Does Mental Illness Exist?

Copyright 2003 -  Revision  Sunday March 16, 2008 21:27 -0600

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This site is about a conflict of human physiology that shaped history but was undetected  until the 1960's.

In the entire history of man on the planet Earth this phenomenon was discovered only once.

It caused mental breaks for office workers.

You will find this material hard to believe.

This phenomenon is explained in first semester psychology lectures where students don't believe it either.

For that reason I wrote a demonstration that will allow you to experience the phenomenon.

The Everquest Connection page has the explanation and assumes you have not taken basic psychology.

The solution for this problem was the office Cubicle.

This site argues that the this phenomenon causes College Suicides and Missing Students.

The phenomenon causes mental events around the world, Chaco Canyon.

If you use computers in unprotected workspace such as homes, dorms, student apartments, and small business offices read  ...Prevention... at the bottom of most pages.

Long  term exposure can cause severely altered mental states. Qi Gong  Kundalini Yoga

If you are visiting the site as part of a school project send the person responsible for controlling violence at your school to this site.

TOP__

Does Mental Illness Actually Exist?

This project began, in part, to find out why a simple problem known to cause mental breaks in business offices

is unknown in any area of mental health services.

As you read this presentation answer this question.

Can anyone cite a case of someone 'blind from birth' having panic attacks or schizophrenia?

I can't find one. Volunteers searching the APA database for me can't find one.

One source says there are only two such cases in all the literature.

The behaviors we see in schizophrenia and other "disorders" of the DSM certainly do exist. But the belief that mental illness is brain disease caused by chemical imbalances has been challenged.

There is a politically correct theory of mental illness. Actors perform Public Service Announcements, PSA's, to tell us that mental illness is disease just like physical diseases.

But there is a new study that reviews the literature available, prepared by and for mental health professionals. The study compares drug advertising and popular media stories you would see on TV newscasts with professional material. The chemical imbalance theory appears only in popular media and is not in the professional papers.

The authors of this study have appeared on a Tampa, Florida TV program and YouTube video of that interview is available. They explain that drug company advertising that espouses this notion of disease to explain mental illness is banned in other countries.

The belief that mental illness is brain disease is explained in a politically correct way. It is said to be a metaphor to explain mental illness to the masses. The authors of the study did not dare say it is actually nonsense.       (Tampa Video links)

No matter what you have heard, no one has ever found evidence directly connecting chemistry differences with mental illness.

There are people who have the chemical changes but no mental illness and people with mental illness but no chemistry differences compared to normal controls. There is only a statistical correlation for the chemical imbalance theory.

The fact of the chemistry differences and that they are sometimes found in those with disturbed thoughts and bizarre behaviors does not tell us which is the cause and which is the effect.

Do chemical changes cause mental illness or does mental illness lead to chemical changes?

So What is mental illness?

This site VisionAndPsychosis.Net offers a new explanation. Mental illness and schizophrenia are altered mental states installed by operant conditioning that arises when we have massive exposure from Subliminal Distraction.

In early stages of first psychotic episodes in ICU Psychosis, and Qi Gong or Kundalini Yoga caused mental problems the episode will disappear with no treatment if Subliminal Distraction exposure stops.

This is well known in hospitals and among writers of sites about Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga. They don't know why this happens or that Subliminal Distraction is involved. They just know that stopping the activity will stop the mental episode.

One in three Intensive Care Unit patients who spend more than five days in the ICU has a mental break. They rip out tubes, fight with nurses, hear voices, and have delusional psychotic episodes.  Doctors are stumped as to the cause. Although there are many visits to my ICU Psychosis page no one has announced a study to investigate Subliminal Distraction as the cause of ICU Psychosis.

Subliminal Distraction exposure is  why the medicines don't work or appear to work for a short time then stop working. Remissions and relapses happen when Subliminal Distractions increase or decrease. Unaware of this problem, medicine or talk therapy is credited with causing improvement.

When Jason Weed had a psychotic break and killed a mail carrier, psychiatrists remarked that the episode disappeared in one week after a single dose of medication.

Weed had participated in a seminar from Landmark Education that is known to cause mental breaks. There are investigations dated back to 1977 attempting to find why people sitting in the audience at this seminar have mental breaks.

