Have you ever taken a Rorscharch test? If you have, you know that tests such as this are used to evaluate personality traits, and help diagnose underlying psychological disorders. Through the use of algorithims, statistical analysis and interpretation, they help physicians gain a clearer understanding of who we are and how we process our perceptions and emotions, but they are at best blunt instruments for the purpose of understanding cause.
Most of the diagnostic tools we use today were developed in an era before we had the ability to actually observe brain activity--to understand at a chemical, physical, and neurological level what occurs when we experience certain thoughts, memories, or external stimuli. This is not to say that they are worthless, but all they can offer is a very opaque answer to a complex set of questions we continue to have about why we think and behave the way we do. To that extent, they are self limiting and they leave us in a veritable stone age when it comes to developing effective treatments for most mental/emotional pathologies.
Think about the progression of treatments over the past 50 years for a wide range of mental health conditions. Mental health practitioners have talked to patients, analyzed their dreams, poked their brains, cut out parts of it, shocked them with electric impulses, and administered an ever growing catalog of agents designed to accelerate or depress various hormones, and affect brain chemistry. More recently, they've begun looking into the role genes play in predestining such things as addiction, manic depression, and other psychological or personality disorders.
In other words, treatment of this largely understudied organ, the brain, is roughly akin to the way physician's have battled Cancer. They classify, diagnose, operate, radiate, or apply chemicals designed to destroy or cause aberrant cells to destroy themselves. It is only recently, that medical science has begun to look at how we are genetically predisposed to develop certain cancers, much less how they might manipulate those genes to prevent or eliminate them.
Today, PET Scans, fMRIs, and other diagnostic tools that allow physicians to observe the brain in action at the moment events occur or reoccur in memory are revealing a very different picture of how the human brain reacts when subjected to external stimuli, and most importantly traumatic events . Enlightened practitioners have moved from the analytical couch, past the operating theater and the pharmacy into a world of neurons and synapses, where they are beginning to form a deeper understanding of how we are programmed to react and what goes wrong when our brain's operating system glitches.
As I am not a physician, kindly permit me to use an analogy with which I am more conversant, the computing universe. At a highly abstracted level, computers execute numerical operations and they do so according to a set of rules that are baked into them at a physical level in the design of their processors. Those operations and the results thereof are what lies beneath an operating system and together with applications, pieces of software designed to do something specific such as write words, perform calculations, fetch information, or make pictures, they constitute the computing system.
The rules that govern those operations, the operating system and applications work, and work flawlessly so long as the instructions they work from are correct, consistent, and robustly designed to handle minor imperfections. But what happens when an instruction is incorrect or inconsistent? We encounter what we euphemistically refer to as a bug. One type of particularly nasty bug is something we call an infinite loop, a set of unintentionally flawed instructions that continues forever unless the computer is turned off or some other external intervention takes place.
How does this apply to our human brains? Well let's think of our brain as possessing a set of magnificently crafted instructions. These instructions let us see, hear and experience our bodies, and the world around us, store memories and fetch them on demand, and generally perform a wide range of operations-some requiring specialized training and experience--think of those as the applications that we acquire over our lifetime.
Our operating system--the instructions for operating our physical selves-- is also largely baked in--at the DNA level so to speak. We don't tell our body how to breathe, swallow, see or hear, move or touch, although we have to teach it how to make sense of those and perform higher level actions. In the same way we do not teach our body how to react when we are threatened, or experience a traumatic event. It does that all by itself, secreting chemicals and configuring our body for flight or fight.
But what happens if our brain experiences an event so traumatic, one our instructions did not anticipate, and we are caught in an infinite loop, frozen in that moment forever? We have a name for that of relatively recent vintage. We call it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. And it may come as a surprise that it isn't just a 'mental' disorder but also one that has physical implications.
In his NYT best selling book, The Body Keeps The Score, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk explains for the first time how both physical and psychological trauma affect both the brain and the body and how it can result in an infinite loop of profound and recurring personality disorders, that actually reshape brain activity. Movies and Television often portray those who due to war, sexual or physical assault, or other traumatic events experience a flashback that places them in the moment they first encountered trauma. What they miss is that for those suffering from PTSD, these are not simply memories but reenactments hallucinated by a brain forever locked into in the moment trauma first occurred.
There is much more to Dr. van der Kolk's book of course, more than I could begin to summarize here, most importantly how these new insights into the mechanics and chemistry of disorder can be treated. He also offers tantalizing evidence of ways in which we have a built-in agency that can help avoid the worst if we do experience trauma. When we are able to take some action to restore our control at the moment of trauma--to allow our brains and body to alter the flight or fight programming we can avoid the loop, and overcome a potential lifetime of recurrence.
I ask your indulgence for a few more minutes, because I want to take the discussion in a direction you might not have expected. You see, I believe our country has been experiencing a form of trauma for the past decade or so, one in which we are daily subjected to a political rhetoric focused on fear, anger and doubt, amplified by traditional and social media that has resulted in a surge in violent and repressive thought and action. Not to be over dramatic, but I suggest we have been suffering from a form of collective PTSD, a national psychosis that we can observe in the manic and cult like behavior of those most affected.
If we have any hope of restoring order to the body politic, and to our own sensibilities we cannot allow the endless loop of fight or flight to continue unabated. We have agency--we can arrest our on-going preoccupation with a bleak and relentless vision of the future. We can choose to silence our reptile brain stem that tells us our only recourse is to run or fight with one another. We can do this by taking personal action in two ways. First, vote. However you feel, whatever your reluctance to avoid participation, vote--if not for a candidate vote for tomorrow, for hope and not for a return to a past that never was or a future of repression and subjugation.
Equally important to our collective mental health, once you have voted make the decision to stop engaging in the self destructive behavior that we have been encouraged to adopt. We must stop seeing those with whom we disagree as our enemy. We do not need to fight them or run from them, they are us, suffering from the same psychosis, induced by fear, manufactured enmity, and ceaseless propaganda. You need not agree with another's views but whichever side of the political divide you are on you can and must acknowledge their humanity. You must do this not because I say so, but for your own mental health.
A great friend of mine once said that we are all in the same lifeboat. Some are bailing water out of the boat while others are sweeping it in, and a few are sizing us up to see who would be good to eat. We are many, they are few, but powerful as long as we allow them to divide us. Together we can pull the plug on the power that fuels the loop, we can allow the body politic to rest and recuperate and begin to restore our own mental and emotional health as individuals and as a country no longer bitterly divided.
Comentários