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I don't know how we'll view psychology, but I believe we'll look back at a number of psychological illnesses and realize that they're a result of our environmen

I don't know how we'll view psychology, but I believe we'll look back at a number of psychological illnesses and realize that they're a result of our environmental factors much more so than they are naturally-occurring diseases. ADHD is a prime example. I believe modern life is highly over-stimulating us and a sizable subset of our society has trouble coping. Was ADHD a problem before the advent of TV, cell phones, the internet and our 24/7, immediately-available society? It's possible that people used to just go undiagnosed, but I believe it just wasn't as much of a problem as it is today. Concentration is a skill that can be practiced. I've struggled with it myself and have found that meditation is far more effective than medication in dealing with it. Moreover, when I do retreats or backpacking trips where I'm cut off from the digital world, all my concentration issues disappear. It's made me believe that modern psychiatry is myopiclly focused on identifying and treating symptoms and largely ignores the avoidable causes of those symptoms.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
> It's made me believe that modern psychiatry is myopiclly focused on identifying and treating symptoms and largely ignores the avoidable causes of those symptoms. I disagree with that, even though I agree a lot of mental issues are heavily environmental. The reason psychiatry tries to work around them is that the environment of modern civilization is what we have, it's not going to change (easily), and in the meantime, people need to live somehow. Backpacking retreats are a cool hack if you can afford it regularly, but most people can't - they get maybe one longer stretch of free time a year. The environment we live in is wholly unlike the environment we're adapted to. I'm not sure if we can or want to get meaningfully closer to the old days to alleviate our mental pains - for all our adaptations, the ancestral environment sucked hard compared to today, and modern civilization fixed at least as much as it broke.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

> It's made me believe that modern psychiatry is myopiclly focused on identifying and treating symptoms and largely ignores the avoidable causes of those symptoms. I disagree with that, even though I agree a lot of mental issues are heavily environmental. The reason psychiatry tries to work around them is that the environment of modern civilization is what we have, it's not going to change (easily), and in the meantime, people need to live somehow. Backpacking retreats are a cool hack if you can afford it regularly, but most people can't - they get maybe one longer stretch of free time a year. The environment we live in is wholly unlike the environment we're adapted to. I'm not sure if we can or want to get meaningfully closer to the old days to alleviate our mental pains - for all our adaptations, the ancestral environment sucked hard compared to today, and modern civilization fixed at least as much as it broke.