Psycho-Pharmacology - Temple Illuminatus2024-03-29T06:52:35Zhttps://templeilluminatus.ning.com/forum/categories/psychopharmacology-1/listForCategory?feed=yes&xn_auth=noHealing Madness – An Emerging Paradigm for Wellbeingtag:templeilluminatus.ning.com,2011-04-12:6363372:Topic:1397082011-04-12T06:32:02.154ZGrigori Rho Gharveynhttps://templeilluminatus.ning.com/profile/GrigoriRhoGharveyn
<p><i>Many people are terrified by mental illness; they are afraid to tell anyone they suspect they may be mentally ill. Most mental illnesses are derived from our societies and cultures. If we do not learn how to talk about our fears safely, we may never learn how to heal ourselves.</i></p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>Healing Madness – An Emerging Paradigm for Wellbeing</b></p>
<p>We are on the track of an emerging cultural phenomenon that excites us a lot, an emerging paradigm that will be a major focus…</p>
<p><i>Many people are terrified by mental illness; they are afraid to tell anyone they suspect they may be mentally ill. Most mental illnesses are derived from our societies and cultures. If we do not learn how to talk about our fears safely, we may never learn how to heal ourselves.</i></p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>Healing Madness – An Emerging Paradigm for Wellbeing</b></p>
<p>We are on the track of an emerging cultural phenomenon that excites us a lot, an emerging paradigm that will be a major focus for our work for the near future. We see that many people are writing about revising our mental health paradigms to demonstrate that many things that today may be regarded as mental illnesses are actually helpful healing processes.</p>
<p>Things like Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychoses <i>evolved</i>. These things did not just appear willy-nilly out of nowhere. These things could never have evolved unless they performed some sort of valuable, useful functions. Evolution would have culled them from our range of abilities if they did not help us in some fundamental way.</p>
<p>Ancient civilizations may often have understood these things better than we do today. Sadly, we may have lost their ancient wisdom partly because Christianity and Islam have both stigmatized mental illnesses as spiritual illnesses caused by or created by demonic influences or demonic possession.</p>
<p>As an emerging scientific civilization in the Dark Ages, in our collective cultural efforts to develop a more rational approach to the world, we dismissed these quasi-religious approaches to mental health and instead tried to build a model of mental well-being in which we have tried to redefine our madnesses as organic brain dysfunctions.</p>
<p>Sometimes, some mental illnesses, particularly depression, can trigger serious biochemical responses that can eventually lead to organic brain dysfunctions. However, most of these so-called illnesses are really ways in which we may learn to heal ourselves naturally when we are sometimes confronted with impossible circumstances in our lives that may make it seem very difficult to make any successful, healthy choices to fix whatever is wrong in our lives.</p>
<p>Depression is a healing response to being overwhelmed.</p>
<p>Depression motivates us to isolate ourselves, to remove ourselves from sources of our chronic, environmental stresses.</p>
<p>In the old days, we might have just gone on a journey, leaving family and friends behind until we returned. However, in our modern worlds we may not be able to go anywhere unless we abandon our homes and become itinerant homeless wanderers.</p>
<p>We, ourselves, have chosen to do that several times in our life now, so we understand the value of being homeless. Alas, the journeys we may sometimes go on, whether as a traveling vacationer paying their way for comfort in strange places, or as a homeless wanderer existing on the charity of strangers, is a journey within our own minds, a journey upon which it is often very easy to get lost.</p>
<p>When we get lost on this sort of journey, our civilizations tend to call us schizophrenic. When we are lost on our journeys and become more stressed, we may learn to act out in anti-social manners that many people agree are unacceptable behavior; they may then label us as psychotics.</p>
<p>However, none of these terms actually means that we are insane.</p>
<p>Often, it is quite the opposite.</p>
<p>If our societies and cultures do not stigmatize or persecute us for being mentally ill according to their own beliefs, then often, our psychoses, schizophrenia, and depression can actually lead us to our sanity.</p>
<p>All societies and civilizations on Earth are already insane. Few people like to examine this truth, but it is still true.</p>
<p>When we learn to conform to our societies' expectations, we are adopting their existing mental, emotional, and social illnesses. We are saying we will agree to live in ways that may teach us to hurt ourselves in exchange for the benefits of living in a reasonably stable society, culture, or civilization.</p>
<p>However, many of the social, emotional, and mental illnesses that we must adopt in order to adapt to our native cultures may benefit other members of our societies more so than they benefit us. Many social mechanisms are already in place that benefit the members of our societies as a group at the expense of the welfare of individual members.</p>
<p>The new model for mental health that is now emerging recognizes that what we currently call mental illnesses may really be healing processes. Within the structures of these re-emerging paradigms we may learn to teach ourselves how to heal ourselves and how to help each other learn to heal. We may then remake our madnesses into the tools whereby we enable ourselves to heal our own lives.</p>
