psychology – Page 122

Does Cannabis Prohibition Cause Schizophrenia?

In The Politics of Experience, the great Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing presents his own understanding on the ultimate causes of schizophrenia. He concludes that schizophrenia is not mainly caused by either genetic or environmental factors but rather “the experience and behaviour that gets labelled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.”

This is a position that many schizophrenics could themselves agree with. Common to the schizophrenic experience is a sense of having been “skewered” by the world, in that one is doomed if one chooses a certain option but also doomed if one does not choose it. This kind of Catch-22 situation is regularly accompanied by a level of anxiety that is impossible to live with, followed by the mind starting to disintegrate as a way of relieving unendurable levels of stress.

It’s not a position that receives much sympathy from the psychiatric establishment, who are almost all hard-core worshippers of the cult of materialism. Most Western psychiatrists cannot conceive of mental health in any other terms than brain chemistry, and they cannot conceive of treatment in any other fashion than dishing out pills. That someone has been driven insane by society is an unpalatable possibility.

Cannabis use is believed by many to be the cause of schizophrenia, because the association between cannabis use and getting such a mental health diagnosis has long been noted. In the mainstream Western model, it is assumed that the causal relationship of these two variables goes in the direction of cannabis use causing people to develop psychosis and schizophrenia.

This has led to many psychiatrists telling their patients that not only are the patients themselves to blame for their own mental illness (which leads to terrible feelings of guilt and self-recrimination) but that only by avoiding cannabis can they hope to make a recovery.

The problem with this approach is, obviously, that cannabis is medicinal, and the vast majority of cannabis users know this, and so being told such things by a mental health “professional” is confusing, frustrating and enraging.

Getting lectured about what one needs to do to stay mentally healthy by a person who has never had schizophrenia, who has never had any experience with psychosis and who has almost certainly never used cannabis, much less a major psychedelic, is a difficult thing for any person to put up with, let alone an experienced psychonaut. When that person doing the lecturing is actually ignoring one’s own lived experiences with the medicinal qualities of the substance, it’s mind-boggling.

Because of cannabis prohibition, mental health care workers are extremely reluctant to tell the truth about the medicinal qualities of the substance (if they’re even aware of them). After all, if they recommend medicinal cannabis to a patient in a place where it’s illegal, they’re effectively recommending that the patient commit a crime, which comes with various ethical issues.

The problem is that the patient is frequently aware that the mental health care workers are lying by omission, which puts them in an impossible situation – exactly the kind of situation described by Laing as schizophrenogenic. If you have problems knowing what’s real and what isn’t, talking to someone who you know is lying to you while that person is also claiming to be helping you is just too much for the human mind to cope with.

If doctors and psychiatrists are there to help us, why don’t they tell us the truth about the medicine that does so much to relieve abominable suffering? The fact that they refuse to do so only feeds into the perception often held by paranoid schizophrenics – that they really are out to get you. It also makes people wonder if they’ve fallen into a time warp of some kind.

Prohibition of cannabis medicine is so absurd, so ludicrous, that it actually causes mental illness in the people whose lives are affected by it.

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All Of Us Carve A Niche Out Of Nature With Violence

Humans are part of Nature, and therefore human nature is also red in tooth and claw

The Internet is full of people trying to score points from each other in the eternal game of oneupmanship that all social species engage in. In the West, with our heavily Jesus-based culture of masochism, we demonstrate that we are better than other people by showing how much violence and injustice has been done to us in the past. The more we are like martyrs, the better.

Our cult of victimhood impels us to emphasise how badly our ancestors suffered at the hands of The Man, whether these ancestors be women, lower classes or other races. It also impels us to emphasise how our own ancestors did no wrong, unless they were misled by some enemy without or betrayed by an enemy within.

It’s as if each one of us holds the power to act as an instrument of karma, and past injustices done to us give us the right to do injustices to other people. And like so much of modern society, it’s absolute horseshit.

Native people often describe an idyllic past in which they all lived in peace and in perfect harmony with Nature, but the truth is infinitely more violent. Although many native peoples had sophisticated cultural strategies for minimising the carnage of warfare (such as ritualising it), it’s clear from any scientific perspective that all human groups are guilty of using violence, and must be.

