Tag: psychiatry

Sterlin Lujan: Compassionate Anarchy – Episode 156

by Kurt Robinson on March 13, 2017 in Podcast • 0 Comments

The Story: Sterlin Lujan’s approach of relational anarchy

Every day millions of freedom lovers take to social media in an attempt to argue their way to a freer world, trying to convince people that they should be able to enjoy liberty, that they have rights that should be respected, that they are sovereign individuals who should command their own autonomy. Most of the time, the response is “No, I shouldn’t, no I don’t, and no I’m not.” The freedom lovers fail because they try to isolate people’s beliefs with logic, quickly making them defensive. Few people really want to hear how wrong they are, how foolish they’ve been for believing in government indoctrination, and how many contradictions their outlook contains.

Sterlin Lujan has a different approach. By using the insights that he has gained from studying psychology, he has devised a method called “compassionate anarchy” or “relational anarchy”. He says that instead of trying to be combative, we should learn to relate to people. By building positive connections with people, we can allow the essence of freedom to enter right now. By practising respect, we create respect.

In this episode, Kurt interviews Sterlin about his ideas on how to embrace and spread liberty, how certain substances such as ecstacy (MDMA) may give us insight into how to be more empathetic, how the desire to rule or be ruled is a type of stress response to an authoritarian society, and how stress responses can be healed using different types of talk therapy.

Join us on another psychologically anarchic episode of … The Paradise Paradox!

The Links:

Thomas Szasz on Wikipedia

Thomas Szasz Cybercenter for Liberty and Responsibility

Prodromal phase of psychosis

The Cash:

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The Episode:

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Depression and cultural alienation with Andrarchy

by Kurt Robinson on January 4, 2017 in Best Bits • 0 Comments

Andrarchy explains why his experience with depression was less about mental illness and more about alienation

Transcript:

I don’t think I had a disease called “depression”; I think that my mind was conflicting with what is socially acceptable for a mind. I was having difficulty integrating with society. And because I was having beliefs and ideas that were different than everybody else’s, that created discomfort and sadness in me that was difficult to resolve because there was nobody there to guide me through the experience.

I do believe that there is a place for therapists – whether they’re psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, whatever – I do believe there’s a place, because if somebody had been there to say “this is normal” – not just “this is normal”, because they do say that – but if they were to explain to me, basically, “hey, society is a construct; it’s a set of delusions we all kind of agree on so we can function, so we can go to the store and make sure there’s shit there – we share these beliefs, not necessarily because they’re true, but because they enable us to form stable societies. Just because you don’t see them as true, doesn’t mean you’re broken.”

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Watch and listen to the full interview here.

Mental Illness Outsiders – The Andrarchy Show Episode 5

by Kurt Robinson on December 9, 2016 in Podcast • 0 Comments

The Story: Mental health, isolation and reason

When you see a homeless mentally ill person doing something unusual on the street, you might do as most people do, and ignore them. Have you ever thought about why they’re on a street corner barking? Maybe they weren’t always like that, but over the years, their desperate attempts to get anything resembling affection – attention, acknowledgement – lead them to stranger and stranger behaviours.

If you’ve ever had an experience with mental illness, you might have noticed that your thoughts can quickly carry you away, getting you to places full of anxiety, dread, hopelessness and even delusion. There are mental tools that we can use to help us gain control of our minds and our lives. Meditation is one of them, and so is logic. Being able to look at our thoughts and analyse them a little more objectively can help ground us.

In this episode, Andrew “Andrarchy” Levine interviews Kurt about mental illness among homeless people, and about the role of reason in stabilising your own mind.