<p>It often requires a cultural and social background that understands and supports these new healing processes and paradigms in order to learn to heal ourselves, however, the good news is that such cultures are now emerging.</p>
<p>The kind of cultures that can help us to teach ourselves to heal ourselves are becoming more widely accessible and acceptable; people like Deepak Chopra are helping to pave the way into this braver new world.</p>
<p>We wish we had it all together to tell you all of the details, but we are still learning about this; we are still learning how to write about it. We have had to take ourselves far beyond the veil of acceptable behavior in order to learn this; we have had to become as crazy as the people whom we hope to help, people who must still learn to heal themselves by using their own madnesses as the tools that will finally help them to heal.</p>
<p>Our most recent journeys into darkness and madness have been deeply gratifying worthwhile experiences; we are much healthier now. We will continue to become healthier because our new paradigms for mental, emotional, and social wellbeing are far more successful than anything that our more traditional medical practices of today have been able to provide, thus far.</p>
<p>Always remember, any belief in rationalism is just another irrational belief…</p>
<p> </p>
<p><i>To your good health! May your madness drive you sane…</i></p>
<p><i>Love, Grigori Rho Gharveyn</i></p>
<p><i>aka Greg Gourdian, Roger Holler, et al…</i></p>
<p><i> </i></p>
<p><i>Namaste</i></p>
<p><i> </i></p> Peace, Love, and Microdots, How Hallucinations Work...tag:templeilluminatus.ning.com,2011-04-11:6363372:Topic:1363052011-04-11T00:55:20.091ZGrigori Rho Gharveynhttps://templeilluminatus.ning.com/profile/GrigoriRhoGharveyn
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Peace, Love, and Microdots, How Hallucinations Work...</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<p>You do not need any LSD or any other kind of psychedelics to hallucinate.</p>
<p>You are already hallucinating.</p>
<p>Psychedelics enable you to consciously interact with your hallucinations by projecting them more vividly.</p>
<p>When used with sound medical advice such as Doctor Timothy Leary proposed, psychedelics may sometimes lead to enlightening experiences because people may sometimes…</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Peace, Love, and Microdots, How Hallucinations Work...</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<p>You do not need any LSD or any other kind of psychedelics to hallucinate.</p>
<p>You are already hallucinating.</p>
<p>Psychedelics enable you to consciously interact with your hallucinations by projecting them more vividly.</p>
<p>When used with sound medical advice such as Doctor Timothy Leary proposed, psychedelics may sometimes lead to enlightening experiences because people may sometimes learn to use them to guide themselves to better cognitive health.</p>
<p>Used recreationally, psychedellics may be used culturally to reinforce a set of values at variance with conventional value systems; Hippy culture is partly a product of this sort of cultural reinforcement process.</p>
<p>Recreational use of psychedelics may be more risky, at times, than the use of psychedelics in controlled, purposeful environments designed with the intention to help guide hallucinating people to better understand themselves and how their own minds really work.</p>
<p>For this reason, anyone inclined to risk their mental or emotional equillibriums, and sometimes risk their lives, as well, are strongly encouraged to learn to use psychedellics responsibly or else to avoid using them at all.</p>
<p>The misuse of psychedellics is not advised, the consequences of misuse are very serious, regardless of whether anyone is ever injured.</p>
<p>Psychedelics can sometimes lock a person into their chosen world-views.</p>
<p>If a person's world views are skewed in any manner they may become less able to challenge their own biases, they may have more difficulty learning to maintain their equillibrium because their minds become more rigid.</p>
<p>People with strong potentials for this sort of initial reaction will usually not experiment with psychedelics or may only experiment with them very briefly, often once will have been more than enough for them, often with serious consequences that may take months or years to emerge.</p>
<p>The changes made by psychedelics to how peoples' minds operate at their deepest levels are typically so profound that they become permanent changes that will last them their entire lifetimes, yet they may be nearly entirely unaware of these changes or how these changes are constantly slowly evolving within their minds over time.</p>
<p>Aside from a reactive, abrupt 'locking-in' of a person's world views, there is also the possibility of an abrupt extraordinary expansion of a person's world views.</p>
<p>Locking in a person's world views has great benefits to society, however, when a person's world views expand they may learn to challenge local conventions such as aculturated, socially acceptable forms of injustice, such as prejudice or bigotry.</p>
<p>These properties of expanded awareness make LSD dangerous to established political and religious authoriities whose power always relies upon deceptions, deceptions that enlightenment exposes.</p>
