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Experiences of stress in the womb can predispose to addiction, for example, by altering the brain’s ability to respond to stress in functional ways.
Dopamine is the essential neurotransmitter in the motivation system,
“I don’t want you to call what you have a mental illness. You have been injured.” The insight that his symptoms were not the manifestations of some mysterious medical condition,
mainstream psychiatry takes the biological emphasis too far, reducing everything mostly to an imbalance of DNA-dictated brain chemicals.
psychiatry commits the same error as other medical specialties: it takes complex processes intricately bound with life experience and emotional development, slaps the “disease” label on them, and calls it a day.
a diagnosis may seem to account for and validate a lifetime of experiences previously too diffuse or nebulous to put one’s finger on. That can be a first and positive step toward healing.
The dead end comes when we assume or believe that the diagnosis equals an explanation—an
the world into which kids are being born these days might as well have been designed to promote disruptions of cognitive function and emotional self-regulation.
diagnoses reveal nothing about the underlying events and dynamics that animate the perceptions and experiences in question. They keep our gaze trained on effects and not their myriad causes.
there is nothing disordered in resisting authority figures that, for whatever reason, we do not feel confident in and safe with.
“it became clear really quickly that the diagnoses were not connected to the physiology, that they were just descriptive, and that there were hundreds of physiological routes to somebody having an attention problem, for example. And yet the profession acted as if these descriptive labels were really a thing . . . I knew that if we were doing ‘research,’ if we were using these hollow descriptors which we call ‘diagnoses’ and then study interventions and outcomes, we would just get garbage.
I’m not so interested in the formal diagnosis as such. My “diagnostic” focus goes to the specific challenges the person is facing in their life and the traumas animating those challenges. As for “prescriptions,” I am primarily interested in what will promote the healing of the psychic wounds the ongoing traumatic patterns represent.
“it has crowded out the much more common-sense insights that people have about why they become distressed and how to resolve their distress. Really—how do I put it—it’s given us an inaccurate map of our own pain.”
“The evidence of a link between childhood misfortune and future psychiatric disorder is about as strong statistically as the link between smoking and lung cancer,”
“These brain changes may be best understood as adaptive responses to facilitate survival and reproduction in the face of adversity. Their relationship to psychopathology is complex.”
Emotional injury during development can have physiological consequences, even without abuse or neglect.
The most powerful predictor of your functioning in the present is your current relational connectedness
Genetic vulnerabilities do not code for illness, but they may confer sensitivity for a person being more impacted by life’s vicissitudes than someone else with a hardier predisposition—a
Sensitive people feel more, feel deeply, and are more easily overwhelmed by stress, not just subjectively but physiologically.
“Genes affect how sensitive one is to environment, and environment affects how relevant one’s genetic differences may be,”
Some people will feel more pain and will therefore have greater need to escape into the adaptations that mental illness, or addiction, represent. They will have more need to tune out, to dissociate, to split into parts, to develop fantasies to account for realities they are unable to endure.
The same “sensitivity” genes that in a stressed environment can help potentiate mental suffering may, under positive circumstances, help promote stronger mental resilience and therefore happiness.
no one has ever identified any gene that causes mental illness, nor any group of genes that code for specific mental health conditions or are required for the presence of mental disorder.
Literally what separates those of us who do suffer from those of us that don’t is what happens to us during our lives.”
preference for a simple and quickly understood explanation,
Life in its wondrous complexity does not conform to such easy reductions.
Even more regrettably, we miss the excellent news that if our mental health is not dictated by our genes, then we are not their victims.
There is a catch, however: we cannot select which emotions to force below consciousness, nor willfully reverse the mechanism even after it has outlived its usefulness.
“if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.”
Thus the repression of emotion, while adaptive in one circumstance, can become a state of chronic disconnect, a withdrawal from life. It becomes programmed into the brain, embedded in the personality.
He, too, saw depression as an adaptation of the brain to the loss of connection,
their abnormalities reflect experiences, rather than being the primary cause of them.
Brain disturbances manifest the stresses of existence during formative periods and, once established, become a source of further stress.
Her crushing belief in her unworthiness revealed itself to be a self-protective strategy gone awry.
the very mental patterns and behaviors that seem to throw our lives into such chaos originate as an attempt, a temporarily and partially effective one, to regulate our nervous systems, to bring our bodies and minds to equilibrium.
They bring short-term relief. That more and more people are resorting to self-harm is a marker of the growing prevalence of stress and trauma.
there is nothing weird about a child seeking attachment with his parent. What is abnormal is that any child should have to do so.
splitting from the present is a form of instantaneous self-defense.[9] From that perspective, it is a miraculous dynamic allowing vulnerable creatures to survive the unendurable.
What we call a disorder is revealed to be an ingenious means for an assaulted psyche to absent itself from agony.
the heritability of ADHD traits to be in the range of 30 to 50 percent.[13] The genetic thesis never made sense to me, even though two of my children and I myself have been diagnosed with this “brain disease.”
in an emotionally chaotic home characterized, amid plenty of love, by parental anxiety, depression, and conflict. This adaptation then becomes wired into the brain,
when a syndrome rises sharply in frequency over a short period of time, genetics cannot possibly be the cause.
Today, voluminous research has linked the symptoms of ADHD to trauma or early stress, and has shown that both can impact the dopamine circuits of the brain and that adversity can interfere with a child’s subsequent capacity to focus and to organize tasks.
can include maternal depression
help parents understand the stresses they were unwittingly transmitting to their offspring.
“Dogs which have lots of social contacts with other dogs and many interactions with people seem to show fewer symptoms [typical] of ADHD. The more that you physically connect with and play with the dog, the fewer the problems.
That “closeness,” really an unhealthy lack of boundaries that psychologists call “fusion,”
Harmful as the dynamic was, in Caterina’s mind it was her moral duty to protect her parents:
Absorbing a parent’s sorrow is not the Nature-given responsibility of a child.
“If you weren’t on medication, you’d not be able to have this conversation right now.
Hand in hand
theres no reason for demonizing these as theyre a tool
