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Comment by interfixus | Hacker News Reader

I have consulted the HN guidelines to find a polite way of saying this. Best I can come up with is "What an utter load of superstitious crap".

Purely anecdotal, of course, but everything I have ever seen confirms a very clear positive correlation between mental illness and all sorts of dabbling in various squishy 'spiritual' matters. I don't know which way the influence goes, but suspect both, really.

The strong version: I believe that if you encounter serious mental health issues, and you start seeking cure in this strange mumbo jumbo alt.reality, you will very likely never get well again.

[Typos edited]

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If you ignore all of the “superstitious crap”, what you end up with is: people experiencing mental illness in this tribe are treated with kindness and respect, told that they are experiencing something important and special and helped through their recovery by a patient and sensitive guide, instead of being told they are broken and thrown into a jail-like setting where they are treated with drugs that have severe side effects.

In other words, religion trumps modern medicine for mental illness. I agree, but I don't see this tribe's beliefs having a special status or better probability of success above any other religion.

There isn't much of a difference between religion and psychology (I'm talking about applied one, psychotherapy). As far as I remember the only method coming from evidence-based medicine approach is CBT. Everything else is based on anecdotal evidence.

The problem of the article is that it ignores physiology which is evidently related to mental illnesses. A lot of illnesses have genetic factor.

I actually don't like calling inherited conditions illnesses. And I'm talking about anything including diabetes. You can't get sick with bi-polar disorder or diabetes. They're given from birth. You can't be completely cured and have to maintain yourself with medications for the rest of your life.

If you have the requisite genetic triggers, bipolar has only a chance of popping up. It's triggered by circumstances in your life that present significant stress/hardship.

Next to that, there are also plenty of people that manage to wean themselves off medication after they've been on it for a few years. It's not something you're necessarily stuck with for the rest of your life.

I hope so. Have you got any links to read about first-hand experience of going off medications from a person with bipolar disorder?

Yes you can. You can have all sorts of genetic dispositions, which may or may not express themselves depending to the lifestyle and environment they are up against.

> I have consulted the HN guidelines to find a polite way of saying this. Best I can come up with is "What an utter load of superstitious crap".

I'll try. This is an interesting story of how the traditional pseudoscience of shamanism can meet halfway the modern pseudoscience of psychiatry. In this new paradigm mental health patients can live fulfilling lives by helping saner people hang on to their delusional beliefs.

There is no problem with any of this as long as objective reality does not exist.

Very well put.

Moreover, since we have circumstantial evidence that objective reality does not exist (see the various interpretations of quantum physics) I see no problem with any of that.

"superstitious crap"

"I believe"

I was going to reply less politely too and ask if we'd have a similar tolerance for "The homeopathic view of oncology"

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