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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to accept that a bad feeling is a result of a physical mechanism in your brain. It's obviously true. It's just hard to internalize, the same way you've internalized gravity. For example, if you accept that, then you must also accept this: It's within the capability of science to develop an anti-love potion. Want to fall out of love with someone? Drink the potion, or wear the headset. Doesn't matter how much you loved them before: you won't after.

I just want to say thank you for the absolutely stellar comment. It's the best I've read in quite awhile. Perhaps because it touches on so many mechanisms that fascinate me.

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It's within the capability of science to one day develop an anti-love potion. Want to fall out of love with someone? Drink the potion, or wear the headset.

Actually, I have semi-jokingly suggested that friends in unrequited love take a certain class of antidepressant for a while, since this is one of the side effects -- it has a pretty good chance of working. So it may be easier to accept, although this is just n=1. (On the other hand, nobody has actually taken this advice..)

Oh god. What antidepressant?

As someone with experience of psychiatric medicine, the way things are going at the moment in the field is, in fact, to over-emphasise the biological side of mental illness. It goes beyond the (unsubstantiated) idea that mental illnesses result from "chemical imbalances" for which no tests exist, to a total disregard for the social circumstances of the patient or their psychological profile. Sometimes the medical people will refer to a bio-psycho-social model, but it is mostly just lip service. If you want to see the Fundamental Attribution Error in action, psychiatry is the place to look. It's a variant of the FAE where the patient is held primarily responsible (through their biology) and their relationships with other people or current circumstances, or even upbringing, are ignored.

Ronnie Laing showed that for at least some sufferers from mental illness, taking them out of a pathological family environment would cause a remission. Release them back to their family, and they would get ill again. That was in the 1960s.

It can also be a result of physical mechanisms elsewhere in your body! The nervous system is large and complex. For example, feelings in your gut can trigger anxiety, and links have been studied between gut microflora and anxiety.

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