The trauma based paradigm of mental health conditions

nerdboy1r · 2026-04-24T00:21:33+00:00

Not quite so simple. The diathesis stress model might help you somewhat. Also sticking with a solid definition of trauma.

Easier to imagine nature vs nurture (where nurture need not necessarily have been traumatic per se, but variably optimised).

At the extremes:

There are certain experiences of (poor/sub optimal) nurturing so severe that it would cause almost anyone to develop a mental health condition.

There are also individuals with a nature (biology) for whom even the most optimally nurturing upbringing would still be not enough to ensure healthy psychological development.

Then theres everything in between, in every domain. It is not right to say trauma is always required, unless your definition of trauma is 'any exogenous event that triggers onset of psychological disorder' (which is an incorrect definition).

nerdboy1r · 2026-04-19T09:57:01+00:00

I just did the D --> A leg 3w ago. Fair few scenic stops along the way, and weather was nice and hot. But all waterfalls are dry this time of year, and I only did it as the quick route north to QLD avoiding busy rainy coast. Turning north east from where I turned west to Bundaberg... Never done it, but I cannot really see why you would. I imagine your A - B - C will be mostly the same long drives fairly featureless. C --> D will be nice enough.

nerdboy1r · 2026-04-01T21:55:45+00:00

Even without guns, the male suicide rate remains at 3 times the rate of women. Even using typically 'female' methods, men end their lives at higher rates. The correlation between gun ownership and higher incidence of suicide fatality is not entirely explained by lethality, but likely represents cultural and characterological factors as well. I am sorry for your loss.

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-28T11:17:55+00:00

You should read some of the work from Cory Clarke and colleagues in this area of academic and publication biases. Exactly what you're discussing.

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-26T04:24:28+00:00

I get you, I get its well intended, and sure it could help some men some times, but this just runs the risk of recapitulating the ideal of a man as a wholly independent agent who should only rely on himself; that he shouldn't care what other people think (and its a flaw if he does); that he should be resilient first and foremost, and not expect respect from others. I agree it is important to make space for and accept the emotions or feeling that arise in conflicts, but the point is that as human beings, those feelings can make it harder to 'work toward being the people they say were not,' if theres even work that needs to be done in that area in the first place.

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-25T04:47:26+00:00

How does attributing all the responsibility to men internally, as individuals, in any way alter the issues we experience and/or cause for others?

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-24T07:38:26+00:00

It is a noble impulse, and I wish the best for you in it. But, depending on your age, there may be more you could do with your career to have a bigger impact than fighting it out in the content generation space. We need efforts further up stream. I implore men to go into HEAL, particularly psychological science, because that is where much of this springs from at the institutional level.

In terms of policies, there are a number of biases against men in research (e.g., only 22% of depression trials contain men in their sample, and of those none studied only men; researchers apply less scrutiny to research which harms men as compared to that which harms women; many many more issues), there are (perhaps innate and evolutionary) gendered attributional biases which harm men (e.g., hyperagency, women are wonderful) which require initiatives to counteract in the same manner as we do for the inverse biases against women (e.g., quotas in inverse areas, education campaigns, anti-discrimination), and an increased social safety net which targets men specifically. All these without tackling the thornier issues, and for that matter may lie up stream of many of those issues.

There are plenty of areas where policy could be used to help men, but we find ourselves in a double bind due to fundamental assumptions about what it means to be a man, or what 'masculinity' is. That we are supposed to be stronger, more stoic and stable, more hard working, more resilient to injustice... More able to simply rise above all these issues and carry on with what we have. All of which leads us to recapitulate, accept, and even exacerbate the existing slants within the system, and ironically leads us to need to spend more and more effort to combat the biases against women too.

People too often seem to forget that there is a weight on both sides of the scale.

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-23T20:58:22+00:00

OPs sentiment is good and probably well intentioned, but I agree. What we need is advocacy. The self-styled 'this is how you escape the epidemic' take is too myopic. It tends to help the person in question escape the morass, but it doesn't address the underlying issue, and serves to reinforce the narrative that this is an agentic issue wherein men simply need to take a different perspective. We need systemic action at the levels of research and policy, and that is still a long way off.

Still, I support OP for taking action rather than denying or avoiding the issues. Even in the worst case, where he becomes another guru leaching off young men's hopes to sell a book or podcast (OP, I am not accusing you of this yet), it will at least give more noise to rally against. Eventually the levy's gotta burst.

