11 ms·

The Mystery of Urban Psychosis

58 points by wallflower 10y ago

astazangasta 10y ago
If you live in a city, you should read this essay: http://www.altruists.org/static/files/The%20Metropolis%20and%20Mental%20Life%20(Georg%20Simmel).htm http://www.altruists.org/static/files/The%20Metropolis%20and... >Our psychic activity still responds to almost every impression of somebody else with a somewhat distinct feeling. The unconscious, fluid and changing character of this impression seems to result in a state of indifference. Actually this indifference would be just as unnatural as the diffusion of indiscriminate mutual suggestion would be unbearable. From both these typical dangers of the metropolis, indifference and indiscriminate suggestibility, antipathy protects us. A latent antipathy and the preparatory stage of practical antagonism effect the distances and aversions without which this mode of life could not at all be led.
- dominotw 10y ago
  trivial observation packaged in flowery language to sound insightful ? tl;dr: there is too much going on in the city to give a shit.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - astazangasta 10y ago
    > The essence of the blasé attitude consists in the blunting of discrimination. This does not mean that the objects are not perceived, as is the case with the half-wit, but rather that the meaning and differing values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial.
    - benevol 10y ago
      Sure, but here's the thing: The inter-subjective reflectivity of perceived para-circular linearity is subject to radial normality of the urbanoid race condition reflective of mostly pervasive stray projection, which, in 93 percent of all cases, prevails as the main subject of pre-relationary trajectory analysis, as proven by the late Phil Corytorov.
  - jacobush 10y ago
    Yes, but at least I need the flowery language sometimes to speed down my thought enough to give a shit.
- oldmanjay 10y ago
  If you don't live in a city how likely is it that you care about those people in the city you wouldn't care about if you did live there?
stewbrew 10y ago
"the same factors that increase your chance of getting diagnosed with schizophrenia also increase your chances of ending up in living in a deprived urban area" I wonder how much of this mystery is based on spurious correlation -- people with mental problems fleeing rural areas and moving to cities, other (social) factors that are more common in cities and influence the probability of developing a mental illness.
- _rpd 10y ago
  > people with mental problems fleeing rural areas and moving to cities Yes, although it is not easy, perhaps it is easier to live as a person with schizophrenia in an urban environment. Although inadequate, there are more likely to be some mental health services, and urbanites tend to encounter and tolerate a broader variety of human behaviors.
  - Gibbon1 10y ago
    Might be people suffering an episode of mania in a rural area pass unnoticed by the various authorities.
    - Hydraulix989 10y ago
      Yes, to me this seems like a misinterpretation of the data. Growing up in a small rural blue collar town in the wifi-less farm country outside of Pittsburgh, we had our fair share of "crazies" that everybody knew about -- the ominous rotting but not abandoned house up the road that everybody stayed away from because of unsettling rumors. These data points are easily overlooked or dismissed as local lore or "rural legends." If you've seen the movie Prisoners [2013], it's startlingly accurate in this aspect.
      - Gibbon1 10y ago
        Reminds me, my brother in law's dad was in the appraisal/real estate business. Mentioned once trying to figure out what to do about a guy in one of the houses he had paper on. He apparently had shot the windows of the house out from the inside. He was obviously armed, crazy and paranoid. In a city the police would have to do something about that guy. In rural Alaska, they can wait.
jhallenworld 10y ago
This, and other recent events, remind me of the "muckers" from John Brunner's 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_on_Zanzibar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_on_Zanzibar
TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
> The two big psychological negatives of city living, social isolation and social threat, are already well studied in mental health. I'm not familiar wit the the term social threat. Is anybody able to elaborate on the meaning on this term in the given context, or link to an explanation.
throw001away 10y ago
I'm a regular reader of HN and a sometimes commenter. My other account is over 1100 days old. I'm going to write this anonymously because the content is otherwise not well linked to my online profile. I started writing this in response to @Gibbon1's comment: Might be people suffering an episode of mania in a rural area pass unnoticed by the various authorities. Which raises the question: which is better, to be noticed by the authorities, or to have your episode of mania / psychosis, and then return to your (slightly more?) centre way of being? Presumably once you've had one episode that gets noticed by the authorities you then probably get 'treatment'. Yet do we even know what these conditions really are, and do the treatments work? If the definition of the treatment worked is that the person is too dulled or numbed to function well enough to have another episode then, in my opinion, we aren't really treating the condition, we don't understand it well enough to heal it. The troubling thing is when the episode results in harm, or risk of harm, to others. With reference @Hydraulix989 comment, perhaps the ominous house up the road is a better place to be an in a city crawling with cops and psychiatrists. There are, or tend to be?, fewer 'services' for mental in rural areas, but maybe that's a good thing because I'm not convinced who the services serve. Urban mental health services are a form of institutionalisation of people with mental health issues. The overwhelming dogma of the medical field is that mental health needs treatment of some sort. More recently we're seeing that treatment can include things like dietary or gut flora therapy, relaxation meditation, that sort of thing. I was adopted, I met my biological parents when I was 22. Biological father went to high security prison for a home invasion and drug dealing / growing pot, biological mother lost access to her children for a good deal of time due to her wayward lifestyle. I ended up being charged with drug trafficking myself, and only just avoided a sentence when the charges were dropped due to the police's illegal methods. I have a couple of assault charges up my sleeve. I've experienced several 6 month periods of injecting methamphetamine 4 days out of 7, and longer periods of lesser usage. This one time I stayed awake for 6 days, my housemate was awake for 7 days. I have seen my own child a handful of times since it was born. I've always made it a point to be very careful who I talk to about my internal experience, you don't want to reveal that sort of thing to the wrong sort of people and end up on a court ordered medication program. Ordinarily I'm quite normal and well behaved. Through a set of pretty terrible circumstances I've moved away from the city I lived in, stopped contact with almost everyone I knew, and now live in a smaller city where I've had a stable well paying job for nearly 3 years, have had pre-approval for finance to purchase a house, and just put in an offer to buy a place. I would hope that, rather than end up on medication, or in a cycle of treatment and poverty, I become that ominous house up the road - I think that would be a better outcome for me. But perhaps I can live a relatively normal life if I make the enough of the right choices enough of the time. I'm lucky that, given regular sleep, good nutrition, and plenty of exercise, and having avoided all of the doctors medications, and never spent a day in psychiatric care or prison, nor suicided, I can maintain my composure fairly indefinitely, I hope. I'm not very good at intimate relationships, they seem to be a trigger for, or lead to a set of circumstances where I become unhinged, and having written all of this down for the first time I think I'm going to make a commitment to stay out of them.
Mendenhall 10y ago
So much more goes on in city life than rural life. More interactions more noise etc. etc. Perhaps with more things around that affect you, more odds of psychosis.
gojomo 10y ago
Surprised this article, and the researchers interviewed, don't highlight contagious agents as a possibility. There's a strong case that Toxoplasma gondii, a communicable parasite, can contribute to schizophrenia or other mental illnesses: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cat-parasite-toxoplasma-gondii-linked-to-mental-illness-schizophrenia/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cat-parasite-toxoplasma-gondii-l... Other viruses have been posited as contributors to mental illness, and there's a relationship between schizophrenia and season-of-birth that may indicate prenatal/youthful infection with some otherwise mild seasonal illness (like flu) might increase the risk of schizophrenia later.

