Category Archives: Anxiety Disorders

by | October 9, 2017 · 6:13 PM

Do People with OCD Enjoy Thinking about Their Obsessions, or Is It Always an Involuntary/Unpleasant Experience?

Answered on Quora:

Do people with OCD enjoy thinking about their obsessions, or is it always an involuntary/unpleasant experience?

Actually enjoying your obsessions (or repetitive thoughts) is a rule-out for OCD. If you enjoy your repetitive thoughts, OCD is literally ruled out. I sometimes come across people who enjoy their repetitive thoughts and think they had OCD. I told them that they did not.

Most common differential diagnoses were Prodromal Psychopathy (person is developing psychopathy but does not yet have it), Pedophilia, GAD and Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. Also things like Homosexuality which are not even illnesses. None of them are common. The only one I have seen more than once was Pedophilia.

But by and large, people who come to me suspecting they have OCD are correct almost all (98%) of the time. Clinicians despise self-diagnosis and say it has no credibility, but with OCD at least, many persons are quite certain that they have it, and they are correct in their self-diagnosis.

Usually what happens is they get symptoms and cannot figure out what is wrong with them, so they start doing research. They come across articles that describe OCD in great detail or are case histories of OCD’ers. They read that, and something instantly clicks. They say, “That’s me exactly! The person who wrote that could have been crawling around in my brain reading my thoughts.”

Pure O OCD symptoms are remarkably similar. I also like to say I can spot Pure O OCD symptoms half a mile away, blindfolded, at night. That’s not true, but you get the picture. It’s like they are all “reading off the same script.”

The symptoms are so clockwork-like that it has led me to think there is something wrong with a person’s brain who has OCD. The symptoms are classic, almost all of them display the same core symptoms and you can go down a checklist to figure out who has it, or just recognize it by sheer intuition. In that sense it is very much like how physician diagnoses a physical illness he is familiar with quite quickly via sheer intuition. In that sense, OCD resembles a typical physical illness very much.

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Filed under Anxiety Disorders, Mental Illness, OCD, Psychology, Psychopathology, Psychotherapy, Symptoms

by | September 17, 2017 · 3:59 PM

Cultural Left Lies about Homosexuality

We do not choose our sexual orientation. This is actually the official pronouncement of the American Psychological Association, and there is no basis whatsoever for making that statement, although for men there seems to be something to it. Plenty of women have obviously chosen lesbianism and then chosen to be straight again.

Sexual orientation is inborn. Then why do these lesbians date men for years and decades before they finally “wake up” and realize that they are lesbians? If they are born that way,  what happened? Did their true nature go into hiding until they were 40?

Male homosexuality is inborn or genetic. It is almost certainly not genetic, but it may be a developmental disorder, so in that sense, it may be inborn. And while it is fixed in adolescence or even before, we still do not know if or how childhood factors play a role in male sexual orientation. In other words, it’s not proven that prepubertal boys already have a preset sexual orientation.

Gay men are no more likely to molest children than straight men. On the contrary, they are 12X more likely to molest children than straight men, and we are talking little kids here, under 13, not teenagers.

10% of all people are gay. This is called the “10% lie.” It’s been disproven so many times that we should hardly bother to disprove it anymore, except that we have to because the gays keep lying about it.

The rate of homosexuality is not increasing. False. The background rate may be ~3%, but among the youngest generation in the UK, 6% of all men are gay. The same study showed that only 45% of men said they were completely heterosexual. Previous studies put it at 60-65%. Clearly the rate is increasing. This also calls into question the “born that way” theory.

The rate of homosexuality is the same all over the world. False. In Ancient Greece and Rome, rates approached 95% of men. Among certain groups in Afghanistan, the rates are extremely high. There are also societies where it seems to barely exist at all. Sexual orientation may not be up for grabs so much, but at least men can engage in homosexual behavior at vastly different rates.

Gays do not recruit or convert. False. Gay men continuously try to seduce straight men, with young, very handsome straight men being hit the hardest of all. It’s dubious whether straight men can actually be converted to a homosexual or even bisexual orientation, but they can definitely be converted to bisexual behavior.

The Gay Lobby does not have a subversive agenda. False. The Gay Lobby has long stated that one of its most important goals is to abolish gender, as they put it. That’s subversive in my book.

Everyone is at risk of HIV. Hardly. The vast majority of Americans either have zero to extremely low HIV risk. The HIV rate among lesbians is close to zero.