This can be proven by simply looking around at the laws by which Nature operates. The price for being peaceful is not to suffer persecution – it’s to be dead. A will to engage in peaceful conduct is not necessarily going to be reciprocated by other people, and almost certainly will not be by wild animals, and if it isn’t, there might not be much one can do about it.

It is impossible to occupy any niche in Nature without violence, because for every niche one might occupy within Nature there is another organism willing to use violence to drive one out of it. This is true of whatever level of the Great Fractal one wants to look at it on.

There are no creatures out there that can survive without preying on either other creatures or on plants. Any creature that wishes to attend to its own basic metabolic needs is forced to conduct violence against other life to get energy or nutrients.

This is not only true in the immediate food-gathering sense but in the long term mating sense as well. Males of sexually reproducing species must attract their females through demonstrating a capacity for resource acquisition, and this is done through acquiring and defending a territory, which is almost impossible to do without violence.

In order to build a house, a person has to cut down trees in the forest to clear a space, destroying the habitat of all of the creatures that dwelt within. But more importantly, in order to defend that space against the forms of life that would occupy it, that person has to be ready to kill.

All manner of parasites, like bugs, spiders, weevils etc. have to be killed for the sake of food security and to avoid destruction of property; all vermin like mice and rats have to be killed for similar reasons; larger animals have to be killed lest they destroy the property; humans have to be killed lest they take over and try to enslave one.

Almost wherever the reader is sitting in the world right now, someone was killed for it at some point in the past. Someone will have died so that someone else could secure rights to that land, even if it was before recorded history. For your ancestors to have carved out a niche in this place, where food has to be hunted and agriculture demands the destruction of ecosystems, someone and (not or) somethings had to be killed.

All of us are descended from killers. Every single one of us. There’s simply no other way to occupy a niche within Nature in the first place. If being descended from peaceful people awards some sort of moral superiority when it comes to discussing political issues, there are none of us still living who can claim it.

Anyone claiming that their ancestors were peaceful by nature or that they are genetically disinclined towards violence is a liar.

Ethnomasochism

In abnormal psychology, masochism is known as a paraphilia that is characterised by “the derivation of sexual gratification from being subjected to physical pain or humiliation by oneself or another person” (Merriam-Webster). The depictions of masochism in films such as Secretary and books such as Fifty Shades of Gray are, while dramatised, essentially accurate.

Some masochistic individuals have displaced this ordinarily individualistic sentiment with a collective one. It’s common for Jewish men to engage in Nazi roleplay with hired dominatrices, for example. Central to this is the idea that an individual can derive pleasure from being called a “filthy Jew” or similar by a dominatrix, as long as they are able to identify with the race that is being derided.

Ethnomasochism is essentially masochism taken to the collective level of the race. Instead of begging to be whipped by a woman on account of personal transgressions, the ethnomasochist invites abuse on account of the collective transgressions of those sharing a skin colour with them.

It’s becoming common to encounter ethnomasochists on the Internet, especially on social media. They can be found wringing their hands about the past crimes of people of European descent, stereotyping all European colonists as rapists, thieves and murderers.

They will describe a world history in which all races lived in harmony until Europeans started spewing out of Europe like demons out of the mouth of Hell, bringing misery and suffering to all they encountered, for no other motivation than the pure malice their stony hearts held for all life. Usually this comes with a demand that white people collectively make up for the crimes of their race by means of some kind of reparations.

In other words, white people are bad boys that need to be punished.

One can almost guarantee that the sort of person who is an ethnomasochist is also privileged, middle-class and holds deep Marxist sympathies. Chances are high they have a micropenis or are impotent when unable to live out some race-based humiliation fantasy, such as getting cucked by a “black bull”, and chances are also high that they hold much contempt for white working-class people, who they are happy to stereotype as ignorant, violent and lazy (sound familiar?).

To this end, we can define ethnomasochism as “the derivation of sexual gratification from being subjected to physical pain or humiliation by oneself or another person on account of belonging to a particular, despised race.”

Ironically, this movement is actually more racist than normal people are. White people who have a fetish about seeing their girlfriends railed by black men are very, very similar to men who have a fetish about seeing their girlfriends railed by dogs. Part of the thrill comes from the degradation implied by having sex with a creature that’s less than human.

