I have some beliefs that are unfalsifiable, and I’m okay with that, because they work in my life. I just wouldn’t proclaim I’m hanging on to some objective truth, and if somehow they were disproven, well, I think I would have a hard time believing any more. Whether by choice or happenstance, I don’t know, but I find it hard to believe in things for which there is evidence to refute.
I think a lot though, about how much our social context reinforces our beliefs. The higher the social consequence for believing something else, the less likely people are to consider other viewpoints. And I was thinking today, this is probably how MAGA happened. People at this point are so socially mired in these hyper-political social circles that they would literally lose everything they cared about, everything that gives their life meaning, if they started considering alternative viewpoints. I’ve seen it happen with people leaving their church, I’ve seen it happen with people leaving the Mormon community, it’s just extremely onerous for some people to believe or not believe certain things. We can condemn them, I guess, but I’m more inclined to point the finger at people who should damned well know better.
I recently listened to a Behind the Bastards on Dr. Oz (a special event: The Bastards of Oprah, lol), and that man is one of the best heart surgeons in existence. He has saved countless lives through his medical practice. He has demonstrated in-depth academic knowledge sufficient to be recognized in elite academic circles. There is no frickin’ way that guy doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing. He is 100% Grift. And it’s people like that who are the problem, IMO.
Judith Herman talks about this in her seminal work, Trauma and Recovery. It’s been ages since I’ve read it and I think she leans more psychodynamic than me, but she recognized at the time, Freud’s actions were so damaging because in order to heal from trauma, the survivor has to face it, to name the unnamable thing, and that is as true now as it was then. When you say, “No, that didn’t happen” you’re effectively denying someone the chance to heal. For a therapist to do that would be unconscionable.
I honestly don’t know if I have PTSD. I am pretty sure that my older sister does. As I have said many times, I have been in therapy since roughly the second grade. I was diagnosed with a lot of things. Once I was old enough to study up on what those diagnoses meant, I realized they were incorrect. My sister, who has a masters in special education, is sure I am somewhere on the autism spectrum. I have never received a formal diagnosis of that either. I do have an awful lot of symptoms and problems that often go along with autism. If the many doctors and therapists missed something that obvious and basic, they may well have missed PTSD.
Back To The OP
I have noticed I always get a minor lift in mood and energy the first few days on a new antidepressant. This is clearly the placebo effect. I know to wait about two weeks to look for signs that the new pill is working.
Back when my second bout of chronic depression started, my Mom insisted I try St John’s Wort. I protested that there was no scientific evidence it did anything. She was understandably desperate and insisted I try it because ‘what harm could it do?’. I took a capsule daily for quite a while. Eventually, Mom agreed that it was not having any effect except costing us money.
As far as I understand it, the only supplement which has really been shown to be effective is Vitamin D, and that’s only for people who have Vitamin D deficiency. (There may be others, but that’s the one I know.) I’m pretty skeptical of supplements myself but if I had a persistent health problem that did not respond to conventional treatment, you bet your buttons I’d try anything else, provided it was safe. There’s a difference between saying, “this doesn’t work at the population level” and “this will never work for anyone.” Studies can rarely prove that latter thing, so why not?
My rule is just that I have to try the evidence-based stuff first.
To be honest that’s kind of how we came across EMDR. We were skeptical about it for a long time, and then my husband had a seminar on it at work, and he said, “Um, I think there might be something here. There’s emerging evidence on this.” And we weren’t entirely sure it wasn’t bullshit, but we were sure I’d exhausted all of my other options, so we decided to try it and see what happened.
I cannot remember what age I was when I saw a James Randi special. I have been a skeptic since that day. I had read up on St John’s Wort previously. I saw no evidence that it worked. I saw no consensus on what actual chemical in the plant was supposed to help with depression, how much you should take of that chemical, or how much was in a capsule.
Way back when Prozac came out, my psychiatrist prescribed it. It didn’t help me at all. But there was evidence it did help many people. It just didn’t help me.
As has been said before, science is the new kid on the block. For most of humanity’s time on this planet, magic and tradition were the ways to go. The scientific method is rather young. It has taken us farther than we ever went in all the time before it was discovered.
I do see some therapies as worth studying- transcranial magnetic stimulation, ketamine, psylocybin and other psychedelics etc. These are either new things, or things that have not been available to most humans. St John’s Wort has been widely available for a long time now. We noticed willow bark tea relieved pain and discovered aspirin.