HIV does not discriminate. Like Hell it doesn’t. Gay men are 1.5% of the population and 70% of HIV cases. Sounds like a discriminatory disease to me.

Sexual practices play no role in HIV. Like Hell they don’t. The crude equation of HIV is this: Humans who get fucked in the ass fuck other humans in the ass (with their penises). Sure, a woman can practice receptive anal sex and get HIV, but there is almost no way to give it to anyone else as she lacks a penis full of semen to transmit it. Hence, as the New York Department of Health noted in the 1980’s, HIV goes from men to women and then it stops.

Gay men are no more likely to have sex with young teenagers than straight men are. False. 25% of all gay men over the age of 25 have had sex with a boy age 13-15 when they were over age 25. Only 6% of all straight men over the age of 25 have had sex with a girl aged 13-15 when they were over 25.

The only difference between gay and straight men is the PIV sex. Hardly. There are extreme differences between gay and straight men even outside the bedroom.

Effeminacy and masculinity have no relationship to sexual orientation. In fact, gay men are much more likely to be effeminate, and masculinity is deeply rooted in male heterosexuality. Perhaps ~70-75% of gay men are effeminate, and perhaps ~1-3% of straight men are effeminate. I have only see two truly masculine gay men in my life, both on Youtube videos. The rate of seriously masculine gay men must be vanishingly small.

Gay men are just as mentally healthy as straight men. Studies consistently show that gay men have higher rates of depression and anxiety disorders than straight men.

Increased psychological problems among gays are due to societal discrimination. Recent data out of Denmark and Sweden, as gay friendly as anywhere, show that the rate of psychological problems remain elevated even in perfect conditions. No one knows why psychological problems seem to be part of the package that male homosexuality comes wrapped up in.

Gay teens have an elevated suicide rate. Not true. They have a higher rate of suicide attempts, but the rate itself is not elevated.

Gays have a high suicide rate. Not so for gay men or lesbians.

Children raised by gays are just as psychologically healthy as children raised by a man and a woman. False. They have more problems and are about as psychologically healthy as kids raised by single Moms. The best environment for children is a man and a woman.

Children raised by gays are no more likely to be gay than anyone else. The latest studies show that ~12% of children raised by gays are gay themselves, which is vastly higher than the background rate. This calls into extreme question notions about sexual orientation as inborn.

Gays live just as long as straights. Nope. Their life expectancy is shortened by a full 20 years.

The shortened gay lifespan is due to discrimination. False. Gay men like 20 years less in Sweden and Denmark too, the most gay friendly countries on Earth.

Lesbians live just as long as straight women. False. Lesbians live a full 20 years less than straight women.

Gay men are not more promiscuous than straight men. False. A huge percentage of gay men have had 100+ sexual partners. Only 6% of straight men have.

HIV is not a gay disease – straight men can get it too. False. It is nearly impossible to get HIV from PIV insertive sex.

Reparative therapy does not work. False. It does not work for gay men. However, surrogate sex therapy for lesbians has been shown to work. Lesbians who were incapable of sex with men can become capable via surrogate sex therapy.

Gay men are no more likely to be serial killers. False. Gay men are 12X more likely to be serial killers than straight men.

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Filed under Afghanistan, Anxiety Disorders, Asia, Britain, Crime, Denmark, Depression, Europe, Gender Studies, Health, Heterosexuality, Homosexuality, Illness, Mental Illness, Mood Disorders, Politics, Psychology, Psychopathology, Psychotherapy, Public Health, Regional, Serial Killers, Sex, Social Problems, Sociology, South Asia, Sweden, USA

by | August 26, 2017 · 7:36 PM

Can OCD Be the Root Cause of Other Mental Disorders? If So, Can It Possibly Be the Cause of Schizophrenia in Some People?

Answered on Quora. 

There are definitely some other disorders you can get as a consequence of having OCD, such as Depression, Panic Disorder, Social Anxiety, and suicidality. However, schizophrenia and psychosis is not one of them.

But many OCD’ers worry that they may get schizophrenia or that they are in the process of getting it. Sufferers call this S-OCD, Schiz OCD or better yet OCD with the Schizophrenia or Psychosis Theme. This is simply someone with OCD who has adopted the theme of a fear of going psychotic. As with most other forms of OCD, the fear can cause symptoms that seem to mimic the fear itself. In this case, it can cause symptoms that mimic schizophrenia or other psychoses on the surface, however, careful prodding and questioning generally makes a differential diagnosis between OCD and Schizophrenia fairly straightforward.

