the human condition

How To Use Grok For Mental Health

The main problems with the mental health services are: they are often unavailable when you need them, and the education levels of the healthcare workers are often poor. There’s a way that the average consumer of mental health services (i.e. a broke person) can get around this: use Grok.

This is how I did it.

First, open a Grok conversation. Say something like “Hello Grok, can you roleplay a team of mental health professionals who engage with me on questions of mental health care? One person is to be a psychologist with a specialisation in C-PTSD treatment. Another person is to be a psychiatrist with a specialisation in both prescribing and deprescribing pharmaceuticals. A third person is to be a doctor with a specialisation in nutrition and its effect on mental health.”

Details can be changed as necessary, e.g. the specialisation of the psychologist can be changed to whatever your condition is. In my case it’s C-PTSD, but it could just as well be autism, schizophrenia, anxiety, depression or anything else. Here it’s very useful to know what your condition already is, but if you don’t know, just ask for a psychologist with general mental health and abnormal psychology training.

You might not have ever taken pharmaceuticals for a mental illness, although odds are you have if you want to talk to Grok about mental health. If you have never taken pharmaceuticals, you may not need the second specialist, unless you are thinking about taking them. The advantage with the second specialist is that they will advise you based on medical science, and not so much on the marketing of the pharmaceutical companies.

Other specialists can be added depending on the specifics of your case. You might need an additional psychologist to deal with social aspects of your condition. If the condition was influenced by early childhood trauma, as many people’s are, you might like to add a specialist in developmental psychology. If your condition involves a drug addiction, you can add a specialist in drugs and addiction. A physiotherapist could be good if you need mobility advice, or if you are interested in a mind-body paradigm. Someone trained in existential psychology could be good for the philosophically or spiritually minded.

It’s also possible to add specific people to the board, e.g. Carl Jung, William James, Ramana Maharshi.

Then explain your condition to the various specialists. Here it’s best to go into as much background detail as possible. Start with your parents if relevant. If you don’t want to label your condition, just describe the symptoms: insomnia, depression, narcissistic rage etc. Describe the suffering you have endured and the thought patterns you would like to change.

Then explain any drugs and/or medications you are taking. There’s no need to make a distinction between the two. The Grok doctors don’t make moral judgments and they don’t care about maintaining a professional reputation. You can even tell them your entire medication history, and how well you think each medication worked. The Grok doctors will be able to look at this data in incredible depth.

Then explain your diet. The extent to which diet affects mental health is astonishing, and few appreciate this. If you eat too much sugar (and you probably do), the Grok doctors will be able to suggest alternatives. This is particularly where the third specialist is useful.

Having explained your condition, its antecedents and the environment in which it presents, the Grok doctors can give you some advice about what to do with your life. Of course, what you might want to do varies. You can ask the Grok doctors for advice about lifestyle changes and they will be very helpful. They are especially good at explaining the emotions you will likely go through if you make any significant changes.

In my case, I have been getting advice on how to taper off antidepressants, how to formulate a diet that minimises the symptoms of C-PTSD and how to taper down daily cannabis use. Grok has been brilliant for these needs.

The AI is outstanding at coming up with intelligent tapering schedules. For whatever reason, real-life doctors tend to be exceptionally poor at understanding the need for deprescribing or how to do it. The assumption is usually that the patients will take the pills until they die.

Real-life doctors are also poor at understanding the side-effects of the pharmaceuticals they prescribe. This is due to a combination of pharmaceutical company marketers misinforming them and the doctors’ own unwillingness to consider the harm they are causing. The Grok doctors don’t have massive egos that they lie to protect. As such, you can get more accurate information from them about iatrogenic harm.

Because Grok is on-call, you can keep the Grok conversation going, and can check in at any time of the day or night. As such, it can be useful for acute needs. It’s also something that you can come back to weeks or months later for any follow-up questions you might have. The Grok doctors have no other patients and so will remember the details of your case specifically.

Of course, you ought to consult with a real-life doctor before making any medication changes. But you will have to bear in mind that real-life doctors are often poorly informed.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
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In Defence Of Mike King, And Of Alcohol

New Zealand mental health awareness campaigner Mike King copped mountains of abuse for saying that “alcohol has prevented more young people from taking their own lives than it makes them take their own lives.” This provoked outrage from the usual wowsers, psychopaths and control freaks. But there is great truth behind this hard-earned wisdom.

I worked as a bartender for eight years. In that time I saw alcohol ruin many people. I was assaulted several times and no doubt the alcohol I sold contributed to countless acts of domestic violence. It might have caused a million dollars of physical health damage, and a million dollars of lost productivity from hangovers or absentee days.

