Information and Mental Disorders

One thing I have observed in my long stint as both a psychiatric patient as well as my general life experience is that many severe mental disturbances have features of an inability to accurately process information, sort through its complexity, and the ordering of that information in the minds of the disturbed. 

   Fear and dread often comes with an unstable and often innaccurate processing of both someone's external world and internal mind, and information processing can be severely compromised by a malfunctioning brain. This can greatly cripple someone's functionality and operational capacity. 

     Trauma can cripple a mind, and fear and terror play a huge part in the disrupting of information processing and comprehending.

The human brain is both an information processor, decoder, and can even generate and construct entirely new arrangements of information. We see evidence of this through art and creativity.

       I will not dismiss the evidence of brain chemistry, nor the efficacy of medications. If I wasn't taking medications to treat my mental illness, I would not be able to function in society, let alone write these posts. However, brain chemistry is just one factor. Abstract concepts and emotions are other factors that effect information processing and generation in a human mind. 

       We can see indirect and direct evidence of the effects abstract information has on the minds of human beings when we see someone terrorized by a frightening thing they picked up with their senses, or the excitement a scientist or mathematician feels when they stumble upon a new discovery of how to understand something. Abstract information is extremely powerful and has a profound effect on the human brain or mind. 

       The faulty processing of both abstract and concrete information is a strong symptom of mental illnesses like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and psychosis. Psychosis is very much characterized by chaotic and distorted information processing, generation, and idea regurgitation by a person who is psychotic or suffering from schizophrenia. 

   However, I don't like the characterization of people who are schizophrenic or psychotic as being completely out of reality, because I know most psychiatrists themselves don't have a complete grasp of how complex reality is or the depth, power and scope of the human imagination. Psychiatrists aren't quantum physicists, nor are many of them philosophers, and some of them don't have a creative or artistic bone in their body.

    Whether or not you agree with the information presented to you by a mentally ill person or whether or not that information or those ideas and constructs presented to you by the mentally ill person are compatible with the your reality or the general consensus on reality, the information still exists in its own right, nontheless, even as just the information of a disturbed and broken mind.

        Whoever holds the keys to the understanding of, the presentation of, the interpretation of, and consensus on what reality is or is not controls to a fairly significant degree the mental paradigm and the behaviors of that culture or nation, and fields like psychiatry very much get the authority to dictate to the partakers of that field what is real and what is not. It is an excellent avenue for social and political control as well as the containment and preservation of the secrets and compromising information of an authority or agency within a society or nation.