Tag: psychology/psychiatry
Schizoid personality: YouTube videos and comments
There is an evolutionary purpose, but it is in the past, not the future. In tribal days your culture would have only a couple hundred people in it, so one schizoid, who sees the culture from the outside can change it. Nowadays we have a global culture, and those who would change it are labeled âdisorderedâ. In the past the reclusive schizoid would be the shaman or the wise hermit, now weâre just seen as crazy recluses. Read the full page
Links about the concept of Wahnstimmung. Here, too, beyond the context of schizophrenia, in the sense of a state of dissociation and free-floating anxiety. Continue reading
Clinical psychology info on schizoid personality disorder
Technical clinical psychology info on SzPD. Read the full page
Takes on the SzPD + AvPD diagnosis
https://www.reddit.com/r/Schizoid/comments/1mquasr/comorbid_avpd/[đĄ]
r/Schizoid, u/UtahJohnnyMontana
My completely amateur take is that schizoid is avoidance squared. It is avoidance of avoidance. It is uncomfortable feeling all those things that cause avoidance. Why avoid the things that cause uncomfortable feelings when you can avoid feeling anything at all? And then the veil comes down and you are schizoid. It seems like this happens early for some, late for others, and sometimes not at all, but if you look back far enough, there was usually a time when a schizoid was a pretty sensitive and avoidant looking person.
u/PjeseQ
Didnât pursue official diagnosis, but itâs quite probable that I used to be avoidant in my teens vs schizoid now. As far as I can remember, avoidant traits were much worse to deal with. Itâs much easier to be just indifferent towards interpersonal contact rather than anxious about it.
There is also this conspiracy theory circling around that a burned out AvPD turns into SPD eventually. I think it might be true to some extent.
How sad it is to be ill⊠knowing so much about your own illness and yet being unable to do anything about it.
I donât want to play the game of life
The most frustrating part is that there doesnât really seem to be a real solution for this problem because every piece of advice people usually give is like, self-contained within the parameters of life if that makes sense, like every piece of advice people give still involves having to participate in life. Read the full page
Jetta â An autistic kid talks about the universe and the end of time
Chris: If you could share one message with the whole entire world, what would you say?
Jetta: The universe is about the end.
Chris: Why do you want people to know that?
Jetta: Because someday it will end in our face. Read the full page
r/Schizoid, u/Concrete_Grapes
Schizoids are somewhat in a unique place as far as personality disorders go. We are inward facing, self-validating, self-reliant (on thinking through things, not always financially or housing), etc.
So, we frame the world, usually, as if everyone else is or should be this as well. To us, this is âthe normââand we literally cannot gain something good, or new, from interactions. We donât need to interact with someone to validate an experience, or âmove onâ from some emotional attachment or slight.
However, normal people do not exist like this at all. Ever. Not even a little. Not for even a handful of minutes a year.
They are always outward facing in searching for validation. They feel they have no value, unless itâs measured by, or against someone else. Their emotions literally exist only as a function of social validation, or as an attachment to others. If they are mad, they are mad at someone. If theyâre sad, they need to process it with others, and reference stability and coping mechanism off the âotherâ⊠they cannot do this on their own.
Thatâs why virtually everyone that goes to therapy, goes to deal with their emotions, and the severe control emotions have over their actions.
Thatâs why a schizoid often gets nothing from most therapists, itâs not emotions for us, weâre stuck internally, conscious, and intellectualizing emotions away if they do happen, or forcing them to appear when we lack them. Hyper-aware of this, usually.
Other. People. Never. Do.
So theyâre reaching out to process and connectâtheyâre unfulfilled, or some door isnât closed, and they feel an internal emotional sense that they âmustââsome how, reference off you to complete the task.
To you, thatâs nonsense.
I mean, Iâm saying it in an extreme way, and one can argue itâs not always like thisâand itâs not.
But go read what âmindfulnessâ isâthe thing where people struggle to do it even a few minutes a day, after months of trying, on purpose, and tell meâif, to you, that sounds like horse shit, because itâs describing a state youâre in 99 percent of the time as default.
Thatâs what I mean.
Iâm perfectly crafted to not be able to live.
Do you think schizoid can be âfixedâ?
u/Fun_Researcher4035, r/Schizoid Continue reading
Treading water
u/Critical-Sense-1539, r/Pessimism
I get a similar sentiment whenever I come across popular âself-improvementâ content. Iâve never bought any promises that I could ever better my life or progress in any real sense, for no matter what I achieve, I will always be striving. I donât get inspired whenever I see someone struggle really hard for wealth, influence, a big muscly body, a romantic relationship, or some other insipid marker of success.
I see a futility in these attmepts to attain âfulfilmentâ or the âgood lifeâ, a bit like the futility of treading water. You swing your arms and kick your legs to stay afloat, just so youâre able to breathe for a moment longer. However, no matter how hard you try, youâre not going to get out of the water. Youâre always sinking so to stay above water, you have to expend effort over and over and over again until youâve got none left to expend.