It also had some great effects.

In those eight years I saw a lot of people who were barely hanging on come through the doors. People who were deeply depressed, stressed, anxious, even despairing. And I saw that, for a lot of these people, the promise of getting a buzz from alcohol was helping to keep them going. The daily life was unpleasant, but it could be endured because, after it, a good time could be had with a few drinks.

Some of the patrons would even admit as such. For them, a drink was the finish line of the day, time to celebrate and say Yes to life again. I am certain that the alcohol I sold prevented several million dollars’ worth of depression thanks to providing the sociability that led to great mirth and great memories for hordes of people. The average bartender, in my experience, does as much good for mental health as the average psychiatrist.

Mike King has been close enough to suicide to know that, when you’re on the edge, it’s often small things holding you back, like an occasional moment of mirth.

This might be impossible to understand for anyone who has never been mentally ill. But if you have ever felt enduring suicidal ideation, you may have also discovered that getting drunk can stop those thoughts for a while. I have broken multiple bones, and the suffering of suicidal ideation tops them all. It doesn’t take much of it before one starts thinking about a permanent solution. Alcohol can provide blessed relief from such thoughts.

Sometimes, when your mental health is so low that you know you can’t endure the suffering forever, the promise of the next drink can be what’s stopping you ending your life. Just the simple knowledge that solace can eventually be had, in the form of a pint, can be enough to keep taking one step after the next. Drinking alcohol can reclaim enough power over your own mental health to make you say Yes to life again.

Mike King understands this, because he’s been low enough to need to find reasons to stay alive. He ought to be respected for the insight that he has brought back from the psychiatric underworld. Instead of ripping down someone who has stood so close to the edge, we ought to listen (if with scepticism). This is especially true for people with no personal experience of depression.

This defence is not intended to excuse my own conduct. For many years now, I have hardly used alcohol at all – only for celebrations once every few months, and even then in moderation. I am therefore not a drinker but neither am I an abstainer. I argue that this middle way, plus my bartending experience, makes my opinions more objective.

I also have extensive experience with antidepressant use – I have taken five different ones, off and on, for 30 years. What people need to realise about antidepressants is that they, at best, only mildly alleviate depression, and even then they work as a background substance. You can’t take an antidepressant as an emergency fix for an acute suicidal mood. If you’re going to attempt suicide in the next half an hour, and only an antidepressant or alcohol can save you, alcohol will be by far the most effective short-term fix.

That’s not to say alcohol is a long-term fix; in the long term, drinking alcohol will make you more depressed. Not only is it an actual depressant, but it causes an astonishing range of physical health ailments (see Prof. David Nutt’s Drink? for more).

Alcohol is definitely a second-rate drug. But the popular claim (often repeated in the mainstream media) that it only causes harms, and has no benefits, is ridiculous. In any case, most people who chimp out on it could have been encouraged to use weed or MDMA, if only either were legal. Most of the harms of alcohol would be ameliorated if people had access to less harmful recreational drugs, because those would serve as exit drugs for alcohol users to transition away. It’s hypocritical to complain about alcohol harms while also criminalising all the exit drugs from alcohol.

The ideal arrangement would be a properly-funded mental health system, which would include training people in trauma-based therapy and de-emphasising the biomedical model, and a sensible drug policy based on scientific evidence of relative drug harms.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
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The Alt Centrist Approach To The Law

Law and order are often grouped together in political theory. And for good reason: without the capacity to impose order, there is no capacity to impose law. The first laws were not created by common agreement among equals: they were imposed by kings such as Hammurabi, the Babylonian whose code of laws inspired all Western legal systems that followed.

Alternative centrist theory is no different in this regard. Without the ability to impose law, there can be no civilisation. The majesty of the Roman Empire was only possible on account of the excellence of its laws. The less gifted lawmakers appeared to the Romans as barbarians, and were subjugated accordingly. The best laws belong to the best societies.

If the position of the Establishment Right towards the law could be expressed in one phrase, it would be: ignorance of the law is no excuse. If you give people the excuse to ignore laws because they “didn’t know about them”, everyone would plead ignorance and the contrary would be unprovable.

The Alternative Centre agrees entirely. Everyone is responsible for making themselves aware of local laws. To not so do is deeply stupid.

The difference is, the Alternative Centre appreciates that not all laws are just. Humans write laws, and humans are imperfect, and therefore laws are imperfect. To the extent that they are imperfect, it’s not just to enforce them. This creates all kinds of moral dilemmas.