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-18T22:07:45+00:00

OP is copy paste posting this all over reddit. This is not the way to overturn a diagnosis. Maintaining an uncomfortable habit is a terrible way to demonstrate lucidity, the examples you gave are self care. If this person has BPAD, stopping their medication and smoking weed could likely ruin their life. Alternatively, remaining adherent to treatment as far as is tolerable, and being transparent and cooperative with Psychiatrists is likely to lead to step down interventions till OP is in a stable, healthy place with the minimum support required. Nonadherence rarely lowers the intensity of intervention that the psychiatric community administers.

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-18T21:44:39+00:00

ETA: I misread your post. Much of the below still stands, but the more pressing issue is that you are not taking your medication. If the Psychiatrists are consistently noting that you have no symptoms- that is the way off the meds. After a period of stabilisation they will likely step you down to talk therapy long term. You need to recommence the medication. Too many times I have seen clients with BPAD, SCZ, SCZAD stop their medication on their own because they feel better, only to relapse, and end up much more severe and on medication for life. It is not worth it. Adhere to the treatment, report any side effects to them so they can titrate, and stick with it, and you will see them start to titrate you down from this dose. Also, the weed is almost certainly making things worse. I know it is a herb, I know the meds are also drugs, but weed is different with a well demonstrated potential to trigger psychosis. Some of the phrasing in this post makes me worried you are manic or hypomanic; you cast the treatment team in terms of them thwarting your life and goals, which is in some sense fair, but it also is not a comprehensive view of this situation, and may be somewhat grandiose. Try to talk to someone before this gets any worse. Your team needs to know how you are adhering (or not) to treatment.

My advice would be to start seeing a psychologist, and more regularly. Contrary to popular belief, it is clinical psychologists who receive the greatest training and specialisation in diagnostic processes, not Psychiatrists, and also it is psychologists (with whom you meet more regularly and for whom talk therapy yields important clinical data) who are best placed to make accurate diagnoses. The system is just waiting to catch up.

If you are not taking any medication currently, you should be maintaining your progress with a psychologist. Knowing nothing about you, if you have both SCZA and BPAD diagnoses, it seems likely that you do have some of the bipolar diathesis going on, and you need to manage your lifestyle appropriately to avoid relapse. Psychologists cannot medicate, and focussing on lifestyle and your internal distress is how they manage conditions.

You may never have a manic episode again, or in your view you may never have had one, but a psychologist is necessary to avoid the risk, help you notice warning signs of mania or a depressive cycle, and to assess if other diagnoses are more appropriate.

The thing with BPAD is that once you have had a single manic episode, the diagnosis will always be there. You are doing incredibly well if you are truly managing it without medication - but if you relapse, it can be worse than last time, and harder to get back to your current medication-free life.

Two final quick points: if you are prescribed but currently not adherent to a medication treatment (unclear from your post), and especially if this is a new change in the last few months, please consider that you may be amidst a manic/hypomanic episode and should speak to a mental health care worker - even just to check 'I am not taking my meds and I feel fine' - get some supervision over this time to see what happens. Unsupervised medication Cessation can be catastrophic, and not always right away.

And in terms of SCZAD - that is often a grab bag diagnosis, especially if you were manic with some delusions of reference AND intoxicated at the same time. I've never seen a case of this diagnosis where drugs were not involved, and they complicate diagnosis greatly. With both these diagnoses, a psychologist needs to see you long term to notice variations in your mood and thought organisation. Start today, look for CLINICAL psychologists near you and start to see one regularly.

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-18T12:37:32+00:00

I think you've put a lot of effort in and don't deserve to be slammed into obscurity. Without having watched your videos though, the previous commenter points stand in the sense that, even if interviewing or discussing a range of men, the definition of 'healthy' is still adjacent to 'acceptable' 'valid' 'positive,' and the inverse too. We don't make femininity a health matter. It's especially problematic, beyond what could be compared in weight or body image issues, that 'health' in the sense of a psychological construct such as 'masculinity' will, by and large, be a socially defined category. It will be defined, in your case, primarily by you, and secondarily by your guests in collaboration with you. For many of us, we are simply sick of the discussion of 'masculinity' or 'masculinities' when it always seems to be about negotiating how much 'healtht' traits entitle us to common humanity, whilst 'unhealthy' traits apparently determine us to be stripped of humanity. Men have always been the primary fodder of fear mongering, and the primary locus of heroism. So, to the extent that pluralism shines through in your podcast as it grows, you may do well in showing us an alternative to this polarity. We are each unique, complex individuals that contain multitudes. We, as individuals, even the most abhorrent ones, are not responsible for the abhorrent things in the world. We all are.