Nevertheless, many S-OCD’ers sadly get diagnosed with schizophrenia or other psychoses by ignorant clinicians and as a result are medicated inappropriately. This subtype of OCD is very poorly known and often misdiagnosed.

I run into S-OCD’ers with incorrect diagnoses of Psychotic Depression, Schizoaffective Disorder, Schizophrenia, etc. on a fairly regular basis. The fact that when OCD is very bad, OCD’ers appear psychotic on the surface (but are not psychotic) confuses matters even more. It takes an experienced clinician to figure out what is OCD appearing psychotic and what is an actual psychosis.

At times the two illnesses are found in the same person, and sometimes in these cases it can be hard to figure out where the OCD ends and the schizophrenia begins or figuring out if a given symptom is best seen as one illness or the other. When the illnesses occur in the same person, it is sometimes called schizo-obsessive disorder. These people, who have much better insight than other schizophrenics, sometimes have a tendency to hide symptoms, which makes diagnosis even more confusing.

But having OCD is not going to give you schizophrenia. That’s not possible.

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Filed under Anxiety Disorders, Depression, Mental Illness, Mood Disorders, OCD, Psychology, Psychopathology, Psychotherapy, Psychotic Disorders, Schizophrenia, Symptoms

by | August 26, 2017 · 7:27 PM

Could People Who Have Intrusive Thoughts Also Have Sociopathic, Etc. Tendencies?

Answered on Quora.

Psychopaths don’t have intrusive thoughts about violence or much of anything else for that matter. Intrusive thoughts about committing acts of violence tends to rule out sociopathy right there because sociopaths don’t experience these thoughts as intrusive. Rather they just like them. If they want to think them, they think them. If they don’t want to think them, they don’t think them. But they are not going to experience intrusive violent thoughts in my opinion.
OCD and sociopathy pretty much rule each other out. You have one or the other and it would be very hard to have both. These disorders are the opposite of each other. OCD’ers experience tremendous guilt and never commit any irrational acts of violence and sociopaths experience no guilt and commit an incredible amount of violence. So you see we are dealing with two things that are the polar opposite of each other.
PS if you were a sociopath, you would not be fussing and worrying about thoughts like this, much less going on line to try to fix them. Sociopaths don’t think there is anything wrong with thoughts of hurting and killing others. They like to think about these things.

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Filed under Anxiety Disorders, Mental Illness, OCD, Personality Disorders, Psychology, Psychopathology, Sociopathy

by | July 20, 2017 · 3:11 AM

Do Therapists Ever Think Their Clients are Unfixable?

Question from Quora:

Some people are utterly unfixable or even improvable, but they are quite rare.

There are clients who are just too far gone, and they cannot be helped at all. It is as if the person were a ceramic bowl that was dropped on a hard floor. The bowl is now in 100 pieces, and the person who dropped it is on the ground looking at the pieces and throwing up their hands. “Where do I start?” he asks in exasperation.

All sociopaths and psychopaths are unfixable by their very nature. We can’t cure the sociopathy and psychopathy because they don’t want to get better. They enjoy being antisocial, and they do not wish to change. However, we can get them to change their behavior. For instance, a homicidal sociopath may show up in the office. A good therapist may be able to convince this sociopath that acting on their homicidal fantasies would be one of the stupidest things that they could ever do. This sociopath may then be able to go through life without killing an innocent person. So we can’t fix sociopaths, but we can change their behavior somewhat, tone it down, or reduce the amount of damage they do to society.

All paraphilias are unfixable by their very nature. The paraphilia quite literally will not and cannot go away. It’s etched in stone.

Schizophrenia is largely unfixable. They need a great deal of medication, and even then in most cases, they are repeatedly hospitalized. A few can go on to lead somewhat normal or even successful lives, but these people still need continuous medication and regular psychotherapy. In addition, they need frequent interventions to stay out of the hospital.

Many illnesses such as OCD, Bipolar Disorder and Chronic Major Depression are unfixable by psychotherapy. Most of these people will need medication for the rest of their lives. However, psychotherapy can improve their conditions a lot at least in the first and last cases.

Long-term suicidality is very hard to fix. It tends to become chronic with repeated attempts over the years. The suicidal person is typically defiant and is furious with you for challenging their suicidality. You are expected to sympathize with their condition, which is actually a very bad idea. Most suicidal people are what I would call “defiantly suicidal.”