Landmark is aware of the mental breaks and warns those with previous mental health problems not to take their seminar. (est link)

If you read the physician's instructions for these medications many of them cause, as side effects, the symptoms they are used to treat.

Information about Subliminal Distraction is available only on this site. . It comes as a result of a five-year investigation to determine why a simple problem discovered in the 1960's is unknown in any area of mental health.

As the investigation progressed the material discovered was posted to this site.

The site is a difficult read because the information is not intuitively organized since no one would be aware of it or know what question to ask in a search string.

This site is organized around investigation subjects that have no explanation or which have previously been explained by myth and invention. Alien abductions, the disappearance of Flight 19 (thought to be a Bermuda Triangle mystery), College Suicides, and strange student disappearances are some of those subjects.

This method casts a wide net on the Web to bring visitors to the site. No one would ever search for Subliminal Distraction if  they had not taken first semester college  psychology, specifically psychophysics.

What is Subliminal Distraction?

Subliminal distraction arises from simple facts of human physiology. There are no off switches for the sensor cells in your eyes and ears. If stimulus strikes them neural impulses are sent to your brain.

That is why you can be awakened from sleep by sound.

Visual Subliminal Distraction is not well known in the United States. Acoustic subliminal distraction is studied as a fatigue factor in business offices or other places where you would concentrate in a noisy environment.

Two other facts of physiology form a "conflict in the physiology of sight." You can consciously ignore something in your vision field but you can't "stop seeing" it.

Why does this conflict exist?

There is a certain economy in our physiology. Simple features of it may exist by the omission of abilities and serve more than one purpose. Humans evolved as hunter-gather pre-humans. We retain a vision driven warning system that will break your concentration with a startle if something moves in your peripheral vision. The early reason for this system was to prevent predation by animals.

If the sensor cells of  your eyes stopped working when you concentrate on something and ignore things in peripheral vision, these early human ancestors would not have survived or evolved.

This feature of physiology was not a problem for early man. Small family groups and roving bands did not have behaviors to cause exposure. When they began to live in too-small single-room arrangements the opportunity for exposure began. Specialization in performing skill work for tribal duties allows long periods of exposure to create the mental break.

Today we must sit in a crowded office location with constant movement in peripheral vision. We can ignore movement in peripheral vision that would break our concentration but we can't stop subliminally seeing that movement. If that movement is close enough it will trigger the threat-detection system. You can also learn to ignore threat-movement if you decide is is not dangerous to you.

When lean-to's and brush arbors were used that moved workers close together making the detection of others near you moving more likely.

But that economy of function in our physiology arises again. The threat-detection is such a primitive part of physiology that there is no voluntary control for it.  The subliminal functioning of the system prevents your being aware it still detects threat-movement and attempts to force the startle and vision reflex.

Subliminal sight and peripheral vision reflexes caused mental breaks for office workers using the first prototypes of close spaced office workstations in the 1960's. Designers, engineers, human factor scientists, and psychologists they hired solved the problem and designed the cubicle to deal with this problem.

New page construction paused here, Sunday March 16, 2008 09:27:36 PM -0600.

Until I can finish this text you can use other site pages that have much the same material in different presentations.

Schizophrenia and the Cause of Mental Illness.

New pages are created by editing the Peripheral Vision page.

What is Peripheral Vision ?

There are many definitions for peripheral vision in psychology. Non-Macular vision, non-foveal vision, and ambient vision are all peripheral vision.

The area of peripheral vision discussed on this site is just past the periphery of conscious vision on either side of the head. You may consider this as a thin cone wrapping around the normal cone of conscious vision.

This area of vision operates subliminally. No one is aware of the subliminal operation until movement is detected and a peripheral vision reflex happens.

You may be familiar with the phrase, 'catching something out of the corner of your eye.' When that happens you have experienced a peripheral vision reflex. Both the human vision startle reflex as well as weaker reflexes are derived through peripheral vision. Only movement is detected so stationary objects in this area of peripheral vision are invisible.

Peripheral Vision is monocular, each eye sees a different field rather than the overlapping fields of conscious sight.

The speed of approach for moving objects must be determined by increasing size or by the speed at which the image crosses the retina.

Proximity is also determined by increasing size and by the amount of space, number of rods, covered by the moving image. This monocular system to evaluate movement can make mistakes of perception so that peripheral vision reflexes are created when the situation would not warrant it.