I see all pursuits for fulfilment in this sort of image; we are always lacking something. Living to try and satisfy all your desires is a game that you can only ever lose because for every desire that one satisfies, another shall show up in its place. Now, realizing this probably wonât fix the pain associated with not achieving your desires but it might help alleviate feelings of self-hatred or guilt for having a âbad lifeâ. After all, thereâs no need to feel bad about yourself for losing a game that was impossible to win all along.
u/Kunigunde9467, r/Pessimism Continue reading
(EN Wikipedia) Depressive realism[đĄ] Continue reading
Andrew McIntosh â On the Drive Towards Death and the Drive Away From Death (Ineffectual Whinging)
Just throwing a hodge podge of ideas Iâve read about and find interesting together in the hopes of coming up with a synthesis that doesnât mean much in the end anyway. Itâs not like I believe there are such things as âDeath Drivesâ and âthe Willâ and all that, theyâre more metaphorical for what is probably more mundane, neurobiological stuff going on in our stupid brains. Read the full page
At the end of the day, 99% of the activity is data hoarding, 1% is making use. Music years ago, other things later. Because then, when you use it, youâll be fed up with it. Of course people like to work, because otherwise their brains explode; itâs the same mechanism. Endless search for mechanical and repetitive distractions. Tergiversations around the core of desperation.
And this is⊠when things are going well.
And then they say to the hoarder: «You donât need to accumulate everything. This thing X, you donât need to hoard it, resist it.» But if there is no need for me to save X, it means that there is no need for me to save Y, it means that there is no need for me to save anything, by simple syllogism.
And indeed, that is correct. But it only confirms the nihilism and the absolute meaninglessness of everything.
https://www.madinamerica.com/tag/chemical-imbalance-hoax/[đĄ] Continue reading
Applying âthatâs subjective thoâ to that rings very, very hollow. To criticise them, you have to take the claims apart; [âŠ] Read the full page
Volunteering is the way, kek. Read the full page
One day is the time it takes to get bored of your new shiny toy.
So you then go back to either your life as a slave or your basic organic distractions.
Also see Fichte
Sex, drugs, food.
Being able to get pleasure from anything else requires an incredible and amazing nervous system and a decent amount of self-illusion.
Andrew McIntosh â On Conspiracy Theories (Ineffectual Whinging)
One of the main reason for getting into conspiracy theories is to get the illusion that by doing so, youâre exercising some kind of agency in the world. Read the full page
r/SuicideWatch, u/braujo
[âŠ] The reason youâre unhappy isnât a lack of working on yourself, thatâs something people tell you on Reddit to feel better about themselves. Plenty of fat ass motherfuckers are out there living their best lives, there are monsters that get married and built a beautiful family, ugly guys that get laid every dayâŠ
Working on yourself is great if thatâs what you want, but do not fool yourself. The reason our lives suck isnât superficial, self-help bs. Itâs something deeply wrong in our brains.
On responsibility as the solution
It were the old family men of the pre-nihilistic-era, that believed in a future, and that told their children their morals, their hopes, their beliefs. Read the full page
âRational depressionâ is the worst kind, because it simply acknowledges the truth of the cesspit that is oneâs existence. The other kind, yes, reaches deeper abysses, but one holds on to the knowledge that itâs like a passing wind. Lucidity, instead, makes the soul suffer with truth.
In his âAnalysis Terminable and Interminable,â which was written in 1937, two years before his death, Freud expresses his deep frustration with the futility of the therapeutic attempts to cure self-destructive tendencies, âIn no phase of oneâs analytic work does one suffer more from the oppressive feeling that all oneâs efforts have been in vain and from the suspicion that one is âtalking to the windsââ (p. 404) The death drive reveals itself as incurable, it is a constitutive obstacle beyond which therapy is not capable of progressing. One can say that since the curse of the negative psychoanalytic insight, psychoanalysis has functioned as a breakdown of itself. It is a disappointment, a negation and rejection and a failure of itself. Psychoanalysis has thus become negative, an empty, meaningless huskâthe living dead.
The negative insight undermines psychoanalysis from within. Like a black sun that shines with darkness instead of light and, with this, dismisses its essence. A practical therapeutic dimension of psychoanalysis is its outer shell that remains from its original positive framework. As long as psychoanalysis maintains functioning in its therapeutic dimension, it betrays its negative insight and inner breakage, making the psychoanalyst a fraud. The psychoanalyst, in this case, is like a priest who lost his faith in God and fell into deep despair but still preaches, attending to the demand of the parish.
This internal breakdown can be considered a defeat of psychoanalysis, its failure, and its disability. From this, one might conclude that psychoanalysis should be relegated to the basement of history as a failed project, Freud should be declared a charlatan, and that various more empirically validated methods of comprehension and treatments that really help should now rightfully declare their victory over psychoanalysis, or that psychoanalysis has to be fixed, for example, by combining it with modern research. Such attempts have been made many times.
