Time magazine recently had several articles about the effects of prayer/belief/etc which I thought were interesting...
1. Anybody felt your spiritual/religious/philosophical beliefs challenged by your career in psychology/psychiatry? Have your beliefs evolved?
Not particularly no. Hinduism holds that there is a very strong connection between mind, body, and soul. It doesn't speak much on psychosis, but as far as existential crises, mood, concentration, and cognition, well one could argue that hinduism/buddhism deals more with these subjects than anything else. Perhaps somewhat uniquely, they deal with these subjects beyond just one's relationship with god (i.e. they don't only revolve around the idea that through faith you will find inner peace).
I have found that religion influenced my decision to go into psych precisely because hinduism and buddhism place so much focus on 'getting your mind right' through right thinking, right action, introspection, and soundness of body.
And of course I'm a huge mindfulness meditation junky and plan to research it in my academic career.
2. Does free will really exist? Is the soul 'real?' E.O. Wilson makes some compelling arguments in his books. Do we assume free will exists in forensic psychiatry when assessing intent or sanity?
Lol, I've written something like 50,000 words on this subject (all unpublished lol). I don't believe in free will, and I don't believe in determinism. I take my approach to conscious will from the study of quantum physics, chaos, and the mathematical modelling I did in a former life. If we accept quantum physics we accept that the universe at its root is fundamentally probabilistic. If we accept what we've learned from attempting to model choatic systems in nature, it's that there may be higher levels of order despite disorder at smaller levels. And that natural systems may be inherently noisy. Basically, I don't believe in free will because this physical world and these physical bodies and physical brains do place constraints on us. But I dont believe in determinism because these external and internal changes in weight, so to speak, only affect likelihoods.
blah.
3. Psychosis is a defined as a 'failure in perception of reality,' yet philosophically no one has defined 'reality.' Clearly, philosophy isn't at the front of our minds while working with patients, but it is a provocative question, no?
I've talked before about the similarity between states of mind that meditation practitioners across cultures achieve to what is often seen in so-called 'disorganized schizophrenia'. I've had the opportunity to experience interaction wtih several disorganized schizophrenics and continue to be amazed by the striking similarities. Especially as, being an avid meditator myself, I've experienced states of mind that I would communicate in a fashion similar to the way they express what they see.
I think an important distinction between what a meditator experiences and what a psychotic might experience is in how much weight we give to what we experience in such a state and that we recognize that it isn't the way 'the world' experiences it.
The problem of 'reality' is a thorny one. Whether we talk of the restricted visual range we have, or the fact that our hearing is on a logarithmic scale, or simply the vagaries of the human sensory system, it is clear that even first order perceptual inefficiencies exist such that it's doubtful that anyone can experience reality. Ultimately even the things we take for granted, like short wave-length light looking red, are due to the way we interpret sensory information.
A synesthete may interpret what we call 'sound' as 'vision', but it doesn't flow that just because they are in the minority that their representation is the incorrect one and ours is the right one.
A psychotic hears voices telling himi to kill. Someone else kills without hearing the voices. But perhaps they are both representations of the same inner drive, right or wrong, to perform the action.
Just because there is a 'consensus' on reality doesn't mean that people who perceive it differently is wrong.
4. I'm currently working on a senior elective project with a professor trying to distinguish reported religious/mystical experience from psychopathology. Do any of you believe there is a difference?
Hope these are re-posted questions! Thanks!
See above. I think perhaps one distinction is that people who experiencce religious or mystical experiences in some way are wanting them to happen often enough. Even the ones who say they didn't, often times were searching for a sign of god, and it came. Or they felt empty, and it came. Whatever. Same thing.
I've always been interested in the idea of stressors leading to psychotic/manic breaks, and of the prodromal period of withdrawal. Its not too dissimilar fromt he process by which one first feels something wrong and then seeks out spiritual epiphany.
Perhaps the difference is that those who experience a religious epiphany are actively seeking one, whereas those who experience psychosis are NOT actively seeking it, yet both are driven to it by the same stressors.
*shrug*
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