Psyche pathology and Well being 9- the Cognitive Science Show (0gCtVH_SviA)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0gCtVH_SviA

Welcome back everybody to episode nine. There’ll be one more episode after this, 10 episodes, but this is episode nine of Psychopathology and Well-being. I am here again with Gary Hovannessian and Greg Enriquez. Greg’s going to do a bit of a summary about what we did last time and then he’s going to remain center stage even though there is no stage, there is no center. He’s going to take us through a particular instance applying everything that we’ve been discussing and then next week or next time I will put everything we’ve put together into conversation with a prominent recent model of well-being by Bishop. We’ll see many points I think of genuine convergence and some differences that I think will spark some important discussion and insight. So I’m looking forward to all of this. So welcome gentlemen and I’ll turn things over to Greg. Thank you so much, John. Yeah, we had talked about whether we go straight into well-being and right afterwards I was like, actually it might be a good idea to hone in on a specific kind of psychopathology given that that’s certainly and although we’ve alluded to a lot of it, we really haven’t talked exactly about psychopathology in terms of the sort of traditional classes like DSM and I wanted to do that and I wanted to especially hone in on the concept of depression. Before I do that, let’s just review a little bit about where we were last time. What I brought last time to bear was after the layout of both traits and attachment theory and then the tie-in to recursive relevance realization, I wanted to make the argument that we could apply this lens that I developed around character adaptation systems, the idea that there’s a stacked layering of adaptive processes that really relates to first you have sort of a participatory organism-environment relation, then you get procedures that evolve and then get perspectival knowing and then propositional knowing. You can follow the layers of John’s taxonomy of knowing and then also basically like actually there’s a habit system that emerges it seems pretty early in the animal kingdom, an experiential system that comes online sort of as you shift into the animal moving around, maybe in the Cambrian explosion, then we follow the trail of mammals that extends into a working memory, inner mind’s eye, and then in the primate world, certainly in other mammals too, but definitely the primate world and the hominid primate, we get a very strong relationship system managing the self-other. I argued that extraversion and neuroticism sort of ground the organism, animal jump, and then agreeableness or really this whole self-other attachment structure develops in its relational system and the social mammals, and then we get into the human and the idea of extended interpersonal, intersubjective connectivity and then symbolic communication, symbolic syntactical, the development of the culture-person plane, and I argue that openness and conscientiousness are really extensions of subdevelopmental traits in animals and then really become very salient in humans, and then we could see this sort of plasticity, stability, dynamic in relationship to the traits of extraversion, neuroticism, this agreeable thing, conscientiousness, openness, and these systems of adaptation I think create mid-level elements that tie together things like attachment theory, the traits, and recursive relevance, and I then made the case that it’s also that when we look at the concept of adaptation and psychotherapy, we see that a lot of emphases in the traditional schools of psychotherapy focus on maladaptive process in various levels, and then I made the case that the behavioral approach could be paired to the habit, the emotion focus, the neo-humanistic emotion focus, the experiential system, the psychodynamic with the relationship and defense system, and cognitive narrative and existential with the justification system, and that that did is it enabled us to sort of lens ourselves into the key insights at least at the individual level of the major paradigms and how we could use this to as a sort of an intersecting mode. Beautiful. So that’s where we were, and now the issue is, hey, can we also now flip if we’re thinking about sort of character adaptation, can we flip this and say, well, what about concepts of psychopathology? Okay, and if you know the literature, the course has been a long-standing debate about what the hell these things are, what is a mental disorder, okay? We opened some of our early discussion with that. I think that one of the most obvious mental disorders, in fact, it’s often called the common cold of mental illness is depression, okay? And what I’d like to do then is argue that we can, depression’s a very good case to study in the sense that it spills into all sorts of different domains, it raises all sorts of questions, and it’s undeniably important, okay? The World Health Organization in 2017, before COVID, identified depression as the leading cause of all health disability, okay? And over 300 million people at that time, and we’ve seen perhaps a 20% increase since that time. So we’re seeing, and that was increasing prior to COVID, so we’re seeing this very, very major issue. This is a 2017 report. It’s growing, okay? Especially in young women, elderly are all vulnerable to the concept of depression. So it’s a common cold of mental illness. It’s incredibly important. Yeah. But one thing, just because there might be some initial things that people are thinking, you can see areas of significant increase in depression, even in areas that are affluent by many socioeconomic standards. So it’s not just driven by poverty or sort of, you know, people’s degradation of their circumstances. And also the age at which people are committing suicide is also dropping. So child suicide is now a well-discussed, well-referenced thing, which of course is deeply also perplexing. So just to be clear, what Greg is saying, people are, oh yeah, that’s because there’s so many, like, no, no, no, that’s not the sort of enlightenment myth that if you just make people materially well off, then you’ll alleviate all of these things. It doesn’t track with the data. So I just wanted to make that clear. So what Greg is talking about is something that needs to be addressed directly and specifically. It won’t be lifted by the rising tide of economic prosperity or something like that. Definitely. In fact, I would argue that you, the good reason to say that, you know, emphasis on materiality is certainly not a cure for this. Yes, yes, yes. And so, yeah, it’s a major issue. And I will note in terms of the mental health crisis, I would argue that we have by far the most data that the most acute cohort is our young in the mental health crisis. So our young in terms of depression, anxiety, alienation, and those kinds of things are seeing an enormous increase. Jonathan Haidt’s work and others are very point to this, John Twinge’s work. It’s really scary, folks. And so, and that’s across the socioeconomic status. So that is definitely something to be really aware of. Okay. So as is John’s tendency, and it’s a tendency I love, let’s start with the processes of problematizing this concept. Right. Okay. So let me ask you guys, just we’ll throw some things out there. When I say, what is depression? What emerges in relationship? How would you respond to that question? Gary, why don’t we jump off with you and see when I say, hey, what is depression? How do you respond to that? Sure. Well, there’s a couple of things that come to my mind. One of them is that I think the way most people think of depression, I think the way you characterized it, right, as the common cold of mental illnesses. I think that’s sort of indicative of like where the culture is at and its understanding of what things like depression even consist of. And that actually has some confusion in it. It’s got a very biomedical sort of set of presuppositions grounding it. And what I assume we’re going to try to do today is start deconstructing some of that and looking deeper into the phenomenon and the phenomenology of depression as it’s experienced by individuals. What comes to my mind specifically is, I guess my working definition of depression is something like when certain aspects of a person’s self are not being able to find life in their experience, are being sort of stifled or literally depressed. And that tends to manifest itself or express itself in the form of disengagement from certain parts of the world and disengagement from certain parts of a person’s own self or their relationships with others. And there’s a kind of alienation that comes along with that, especially when it pertains to the person’s relationship to certain forms of emotional experience. Lovely. So yeah, I really love definitely the need, of course, in this psyche pathology, you need to place this in the context of phenomenology, the relationship one has to the self, the world, offensive alienation, dissatisfaction, and then a fundamental kind of consequence of depressing one’s engagement. That’s a really nice discussion, I mean, framing, I think, especially from a