Depersonalization= a problematic mind and therefore life

Peter said:

I believe this attitude to be one of the central problems of the depersonalization community. Due to your lack of emotional experience you will always be missing out on every life experience you make. Your life will be far away from being complete and you will always know that it is a shell of what it could and should have been, no matter how much you delude yourself that you "accept" this hell. "Acceptance" of depersonalization disorder is and will always be a misnomer, because utlimately both on an individual and systemic scale it's what keeps depersonalization going, by keeping sufferers from trying treatments that could work for them and by preventing sufferers from addressing the external causes of the lack of treatments, which is the ignorance of psychiatry. For example just look at what patients with chronic fatigue syndrome are doing. They are acting in exactly the opposite direction and it worked well for them, since chronic fatigue syndrome is getting more recognition and research thanks to aggressive advocacy of patient groups.

Basically you are giving up and surrendering your life to this disorder, probably with the motive in the back of your head that you will be "rewarded" with a recovery for your acceptance. It's the same way clerics tricked the common folks for millenia by telling them that after their life of hardship a glorious heaven awaits them.

Click to expand...

This is probably the biggest point of contention in this community. Do we accept or ignore DPDR? Or do we fight against it and search for “the cure?” The best answer to that argument I suppose depends on how we answer the million dollar question: what IS DPDR? What is the best way to conceptualize this….phenomenon? Is IT a thing, entity, or process (like cancer or a broken leg) that is reducible to matter? Is it solely an undesirable experience (like pain), the existence and intensity of which is contingent on whether and to what degree we are focusing our attention on it? Or is it more of an action (like obsessions and compulsions) that we are actively creating through the meaning that we attach to our experiences?

I think before answering what is the cause or cure for DPDR, we need to come to a good understanding of what it is. This is one aspect of medicine, especially psychiatric medicine, that is highly undervalued.

I realize, Peter, that that is how psychiatrists, per the DSM or ICD, define the concept of “mental disorder,” and that DPDR meets this universalist definition of “mental disorder.” But this icd definition is so broad and all-encompassing as to include all problems we might suffer from in our lives—as long as that suffering is classified as “clinically significant” (whatever that means). That kind of definition is great if your goal is to claim all of life for medicine, but it’s not necessarily going to help us come to the best understanding, and therefore the best way to deal with, our problems.

Yes, all mental phenomena are dependent, not just on the brain, but on our entire structures. But it does not follow that the mind is reducible to the body. I would agree that I have not seen a mind without a brain, but I’ve also never seen a disembodied brain mind anything. This distinction we have made between mind and body is not empirical, but rather conceptual. Body refers to that aspect of ourselves that is best understood in materialist and mechanistic terms, whereas mind refers to that aspect of ourselves that is best understood in semantic and teleological terms. The foundation of body is matter (structure) while the foundation of mind is not the brain, but language. And language, while also being necessarily contingent on structure, is not reducible to matter.

Of course, this is all a matter of epistemology. If you are a philosophical materialist, then you would have to presume, not that the mind is in or comes from the brain, but that “the mind,” like soul, is an invalid construct. But if that is your position, I would be interested in hearing your explanation of the placebo effect? How is it that when a person ingests a (mostly) inert substance he nevertheless experiences a significant reduction in his suffering? Neuroscience struggles greatly with that one, while semanticists can explain it very convincingly and parsimoniously, in my view. Even though there is no “mind,” it is a valid explanatory concept as distinct from matter.

Im not sure which medical problems you are referring to when you say we found effective treatments before an understanding of its pathophysiology was elucidated. Are you saying that we were able to successfully correct a structural problem before having any understanding of what that structural issue even was? If that’s the case, then we got incredibly lucky. But if you mean that we were able to effectively reduce the suffering of a condition that is defined as a syndrome, of course that happens. In fact, we have been doing that more or less successfully for millennia. Suffering is not the same as derangement of pathophysiology.