Bipolar Disorder Archives - Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog & Pages

Can vMEMES cause Clinical Depression..?

Updated: 24 January 2019 The Gravesian approach lies at the core of Integrated SocioPsychology. The following is a plea to psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, mental health workers and those involved in research into various areas of psychopathology to examine rigorously Clare W Graves research with a view to its implications for mental health conditions. There are literally millions of people whose suffering could be alleviated if we understood more of the psychological processes underlying it. There are a multiplicity of reasons why the work of Clare W Graves (1970, 1971b/2002, 1978/2005) needs to be taken up much more comprehensively by the academic communities and investigated rigorously for its validity. (Which will result in a much higher profile and wider acceptance of his theory.) One of these reasons, I propose, is the applicability to mental health of the Gravesian approach. Strangely enough, for all the many champions of Graves’ work and the Spiral Dynamics ‘build’ developed by Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996), little has been said about the relationship between Graves’ Spiral of motivational systems (vMEMES) and psychological disorders. Although my plea is for research into the Gravesian approach related to all forms of mental illness, in this piece I will be focusing primarily on… Read More

23/01/2019

What is Mental Illness? #2

PART 2 Underpinning the attempts to categorise and classify mental illness are 4 broad approaches… 1.Deviation from statistical norms (statistical infrequency) This is based on the notion that abnormal thought and behaviour are pretty rare in the general population. The scores of most human characteristics and behaviours, when measured, tend to fall fairly evenly about the mean, giving the bell curve of normal distribution. Eg: there are a lot of people who are ‘averagely’ tall or aggressive whereas very few people are very small or highly aggressive. Thus, there are as many people/scores above the mean as below it in a normal distribution. The further you travel from the mean, the fewer people/scores there are in the population. In a normal distribution – see graphic above – the majority of individuals are clustered around the mean. In a normal distribution the scores of 95.5% of the population will fall within 2 standard deviations from the mean. Scores beyond 2 standard deviations are considered statistically infrequent and, therefore, abnormal. Thus, thoughts and behaviours which occur in 4.5% or less of the population can be considered abnormal. As a way of defining what is meant by mental illness, this approach works well for… Read More

09/06/2016
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Glossary B

Nos A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P-Q R S T U V W X-Y-Z Back Region: any area if social context in which, according to Erving Goffman (1969), a person is able to relax from the role playing and ‘peformance’ required by the front region, to create or preserve a particular impression. Goffman’s concept of different roles in different regions fits with Robert Dilts’ Neurological Levels model (1991), in which Identity and the Values & Beliefs which flow from Identity need to be matched to the Environment for someone to cope in a sustainable manner. Backcasting: sometimes seen as the opposite to forecasting, this involves identification of a particular future scenario and tracing its origins and lines of development back to the present. Balance Theory: based on Fritz Heider’s (1946) assertion that people like to be consistent in their attitudes – ie: in a state of balance – this is the idea that people will experience cognitive dissonance if their attitudes, likings, dislikings, etc, are out of balance and so will attempt to resolve the conflict and get back in balance. For example, if people in relationships find… Read More

16/03/2016

On Being Sane in Insane Places

Updated: 19 January 2018 David Rosenhan’s classic 1973 study remains one of the most important in the field of mental health. For all its faults – and there are a number of serious ones – it almost encapsulates the difficulties in trying to determine if someone is mentally ill. The last half of the 20th Century and the first decades of the 21st have witnessed virtual ‘epidemics’ of ‘mental illness’ inflicting themselves upon the Western world. These ‘epidemics’ have, in turn, spawned huge industries in mental health care and pharmacology – and there is increasing concern about the role of the pharmaceutical industry in influencing what is classified as mental illness and how such illnesses are treated. Lisa Cosgrove & Sheldon Krimsky’s 2012 expose is just one of many focusing on just how many of the authors of the Diagnostical & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – latest version DSM-5 (2015) – more and more have financial interests in the pharmaceutical industry. Thus, to some, it looks like the ORANGE vMEME’s desire for profit is driving changes in DSM – the medicalisation of mental illness that can be cured, or at least managed, by chemotherapy. Opponents to this direction tend to favour GREEN’s motif… Read More

29/12/2015
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What is Mental Illness?