phenomenological center perspective. John? So I published on this with something related to this with Leo Ferraro, and I take a look at a cognitive science perspective, which I’m not, of course, ridiculously claiming is exhaustive. But the idea is that depression is a form of what we call parasitic processing, in which is components of functional components, for example, heuristics, right, that are individually adaptive, and the dynamic self organizational nature of cognition, which is tremendously adaptive, also configures these things in a cycle that narrows a person’s capacity, and also narrows a person’s receptivity. So you get a reciprocal narrowing of their ability. So it is a profound kind of self deceptive self destructive cycle. These things take on a life of their own, they’re dynamic and complex systems. So one shot intervention, which is why I think Greg’s model is so important, by the way, just the note in that one shot or one level of attempt of intervention is not going to work as the system is co opting the very adaptivity of our cognition, and it will adapt and preserve itself and be resistant. And if that’s why it has this compulsive nature, and it reciprocally narrows the person down to the point where they lose agency. And I see that that notion of parasitic processing allows us to give a coordinated account of anxiety and depression, because they’re often co morbid, because it can reciprocally narrow in which what’s happening is a withdrawal, as Gary, as Gary said, and but it can also happen that the system is trying useless metabolic expenditure useless rumination in order to try and somehow deal. So it’s a tire like spinning, which is the original duke, an axle, a wheel spinning off center on its axis destroying itself. So for me, that that this is very much a phenomena of recursive relevance realization, the very processes that make us adaptive, make us susceptible to anxiety and depression. And I think that’s precisely why they’re the common cold of psychopathology, because they are running on the fundaments of recursive relevance realization. Great. So notice, though, I just really audience just take a step back and be like, Okay, hey, depression is a number one disease. That’s a in terms of disability. That’s a disease. It’s the common cold of mental illness. No, it’s an alienation of self. No, it’s a recursive relevance process. It’s parasitic and narrowing. Okay. So immediately, what we did, like with mine, you’re like, wow, there’s a lot of different immediately a lot of different available slices, whereby what I would be arguing is people are operating from particular paradigm schools of thought, they’re going to grip a particular aspect, and you’re going to frame it, right, but there’s an aspect that would be a through line that actually maybe get missed. And this is certainly what I’m going to suggest is there’s an actually through line here that we’re missing. And it’s going to look pretty obvious when we actually look at it. But that’s often good for a through line. You’re like, Oh, we’re all seeing aspects of this elephant. And then when you see the elephant, like, Oh, shit, that’s what that is. Okay. So I’m going to see if we can find the elephant of depression. All right. To set the stage, though, I’m going to continue this problemization with just some sentences that we might use in everyday terms. Like, Hey, I think this lousy weather is making me depressed. Okay, people say that, right? I felt depressed after we lost the championship game. Although he acts okay on the surface, deep down, he’s depressed. Think about Gary and the self, right? Okay. She often feels depressed about her life. She suffered a major depressive episode after she lost her job. He was hospitalized with a melancholic depression. Okay. So you got this term being used. And I utilize those statements with intentionality. You’ll notice an increasing continuum of severity here. Okay. So, Hey, the weather’s making me depressed. Oh, my God, a championship game. I really cared about, Oh, my God, my life and a job and a major depression. And then ultimately massively hospitalized as a function of that. So I want to want to create a continuum of severity and wonder about that continuum. Okay. Yeah. I also noticed in those that very pertinent example. Of course, I love the idea of finding the through line. That’s amazing. I did a deduction. I also noticed at each one, there’s sort of an ambiguity. It’s not clear how depression is to be distinguished from grief or sadness. And we certainly don’t want to pathologize those experience. I think one of the worst things we can do to people in grief is to pathologize their experience. I take grief to be a completely authentic and adaptive response. And so again, part of the issue is not only finding the through line, but like, again, what bounds this phenomena such that it is responsible and right to recommend therapy from phenomena that are similar in which it would be inappropriate to point people towards therapy. Lovely. If we go back to some of our early conversations, this came up with anxiety. And I was like, I want to emphasize a psychiatric anxiety or clinical anxiety feature and distinguish that from normative anxiety. Yes. We want, we do not, I’m going to actually claim the same basic thing with depression. And I’ll explain why that there are depressive reactions. Okay. That, and actually I’ll jump to this now. This is an example. It’s like, if you never had a depressive reaction, let me, the example I give for people, they it’s like, Oh, John, I forgot to mention last night, my entire family was killed in a car accident. But thankfully I’m in good shape and I was here today and I want to be available dialogue about depression. Right. Because really we wouldn’t want any pathological responses that would involve intense morning, shutting down, feeling paralyzed, numb and overwhelmed by the world. And so I can just engage, have my coffee and it’s disappointing, of course, but I’m ready to move on. Okay. You’d be like, Oh my God, you’re a psychopath. Right. I stopped the tape, get the hell out of here. Something serious. You’re either in a depersonalized state or you’re actually a psychopath. Right. That’s basically your two options. Okay. So in this case, the absence of a depressive response, okay, at least a catastrophic grief response, and then be in trauma. And you do all sorts of different things. You drop into numbing, you shut down, do you weep, you know, whatever the point would be the magnitude of that injury, psychological injury would be such that you would expect a trauma response from the system. And if you didn’t get it, that would be weird. Okay. And there are lots of situations I’m going to suggest that actually a depressive response is going to be calibrated. If you’re on the train to Auschwitz. So let’s talk about what that actually means. But before I do that, I’m going to offer, just like we did, I’m going to offer another angle on the problematizing only this time from common sense sentences, I’m going to offer it from scholars in the field. Okay. So here is a well-known psychiatrist in 1997. Most people in our society no longer view depression as a mysterious sickness of spirit or an emotional weakness, but rather a disease of the brain and with its important health implications. Okay. So it’s a disease of the brain. All right. Notice then now we’re in the neurophysiological, neurobiological mechanism explanation. Right after that is a quote, that’s actually sort of in reference to that. It is a myth that depression is a disease of the brain. That was by another individual. Okay. This is coming from a behavioral tradition, actually. Depression is a normal reaction to serious environmental stressors. Depression is caused by maladaptive psychological patterns of thinking. Hang on a sec, Greg. Yeah, I’m not getting sound. Okay. Testing. Okay. Getting it again. Okay. Good. Psychological, I’m sorry, depression is caused by a maladaptive psychological patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. Okay. The source of depression is found in the unconscious. I mean, out of the unconscious. If a person is grieving from the recent death of a loved one, they should be exempted from being diagnosed with clinical depression. Okay. That came up. Given that depression is biological in nature, people are not responsible for how they treat the syllabus. That’s interesting. Okay. Depression arises as a result of not being able to meet the socially constructed standards of defining the good person. Okay. So the last one is a social constructionist view. The other one is an absolution of responsibility as a function of a biological view. We have maladaptive views. We have normative views. We have all sorts. These are all experts in various contexts making claims. Okay. So one of the things I want to then say is, yeah, what is this thing? What is depression? Okay. And I’m going to argue that Utalk affords us a pretty clear descriptive, metaphysical framework that sets up an alignment of the ontology of depression. Okay. In other words, we can actually say what we refer to in this. All right. Let’s go back to some of our discussion of behavioral investment theory. Okay. And behavioral investment