All diseases come from nerves! Psychological causes of poor health

Biological and social characteristics of a person

Man is considered to be a “reasonable man”, since he has developed qualitatively in the process of evolution, due to which he has become different from animals. As a biological species, humans have the following characteristics:

bodily characteristics adapted to work
a highly developed enlarged brain capable of conceptually reflecting the world around it
consciousness that helps to understand the world around us
thinking and language that gives a person the ability to communicate and convey accumulated experience
an upright walking method that frees a person's hands
the structure of the teeth, changing the shape of the skull.

The social in a person is manifested, first of all, in the peculiarities of joint life activity and verbal communication of people. Social characteristics of a person are characterized by the following points:

attitude towards work and activity
conscious attitude towards nature
targeted and planned social activity
reproduction and preservation of social and cultural values
creation of a family as a social unit of society
upbringing and education of the younger generation
development of abilities and talents
support of their own kind with obvious deviations from the norm

External and psychological signs of a person

A person’s personality is understood as a set of external characteristics that distinguish him from other people and confirm his belonging to the human race. There are many classifications of external signs of a person, we will look at the main ones:

Own and related. Own characteristics belong to a person according to his physical nature and include: general physical (height, age), demographic (gender, nationality, race), anatomical (external structure of the head, limbs, torso), functional (gait, gestures, speech, habits, posture). Associated features are those elements that form the personality (clothing, personal items, jewelry).
Group and individual. These are the aggregate external signs of a person that are characteristic either of a group of people or of one person.
Permanent and temporary. These signs can either be with a person from birth to death, or appear and disappear (like hair, warts).
Natural and artificial. Such signs are either inherent in a person by nature (wrinkles), or appear as a result of changes in signs of a person’s appearance (tattoos, piercings).

In psychology, the main signs of a person that characterize a person’s mental appearance are divided into 8 groups:

sensory-perceptual (vision, taste, smell, hearing, touch)
physiological (thirst, hunger, sexual desire, pain, need)
reactionary (trembling, palpitations, dizziness, nausea, weakness, horror, pallor)
emotional (fear, joy, anger, love, despair)
verbal (message, request, demand, scolding, complaint)
intellectual (imagination, thinking, faith)
physical (work, rest)

What is the difference between neurological and mental illnesses?

Some neurologists believe that a "neurological disorder" is a kind of "commentary" on the "physical" (structural) and functional signs (symptoms) of damage to the "brain" rather than the "mental domain", such as thinking.

Definitions of what constitutes signs (symptoms) of a mental disorder have changed much more frequently in the history of psychiatry than in any other medical discipline. on the subject of semiotics of a particular disease. “Mental illness” is essentially a “cultural judgment,” and individual “labels” such as “schizophrenia” or “bipolar affective disorder” describe a variety of phenomena that are sometimes different from each other or even directly opposed to each other. and sometimes they have a common biological (genetic) base. From time to time it seems that "Mental illness" is not a scientific term, and claims to this paradigm (term criteria) cannot be objectively verified. The definition of “mental illness” takes a completely different approach and evaluates phenomena based on psychosocial criteria. The "mental illness" paradigm completely excludes signs of brain damage as a defining feature of how to classify or label a mental disorder, prohibiting the use of medical criteria, and effectively states that these labels have no "physical" consistency with them. Additionally, the "mental illness" model suggests that there are no medical or psychological differences between "mental illness" and "non-mental illness".

It seems that neuroscience is “necessarily objective” while psychiatry is “necessarily subjective,” even though both disciplines are about how we interpret human experience.

Essentially, “mental illness” is a psychiatrist’s way of telling a patient “we don’t know why this is happening” and “there is no need for an objective diagnosis of a mental disorder.” So, the psychiatrist argues that there is no medical explanation that can be found for a mental disorder, and one must look elsewhere for the definition of “mental disorder”, just not in the area of neurology. "Mental illness" is a diagnosis of exclusion - all other explanations must fail here, and professionals generally refuse and assign a logically convenient "label" in order to avoid confusion about the diagnosis of this or that mental disorder.

Some doctors say that neurology and psychiatry are either “twins” who want but cannot separate, or are actually two manifestations of the same “subject” (brain disease). There is no doubt that psychiatry is limited from neurology in a completely arbitrary line, and there is a large degree of overlap between these specialties.

Recessive and dominant human traits

Since a person is not only a biological, but also a social being, his genetics differs from the genetics of other living organisms. Genetics, which studies the inheritance of human characteristics, identifies recessive and dominant traits in people.

Dominant human characteristics carry the possibility of inheriting diseases in 50% of cases. That is, if one parent is healthy and the other is sick, then the probability of having a healthy or sick child is 50/50. Dominant traits include:

skin (dark, thick, piebald spotting and pigmented spots in the sacral area);
vision (myopia, farsightedness, cataracts, strabismus);
height (dwarfism);
hands and feet (polydactyly, brachydactyly, left-handedness, thin, hard and flat nails, thick and flattened finger, elliptical patterns on the fingers, varicose veins, second toe longer than the big toe, increased mobility of the big toe);
facial features (freckles, round face and chin, dimples on the cheeks and chin, thick unjoined eyebrows, long eyelashes);
nose (round, straight and with a hump, round nostrils, high and narrow bridge of the nose);
mouth (the ability to bend the tongue back, roll up, teeth at birth, protruding teeth and jaws, gap between incisors, predisposition to caries, full lips, Habsburg lip);
ears (sharp tip of the ear, loose lobe);
blood (groups A, B, AB, presence of Rh factor).