Personality disorders are generally incurable. Theoretically, they could be fixed, but these people almost never present for therapy, and when they do, it is often at the behest of others, and they do not really wish to be there or get anything done. People with personality disorders, like sociopaths, literally do not want to get better. They like their personality disorder, and they are incredibly resistant to change. There are some case reports of cures of personality disorders, but in general the prognosis is grave.

I have never been able to fix long term low self esteem, and I have tried with a few people. There is something about that condition that hammers itself into the brain as if into concrete. I do not know why, but long-term low self-esteem seems to be one of the hardest psychological problems to fix. Why this is, I have no idea. Perhaps someone else can offer some ideas.

In many cases, long-term mental disorders simply cannot be fixed or cured. However, with psychotherapy and drugs, people can often get much better than they were before. We need to stop thinking in terms of cures and start thinking in terms of amelioration.

I realize that many clinicians insist that most people can be fixed or cured of long-term conditions, but I think they are lying. They are probably trying to drum up business. Many clinicians fear that if word got out that a lot of long-term mentally ill people cannot be fixed or cured, people would stop coming in for therapy. There goes their paycheck. Therapists are a lot more money-oriented than most people believe, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I know this field very well.

Clinicians have nothing to worry about. Even if a lot of conditions could only be ameliorated and not fixed, I am sure a lot of folks would show up to try to get some improvement. Some mental disorders are so painful that any improvement feels like a miracle cure to the client. A lot of people have given up on being cured anyway, just want to at least get better and are quite happy to do so.

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Filed under Anxiety Disorders, Depression, Health, Medicine, Mental Illness, Mood Disorders, OCD, Personality Disorders, Psychology, Psychopathology, Psychotherapy, Psychotic Disorders, Schizophrenia, Sex, Sociopathy

by | July 20, 2017 · 3:10 AM

The Untreatable Borderline Personality Disorder Client: A Therapeutic Nightmare

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)is one of the hardest disorders of all to treat. It can be improved with some therapies, but the road is long and hard. Many seem to go on for years or decades with little or no improvement. There are reports of cures, and I am familiar with a woman whose BPD cleared up at age 55 after having come on in childhood. That’s probably a typical cure. Decades of nasty illness followed by a lifting of the illness in middle age.

Many mental disorders improve in middle age, and even many personality disorders improve during this age period.

Schizophrenia often ‘burns out” in middle age, and florid positive symptoms are replaced by more negative symptoms.

Many anxiety disorders attentuate in middle age.

Even psychopaths often get better or at least less destructive in middle age, as many of them also burn out in a similar fashion as schizophrenics. A number of highly antisocial psychopathic men get better in middle age as the antisocial behavior attentuates. It is often replaced by depression, heavy drinking and a pessimistic, cynical, imbittered and misanthropic person who nonetheless does little damage to society anymore.

It should be noted the clients with BPD vary widely in their symptom pathology.  Some are much more functional than others. Quite a few can even function well at their jobs all day, but when they come home from work, they fall apart and shift into full BPD pathology.

However, some people with BPD are so ill that they seem nearly untreatable. It is these people who will be the subject of this post, not BPD’s in general. These people seem so far gone and broken that one wonders how anyone could ever even begin to put them back together again. I suppose some progress could be made, but the damage is so severe that I have a hard time seeing how even the best therapist could possibly fix these people in any significant way.

A typical case might be a young woman who, only in her late 20’s to early 30’s, already has 8 -13 suicide attempts and many hospitalizations behind her. She goes into the hospital on a regular basis. Therapy seems to do nothing but feed her pathology as she manipulates gullible new therapists to believe her lies, nonsense, and projections as the new therapist confuses symptom pathology with the truth. Drugs do almost nothing.

Diagnosis itself is often difficult because the BPD is so severe that the person often appears psychotic/delusional. One wonders what are delusions and what are not. Even the delusions do not seem to last for long, as they are dropped, changed around, added to or substituted in a wildly chaotic fashion.

Usually there is a lot of combativeness and involvement with the court system, as the extreme rage leads a litigious person.

Splitting is severe and textbook.