theory basically says this organism into animal shift, okay, is coordinated by the nervous system essentially coming online, taking control of the participatory dynamic response. And in the Cambrian explosion, we get the complex active bodies, prey predation, mating relations, and then you’re moving around in relationship to other. Okay. And it’s the coordinated activity of the whole complex active body that’s centralized in the neurocomputational structure of the brain that really provides us a functional analysis of what’s going on. And now I can say that the paths of behavioral investment are structured through a hierarchy of recursive relevance realization through John’s work. Okay. That dips into predictive processing. All right. When I emphasize this in terms of behavioral investment, what became salient to me was what’s called the circumplex model of affect. We talked a little bit about this before, but I’ll just reiterate. This is the idea that affect that’s energizing motion can be analyzed in terms of two poles. Theodore Milan identified these poles as a personality theorist, one of which is pleasure and pain. Okay. So this is, hey, the nature signal to go toward, you know, this is good, this is bad. Okay. And be able to valence qualia that. The second rotating thing is to spend energy actively or conserve energy passively. Okay. If you create these dimensions, what you get is a two by two basic structure, a circumplex that we can then identify four quadrants with. All right. So you get an active pleasure quadrant, which then situates the animal to expend energy with desire. We can characterize that as desire. Okay. Now we got active approach pleasure. Okay. Passive pleasure is contentment or relaxation. It’s the success of achievement and now consolidate classically after orgasm. Okay. So you can place orgasm on this in this particular way. Now we flip it over and then we have active avoidance. Okay. The state of anticipated predicted threat, which is generally a state of fear, anxiety. Okay. The system’s aroused, it’s agitated. It’s either anticipating possible threats or identifying a stimuli, the former being anxiety, the other one being fear. Okay. And this generated an act of arousal to throw the thing in reverse. And then finally, if you can remember Seligman’s dogs, there’s a passive conserve pain. Okay. There’s nothing to do. You can’t escape. The system is upon you and there’s nothing to do but conserve. So what do you do? You shut down into a depressed state. Okay. So here, when we do this, we basically say depression and in this context would be framed as a state of the organism. And if we extend it over time, what we’re basically saying is the organism is in a state of mental behavioral shutdown. Okay. And then this becomes the elephant of what we actually mean by depression, meaning depression refers to the mood state of being shut down. Okay. The occupied, the exact opposite of desire. And we’ll see that this comes online. Okay. And so then the issue is, well, then the calibration of the kind of extension into the state becomes then the key differentiating elements. So we say that depression then is a state of behavioral shutdown. It might be mild and in response to certain things like living in Canada in the winter. Okay. It’s like, hey, I don’t feel nearly as much energy. Yeah, you’re probably right. There’s a clear seasonal component to your mood. And with good reason, if it’s freezing and dark, right? Okay. And at the same time, we can say, huh, aren’t there kinds of agent arena relations that tend to be parasitic that track people into particular kinds of patterns, right? And so then you get, oh my gosh, there are particular kinds of self-relations, world relations, pattern processes that pull you in a maladaptive way into this quadrant. Okay. And then finally, if you blow out your approach system, or you do have a really weird dopamine system metabolizing or serotonin system metabolizing, or you get other kinds of things like strokes in certain kinds of your brain, the idea that you could fry your behavioral activation system or exaggerate your behavioral inhibition system, and that pulls you neurobiologically into this category is also plausible. Okay. So what this means is there are lots of pathways to find yourself shut down and the continuum of shutdown then becomes a lot of the aspectualizing specifiers, but the through line is the state of behavioral shutdown. Right. Right. Okay. So then the invitation is, and I’ve heard so many people, well, that’s obvious. I mean, everybody knows that depression is a state of behavioral shutdown. It’s like, yeah, but not. It’s like, when you actually stop and think about what is it that we’re attaching our descriptions to, it’s an absence of a through line that needs to then be specified. And after it’s specified, we’ll then coordinate the particular aspectualized features that then make sense out of the hole. But until you get the through line, you got a bunch of people talking past each other. Okay. That’s the basic argument. All right. So the bottom line is, in terms of folks out there, if you just want to, well, what do you mean by behavioral shutdown? It means you feel like shit and don’t feel like doing shit. Okay. You want the, you want a core phenomenology of what depression is. It is that feeling. And you can get that feeling for a couple of hours. Right. And that’s a depressed mood. That’s very normative, by the way. Okay. Track yourselves. If you have three unexpected- Normative in the statistical sense. Is that- Both. Oh, both. Okay. I’m going to make both senses. You want to be careful whenever we’re using that term that we- Exactly. Thank you. Yeah. It’s normative statistically. And I’m going to argue from a behavioral investment perspective, it’s got some normative features to it. First off, if the core of the circumplex of affect creates this four quadrants and you have desire and it’s antithesis depression and contentment, it’s antithesis anxiety, that structure is normatively functional from a behavioral investment perspective. Okay. Secondarily, what essentially the system is doing is it’s calibrating its structure of investment relative from a predictive processing perspective to an anticipated inference. And to the extent that you’re controlling your anticipated inferences, you’re feeling good, especially if it’s accelerated relative to expectation. Okay. So you have an implied align of this effort is going to result in this return. And as long as it’s on expectation or above expectation, I’m feeling good. Okay. However, if it’s not on, okay, or it’s in both either in time, effort, and outcome, these are all the various kinds of ways you’re going to track your investment pattern. If it’s not, you have to recalibrate. Okay. And what I would suggest is watch yourself during the day, you get up during the day, and a shitty thing happens to you don’t expect. Okay. Then in the afternoon, something else shitty happens to you. And then you get home and you get unexpectedly into a fight with your wife. See how you feel at seven o’clock. Okay. In fact, they track this. If you hit three unexpected, moderate efforts, the number of individuals, especially if you have high trait neuroticism, the number of individuals that will be triggered and then mooted, meaning that this now becomes extended into the system that says, Hey, your investment patterns are not tracking. We need to signal and recalibrate, shut yourself down, feel like shit, and update what is going on and attend to it. And so for me, a depressed mood, feeling like shit for a couple of hours in the context of failing to achieve expected outcomes in relation is actually an understandable functional response from a behavioral investment perspective. Okay. So that’s what I mean in relationship to like, it is not necessarily maladaptive for the system to feel like crap. Yes. Yeah, go ahead. So just, I mean, from a triple R PP perspective, one of the things that can be going there, when Greg said active interest, that doesn’t just mean inference, active interest is behavior, just to be clear about that. The way inference is used in the predictive processing model, it’s used because of its historical provenance. It’s not really the most theoretically felicitous term because it sounds like it’s all propositional. And that’s clearly not where most of predictive processing is now. So I just wanted to make that point clear. Right. And then the other thing is, it’s participatory anticipation. Yeah, yeah, that’s how I like to, I like to put it that way. I think that’s a better way of putting it. And then the other thing is one of the things that you can do in response to a bunch of failures is you can change the world through action, or you can also revise your model. So remember, there’s a key term in what Greg said, which is expectation. Expectation is a transjective phenomenon. It’s not equivalent to the probability of an event. Right. Right. And so if you change your model in certain ways, right, and you can see Buddhism and stoicism, right, trying to change the model in this way, you can alter expectations and then alter the kind of failures. One way of thinking, I’m not saying again, I would don’t take me to be