However, to me, this inner breakdown of psychoanalysis, its internal tragedy, which many adherents of psychoanalysis, including Freud himself, try to cover up, is the dearest in psychoanalysis. In this tragedy of the impossibility of psychoanalysis, in its curse, one can feel something painfully dear, absurd, and therefore sincerely human, and for the same reason, unbearable and repulsive. Perhaps in this personal tragedy of Freud and the tragedy of the breakdown of psychoanalysis, in their wretchedness, they coincide the most with the more profound deep pathetic and tragic truth about each of us. In this rupture with itself, psychoanalysis coincides with us, with our inner rupture, and with the inner rupture of the world.
Plunging into a black night of its soul, it meets the soul of each of us since the darkness of the soul is the only thing we genuinely hold in common. Our internal breakdown, brokenness, malfunction, tragedy, and absurdity encounter who we most genuinely are. This psychoanalysis coincides with life as such, as something doomed to failure and, in its essence, is nothing but a failure.
Julie Reshe, âNegative Psychoanalysis for the Living Deadâ
Brief and simple guidelines to navigate the mental health system
The human being is by nature incoherent and inconsistent. Read the full page
Acceptance is the hardest thing. Because everyone around you is trying to change you.
I feel incredible release. From the things of life, from meds, from all the bullshit.
u/WanderingUrist
Iâm unclear as to why self-worth is necessary or meaningful. If you need to engage in self-delusion to delude yourself into believing in another delusion, you are probably better off with just dropping all of it.
Some of that discouragement for me (ed. in advocating) comes from seeing this world lacking in a plethora of metacognitive skills. Even the institutions themselves that discuss mental health â papers, researchers, those that present themselves as being scientifically minded, unbiased, and focus entirely on a description of the nature of certain things regarding mental health and neurodivergency â are constantly lacking so much metacognition that the very papers, the very pieces of research I read make that very apparent. And the people doing such work in the therapeutic world and otherwise donât have any idea itâs happening. They donât even know. So much so that Iâve seen forms of therapy that are attempting to instill metacognition in many of those that suffer with psychosis and many of those that are considered schizo-spectrum⊠When metacognition is the reason those people are sometimes crippled, mentally crippled by the world that they inhabit. But still, they try to produce more of it, only in a direction that would make them more functional, more available, more compliant to a society that they already oftentimes perceive as being run by mad men, and supported by cowardice, fear, death, fear of worthlessness, fear of invalidation. And in name of those things, the banality of evil grows and grows and grows.
Schizoid Angst â Schizoid Ramble: Emptiness and Advocacy
The concept of the âpotentialâ is probably the most stupid lie that is told by people since ever.
If you are able to do something, your brain will lead you to do that, or at least something relating to that (not everyone can become an astronaut, for example, but you will work in related engineering stuff). If your brain wonât, then you wonât.
Psychological mechanisms that feed the collective illusion
(EN Wikipedia) Just-world fallacy[đĄ] Continue reading
Why I donât kill myself: an essay about beliefs
r/Pessimism, u/finitemode Continue reading
Discerning gullible people, with judgment
In these last decades, conspiracy theories blew up. Stuff inside vaccines, UFOs, chemtrails, but-you-canât-see-the-stars, itâs weird for a building to collapse just because a large airplane crashed into it at 750 km/h, and so on⊠Continue reading
Psychiatry is a pseudoscience (a collection of posts from Reddit)
Disorders are not included within the DSM based on any objective evidence, and are always a reflection of the normative biases of the society. For example, homosexuality was in the DSM until the 1970s, but neither its inclusion nor its removal were based on any kind of objective evidence. Read the full page
Those who do drugs, itâs just because they forget that you can stretch your limbs.
Against the idea that suicide is not worth it, like some important authors say instead
In reality, we donât kill ourselves because the rationalized suicide is basically impossible for everyone⊠Read the full page
r/Pessimism, u/CardinallyConsidered
Too much ignorance, and we have absolutely no respect for the potential for suffering that exists here. We are far more likely to shoot ourselves in the foot (so to speak), cause others as well as ourselves more pain than we ever thought possible, only to eventually decay and die.
Too little ignorance, and you become completely frozen by fear. You fully recognize the fragility of your body, the consciousness resting in it, and the fragility of all individual life forms.
[âŠ]
A certain level of solipsism is required for a decent quality of life. A certain level of ignorance and delusion are required for a decent quality of life.
[âŠ]
The sweet-spot of delusion. Thatâs where itâs at.
[âŠ]
Meditation has helped me in very gradually lifting the veil of safety/security. And then psychedelics rip the veil off of your face all at once and itâs just WAY too much. We are biologically programmed to be reproducing machines, and there are many mechanisms in place that keep us from completely losing our very complex human minds.
Derek Muller went to visit Chernobyl⊠Read the full page
My personality with the pills from The Matrix
Memez are fun. Read the full page
This life is a prison.