Self-image is so unstable that the person almost literally adopts the full personality and even persona of whomever is on their radar at the moment. The clinician needs to be prepared that this person will so identify with the clinician that they will adopt the therapist’s image and persona as their own. Boundaries nearly do not exist for these people, and they often fall in love with their therapists, try to seduce them, or on the other hand become furious at them to where sessions became rage attacks at the therapist, and the therapists is at odds of how to respond without violating ethics.

The client can become overtly suicidal even during sessions, and infatuation with the therapist can quickly split to where the therapist is the source of all evil. Homicidal threats and homicidal-suicidal threats against the therapist may now appear. The client then hospitalizes themselves due the “horrible trauma from the evil,  incompetent therapist” and soon finds sympathetic new therapist, typically a feminist woman, to unload her story on. The new female therapist forms an alliance with the client against the “evil male” former therapist and accuses him of damaging the client.

Commonly, the therapist gets angry and tells off the client. This leads to abandonment and a vengeance agenda against the therapist, who has now “irreparably damaged” the BPD and “caused them to spiral out of control.” Be prepared to get accused of abandonment, causing severe trauma in the client and making them dramatically worse. The client may become hospitalized due to allegations of damage from an incompetent therapist.

These people are so difficult and chaotic that many clinicians refuse to see Borderline patients. Some are on the record as saying that when they say a Borderline client coming their way, they hide under their desk until they go away. For a lot of therapists, these clients are nothing but trouble, and endless parade of drama and chaos. Therapy itself is chaotic, mercurial, and wild with severe splitting and often extreme idealization of the therapist for good or ill or both, interrupted by fairly regular hospitalizations. The therapist begins to wonder what’s in it for them and thinks you could not pay them enough to suffer through such clients. These clients make an excellent argument that therapeutic abandonment is the proper choice with some clients.

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Filed under Anxiety Disorders, Borderline, Mental Illness, Personality Disorders, Psychology, Psychopathology, Psychotherapy, Psychotic Disorders, Schizophrenia

by | July 14, 2017 · 12:20 AM

Do Psychologists Make Their Patients Aware of the Diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder or Sociopathy?

I recently answered this question on Quora.

Do Psychologists Make their Patients Aware of the Diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder or Sociopathy?

These personality disorders seem to carry a lot of social stigma, therefore are patients made aware of their diagnosis or does the therapist just continue behavioral therapy to treat the symptoms rather than informing them of the diagnosis?

I am not a psychologist. I am a counselor. I only work with one disorder, OCD, and I can quite accurately diagnose that condition, I assure you. Nevertheless, I am not allowed to give out legal DSM diagnoses. However, I can obviously give out my opinion on a diagnosis. I can also tell the person my opinion on what they do not have. For instance, I have gotten many clients with OCD who have been misdiagnosed with some sort of psychosis. I am an expert at telling the two apart. I simply tell them that in my opinion, they are not psychotic. Then I tell them to fire your clinician and go get a new one that will recognize the difference between OCD and psychosis (many clinicians are very poor at telling these apart).

Other than OCD/psychosis, I also have to make differential dx on OCD/sociopathy, violent thoughts, etc., OCD/pedophilia, pedophilic thoughts, etc. and OCD/homosexuality. In a limited number of cases, I told clients that in my opinion, they did not have OCD but instead had some psychotic disorder, or sociopathic traits, or pedophilia, or that they were homosexuals. Most of this differential dx is pretty straightforward.

I have never had any narcissistic clients, God forbid clients with NPD. One thing nice about working with OCD clients is that they are usually very nice people. Not all of them, mind you. But if they are not nice, there is often some other reason, for instance, Borderline Personality Disorder in an OCD client could possibly make them impossibly vicious, cruel, unstable, not to mention extremely crazy, far crazier than any OCD sufferer ever gets.

OCD by its very nature strikes nice people. The fact that they are so nice, meek and kind is actually one of the main reasons that they have the disorder in the first place! For the most part, only nice people get it, and the nicer you are, the more likely you are to get it. I will leave it at that for the moment and give you a chance to think of why that might be. I know why but it goes beyond the scope of this post at the moment.

But in general, I never even give my opinion on other anxiety disorders or on any mood disorders or personality disorders. I only rarely see clients who have psychotic disorders, and the two that I have seen were already diagnosed. I also very rarely see people with personality disorders, and the few that I have seen were all females with Borderline PD diagnoses. I did see one woman for two sessions with obvious Borderline Personality Disorder, but I had not figured it out yet in the first session, and by the second session, I declined to diagnose her. She has already been diagnosed by a psychiatrist from afar anyway. So apparently I am guilty of failing to dx a Borderline PD client.

