If psychiatrists really think that paranormal experiences are mental illness..?

Question

why don't they study it in order to "deprogram" people who think they are experiencing the paranormal...instead of just medicating them?

Answer 1

I understand what you're saying Denie, but many mental illnesses are psysiological, not social, in nature.  You can address certain problems with therapy ("deprogramming"), but others require chemical intervention.

Answer 2

I doubt psychiatrists or any other Doctors treat paranormal experiences with medications.They may treat some symptoms.If someone can't function because they're possessed or haunted.What should they do?What percentage of these people are delusional?Do you feel most of the time it is a demon or ghost?If so,why does the medication work?Doctors must treat people based on what they know.Mental illness is treatable in many of it's manifestations.I'd hate to see it thrown back into the supernatural realm.It was pretty horrible for the mentally ill when it was there.

Answer 3

yeah, they better study it instead so they would know...or should I say maybe they have to EXPERIENCE something paranormal so their outlook would change....

Answer 4

Setting people who witness (or imagine they witness) the paranormal aside- how should the psychiatrists treat the people that think that they are Napoleon Bonaparte or that the government is controlling their brain using traffic lights or whatever their delusion is? Do you concede that medication in some cases is appropriate and effective?

Answer 5

First, not all psychiatrist believe that every paranormal experience is a form of mental illness. Some are open to the possibility and actively educate themselves to the differences between exceptional experiences and psychosis.

That said I believe that many psychiatrist which are trained primarily as medical doctors not mental health professionals very often rely too heavily on medications (which is understandable because that it what they have been trained to do and what they know best).

The chemical imbalance theory that is embraced by the medical community has very little supporting evidence.

Many medications for different symptoms like depression perform either insignificantly better or even with a non active placebo. Active placebos (where you can experience side effects) often outperform medications for depression.

This is not to say that medication can't be effective because it can (just like a placebo pill) and in some cases medication is appropriate.

Many psychologist are very skeptical (in fact the most skeptical group) of paranormal experiences and treat the issue (experience) as a symptom of a disorder.

This is unfortunate as that the founder of psychology William James believed that the total human experience was worthy of study by psychology. In fact he pioneered the study of religious experiences, something that would make most modern psychologist flee from the room if they couldn't get you to change the subject and you wanted to discuss it.

Good mental health professionals do talk (not just medicate) their patients/clients in order to understand their world and assist them with the challenges they want to discuss.

Psi

Answer 6

Well because of their material belief they are biased. People who are intelligent and try to scientifically investigate actually end up with positive results, therefore they get lashed by the materialist as practices of pseudo-science because the results support the case. They find any other explanation for anything not material. They Dismiss NDEs at any angle they can work with.

Truth is, they would love for people who have paranormal experiences to ''All" be crazy and mental, yet the people who witness these things usually have to mental illness history.

Answer 7

They'd be wrong. Over the years I've studied psychology as a fascinating hobby, as well as the scientific method, and I know (at least in my case), that my paranormal experiences are quite real, just unrepeatable, therefore unverifiable. Ghosts don't come in bottles.

My health is very good for my age in spite of hemiparesis, and each time an unusual event occurs, I do a quick mental checklist: Am I rested, fed, unmedicated, sober? Did I sleep well? Any colds or bugs going around?  If I answer well, then my mind becomes a detailed observing machine with no fear or preconceived notions. This would seem to answer the scientific method, lacking only multiple witnesses.

I personally don't believe reality can be deprogrammed. The force of life is too strong. The truth, even if we don't like it, will out.

Answer 8

Psychiatrists are tought in their training that people that say they have witnessed an abnormal experience suffered a shock that damaged their image on reality.Practicly if you have seen a ghost they will start looking too see if your brain chemistry is normal, if you got badly scared lately or so...

  Also psychiatrysts are the adepts of neural inhibitors (a.k.a. medication like Benzamide) believing that by reducing your neural activity they will heal you...

  Luckily psychologists don't share this view (surely not me) and place the abnormal phenomenoms in other areas than the same with mental illness.

  But to answer your question, they don't learn to "deprogram" people because we are not dogs and we cannot be programmed and deprogrammed like Pavlov's lab animals.Each one of us has a "map of reality" that once is disturbed by something like abnormal experiences can add ireversible damage.Psychiatrists live on the opinion that brain has a "normal chemistry' that when becomes abnormal must be restored... with drugs.

Hope I did not confuse you...

Answer 9

because psychiatrist want to know answers from the people experiencing the paranormal event that it is true (prove that they not only create imaginative stories)and to analyze the answers carefully to get what they do want to know about this people. You see before we will be cure by a doctor if we got a disease the doctor ask us questions to let them Identify what kind of the disease you have and this is the same procedure used by our psychiatrist.

Answer 10

No, not an illness.  A mental *phenomenon.*  A completely ordinary phenomenon.  Every person is tricked by their senses from time to time, what we call a hallucination.  This is completely normal and not an illness in any way.  People who believe in 'paranormal experiences' are just misinterpreting these phenomena as real things.  They don't like to hear the idea that they were hallucinating because they think that means something must be wrong with them even though they feel fine.  So they assume their experience was real.  When you hallucinate, you don't think 'gee that's weird, I must be hallucinating.'  A true hallucination is, by definition, so real that you _do not believe_ you are hallucinating.  But hallucinations *are* normal and having a hallucination does not mean anything is wrong with you.  Psychiatrists are just familiar with how fallible and easily tricked our perception is because this has been demonstrated many times in many independent experiments.  People who believe in paranormal experiences just put too much trust in their own senses.

This is why we need two qualifiers for what is 'real.'  'Real' is what you can sense/experience, *and* what can be independently experienced by others.  And independent experience is demonstrated by a quantifiable measurement of your experience.  You can see ghosts, and you can find other people that see ghosts, but you can NOT be sure you're both seeing the same thing (even if you both describe the same thing qualitatively) until you can take quantitative data of it.  So you can't consider it any more 'real' than a guy tripping LSD who see's the clouds become marshmallows.  Indeed, drug users can see and describe the same things as each other (gee, ask me how I know) but they can't *measure* it so it's not 'real.'