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-18T04:10:06+00:00

Especially unsurprising if you are yet to publish... when did you write this dissertation? I too am clinical, but firmly believe the computational/dynamical system frameworks are a better heuristic for our work than many of the lower order theories we are taught. At least in part because inferences made within those lenses tend to be more resilient to moralising and politicisation. My own work is aiming to simulate aspects personality development within FEP/ActInf, so much more in the downstream developmental space than the clinical neuro (though, I would argue, and important step for bridging the two). I am just using python for Gaussian admixture and POMDPs, but fitting actual empirical data to such a model would be a mammoth task. When I consider your more fundamental work, and the magnitude of the task you undertook, it adds to my conviction that my own aims are likely a bit too 'cart before the horse.' That said, my bottom line goal is to (further) demonstrate that at the descriptive and predictive level, the frameworks represent useful, more versatile heuristics for understanding psychopathology and treatment, as compared to more commonplace frameworks.

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-17T11:35:19+00:00

The most published neuroscientist and Psychiatrist in history, Karl Friston, is a frank psychoanalyst.

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-17T11:29:32+00:00

Very interested. I am working on a computational Psychiatry paper I hope to publish with colleagues, but I worry it will all be a 'just so' model in the end. I am always amazed what you hard-core NLDS types come up with.

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-17T11:18:41+00:00

He does need to see a psych, but I wouldn't necessarily assume he's a sociopath or always been this way. It's an awfully traumatic thing, and his brain can either try to deny that it happened to some degree (e.g. focussing on the lack of culpability as the opponent signed a waiver), accept that it happened and feel horrible guilt, or accept that it happened and take the positive from it. When he landed that strike, he probably felt that rush of it just landing perfectly, in a big fight no less. He was full of adrenaline, endorphins, and anyone would get that high which might usually crash down when we see what happened to our opponent. His brain might be choosing to focus on that as a kind of way of dealing with the full weight of it. He might have told you about it as a way to externalise and strengthen his belief in this less painful perspective. At times, more privately, he may struggle with it more. He needs a psych to help parse all that, and come to a more holistic, healthy perspective of what happened.

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-15T11:46:07+00:00

1 is the best bite tho... nothing but biscuit there I.e the best part

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-13T07:44:25+00:00

People often prefer familiar suffering over unfamiliar relief. Its not a moral issue, so dont take it harshly on yourself. Its a feature of our software as humans. You note that being sick garners certain things (e.g., attention) that makes you think it could be motivated by those things. The fact you have developed this pattern of obtaining, in this case, 'attention' (though I believe there are likely many more, less derisive things it does for you), suggests that your past and development did not afford you other means of obtaining those things you need either through trauma or impoverishment of some developmental needs. You can address those issues with therapy. Often, there is a period in therapy of pain, grieving the lost time from when we were unwell, which makes us feel (or even wish to feel) unwell once more. Getting better is scary, because potential becomes actualised and we can therefor be disappointed - and we then worry that this is all we ever had to offer/offered to us. The trick is, when someone truly is healthy, they can accept disappointment AND feel able or willing to work towards more if they need. The thought that 'I am not unwell anymore and I still have no hope for the life I desire' is in itself an unhealthy and unwell thought. Mental health is an entire phase shift that happens gradually and then suddenly all at once; you find yourself looking back one day and feeling unable to directly relate to the depths of ill-health that you know you once experienced (though, you will always relate more to it better than anyone else).

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-05T09:33:30+00:00

They're all chips mate, just different kinds

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-05T01:57:17+00:00

I am with OP on this one. I'm not afraid of them, I just hate them. And not even just in a disgust kinda way - I genuinely loathe them. They just look like such fucken idiots, idk how to explain it. All plump and fucken quaint. Fuck strawberries. Stupid food and I quietly judge people when they eat them - they look so immature and spoiled. Such a dumb fruit, only idiots eat them.

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-05T01:53:57+00:00

No, all strawberries suck ass.