Relaunched: 9 May 2019 There are some very good reasons to try to define what mental illness is and, as a corollary, what good mental health is. For example, if a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist is to treat a patient, they must be able to identify the illness. For psychiatrists and clinical psychologists to be able to recognise illnesses reliably means having a classification system which lists the symptoms (indicators) of the various illnesses. Then, when the illness is correctly identified, the appropriate treatment can be administered. Good mental health is the recognised standard to be achieved via application of the treatment. Also, it is only by linking symptoms together to recognise the syndrome of the illness that is it then possible to search for causes of the illness (aetiology) and apply or develop a treatment for the illness. The example often used to justify this position is that of Richard von Krafft-Ebing. A medical student in the 19th Century, he linked together the symptoms of what we now call Syphilis – delusion, forgetfulness, mental deterioration, eventually paralysis and finally death – to form the syndrome of what he called ‘General Paresis’. From this he established (1886) that General Paresis was caused by infection… Read More

04/11/2015

Suicide?

Updated: 20 July 2013 Early in 2013 The Guardian’s James Meikle, based upon data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), reported that 6,045 suicides were recorded in the UK among people aged 15 and over during 2011. This figure represented a significant rise that, unfortunately, was part of an upward trend. (In 2001, Kevin Brewer noted that suicides in the UK were about 4,000 per year.) The suicide rate was 11.8 deaths per 100,000 people, the highest since 2004. In England, the suicide rate was 10.4 deaths per 100,000; highest in the north-east, at 12.9, and lowest in London, at 8.9. In Wales, the suicide rate was 13.9, up from 10.7 in 2009. Meikle acknowledged that suicide rates were slightly lower in Northern Ireland – ie: 289 suicides in 2011, down from 313 in 2010 – and Scotland, though clearly still concerning. The ONS figures reveal an effect of age and gender:- The male suicide rate in 2011 was the highest since 2002, and among 45-59-year-old men the highest since 1986. For men, the suicide rate was 18.2 per 100,000 population. The rate was highest among males aged 30-44, at 23.5 per 100,000. Among 45-59-year-old men the figure was 22.2… Read More

29/10/2015

Selfplex

Updated: 19 December 2016 ‘Selfplex’ is the term used by Susan Blackmore (1999) to depict ‘self’ effectively as the key confluence of schemas – ‘the ultimate memeplex‘ – which provides the concept of ‘I’, the cognitive awareness of who I am, how I think, what I feel, what I believe…why I am the way I am. Someone’s sense of identity or identities. The term ‘ego’ is widely used in Psychology and the other behavioural sciences as a cipher for ‘self’. It has even entered mainstream popular language in usages such as: “That’s egocentric” or “He’s got a lot of ego”. The very diversity of usages makes it too vague to use as a term for ‘self-concept’ – though it is often used in that context – which is why ‘selfplex’ is preferable. Sigmund Freud (1923b) used ‘Ego’ in a very specific yet cohesive sense. It is a force which attempts to balance the motivations of the Id and the Superego where they compete for dominance and restrains the more socially-unacceptable demands of the Id. This latter function can be seen in the way the PURPLE vMEME submits to the family or group to gain acceptance. Yet Freud also perceived the Ego as… Read More

19/10/2015
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Schizophrenia and the Tragic Story of Moby Grape

Recently, after several years without a turntable, I treated myself to one and started digging out LPs I hadn’t played in years. Among the delights I rediscovered was the music of Moby Grape. Moby Who? I hear you say. Well, for 6 months or so back in 1967, Moby Grape were the ‘next big new thing’ for the record companies starting to take a serious interest in the burgeoning hippie music scene of San Francisco. Unfortunately Moby Grape’s star did not rise for very long, crashing down in a tragic welter of legal disputes, drug abuse and ‘madness’. RCA already had an album out by Jefferson Airplane by late 1966. Warner Bros had signed the Grateful Dead but didn’t quite know what to do with them. Quicksilver Messenger Service were just getting going and Janis Joplin was beginning to find her feet in Big Brother & The Holding Company. For most A&R men/talent scouts filtering into the San Francisco Bay Area, the local hippie bands, with to some extent the exception of the Airplane, were just weird. They didn’t understand the music business. Moreover, in their insular, stoned way, most of them didn’t want to understand that music was a business!… Read More

16/09/2012
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