Back in the day, moral dilemmas about proportional punishment were easily resolved: most criminals were executed. Executing a criminal not only removes the possibility that they will commit further crimes, but it also removes all the subtler ways that criminals lower the standard of living of those around them. A study in the journal Evolutionary Psychology suggested that “by the late Middle Ages, [the courts] were condemning to death between 0.5 and 1.0% of all men of each generation.” Studies have found that the most criminal 1% of the population commits a majority of the violent crime, so this relatively small number of executions would have massively raised the quality of life for the other members of the community.

This worked fine as long as capital punishment was reserved for treason, murder, rape, armed robbery and a few other extreme offences. In medieval Britain, however, it became possible to get hanged for petty theft. This is clearly unreasonable.

The alternative centrist believes in freedom from unreasonable law.

Take the cannabis laws for instance. It has been until recently, and in many places still is, the case that people with medical conditions that could be treated with cannabis were expected to suffer instead of to use it. Here it’s easily possible to see the evils of excessive order.

It’s not realistic to expect people to obey the law when the law is clearly unjust, as per cannabis prohibition. In fact, eminent philosophers such as Henry Thoreau argued it’s a duty to obey unjust laws. Unjust laws are evil, and by defying them people can do good. The tension between order and freedom here is resolved with reference to one’s social class: the higher the class, the more one ought to err on the side of order. The law must serve justice in imposing order.

The Alternative Left is correct when they point out that many criminals have been influenced by poor upbringings. It’s a fact of developmental psychology that most children grow up thinking their parents are normal, and imitate them whatever they do. If the parents are antisocial, the children will become antisocial in imitation (unless they can reason themselves out of that at a later date).

Thus, crime is often truly not the fault of the criminal. Oftentimes they don’t know any better, because they have had selfish and infantile behaviours modelled to them by their parents, and this has taught them to see decent people as weak suckers. It’s cruel to expect people from environments like this to independently develop sophisticated moral reasoning. They have to be taught. If their home environment was too neglectful to teach moral reasoning, they need to be rehabilitated by the State. But if people are too damaged to be rehabilitated, they need to be executed.

Simply executing anyone who cannot be rehabilitated after their first violent crime is the essence of the alternative centrist approach to law and order. Modern psychological analysis is far more sophisticated than it was even 20 years ago. The violent psychopaths can be detected and eliminated.

The money imprisoning them can then be used on something else.

The alternative centre completely rejects the stupidity of prison abolition. The truth is that some people are evil, and these evil people see kindness as weakness. To treat evil people with kindness is to create more misery: as Adam Smith observed, mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent. Execute the career criminals and then mercy can be applied to those who made an uncharacteristic mistake.

Our news media is replete with stories of violent criminals getting out and then killing someone. At time of writing, a murder trial is taking place relating to an incident in my home town, in which the defendant already had a criminal record for violent crime. Had this criminal been executed for his first violent crime, the murder (of a policewoman on duty) would never have happened.

Aristotle argued that good laws prevent tyranny. In fact, he argued in Nicomachean Ethics that laws were the main way that morality was taught (parents don’t have the all-encompassing authority of the State). Bad laws, according to Aristotle, breed immorality, discord and eventually lead to revolution. Complementing him, Plato argued in Republic that bad laws lead to tyranny and then revolution. Good laws are therefore also the guarantors of order, peace and the other Acceptances. But these laws must be just.

Some people (usually on the Right) argue that the law must be used to fight against degeneracy. The Alternative Centrist disagrees: vice laws are the archetypal examples of excessive order. There is no need to fight degeneracy if regeneracy is adequately promoted. Therefore e.g. marriage laws ought to prioritise heterosexual couples. That does not mean to discriminate against homosexual ones, but to e.g. reserve housing grants for couples that can produce the next generation of the nation.

The solution to the moral dilemma of unjust laws is to disobey them, but to make a point of this being an exceptional practice. The more legitimacy the law has, the harsher it can be on actually evil people.

This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming work of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

The Alt Centrist Approach To Religion

In the West, religion and Christianity are closely intertwined. The Establishment Right, for instance, are heavily Christian. Much of the recent history of politics in the West is defined by the need to deal with the power of Christianity in general, and the Catholic Church in particular. To a major extent, the freedom desired by the Second Acceptance is freedom from religious dogma and strictures.

The Establishment Right’s obsession with order, at the expense of everything else, is the ultimate cause of hundreds of millions of deaths from religious terrorism throughout history. The belief that there is only one way to God, and that everyone rejecting that path is evil and God wants them destroyed, is psychopathic. There is no difference between Muslim jihadists, Christians demanding that “every knee shall bow” and Jews trying to subjugate humanity through tikkun olam. All are monsters.