There are not many more truthful thoughts than this. Youâre a prisoner of your brain and your chemicals, even before being a prisoner of the society. And you only care about this when itâs a problem, of course, otherwise who cares, you just ride the wave.
Also see:
- /images/smbc-this-life-is-a-prison.html
- /quotes/life-is-rape.html
- My music track âThis life is a prisonâ[đĄ]
JAI @jaivcalla â I have to fucking say this
Completely different ontological plane of existence compared to Peopleâą.
Related: University of Utah Neuroscience Initiative â The Unfixed Brain[đĄ]
Umberto Galimberti â Interviews and conferences (excerpts)
Schopenhauer is considered a pessimist, of course: every time you donât praise or exalt âthe individualâ, you are pessimistic, of course, right?⊠⊠Even poor Leopardi is pessimistic, isnât he? Those who say âpessimismâ⊠Iâm like: are you looking at reality, goddammit, or do you really not want to see it? Read the full page
Why are normal people able to live (as explained by Lex Fridman)
Lex Fridman (a ânormieâ), explains in detail how he is able to live and not dwell on nihilism and depression, something that if youâre anything like me is fascinating and sometimes hard to fully grasp.
The bottom line is that itâs mainly how your brain is wired and its chemicals, which is consistent with the clear failure of psychotherapy in so many mental illness cases, and with the extensively demonstrated impossibility of changing the core of oneâs personality â and, by contrast, with how drugs are a way more useful tool, albeit also limited and sadly inconsistent, chaotic, still not very issue-specific, and full of negative effects.
Iâm Thinking of Ending Things
Sometimes the thought is closer to the truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you canât fake a thought. Continue reading
But what happens if your parents grew up in a home where there was a lot of rage, your parents are terrified of rage, so they give you the message that good little girls donât get angry. The message that you get is that angry little girls donât get loved. So, to maintain your relationship with your parents, then you â not consciously, but automatically â your brain will repress anger in order to maintain the relationship with parents who canât handle your anger. Because maintaining that relationship is the only way to ensure your survival. Itâs been shown in studies after studies that repression of anger also represses the immune system, so you get e.g. colitis.
Because the two systems are part of the same supersystem, and because healty anger and the immune system have the same function, which is to protect you. So suppressing your self-protection in one way is suppressing it in another way as well, and that same system will then turn against you, and now you get an autoimmune disease.
The emotional repression disorganizes the immune system.
Gabor MatĂ© â The Roots of Healing â âSounds Trueâ (Tami Simon), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P38fhtdWFhY[đĄ]
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Luigi Anepeta, psychoanalyst, at LIDI (Italian League for the Protection of Introvertsâ Rights)âs official forum
https://lidi.forumfree.it/?t=51672617&st=30#entry625292054[đĄ]
The percentage of introverts varies depending on the statistics: in the absence of a clear definition of what it means to be introverted, estimates range from 5% to 25% â the latter figure being supported by American researchers. The 5-7% estimate proposed in my book âTimido, docile, ardenteâŠâ wasnât based on formal studies, but rather on my own observations in elementary schools, where the introverted child â easily recognizable at a glance â tends to be, on average, 1 in every 15 to 20 students. Today, I would be inclined to widen that range to 5-10%.
That introversion has a genetic basis â whose positive or negative developments depend on environmental influences â seems to me beyond doubt, given not only the behavioral traits observable early on, but especially the inner experiences (empathy, sense of justice, aesthetic sensitivity, etc.): these â both the traits and the experiences â are consequences of neoteny, which is, in absolute terms, the most defining feature of introversion.
Genetics is an extremely complex science and susceptible to ideological âaberrationsâ. With regard to introversion, what seems certain is that there is no single introversion gene, but rather a constellation of genes â dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands â present in the parental genetic makeup and âextractedâ as a result of their combination. In parents, these genes may be evident as personality traits or masked by the dominance of extroverted genes. Once extracted and variously combined, they give rise to the introverted mode of being.
Anonymous 04/23/18 (Mon) 13:55:38 No.174245, obscure imageboard
[âŠ]
>>174236
Secrets are all too easy to deal with. Skeletons in the closet are easy to hide. Itâs when your entire being itself is a secret, thatâs when interacting with people becomes complex and difficult, painful even.
Iâve noticed that so much of genuine social interaction rests on sharing experiences. Technical discussion is a kin to small talk and fails to bridge a gap between people and form a connection. Itâs about seeing a reflection of yourself in your environment, seeing that a shared reality exists between you and another being, thatâs what truly quenches loneliness.
The usual normalfag advice of âjust be yourselfâ seems so appropriate now.
Itâs possibly all theyâve ever known.
Ironically, the most anti-work post ever written, without realizing it: https://waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-career.html[đĄ] Continue reading
Anonymous 02/09/18 (Fri) 20:03:16 No.3716, obscure imageboard
[âŠ]
But try to look at it with full honesty, without bias: the closer you look at yourself and the actual course of your life, the more you realize the objective fact: you were the Rain Man retard. And all your imaginary lives are delusional fantasies.
