2024-01-09: Rediscovering Omnivore

Notes

I work in the K-12 school system, and our breaks are usually the time when I rethink and optimize my systems. I decided to overhaul my vault, and also to commit to making blogging a habit. In that process, I discovered the incredible wealth of the blog-o-sphere. But, I wasn't sure what tool to use and annotate with (as I'm a big highlighter).

And then I (re-) discovered Omnivore. Having a platform to save all my highlights and annotations, and the ability to easily extract them, has really skyrocketed my blog and online article reading lately.

So, this week's Reading Log is quite all over the place!

Here are some of my favorite readings for the last few weeks:

by Matthew O'Connell at the Speculative Non-Buddhism website

The post discusses the anti-intellectualism that is rampant in both American culture, and specifically within Western Buddhist and New Age-y communities. This article moves through several tensions within the practicing spiritual/contemplative life, and offers questions for reflection and meditation.

Combining meditation with critical questions

"Bringing together meditative equipoise and the training of attention with explorative, critical thought is a great antidote to anti-intellectual approaches to the practising life, as well as to the aloofness that often accompanies the disembodied intellectual, who often goes too far in the opposite direction."

I've been using some of those questions for my own practice, especially: "What hope fills my practicing life? Which desires feed my reasons for sitting and engaging in the practices I care for?"

on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

I've been curious about psychiatry. Mostly, because I know they used to be much more involved in mental health counseling/therapy than they are today—and maybe they still are? Either way, often times I wonder about the assumptions of these professionals: To what extent do they believe that mental illness is "a chemical imbalance in the brain," or some more intellectual-sounding variant of that? How do they conceptualize mental illness at their niche-intersection of physiology and medication? This entry is quite prolific as an introduction into these any many more of the central philosophical questions surrounding the practice of psychiatry.

Perhaps the most interesting bits of this article were the historical perspectives in the philosophical development of psychiatry. It tells us that the field has needed, still needs to try so desperately to be seen as a medical science (and how medicine itself derived from a similar desire to be seen as scientific). "Science" has cultural currency as the sole (or most well-respected) arbiter of knowledge; "medicine" earned its legitimation for its increase of rigor along "scientific" lines in the 20th century. Still downstream are psychiatrists, psychologists...all the way down to us lowly mental health counselors, trying to prove to slow, gargantuan health care systems that we are worth funding.

Call for medical models of disease to be applied to psychiatry and psychopathology

Many scholars have argued (e.g. Bynum 1994, Carter 2003, Whitbeck 1977) that in the nineteenth century medicine changed in many ways, including a shift in thinking about disease. Instead of seeing disease as the identification of symptoms, it was the linkage of symptoms to distinct pathologies, understood as departures from normal function, that came to define disease. Heinrichs (2001, 271), for example, insists that psychiatry needs to employ this basic medical outlook, and therefore needs a developed theory of how the mind/brain works that can be used to identify psychological abnormalities and explain how they arise.

Yet the natural consequence of such an outlook is to label certain experiences as the "norm," so that we can identify others as deviant—whoops, I mean "pathological." This understanding of disease derives from the medical model, which the author separates into the "minimal" and "strong" version. The strong version is presented as:

The strong version of the medical model regarding mental disorders

Someone committed to a strong version of the medical model sees validating a diagnosis as understanding its underlying causal structure: a valid diagnosis rests on a biological process that can be identified by experiment and observation using the methods of the biological and cognitive sciences.

The author closely follows the logic of medical model in psychiatry; the article also features prominent critiques of understandings of mental disorders that reduce them to one explanation or another—even including critiques that the very category of mental pathology should be tossed out. At this juncture, there is a mention of 4e cognition, which is an area of research that motivates my own writing.

Embedded, embodied, extended, and enacted cognition

An important development that is avowedly skeptical of the existing biomedical paradigm in psychiatry is the rise of approaches inspired by the 4E movement in philosophy of mind... [T]he 4E movement includes ‘embedded’ theorists who stress the dependency of minds on environmental scaffolding (Hutchins 1995) and “embodied” theorists who believe that bodies or aspects of the wider environment are constitutive of mental states, and often that sensorimotor phenomena are constitutive parts of cognition, rather than just the input and output of cognition.

Finally, the author is excellent at moving between the weeds of the arguments, and zooming back out toward the actual purpose of these arguments in the practice of psychiatry itself: "The scientific project idealises, whereas the clinical one uses the resources of the science to help individuals."

on meditationstuff at WordPress

MeditationStuff is by far the most interesting blog I have encountered. As I was looking for some writing around Reflections on Depersonalization-Derealization , I stumbled into this strange corner. In general, this blog speculates as to the mechanisms of different practices—and not just meditative practices, either. Sometimes, he rambles; but I find him to make a lot of sense, especially in contemplative areas that I have a hard time putting language to. This post is about the broad category of therapeutic practices that he has tried, including Focusing, a method that I have also found valuable. A pretty quick read.

Focusing and transformation

Focusing is about becoming; it’s a transformative protocol. You are not static, the territory is not static, and “nearby in reality-space” does not necessarily mean “nearby in word-space.” The territory exists prior to logic, prior to words, prior to understanding, and it’s alive and changing... And practices like Focusing help you adapt to that territory, when your logical system is starting to fail you, especially when your logical system fits the territory perrrrfectly, except for this one liiiittle tiny piece, and, in fact, that liiiittle tiny piece contains an entire *universe* that structurally dwarfs your entire logical system.

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2024-01-15 Philosophy of Mental Illness -