Moreover, a person can only feel shame on account of belonging to a particular race to the degree that they identify with being a member of that race (i.e. to the degree that their identity excludes other races). So it’s only possible to feel ethnomasochistic sentiments about the past crimes of the white race if one identifies strongly with one’s skin colour to the exclusion of other personal qualities – which is the definition of racist.

Curiously, it’s impossible to cure ethnomasochism by subjecting a person with it to hearing a non-white person talk about how they think there’s nothing wrong with white people, or how they were glad for European colonisation because it saved them from the vagaries of Nature, or from cannibalism or ceaseless tribal warfare, or because it gave them an opportunity to engage with the modern world and the wealth of accumulated wisdom going back to before Socrates, Plato, Buddha, Lao Tzu and Confucius..

Because the ethnomasochist is racist, they will often assume that non-white people do not have the intelligence to reason their way to original conclusions, and thus their opinions are irrational and therefore can be rejected in favour of the anti-white narrative.

The cure for ethnomasochism is reading a history book, because an appreciation of history will tell you that the whole world is terrible and always has been, whether or not white people showed up. All non-white races have treated each other with horrific disregard at various points because that is human nature when exposed to the environmental challenges presented by planet Earth.

The Distinction Between Real Medicine and Corporate Medicine

Medicine is a highly profitable industry

Most people visit their doctor under the impression that medicine is a singular, monolithic discipline and that all doctors learn and practice the same things at medical school. This is a similar level of trust to what was once given to priests, who doctors have now replaced. As with priests, this is a level of trust that is no longer justified, because an ever-increasing number of doctors have rejected real medicine in favour of a corporate imitation of it.

The purpose of real medicine is described in the Hippocratic Oath. In this oath the physician vows that “I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm.”

Corporate medicine is different. The purpose of corporate medicine is to make money, usually as a direct consequence of the fact that sick people are also very anxious and anxious people can be easily parted with their money, as long as you can convincingly reassure them.

The logic of profit maximisation leads to a number of negative outcomes for the patient.

For example, consider the following moral dilemma. A doctor is treating a patient who is suffering from a disease that can be easily cured by two medicines. Medicine A has a 95% efficacy and generates $100 in profit. Medicine B has a 90% efficacy but generates $200 in profit. Which is prescribed?

In real medicine, Medicine A would be prescribed all the time, but this is not always the case in our societies, and sometimes it is never the case. If Medicine B generates more profits, then there is always an incentive for the doctor writing the prescription to let the balance of their judgement fall in favour of Medicine B.

Sound implausible? A 2016 study by ProPublica showed that pharmaceutical companies only have to buy American doctors a few meals to have a significantly higher chance of getting their brand of pharmaceutical prescribed, and those doctors being paid $5,000 or more are the most likely of all to do so.

In real medicine, a substance is medicinal if it alleviates the suffering of the patient. In corporate medicine, a substance is medicinal if it creates a profit for the shareholders of the manufacturer of that medicine.

So in the case of cannabis, because no profit can be made from the substance there are no pharmaceutical company representatives who are telling doctors about how useful cannabis products are, and so these doctors (who show little interest in keeping up with new research after they have graduated) don’t know anything about them, and engage in no mechanism that might inform them.

Doctors who practice corporate medicine are never pleased to hear that their patients have given up drinking alcohol or smoking tobacco for the sake of using cannabis. Alcohol and tobacco not only produce massive profits for corporations and therefore the potential for kickbacks to doctors (unlike cannabis) but they also make people sick, which means that they can be sold other medicines. Cannabis, by contrast, cannot be profited from.

The easiest way to tell if your doctor is acting to alleviate your suffering or simply to make money off it is to ask them about the medicinal value of cannabis. Because cannabis can easily be grown at home, there is no real way for doctors to make money off it. Therefore, a doctor practicing corporate medicine will play down the positive effects of cannabis, even going as far as to deny that there are any, and they will play up the negative sides.

Of course, cannabis might not be any good for your condition but from listening to the doctor’s answer to your question you will be able to determine if they have kept up with new information in the medicinal field.