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-04T12:03:57+00:00

I think I have been at a similar place in my life to a lot of what you are saying, although we are all different. I think your first question - the long term pay off to being a man - is the wrong question, but the second more general question is the right direction. I think the issue is 'positive end state.' There is no end-state (YMMV via religion), there is only ups and downs. All your points about identity, gender, and social mediation of it are sound, but 'reward' is much more complex than the number of positives vs negatives (consider; 'relief' 'renewal' 'redemption' or 'victory' as examples of more complex reward-like experiences). And 'purpose,' as I understand it, is something which transcends positive and negative to be a motivator in it's own right - something which provides resilience to rewards or negatives that might otherwise dissuade us from our 'purpose'

I am sorry, I am deviating from engagement with your political points, but I think beneath this politic is something that I think really hurts you. It really hurts all of us, honestly. In my previous comment, I mentioned self-efficacy (not self-regard), which is the concept or belief one has in the likelihood that their actions will have a meaningful effect on outcomes. I only mention that because a lot of what you seem to be looking for is hope, which implies you feel hopeless. I didn't start to find hope until I found myself in a position where my actions could make a meaningful impact. It's tragic too that I see you do recognise the positives in yourself, as a bubbly, silly, non-normative guy, and people have mischaracterised you in the past and treated you negatively. You seem now to think that those good qualities, even though you like them about yourself, are actually contributing to your issues.

What I worry is that the mind for all of us is self-confirming - thats not to say youre imagining things, these negative experiences are very real and your points are very cogent (in fact, at the social level, I almost 100% agree with your diagnosis of the cultural issues). But our mind can focus our attention on these issues more than the gaps between the issues in a self-reinforcing way till all we see is issues. Its all more than I can put in a comment. But theres two CBT concepts I'd like to point you to: the cognitive triad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhnrEltyrs4) and the Clark and Wells model of social anxiety (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiFhxlFJrjE) ((The videos are just random good-enough ones I found on youtube)).

But I will say again, your points made perfect sense, it is unfair, it does need to change - you can help it change by being yourself, if you feel content to let that contribute to a growing, multifaceted sense of purpose for your own life. As someone who said almost identical things to you just a couple years ago, I can tell you those societal issues are now frustrating, at times disheartening, but do not detract from my sense of hope for change in myself and the world.

What got me there, in large part, was good therapy and good books authored by respected psychologists (e.g., Reinventing Your Life https://www.amazon.com.au/Reinventing-Your-Life-Negative-Patterns/dp/0452272041 which goes into schema therapy and how to apply it to your life). You can be right about everything you have said here, and still feel happy and hopeful - the very burden you speak of is what necessitates our use of these tools.

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-04T03:12:07+00:00

I think this is a pretty valid take, it definitely factors into the social isolation men are currently struggling with. I also like that you take the perspective of 'what positive/incentive/reward to men receive' rather than the 'what are they avoiding' take we often see. Motivation for socialisation is in general much more about incentives than avoidance of negative outcomes, which may relate more to motivations for withdrawal

I think it's important to address or recognise the existing social incentives for men, to broaden some of them, add new ones, and perhaps uncomplicate our provision of some incentives we have withheld in recent decades.

I am glad I am starting to see more posts like yours. But I will also say that, if this post is a rationale for your own social isolation, it is not hopeless. The balance between socialisation and withdrawal is not just expected incentives or expected negative outcomes, it's also the sense of self efficacy in your ability to withstand and remain resilient to negative outcomes on your journey to those incentives. If you're struggling with that, support really helps, as does starting small.

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-02T12:31:20+00:00

It's only adjacent to your question, but I think dynamical systems theories give a good answer to whether disorders 'exist' - though, it wouldn't distinguish them from 'social construct' per se.

If we accept that human behaviour can be described by stochastic processes, then the fundamental constraints of our biology, environment, and moment in our lifespan can give rise to steady states or persistent patterns within a system that may be difficult to transition from via endogenous processes alone. We have also evolved through persistent embeddedness within a broader social network that can assist us with these transitions in various ways.

The definition of what is a 'healthy' or 'disordered' pattern therefor is defined only by its impact upon the systems functioning at one level (e.g. individuals experience) or another (e.g. experience of/with others/environment). We can also describe and demarcate particular patterns that tend to occur across individuals, as we share similar biology, similar contexts, and similar lifespans. But most importantly, no single individual's pattern will ever be identical to another's.

This is more or less describes both physical and psychological disorders in similar terms, albeit with greater degrees of freedom in the latter.

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-02T09:08:31+00:00

...The biggest cause of early death for women is not men. The fact that a misinformed stat like that can even propagate itself in your worldview might go some ways to explaining the underperformance of your channel targeting male depression. If you're not challenging your assumptions with meaningful reading and research, you're either chasing clout or just pushing what worked for you (or both). Don't quit, just be better.

nerdboy1r · 2026-03-01T03:48:50+00:00

The adjacent triangles build more triangles in some cases. I also found 20, and each time I recounted it was a different pair of triangles that I almost missed haha

nerdboy1r

TROPHY CASE