Mental health and mental illness have recently come to the fore in all aspects of reality. Part of the reason for this, one might say, is that the faster the world moves due to data-driven and machine learning pipelines on the one hand and TikTok and increasing screen time on the other, the more labour is being put in by workers to stay caught up in the unending quest of capitalism for surplus value. In this sense, far more people are having to deal with mental health issues related to their everyday life, and the greater the mental health toll, the greater is the suffering of the economy (because who cares about people anyway). The other side comes from increasing awareness and calls for change by those affected. In some countries, mentally ill individuals are still chained up inside madhouses and left to the elements (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/11/11/nigeria-urged-to-ban-chaining-people-with-mental-health-issues). The problem of other minds dictates that we cannot access the minds of others to see how they actually think and perceive the world. All we can do is look at their outward behaviour for cues. Yet for those will a full-blown mental illness, this outward behaviour can be a matter of life and death, as we have seen especially in the United States, where too often it's shoot first and ask questions later (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/policing-mental-health-recent-deaths-highlight-concerns-over-officer-response-n1266935).
What is interesting about schizophrenia in particular is that a certain interpretation of the brain implies that those with schizophrenic brains are actually "normal" and those with "normal" brains are the ones that are spoiling it for everyone else. Let me trace the logic:
1) "Neuroscientist argues the left side of our brains have taken over our minds." https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6219688 "A way of thinking which is reductive, mechanistic has taken us over. We behave like people who have right hemisphere damage. [The left brain] treats the world as a simple resource to be exploited. It's made us enormously powerful. It's enabled us to become wealthy, but it's also meant that we've lost the means to understand the world, to make sense of it, to feel satisfaction and fulfilment through our place in the world."
2) "Right hemisphere language functions and schizophrenia: the forgotten hemisphere?"
"We take an evolutionary view of the origins of psychosis—that schizophrenia and language have a common origin in the genetic event 100 000 to 150 000 years ago that gave rise to Homo sapiens as a species. At that point, either asymmetry (the genetic basis of torque) was introduced as a new feature or an asymmetry that had entered at some earlier point in the hominid lineage was critically modified to give rise to the capacity for language. Thus the two hemispheres assumed differentiated roles in supporting the components of the capacity for language."
3) Abnormal Asymmetry of Brain Connectivity in Schizophrenia
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4273663/
"The loss of the cerebral torque and the abnormalities of gyrification, with an increased or more complex cortical folding in the right hemisphere may provide an anatomical basis for such aberrant connectivity in SCZ. Furthermore, diffusion tensor imaging studies have shown a significant reduction of leftward asymmetry in some key white-matter tracts in SCZ."
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What am I trying to say? If one takes a hemispheric interpretation of brain functionality, then neurotypical individuals are those whose left brains become dominant and are linearized towards specific plans and goals. Schizophrenic people are those whose right brains become dominant and are non-linearized and look at the big picture and how we are all interconnected. Stephen Jay Gould wrote a book called Time's Cycle, Time's Arrow, allowing one to conclude that it is possible to look at time as linearly stretching into an unknown future (as Westerners and capitalists tend to do) or as a cyclical phenomenon of replacement and regeneration (as indigenous people tend to do). Since resources are finite and our planet is finite, there are only two possibilities: we achieve some sort of balance in our extraction and conversion of resources and survive as a species, or we continue to kick the rock down the road and put profit before people and our future as a species.
Let us take stock of our most important resources: Water: Industry Is Driving The Global Water Crisis. Investors Can Help It Reverse Course
Soil (food/nature): Nature loss: Insatiable greed degrading land around the world - UN
Sand: Earth Is Running Out of Sand ... Which Is, You Know, Pretty Concerning
Energy: It is now or never: With the world in an unprecedented energy crisis, top CEOs are searching for solutions
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/03/it-is-now-or-never-ceos-on-gas-renewables-and-the-energy-crisis.html
Minerals: Critical Mineral Shortages Could Disrupt Global Supply Chains
Public Health: Cost-of-living crisis driving 'breathtaking' surge in extreme poverty -UNDP
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The fundamental problem with humanity is clear for all to see, namely an unwillingness for those with power, resources, and influence to recognize or acknowledge the interconnectedness of the species as a whole. If one concludes, then, that schizophrenia is fundamentally a "right-brain interpretation of the world" problem, which would actually promote solidarity versus greed, then interesting questions arise about the notion of who is "abnormal", and why we shouldn't be promoting neurodiverse trains of thought given that we've been trying feudalism for millennia and as a species, we are still no better off.
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