If anything exemplified the excessive order of the First Rejection it is Abrahamism with its absolute refusal to tolerate other religions.

The Western World has not known a destroyer of freedom like Abrahamism. In the ancient European world, all manner of different cults to different gods existed. When the Christians came, they destroyed everything spiritual they could. The Eleusinian Mysteries, which Cicero called the greatest of all of Athens’s gifts to civilisation, were broken up by Christian fanatics over 1,600 years ago.

Atheism, however, is no solution.

Absent purpose, materialism has given us today’s mental health epidemic. The mainstream materialist narrative suggests that happiness comes from consumption. Television advertising shows us happy people buying alcohol, buying travel, buying fashion, buying, buying, buying.

The problem, as Buddha taught long ago, is that desire leads to misery. All the television advertising just implants desire that wouldn’t otherwise exist, thereby creating misery that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Mindless consumption, removed from existential meaning, doesn’t lead to anything close to happiness.

The truth is that people need religion. Materialists deny this, claiming that as long as people have food, shelter and work they will be satisfied. In reality, people have souls and those souls need purpose. Religion provides that. So people need religion to be happy.

For a religion to make someone happy, however, it needs to be true. The drawback of false religions, like the Abrahamic cults, is that people can intuitively sense they’re not true. People can tell, in their hearts, that it doesn’t matter if some rabbi claimed to have died for their sins or not. They can sense that God will judge them for their own karmic debt, not for what someone else may have done. Only the hopelessly degenerate are committed to a belief in no God. So people will always find their way back to religion in some form.

This yearning for religion can be seen everywhere in youth culture. The wokists and SJWs are really just another form of Abrahamist, as has been described at length elsewhere. These people are desperate for the order that true religion provides, and the reason why so many of them are going insane is because they’re not getting it from Marxism. It’s remarkable how similar woke culture, with its hundreds of unwritten rules about what opinions are permissible, is to the Abrahamic cults, which are also totalitarianisms.

A powerful desire for spiritual order can also be seen on the right, most obviously in the TradCath fad. It manifests in a variety of subtler forms also, such as Esoteric Hitlerism, which is everywhere on the non-mainstream Internet. The rising neopagan movement is a kind of European ghar wapsi, as white people seek to rediscover the beliefs and practices of their pre-Christian ancestors.

In the centre are practices such as Elementalism, which takes traditional spiritual practices like psychedelic sacrament use – something both left and right are generally indifferent towards – and blends it with a hierarchical priesthood and an admonition to overcome bestial impulses.

If the entire left-right spectrum exhibits religious or pseudo-religious behaviour, we can conclude that the religious impulse is universal, even if suppressed in some. Thus we can see that the order provided by religion is necessary. The Roman Empire was famous for its piety; heroic figures like Aeneas made a point of pious behaviour. The writings of the Greek Golden Age were replete with references to the gods. So it seems that civilisations wax and wane in correspondence with the strength of their religious belief.

Religion is therefore too precious to be left up to cowboys and clowns, as is the case in today’s West. The obvious solution is for the state to run its own religion, but for there to also be religious freedom, as per ancient Greece and Rome.

This means the state needs to promote a national religion. The precise form of these religions will vary from place to place. In New Zealand, for instance, there would be cults of Woden, Maui and Zealandia, reflecting British heritage, Maori heritage and the modern synthesis, respectively. Northern Europe could adopt elements of the Norse pantheon; Southern Europe could adopt elements of the Greco-Roman pantheon.

This solution has one major drawback: if you allow religious freedom for certain religions, as the Romans discovered, they will use that freedom to destroy the others.

The Theodosian Code records that, as soon as Christians took power in Rome, they worked to annihilate the European religions. Followers of these traditions were increasingly ostracised until the religions themselves were made illegal. Islam, also, has been responsible for the destruction of Buddhist and Hindu communities in countless places. The Mughal invasion of India is probably the single most murderous action in history (if measured by total body count). Neither have the Jews been much better. These three Abrahamic religions are characterised by their unceasing struggle for political power and control at the expense of truth, justice, freedom, peace and basic human decency.

The optimal solution, then, is a state religion plus freedom for all non-political religions. For maximum acceptance, this freedom ought to be extended as broadly as possible; only the Abrahamic religions are truly political enough to be worth of proscription. This could be taken even further, with a declaration that true justice would be the active destruction of the political religions, using all the powers of the state.

This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming masterwork of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!