58 points by wallflower 10y ago

If you live in a city, you should read this essay: http://www.altruists.org/static/files/The%20Metropolis%20and%20Mental%20Life%20(Georg%20Simmel).htm http://www.altruists.org/static/files/The%20Metropolis%20and... >Our psychic activity still responds to almost every impression of somebody else with a somewhat distinct feeling. The unconscious, fluid and changing character of this impression seems to result in a state of indifference. Actually this indifference would be just as unnatural as the diffusion of indiscriminate mutual suggestion would be unbearable. From both these typical dangers of the metropolis, indifference and indiscriminate suggestibility, antipathy protects us. A latent antipathy and the preparatory stage of practical antagonism effect the distances and aversions without which this mode of life could not at all be led.

dominotw 10y ago
trivial observation packaged in flowery language to sound insightful ? tl;dr: there is too much going on in the city to give a shit.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- astazangasta 10y ago
  > The essence of the blasé attitude consists in the blunting of discrimination. This does not mean that the objects are not perceived, as is the case with the half-wit, but rather that the meaning and differing values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial.
  - benevol 10y ago
    Sure, but here's the thing: The inter-subjective reflectivity of perceived para-circular linearity is subject to radial normality of the urbanoid race condition reflective of mostly pervasive stray projection, which, in 93 percent of all cases, prevails as the main subject of pre-relationary trajectory analysis, as proven by the late Phil Corytorov.
- jacobush 10y ago
  Yes, but at least I need the flowery language sometimes to speed down my thought enough to give a shit.
oldmanjay 10y ago
If you don't live in a city how likely is it that you care about those people in the city you wouldn't care about if you did live there?

stewbrew 10y ago

"the same factors that increase your chance of getting diagnosed with schizophrenia also increase your chances of ending up in living in a deprived urban area" I wonder how much of this mystery is based on spurious correlation -- people with mental problems fleeing rural areas and moving to cities, other (social) factors that are more common in cities and influence the probability of developing a mental illness.