saying anything exhaustive here, but one thing that is happening in these negative things, right, is they are internal signals that maybe an update of the model is needed. And so you’re getting withdrawing from participation so that energy can be directed towards significant recalibration. Now, of course, people might not make use of that. They might divert. They might, they might, you know, take drugs to just remove the problem. Like, so it, but there is an adaptive potential in there, which is, right, sort of withdraw from action and do some significant revisal on your model so that these negative expectations disappear, not because you’ve changed the probability relations in the world, but because you’ve changed the meaning, the connectedness between you and the world about these expectations. So I just wanted to say, I just want to add that in. And first of all, don’t hear just logical inference when you hear inference. Yeah, definitely. And secondly, it feels shitty. Yes. But one of the things it can do is it can provoke a significant model revision that reduces expectation failure, precisely by reducing the meaning of expectation in a fundamental agent arena relationship sense. Lovely. I’d like to expand on that and everything that’s been said so far, just a little bit. I’m thinking also about the processes by which people are able to overcome their depressive states and how we turn to those, we might get some clues into what even goes into depression, that sort of some other through lines that we might be missing, by just talking about what’s going wrong, rather than also what also goes right. So I’m thinking from an attachment perspective, right? There’s a kind of isolation that’s experienced during depression where- Actually, can I pause you just for a sec, Gary? Then I’ll hand it right back over to you. Because what I want to do is I want to just extend this a little bit, show a little bit, just make sure people are aware of what, if we extend a depressed mood, what does it look like? And then I’m going to give you a little bit of taxonomy that’s already been implied, which is that there are normative kinds of reactions, there are problematic reactions, and then maybe even depressive diseases. I’m going to argue that there are depressive reactions, depressive disorders, and depressive diseases. And then the issue is, well, how is a person relating to the mood and the agent arena relationship? And then I’ll hand it back to you and then say, hey, from attachment perspective. Sure. So then in that case, just one other quick point, something that John has said before, that if in depression, what’s happening is a kind of inhibition of behavioral activation, so that you can stop, pause, and pay attention to what might be going wrong. The paradox there is precisely that, again, to borrow your guys’ terms and John’s especially, the very thing that makes you adaptive in other circumstances, right? Stopping and paying attention to the world to try to assimilate what’s going on or to accommodate is actually making you maladaptive in these kinds of states, because you’re not just paying attention neutrally, you’re finding yourself in a precarious position that’s really narrowing your attention. And so that’s- You’re ramping up looking for error. So signal detection theory, you’re moving the criterion, you go, crap, the model’s failing over and over. I got to find deep error that I haven’t seen before. I better shift the criteria and see as many events as error events as possible. Now, that’s massively adaptive in terms of getting you looking for what you need to change your model. But it’s also terrifically overwhelming for people because suddenly everything looks like error. That’s part of depression, right? It’s like everything’s going wrong, right? So then this is a necessary condition for us to keep in mind as, in order to understand what a solution to the problem of depression looks like, we need to be able to address this concern. How one can overcome this kind of narrowing, this kind of bias. Exactly. The first noble truth from Buddhism, sort of with a Dervakian reinterpretation, which is everything is threatened by dukkha. There is no aspect of your life in which this cannot suddenly take shape and as Greg says, just pull you down. Lovely. Lovely. Yeah. So I’m going to then suggest that our current system is set up so that when the person finds themselves in a state of shutdown, there’s a whole host of things that are actually the way our current society is set up is prime them for a maladaptive, introspective looping. And I’ll give you one clear possible reason right now. If we think of the depressed mood as the problem, and immediately, in other words, oh my God, what’s the fuck wrong with me? Oh, right. Oh, my feelings are what’s wrong with me. I’m way too sensitive. By the way, if you’re high trait neuroticism, the ego experiences the self as high negative relative to others. And then the error is like, oh my God, there’s something wrong with it, what it is that I feel and think. Okay. And now my problems are that I have these feelings. All right. If you turn the attention of an, of an, now I mean, analytic egoic inference, that justifies the situation as the reason that I have problems is because my feelings are bad. Okay. And from a psychic coordination perspective, you’re actually in deep trouble already. So if you hone the recursive relevance from the ego, that secondary onto the self, and then you point to yourself as your feelings are the fucking problem. If you weren’t such a baby, if you weren’t so hypersensitive, if you stop whining about this stuff, if you get your ass out of bed and move, okay, you can then see a very, very clear analysis of, oh my God, I got to find error. I find the error with myself. And then I hone in on the error in a particular type of way that actually reciprocally narrates, because you’re trying to say stop that. But actually it also creates all the images of you’re the problem. You’re never getting any better. And this is something essentially inside of you. And you better give it up all, all the heart does with all that imagery is feel more depressed. So there’s a particular kind of problem that situates us inside. And I would argue in socially, but I’ll get that to the insect. But our point of it is, is that, Hey, if we frame this in terms of state of behavioral shutdown, now we can create the continuum and we can contextualize. Okay. And I was, I was going to say, just so we know, if we really look at depression, now I’m going to use the term major depressive episode. Okay. So a major depressive episode is, is what we clinicians would definitely call clinically significant. Indeed. You don’t even have to be this far before we’ll label it, but by the time you’re here, a major depressive episode is when you feel most of the day, five of nine symptoms, okay. Much of the time for two weeks. Okay. This then is definitely in a state of a pretty significant set of shutdown. Well, what are the symptoms? All right. Well, the first two, and you have to have at least one of them. And most people have both elevated negative affectivity, especially in the felt sense of the feeling blue, feeling down, feeling sad. Okay. Not uncommonly also feeling agitated, irritable, and anxious. That’s a secondary facet of the negative feelings. But if you’ve put yourself in trait neuroticism distress, the two biggest facets really are depression and anxiety. It’s obviously with depression. It’s here with this one, blending. Okay. The flip side, second major characteristic that you have to have is called anhedonia. The absence of pleasure, interest, and engagement. The pleasure system comes down and the negative affect, especially the passive negative affect system goes up. And these are the primary symptoms. They’re the essence core, which of course, from a circumplex affect model is exactly, yeah, the system jack up the brakes and shut the, put on the emergency brake and stop doing shit and pull down the urge to go do stuff. Okay. So that’s the essence of it. And then you see symptoms like low energy and fatigue. That’s pretty consistent. Right. You see a guilt, self-blaming search. Like what did I do wrong? Okay. A perseveration on a felt sense of ineffectiveness, a sense of guilt. Okay. You also have difficulty, interestingly enough, concentrating on future and non-mood related material. Like the default mode network goes into this hunting for fuck-ups and why it is that you screwed up from a high error or lessening the error perspective and then bringing those onto your screen. Okay. Right. It’s self-loathing part of the- Exactly. The guilt, shame, that criticism of self can be guilty. It can be ineffectual. It can be shame-based, which then gets into worthlessness. Okay. All of that would fall under that turn against the self set of symptoms, guilt, shame, self blame, et cetera. Okay. And then finally, there’s escape wish, which is really interesting for us humans, often a suicidal escape wish. Okay. So talk about, we wonder whether a higher cognitive capacity, which is obviously allows us to do a lot, but that which is adaptive can be maladaptive. Our capacity for abstraction in this case may really get us into a lot of