Recessive human traits carry the possibility of inheriting diseases in 25% of cases. Typically, with such inheritance, both parents are considered healthy, but have a potential pathological gene, which is passed on to their children according to the following scheme: 25% of the offspring will be healthy, 25% of the offspring will be sick, and 50% of the offspring will be, like their parents, latent carriers of the pathological gene. Recessive traits include:

skin (thin skin, albinism, fair skin);
vision (night blindness, color blindness);
hands and feet (right-handedness, circular patterns on fingers, second toe shorter);
hearing (congenital deafness);
processes in the body (diabetes mellitus, hemophilia);
facial features (square face and chin, thin connected eyebrows, short eyelashes);
nose (pointed, snub-nosed, narrow nostrils, low, wide, straight and bent bridge of the nose);
mouth (thin lips);
ears (fused lobe);
blood (blood type O, lack of Rh factor).

Of all known diseases, 1000 are transmitted by a dominant trait, and 800 by a recessive trait. These signs can explain the transmission of diseases from generation to generation, as well as the sudden manifestation of the disease after its long absence in the family.

Mental and psychological: what is the difference? Or about the fear of going crazy

Division into psychological

and
mental
, both normal and pathological, are historically understandable, but terminologically unjustified.
If they say that a person has mental problems
, most often, in fact, they mean
psychotic mental disorders
, which narrows the concept of the psyche to psychosis, an extreme form of mental disorders.
And if they want to say that a person is experiencing universal human difficulties, then they talk about psychological problems
, which, strictly speaking, is very strange, because psychological problems can only exist in the scientific sense (yes, the science of
psychology
has many problems), but a person can have only mental problems. Talking about a person’s “psychological problems” is as semantically incorrect as talking about “medical problems” instead of “health problems.”

Nevertheless, not only in everyday life, but also in science, two concepts have taken root: “human psyche” and “human psychology”. Thus, the word “psychology” has become a defense against the recognition of the disturbing truth that every person is endowed with a psyche. It must be admitted that psychologists themselves greatly contributed to this, avoiding in every possible way the use of the word “psyche”. And the word “psychology” has become too tightly integrated into speech in its second, figurative meaning, that it is no longer possible to abandon this meaning of the word. For example, the phrase “psychological support” cannot be replaced with “mental support”. The word “mental,” however, has acquired a more negative character, and the phrase “mental support” is more likely to evoke associations with “mental treatment.”

By the way, the definition of psychology as the science of the soul is historically understandable, but not justified. The term “soul” (in Greek “psyche”) has an exclusively religious meaning and is not used today among scientific terms in psychology. The soul was “studied” by religious philosophers, and modern psychologists study the psyche, or rather, its manifestations.

However, if someone is frightened by the word “psyche” due to its association with “mental illness,” then he should also be frightened by the word “soul” due to its association with “mental illness.” However, I must admit, the word “mental” is more repulsive, and, obviously, the merit for this is, first of all, psychiatrists.

But if a person is “afraid” of everything related to the mental, there must be many reasons for this.

Of course, these difficulties and confusion in concepts are associated not only with the historical development of these two sciences of the human psyche, but also with the history of attitudes towards people with mental illness. It is unlikely that psychiatry and psychiatrists could earn trust when, just a few decades ago, such barbaric methods of “treatment” as electroconvulsive therapy and loboectomy were used (remember, for example, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”).

But it’s not even about the horrors of psychiatric clinics that we read about in books and saw in movies. The point is, first of all, in doctors, whose task is to treat, for which it is necessary to study the disease. And doctors who studied mental illness spoke about the psyche only in connection with illness. But worse than that, because... doctors treat patients; anyone who goes to see a doctor who treats mental illness turns out to be, as if right away, mentally ill.

And this is the main frightening meaning of the word “psyche”. And the point is not even that if a person turns to a psychiatrist, or even starts talking about problems with the psyche, those around him immediately classify him as a “crazy person”, so to speak, stick a label on him, although this is very important.

It's scary to think about the mental, because a mentally ill person can almost never notice his mental problems, and we all know about it. Of course, psychiatrists know about this, and we know about it too. And we are terrified by the very fact of a visit to a psychiatrist (and, at the same time, to a psychoneurologist, psychologist or psychoanalyst), because we are scared not only by the fact that we may be diagnosed with mental disorders, but to a greater extent by the fact that we won’t even know about it. won't try to tell the truth.

But some people pluck up courage and come to a psychologist, despite the fact that the name of his specialty contains the root “psycho”.

As a rule, people come to a psychologist for advice.

But who is a psychologist to give advice?

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