<p>So psychedelics become illegal not only to protect people's lives, but also because it is politically expedient, it is hazardous to authorities for widespread use of psychedellics to emerge.</p>
<p>If you are already using psychedelics and cannot be dissuaded to stop, please by all means, learn to use them in the most responsible manners possible for you, for your own well being, and for the well being of your families, friends, and communiites.</p>
<p>The risks of using psychedelics are so enormous that irresponsible recreational use should be avoided. Please respect yourselves enough to keep yourselves, friends, and families safe.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>So what is really happening that makes psychedelics so dangerous?</p>
<p>All people have vast ibraries of complex models for everything they experience.</p>
<p>Archetypal images of familiar objects are all stored with 'variance-from' definitions of their archetypes that specifically define familar examples of these archetypes in their environemnts.</p>
<p>People learn to project their mental models for their realities as a sort of cognitive filter for their senses, a sort of 'mental-shorhand' that substiutes their mental models for their phsyical senses in their awareness.</p>
<p>All parts of our models, whether they are models for physical objects or people, models for the behaviors of objects or people, or models for the relationships betweeen objects, people, their respective environments, and each other, all parts are projected.</p>
<p>We become habituated to see what we imagine in our minds in favor of being completely aware of our sensoriums, our collective sensory awareness of our immediate physical environments.</p>
<p>We learn to filter our objective experiences with our cognitive preferences to see things in terms as comfortably as may be possible for ourselves.</p>
<p>All of the objects, properties, and processes modelled in our minds are 'tagged' with emotional weights or vectors.</p>
<p>If we are joyful when we imprint a new experience, then that new experience will cause us to phsyiologically respond to our memories of that experience by producing hormones that physiologically excite us to experience our joy again.</p>
<p>If we are fearful when we imprint a new experience we learn to respond to similar stimuli with fear, we produce hormones that reinforce our fear creating a state of anxiety with our memories that may often be entirely unrelated to our immediate physical environments but which we are prejudiced to believe must be related to our environments.</p>
<p>Consequently we become prone to see a threatening or menacing property to some part of our environment that may be indescribable to us.</p>
<p>Our minds cannot tolerate not knowing things when we are in stress.</p>
<p>We must find the source of our stress.</p>
<p>This is a deeply programmed part of our cogntive behaviour, part of our instincts in our subconsiousness, part of the most powerful parts of our minds by virtue of being the part of the oldest parts of our cognitive evolutions as we learned how to relate to the worlds we discover around ourselves.</p>
<p>Consequently, when some indescribable property of our environment bothers us we subconsiously choose to asign our anxiety to anything in our immediate or imaginary environments that offers us an explanation for our anxiety.</p>
<p>This mechanism reinforces our prejudices, we typically choose imaginary things that we are already afraid of to rationalize our generalized states of anxieties, or we find something in our environments that is 'out-of-order' to fix, or we fixate on something in our environments and transfer all of our accumulated anxiety in a moment of sudden irrational terror, spooking at a shadow, a falling leaf, or a new rattle in our chest we may imagine is incipient pneumonia.</p>
<p>With psychedellics, the things which hurt us most deeply tend to be projected in the form of hallucinations.</p>
<p>If we are lucky enough to be well balanced, with our emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual equillibriums all functioning optimally, then our hallucinations tend to disappear, there is nothing urgent for us to project.</p>
<p>There may be mild sensory distortions as a side effect, things we can enjoy playing with that augment our sensoriums making them more pleasurable, but the sorts of vivid hallucinations that might badly frighten us or cause us to put ourselves or someone else at risk are typically quite impossible.</p>
<p>In this state, psychedellics become very powerful hypnotics; we may accidentally imprint our belief systems with our own, possibly irrational, daydreams.</p>
<p>We become vulnerable to imprinting ourselves with false information about ourselves and our relationships with our environments that may put us at risk in many direct or very subtle ways.</p>
<p>This state may also be used to rationally guide ourselves to heal our own minds, but learning how to do this is very difficult with no one to guide you; paradoxically, it can be a very dangerous matter for you to allow anyone other than yourself to guide you in such states, you may learn to relinquish all authority for yourself to your guides.</p>
<p>No true guide will allow you to do this but many cults appear to be examples of guides who abuse their priviged charismatic access to other people's minds.</p>
<p>Psychedellics make you very vulnerable to imprinting, while also making you very vulnerable to legal prosecution. Two complimentary facts that make their limited use beneficial to our alleged authorities, our governments and churches.</p>