fucking trouble. If only I were dead, then I wouldn’t have all these problems. Right. It’s like, well, okay. I don’t know that natural section was prepared for us capacity for that, but that clearly is what our justificatory abstract reasoning capacity can get you to. And especially if you see other people doing it and it’s, you know, so it’s really interesting that we humans, whether other animals commit suicide, it’s a debatable one, but we sure as hell do. Okay. And the idea that you could then escape from the suffering of your soul by killing yourself and thoughts of death, thoughts of suicide. So all of those are very behavioral shutdown markers. Then you get shifts in the organism state. You get a change in eating. Okay. Often a reduction of appetite around desire, but sometimes you get like this hibernation thing with it as a consumption. Same with sleep. You get it. So often you’ve got a high sleep. A lot of times you get this agitated defensiveness where you can’t sleep or your whole sleep disruption is taken. Okay. And then you also get shifts in movement in mild to moderate stages. There’s generally an agitated arousal because the threat dynamic, and then you get into deep depressive states, you get a psychomotor retardation, flattening of the structure. By the time you’ve actually got psychomotor retardation, you’re almost certainly in a pretty serious depressive episode. Okay. So those, when clinicians get together and they do the taxonomy, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, et cetera, these are the nine symptoms that pop when we do a major depressive episode, put it in the context of two weeks. Okay. So this just gives you a framework when we extend the mood over time. By the time it’s major, I’m going to argue, yeah, that’s a problem. We’re now in, okay, except maybe death of the family. Right. Okay. It may make sense to be in this kind of level and complex bereavement and intensity. And you could imagine why my entire behavioral investment system, all that I’ve invested in my children, my wife, my house, everything now is a dead end if that happens. Right. And now what am I doing? Okay. So the point of this is, is that we can then frame this if the environmental stressor is severe enough, you’re on a train to Auschwitz, family died, you’re in an abusive situation, you’re in prison for the rest of your life. Okay. Well, we could imagine very readily how this might induce shutdown. And indeed all the animal models are pretty similar. You put an animal in a high stress situation he can’t escape from. She can’t escape from all the animal models. And then they actually give you antidepressants and see how long you resist. And then the ones that cause you to resist longer is like, oh, okay, that’s going to be a good antidepressant. It’s kind of funny or twisted in some ways, right? Yeah. It’s like, huh, okay, we’ll put them in the, you know, there’s a swim test for rats and they hate water and you drop them in and they can’t touch anywhere and they swim, swim, swim, and then they’ll freeze. Okay. And then you give them antidepressants and the longer that they swim as a function of being in its pool, then that’s resisting to depression. Yet from the behavioral investment perspective, actually freezing isn’t a bad idea. If you’re in a pool, you can’t touch. That’s kind of interesting. So anyways, unless the pool is actually consisted of milk. And so you want the rats to swim as fast as they can to turn it into butter to then climb up. But by the way, if we take a recursive relevance realization, stability, plasticity, order of conservation, you can totally see some, and Seligman found this one third of Seligman’s dogs would never submit, you know, not too many people talk about that one third, you could never get them to submit. Okay. They would always try to jump out of the cage. So they were essentially depressant resistant structurally. We would think about these in terms of high extroverted, low neurotic kinds of dogs. Okay. And what they’re doing is they’re working super hard no matter what to get the hell out of there. Okay. Now from an exploration perspective that might afford good to escape, but if the whole system is shit, you could really argue, well, you keep trying and you’ll just run, you’ll just burn out a lot faster. Okay. Or you might get yourself killed fast. You might get yourself killed. Exactly. I mean, you know, where would you want to be if all of a sudden everyone surrounded your tank, your, your, you know, your little company and you’re going to get killed as you run away. Are you the guys like, all right, I’m taking them on while you’re going to get done down. If you’re the scared guy hiding in there, you at least surrender and get caught. Okay. There are lots of, lots of reasons from a basic order chaos perspective that nature would have this continuum. Some systems shut down, get conservative. Some systems refuse that and constantly are exploratory expenditure and most are in between. Okay. So yeah. So Greg, I’m wondering like you’re, you’re, so you’re, you’re obviously putting this in, you have to take a look at the agent arena relationship, totally world enactment. Do, do I’m asking both of you, do the psychotherapist take into account the possibility of like, sorry, this, I don’t mean this in any science fiction sense, but cosmic threat. I’m thinking of Pascal, those infinite spaces, terrifying me. You’ve got the enlightenment just rolling in and he’s seeing the collapse of one worldview and what’s going to replace it is not clearly available and he’s experiencing and he can’t escape from it. He can’t say, well, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to leave the cosmos. I’m going to go somewhere else. So like it’s he, and like, do they ever consider that? I don’t know what to call it. Sort of psychoontological. So I don’t, I don’t think, you know, if you read the ponce, it’s a, it’s, in one sense, it’s a very depressing read. It’s, you don’t read, you don’t take, you don’t take the ponce to the beach. Hey, you know what I’m going to read when I’m on the beach? I’m going to read Pascal. No, no, you don’t do that. It’s really down, right? Or Kierkegaard, but I don’t think of them. I don’t think of what they’re doing as somehow, and it can be very profound, very deep, persistent. I don’t, I don’t, you know, Kierkegaard doesn’t ever get better in that sense, but that doesn’t strike me as what we’re talking. That strikes me like being like grief or, or, or, or like what you’re talking about. Well, I would characterize that then as existential depression reflection. Okay. So, you know, it’s an existential depression that you’re then struggling with now, depression in what sense? Okay. I would argue certainly it would be the case, John, if somebody came and was like, Hey, I’m going to live in my life, you know, as a Christian will say, and believe. And then all of a sudden I got a aware and I became an atheist, but then all of a sudden I was alienated from my work, my friends, I had no meaning. Yes. Yes. Yes. Now I don’t know where I am in the universe. I feel all sorts of anxiety. God is dead to me. And I can’t get out of bed with a lot of enthusiasm because the existential structure of my world now has changed totally. We’d certainly diagnose that with depression. And I would want the clinician to know what existential therapy, logos therapy from a Victor Frankl perspective is fundamentally about. And we, from a Utah perspective, you locate that in the higher order justification system. I see. I see the meaning making system now can’t get a grip that legitimizes one’s purpose. And if you can’t do that, you are in trouble. Okay. And you could definitely argue now whether Kierkegaard was depressed or Nietzsche or, I mean, Nietzsche, you know, definitely, I think you can argue a lot of the existential people are depressed depending on how you define the term. Okay. Right. Right. So again, we got to get into this, and this is why we need this nuance of my question would be, Hey, if it stays fairly intellectual, okay. And it affords then, no, we wouldn’t necessarily label a clinical depression. You’re struggling with existential issues, but it’s, I would certainly argue that to the extent that those things grip, okay. And feedback on your actual engagement in the world, as they often do, you’re now vulnerable. In fact, the entire meaning crisis. Yes. Yeah. That’s what is really an existential crisis that then causes us to be gave chaotically to lose the real grip of with others and world and now wander around feeling like zombies, which then leads to a heck of a lot of depression, especially having temperamental neuroticism. Yes. Yes. So I would say they’re very interrelated. So we have, yeah, go ahead, Gary. Yeah. I was thinking that, so, you know, I would say that one of the most important things I’ve learned through my doctoral training so far is that our sense of self isn’t something that we’re born with nor something that comes from within, but it’s a reflection of our relationships as they develop across time from early childhood and infancy onwards. And so my point there is that having a stable sense of the world is sort of a reflection of having a stable sense of self in place and