the era of the first jets. Still primitive, but beyond their early, Wright-brothers-esque days of Freud and Jung.
Personally, I think they're mistaken. I think Freud and Jung were not the Wright brothers of psychology; I consider them to be more along the lines of the Da Vinci of the discipline; full of interesting ideas, most of which were obviously flawed and impractical in application.
Where are we now? We might have made it to the Wright brothers by now; we might still be stuck trying to fly hot-air balloons though. Modern psychology is riddled with flaws, ranging from causation/correlation fuckups, to lumping disorders together by symptom, not by cause.
Throat swollen? You must have strep! We will prescribe this drug for you, which in theory can treat strep. We're not entirely sure, of course; we think it works, and it seems to do well in studies, and nobody has died or given birth to three-headed calves just yet, so we've decided to release it to the public.
And after you spend a year or two with minimal results on their latest wonder drug, it turns out you had thyroid cancer the whole time!
See, this is an area where the mediocrity principle is being over-applied.
The human brain is complex. Enormously complex. We like to watch television and get the idea that scientists know what the various parts of the brain do, how we're wired, etc. We like to imagine that maybe someday soon we'll understand how it all works, and be able to solve all those little problems.
Except there's a hitch in that plan.
Because we don't know shit.
Neuroplasticity, for example. The brain can, and will, alter its structure based on external stimuli. And I don't mean bashing on the skull with a hammer; I mean purely intellectual and/or sensory stimuli.
And bashing on the skull with a hammer, technically. That also works.
What we have now is sort of a rough idea of where some processes take place usually.
Since we don't understand the underlying causes of, well, just about anything when we're talking about the human mind, shrinks tend to group disorders by symptom.
Take autism, for example. It's not a disorder anymore; now it's a "spectrum". Frankly, if you're trying to lump enough things under one diagnosis that you have to call it a "spectrum", you probably don't know what the fuck you're talking about. You're guessing, and sometimes I think the rest of the world would be happier if the APA would just come out and say "Heh, yeah, we're mostly just talking out our asses half the time, but we really do mean well."
Except for the ones who are more interested in cashing a paycheck, but we can deal with that another time.
My experiences with shrinks have been generally on the negative side, to be honest. First couple times around, I got... rather poor results.
Once again, diagnosis by symptom. If the symptoms weren't so fucking vague, or if there weren't so many individual issues which can overlap or appear roughly analogous, that might work.
As it is, you get things like being diagnosed for depression when your actual problem might be something completely different. Which was more-or-less what happened to me. Twice.
Not including the diagnosis I got when I was a kid. Which was mostly along the lines of "there's something wrong with your kid, but I don't think it's treatable, so don't worry about it."
So.
Depression isn't my problem, you see, despite what it may occasionally seem like in this blog. I'm not depressed; I'm bipolar.
Kinda. Mildly. Though apparently my depressions are significant, hence my repeated diagnoses as a severe depressive.
I don't go manic very often, which is probably a good thing. Most of them are fairly simple, and frankly not really classifiable as "manic periods". I'm just... mellow. Happy.
For no reason.
And that, frankly, is weird as hell sometimes. To be sitting there, and knowing that all the anxieties that I ordinarily suffer under are still there, there has been no alteration to the situation that was dragging my mood down the previous day, and yet... I'm moderately euphoric. The feeling most of the time is fairly easy to quantify; it feels like being in love.
Something more along the lines of your genuine, classic manias are rare as hen's teeth for me. I can literally count the number of times I've had that sort of manic episode on the fingers of one hand. Again, probably a good thing. One of the things I live in mortal fear of is finding something that would trigger a manic episode of that nature on command.
Because that shit is more addictive than heroin.
So.
Since my manias aren't classic manias, my first couple shrinks didn't diagnose me correctly. So they put me on the wrong drugs. And trusting that they knew what the hell they were talking about (at least the first one), I dropped myself back into a situation that left me... in a rather poor way for the better part of a decade when that treatment failed miserably.
And left me with a profound distrust of shrinks.
Where was I?
Oh right.
Beautiful and unique snowflakes.
By lumping disorders by symptom, psychologists are ignoring the idea that radically different underlying causes can create superficially similar disorders. A treatment that works for one root cause may have absolutely no effect on another root cause, even if the symptoms appear nearly identical.
I like my hypothesis, because it accounts for the fact that individual reactions to therapy and/or drug treatments vary wildly.
Neither am I, of course.
At least, I don't think I am. I have to operate under that principle; there's a scientific name for it that escapes me. Something along the lines of the mediocrity principle, which basically asserts that nothing is a beautiful and unique snowflake. Not even snowflakes.
Sure, an individual flake might be unlike any other flake in very minor details, but in general, it's close enough to identical that nobody will ever really give a shit about the differences.
So whenever my mind is seething with all kinds of nasty emotional turmoil, and Kirk/Bones are making themselves difficult (read this if the previous comment made no sense to you), I remind myself that at least some people out there deal with the same shit that I do.
And while that doesn't help at all, at least it keeps me from getting all pretentious about it.
No, your pain is not unique. Nor are your triumphs. There are people out there who understand you. There are people out there whose life sucks worse than yours, and/or whose life is better than yours.
