A . Psychological . View . of

MENTAL . DISORDER

Most states of mental disorder have a firm basis in forms of psychological confusion. How much they also have a basis in physiology and genetics is debatable, aside from obvious causes such as damage to the nervous system or brain. In all these articles on this website I only consider the causes and effects of psychological conditions on people.

Therefore I treat the forms of mental disorder as states of confusion and despair.

Confusion is generated when the boundaries of the ego of the person are either vague and not understood, or else are conflicting.

An example of conflicting boundaries is where behaviour that is adequate in some kinds of situations becomes inadequate in other kinds of situations. A person may prefer to use will power as the major means of handling general social, political, or economic issues ; such an approach may well be successful. Nevertheless, this approach will be unskilful when the person has to handle relationship issues which have a high level of emotional content.

Unclear or conflicting boundaries generate confusing experiences.

Some states of mind produce a contraction in the boundaries of the ego : for example, experiences of guilt and despair will do this. Other states produce an expansion of the boundaries : for example, narcissism and vanity. These contractions and expansions usually affect different compartments of the mind. A sense of guilt will often narrow the religious compartment of the mind, whilst vanity may expand the sense of being an important person in the political compartment. [¹]

Negative experiences always have a greater impact on a person than positive ones. To offset this imbalance, what often happens is that a compensating effect occurs. As negative experiences contract the ego's boundaries in some compartments of mind, so in some other compartments the ego's boundaries expand.

Mental disorder can be viewed as an extreme imbalance in the contraction - expansion effect.

For example : the contraction effect produced by guilt often leads the person to think that the world is not real or not worth participating in. Whereas the expansion effect produced by narcissism may induce a sense that the person is a saviour or is in touch with unseen higher realities.

In mental disorder, both contraction and expansion effects lead to unrealistic interpretations of experience.

Psycho-somatic disorder can be viewed as a way of handling psychological confusion by displacing it to a body problem. The reason for this is that body pain is usually easier to handle than mental pain. Psychological pain that is prolonged over many years will almost certainly result in the creation of some physical disorder. In my experience, the kind of physical disorder that is created is linked to the kind of psychological disorder that the person is suffering from.

The creation of physical disorder from psychological disorder is achieved at a psychic level of reality. The psychological disorder springs from the subconscious mind, but the corresponding physical disorder results from the unconscious mind. No person can control the unconscious mind. Hence the person is not to blame for the physical symptoms.

In the section on psycho-somatics, I list the correspondences between psychological disorders and physical disorders that have happened to me, plus an occasional speculative suggestion. How the physical symptoms are produced from psychological distress, I have no idea.

For a combined philosophical and psychological interpretation of suffering, I propose a viewpoint that there are three general levels of suffering. These levels are power, justice and freedom, with each level producing its own kind of sorrow. The two articles that focus on this viewpoint are :

-- Meaning in Life, on my website Discover Your Mind. (read first).

-- Levels of Suffering, on my websites Discover Your Mind and Patterns of Spirituality. See Links page for their addresses.

In addition, there is an article called Sorrow, on my website Discover Your Mind, which explains why happiness is always linked to unhappiness.

Footnote
[¹]. My definitions, descriptions, and analysis of emotions are given in the three articles on Emotion. See Basic Ideas page.

The articles in this section are :

A Psychological View of Mental Disorder

Psycho - Somatics

Prediction and Psychological Distress

Ian Heath
London, UK

www.confusion.discover-your-mind.co.uk/index.htm

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