Emotional stress is biological stress unless you believe in an extreme form of cartesian dualism incompatible with modern understanding of physiology.
Yet, many people who consider themselves to be rational and scientifically-minded, and who reject dualism, scoff at the notion that physiological illness can be caused/exacerbated by emotional stress.
Try this out some time: suggest that an illness like chronic fatigue syndrome or general autoimmune illness is at least somewhat linked to emotional stress and/or trauma, and see what kinds of reactions you get (or go and look at the discussions about this topic in CFS communities).
What's next, are you going to suggest basilar skull fractures are somewhat linked to emotional stress?
The responses you'd get would likely be due to PTSD induced by interacting with the very rational and scientifically-minded profit-maximizing medical industry, and/or incompetent physicians unable to provide an effective relief for the underlying condition.
Try out this some time: try to reduce stigma around various disorders instead of suggesting running nonconsensual unethical experiments, bordering on sociopathy, on those suffering from difficult to treat disorders.
If you want to discuss this topic in good faith you should edit your comment to remove this appeal to ridicule.
I don't know what you think I'm advocating that motivates the bilious accusations in the rest of your comment.
From what I can tell:
- We seem to agree that people suffering chronic, difficult-to-treat illnesses have it extremely tough, and it would be ideal if they didn't (I know this from personal experience)
- We also seem to agree that the profit motive creates perverse incentives in medical research and treatment.
Outside of that, your comment seems to be just another example of the very phenomenon I was pointing out.
To be clear: I've experienced difficult-to-treat illness that seems to be autoimmune-related for much of my life.
I'm now almost completely well, having undertaken a variety of treatments including deep emotional/trauma healing work over the past 8+ years.
There is no mainstream physician, of any supposed level of competence, who would have recommended the approach that has enabled me to achieve the level of health I've now reached.
There are notable exceptions – Gabor Maté and Bruce Lipton being the most prominent – yet neither are taken seriously by the scientific/medical mainstream, despite both having advanced mainstream medical credentials.
The point being, I imagine this same thing happens with adults. And I think we, as a society, do a horrible job realizing how deep trauma can run and how it can manifest itself. For children everyone accepts it as normal, but for adults the perspecitive seems to be exactly as you state it is. And this is just wrong.
If that makes sense.
If you haven't already, I'd strongly recommend looking up Gabor Maté; he's written several books and has plenty of talks/interviews on YouTube, and at least a couple of threads here on HN I think.
He’s a Canada-based physician who has spent his career researching and writing/speaking about this whole topic.
The world needs to pay a lot more attention to people like him IMO.
More awareness = better outcomes.
How people handle Trump and his base is a good marker of the populations mental health/self-awareness levels.
Uncertainty is scary. That is why trauma victims are placed in boxes, but it is wrong to do.
We have celebrated people who persevere and overcome their circumstances and we must continue to do so. We must give the gift of believe and faith to people who exist through circumstances that are destructive to the development of faith, belief, and trust.
Any victim has the potential to do that if their environment is supportive to providing that. It always depends on surroundings and belief of everyone. Everyone matters.
A heart attack can be triggered by stress. But you don't go up to someone who's had a heart attack and say, "Just relax -- it's just stress." Stress may have been the spark but once the fire is lit it burns all on its own. Similarly with a lot of bodily ailments, once a system is compromised then "relaxing" might not be enough to fix it.
As someone with CFS, what we don't like is when people imply or just say that it's "not real," "not that bad," "all in our heads," etc. Often laypersons become armchair diagnosticians, tell you that you're 'stressed,' and then assume that knowledge will fix the problem. But, just like the patient who's had a heart attack, the problem is a lot bigger now, and the interventions required are a lot more difficult than "just relax."
Not necessarily.
You can believe in the "modern understanding of physiology" and still think that "Emotional stress" is a "thinking" process that does not affect biological physiology.
It's not necessary that every emotion or brain process manifests in any other way aside from brain synapses firing and so on (e.g. that it affects the bodily operations in some other way).
So, it's not an either-or, but 3 options:
1) cartesian dualism (emotion and biology are two different spheres, soul independent of the body etc)
2) emotional stress triggers biological stress
3) emotional stress remains a brain process and doesn't trigger biological stress
And the case is probably sometimes (2) and sometimes (3).
They really are identical on a certain level.
