Thought Experimentation

I'm feeling slightly spaced, just had my first exam in abnormal psych and my head is full of useless distinctions for behaviors most people have and emotions most people experience and paranoia that seems perfectly rational to me. Im adding a new paradigm, the reversion paradigm; either everyone Ive ever met is psychologically disturbed or there is no such thing as psychologically disturbed, there are just some people who are so hung up on themselves, their schema's, their feelings, their perceptions, et cetera, that they think they must be totally unique and go to a professional to confirm it. I'm not discounting the people who really have difficulty coping, or the real crazies. I'm just saying Ive never known anyone cured by therapy, and I have trouble believing that it is our place to correct brain dysfunctions that are only dysfunctional because we have decided to define them as such in this place and time.

My grandmother may have bought guns and started going to church when she had an episode, but that is the norm for much of society. She may have also accepted a ride from a helpful semi driver who was going where she was when she decided to skip the state for no apparent reason, and for her own indiscernible reasons left a note at a truck stop where they stopped to eat to saying that she had been kidnapped and to call the cops. She may have later parted ways with the driver without warning him, amused with the prospect of what such a simple action can do without knowing that there were roadblocks throughout the state stopping semis looking for her. She may have actually believed she had been abducted, or she may have just been having some fun, seeing how she could manipulate her environment. Her episodes could be seen as a grand experiment, a moment of clarity, or an act of defiance against the boredom and monotony and sublimation her life was when she followed custom, was a testament to norms. Perhaps her mother dying when she was so young and trying to find a husband but unable to fulfill the duties she was told were hers as wife and mother and unable to find a man who could fulfill the duties she was told were his as husband and father, and with nothing else to define her she fell to pieces. So the system didn't work, her socialization left here ill-prepared to deal with life.

Cognitive psychology is about such situations, when reality is out of tune with perception. Its answer is to change the perception so that a person feels better about their reality. I think that human greatness comes from changing reality so that a person feels better about what they perceive. What if a therapist got hold of Gandhi and convinced him it was not a lawyers responsibility to change the law, just to use it. That it was his job to use his knowledge to prove or disprove that something was lawful, not to get involved with world issues, economics, imperialism, that he should adjust his schema to make him happier and accept things the way they are. What if they told him the anxiety he felt over the English colonial powers over India were the wrong way of thinking about things, that he should try to see the positive aspects.

What if a psychoanalyst got hold of Mark Twain and asked him if he thought that maybe his preoccupation with political thought and religion was due to the distance of his father and wanting to have sexual ideation of his mother. What if Twain then remembered a particularly traumatic event of his childhood, felt catharsis, and no longer cared for illustrating race relations, the way women had been made useless, the hypocrisies of religion, the tyranny of government, et cetera, through his stories and letters and lectures?

Reversion paradigm continued: When considering a sample of scientists compared to the larger population, scientists are disproportionately afflicted with schizophrenia. When considering a sample of artists and musicians compared with the larger population, the artists and musicians are disproportionately afflicted with depression and/or bipolar disorder. (Seriously Research it). So, it is the crazies who have defined beauty, who have seen past the prior construct to redefine for us all what reality is, who have, in short, made life worth living.