I'm embedding some more discussions, and I think it's important for me to add a few comments that will relate to the content in the videos. I can't offer medical advice, and I, obviously, want to recommend, strongly, that people discuss any of these or similar issues with their doctors. But it's noteworthy that, in my view, the habit of drawing the immediate conclusion that a person who discusses events in his or her life that appear to have not been real (and that the person appears to have perceived in a hallucinatory state or the like) is, potentially, a very dangerous and otherwise-problematic practice. It's profoundly unscientific and seems as though it can, in many cases, partially be rooted in this sort of fear, on the part of the person who's being presented with the "account," that one is helpless to understand or do anything about the problem. Aside from that aspect of the issue, one has to consider, in my view, that large numbers of people have reported, for example, very similar accounts of alien "abduction" experiences or the like. One's inability to understand a technological or nontechnologically-based-but-"mechanistically-complex" mechanism that might account for those types of experiences implies nothing about the extent to which anyone might be or not be making use of those mechanisms, such as in the context of his or her use of some sort of technology.
Another issue is that many of the types of "algorithmic" reasoning that are employed in the context of psychiatry are not based in anything resembling scientific evidence, and there's a danger that certain groups of people will, given the frequency with which this type of thing has occurred in recent decades, come out on the short end of the stick, so to speak, when it comes to their being diagnosed with one condition or another. In the case of the absurd overdiagnosis of bipolar disorder that is, in my opinion, occurring these days, there's the potential that young women and also women of any age will wind up being diagnosed with with bipolar disorder with greater frequencies than men might be diagnosed with bipolar disorder (I'm referring to any of the various subtypes of the disorder). The authors of this book, for example, discuss some of the various endocrinological abnormalities that can produce symptoms or disease states that someone might misconstrue as being evidence that a person who is experiencing those symptoms is "bipolar" [Klonoff and Landrine, 1997: (http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=LG9ctTVMOlUC&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=misdiagnosis+bipolar+glucocorticoid+OR+addison%27s+OR+Cushing%27s&ots=jA_SlSSgHv&sig=oamwBxy21gvWALS8bxMPLCZWknw#v=onepage&q=bipolar&f=false)]. To say that a woman is "getting moody" or that she is "up and down" (these are not actual quotes from any texts but are representative of the types of phrases I've seen people use to describe women who supposedly "are bipolar") and "just all over the ballpark, you know, just all the f#$& over the place, for Christ's sake" is basically analogous to saying that she's suffering from "hysteria" or something and that she's just irrational because she's a woman or something. I used those phrases to communicate the kind of hatefulness that can be sort of latent in a lot of these comments that, for example, the significant others of women who have been diagnosed with bipolar have made, in various texts or articles or the like. I remember seeing at least two research articles that have reported the finding that young boys are twice as likely as young girls to be diagnosed with ADHD, and yet the "true" ratio between genders is thought to be 1:1. It stands to reason that some of those girls might go on to have difficulties from ADHD symptoms and to then be misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder and be given medications that are very unlikely to be appropriate for the treatment of their symptoms. One can say that the ADHD medications are not so terrific, but, in my view, many of the drugs used in bipolar disorder have more potential to cause problems.
Anyway, even though I understand that people are unlikely to be intentionally misdiagnosing or persecuting people, the point is that it's a very, very dangerous thing to stamp a person with a label that cannot be removed and that proclaims that their statements about their experiences have no validity whatsoever and that no one should believe the things the person says. No one's going to do that to me, given that I can do scientific work and the like and can sort of "assert" my credibility in a multitude of ways, but many people aren't likely to be so fortunate.
[url for above video on youtube: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCULfqlQ7s8)]
[url for above video on youtube: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC8lZbVhfBA)]
[url for above video on youtube: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpBKFCNtueI)]
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