No, psychology isn't predicated on mind/body duality. Much of it is arguably compatible with mind/body duality simply because it doesn't address physical root causes but only higher-level phenomena, but going beyond that to say that it is predicated on mind/body duality is like saying that Computer Science, because it deals with abstract computation and mostly not the underlying physical mechanisms (left to the separate field of computer engineering) is predicated on computation/processor duality.
Can you tell me how psychology exists without the mind?
> Much of it is arguably compatible with mind/body duality simply because it doesn't address physical root
So it is predicated on the mind/brain.
> because it deals with abstract computation and mostly not the underlying physical mechanisms (left to the separate field of computer engineering) is predicated on computation/processor duality
Your analogy seems off and you assertion contradicts itself. Computer science is a math. It lives in the world of "forms". Computer science exists without the processor. It existed before the processor. Lambda calculus and the turing machine existed before the processor. Just like arithmetic existed before calculators. Are you saying the mind exists without the brain? The mind existed before the brain? So aren't we back to square one - the mind/brain duality?
If psychology isn't predicated on mind/brain duality, what is it predicated on?
It doesn't (well, except maybe behavioral psychology, which arguably could) exist without the mind.
It just doesn't care one way or another about whether the mind is a direct product of the physical body or not. “Mind/body” duality isn't just “the mind exist”, but “the mind is at least in part not a property of the body”.
> If psychology isn't predicated on mind/brain duality, what is it predicated on?
Depends what particular branch. Behavioral psychology is predicated on humans existing and having behavior, most of the rest of psychology is predicated on humans existing and having cognition, whether or not that cognition is a property of the physical body.
Okay. So psychology requires the mind. Good. Does psychology deny the brain exists? If not, you have the mind-brain duality.
> Mind/body” duality isn't just “the mind exist”
Yes. I suspect that's why the part about the brain and duality is in "mind/brain duality".
I'm glad we are agreed. Otherwise, if there was no mind-body duality, we wouldn't have psychology but only neuroscience. Maybe one day, hopefully.
IIUC, classically "mind-body dualism" involves an assertion that the mind cannot be explained physiologically. Psychology only asserts that the mind can be reasoned about directly. The usefulness of psychology depends on that reasoning being sufficiently accurate and sufficiently easier than reasoning neurologically for some problems.
No because such duality doesn't exist. It's a relationship of composition rather than duality. It's empirically shown that neurons and atoms exist and neurons are composed of atoms. Last I checked, there isn't any empirical evidence for "the mind" just like there isn't any empirical evidence for "the soul". And nobody is asserting that the mind is composed of brains.
> IIUC, classically "mind-body dualism" involves an assertion that the mind cannot be explained physiologically.
No. Classically, the mind-body dualism is the idea that the mind and body are distinct separate entities and that the mind does the "thinking" and the body cannot "think". Has nothing to do one explaining the other.
> Psychology only asserts that the mind can be reasoned about directly.
Not directly, indirectly.
> The usefulness of psychology depends on that reasoning being sufficiently accurate and sufficiently easier than reasoning neurologically for some problems.
Or... there is no such thing as a mind-body duality and it's all just body and psychology is pseudoscience. Mind-body dualism is just a rehash of the soul-body dualism. People used to believe that the soul controlled the body and that's why the body could move. People used to believe that the sickenness of the soul translated to sickenness of the body. Hence why people used to believe diseased people were cursed by god for their sins. We don't subscribe to that belief anymore after advances in physiology. As we learned more about the body, the soul slowly faded away. Makes one wonder what advances in neuroscience may do to the mind.
No, mind-brain duality isn't “mind and brain both exist” but “mind exists independently of brain”. (It's usually referred to as mind/body duality rather than mind/brain duality now because no one actually thinks the physical basis of the mind is purely brain, and the essence of the purported duality isn't the mind having a physical locus other than the brain but it having some not-physically-determined aspect.)
Brain.
> and there's plenty of psychology where invoking neural substrates is unnecessary or even impossible.
Mind.
I already discussed the flawed algorithm/hardware analogy in another comment.
It's so strange that the two commenters claim psychology isn't predicated on mind-brain duality and yet in their same comment show that psychology requires mind-brain duality.
If psychology isn't predicated on mind-brain duality, it wouldn't exist any longer. We'd just have neuroscience.