Louis Theroux - By Reason of Insanity Part 1 (2015)

[stMarkus]

http://www.alluc.com/l/Louis-Theroux-By-Reason-Of-Insanity-S01E01-x264-C4TV/zbbeu7d3

 

Highly recommend this as it is interesting and insightful as Theroux's documentaries usually are plus it deals with mental illness. Of course there is the general idea of heavy medication that is put forward as a cure for their "illness" and pain of childhood trauma is sadly and expectedly left entirely undiscussed.

 

As a specific example, there was a man who had killed his father, whom he believed had sexually abused him and Theroux or the psychiatrist don't seem even slightly interested whether the father had actually done it. Instead Theroux keeps asking the patient questions like "Do you/did you love your father". I'm sure he could never prove that his father raped him as he was thirtysomething when he killed him but I kept imagining some analogous situation where in a documentary the interviewer keeps implying to a rape victim who had killed their assailant that they should have instead loved their rapist. How sick would that be?

[Devon Gibbons]

http://www.fdrpodcasts.com/#/2041/there-is-no-such-thing-as-mental-illness

[LovePrevails]

thanks for sharing I'm really enjoying it

this may also interest you

[PatrickC]

I like Louis a lot. He seems like a genuinely empathic chap that tries to understand a persons predicament. But for want of a less trite term to give him, he's very much a 'blue pill' kind of guy and rarely questions any kind of authority.

 

There was a distinct feeling of hopelessness watching that program. Like all the patients were in a state of self managing themselves and the psychs were merely looking for surface signs of psychosis. No real attempt to understand the root causes to their psychosis. Louis himself seemed to be looking for remorse, as a sign of better mental health too. Which was quite disappointing, since the accusation he made agianst his father wasn't explored much at all. I'm no expert of course and I appreciate that meds can probably have their place. But such a lack of curiosity into these peoples history was quite telling.

[Better Future]

Stefan doesn't believe in mental illness, so does that make all of these people guilty and responsible for their actions? Should they all be transferred to prison?

[the wandering shaman]

if you listen to the gabor mate and robet whitaker interviews (also read 'anatomy of an epidemic') to be clear stefan is saying he doesn't believe mental illness is just a biological condition that just 'happens to you due to dopamine or seratonin levels or genetic reasons and THATS IT, he posits that a psychosocial component may be the root cause ie that the environment or a persons treatment can cause these 'illnesses', robert whitaker also points out that 50% of the psychosis patients in the system were initially there in their first psychotic break from use of illicit drugs and then instead of treating this as a one off incident of drug psychosis that will wear off they put these people on anti psychotics for many years and these drugs over the years cause further mental decline and then become the cause of further episodes of psychosis and then more and more medications are piled on, since the use of anti psychotics the number of people utterly disabled by psychosis has increased a lot as has the rate of readmission for psychosis, i urge people to read 'anatomy of an epidemic' by robert whitaker he makes a VERY good argument as to how people can start off with short episodes of extreme psychological stress which can lead to patients then being sucked in to cocktails of psychoactive prescriptions which just leads to a downward spiral of further and much worse and much more reoccurring things like psychosis.

 

one woman started by taking a tablet as a child to stop bedwetting, she had a negative psychological reaction to the drug, they then put her on psychiatric drugs and over the years her mental stability spiraled to the point where she is now in a near catatonic state and cannot even talk.

 

my empirical sources can be found in anatomy of an epidemic by robert whitaker, he has a mountain of data and case studies on psychiatry in  that book

[Better Future]

he posits that a psychosocial component may be the root cause ie that the environment or a persons treatment can cause these 'illnesses'

I agree, I think the environment is the major cause in most cases of "mental illness". If this is the case, would it still be reasonable to relieve these people of personal responsibility when they commit crimes? 

[LovePrevails]

I like Louis a lot. He seems like a genuinely empathic chap that tries to understand a persons predicament. But for want of a less trite term to give him, he's very much a 'blue pill' kind of guy and rarely questions any kind of authority.

 

There was a distinct feeling of hopelessness watching that program. Like all the patients were in a state of self managing themselves and the psychs were merely looking for surface signs of psychosis. No real attempt to understand the root causes to their psychosis. Louis himself seemed to be looking for remorse, as a sign of better mental health too. Which was quite disappointing, since the accusation he made agianst his father wasn't explored much at all. I'm no expert of course and I appreciate that meds can probably have their place. But such a lack of curiosity into these peoples history was quite telling.

 

I actually kind of agree and thank you for bringing this to my attention as it crossed my mind, family was never really brought into question even though some of the patients were clearly very isolated as children.

 

No digging deep, no recovering from childhood trauma.

[stMarkus]

i urge people to read 'anatomy of an epidemic' by robert whitaker

 

Thanks for the suggestion, I am very interested in this.

 

I like the views of R.D. Laing on schizophrenia and other explicitly unintelligible behavior patterns. He takes the route of semantic/behavioral/cognitive analysis of the patients past life and childhood from the perspective of the self. Take for example a person claiming to be Jesus or Napoleon or what have you. How would that come to be? Say that as a child that person is denied the realization of the self by subtle and incessant suggestions to embody their parents' phantasy. In plain language that would mean to the child: "You can be no one but whom I tell you to be! You are what I say you are!". The parents' phantasy is eventually seamlessly accepted and everything appears well until the child (or adolescent usually) starts feeling the unreality of their phantasy-self. Now to escape the pain of that unreality they instinctively rebel with the original situation that was created for them by the parents. But since their whole self is built on the idea that "I am whomever my parents want me to be,"  they change that into "I am whomever I want to be" in an act of instinctual rebellion. In this the original self is never acknowledged; instead the parents' phantasy is exchanged for the child's phantasy: "I can be whomever anyone tells me to be but I was always a slave and now I'm free so I can be whomever I want to be i.e. Napoleon, Jesus, etc." In that way the parents' destructive phantasy is turned into the child's unintelligible behavior that is labelled as mentally ill and "treated" appropriately. The process is also compounded by the child's effort to break away from the phantasy which is a collective process within the whole family. Hence, if the child attempts to break the phantasy, all the other participants perceive that as threat to their own reality and vehemently disregard and attack the emerging real self of the child. Thus adding to the confusion and unreality of the child's sense of his self.

 

In Laing's books there are many real life examples of patients with serious schizophrenic symptoms who's evolution into insanity is paralleled with cogent analysis of their childhood, parents etc. The conclusions seem to lead very logically to behavioral and metaphysical reasons instead of any neurological impairment. This also seems to apply in the situations of this documentary and probably most similar situations.