<p>Consequently, no matter how you may use psychedellics, they may still remain very, very dangerous.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>When using psychedellics our minds project our anxieties and fears, particularly our 'safer' irrational fears. Many people experience manic moments of sudden panic as they encounter projections of their fears and interact with them as if they were interacting with their real immediate environments.</p>
<p>This can make phobic conditions worse.</p>
<p>This can make anxiety disorders worse.</p>
<p>This can make depression worse.</p>
<p>This can make psychosis worse.</p>
<p>This can make schizophrenia worse.</p>
<p>This can make bipolarity worse.</p>
<p>This can make dissociativeness worse.</p>
<p>Fortunately, in the new emerging models for mental and emotional health being explored by many theorists and practitioners, all of these 'disorders' are being reviewed and recontexted because in the light of these new emerging models these are now considered to be natural healing processes.</p>
<p>Of course, the pharmaceuticals industry is heavily invested in chemical therapies, cognitive therapies compete with them financially.</p>
<p>Anyone can learn cognitive therapies to heal themselves, provided they are given a supportive environment and time to learn.</p>
<p>You can't hold people hostage to their own ideas as easily as you can with their medications.</p>
<p>You can't gaurantee that when our social infrastructures collapse people able to use their minds well will very badly decompensate and put themselves and their neighbors at risk, while people suddenly withdrawing from most psychopharmeceuticals will almost inevitably decompensate dramatically.</p>
<p>Sadly, sudden massive infrastructure collapses are being planned for, not to prevent them, but to make sure that they will happen. At least, according to many expert conspiracy theorists.</p>
<p>So how do we prevent mass decompensation?</p>
<p>Psychedellics may not appear to be the answer, they appear to cause too many serious side effects or permanent conditions.</p>
<p>However, the potentials sometimes unlocked by psychedellics may be part of the answer, potentials we should perhaps encourage people to learn to explore without psychedellics.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Potentials we will explore in the next part of this series...</em></p>
<p><em>Blessed be...</em></p>
<p><em>Namaste</em></p>
<p> </p> Hallucinating Minds, How People Hallucinatetag:templeilluminatus.ning.com,2011-04-10:6363372:Topic:1356932011-04-10T22:55:09.402ZGrigori Rho Gharveynhttps://templeilluminatus.ning.com/profile/GrigoriRhoGharveyn
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Hallucinating Minds, Why People Hallucinate</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Most people are unaware they may be hallucinating.</p>
<p>Technically, hallucination refers to perceptions in the absence of external stimuli.</p>
<p>In one sense then, everything might be regarded as hallucinatory, if we accept the premise that there is no such thing as objective reality, a premise difficult to prove or to disprove.</p>
<p>We will dismiss this special case of hallucinations, for now, as…</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Hallucinating Minds, Why People Hallucinate</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Most people are unaware they may be hallucinating.</p>
<p>Technically, hallucination refers to perceptions in the absence of external stimuli.</p>
<p>In one sense then, everything might be regarded as hallucinatory, if we accept the premise that there is no such thing as objective reality, a premise difficult to prove or to disprove.</p>
<p>We will dismiss this special case of hallucinations, for now, as most people sincerely believe the material worlds they experience with their senses are objective, real worlds.</p>
<p>In popular culture hallucinations are considered to be unusual events in which what is perceived may include a distortion of perceptions of an objective experience, as well as perceptions that may appear to have no objective stimuli involved.</p>
<p>Such distortions may more accurately be classified as illusions, however, in common parlance they may more often be described as hallucinations.</p>
<p>The most common classes of hallucination most people may be aware of are those hallucinations that occur with various types of intoxication such as may be experienced with alcohol, marijauna, or LSD.</p>
<p>Alcoholics, stoners, and fans of psychedelics may all be familiar with seeing things that 'just-aren't-there'. They may all exhibit unusual behavior, they may appear to respond to perceptions of their environments that may be unique to themselves, perceptions other observers may be unable to share.</p>
<p>Groups of drunken, stoned, or tripping people may hallucinate together at times through the power of suggestion, each contributing to a dialogue that drives the definitions of their perceptions in a common direction, a direction that may seem very bizarre to unintoxicated observers.</p>
<p>It is possible for someone hallucinating to be unaware that there is anything wrong with their perceptions, they may sometimes accept things as they appear to be to themselves without challenging the reality of their perceptions, particularly when their possibly irreal perceptions are reinforced in a group.</p>
<p>And, in fact, ordinary people also may be described as hallucinating, when their conditioned preferences for how they perceive things drifts from the consesus points of views.</p>
<p>It is this ordinary, daily form of hallucination that most concerns us.</p>