The session was about her OCD, not her BPD and she was very nice through the whole session. It would have ruined the whole thing if I told her she had BPD, and I doubt if she would have accepted it anyway. At any rate, I am not allowed to give legal dx’s anyway, so it’s apparently proper for me not to diagnose someone!

That only comes up if there is differential diagnosis. I simply say that I not only can I not legally give these out but that I am not qualified to work with any condition other than OCD, which I can actually work very well with. If they want me to work on their depression or whatever, I tell them that I have no expertise or training in that area so I can guarantee nothing and it would be similar to talking to a friend or family member.

If I were able to give out diagnoses, I think I would simply give them out in most every case. Possibly if it might make a suicidal patient go over the edge, I might decline to give one out. But I will disagree with the clinicians below. In my opinion, physicians and other medical professionals in addition to all licensed clinicians should give out whatever diagnosis is appropriate. I feel it is a moral matter. The patient or client is simply owed a diagnosis on the part of the clinician or MD and I feel it would be remiss of the clinician or MD not to tell the patient what is wrong with them, and I mean everything that is wrong with them.

This is just my personal opinion and I believe there no ethical rules on the subject. Also I respect the clinicians below for not giving out diagnoses in cases where it would not be helpful. I simply feel that this is a case were morals or even the categorical imperative trumps pragmatics or even common sense.

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Filed under Anxiety Disorders, Borderline, Ethics, Health, Medicine, Mental Illness, Narcissistic, OCD, Personality Disorders, Philosophy, Psychology, Psychopathology, Psychotherapy, Psychotic Disorders

by | July 5, 2017 · 9:51 PM

Repetition in OCD and Other Disorders

Optimus Prime: Fair enough, he’s said what he wanted to say and has repeated it a gazillion times. As you said, the man cannot control himself. Robert, apart from NPD does he suffer from OCD as well?

Sure, I actually wish Trash well honestly. He’s just not a good fit for the site.

OCD does not = constant repetition. The thoughts repeat in the brain (definitely in my case), and some of the compulsions can be repetitive, but that is because they are trying to get it right or perfect or make perfectly sure they did it right.

That’s not what is going on here. This is different. We are looking at NPD as the primary process here.

It’s like he’s not sure you heard him the first time, so he’s saying it again or shouting it to make sure you heard. Also I think he is in love with the sound of his own voice.

I will admit that Trash is a talented and even entertaining writer. He makes this cool statement or analogy and then he repeats it in the next post because he thinks it’s such a neat little bit of prose. It often is a nice sentence or phrase, but you are not supposed to repeat it no matter how damn good the image is. You say it once and move on. He’s saying it again because he thinks it is a nice image, and he is impressed with himself, so he says it again to make sure you heard him the first time, like what people do when they say something and get no response. They often repeat it because they are not sure you heard them the first time.

I do not wish to single this man out as being “Mr. Crazy.” Face it, we’re all nuts.

And as we are dealing with a personality disorder here, I would like to point out that in my opinion, we all have disordered personalities of varying degrees. I think we all have adaptive personalities to varying degrees too.

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Filed under Anxiety Disorders, Mental Illness, OCD, Personality Disorders, Psychology, Psychopathology

by | June 25, 2017 · 12:34 AM

False Memories in OCD

False memories are quite common when OCD gets bad. I have dealt with a number of people who were going round and round about false memories. They are not an extremely common symptom, but you do see them sometimes when the illness is bad. It’s generally a sign of a bad illness.

Ms. Z was periodically convinced that she killed people. She would have a conversation with someone for 5-10 minutes, then walk away ,and then suddenly think that she had killed them somehow during the conversation. Perhaps she had suddenly swung her fist out and beat them to death? Perhaps she had pulled out a knife and hacked them to death? Perhaps she had shot them with a gun? She would have all sorts of false memories of how she killed these people.

In the course of these false memories, she would become 100% certain that she had killed that person she was talking to in that store that day. In the next few days, she would ask around to people she knew if anyone got murdered or if she killed someone in the store that day. Of course she would always be told no. I’m sure her friends must have tired of answering these weird questions. As soon as she was told that no murder had occurred, immediately the firmly held belief that she had killed that person would vanish, and she would never think about it again. Until a little while later when she would be talking to someone again and then walk away and once again become convinced that she had killed that person…

Another woman, Ms. S., was a young college student. She was at a large California university that had a lot of long, winding trails with undergrowth. There were deep gullies on the sides of the paths that were overgrown with foliage. Ms. S. would be walking down the paths and as she walked, she passed all sorts of people coming her way. At some point, she would suddenly get an idea that she had grabbed one of the people coming her way and thrown them down into one of the gullies.

