This is supposed to be “new” research and implies a new discovery? What a joke. Anyone who has ever worked with any population of the “mentally ill” who has half a brain and is not in deep denial know that trauma and abuse is key in almost everyone’s serious mental illness!! Simple listening and observation is all that is required.
Acting like this is new information is insulting to those of us who live and breath this sort of thing.
The article in Medical News Today reports on a study in the British Journal of Psychiatry. Welcome to reality all you wise doctors of medicine.
My first thought on reading the subject header was an expletive.
It frustrates me that my pdoc isn’t even interested in discussing my early life experiences, and that my family (adoptive) assumes that my ‘problems’ are only natural as my biological mother had vaguely known psychological problems (lots of assumption on this part); therefore, it makes perfect sense for me to be medicated to correct these biological defects.
What about the negative experiences that have impacted me over the years? (There may be some denial here on the part of my parents as my dad drank a lot when I was a kid and my mom was a classic enabler. It’s easier to blame my biological parents’ genes.)
So yes, there may be a physiological/hereditary basis insofar as it has made me more susceptible to stressors. In the absence of professional help in addressing those stressors, I’ve had to independently psychoanalyse my own childhood and early adult years, and only that way have I been able to shed some of the self-limiting behaviours that came out of my coping with those experiences.
I don’t think most mental health professionals have a clue, but have gravitated towards one particular modality of analysis and try to fit their clients’ cases into that. Unfortunately, drugs are the easiest modality to revert to.
Thanks for sharing that background on Marjorie Wallace, Sloopy! Fascinating.
I have been away on holidays – It is good to be back to my own computer and access to your site. It will be good to catch up on your blogs.
What, life experiences affect mood and personality! What will they come up with next – external stimuli may be related to behavior? Again it is astounding how much credit these guys get for stating the obvious.
It’s insulting to us who live and breathe this sort of thing, as it is to all the profesionals/researchers, who’ve said and tried to get this acknowledged, some of them for decades/decades ago. Laing, Bateson, Mosher (Now, some people may say that they weren’t into abuse, but into some communication-stuff. Exactly. Abusive communication), Hammersley and Read just recently, etc.
I like that they try and give it a little twist, and make it a biological thing anyway… Of course, it’s not that Kristina simply reacts to having been violently, physically assaulted, so that she lost the child she was pregnant with, nope. If that’s of any significance at all (I guess, it’s just as irrelevant as the permanent bombing to the Yugoslavs, or the Famine to the Irish… ), it maybe has messed with her brain, and made it diseased, like in Alzheimer’s or diabetes. So, take your meds and get “stabilized”! Then maybe – maybe NOT – we can talk about being beaten up and losing your child… Arrrgh!
It’s amazing how psychiatry has to suspend all logical thinking in order to fit the facts into its rigid medical model. It is like watching an infant awkwardly trying to ram a round peg in a square hole.
When Belgrade was carpet-bombed in the 1999 NATO ambush on the city, many of its residents were left so traumatised by the aggression that they became acutely psychotic. Around 7% of the city went mad.
Psychiatrists working behind the facade of Western “aid charities” immediately lept to the challenge of “treating” the hapless Yugoslavs. Lucrative is that madness…
However, instead of making the fairly obvious link that months of aerial bombardment is quite enough to turn anyone insane, psychiatrists actually claimed there was a matter of genetics.
Marjorie Wallace – perhaps the most odious propagandist for British psychiatry – was one of those leading the claim that the Yugoslavs were somehow pre-disposed to madness, and how the bombing was irrelevant. The Yugoslavs would have gone mad with or without the bombing, you see! Very comforting news for the cruise-missile leftists.
Wallace levelled the same slur at the Irish, too. Born mad, the lot of them. The Great Famine killed around a quarter of the population of Ireland. More than a million people perished. Unsurprisingly, the trauma of watching family, friends and neighbours dying in the gutter sent thousands of people mad.
But Wallace claims it wasn’t the trauma that turned them crazy. It was because the Irish are genetically flawed. They have diseased minds, she says, and that pre-disposes them to madness.
Is it any wonder the fascist thinkers behind “modern” psychiatry were drawn to Nazism?
I could have told them that years ago and saved them the cost of the research lol. It’s been known for ages that abuse can result in adult psychosis, and that the earlier the abuse happens, the more likely you are to have psychosis.
I wish they’d stop researching and start listening to patients.