The University of Florida, Florida State University found that physically attractive people almost instantly attract the attention of the interlocutor, sobesednitsy with them, literally, it is difficult to make eye. This conclusion was reached by a series of psychological experiments, which were determined by the people who believe in sending the first seconds after the acquaintance. Here, a curious feature: single, unmarried experimental preferred to look at the guys, beauty opposite sex, and family, people most often by representatives of their sex.

The authors believe that this feature developed a behavior as a result of the evolution: a man trying to find a decent pair to acquire offspring. If this is resolved, he wondered potential rivals. Detailed information about this magazine will be published Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

In turn, a joint study of the Rockefeller University, Rockefeller University and Duke University, Duke University in North Carolina revealed that women are perceived differently by men smell. During experiments studied the perception of women one of the ingredients of male pheromone-androstenona smell, which is contained in urine or sweat.

The results were startling: women are part of this repugnant odor, and the other part is very attractive, resembling the smell of vanilla, and the third group have not felt any smell. The authors argue that the reason is that the differences in the receptor responsible for the olfactory system, from different people are different.

It has long been proven that mammals (including human) odor is one way of attracting the attention of representatives of the opposite sex. A detailed article about the journal Nature will publish.

I am myself a survivor (I very much feel this term fits, and in fact have more than once been suicidal while on over-stimulating psychiatric medications that made me uncharacteristically obsessive and insomniac). I have also been a student of psychology and the health care system for many years, and am increasingly concerned with the state of mental health care. The psychiatric model of illness does seem to me to have reached the status of religious cult, dismissive of contradictory facts and uninterested in the rigors of true science. Insofar as the “chemical imbalance” model is wrong, or worse, “not even wrong” in its inability to predict illness, it is a major problem that this model has drowned out more thoughtful, facts-based, not pharmacological research on the causes and treatment of mental illness. Unfortunately, those most in the know about just how devestating the practice of psychiatry can be are quite easily dismissed as, well, madmen and crackpots.

So I thank you for your balanced and reasoned voice. While my beliefs are probably closer to a David Oaks or Thomas Szasz (or David Healy), the fact is there is a great need for more moderate voices out there pushing for some sanity in the field of mental health, to accelerate what I believe must eventually be inevitable: collapse of the current reductionist, materialist, false-self paradigms in favor of the truth.

I’ve been working for some years on a book outlining an alternative to the psychiatric model of mental health and illness. Drawn from many fields and research that was once considered important and since been marginalized, as well as my personal struggles and those of many I have met in “the system”, this book aims to highlight the problems with an overly reductionist paradigm that tries to promote “human kinds” to “natural kinds” primarily for economic and politic motives, at the expense of understanding the real societal problems at the root of most mental illness. Your work, the quality of your writing, and the strength of your voice all encourage me to continue in my efforts. Thank you.

Re comments 10, 16 and 19, I have researched and written about the relationship between stigma and the currently endorsed (enforced?) biogenetic explanations for mental illness here.

Although firmly in the ’survivor’ camp, I ‘m looking forward to further reading and reflection.

In fact the methods of almost all the Arts and Sciences converge on psychopathology. Biology and morphology, mensuration, calculation, statistics, mathematics, the Humanities, Sociology, all have their application. This dependence on other branches of learning and the proper taking over of their methods and concepts are both matters of some importance to the psychopathologist, who is concerned with the human being as a whole and more especially the human being in times of sickness. The essence of psychopathology as a study can only emerge clearly from a composite framework. It is true that methods taken over from elsewhere may lose thereby and are often misapplied, thus producing a pseudo-methodology, and this is a weakness. Yet psychopathology is impelled to make use of methods that have been perfected elsewhere in order to improve their status of its subject-matter, which is unique and irreplaceable for our apprehension of the world and humanity, and to bring it to a level where it can be properly grasped and its significance fully comprehended.

Karl Jaspers, General Psychopathology. In 1913.

What are the “determinants of falling ill”?

In the first place there is hereditary disposition [...] Next there is the influence of early experiences in childhood, to which we are in the habit of giving prominence in analysis: they belong to the past and we cannot undo them. Then comes everything that we have summarized as ‘real frustration’ – the misfortunes of life from which arise deprivation of love, poverty, family quarrels, ill-judged choice of partner in marriage, unfavourable social circumstances, and the strictness of ethical standards to whose pressure the individual is subject.

Freud, Introductory Lectures. In 1917.

Existential psychiatry thrusts aside the term illness, substituting the human condition. Illness is only a category of retrospective understanding. There is no way of knowing, from moment to moment, what will in retrospect prove to be illness [...] The goal of treatment is meeting, being with the other [...] In unlivable situations crises occur which require extraordinary actions. These are sick only in the sense that they are part of sick human situations; blame is possible only when someone is not understood.

Leston Havens, Psychiatric Movements. In 1973.

Re 16: stigma and treatability – not a connection I’d eat my hat to defend, just a casual idea at this point; watch this space for a stigma article coming soon…

Re 17: Matt, glad you liked the essay, and yes, in my endeavor to scrutinize the claims of the survivor movement, perhaps I came out seeming unduly hard on David Oaks. I certainly don’t doubt his passion or commitment to improving the lives of people coping with mental illness; but equally I’d attribute these same qualities to many psychiatrists, while I suspect he wouldn’t — which is partly the root of my critical point about MindFreedom.

The rapprochement of neuroscience and psychoanalysis, as pursued by Schore, Siegel et al. is, I agree, most exciting, and yes, I can well imagine a neuropsychoanalytical movement reinvigorating the good old-fashioned “talking cure.”

It is widely understood that the general principles hold true for those phenomena. What is surprising to me, at least, is that anyone ever thought (if they really did or do so think) that the same principles don’t also hold true for mental “disorders”.

I have to say that this is a truly excellent article. I’m a big fan of Schore, Siegel, et al. Siegel has this great sentence in the opening of “The Developing Mind”:

“The mind emerges from the activity of the brain, whose structure and function are directly shaped by interpersonal experience.”

Right there you have a conceptual revolution. I open all my presentations with this quote.

Now, you have to understand that for me, David Oaks is a true American hero. I think you were a little unfair to him because David is not a clinician– he’s an activist (and a great one at that). More and more MindFreedom has come around to the idea of embracing & promoting alternatives, instead of reacting to an often times abusive mental health system.

But the question then comes down to: what exactly IS the alternative? And I think neuropsychoanalysis is pointing the way to the future. This future has to do with studying how human relationship is crucial to the creation and maintenance of “mental” disorders. And not only that, but studying the ways in which an active, intentional agent interprets, gives meaning to, and assimilates the effects of various traumas into his/her life. In other words, we do not meet trauma as passive agents but rather bring an activity to bear which shaps the effect of this trauma.

Psychotherapy is about helping people to understand how they have assimilated this trauma in the context of a real human relationship with the therapist– and then helping them to go through the painful and arduous task of creating new, satisfying ways of being in relationship.

Matthew Morrissey
San Francisco