An area of the retina made up of mostly rods supplies the signal to the brain, therefore, Peripheral Vision is black and white vision. 

There are experiments now on-line, which demonstrate some color vision in peripheral vision but they made no reference to Subliminal Peripheral Vision. In earlier searches I found experiments done by college students  which demonstrated that there was a high error rate when colored cards were slipped into peripheral vision from behind. (If there sites are still up I will cite the URL.)

 Although sound is sensory adaptable, vision is not. Micro movements of the eye constantly refresh sensor cells on rods and cones. This prevents chemical depletion of sensor cells.

 Although you can ignore objects or movement in your vision field you cannot stop seeing them This is because it is possible to  attach different levels of attention or 'notice' to objects in your vision field. 

Humans can 'habituate to extinction notice taken of moving objects in peripheral vision.' This means you can see something in peripheral vision and not have it recorded by your conscious mind. Weak peripheral vision reflexes can be overridden. Habituation causes the stimulus to fade from attention.

Conscious sight has depth perception and persistence of vision. Peripheral vision does not, except for the ‘apparent size' illusion  and/or the rate of movement the illusion may create. The flicker fusion rate is the point at which flicker is no longer detectable. This varies from person to person. These two Wikipedia articles discuss this. They are incomplete and have no citation references.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_of_vision

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold

This has implications for early computer games that were played using a Television as the viewing monitor. The scan rate for Television is determined by the sixty cycle power line frequency. Alternating  frame lines are scanned  every sixtieth of a second. A full frame is drawn every thirtieth of a second. This interlacing smoothes the "page flipping" effect. I still do not have a definitive article on this but I believe it means that flicker from a TV can be detected in Subliminal Peripheral Vision.

If two persons play these TV monitor games, dual controller,  the "off player" can be exposed to stimulation in Subliminal Peripheral Vision if they turn their head while not controlling play. As the head is turned back toward the TV the flicker appears to approach from behind providing stimulus to create a Peripheral Vision Reflex.  The psychology involved is explained on the Everquest Connection page.

There is some information that the preteen suicide rate began to rise about the time of the introduction of the cartridge computer games, Atari, Commodore, Sega, and others. 

There is no long term memory normally associated with peripheral vision. There are news releases of experiments posted on the Internet which indirectly reveal this.

Peripheral vision reflexes are created at a level in the brain below thought, reason, and consciousness. For this reason when you choose to ignore movement that is distracting to you and that is positioned in your Subliminal Peripheral Vision you lose track of it.

Conflict of Physiology

The conflict of our physiology explored  on this site is that although you can ignore  peripheral vision reflexes, you cannot stop seeing the movement that causes them. You cannot tell your brain to stop subliminally detecting that movement and attempting to force  the reflex.

Peripheral Vision Reflexes

Peripheral vision reflexes are an evolutionarily developed, retained, warning system. For early man or pre-humans to survive they needed a system to warn  them of predators approaching from behind. To function it must work all the time no matter what  you are doing. If you had the ability to turn the brain system off at will, it could not warn you in critical situations.

The act of concentrating on something at arm's length, in your hand for instance, causes physiological changes in the eye.

When you focus on a close object your eye accommodates by changing the shape of the lens.  This shape-change expands the area covered by Subliminal Peripheral Vision.

Plitz's reflex, or Attention Reflex, changes the size of  your pupil. This floods the retina with ambient light desensitizing the rods so that only a large movement close by will trigger a reflex.

M and P Pathways

Although all signals from the retina travel on the optic nerve there are actually two pathways. They route the signals from conscious sight and peripheral vision to different parts of  the brain. This allows humans to have two vision systems running at the same time. The pathway from peripheral vision is subliminally observed.

http://www.vestibular.org/computer.html

Links (Site links and page links are not the same. Site links are a favorites dump of sites visited in the investigation.)

______________________________

Mental illness links for this page.

Tampa___

Tampa interview of researchers.

Serotonin and Depression: Fox Channel 13 Tampa Bay Digest Version (Time 9:56)

This video is an interview with two researchers who performed a study reviewing medical literature. Articles used to communicate with doctors do not support low serotonin as a cause of depression, chemical imbalance theory. Tom Cruise was right. The two medical researchers discuss the non scientific use of this information. Their position is that ads by drug companies that promote this belief should be banned. (Those ads  are prohibited in other countries.) Statements in advertising are not supported by studies communicated to mental health professionals.