<p>Cognitive science theories have developed models for human cognitive evolution that consistently support a conclusion, that in this case, many, most, or all people are always hallucinating.</p>
<p>It may be impossible to stop hallucinating without becoming something like a Zen master, the only cases where people may be free of hallucinations may be in states of satori, bliss, deep meditation, or prayer, and possibly, not even then.</p>
<p>It is presumed by the unenlightened that all of their perceptions are real, but only a few classes of people consciously explore possibilities that their perceptions may really be irreal.</p>
<p>The reason cognitive sciences can demonstrate the validity of their models in which all people most likely must be hallucinating all the time is based on how human minds evolve.</p>
<p>The cognitive growth of each person appears to be based on learning symbol sets in which there is a perceived relationship between the symbols we create for things, symbols that we perceive with our minds, and things experienced in our sensoriums, the sum experiences of the processes of all of our senses informing us about our environments.</p>
<p>We cannot juggle five bowling pins in our minds.</p>
<p>We can, however, imagine juggling five bowling pins in our minds.</p>
<p>When we imagine we juggle five bowling pins we are manipulating our mental symbols for bowling pins, animating their behavior very realisitcally to ourselves in our minds.</p>
<p>We may lack the physical coordination to really juggle five bowling pins; we may rarely imagine all the pins falling to the floor, but falling to the floor may be the result more often than not if we try to juggle real bowling pins.</p>
<p>In order to anticipate how the world around us will change so that we may be prepared for whatever will happen next, we learn to build very elaborate models of the world in our minds.</p>
<p>The more threatening our environments appear to be, the more pressured we are to learn to model the worlds around us in our minds more successfully in order to more successfully anticipate trouble in order to avoid it.</p>
<p>In addition to threats from the physical world such as a moving vehicle, we must be able to model social threats, health threats, and financial threats, etc...</p>
<p>Social pressure plays a huge role in teaching us to model our external environments in our minds and use our mental models to explore the possible consequences of our own behavior.</p>
<p>Consequently, all people appear to develop very elaborate mental models for reality and how the elements of their models are identified, function, and interact.</p>
<p>Cognitive sciences study how all people acquire their mental models, how we all learn to assign various distinguishing properties to the elements of our models, and how we learn the rules by which the elements of our models should interact with one another, as well as what the implications for how these processes evolve may be.</p>
<p>Cognitive sciences study how people often 'live-in-their-heads' often unaware of real events or the properties of things in their environments because they prefer to stay in the safer realms of their imaginations, often ignoring things such as red lights because their models anticipate making a turn at a green light, and they mistakenly choose to perceive the green lights in their minds rather than the red lights at their intersections.</p>
<p>Because our models become increasingly elaborate, many people choose to ignore new information that may require them to update their models. This process further motivates them to live in isolation in their minds, increasingly 'out-of-touch' with what we might regard as their real worlds around them.</p>
<p>Over time, most people become so heavily invested in their beliefs about their perceptions that they unconsciously modify their perceptions to agree with their beliefs.</p>
<p>So long as their models for reality closely agree with other people's models for reality, things may work well, except for the occasional traffic accidents.</p>
<p>However, as more stress is applied, most people respond poorly.</p>
<p>Stress inhibits higher cognitive functions resulting in less capacity to think or act with awareness, while also exciting reactive behaviors, behaviors relying heavily on our personal models for reality, models with which we feel more familiar, more comfortable, models that typically feel safer to us than the stressful or unfamiliar environments our senses should be engaging us with.</p>
<p>Stress habituates us to mentally over-ride the perceptions of our senses and choose to see things in our minds in our own familiar ways, regardless of how different our imaginations may be from the objective worlds we describe to ourselves this way.</p>
<p>The differences between our interior, imagined worlds, and our exterior, 'objective' worlds are called cognitve dissonance when we become aware of them.</p>
<p>Cognitive dissonance is our awareness that things are not really as they seemed to be to us.</p>
<p>All learning is a process of cognitive dissonance in which we discard our old models for things in favor of new models, new models that may not always be better models, but which we are usually convinced will be better models.</p>
<p>Humor, like learning, is derivitave of cognitive dissonance.</p>
<p>Humor sets up an expectation and then delivers a result that is widely at variance with the expectation.</p>
<p>The abrupt experience of something unexpected causes us to laugh, but we laugh only after an intense moment of tension in which we check our modeled expectations and the experiences of our perceptions to be sure everything is really ok.</p>