She had a pretty clear memory of who the person was she threw down there and exactly how she had done it. She would be overwhelmed with guilt, and she would take off down into the gully searching for the “body” of the person she had thrown down into the gulch. She did this on a pretty regular basis, and eventually the university wondered what she was doing floundering around in the gullies, and they sent the university police down there to see what she was up to. After a while, it become clear that she needed to go to the university counseling center.

In both cases, the women received a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder in addition to OCD. This was an incorrect diagnosis, and it was based on the fact that for a short while after Ms. S  was clamboring around in the gullies or after Ms. Z became convinced that she had somehow killed someone she was talking to, that both women were absolutely convinced that they had either thrown someone down into the gully or had killed the person they were talking to in the store.

The diagnosis was incorrect because as soon as the women were told that there was no one in the gully or that they had not killed the person in the store, the “delusion” completely vanished and they didn’t think of it again until next time. Delusions just don’t go away like that. It’s not a very strongly held conviction if can vanish with a mere word of reassurance.

We look at the whole process in a holistic sense. What is the nature of the process? Is this a characterological process (personality disorder), a mood process (mood disorder like Bipolar Disorder or Depression), an anxiety process (OCD, PTSD, GAD, Panic Disorder) or a psychotic process (schizophrenia, manic psychosis, psychotic depression, schizoaffective disorder)? It is important to look at things in an intuitive sense and get the “smell” or “feel” of what the basic process is that you are dealing with.

In the case above, this is an anxiety process, specifically an OCD process. It’s not a psychotic process, despite the fact that it superficially resembles a psychosis.

Some of these folks with false memories actually go to the police station and turn themselves in for crimes that they did not commit.

“Hi, I am here to report a murder.”

“Ok, what happened?”

“Well I think I killed someone last night.”

“You think you killed someone?”

“Yes.”

“Well, where did this happen?”

“I am not sure. I think maybe the bridge over the river.”

“What time did this happen?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe midnight?”

“Who was the victim?”

“I’m not sure. I think it was a man, maybe.”

“What weapon was used?”

“I am not completely sure. I think it was a knife maybe.”

After a while the police started to get the message. He was not there to report a murder at all. He was there to find out whether or not he was a murderer!

As the conversation degenerated, the man started repeating, “How do you know if you killed someone or not?”

The police did not know what to say to that. After he left, the police were talking among themselves. “That’s so weird,” one of them said. “What does he mean, ‘How do I know if I killed someone or not?’ How could you not know something like that? That’s so weird.” The cops were shaking their heads.

 

As you can see, false memories are quite common in OCD when it gets very bad.

I dealt with them myself at one point in 1985 or 1986. I have to admit it was a pretty nutty way of thinking. I was so ashamed of my false memories (which I temporarily convinced myself were true) that I never told anyone except for a couple of therapists. I have not dealt with any false memory nonsense in over 30 years, and I hope I never have to deal with that again. It’s truly a crazy way to think.

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by | June 24, 2017 · 6:49 PM

I Am Now a Published Author

Here.

You can download my first published work above. I was published for the first time this spring in a book called:

Before the Last Voices Are Gone: Endangered Turkic Languages, Volume 1: Theoretical and General Approaches

This is the first volume of a four volume set called:

The Handbook of Endangered Turkic Languages

The first volume alone runs to 512 pages. Articles are in English, Russian and Turkish, variably. It was published out of the International Turkish-Kazakh University in Istanbul, Turkey and the International Turkic Academy in Astana, Kazakhstan. These are two campuses that are part of one joint Turkey-Kazakhstan shared university.

I contributed one chapter that runs from pages 311-384 titled:

Mutual Intelligibility among the Turkic Languages

It’s 83 pages long and has ~100 references. It may have taken me 500 hours to write that chapter. Tell that to my enemies who claim I do not work, ok? When all is said and done, I figure I may make 75 cents an hour on this work. But this is how academic publishing works. There’s just no money in it. It’s all a labor of love. In addition, most work is done by professors who have to publish as part of their professorship (publish or perish), so in effect, their professor salary is covering their publishing.