Sixty percent of  those who start these drugs go off them within four weeks. Fifty percent get better on placebos. Drugs help only about 10%. Six out of ten have adverse effects.

Digest 9:56.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbTqjSfMPKA&mode=related&search=

Part 1 -7:36.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWE3UGl7KFk&mode=related&search=

Audience phone calls.  Part 2 - 7:33  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzDv6Cublaw&mode=related&search=

Part 3 - 6:39  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw0PxgTIT4k&mode=related&search=

est__

The est problem is best described in this quote from the 'Landmark Education'  site.

"6. From time to time, during or shortly after participating in the Program, a very small number of people who have no personal or family history of mental illness or drug abuse have reported experiencing brief, temporary episodes of emotional upset ranging from heightened activity, irregular or diminished sleep, to mild psychotic-like behavior. An even smaller number of people have reported more serious symptoms ranging from mild psychotic behavior to psychosis occasionally requiring medical care and hospitalization. In less than 1/1000 of 1% of participants, there have been reports of unexplained suicide or other destructive behavior. While we know of no independent studies to suggest that people who are physically, emotionally and mentally healthy are at risk in the Program, certain persons have claimed that the Program has caused or triggered in them a psychosis or psychotic event".

Scroll down the Landmark page until your reach the quoted number "6" paragraph above. http://www.landmarkeducation.com/display_content.jsp?top=24&mid=343610

Seattle Post Intelligencer

No proof mental illness rooted in biology, Friday, August 29, 2003 By Keith Hoeller Guest  Columnist

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/137089_mentalhealth29.html 

CLINICAL PHARMACOLOGY    Pharmacodynamics

Abilify®

RISPERDAL®

Zyprexa®

Note:

All the drugs have almost a verbatim statement under  'Pharmacodynamics' or 'method or operation', and the phrase "it has been proposed." This does not mean they are all the same chemistry but indicates that they all have the same theory for the cause of mental illness. And that is a chemical change in the brain. Articles you can research on-line indicate these medications have a low rate of  results. ECT is the first line treatment. (Builds your confidence in medications doesn't it?)

MotherJones.Com - Is it Prozac? Or Placebo? - By Gary Greenberg - November/December 2003 Issue

Gary Greenberg is a psyschotherapist and professor of psychology. His writing on medicine and science has appeared in the New Yorker, Discover, Rolling Stone, and McSweeny's, and is featured in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2002. I did not  find a title for Professor Greenberg.

  Full article available here. http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/11/ma_565_01.html
 

(The drugs mentioned below were Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Effexor, Serzone, and Celexa.)

The "I" in the first quoted sentence is, of course, Professor Greenberg author of the Mother Jones article.

"Psychiatrists and other mental-health professionals (I am a practicing therapist) know that any given antidepressant has only about a 50 percent chance of working with any given person. But what most people -- patients and clinicians alike -- don't know is that in more than half of the 47 trials used by the Food and Drug Administration to approve the six leading antidepressants on the market, the drugs failed to outperform sugar pills, and in the trials that were successful, the advantage of drugs over placebo was slight."


"...University of Connecticut psychology professor Irving Kirsch and his co-authors used the Freedom of Information Act to extract the data from the FDA...." This is the research mention just above this article. 


"Most illnesses remit as part of their natural course, but the placebo effect occurs far too frequently to be mere coincidence. No one really understands why..." The effectiveness of Qi Gong may indicate why Placebos work.


" Because any drug may well be acting as a placebo, it is not a sufficient test simply to give a new compound to sick people to see if they get better. To rule out the possibility that patients are recovering because of faith or a good sales pitch, and to ensure that the drug works by virtue of its biochemical properties, the FDA has, since the late 1970s, required that all drugs be tested against placebos. Typically, between 35 and 45 percent of people given placebos improve. If a candidate drug outperforms a placebo in two independent studies, and if it does so without untoward side effects, the FDA will approve it for use."

"...All patients are given a week of placebo treatment, and the strongest responders are eliminated from the study. The idea, of course, is to get a more accurate estimate of the true drug effect..."


