Love and Neurosis 💙

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On this wonderfully fabricated day of promoting national fecundity, I am pondering all the problems that arise to individuals in relationship.

Neurosis.

Neurosis is a latinized word for nervousness. Originally, nervousness just meant excessive worry or sadness.

Though for pretty much all of history various organs of the body were held to be responsible for various ‘strangenesses’ that people would exhibit, It was the great proto-modern scientists of the 18-19th century that capitalized on the nerves as the reason for such oddities.

The actual oddity, though, is it is reasonably possible that there is no more or less reason to see a connection between ‘disordered’ behavior and the nerves than it is to see a link between odd behavior and any other organ. It is only the lens we are having now that we see through the trope of “nerves-brain”.

As well, when we look with a discerning mind, no more or less people are being ‘fixed’ due to an emphasis on the brain than they were when it was other organs, humors, or even “sin” that was the problem of behavioral oddity.

Capitalism and Empiricism

Capitalization – the emphasis of developing useful something from an apparent excess of nothing – thus moved our modern psychology to focus on the mass of nerves called the brain as the cause of human behavior oddity.

Yet, due to the lack or general inability for psychology and it’s ilk to really make a dent in the problems it defines, neurosis, as a name for a disease, has been broken up into multitudinous parts, yielding the “disorders” we find in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders -5 that we use now. As though coming up with more diseases will solve the problem instead of just one problem ‘neurosis’.

So, when someone tells you that you have General Anxiety Disorder or Major Depressive Disorder due to bad relationships, you can tell them that actually you simply are a little more worried and sad about things than most people. And maybe if they would stop being so neurotic you might actually be ok! 😁

As well, you can tell them it probably has very little to do with your brain or nerves — any more than it has to do with your lungs or your liver — or any other chemical mass.

And, as to the topic of chemistry:

if all we are looking for is to feel better, we may have to take another look at addiction, what that really means, and whether institutional addiction under the name of ‘medication’ is really an ethical standard we want to support.

No judgement; just open consideration of the facts.

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY!

Perhaps if we understand mental issues as an issue of the heart, we might actually get somewhere!

🫀🧠🫁❤️

In a crazy world, it’s the ones that are actually responding rationally who are deemed problematic.