having a stable sense of self in place is sort of a reflection of, or a function of the kinds of relational dynamics that, or at least partly a function of the kinds of relational dynamics that you were able to enter into and participate in with early childhood caregivers and, you know, other children in the early days and preschool, school, whatever these sorts of things, as well as individual differences in like temperament, for example. And so when I think of times when I’ve heard people talk about these global depressive states that they’re in, that they’re unable to get out of, whereby they describe the world as fundamentally depraved or devoid of any real meaning or something being wrong with the, right, the core of the world itself. Oftentimes I’ve found that these like high level descriptions are able to, if you prod and prompt them long enough, these high level descriptions collapse into very particular concerns that they have. So it’s not even that life has no meaning because I’m alienated from others. It’s that life has no meaning because I’m alienated from others every time I try to give my friend a call and he doesn’t pick up the phone, for example. And there’s something that happens in the micro moments that gathers that entire world of depression in it. And so when these kinds of micro states sort of repeat and reiterate across time, they give the semblance of a macro picture of a depressed world, in a sense. Yeah, I think that’s a really, I mean, basically for me, the justification system is really mostly, do you say, Jonathan Heytster, there’s an elephant and a rider, not even a horse and a rider, you know, for me, it’s a primate, but it’s still the structure is pulling justificatory narrative first. So that’s the pattern. And then if you take an act, Stephen Hayes and others take an act perspective, that’s acceptance and commitment therapy. It’s got a particular really interesting way in which he analyzes language, which I would argue creates a feedback loop. So you get these microscopic kind of incidents, hey, this person does this, and now, hey, other people don’t like me. Okay. And then you utilize the abstraction of language, other people becomes then a frame that you then apply with enormous generalization, that also essentializes self in relationship to other, and then validates the pattern often in a very vicious loop. So you have this, oh, these are injuries, and that is at the core. And that how you metabolize those injuries, what they actually mean to your core relational value, right? Well, yeah, I found it’s also really interesting. So in my experience, with couples therapy, there’s been a similar sort of dynamic that’s unfolded where over time, when there’s a certain problem that becomes pervasive in the couple dynamic, every time it sort of shows itself, one or both of them say, oh, you always do this, you never listen, there’s this generalization when in fact, what as a therapist, at least I try to do is invite them to at least try to treat every situation as a brand new situation that might have the potential of difference, or being differentiated from the past. I asked them, in this case, what you want to do isn’t to be interacting, what you want to do is interact with one another, not with your memories of one another. And there’s a difference there. So how do we pull out of, right? Right. No, that’s Sue Johnson’s work on attachment theory in couples. Yeah. Really good here. What you’ll do is you track the patterning, the felt sense of self other patterning, that becomes intuitively reified, then you get confirmatory bias, and you get over generalization, and you get you always do this to me. And then of course, whenever you say that from the other person, oh, shit, I don’t always do, you know what you always do. So and then you want to then signal that what is actually the attachment need? What’s the miscommunication in relation? How do you create a different kind of holding environment? And your point there, what I would say is, yes, you don’t want to centralize, you want to place self as context, there’s things are always changing. And they use a John point that I now use, what do we ask specializing, you know, in relation and what’s flexible, expect utilizing versus what’s recursively narrowing as specializing that repeats old maladaptive patterns? Yeah, that’s great. So there’s a point I want to make there here, and I don’t want it to be too digressive. I just I want to make sure that we’re not staring into performative contradiction. Because I think making serious and deep criticisms of the ontology of one’s world does not mean that one is necessarily depressed, even if that brings with its sadness. One of the premises that we are bound here together with is that there’s things fundamentally wrong with the ontology that has been used. And we’re seriously questioning it. And and this and we’re seeing the negative consequences of it being pervasive. That doesn’t mean that we’re inherently depressed. So I agree with you, Gary, that often you can see over generalization, it can be reduced to specificity, specificity. But the but you don’t want to do with the reverse mistake of taking every attempt to do a penetrating critique of fundamental ontology to be now that’s not what really you’re doing. You know, Heidegger is really doing that. He just wasn’t getting along with his wife, right? You don’t want to do that either, right? You don’t want to review you don’t want to have you don’t want to have a kind of you don’t want to tilt towards a psychologist that would put all of us, the three of us into a performative contradiction here. So theoretically, I like trying to under I guess, well, part of it is I think we should like Greg unfold his taxonomy because perhaps that will address the issue. How do you see between the skill and correct this, right? I think that’s absolutely. So let’s let’s then dialogue about sort of then what emerges actually from depression as a state of behavioral shutdown is because a descriptor then organizes its patterning function and then it places it both in the agent arena developmental context. Okay. And then what you emerge from that is, oh, there is a logic to shut down, just like there’s a logic to desire, just like there’s a logic to anxiety and the logic to contentment. Okay. So what is that logic? And how would you then calibrate the proper response, the agent arena response when depressive shutdown makes some sense? What’s it built for in relation? And then the issue is when does it become a reciprocal narrowing parasitic process? Right. Right. Right. Now, now when you’re asking that question, now you have moved to a maladaptive depression. Okay. So I’m going to actually argue that in to the extent that becomes entrenched, by the way, this is actually a common core of clinical psychology or psychotherapy, an entrenched maladaptive pattern now becomes a clinical syndrome. Okay. So now there’s a patterning where this depressive grip, okay, becomes like a black hole and forces due to paradox, attachment systems, justification, relational patterns, habits, pulls the system and shuts you down maladaptively. Okay. So then it’s this distinction between allowing the recalibration where the negative feeling depressed state is properly contextualized relative to the failure of the investment system to navigate and then affords that integration upgrades and then reboots the system for investment. That’s what it ought to be doing. If it fails to do that, it engages in reciprocal narrowing parasitic process because the paradox of shutdown often results in exactly this vicious unexpected maladaptive loop. Right. And when that happens, you get maladaptive patterns to the extent then that they, now you put those on a continuum to the extent that they’re entrenched and clinically significant. That’s where we’d make the judgment as to when we’ve moved from an understandable depressive reaction to a depressive disorder. And that’s the line. And it’s going to be a continuum, but we can basically differentiate. We’re going to use the specialized level of adaptive, you know, to maladaptive and then the level of maladaptive entrenchment that then creates clinically significant labeling of this process as being, say, parasitic to paradoxically create a vicious cycle of adaptive maladaptive shutdown. So that’s what I’m suggesting is that there are lots of reasons. In fact, there are a couple of paradoxes about depression. Like it shuts you down, makes you feel like not doing shit. And then in our scenario, particularly the less you do, the less viable options you have. So it’s by definition, it’s like telling you not to do stuff. And then it screws you over by not doing anything. You have less. So now you’re like, now you want to do it. It’s like a nightmare. Okay. And that’s why in this environment, this kind of reaction almost certainly is a mismatch. It’s a very vulnerable mismatch, especially through temporally neurotic. You have a lot of self-criticism. You have a lot of uncertainty, don’t have good supportive relations and haven’t been trained as to the difference between a maladaptive holding of negative feelings and a maladaptive critique of the negative feelings as bad themselves. That’s the triple