Research now doubts
Research 100% Doubts That Certain Mental Disorders Are Disorders At All
November 7, 2024
Research 100% doubts that certain mental disorders are disorders at all.
This light shines bright as neuroplasticity has been forefront of the material in front of me of late as I complete the Meditation Teacher Training, a lot of which involves neuroplasticity, nervous system function + mindset health.
Having spent the last 12 years in the Healing + Holistic Therapies, these 3 diagnosis’s seem to be the most common, + destructive when it comes to education [or lack of] + modern aka pharmaceutical “treatment”
These are the 3 most common “ailments” when it comes to women’s therapy planning [stress related] + planning a protocol [that almost always involves 1 of regenerative meditation]
Witnessing my own experiences + that of students \ clients regeneration in mental health I had serious doubts, Q’s, as the mental health mis-information was becoming very visible.
I am wanting to highlight on my exam the distance between healing | regeneration with the big pharma approach + compared to that of certain styles of Meditation [evidence based regeneration]
What I found : that isn’t mainstream knowledge. Current Research Doubts That Certain Mental Disorders Are Disorders At All !! https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23965?
Is depression a mood disorder or an adaptive ?
Hang in there with me now because this is vital reading, if not for you then for you to imprint another with this side of psychology.
What if mental disorders like anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder aren’t mental disorders at all?
In a compelling new paper, [as above] biological anthropologists are calling on the scientific community to rethink mental illness.
Rightfully so !
Explained in the articles + studies, with a thorough review of the evidence, they show good reasons to think of depression + PTSD are responses to ADVERSITY, rather than chemical imbalances + ADHD could be a “way of functioning” that evolved in an ancestral environment, but doesn’t match the way we live today + I couldn’t agree more from what I have personally witnessed as a practitioner over a 12 year period.
Mental disorders are auto-pilot, routinely treated by medication under the medical model.
So why are the anthropologists who wrote this study claiming that these disorders might not be medical at all?
They point to a few key points.
First, that medical science has never been able to prove that anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are inherited conditions.
Second, the study authors note that despite widespread and increasing use of antidepressants, rates of anxiety and depression do not seem to be improving. From 1990-2010 the global prevalence of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders held at 4.4% and 4%. At the same time, evidence has continued to show that antidepressants perform no better than placebo. Marry this with my current studies that meditation has proven to regenerate the brain / neural pathways and re codes the nervous system in which stem new psychological and physiological responses to perceive and cope with life in positive ways.
Third, worldwide rates of these disorders remain stable at 1 in 14 people. Yet “in conflict‐affected countries, an estimated one in five people suffers from depression, PTSD, anxiety disorders, and other disorders,” Taken together, anxiety, depression and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity. “Defense systems are adaptations that reliably activate in fitness‐threatening situations in order to minimise fitness loss,” It’s not hard to see how that could be true for anxiety, worry helps us avoid danger.
But how can that be true for depression?
They argue that the “psychic pain” of depression helps us “focus attention on adverse events so as to mitigate the current adversity and avoid future such adversities. But research shows that a consistent meditation practice reprograms neural pathways in the brain and, therefore, improves our ability to regulate emotions.
Through meditation, we familiarise ourselves with anxiety-inducing thoughts and storylines. We learn to see them, sit with them, and let them go If that sounds unlikely, then consider that neuroscientists have increasingly mapped these three disorders to branches of the threat detection system. Through Meditation, specifically focused on inducing @the relaxation response’ ( sympathetic mode, disarming the fight or flight ( that 90% of humanity are running on unconsciously ) Students and clients begin to recognise when they are in a trauma or fight /flight response and swiftly able to disarm themselves. Meditation is a therapy that leads its participants to Healing and new formed habits and awareness. It is a short term and long term with zero side effects.
The reason Meditation is so vital in these 3 conditions is because, Anxiety may be due to chronic activation of the fight or flight system. Which meditation disengages, PTSD may occur when trauma triggers the freeze response which helps animals disconnect from pain before they die, and depression may be a chronic activation of that same freeze response.
All which meditation disarms.
Labels are something we internalise to define who we are and what we are capable of. Or to make excuses for. All too often, labels limit us. And that’s why reconsidering how we label anxiety, depression or ADHD is important. Does someone have depression, a medical disorder of their brain, or are they having a depressed adaptive response to adversity?
Adversity is something we can overcome, whereas a mental disorder is something to be managed.
The labels imply very different possibilities. Consider how we label ADHD. A generation ago boys with ADHD were labelled as “bad boys” and were given penalties or detentions. Now we help kids with ADHD understand that they have a “learning difference.” Instead of detention, we try to provide support in a variety of modalities. When we do, the behavior problems often disappear.
That label change to learning difference is vital, because it gives space for kids with ADHD to be “good kids” and to succeed. Yet ADHD is still “attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder.” In Finland, where substantial physical activity is part of the school day, rates of ADHD are also very low. Meanwhile, in the U.S. children are asked to sit still for the majority of the day. Elementary school students often get only 15-20 minutes of recess a day, a far cry from the 60-90 minutes their parents had. Coincidentally, ADHD rates in the U.S. have gone up over the last 15 years.
ADHD is not a disorder. Rather it is an evolutionary mismatch to the modern learning environment we have constructed. Edward Hagen, professor of evolutionary anthropology at Washington State University and co-author on the study, pointed out in a press release that there is little in our evolutionary history that accounts for children sitting at desks quietly while watching a teacher do math equations at a board. If ADHD is not a disorder, but a mismatch with a human environment, then suddenly it’s not a medical issue. It’s an issue for educational reform. And that is a compelling thought, given the evidence that kids’ focus and cognition are improved by physical activity. Still, i felt we need to take this study with a grain of salt. There is a large body of research beneath this showing other biological factors when it comes to ADHD. For instance, there is evidence that premature birth increases rates of ADHD later. Social reform or medical treatment? Study author Kristen Syme, a recent WSU Ph.D. graduate, compares treating anxiety, depression or PTSD with antidepressants to medicating someone for a broken bone without setting the bone itself. She believes that these problems “look more like sociocultural phenomena, so the solution is not necessarily fixing a dysfunction in the person's brain but fixing dysfunctions in the social world." It’s a fair criticism of the way we treat mental illness. But the stated goal of the paper is not to suddenly change treatments, but to explore new ways of studying these problems. “Research on depression, anxiety, and PTSD, should put greater emphasis on mitigating conflict and adversity and less on manipulating brain chemistry.” But what about the fact that there is plenty of medical evidence for that brain chemistry? Consider a recent study done in Turku, Finland. Researchers showed that the symptoms associated with depression and anxiety are connected to changes in the brain's opioid system already in healthy individuals.
Can we reconcile brain studies like this with the biological anthropologists criticism of how we handle mental health?
Actually we can. The changes in the brain associated with anxiety and depression are evident, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be understood as responses to adversity. Based on this, do we need to make changes in how we treat mental health? Yes and no. When it comes to what labels we use, a change is welcome. Mental health recovery in part, depends on whether patients believe they can get better.
Telling our patients or students that their symptoms may be tied to a “”healthy response”” to adversity could be very encouraging !
Let me know what you think !