Hoyle Leigh, psychiatrist and MD who co-founded the Yale Institute of Behavioral Medicine in the 70s, and went on to write Genes, Memes, Culture and Mental Illness: Towards an Integrative Model in 2010 [1], defines mental illness in that it is caused by pathological memes, and studies diseases of the mind as memetic diseases.
One form of memetic infectant, which can express itself as a pathological meme, is laws. Law, when “hosted” in human brains, infects the human brain, to achieve higher forms of social organization. Laws have to live somewhere, and while there is ongoing research into distributed virtual states (DVS) [2], where Ethereum could be viewed as a proto-DVS, nation-states remain the most widely used legal organization, and humans remain the primary hosts for law.
The search for what causes mental illness and the history of meme theory
The concept of disease transmission and contagion was well established before microorganisms were identified. As the conception upon diseases transmission reflects the society’s state of progress, we passed from the miasma theory and spontaneous generation theory, to germ theory. [3]
Likewise, the concept of meme-transmission reflects society’s progress. From possessed spirits or an infection of the uterus, to the most important concept in the history of medicine, the meme theory.
The executive (ego) function, default mode network, and failure to integrate with law
The executive function, the ego in Freudian psychology, orchestrates the mind in a default mode network. [4, 5] To understand the default mode, we can look at the flow-state where the default mode shuts down, a departure from the ordinary, a stepping outside the self, characterized by that the ego dissolves, and time slows down (time is computed all over the prefrontal cortex which orchestrates the default mode network. )
When confined in a centralized legal system, enforced by a monopoly on violence, the executive function is in a battle-of-wills with the agency of that system. [6] Failure to integrate with that external violence in some way (either by winning, conforming, escaping or competing) causes law-integration disorder, what has been falsely described as mental disorder.
Hoyle Leigh defines diseases of the mind as memetic diseases, and the term mental disorder is based on the theory that the executive function is memetic. The orchestrator of the mind is, in order to be able to orchestrate, above the memetic cortex in a hierarchy of control. The executive system is older than culture, it is a separate system, and has been co-opted by the mind to regulate and filter memes.
Towards a model for law-integration disorders, falsifying the idea of mental disorder
Law-integration disorder (what has wrongly been called mental disorder) is a dys-integration between law and the executive function, causing an attenuation of the executive function as a result of coercion through external legal forces and physical violence (including threat of violence. )
Mental illness is a secondary infection, resulting from law-integration disorder.
Psychiatric science as a religion to make people blind to the monopoly on violence
The forms of mythologies that arise in centralized legal systems are shaped by slave mentality, and devaluing that which the master values and the slave does not have. This is a way to maintain horizontal trust between slaves. Slave morality is the inverse of master morality. As such, it is characterized by pessimism and cynicism. Slave morality is created in opposition to what master morality values as 'good'.
Under monopolies on violence, where from a government perspective then violence is 'good', then slave mentality looks at use of physical force, and devalues it by forming narratives that violence does not even exist. [7] To not even recognize the other, as the most extreme form of rejection of value. This is the origin of psychiatric mythology, where instead of being attentive to physical violence, slave mentality forms a narrative where it's "in your mind".
Psychiatric mythology [8] has evolved as a reaction to the nation-state, as a way to maintain horizontal trust between slaves, who secure the nation-state consensus and who also benefit from government as it co-ordinates them so that there can be economic and technological growth.
The symbolism in psychiatric diagnosis is a figment of statism pseudo-science. For example, the "shadow self", controlling the subject, is a way to represent an external physical threat, a monopoly on violence, in a mythology where it’s an internal conflict.
Hysteria as a case study of diagnosis as projected neurosis
Centralized law is not that old, and if laws can be hosted in smart-contracts and blockchains, then where have they been hosted before? In human brains. If you run a nation-state on top of human brains, those brains will spin stories to subjectify the legal processes that they perform, which causes the culture that is often called “statism”.
Then, because the stories are subjectified, those who do not mirror them get diagnosed to subjectify the legal processes. For example, in the 19th century, when males were legal masters and the "hosts" for the smart contracts at the time, the beliefs which spun stories to subjectify those legal processes, that manifested as neurosis, were projected onto a population who did not mirror them, the female population, with "hysteria". [9]
Law-integration disorders can broadly be divided into two spectra, the psychopathic or schizo-neurotic spectra (for example narcissism), and the hyper-empathic or schizo-psychotic spectra (for example autism or ADHD). The two spectra are then in co-dependence with one another, and both are slave mentality, and both are the result of decreased executive control, associated with a statist worldview.
The schizo-neurotic spectra takes the shape of neurosis. Psychiatric science, because it is centralized, is never going to favor diagnosing the psychopathic spectra, because power trickles down rather than the other way around, which is why narcissism was removed after DSM III. Per how centralized law integrates with the human brain, psychiatric science will always be weaponized in favor of the neurotic spectra, and so more accurate models like the "law-integration disorder" model could turn that balance around.
Diagnoses that are believed to be mental disorders, are then projections of statism as a law-integration disorder, specifically neurosis and the schizo-neurotic spectra, and in for example hysteria, the stress that was diagnosed as hysteria were reactions to violence, not stress from processing legal code (since females had no legal authority. ) The symptoms of Hysteria were secondary to the onset of law-integration disorder, caused by violence exerted from society onto a person selected for “ritual sacrifice”, resulting from pecking order instincts.
Master mentality and outgrowing the law-integration disorder duality
Nietzsche claimed that those who adopt the master morality promote the common good and peace in society in order to develop all forms of life as expressions of the will to power. With self-determination and the will to self-actualization, the executive (ego) system becomes better at competing with the external legal forces that seek to impose its own will and agency.
Towards a psychiatry 2.0 to incentivize reforms of coercive legal systems
Formalizing new and more accurate models can improve health. The miasma theory was replaced with germ theory, improving how bacterial infections were treated, and by replacing the mental disorder theory with a model for “law-integration disorders”, memetic infections (that cause mental illness) could be treated better, and also prevented through removing the external coercion that attenuates the executive (ego) function.
References
- Genes, Memes, Culture, and Mental Illness Toward an Integrative Model
http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9781441956705 - Ethereum, blockchain, and smart contracts — the future of law?
https://www.lawsociety.org.nz/news-and-communications/latest-news/news/ethereum,-blockchain,-and-smart-contracts-the-future-of-law - From miasmas to germs: A historical approach to theories of infectious disease transmission https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223957556_From_miasmas_to_germs_A_historical_approach_to_theories_of_infectious_disease_transmission
- The default-mode, ego-functions and free-energy: a neurobiological account of Freudian ideas
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2850580/ - Belief in core values triggers a ‘default-mode network’ in the brain
https://news.usc.edu/90485/belief-in-core-values-triggers-a-default-mode-network-in-the-brain/ - The dominance hierarchy and the evolution of mental illness
http://thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673667923069/abstract - Psychiatric diagnosis as a political device
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057%2Fsth.2009.11 - Is psychiatry a religion?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2625374
Women And Hysteria In The History Of Mental Health
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3480686/