negative neurotic loop, where you’re like your negative reaction to the negative feelings, negative situation, feeds you back in and grabs a hold. And this can happen with anxiety and depression. And the internalizing conditions, if you know the high top hierarchical taxonomy of psychopathology, you know, the biggest cluster that psychotherapists call the internalizing conditions. And they’re essentially these negative loops between a feeling system and an ego in a relational world that ties you into maladaptive patterns. Okay. And depression is one of them. And that’s the shutdown pattern. So it’s a maladaptive depressive disorder that grabs the system and pulls it, unfortunately, creating a vicious loop that reinforces itself. And when that’s happening, that’s when we know it’s in a disorder. Now, notice the system is operating based on its sort of evolved social cultural structures. It’s not the operating system is not malfunctioned, but it’s maladaptively applied so that it feeds back on itself in a problematic way. Okay. And then we could argue, and there’s certainly lots of things I would argue something like bipolar one disorder, there would be lots of conditions that you could imagine the underlying architecture of the behavioral activation, behavioral inhibition. I know it’s more complicated than that, but just use that can go haywire. There are lots of reasons why it potentially could go haywire. And it would look a particular kind of way. It would be not readily identified in relationship to the certain kinds of reciprocal cognitive processes, the relational processes, but instead would be more embodied, okay? More independent of cross environmental and generally more severe. And I would then argue that there are such conditions, melancholic depressions that are well characterized by essentially an entire psychosocial collapse that has biological structural dynamics that are very likely to be impairing the system to capacity to reboot. Okay. This would be a depressive disease. Okay. Where we can suggest that it’s more than just correcting the reciprocal narrowing, getting a better environment and updating its psychotherapy. You may want to, you’re dealing with more than that. And I’ve certainly been in places where I’ve worked with individuals whose entire sickness, the press sickness is so paralyzed and it had been so chronic and so deep, the system is neurodevelopmentally almost certainly impaired. Okay. And there’d be lots of possible causes for that, but it really is the attribution that the fundamental bioarchitecture that embodies our cognitive capacities has been impaired and is deviated from the normative biological structure that affords engagement in the world. Okay. So that’s a depressive disease. So now what we say is, oh, shut down. That’s a normative response, normative socially, understanding relationship to conservation, updates and orients towards possible fixes, and then reboots the system. Signals that you’re in trouble, change your options, feel the pain, reboot. It’s like, it’s like an emotional pain structure. Need that. Okay. Then there’s, oh, wait, it tips over. So you expend less effort, do less things, feel more bitter, feel more alienated from self and start justifying and feeling in a competitive way, searching for error, only feeding back on yourself. That’s a depressive disorder. And there are cases, either development over time, tumors, other kinds of vascular disorders and thyroid problems, et cetera, that would suggest biomechanical misfunctions, malfunctions that would be better labeled as depressive diseases because the underlying associative causal architecture can be pointed to in relationship or at least inferred as a function of nonoptimal neurobiological function. This is excellent. Can I ask a question? Of course. So, roughly, and I’m not totally happy with this because I’m a foree cognitive scientist, but it sounds like disorders are sort of more software and diseases are more sort of hardware. But, and clearly there’s an arrow this way where hardware would cause the disorder. Does the error, does the causal loop ever go the other way where, absolutely, you know, you’ve got bad software running and if it runs long enough, it starts to distort. It’s a very, very, very, very, very running and if it runs long enough, it starts to distort the hardware because of neuroplasticity and other issues like that. Totally. Right. So neuroplasticity. So the more you’re running negativistic thinking and the less you’re running positivistic thinking, think the old Hubel and Weasel stuff, you know, the neuropruning and regrowth and the way you get structured, you’re spending all your time in this section, you’re growing your capacity for negative thought and your imbalance between extroversion and irosin is already bad and it’s just going to grow. It’s also the case that depression is a fundamentally stressful situation. Right. So the body then drops into a low, low time perspective. I mean, it’s like, okay, do what you can now run hot with cortisol. Okay. Shoot the system through hormones, run hot now and fuck your long-term system. That’s what the body does because it’s like, you know, then spend the money now and you’ll, but you’ll pay the price because you’ll then create structural damage if you run cortisol for a long time. That’s why you don’t want to be in steroids folks forever, but essentially it’s like putting the body on steroids for, if you have chronic depression, you’re in a debuse situation for a long time. You talk to yourself now, the whole developmental learning pattern, and then the neurobiological pattern is growing up in the context of a stress system and that implodes and Robert Sapolsky has done a lot of really good work on stress and the long-term damage of that. He’s got an overly biological model of depression. I’ve critiqued him on that in my opinion, professionally, but he certainly tells you, man, you stick an animal in a stress condition for years and the entire structure starts to come down. And if we think about depression and I believe this functionally, it’s sort of like, it’s an animal response to a sick role. It’s like, you’re not doing well. Okay. The bad things are happening. So then if you just do an animal organism relation, it’s like, yep, you’re sick. Okay. Shut it down. So it’s like, okay, you’re sick. You feel sick. You’ve stressed a long time. That system basically is in all sorts of trouble if you stay in that state for months into years. And the chronic depressions definitely do draw all sorts of, and we know that there are lots of ailments, other ailments that start to become co-morbid with long-term chronic depression. So one of the real risks with depressive disorder, is it becoming a depressive disease? Totally. Okay. So you put it on a, if it starts off as a depressive disorder, then the concern is that through a developmental pathway, the feedback going the other way, exactly as you reported, would begin to emerge. Okay. It’s also the case that yeah, you can get a vascular condition. You get many strokes in the behavioral activation system. Okay. And the, you know, left hemisphere is more approach oriented, right hemisphere is more avoidance oriented. You break out the left hemisphere’s approach system from like say many vascular strokes in a fairly short period of time. You’re very likely to get people starting to depressed. Okay. Because much more so than they reverse. All right. If you blow out the negative affect system on the right side, people still have impairments, but they’re less, but that’s like, that’s an example of clearly you blow the system out in the hardware level and it will go quickly shift. But if you, if you operate in a particular way, you’ll shift the structure, just like working out or not working out the health considerations, all of that stuff feeds back. Okay. So the summary then for if we just kind of take it’s like, oh, okay. What are we talking about here? Well, there’s a thing, there’s a common cold. Okay. The problem is, is that we have this question. Well, what is it a disease? Is it a psychological problem? Is it a normative reaction? And the answer is yeah. If we define it as, if we define it as a state of behavioral shutdown, we can understand the continuum. We can understand the functionality. We can understand why reactions are reasonable and depressed moods or away. Why in our current environment, we’re very vulnerable to have this become a parasitic reciprocal narrowing process that turns it into a disorder, either inside your psyche or between people who are neurotic couples. Okay. And, or anybody else in that regard. And then you get interpersonal, interpsychic patterns that are maladaptive, creating habits, other secondary emotional reactions, defenses, justifications. And then that system pulls it into a general negative and a passive negative in particular. If it sits there and pulls up the negative affect, pulls down, you can easily see why that paradoxically creates a shutdown vacuum. This is your, you know, internalizing neurotic condition that we see in psychotherapy all the time. If you get this chronically, then that’s going to vulnerable, make the whole system vulnerable. And there are a lot of other pathways