<p>Humor digs at those parts of our awareness that inspire fear or anxiety in order to create the sudden intense tension, and then resorts to silliness to break the tension in order to provide catharsis.</p>
<p>Catharsis is a healing process, consequently the popular old saw about good humor is very true, laughter really is good medicine.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>We'll be laughing our way to the funny farm now...</p>
<p>haha hiho hehe...</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Seriously.</p>
<p>All people are always hallucinating.</p>
<p>Validation is big business because people are secretly afraid they are all mad, and validation gives us a comforting illusion that we are normal.</p>
<p>It is impossible to have a consensus regarding what normal may be, so in one sense it is impossible to be normal, but in the sense of being ordinary, we are all very normal.</p>
<p>However, we may very well all be mad as hatters as well, perhaps far from ordinary at all...</p>
<p>Unless, of course, we accept that madness is indeed ordinary, normal, a theory cognitve sciences appear to confrim.</p>
<p>Cognitive sciences demonstrate that stress drives a wedge between perceived reality and objective reality.</p>
<p>The more stress present in our environments the less mental energy we have to be aware of our environments with, and also, the more emotionally motivated we become to dissociate from our immediate environments.</p>
<p>Brainwashing uses stress to break people's minds to force their cooperation.</p>
<p>Our environments are increasingly saturated with brainwashing messages, enough so, that all people cannot help but to be mad.</p>
<p>Only their collective agreements that they are not mad, agreements all made under stress to mitigate their fears that they may be mad, may give anyone any sense of security; however, many of our aculturated social agreements are breaking down, eroded by increasing stress.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>We should cover two more aspects of Hallucinating Minds, a close up of cognitive mechanisms that produce hallucinations, and how an emerging age of enlightenment may help us address our fears, reduce our stress, and relieve social and personal influences that encourage us to hallucinate.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Blessed be...</em></p>
<p> </p> Your Doctors' Drugs for Youtag:templeilluminatus.ning.com,2011-04-10:6363372:Topic:1339912011-04-10T03:47:05.214ZGrigori Rho Gharveynhttps://templeilluminatus.ning.com/profile/GrigoriRhoGharveyn
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Your Doctors' Drugs for You</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Anyone currently using any form of prescribed psychopharmeceuticals for any conditions, such as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolarity, or psychosis may often feel ashamed or stigmatized.</p>
<p>If these medicines sincerely help someone cope with their problems then it is unfair for anyone to find fault with them for relying on these therapies.</p>
<p>A life free of drugs may not be best for all people; we may all be…</p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Your Doctors' Drugs for You</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Anyone currently using any form of prescribed psychopharmeceuticals for any conditions, such as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolarity, or psychosis may often feel ashamed or stigmatized.</p>
<p>If these medicines sincerely help someone cope with their problems then it is unfair for anyone to find fault with them for relying on these therapies.</p>
<p>A life free of drugs may not be best for all people; we may all be well advised to learn respect the difficult life choices anyone using such medications must make, choices that may too often contribute to situations where they may sometimes feel very uncomfortable or even alienated when experiencing the sometimes poor regards some people may sometimes express regarding their painful, very personal life choices.</p>
<p>One reason it is important to avoid any judgmental statements regarding these difficult choices is that any hurtful remark may be remembered and may be re-examined so often that the person who felt hurt by this remark comes to habituate themselves to believe these remarks are true, rather than understanding these remarks are only opinions, opinions that are never worth nearly as much as the good regard they deserve to always hold for themselves.</p>
<p>Alas, it becomes easy for such people to lose self-confidence when faced with casual hostility for their life choices; this can help put such people at risk in several ways.</p>
<p>If you are a patient relying on psychopharmeceuticals with any success please do not allow yourself to be dissuaded from using your medications by the criticism of people who cannot place themselves in your own shoes well enough to understand how you feel about your medications.</p>
<p>Most people who rely on such medications are ambivalent about using their medicines. Small pushes, tiny criticisms, can build up to a social pressure to conform to expectations that they should, perhaps, be drug-free.</p>
<p>Deciding to quit successfully managed pharmaceutical therapies may often bring many patients immediately into crises. It is rarely safe to rapidly withdraw from most of these medications without a physician's guidance.</p>
