Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Why the underlying details

Now I am going to discuss why I plan to go into great detail regarding how I believe human nature works and results in mental health problems or conditions.

Often people and professionals who might try to help with the sort of problems and concerns I am discussing do not try to explain why they recommend doing the things they recommend doing.  This may be because they do not think it would be helpful, which may very well be true, or it might even be because they really do not know. In some ways we have become such a results oriented culture that we have lost the basis for why we do the things we do or what the main goals of our efforts really are.  This can lead to uncoordinated patchwork that might help a little with one problem but not really do much for a persons overall benefit in the long run.

I am by no means talking only about medications use for mental health issues, but this would often fit into this category and is a good example of what I am talking about.  I am not saying that there is an evil plot to sell medications that has led to our current circumstances where the main thing a person struggling with a mental health issue will receive for their condition is medications.  Rather it has developed much more innocently with most people involved having very sincere and good motives - to try to help those afflicted.  However, in reality what has happened is that there has been relatively little research into non-medication treatments for mental health conditions because it is virtually impossible to raise the money necessary to do the research or to recoup the money even if you find a successful non-medication treatment.

As a result most of the quality research and evidence for mental health treatment involves medications.  So professionals doing what they are supposed to do recommend the treatments with the most evidence for benefits.   It is also much easier to prescribe a drug for someone than to get into their very messy issues, which are often unresolvable with our current approaches and resources.

The problem is that with this approach at some point we start to get further away from the real and ultimate goals rather than closer, and I think we might be getting to that point.  Before going further though let me be absolutely clear.  I am not against medications for mental health conditions.  I am against viewing them as the sole solution or main treatment for most people for most mental health conditions.  

In my opinion we need a whole new understanding of human nature and behavior, and from this mental health conditions or problems, before we can really make significant progress.  My initial plan was to write mainly about addictions since I have been greatly affected by them, but then I realized my ideas on addictions would not necessarily make much sense without at least briefly explaining the underlying framework of human nature and behavior that these ideas are based upon. 

Therefore, I am going to attempt to briefly describe what makes us as humans act the way we do and feel the way we do.  I will be trying to do this from a variety of different perspectives, such as psychological, biochemical or physiological, and spiritual.  The exciting thing to me is that I think all these different perspectives point to the same answers. 

Another reason I will be trying to provide a fairly comprehensive framework for understanding human nature and our problems goes back to something I mentioned earlier.  I am not interested in arguing or debating about my beliefs and ideas.  However, it would feel unfair to me to simply throw out controversial ideas without their surrounding foundation, and whether I like it or not all ideas about human nature, addictions, and God seem to be controversial.  The controversy seems to be due to our tendency to grab onto a belief that is true, but then apply that true belief too broadly.  I will go into much more detail on this tendency later.

Finally, I will conclude with an idea I first heard from and therefore attribute to C.S. Lewis where he discusses the fact that if you are going in the wrong direction the answer is not to push harder in what you are doing but rather to turn around.  And the only way to know if you are currently going in the wrong direction is to have a big picture map that describes the landscape of human nature and where different paths lead.

A mentor of mine described it another way.  If you are baking a cake there is a certain order you must do things.  If you do not add things in that order and bake it at the right time you will not end up with a cake.  Obviously without at least a broad framework for what is going on with us, there is no way to determine a decent path to start on.  As a result we often end up working really hard trying to implement good ideas without finding or producing what we are striving for or looking to achieve.