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
whatever question youâre asking yourself, the answer is that youâre not in control, so ride the wave but be ready to swim
Natalino Balasso, YouTube, @Telebalasso, 2018 New Yearâs Speech[đĄ], in the end credits
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Luciano had become so used to being alone and living cocooned in his hermitage that seeing a psychologist would have been unthinkable: you cannot conceive of solving a problem if the problem is all you have. Itâs easier to lie down inside your own noise and sing something stupid over it when possible. And so, some days, for Luciano it could almost feel like happiness, even with a hint of pride, in the awareness that no one was trying to make him feel better except himself.
Le vite potenziali (âPotential Livesâ) â Francesco Targhetta
Depression is like reverse cancer: thereâs so little you want to do, but you have so much time left.
From the internet
[âŠ] men are stones; they do not change.
Umberto Galimberti, in a lecture
The superego is a structure soluble in alcohol.
The first psychologists, in the 1960s, when they introduced psychology in Italy (as Galimberti recounts in an interview).
Massimo Recalcati â Perversion
The Clinical Lesson of Jacques Lacan: Madness, Neurosis and Perversion (third session). IRPA, Associazione Accademia Pons, Jonas Onlus, Order of Psychologists of Lombardy, Enap Continue reading
Beyond the Sad Passions â Miguel Benasayag
Everything happens as if the permanence of his suffering were the undisputable proof of his identity in the sense of its singularity: âI suffer, therefore I am.â Read the full page
Picky eaters, they grow up to be depressives and sexual anorexics, you know.
Pazuzu in The Exorcist (TV series), episode 4 season 1
The Society of Deviants â Piero Cipriano
The schizoid is rigid in his decisions [âŠ] Read the full page
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
I donât want to tell you clichĂ©s like âbe yourselfâ, because itâs clear that if youâre an idiot, being yourself wonât help you.
Natalino Balasso, YouTube, 2015 New Yearâs Eve Speech[đĄ]
I envy people who commit suicide
r/offmychest, u/SoulOfTheInternet Continue reading
Itâs not that old people are wise: they just have a very low dose of sexuality and aggressiveness â thatâs it. And at this level they are also calm, unless they have a bad temper.
Umberto Galimberti, in a lecture
â So, tell me. Why do you want to kill yourself so badly? Mummy and daddy, they didnât love you enough?
â No, it had nothing to do with anything like that.
â It has everything to do with âanything like thatâ.
The Suicide Theory
The Crazy Woman Next Door â Conversation with Alda Merini
Unfortunately, the soul, which by the way is what then writes and survives [âŠ], is the part that flies over matter and is the one thatâs the most attentive and the most painful: namely, seeing the deterioration of the body, this soul distress itself, it⊠above all, it loses its way. Continue reading
After all, society was not prepared to accept people like us who had different life needs, who wanted to be in company but wanted to be alone, who wanted money but didnât want it, who were a total contradiction, of life, of their id.
The Crazy Woman Next Door â Conversation with Alda Merini
â No, I donât believe that bad people exist; I believe that various forms of desperation exist. Some of these forms are so intense that the person who is suffering from them becomes the perpetrator of their own crimes, but not the mastermind. They find themselves committing a crime with astonishment.
Silvano Agosti â Ricky Farina (@rickyfarina) â âDialogo con Silvanoâ (âConversation with Silvanoâ), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anXfrcF-zE4[đĄ]
Money doesnât buy you happiness, it just buys you a lot of therapy to talk about why youâre not happy.
Castro in Grand Theft Auto V
What we should do is take all the mentally defective people in this country and give them government jobs, and just sit back and watch things improve.
George Carlin quoting a joke by his brother Patrick â âUnmaskedâ interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-clvDxl8qI[đĄ]
Zachary Wheeler â Treatment of schizoid personality: an analytic psychotherapy handbook
There is even a debate as to the legitimacy of schizoid personality as a diagnosis (Slavik, Sperry, & Carlson, 1992). Fairbairn was amongst the first to note that schizoid states are present to some degree in all people, and span a continuum from normal to severe and debilitating (Fairbairn, 1940). Recent authors assert the normalcy of temperamental introversion (Cain, 2012), the biases of object relations theory toward the primacy of relationship (Modell, 1993; Storr, 1988), the creative and regenerative functions of reclusive behaviors (Storr, 1988), and the gains and pleasures of seclusion (Rufus, 2003) as counterarguments to pathologizing schizoid-like behavior. Continue reading
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
And if you donât win [at the slot machines], try asking yourself a question: if you were lucky, do you really think youâd be working in a call center?
Natalino Balasso, âBalasso testimonial videopokerâ[đĄ]
As for music being a comforting thing in times such as these, Iâm sure it is for those who arenât too depressed to still enjoy it. But music canât compare with alcohol or drugs, which directly affect oneâs emotional state as opposed to musicâs indirect effect through our sense of hearing and never fail to provide an escape. Like literature, music is just a harmless form of forgetting the world and doesnât always work as well as weâd like.