That document had to go through two rather grueling peer reviews. I had to make many changes in it to get it to publication. The second peer review had to get past the top Turkologists in the world today, and I am amazed that I made it through review to be honest.

Most people publishing in academic books or journals are academics, professors working at universities. There are only a few of us independent scholars out there (I am an independent scholar because I am not at a university). Also most folks have PhD’s, and I only have a Masters, but there are some folks with Masters publishing academically.

In general, this is a rather selective game where everyone is hyperspecializing as is the trend nowadays. Although my mentor at the project calls me a Renaissance Man, I wonder if the autodidact/polymath is an endangered species if not extinct. Everyone has to specialize nowadays.

For instance, common knowledge in this particular field would be that the only folks who could publish in Turkology would be linguists with a PhD in Linguistics, preferably with a emphasis in Turkology. Beyond that, they may prefer say 5-10 years publishing in the field of Turkology in addition to a professorship in Turkic linguistics. You can see where this is headed. I am not knocking it. I am just pointing out that microspecialization is the game now.

What follows is that since I lack the PhD or professorship or any background at all in Turkology, I should not be allowed to be published in this field, or if by some error I am somehow mispublished, all of my work should be promptly ignored as done by a nonspecialist who could not possibly know what he is talking about. Needless to say, I don’t agree with that, and I carry on tilting at windmills like a good deluded Renaissance Man who never got the memo and wouldn’t read it if he did.

The odd thing is that I knew nothing about Turkology until I plunged into this mess. I had written a short piece of mutual intelligibility in Turkic, as MI is one of my pet subjects and put it up on Academia on my scholarly papers site, and a professor in Turkey happened to read it. He wrote to me telling me he agreed with me, he wanted me to expand it into a document, and they would publish it for me. So off I went, down the Turkic rabbit hole. If you study the very high IQ types (140+), they tend to go on “crazes” like this. They also lose interest after a bit, drop the craze and move on to some new craze. Dilettantism for the win.

I also have an anxiety disorder called OCD which is well controlled. A good side of it though is that you tend to do dive down rabbit holes a lot, and the OCD makes you burrow maniacally into the rabbit hole with the notion that one is going to become the world’s leading expert on whatever rabbit hole you are digging in now. So for one or two years, I went absolutely berserk into Turkic, whereas before I scarcely knew a thing about it. The end result can be read above.

The sad result is that either due to the savant stuff or the mental quirk, I also tend to lose interest in my rabbit holes after a bit. I follow them about halfway to China, make several revolutions around the molten core, and after a year or so, come up for air gasping with incipient Black Lung, and next thing you know, I am bored, and it’s onto a new craze. It’s a bit silly, but we all have our crosses to lug, and as eccentricities go, there are many worse things that dabbling, er hobbyism, er dilettantism, er polymathy, er autodidactism, er Renaissance Manism.

Most of you will probably not find this very interesting, as it is pretty specialized stuff that is mostly of interest to people in the specialty, linguists and those interested in the subject. It’s not exactly for the general reader. But if you have any interest in these languages, you might enjoy it.

I expanded Turkic from 41 to 53 languages, eliminated some languages, turned some into dialects, turned some dialects into full languages, combined languages into a single tongue, created some new languages out of scratch and did quite a bit of work on the history of the languages.

I also reworked the classification a bit because I thought it could be done better. Even though this work does not pay much, the pay is in fame if it is at all. My work will either be accepted by the field or rejected outright or somewhere in between. I have already earned the praises of some of the world’s top Turkologists, much to my surprise. If I get fame, well, I get quoted in papers, maybe invited to conferences, and maybe even referenced in Wikipedia. There are groupies in all status fields, and what the heck, there may even be linguist groupies. If not, there are always starry eyed coeds dreaming of professor types to mentor them. I am already working that angle as it is. Writer Game, Scholar Game, there’s Game for everything.

Or my work does not go over and maybe the field decides I do not know what I am talking about.

Crap shoot, like most of life’s endeavors. Roll em, and wish upon a star…snake eyes!

PS. The title of the series, Before the Last Voices Are Gone, was created by me. I think it has a nice little song.

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Filed under Altaic, Anxiety Disorders, Comparitive, Europe, Intelligence, Language Classification, Language Families, Linguistics, Mental Illness, OCD, Psychology, Psychopathology, Regional, Scholarship, Turkey, Turkic, Vanity