My biggest problem is procrastination. My brain is happy to hyperfocus for hours on researching whatever obscure and irrelevant thing captures my interest, but I just cannot get myself to do minor-but-important admin tasks even when there’s a significant cost financially or health-wise. I’ve also struggled to be on time for anything since I was a young child, getting in trouble at school, at work, and missing out on activities I wanted to do, as well as annoying everyone around me. I actually tried to get assessed for ADHD about a year ago, but the GP was discouraging and I gave up.
I’m case this becomes an issue for you, it was specifically the progesterone part of HRT that helped with these symptoms. I gather that levels of this hormone can start to decline earlier than oestrogen, and this leads to symptoms like irritability and insomnia (which of course makes everything else worse). I felt like I had permanent PMS, it was awful. I hadn’t realised you can start HRT while still having regular-ish periods, but that’s what my doctor recommended. Since I’m under 45 it’s important for bone and heart health to have normal levels of oestrogen, but you can apparently just take progesterone if you are only lacking in that. It’s worth doing some research in advance so you know what the options are.
It’s a difficult subject to talk about because there is an awful lot that sounds like woo, but people are very wedded to their beliefs. I’ve wondered whether PTSD might be more likely to develop if you believe it will; if people around you believe that a given experience will be traumatic vs not. But I don’t know much about the subject and really don’t want to get involved in anything else controversial.
It’s great you found a treatment that worked for you. (And I’m happy to hear your son is doing well too, in the other thread.)
Whaaat? I did miss this, do you know where I can read about it?
This is the exact reason I became so opposed to ‘wokeness’. It was the left adopting this same practice of imposing social consequences for considering different viewpoints and having different beliefs. Punishing and ostracising people for being curious, intellectually honest, and brave or foolish enough to speak up (all while boasting about how empathetic and inclusive they are), and preventing their movement from self-correcting when they adopted bad and incorrect ideas.
This was not the case for everyone in the ‘anti-woke’ movement: there was a second group who simply wanted to impose their own beliefs instead, and now that they have the chance we are seeing who is in which camp. But among the first group, I got to see how people who ‘left the left’ changed their views when exposed to new ideas from a different social circle. I got to experience it myself as I became open to ideas I had previously not encountered or seriously considered. And there were clear parallels with experiences of deconversion from Mormonism and fundamentalist Christianity that I’ve read about. This is part of how I formed my ideas on how people change their beliefs that I outlined to @Mijin above.
I’m glad you said this. I was wondering whether to suggest getting assessed for autism, since you’ve described having many of the symptoms, but I didn’t want to offend you (and oc it’s impossible to diagnose someone over the internet). I’m a member of the subreddit for women with autism, and there are many causes of people who were given a whole laundry list of diagnoses, before finally discovering they have autism in middle age. It’s not so surprising it was missed in childhood, since what’s now I think called ‘level 1 autism’ (they changed it since I was diagnosed) didn’t really exist as a diagnosis until the 90s. But how so many psychiatrists and other mental health professionals could miss it for years, even to the present day, I don’t understand.
My understanding is that the following factors are most predictive of PTSD symptoms following a traumatic experience (I cannot recall the effect sizes for each, so in no particular order): the severity of the trauma, whether or not it was sexual trauma (highest rates of PTSD are for sexual trauma by a HUGE margin**), whether it was interpersonal violence (someone beating you as opposed to a natural disaster), whether the trauma involved captivity/repeat instances, the level of social support you received in response to the trauma, whether the trauma involves shame/shaming and whether or not there were other stressors present at the time of the traumatic event. I don’t know if any research has been done on a victim’s beliefs about what should/shouldn’t be traumatic, but if someone goes through a subjectively traumatic thing and is told, by friends, family or society that their pain is not acceptable for whatever reason, that person has a higher likelihood of developing PTSD.
**My personal theory for this is that sexual trauma is the least likely to be socially validated.
Thank you, it is truly becoming an issue for me, to a disturbing degree, and I suspect perimenopause is to blame. My biggest struggle is task initiation, and because I have a schedule that is chaos every day with constant interruptions, it has been my undoing.
I agree, and also distanced myself from the movement for that reason. Seems like pretty small potatoes right now, though.
Seconded.
I understand how professionals can miss things, because most disorders are comorbid with other disorders. It’s relatively uncommon for someone to have just one disorder. So you end up with multiple symptoms that could be explained in other ways. My ADHD was missed for decades because I had severe depression and PTSD which obfuscated the executive function problems. Of course I felt overwhelmed, I was depressed! Of course I had trouble concentrating, I had PTSD! Well it didn’t really become obvious until the depression was resolved, and I was still overwhelmed, I still struggled to get things done, and all of that got markedly worse.
