Before psychedelic therapy for wartime trauma, there was narcosynthesis
resobscura.substack.com
resobscura.substack.com
During the 1960s and 1970s, patients at a small Sydney private hospital called Chelmsford were subjected to a treatment known as deep-sleep therapy.
Patients were kept in a comatose state for days or weeks by massive doses of barbiturates. They lay naked on beds and were fed through tubes and were sometimes administered convulsive electrical shock treatment while in a coma.
The treatment’s major proponent, Dr Harry Bailey, claimed deep-sleep therapy cured depressive illnesses and compulsive behavior such as drug and alcohol addiction.
It's a great read on numerous fronts, and digs pretty deep into how soldiers were treated once they were back home.
That feels like the root cause of a lot of problems in psychiatry.
In my experience, for an analytical person, one of the challenges is that the analytic mind of the patient may be stronger than the analytic mind of the therapist. We humans appear to often be what may be called lopsided monstrosities. Our strength has become a weakness, in a way.
By this I mean that we tend to use our strengths to try to solve our problems even when another part of us would be more helpful in solving them. For instance, we may analyze, when would be more useful to connect to our feelings, or we may think -- i.e. procrastinate -- when it would be more useful to act.
The aim of the analytical psychotherapy does not appear to be to cultivate our weaker sides. So an analytical person might be able to access the trauma more quickly through these other paths than the analytical mind.
Therefore, it appears that while one of the issues is the aim to have a quick shortcut therapy, even when there are sufficient resources, one-size-fits-all approach might not be enough for a therapeutic process.
This resonates.
I once worked with a coach who helped me realize this. It was the proverbial breakthrough moment. Many people probably could benefit from a similar realization.
And, if you need to process some traumatic experiences -- and practically all of us probably could benefit from such work -- if psychoanalytic psychotherapy does not work for you -- I would suggest trying other kinds of therapy that works more through our emotional or somatic parts.
Meditation for me, hence my username.
After all, beating children into bruising was normal just a generation ago. In many states it’s still legal to beat your children.
Abusive bosses and shit working conditions often get swept under the rug, and the result is trauma expressed to the worker's loved onrs.
From my experience, only way to really deal with those types is to always escalate and get more eyes on the situation
Want to echo this, and say that it is in the psychopath’s best interest to make you feel like you are overreacting. Bringing more eyes on the situation is not overreacting, and if someone who has power over you is trying to convince you of that, don’t trust them.
Is there any solid research showing this connection? It's not obvious that trauma has had a bigger impact over this period than e.g. sedentary lifestyles...
"91% percent of participants who did not perceive themselves to have had a warm relationship with their mothers (assessed during college) had diagnosed diseases in midlife (including coronary artery disease, hypertension, duodenal ulcer, and alcoholism), as compared to 45% of participants who perceived themselves to have had a warm relationship with their mothers. A similar association between perceived warmth and closeness and future illness was obtained for fathers.
82% of the participants who reported tolerant or strained relationships with their fathers had significant health issues in midlife, compared to 50% of those who had warm or close relationships with their fathers.
If participants had strained relationships with both parents, the results were startling: 100 percent had significant health issues, versus 47 percent of those who described their relationships with their parents as being warm and close.
Another study, conducted at John Hopins University, followed 1,100 male medical students for fifty years and found that cancer rates correlated closely with the degree of distance a participant felt toward a parent.
Something something US work until you die culture “take pills back to work” thanks pharmacology for profit!
In terms of training corpus, I wonder how that is managed? Training LLMs on out-of-date scientific papers doesn't seem like a good idea. It might make sense to exclude primary research reports entirely and instead stick with current reviews and textbooks?
GPT-4 have a context window of 32K tokens.
> (for example one usually overlooked is communicating with caring words)
If you meant keep saying "Sorry" like GPT-4 do. No, thanks, that's not caring.