Thomas Ligotti â The Damned Interviews, Tina Hall
How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?
Only one. But it takes a lot of time and money, and the bulb has got to really want to change.
Sala samobĂłjcĂłw / Suicide Room
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
You can imagine, a seventeen-year-old, itâs the age when one fights furiously with their father, even now, and they fought furiously back then too (ed. in the Middle Ages), as in every era, at that age.
Alessandro Barbero, Festival della Mente 2011[đĄ]
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race â A Contrivance of Horror â Thomas Ligotti
The horror handed down to us will be handed down to others like a scandalous heirloom. Being alive: decades of waking up on time, then trudging through another round of moods, sensations, thoughts, cravingsâthe complete gamut of agitationsâand finally flopping into bed to sweat in the pitch of dead sleep or simmer in the phantasmagorias that molest our dreaming minds. Read the full page
Thereâs a thirst for ignorance, because for millennia there has been a thirst for knowledge. Humanity has got to know so much, too much. And as it now notices that itâs worse off than before, the desire has reversed itself, and so there is a thirst for ignorance. But this has not led to a productive step backwards, because by now the damage has already been done and it has already changed the game: it has led to a heavy, aggressive and self-destructive ignorance, not the simple smug knowledge of the old years.
Once that which is in fact an illusion has fallen, you will suddenly find yourself thrown into reality. Read the full page
Emptiness â Distraction â Dream â Desire⊠Read the full page
Itâs really not that hard to understand people: you just have to not listen to them and âlookâ at their appearance.
Grotteschi e arabeschi (Grotesques and Arabesques) â Vitaliano Trevisan
I think everybody should get rich and famous and everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that thatâs not the answer.
Jim Carrey, Ottawa Citizen, December 2005
â»
Iâve often said that I wish people could realize all their dreams and wealth and fame, so that they could see that itâs not where youâre going to find your sense of completion.
Jim Carrey, commencement address at Maharishi University of Management, May 24, 2014
People always end up the way they started out. No one ever changes. They think they do but they donât. If youâre the depressed type now, thatâs the way youâll always be. If youâre the mindless happy type now, thatâs the way youâll be when you grow up. You might lose some weight, your face may clear up, get a body tan, breast enlargement, a sex change, it makes no difference. Essentially, from in front, from behind. Whether you are 13 or 50, youâll always be the same.
Palindromes; also quoted in Morgondagen by Apati
There seems to be an inborn drive in all human beings not to live in a steady emotional state, which would suggest that such a state is not tolerable to most people. Why else would someone succumb to the attractions of romantic love more than once? Didnât they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time? And itâs the same old lesson: everything in this life â I repeat, everything â is more trouble than itâs worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble. This is something that is more recognized in Eastern societies than in the West. Thereâs a minor tradition in Greek philosophy that instructs us to seek a state of equanimity rather than one of ecstasy, but it never really caught on for obvious reasons. Buddhism advises its practitioners not to seek highs or lows but to follow a middle path to personal salvation from the painful cravings of the average sensual life, which is why it was pretty much reviled by the masses and mutated into forms more suited to human drives and desires. It seems evident that very few people can simply sit still. Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness.
Thomas Ligotti â âFantastic Metropolisâ interview
People canât seem to get it through their heads that there is never any healing or closure. Ever. There is only a short pause before the next âhorrifyingâ event. People forget there is such a thing as memory, and that when a wound âhealsâ it leaves a permanent scar that never goes away, but merely fades a little. What really ought to be said after one of these so-called tragedies is, âLet the scarring begin.â
George Carlin â When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?
Old people, they look back at the good old days, and it was good because they were young. But they act like it was âthe dayâ. No, it was âcause youth is good: thatâs gone, youâre fucked; itâs not the day. And then they reject anything thatâs new, itâs like we do with fucking hip-hop, if youâre in your 30s: «Oh, fuck that, that ainât music, we had music back when 38 Special was aroundâŠÂ» What? No. Letâs all fucking kill ourselves for the hypocrisy, right?
Doug Stanhope â Deadbeat Hero
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Pirandello proposed, among the alternative solutions to the problems of existence, murder, suicide, or madness; nowadays, in an age of frantic synergies, we must combine the different possibilities, so we must become completely mad, kill the highest possible number of individuals, and then finally commit suicide.
Carl William Brown (Bruno Mensi)
Umberto Galimberti â The success of philosophy
But for those who, adapted to the world, and with a moderate self-awareness still do not find a meaning of their existence, and therefore come into contact not with this or that pain, but with the essence of pain, for those there is no remedy in the pharmacy and perhaps not even in psychotherapy. Read the full page
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Madness is simply pain.
