Gregg,

This was amazing! I really enjoyed watching this and felt it's fluidity.
Very comprehensive as well. Below are the comments I noted:

I loved JV going off on confusion related to the meaning of mind.

I appreciated Garri's sentiment, "What's more real, the averages or the
individuals?" - While I certainly understand his broader point in
contrasting first and third person empiricisms, we must be careful to
assume that 1st person implies a diversification that 3rd person doesn't.
We should remember that even 3rd person empirical findings can be quite
varied and inconsistent, and likewise 1st person empiricism ultimately
points to an intransitive shared by all, and in that there is a nondual
explanation which allows them to fit together much in the way you all point
to at the end of the episode: *they're not* *different* *things*.

The distinction you and JV made between existential and *psychiatric
anxiety is pure gold. You turn from that to talk about function and
'healthy maladjustment' (being sane in an insane culture), and specifically
bring up the example of psychiatric hospitalizations, highlighting the
cultural emphases and biases of many psychiatrists in assessing patients
functionality (versus from a purely medical model) to make admission and
discharge decisions and as a larger exercise in social control. I can
attest to this, having worked for several years in an inpatient hospital,
weighing in with these medical doctors on such decisions and assessments.
Many (perhaps even most) patients learn to "Fake Good" by exercising more
behavioral control (not attacking people or hitting walls), taking their
medication (knowing full well they're going to stop once they leave the
hospital), or denying suicidal ideation (which seems to magically
dissappear as soon as these chronically suicidal patients are
hospitalized). Suicidal ideation and self-harm are perhaps the best exmaple
of this, merely having suicidal thoughts from time to time is no reason to
be hospitalized and can be reasonably expected for any person, an increase
in suicidal thoughts is symptom of major depressive disorder, the medical
model of depression, and may become severe enough that hospitalization is
necessary.  So the patient is hospitalized and typically put on a
medication. In the case of most antidepressants, it would take several
weeks to effect cognition on the level of thought (the basis for the black
box warning), yet these patients report no suicidal thoughts alomst
immediately after being hospitalized, and average probably 7-10 days in the
hospital before they're discharged, sooner than that if they're an adult.
So for that to be the case it must be that the psychiatrists making the
decisions to hospitalize or discharge are placing emphasis on cultural
expectations, in that case an intersection of infrastructural and moral
expectations.  As JV was saying about culture being in part an organization
of truth vs function, the example of inpatient psychiatry in particular
demonstrates how detrimental the ramifications can be to the integrity of
the culture as a system. Each self-reinforcing loop
(suicidal->hospitalized->not suicidal->discharged->still suicidal because
was lying to get discharged->rehospitalized) taxes the entire system and
increases chaso and entropy. As you well know, healthcare is often referred
to as a "broken industry" for exactly these reasons; the problem isn't the
suicidal individuals, who are adpating in a functional yet maladpative
manner.

To Garri's point about normality, I almost always make a point with my
clients of asserting "There is no such thing as a 'normal person,' it's
just a mental paperweight."

JV then talks a bit about the Is-Ought problem, someone said you can't go
from is to ought. Similar to what you're all saying, I would put it that
you can go from Is to Ought, but only when you start from acceptance of the
Is, which means an aware non-interference with what Is (nondual awareness).
The other piece is that an Ought can never be an Is as a linguistic error,
a limitation of language, because when an Ought becomes an Is, *it then
Is. *

There is a broader discussion towards the end regarding polarities (though
not in such terms), but I would maybe challenge JV a little on positive
psychology and postmodernism not being stand alone things, and he may mean
or agree with what I'm about to say but I missed it or something. So I
totally agree about the need to shift off of an emphasis on pathology and
to also focus on the positives, and I appreciate the philosophical
difficulties that JV brought up about it, my only point would be is that we
can't know what we don't know. Following one of the examples discussed, we
regularly emphasize with students in psychology now (particularly in
diagnostic assessment), to assess for and integrate a client's strengths,
abilities, resources, etc., into our conceptualization and treatment. We
have to look for client strengths, because they exist within the same
system that is a given person and we can't truly know we've actually
effected change unless we recognize the entire system. So we end up drawing
the lines for the system for functional purposes and not based on truth
(e.g., ignoring certain strengths of a client to make a better case for the
diagnosis their parents are "certain" they have). This then trickles down
to a confusion about *who* is actually *what*, because our maps and
territories are vastly dynamic in ways equally good and bad. But like you
say at the end, we need a zoomed out perspective to properly align the maps
with the spiral of levels of complexities that are the territory. However,
from that zoomed out perspective we can see the different levels of
complexity as the tree of knowledge and also parts of the tree of
knowledge, systems within systems. So to recognize the whole system we must
acknowledge the stimulus-response relationship (causal or not) at each
level of complexity. So modernity is psychopathology as positive psychology
is to postmodernism; they're not different things. Positive psychology can
try to say it is a stand alone theory, but (in my agreement with JV-and
perhaps what he meant and I misunderstood) it is inherently a part of the
medical model of psychology and in particular it's emphasis on
psychopathology, it was a response to a stimuli, and now they're the same
system, inseparable. The same is true for postmodernism and modernity,
postmodernism cannot be separated from modernity and still exist. We need
to be clear that this does not mean that the medical model and modernity
are more *true* than the responses they generate, in fact the responses
represent an addition to them at a different level of complexity from the
same epistemology, that allows them to be more manifest and complete and
breach that zone of proximal development, which you again elude to at the
end. Not sure how much sense that made but some of that does mean we have a
cultural shadow that must be integrated if we are to individuate (align)
above and across onto-epistemic combinations that we are confused to
believe are problems/conflicts.

Can't wait for the next episode!!

I do wonder where the notion of effecting change through the relationship
and interpersonal neurobiology lie within that discussion, almost seeing it
as a process ontology in practice. It'd be cool to hear you guys touch on
that if possible.



Regards,

Nicholas G. Lattanzio, Psy.D.


On Fri, Feb 25, 2022 at 4:15 PM Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Premiering now, the first episode of the new cognitive science show,
> Psyche Pathology and Well-being, where John Vervake, Garri Hovhannisyan and
> I explore how we might develop a metapsychology of mental health that
> bridges science, subjectivity and wisdom:
>
> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.youtube.com_watch-3Fv-3DJ-2DeHKAIi1cE&d=DwIBaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=sgfLNY0fxm5kklMtwzMU-DQd9ZfpU9ApLyuUWro7x6c&s=afUhCWDkVKeGM4o_p1RfbCJx5VHHm8ffb9NOg7PfZcc&e= 
>
>
>
>
>
> ___________________________________________
>
> Gregg Henriques, Ph.D.
> President of the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration
> (2022)
>
> Professor
> Department of Graduate Psychology
> 216 Johnston Hall
> MSC 7401
> James Madison University
> Harrisonburg, VA 22807
> (540) 568-7857 (phone)
> (540) 568-4747 (fax)
>
>
> *Be that which enhances dignity and well-being with integrity.*
>
> Check out the Unified Theory Of Knowledge homepage at:
>
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