One of my friends who is a rape survivor will ocassionally post about on Facebook, both as venting and as a way to inform both victims and the general public. When she made public that a boy at her high school had raped her, people got very angry- at her. How could she make up such lies? He was a good boy! Why was she trying to ruin his reputation? Is it because she asked him out and he turned her down?
It also appears that many fans of the film I Spit On Your Grave ( a woman is gang raped. After the rapists are acquitted, she hunts them down and kills them in slow and gory ways) are rape suvivors.
Nothing has changed in twenty years, I swear to Og. It’s the same bullshit. The biggest difference is, I think, that victims are pushing back more and supporters are more vocal in their support. But people’s beliefs about whether someone was really victimized usually boil down to how much it would cost them to believe the victim. It’s that social piece I was talking about earlier. And for women it can be very confronting, if they had a similar experience but don’t want to name it as such. They have to deny this person’s pain to justify denying their own pain, because the cost of acknowledging their own pain would seriously disrupt their own lives. So I think.
There are two completely different type of rejections that are being seen. One is a rejection of the recommendations of organizations like WSAVA that counts pet food manufacturers as sponsors. AAFCO states explicitly that they do not provide any recommendations or have approved lists. This type of doubt is welcome and should be encouraged.
There is no shortage of bad actors in industry who will promote “science” based evidence just to sell their product.
Rejection of peer reviewed, evidence based science however deserves to be criticized.
Specifically for abuse, I would have thought emotional abuse would be least likely to be validated, but if you meant people denying it happened altogether, then yeah.
IIRC the example I saw was something about war in the past vs today, and social validation probably has a lot to do with that.
Just make sure you find a doctor with up-to-date knowledge. There was a period when they thought HRT was risky for everyone and were very reluctant to prescribe it. Current recommendation from the NHS is that if you are under 60, have menopause symptoms, and are not at high risk of breast cancer or blood clots, the benefits are likely to outweigh the risks.
I assume you can’t do anything about your schedule and interruptions? Sounds like a nightmare for getting anything done.
True. But I was never able to get anywhere trying to convince people on the left, who were fairly similar to me and claimed to care about others and to believe in science, to listen. How much more hopeless is it to talk to Maga believers who don’t trust experts of any kind and think appealing to empathy is an attempt to con them?
I guess the other factor is that ADHD and autism are seen as conditions that are diagnosed in childhood, so a mental health professional working with adults wouldn’t think to look for them.
Well, the ten fingers on your hand are naturally divided into two groups of five. Imagine ten bolts laid out in a row. Would you easily be able to tell it wasn’t nine or eleven of them without mentally dividing them into two groups?
I don’t think it means being able to quickly count a bunch of stuff.
Whatever it is @scudsucker read sounds like the sort of bullshit people read that gets stuck as “fact” in their head. As @scudsucker said, “ten” you conceive as the number of fingers on your hands.
Everyone can conceive a carton of a dozen eggs.
50, I can picture number of floors in a typical Manhattan skyscraper
Fifty thousand people I picture a crowd at Yankee Stadium.
If you ask me what a million people look like, I would have trouble picturing it as anything more than an abstract endless crowd as far as the eye can see,
I think this may be tied to how we remember large numbers; we aren’t really good at it and tend to break things down into smaller pieces, on the order of 3-5 digits per unit.
Like phone numbers; using the North American format, people don’t generally rattle off all ten digits of a phone number. They’ll say 3, 3, 4 numbers (111, 555, 1234). When people rattle off the digits of pi, even that gets grouped into easier to remember segments threepointonefour - onefivenine- twosixfive…
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen research into this phenomenon, which is a little more nuanced than saying we can’t conceive of larger numbers than 6, but is likely not directly tied to not conceiving of numbers like millions or billions.
I don’t give a pass to the others. Yes, some people are legitimately duped. But a lot of them allow themselves to be duped because they are simply too willfully ignorant, too comfortable, or too cowardly, to question. Or they actually like what they are being sold.
Also keep in mind that, scientifically speaking, most people don’t really need to “believe” anything aside from what they need to get along with their neighbors or otherwise make things work properly in their little world.
One of our clients at a company I worked with was the fairly large UK chain Waitrose. We had a colleague who was vegan, so spotting vegan haggis on the product list - we dared him to try it.
He said it was pretty good, but he would probably not buy it again.
Not exactly a double blind study, though it was peer reviewed! The scientific method is probably the greatest thing that has become possible for humanity since we (allegorically) came down from the trees.
