Just a guy with some thoughts about thoughts and depression

in libera •  7 years ago 

 Modern psychiatry - mainstream neuroscience - tells us that the brain 'creates' our experience. That my experience of depression was purely a biochemical phenomenon. So that when medication is introduced the functioning of the brain was altered and therefore experience was altered. However when i personally took the antidepressant medication my 'experience' did not change, as it were, the attachment to the experience changed. That is, i was still depressed i just didn't care. 

 As in most cases i eventually had to get the med's adjusted, since those thoughts or attachment to the thoughts came back. I was told that i was broken and just needed to get a 'tune up' every month. When i started looking at my thoughts as the prime mover, however, everything changed.

 If we can think of our way of thinking as having a 'structure' or pattern, and the structure of the brain (whether the 'structure' be chemical, physical, electrical or all three, does not matter here) follows or mirrors thought patterns. It would then stand to reason that medication would not do the trick. That if the pattern of thought is not changed then the brain structure and the previous experience of thought will return. The thought structure  is what has to be addressed.

 I think this is a much simpler model (see Lipton's work). It also has profound implications. For example, that the structure of the brain is not fixed but depends on the thoughts that are entertained. Further one may ask, who or what is looking at the thought structure? Who or what is deciding what thoughts are appropriate. To me, in these questions echos something much bigger.

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