Vittorino Andreoli
Despair is madness. Madness, the perception of the impossibility of living: being there, but as if not being there. Despair as an experience of madness is incompatible with life. It sees death, plans death, and kills the self and the other. Despair is a form of madness possible for man, for all men; it is, in fact, a human perspective, tied to his need to be with others, to the fact that he cannot live alone, because human life is not solitude but sharing, belonging, attachment.
Vittorino Andreoli, Il lato oscuro (âThe Dark Sideâ) (2002)
Waking Life â Richard Linklater
A thousand years is but an instant. Read the full page
â Oh, was I mean? You canât take it? The happening chick that you are?
â Lizzie, Iâm not crying because youâre mean. I just canât imagine how incredibly painful it must be to be you.
Prozac Nation
No to the solution when you are the problem
Cripple Bastards â Morte da tossico (âDeath of the Addictâ)
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.
Agent Smith in âThe Matrixâ
(In the psychiatric hospital)
Susanna: But what if you donât have a secret?
Lisa: Then youâre a lifer, like me.
âGirl, Interruptedâ
Reviews of âThe Depressed Personâ by David Foster Wallace
Wonderfully modeled on the depressing spiral of searching within oneself to find an answer to a problem that IS oneself. Read the full page
More than a source of mental pain, today depression is a way of life. Read the full page
Lying On the Couch â Irvin D. Yalom
But Marshal had not been swayed by these new developments. At sixty-three, he had been a psychiatrist long enough to have lived through several such positivistic swings. Read the full page
If we continually try to force a child to do what he is afraid to do, he will become more timid, and will use his brains and energy, not to explore the unknown, but to find ways to avoid the pressures we put on him.
John C. Holt â How Children Learn
It is very common for schizoid individuals to present for treatment in their 30s and 40s, at a time when the possibility of a relationship is growing more tenuous and that of companionship seems to be getting more and more distant. Read the full page
As If The World Were Ending: The Meaning of the Schizophrenic Experience â Eugenio Borgna
âConfess! Confess! they shouted at me, just as they once did with sorcerers and heretics, and in the end, I decided to let myself be classified within an illness defined by doctors and indiscriminately labeled in medical dictionaries as either theomania or demonomania. By relying on the inherent meanings of these two definitions, science grants itself the right to make disappear or silence all the prophets and seers foretold in the Apocalypse; and I took solace in being one of them.â Read the full page
Angels of the Universe â Einar MĂĄr GuĂ°mundsson
No, this grave is not deep enough to accomodate the feelings of us all. Read the full page
In the context of obsessive experiences, depression intervenes [âŠ] driven by a push for change that leads the subject to feel the need to address their unfulfilled needs. However, these needs have taken on an anarchic and transgressive drive and are intensely guilt-ridden. Continue reading
Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isnât thinking isnât thinking of
They Might Be Giants â Where Your Eyes Donât Go
Madness is the emergency exit⊠you can just step outside, and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened. You can lock them away⊠forever.
Joker in Alan Mooreâs âBatman: The Killing Jokeâ
Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.
Barfly
Itâs no longer a question of staying healthy. Itâs a question of finding a sickness you like.
Jackie Mason
Thereâs no bad like a good man gone bad.
Charlie (Bud Spencer) in âWho Finds a Friend Finds a Treasureâ
Life is a state of mind.
Being There
Erich Fromm â Normal people are the sickest
I think itâs a common fiction that people share, that the modern person is happy. Read the full page
â Well, you know, Iâve been observing you here now for the last four weeks, and I donât see any evidence of mental illness at all. And I think that youâve been trying to put us on, all this time.
â You know, what do you want me to do? *mimics crazy gestures* You know what I mean, is that it? Is that crazy enough for you? Want me to take a shit on the floor? Tsk! ChristâŠ
One Flew Over the Cuckooâs Nest
The consciousness of self is the greatest hindrance to the proper execution of all physical action.
Bruce Lee â Tao of Jeet Kune Do (posthumous)
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
Emil Cioran â The Trouble With Being Born
Were (say) Frankl to attempt to cure (say) Zapffe from his âexistential frustration,â âontological despairâ or âmetaphysic-melancholic clairvoyance,â the chances are that Zapffe (rather than âcuredâ) would be baffled by Franklâs sophomoric philosophizing. âYou may be psychologically healthier than I,â Zapffe would gladly admit, âbut I must insist that I am a better philosopher. A lifelong search for a meaning of life in general, and of my life in particular, has led me â reluctantly, but with cataclysmic consistency and sleepwalkerâs certainty â to realize that itâs all fantasy and delusions, divinely subsidized to put us at peace with our âsituation.â You are certainly right that psycho-pathological explanations of my biosophical pessimism would be totally irrelevant; but I also fail to see what you can possibly accomplish with your naĂŻve, maladroit metaphysics, behind which â if you will permit me to speak your language for once â I see but the profoundest, most fundamental trauma, and that great universal repression which prevents all fatal insight into man and his âcosmic conditions,â the mysterious, grotesquely absurd origin and genesis of body and mind, their inalienable interests, and their final and complete obliteration, the return of the synthesis to the absolute zero.â The biosophist is fully aware of the many marvellous metaphysics offering âpeace in heart,â âreconciliation with the worldâ and âatonement with the almighty,â or the like, to anyone who is willing to join this or that suificating sect, and replace intellectually honest experience with fictitious world views. The spiritual vacuum is often so painful that if the fiction is sufficiently permanent, it does not seem to matter if it should turn out not to be so terribly pleasant.