_rpd 10y ago
> people with mental problems fleeing rural areas and moving to cities Yes, although it is not easy, perhaps it is easier to live as a person with schizophrenia in an urban environment. Although inadequate, there are more likely to be some mental health services, and urbanites tend to encounter and tolerate a broader variety of human behaviors.
- Gibbon1 10y ago
  Might be people suffering an episode of mania in a rural area pass unnoticed by the various authorities.
  - Hydraulix989 10y ago
    Yes, to me this seems like a misinterpretation of the data. Growing up in a small rural blue collar town in the wifi-less farm country outside of Pittsburgh, we had our fair share of "crazies" that everybody knew about -- the ominous rotting but not abandoned house up the road that everybody stayed away from because of unsettling rumors. These data points are easily overlooked or dismissed as local lore or "rural legends." If you've seen the movie Prisoners [2013], it's startlingly accurate in this aspect.
    - Gibbon1 10y ago
      Reminds me, my brother in law's dad was in the appraisal/real estate business. Mentioned once trying to figure out what to do about a guy in one of the houses he had paper on. He apparently had shot the windows of the house out from the inside. He was obviously armed, crazy and paranoid. In a city the police would have to do something about that guy. In rural Alaska, they can wait.

jhallenworld 10y ago

This, and other recent events, remind me of the "muckers" from John Brunner's 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_on_Zanzibar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_on_Zanzibar

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago

> The two big psychological negatives of city living, social isolation and social threat, are already well studied in mental health. I'm not familiar wit the the term social threat. Is anybody able to elaborate on the meaning on this term in the given context, or link to an explanation.

throw001away 10y ago

I'm a regular reader of HN and a sometimes commenter. My other account is over 1100 days old. I'm going to write this anonymously because the content is otherwise not well linked to my online profile. I started writing this in response to @Gibbon1's comment: Might be people suffering an episode of mania in a rural area pass unnoticed by the various authorities. Which raises the question: which is better, to be noticed by the authorities, or to have your episode of mania / psychosis, and then return to your (slightly more?) centre way of being? Presumably once you've had one episode that gets noticed by the authorities you then probably get 'treatment'. Yet do we even know what these conditions really are, and do the treatments work? If the definition of the treatment worked is that the person is too dulled or numbed to function well enough to have another episode then, in my opinion, we aren't really treating the condition, we don't understand it well enough to heal it. The troubling thing is when the episode results in harm, or risk of harm, to others. With reference @Hydraulix989 comment, perhaps the ominous house up the road is a better place to be an in a city crawling with cops and psychiatrists. There are, or tend to be?, fewer 'services' for mental in rural areas, but maybe that's a good thing because I'm not convinced who the services serve. Urban mental health services are a form of institutionalisation of people with mental health issues. The overwhelming dogma of the medical field is that mental health needs treatment of some sort. More recently we're seeing that treatment can include things like dietary or gut flora therapy, relaxation meditation, that sort of thing. I was adopted, I met my biological parents when I was 22. Biological father went to high security prison for a home invasion and drug dealing / growing pot, biological mother lost access to her children for a good deal of time due to her wayward lifestyle. I ended up being charged with drug trafficking myself, and only just avoided a sentence when the charges were dropped due to the police's illegal methods. I have a couple of assault charges up my sleeve. I've experienced several 6 month periods of injecting methamphetamine 4 days out of 7, and longer periods of lesser usage. This one time I stayed awake for 6 days, my housemate was awake for 7 days. I have seen my own child a handful of times since it was born. I've always made it a point to be very careful who I talk to about my internal experience, you don't want to reveal that sort of thing to the wrong sort of people and end up on a court ordered medication program. Ordinarily I'm quite normal and well behaved. Through a set of pretty terrible circumstances I've moved away from the city I lived in, stopped contact with almost everyone I knew, and now live in a smaller city where I've had a stable well paying job for nearly 3 years, have had pre-approval for finance to purchase a house, and just put in an offer to buy a place. I would hope that, rather than end up on medication, or in a cycle of treatment and poverty, I become that ominous house up the road - I think that would be a better outcome for me. But perhaps I can live a relatively normal life if I make the enough of the right choices enough of the time. I'm lucky that, given regular sleep, good nutrition, and plenty of exercise, and having avoided all of the doctors medications, and never spent a day in psychiatric care or prison, nor suicided, I can maintain my composure fairly indefinitely, I hope. I'm not very good at intimate relationships, they seem to be a trigger for, or lead to a set of circumstances where I become unhinged, and having written all of this down for the first time I think I'm going to make a commitment to stay out of them.

Mendenhall 10y ago

So much more goes on in city life than rural life. More interactions more noise etc. etc. Perhaps with more things around that affect you, more odds of psychosis.

gojomo 10y ago

Surprised this article, and the researchers interviewed, don't highlight contagious agents as a possibility. There's a strong case that Toxoplasma gondii, a communicable parasite, can contribute to schizophrenia or other mental illnesses: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cat-parasite-toxoplasma-gondii-linked-to-mental-illness-schizophrenia/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cat-parasite-toxoplasma-gondii-l... Other viruses have been posited as contributors to mental illness, and there's a relationship between schizophrenia and season-of-birth that may indicate prenatal/youthful infection with some otherwise mild seasonal illness (like flu) might increase the risk of schizophrenia later.