
Mental Mountains - 5107h
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/26/mental-mountains/
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andrewflnr
Don't miss the review of all therapy books ever that's linked at the end of
part I. For one thing, it's hilarious, and for another, the context it adds is
pretty helpful.

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braindongle
For the HN-reading 22-year-old out there who is trying to climb out of that
first unspeakably horrible episode of mental illness, and as part of that,
trying to grok what psychiatry really is: at this point in history, models
(theoretical or other) are great and can drive progress in psychiatry, but
don't for one minute believe any hype like this, from the reviewed book's
Amazon page:

"Ticic and Hulley equip readers to carry out focused, empathic therapy using
the process found by researchers to induce memory reconsolidation, the
recently discovered and only known process for actually unlocking emotional
memory at the synaptic level."

Just, no. It's not even worth refuting. What happens at the synaptic level,
and what happens at the emotional level, the _experience_ of emotions? We are
not meaningfully closer to bridging that gap than we ever have been. Despite
great advances in brain science, that sort of talk still belongs in
philosophy, not science or medicine.

This is not to say that UTeB or EIEIO or whatever model doesn't hold promise
for those of us with lived experience of mental illness. The evidence base for
talk therapy continues to evolve. Just ignore any kind of "unlocking secrets"
talk. We aren't there yet. We aren't close. But on the web pages that sell
books, we are always on the verge of...

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Malp
Thanks for this comment- do you think you could reach out to me? Contact
information is on my about, thanks

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braindongle
Hi Malp. What is the reason for your inquiry?

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Malp
Your comment resonated with me and I was curious to see if you had any other
insight that you might be able to share- however, the comments section of an
HN post seemed too public for the subject matter.

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zxcmx
Wait, does this imply that ruminating and getting blackout drunk could be an
effective form of therapy?

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yowlingcat
It would certainly explain its popularity as a coping mechanism!

To be a little bit more forthright -- I'm not sure the fundamentally
dissociative pharmacological pathways that alcohol stimulates are close enough
to the psychedelic ones that SA talks about later on in the post to be
fungible.

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YeGoblynQueenne
>> The predictive model output the anxiety, using reasoning like “if you talk,
people will hate you, and the prospect of being hated should make you anxious
– therefore, anxiety”, but not any of the intermediate steps.

That really makes it sound like poor Richard was some kind of robot with an AI
that used some kind of machine learning algorithm to build models etc.

It sounds a bit silly to be honest, like taking an analogy ("the human mind
builds a model of the world"), mashing it up with some currently trendy
terminology ("machine learning model") and then running with the result until
it's stretched out to an absurd extent and you can't tell what the words mean
anymore.

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keyle
Very interesting read, well explained and somehow 'feels right'. I didn't
think psychotherapy could work until it was explained to me this way.

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Filligree
These books almost always give that experience. It's great, until you realize
they're all contradictory...

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computerphage
In fact, this blog has a warning to exactly that effect, posted a few days
ago, and linked from this post.

[https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/book-review-all-
therap...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/book-review-all-therapy-
books/)

~~~
Filligree
Yep, I read that. It's good that he gave the warning, but anyone who doesn't
follow the blog might still be fooled.

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darkerside
In two words, cognitive dissonance

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hcs
But why, and how not to?