<p>So please, if you are a successful or even partially successful patient on a chemical regimen that seems to work for you, please do not allow yourself to feel pressured to stop using your meds or to change whatever else is working for you.</p>
<p>It's ok to be you however being you will work best for you.</p>
<p>However, please understand, that while many people are successfully treated with various psychopharmeceuticals, as so many people already feel is true for themselves, many other people have had very poor, often critically traumatic responses to their medications; for these people, the traumas they have experienced as a result of poorly or inappropriately administered therapies make them very suspicious that anyone relying on such therapies may be at risk of dangerous, frightening experiences like their own.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>When people from these two camps of rugged survivors meet, both are dependent on belief systems that may sometimes come into conflict with each other's.</p>
<p>One group must choose to believe in the value of their therapies because believing this helps their therapies be more effective.</p>
<p>The other group must believe in the dangers of such therapies because they are attracted to anything which may help ease their suffering but must painfully deny themselves this sort of help because for them it seems to consistently do them more harm than good.</p>
<p>Both groups of patients have very personal experiences they deserve validation for, but both groups often invalidate each other, because they are afraid that their own core beliefs, beliefs essential to their well-being, may be challenged.</p>
<p>Together, both groups have a wealth of experience that can unite them and help each other to grow beyond whatever limits they still experience as a consequence of the successes or failures of their respective therapies.</p>
<p>Some may find new meds that will work for them in spite of their fears, while others may discover safe ways to withdraw from their medications under their doctor's guidance because they learn new coping skills from those who must learn to manage without any meds.</p>
<p>Together we can form a stronger mental health care community and support groups to help each other to heal.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><i>Namaste</i></p>
<p> </p> INTRODUCTION, Psycho-Pharmacology, How Crazy Do We Have To Be?tag:templeilluminatus.ning.com,2011-04-09:6363372:Topic:1339202011-04-09T23:51:46.683ZGrigori Rho Gharveynhttps://templeilluminatus.ning.com/profile/GrigoriRhoGharveyn
<p>Dear Temple Illuminati friends and family,</p>
<p>The following message defines a general outline for this discussion subject in our recent proposal to Leila...</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Hi sweetie!</p>
<p>We applaud your introduction of your beliefs in the group now being moderated by our gifted sister Temple Crone... (what happened to Bliss?)</p>
<p>You prove to us just how much you are our sister at every turn... <smile></p>
<p>We still owe you a reply there; we will get around to it, as we…</p>
<p>Dear Temple Illuminati friends and family,</p>
<p>The following message defines a general outline for this discussion subject in our recent proposal to Leila...</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Hi sweetie!</p>
<p>We applaud your introduction of your beliefs in the group now being moderated by our gifted sister Temple Crone... (what happened to Bliss?)</p>
<p>You prove to us just how much you are our sister at every turn... <smile></p>
<p>We still owe you a reply there; we will get around to it, as we owe a reply to TC and to the group as well as to ourselves and to you.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>A recent chat with <a member> upset <this member> somewhat, but what we ask you now may upset them even more if they are afraid to explore the potential truths we hope to reveal.</p>
<p>Many people will most likely object, perhaps raucously, to which we can only say, Please! Bring it on!</p>
<br/>
<p>Some people may come to regard us as a Super-Troll if we proceed with this, not because of our bad manners, but because we all too likely will inspire trollish vindictive replies from many people if they cannot mitigate their reactions when responding to what we believe we must share with anyone who may be in need of help with drugs.</p>
<p>We would like you to open a new subject area for us, one dedicated to drugs of all kinds, legal and not-so-legal, anything with psychopharmeceutical properties.</p>
<p>Discussions may be expected to fall loosely into something along the following lines:</p>
<br/>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em>Your Doctors' Drugs for You.</em></span></p>
<p>This should be moderated as a neutrally opinioned discussion of all forms of psychopharmeceuticals and experiences with them. </p>
<p>Many people feel deeply stigmatized that they depend on one or more of these drugs, we hope to help them feel less stigmatized.</p>
<p>While many people are actively helped with the drugs marketed by the pharmaceutical industries and peddled through licensed doctor/dealers, many more are hurt by these drugs as well, so voices on both sides of this topic need a forum in which to be heard and to be understood so that those in each camp support each other rather than appearing threatened by each other.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>--- We MUST put up a legal notice stating the goals of each forum discussion that limits liability, we can agree to moderate these discussions in a neutral manner that cautions people about the dangers of exploring these things, but anyone already lost in their explorations with drugs needs help, we are a veteran of nearly everything we will introduce.</p>