Happiness Is for the Pigs: Philosophy versus Psychotherapy â Herman TĂžnnessen
Flowers for Algernon (novel) â Daniel Keyes
Why am I always looking at life through a window? Read the full page
The Fire Within (Le feu follet / Fuoco fatuo) â Louis Malle
â You still have feelings of anxiety? Continue reading
The schizoid individual (and this applies still more to the schizophrenic) does not bask in the warmth of a loving self-regard. Self-scrutiny is quite improperly regarded as a form of narcissism. Neither the schizoid nor the schizophrenic is narcissistic in this sense. As a schizophrenic put it, she was scorched under the glare of a black sun. The schizoid individual exists under the black sun, the evil eye, of his own scrutiny. The glare of his awareness kills his spontaneity, his freshness; it destroys all joy. Everything withers under it. And yet he remains, although profoundly not narcissistic, compulsively preoccupied with the sustained observation of his own mental and/or bodily processes. In Federnâs language, cathects his ego-as-object with mortido (ed. the death drive).
A very similar point was made in different terms when it was said earlier that the schizoid individual depersonalizes his relationship with himself. That is to say, he turns the living spontaneity of his being into something dead and lifeless by inspecting it.
R. D. Laing â The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness
The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. âMany of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.â They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.
Aldous Huxley â Brave New World Revisited
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
[âŠ] only in madness
can one be clear.
âPicassoâ â P.P. Pasolini
Philosophical Investigations â Ludwig Wittgenstein
Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand. Read the full page
For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on.
Samuel Beckett, Molloy
I have the courage. Itâs fear that gets the better of me.
TotĂČ as Figaro in âFigaro qua, Figaro lĂ â (âFigaro Here, Figaro Thereâ)
Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
1984 â George Orwell
The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; by asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido to which something else must have happened, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression.
Sigmund Freud, letter to Marie Bonaparte
You probably wouldnât worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.
Olin Miller
The Last Messiah â Peter Wessel Zapffe
«Know yourselves â be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.» Read the full page
Iâm through with psychoanalysis. After having practiced it faithfully for six whole months, Iâm worse off than before. [âŠ]
I had put myself in the doctorâs hands with such trust that when he told me I was cured, I believed him completely and, on the contrary, I didnât believe in my pains, which still afflicted me. I said to them: âYouâre not real, after all!â But now there can be no doubt! Itâs them, all right! [âŠ]
[âŠ] But now that I know everything, namely that it was nothing but a foolish illusion, a trick designed to affect some hysterical old woman, how could I bear the company of that ridiculous man, with that eye of his, meant to be penetrating, and that presumption that allows him to collect all the phenomena of this world within his great new theory?
Italo Svevo â Zenoâs Conscience / Confessions of Zeno
Beyond the Pleasure Principle â Sigmund Freud
Such memory-traces, then, have nothing to do with the fact of becoming conscious; indeed they are often most powerful and most enduring when the process which left them behind was one which never entered consciousness. Read the full page
As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her [Anneâs] fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten â a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that âw-a-t-e-râ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand.
Helen Keller, in her autobiography âThe Story of My Lifeâ, recounting her experience as a deafblind child.
Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.
Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer â Studies on Hysteria
Men laugh at eccentrics like that, but women recognize them immediately. Pure, chaste women love them, out of sympathy; corrupt women seek out their friendship in order to purge themselves of spoilage.
Oblomov â Ivan Goncharov
Society prepares the crime, the criminal commits it.
Henry Thomas Buckle
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence â whether much that is glorious â whether all that is profound â does not spring from disease of thought â from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora
We cannot give ourselves courage.
Don Abbondio in âThe Betrothedâ by Alessandro Manzoni
A leopard canât change its spots.
A saying
O Julie, what a fatal present from heaven is a sensible soul! He who has received it must expect to know nothing but pain and suffering in this world. Lowly plaything of the air and seasons, his destiny will be regulated by sun or fog, fair or overcast weather, and he will be satisfied or sad at the whim of the winds. Victim of prejudice, he will find in absurd maxims an invincible obstacle to the just wishes of his heart. Men will punish him for having upright sentiments on every subject, and for judging by what is genuine rather than by what is conventional. Alone he would suffice to his own misery, by giving himself over indiscreetly to the divine attractions of honesty and beauty, whereas the weighty chains of necessity attach him to ignominy. He will seek supreme felicity without remembering that he is a man: his heart and his reason will be endlessly at war, and unbounded desires will set in store for him eternal deprivation.
Julie or the New Heloise â Jean-Jacques Rousseau