While your precise melange of bullshit might not be duplicated anywhere else in the world, the fact of the matter remains that it stinks pretty much the same as anyone else's.
I've met a few people who are like me in some ways. Psychologically-speaking, of course. Physiologically is almost irrelevant, after all.
Which leads me to an abrupt tangent. This particular blog is being written in a rather stream-of-consciousness mode, for the record.
Psychology.
Is bullshit.
I speak not as someone who has received their doctorate in the subject, of course, but as someone who has taken some courses, done some independent reading, and spent quite a few years on the treatment end. So take my opinion with a grain of salt. But fuck you, I still think I'm right.
Talking with some folks, they'll admit that psychology, such as it is, is still a work in progress. They're making new discoveries all the time, finding out new principles, refining their models, etc etc. But on the whole, you get the impression that they consider psychology to be a science in... adolescence, so to speak.
If it were something like aeronautical engineering, they'd consider themselves to be, say, around the era of the first jets. Still primitive, but beyond their early, Wright-brothers-esque days of Freud and Jung.
Personally, I think they're mistaken. I think Freud and Jung were not the Wright brothers of psychology; I consider them to be more along the lines of the Da Vinci of the discipline; full of interesting ideas, most of which were obviously flawed and impractical in application.
Where are we now? We might have made it to the Wright brothers by now; we might still be stuck trying to fly hot-air balloons though. Modern psychology is riddled with flaws, ranging from causation/correlation fuckups, to lumping disorders together by symptom, not by cause.
Throat swollen? You must have strep! We will prescribe this drug for you, which in theory can treat strep. We're not entirely sure, of course; we think it works, and it seems to do well in studies, and nobody has died or given birth to three-headed calves just yet, so we've decided to release it to the public.
And after you spend a year or two with minimal results on their latest wonder drug, it turns out you had thyroid cancer the whole time!
See, this is an area where the mediocrity principle is being over-applied.
The human brain is complex. Enormously complex. We like to watch television and get the idea that scientists know what the various parts of the brain do, how we're wired, etc. We like to imagine that maybe someday soon we'll understand how it all works, and be able to solve all those little problems.
Except there's a hitch in that plan.
Because we don't know shit.
Neuroplasticity, for example. The brain can, and will, alter its structure based on external stimuli. And I don't mean bashing on the skull with a hammer; I mean purely intellectual and/or sensory stimuli.
And bashing on the skull with a hammer, technically. That also works.
What we have now is sort of a rough idea of where some processes take place usually.
Since we don't understand the underlying causes of, well, just about anything when we're talking about the human mind, shrinks tend to group disorders by symptom.
Take autism, for example. It's not a disorder anymore; now it's a "spectrum". Frankly, if you're trying to lump enough things under one diagnosis that you have to call it a "spectrum", you probably don't know what the fuck you're talking about. You're guessing, and sometimes I think the rest of the world would be happier if the APA would just come out and say "Heh, yeah, we're mostly just talking out our asses half the time, but we really do mean well."
Except for the ones who are more interested in cashing a paycheck, but we can deal with that another time.
My experiences with shrinks have been generally on the negative side, to be honest. First couple times around, I got... rather poor results.
Once again, diagnosis by symptom. If the symptoms weren't so fucking vague, or if there weren't so many individual issues which can overlap or appear roughly analogous, that might work.
As it is, you get things like being diagnosed for depression when your actual problem might be something completely different. Which was more-or-less what happened to me. Twice.
Not including the diagnosis I got when I was a kid. Which was mostly along the lines of "there's something wrong with your kid, but I don't think it's treatable, so don't worry about it."
So.
Depression isn't my problem, you see, despite what it may occasionally seem like in this blog. I'm not depressed; I'm bipolar.
Kinda. Mildly. Though apparently my depressions are significant, hence my repeated diagnoses as a severe depressive.
I don't go manic very often, which is probably a good thing. Most of them are fairly simple, and frankly not really classifiable as "manic periods". I'm just... mellow. Happy.
For no reason.
And that, frankly, is weird as hell sometimes. To be sitting there, and knowing that all the anxieties that I ordinarily suffer under are still there, there has been no alteration to the situation that was dragging my mood down the previous day, and yet... I'm moderately euphoric. The feeling most of the time is fairly easy to quantify; it feels like being in love.
Something more along the lines of your genuine, classic manias are rare as hen's teeth for me. I can literally count the number of times I've had that sort of manic episode on the fingers of one hand. Again, probably a good thing. One of the things I live in mortal fear of is finding something that would trigger a manic episode of that nature on command.
Because that shit is more addictive than heroin.
So.
Since my manias aren't classic manias, my first couple shrinks didn't diagnose me correctly. So they put me on the wrong drugs. And trusting that they knew what the hell they were talking about (at least the first one), I dropped myself back into a situation that left me... in a rather poor way for the better part of a decade when that treatment failed miserably.
And left me with a profound distrust of shrinks.
Where was I?
Oh right.
Beautiful and unique snowflakes.
By lumping disorders by symptom, psychologists are ignoring the idea that radically different underlying causes can create superficially similar disorders. A treatment that works for one root cause may have absolutely no effect on another root cause, even if the symptoms appear nearly identical.
I like my hypothesis, because it accounts for the fact that individual reactions to therapy and/or drug treatments vary wildly.