<p>Perhaps you are already prepared wit these sorts of notices, or guidelines to observe when drafting them? ---</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em> </em></span></p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em>Uppers, Downers, Sliders, and Bummers...</em></span></p>
<p>A frank discussion of many popular psychopharmeceuticals used for recreational purposes.</p>
<p>This discussion may evolve into a support group for those who may have had problems with such things. (Sliders induce dissociative states that are relatively neutral regarding agitation or agitation supression properties.)</p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em>Peace, Love, and Microdots...</em></span></p>
<p>An exploration of Hippie cultures and the drugs they love, focusing on Marijauna, LSD, Mushrooms and other Hallucinogenics.</p>
<p>A parallel disuccion topic should be:</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em> </em></span></p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em>Your Hallucinating Mind, Why All People Hallucinate</em></span></p>
<p>Most people are unaware <they are> hallucinating, if they knew this it might frighten them. More frightening to them may be the reality proven by cognitive sciences that all people hallucinate all the time; you have to be something close to a Zen Master to stop hallucinating.</p>
<p>This topic will introduce current cognitive theory and how all people mitigate the direct messages of their senses with their minds, translating their experiences into the private worlds of their personal beliefs and expectations.</p>
<p>This discussion topic would include explanations of the day-to-day homeostatic mechanics of hallucination and how these are affected by using hallucinogenics.</p>
<br/>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em>The Cutting Edge of Drugs...</em></span></p>
<p><em>An investigation of the 'powder'</em> drugs, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin...</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Hot Topics! <smile></p>
<p>You bet! but controversy can be far more valuable than quiet fear...</p>
<p>Please name this new Subject area: <strong><em>Psycho-Pharmacology, How Crazy Do You Have To Be?</em></strong></p>
<br/>
<p>Thank you sweetie,</p>
<p>love you lots too!</p>
<br/>
<p>Qualifications:</p>
<p>We are a veteran of mental hospitals, with a nine month stay in 78-79 and a 6 week visit in 2005.</p>
<p>We have worked with patients rights groups as an activist for mental health care reform.</p>
<p>If we could put up with academia we could already have a degree in psychology, we <em>taught</em> psychology and sociology in high school when we were 17 years old...</p>
<p>We have missed out on some recent new drugs, but we've used a wide spectrum of anti-depressants, several anti-psychotics, as well as most of the popular 'recreational' drugs from the 70's and 80's, and one or two more trendy things like xtc or ketamine.</p>
<p>The only drug we are relatively unfmaliar with that is in common use is heroin, however we are familiar with morphine.</p>
<p>We've avoided many pills after trying Thorazine, Quaaludes, and a variety of uppers and downers briefly, many of these simply do not work for us or work in very unexpected ways.</p>
<p>For instance, thorazine energizes us as if it were methamphetamine...</p>
<p>Vicodin and all codein analogues have a nearly consistent side effect of keeping us awake 30 hours or more... We had to quit using these for pain management.</p>
<p>We stick close to the letter of the law these days in respect for our roomates, neither of whom are habituated to the use of recreational drugs.</p>
<p>Unless, of course, we include <em>carbohydrates</em> as a recreational drug, carbohydrates may be more addictive to us than tobacco.</p>
<p>Mmm yes <em>tobacco</em>, now there will be another great discussion topic for this subject area...</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Both <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em>Carbohydrates and Dieting</em></span>, and <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em>Nic at Night</em></span> discussions will be needed in this group...</p>
<p>Carbohydrates are definitely a psycho-pharmeceutical as they play roles in many people's sleep habits, binging or fasting disorders, and depressions.</p>
<p>Nic at Night is a Hippie tradition popular at Rainbow Gahterings a sort of Nicotene mutual benefit association open to anyone willing to donate tobacco or in need of tobacco.</p>
<p>Our spirit guide told us to start smoking again after we had quit for 20 years; his advise was worth following, very carefully...</p>
<p>Another of our spirit guides is our good friend Timothy Leary, our mentor and an expert psychopharmacologist...</p>
<p><smile></p>
<br/>
<p><em>Blessed be...</em></p>
<p><em>Namaste</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>PS</p>
<p>Are you familiar with e-prime? that would make another a very good subject area if we dress it up properly in a Temple gown...</p>
<p>This subject would be about learning to mitigate communication barriers created by 'trollish' behaviors perhaps <em><strong>Trolls and E-Prime, Liberation From Reactive Conditioning...</strong></em><em><strong> </strong></em></p>
<p><em>This might include a discussion on</em> <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em>Universal Truth, What Is Truth Really?</em></span></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p><em>Enjoy!</em></p>
<p><em> </em></p>