Nov 26, 2022
Neuroscience, Psychiatry — Canada’s Feralization of Mental Illness + Substance Abuse
There is a recent story in The Globe and Mail, Canada will soon allow medically assisted dying for mental illness. Has there been enough time to get it right? detailing the new policy of medical assistance in dying for mental illness to commence, mid-March next year.
This policy, already in the Netherlands and in Belgium, seems to be a case of surrender, stretching the opacity in global psychiatry for what is assumed to be irreversible.
There is decriminalization of possession of small amounts of some illegal drugs, to take effect from January in British Columbia. There is a recent study, published in Pharmaceutics, An Immunconjugate Vaccine Alters Distribution and Reduces the Antinociceptive, Behavioral and Physiological Effects of Fentanyl in Male and Female Rats, as a potential path against fentanyl overdose. A lead author of the study said, “our vaccine is able to generate anti-fentanyl antibodies that bind to the consumed fentanyl and prevent it from entering the brain, allowing it to be eliminated out of the body via the kidneys. Thus, the individual will not feel the euphoric effects and can ‘get back on the wagon’ to sobriety.”
There are gaps in global psychiatry that has made severe cases of mental illnesses and substance abuse result in unwanted options, for the individuals and loved ones. There is confusion in some quarters about the share of responsibility of the brain, per condition.
There are serious mental illnesses where the individual got better. There are others that did not end well, but can the problem also be how these conditions are understood, then approached?
Delusions, hallucinations, manic episodes and so forth bear marked experiences where a psychiatrist recommends medications and therapies. However, some patients don’t get better, or find the right combination of treatments because of generalized approaches.
There are no tests to diagnose mental illness. The targets of medications are molecules but the experience of mental illness is not the cell or molecule. Feeling bad or agitated about something is an experience that is different from the action of cells and molecules underlying it. The experience has its mechanisms. The cells and molecules have theirs.
Psychotherapy is sometimes a broad canopy that adopts similar approaches to different cases and does not take into account the moment-to-moment decision of the brain, for mental states.
Medications can induce or inhibit a molecular target, allowing some symptoms to be eased. Multiple medications can be used to cancel symptoms, arriving with tough side-effects.
The symptoms of mental illnesses are experiences. The relieve by medications, are experiences. The side-effects are experiences. There is a constant of experiences in mental illness, as given by the brain, but cellular and molecular neuroscience, dominating what psychiatry often offers, keeps its possibilities capped.
Range of experiences, describable or not, obvious or not, encompass the reaches of mental illnesses and substance use disorder. All experiences are given by the brain, though studies in brain science are not for experiences, but mostly for cells and molecules.
Knowing how the brain decides experience every moment, then facing experiential outcomes with certain therapies, individually designed for patients, against conditions could be useful in taking out the symptoms experienced [by the therapy adopted].
Thoughts
The brain is beyond cells and molecules, as evident by thoughts. Thoughts are not cells, neither are they molecules. What is known or memory, are not cells, or molecules. What is felt, are not cells or molecules. Reactions too are not cells or molecules.
Cells and molecules of the brain are involved in their build or construction, but for the experience of those, there is a top floor or pathway involved. Thoughts and those, are experiences. Thoughts can be used to experience something by thinking about it or sensing it [seeing, hearing and so forth]. There could be the thought of something somewhere and the body reacts, or some other experience, then panic or delight [as experiences] follow.
There is no psychiatric condition without thought, making the measure or the degree of thought, as the representative of experience, promising to understand and ease symptoms.
Neuroimaging sees cells, activity spots, centers and molecule in the brain, but not thought or experiences. There is interaction with the external world, with thought and experiences, but cells, molecules, activity spots and centers in the brain are not noticed by an individual.
There could be thoughts [with properties] revealed as anger, pain, lethargy, confusion, doubt, fear, heaviness, sadness that may correlate with some cases of mental illness, without having a condition. There is a condition called thought disorder, when thought order is not defined.
What do thoughts do?
If thoughts are so dominant and decide how the world is interacted with, or how things are experienced, where do they come from? What makes them able to swing moods or decisions at any moment? Why are they different on the same thing, at different times for the same person? Why are they also different on the same things for different people at the same moment?
Thoughts first, have properties. They get and lose those, as they go around in the brain. The properties thoughts acquire, to what degree, or don’t acquire, become responsible for experiences. They begin to acquire properties as soon as they emerge from sensory inputs. Those that emerge from within the brain also acquire properties, in what is described as thinking, or when thoughts go around, acquiring new properties.
Thought is simply a quantity, whatever it bears is its property. It is possible to remember the description of something but not the word for it, or the phrase. The description [a property] was acquired, but not the word [a property]. It is possible not to feel cold, or hot, when it is externally. It can be described that the sensory input, converted to thought [the quantity], did not acquire those properties. Whatever is known, experienced or felt, are properties, acquired by a relaying quantity.
This is why what should cause anger does not always do, so is delight and so forth, because it did not acquire that property or did so, to a less degree.
Thoughts, theoretically, emerge as the uniform unit, identity or quantity from sensory processing or integration in the thalamus for most senses, and in the olfactory bulb, for smell. It is what gets to represent senses to the brain, so that the book, pen, cable and so forth exist in the form of thought to the brain.
It is thought or its form, theoretically, that goes to the cerebral cortex for interpretation. Interpretation is postulated to be knowing, feeling and reaction, mostly dominated by memory, but as destinations where the relaying quantity [thought] acquires properties that give experiences.
Thoughts are stored can be prioritized or pre-prioritized, expressing consciousness. Most automatic processes are pre-prioritized, while controlled processes become prioritized, though interchanges between prioritized and pre-prioritized are fast and numerous.
Mental Illness
There are automatic processes at play in mental illnesses. The quantities relay in the brain, acquiring properties that they should not, or refuse to acquire others, with no power of control to stem their sprawl. There are sometimes tremors, hallucination of soliloquy, saying things disconnected from reality, having no problem mistaking things, and so on. These are all experiences, as properties that quantities have acquired.
Usually, it is possible to think about turning the spoon around, but not do so, meaning the quantity got the property of the possibility, but did not get to the degree [that makes it seem necessary or that should be attempted] and by control [was not done].
Delusions and hallucinations are cases where some properties are acquired automatically, with controlled less powerful to keep off, causing the acts that makes those cases obvious.
Medications try, going after molecules in the brain. But molecules have broader functions that sometimes make wins become like losses, because of what the person gets to experience away from the self, even if technically, some symptoms are relieved.
Therapy
There is no delusion or hallucination to the same degree, every moment for any patient. This makes the quantity and property angle become important for individualized care. There could be alternatives towards how the patient re-sees the delusion or re-understands the hallucination, but there would be sensory targets to become quantities to acquire properties to get better.
There are homeless people who are also mental ill, but think [quantity with property] about their solutions in a direction, when other properties could be useful. This may help to save lots of lives, away from euthanization and other options of seeming surrender because the experience is ignored, for how the brain, understood by science delivers good or bad.
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