"The FDA does not consider, however, the relative advantage that new drugs show over placebo. So long as the difference is statistically significant -- meaning that the results are not merely random -- a drug can be advertised as "safe and effective" ..."


"Of the 47 trials conducted for the six drugs, only 20 of them showed any measurable advantage of drugs over placebos, a much lower number than turns up in published research."


 

Chemical Imbalance Theory

"Contrary to popular belief, scientists have never been able to find a consistent biochemical, genetic, anatomical, or other functional marker that can reliably distinguish healthy people from the mentally ill." 

This site has several pages and links to articles.

http://www.astrocyte-design.com/pseudoscience/index.html

SCHIZOPHRENIA: Etiology and Course, Elaine Walker, Lisa Kestler, Annie Bollini, and Karen M. Hochman

http://www.neuro.wustl.edu/bio5663/2004%20articles/deErausquin-review1.pdf

Rick Ross

The New York Times/April 24, 1977 By Jane Brody

"The discovery of seven persons who suffered serious psychiatric disturbances after participating in a self-help program called Erhard Seminars Training has prompted three psychiatrists to alert their profession to the possibility that the experience may have devastating effects on some people."

"The psychiatrists, writing in the March Issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, emphasize that their case reports do not and cannot establish a cause-and-effect relationship between the est experience and a psychotic aftermath."

"Dr. Glass cited a study of encounter groups by Dr. Irving Yalom of Stanford University that showed that when the group leader was very commanding, confrontive and assaultive, group participants were more likely to suffer psychiatric disturbances than with more benign leaders."

"It made no difference what belief system the leader espoused, Dr. Glass said. The increased risk of psychiatric damage was related only to the style of leadership. Dr. Glass pointed out that this same authoritarian style is used by est leaders."

http://www.rickross.com/reference/est/estpt9.html

Peripheral Vision Links

I recommend this site.  But you will have to browse several pages.

"Early in evolution, human ancestors had only peripheral vision. The role of this early vision system (still preserved in our eyes) was to detect motion and set off protective reflexes."

http://www.wayfinding.net/vsionsys.htm

Peripheral vision Lego tester

Adobe file with tester construction and data results sample

http://www.edex.com.au/lego/support/activities/032_peripheral_vision.pdf

Nightwalking

"In The Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi, the legendary swordsman of 16th century Japan, implies that he fought his greatest duels with his eyes crossed, and goes into considerable detail about developing and using this strange abitlity."

The method suggested to engage peripheral vision is to suspend an object from the bill of a baseball cap and practice staring at it rather than looking straight ahead as we all normally do.

The site has a page on the physiology of the eye and sight. It describes the normal field of vision.

http://www.navaching.com/hawkeen/nwalk.html#Anchor-The-59125

Institute for Innovative Blind Navigation

Don't let the site name put you off. This site has several pages which explain sight and how the brain deals with two vision systems.

http://www.wayfinding.net/index.htm

This page has the vision material.    http://www.wayfinding.net/vsionsys.htm#four

Speed Reading (peripheral vision)

http://www.ababasoft.com/wider_eye_span/

Vision, is a set of brain level subsystems

This page explains the M & P pathways and vision processing.

http://www.wayfinding.net/visanal.htm

The Red Myth

Color in Vision

http://stlplaces.com/night_vision.html

University of Missouri

The first paragraph on this page refers to psychological factors effecting pupil dilation.

"Interestingly, the pupil/iris combination also changes in response to psychological factors. One sign of activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which is a system important in arousal, fight, and flight, is dilated pupils. For example, sexual interest results in pupil dilation. (This piece of information may come in handy some time.)"

http://web.umr.edu/~psyworld/eye.htm

 University of Utah

John Moran Eye Center --  Anatomy

http://webvision.med.utah.edu/

Kimball's Biology Pages 

A simple explanation of the eye and sight.

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/V/Vision.html

Understanding Human Vision

This site deals with color.

http://www.pitir.com/pentile/Human_Vision.html

Vision and the Brain

Block diagrams of vision paths through the brain explain the M and P channels.

 http://www.thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/i/i_02/i_02_cr/i_02_cr_vis/i_02_cr_vis.html#2

Study Notes Vision

http://www.utmed.com/studynotes/neuro/VisualProcessing.pdf

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