into depression biologically, thyroid problems, for example, and other kinds of things that can set you up from the bottom. When we see that as primary causal, we want to call that a disease because associated with biomathematical. So Greg, this, this is, I think, beautiful that the continuum taxonomy is beautiful. Does this also track with, you know, your general proposal that the major schools of therapy sort of different aspects of treatment of depression? Totally. So let’s go with behaviorism. Okay. And in fact, one of the most, you know, well established sets of principles comes from behaviorism around treating depression goes back to Lewis and others, and it’s called behavioral activation. Okay. So what do you do with behavioral activation? Fundamentally, you want to create incremental opportunities of agent arena relations. Behaviorist don’t usually do that, but now we’re for recognition people. Yeah. Right. We’re going to create a persona proximal thing, recognizing that we have to help the system. Okay. Get engaged in pleasure, competence, and effective control. So they’re getting a return on investment using BIT language. Okay. That is cumulative. Like I, I use this, I tell people, you know, what I think that depression actually does is that I think you have initiation and, and, and then inertia in act in your investment. And I think especially what depression does is it kills initiation. Okay. So I tell people like, Hey, I want to do something. And I want to lie in bed, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, behavior activation wise, we have to get you over the initiation hump and find you into effective control or effective pleasure. So I help them say things like, Hey, do it for 30 seconds. Okay. You want to try to clean the house. All right. Do wash the table for 30 seconds. If after 30 seconds of engagement, you want to stop doing it. Okay. So they can, they’ll see, I need to clean the whole kitchen and then they’ll shut off the initiation. Right. And then the initiation is very hard, bring the initiation proximately, much closer, set the timeframe for activation. And then if the system is actually seeing that I’m cleaning the table and it looks cleaner than the crumbs all over it, they will get a recursive relevance realization engagement and have the system continue. So that’s just one example. Then we move up to emotion-focused therapy. Emotion-focused therapy basically then argues that you have secondary maladaptive emotions. Okay. And this would be the case where the depression often, the person doesn’t know how to hold the depression and metabolize it. And then there’s a lot of, Oh my God, secondary guilt, secondary anxiety avoidance. Okay. And ultimately what that’s going to do then is it’s going to pull the system to not be able to metabolize it and then live in a maladaptive secondary place. So you have to break through that, create a space where you can create an upholding environment to be aware and attuned to the depression and afford a narrative that’s healthy in relation. So that’s what emotion-focused trying to do. The attachment, the relational turn in psychodynamics, like Paul Wachtel, who’s a founder of the psychotherapy integration, talked about cyclical psychodynamic model, grounds it in attachment theory. Okay. Shows the way we might build particular internal working models. All right. Let’s say you’re kind of a submissive individual, really agreeable submissive. All right. And you feel more comfortable when there’s a dominant other and you pull them in, you put them up on a pedestal. Okay. But then over time they feel better, but they also start controlling you. Okay. And then you feel a bit resentful, but as soon as you get resentful, you then feel anxiety because resentment would threaten. So you turn the anxiety against yourself to return you back to a submissive role. And that just elevates the other person. And now you’re in a cyclical, psychodynamic pattern whereby you feel unheard, but you have to be this way. And they’re an accomplice, he calls them, to maintain you in this role. And it’s very hard to break out of this attachment equilibrium. Okay. So it then drives you into your anxious dependent state. And then how do you metabolize that? Obviously the cognitive systems pull in and make overgeneralizations, catastrophic thinking, inferences, et cetera. And then the existential elements is, are you placed in a meaning, values and purpose narrative that affords your actions every day in a long-term arc of being. And if not, that’s going to create some issues also. Now, whether that’s depression, then I would say, well, does it cascade back into the animal or is it just Kierkegaardian existential depression? Okay. Those would be the two, but they would certainly be potentially related. And I’ve certainly seen them clinically related when somebody comes in from what I would say, clearly have a beginning as an existential and then dissipates into the entire structure. And the person that is feeling, you know, every day is nihilistic in relationship to just do in their work. So notice that all of the perspectives, I’m talking mostly individual, but it does go to couples like Sue Johnson’s work. And then it goes even to family systems. You can see that there’s an inability to effectively metabolize the negative situation and negative feeling. Instead you get secondary maladaptive reactions that are trying to block control, move away blame. This is the triple negative neurotic loop. And they all then focus on different systems, habit, procedural, emotional, relational, defense, justification, and the ways in which you might get a reciprocal fluke. And so they all then share this maladaptive idea that you have to hold the negative situation, negative feeling effectively, and then metabolize it into a coherent integration of the psyche, as opposed to if you don’t, you’re going to feel alienated from the world, from your feelings, from the self. And if you do that, you’re in a much more vulnerable place to increase your reciprocal path into the black hole. So is the optimal thing in therapy then to like try to address all of these levels in a coordinated manner? Obviously you don’t want to do it haphazardly. That’s right. I mean, Utah argues that if you transition from the school of thought to the systems of adaptation, you’re upgrading your psychological doctor position. So I can talk about habits and emotions, relationships, defense, and justification super coherently. If I try to talk behaviorist versus emotion-focused humanistic versus psychodynamic versus cognitive, and I have to submit myself to the cultures of those paradigms, it’s a lot more awkward. So Utah says we can do it a lot more effectively if we stay with the systems of adaptation, which are closer to the ontology and the science than the old traditions about how directive should you be? What’s the language? Do you talk homework? Do you talk experiential avoidance versus transference and repression? And so my argument is that you can do it coordinately if we ground it in the psychological science that’s up to the task, as opposed to the traditions, which with their emphasis and their guru following, make sort of a cultural difference that can be kind of awkward and eclectic. So that’s where I like to go. Okay, that’s an excellent answer. So I see three broad types. One is you give into the imperialism of a particular school, and given this argument, you’re going to not treat certain levels in the organism. I’ll just use level language right now. And then you have what I take it from, I talk to many therapists, is they have eclecticism. They just sort of pick and choose. But when you try to ask what’s the methodology, how are you sure this is an optimal way, there’s no structural functional organization to how the levels are addressed. So there’s a lack of an IDOS, right? And how the levels are addressed. Or here’s a coordinated ontology, and then here’s a coordinated response. There’s a structural functional organization to how the therapeutic intervention, because if this is involving sort of parasitic processing, you face the issue that if you don’t do this, like timing matters in dynamical systems tremendously, right? Timing and placement issues are, this is one of the fundamental ways in the core ontology that they’re different from formal systems, right? Timing and placement matter tremendously. And so if you’re just sort of dabbling around, right? So if you shoot at just one level, there’s a good chance the other levels will just adapt and readjust and drag the person back down. And then if you dabble, you’re probably missing the coordination of timing and placement that dynamical systems require. So I think the argument is stronger that you’re making, Greg. I think there’s a clear argument that not only can you do this, I think the argument is you should be doing this for the argument I just gave. Like, if you’re just hitting one level, chances that you’re going to succeed are significantly reduced because the other levels will just reconfigure and draw back down. If you’re dabbling, you’re missing the terribly pertinent fact that timing and placement really matter in complex dynamical systems. So you should be doing it. Not just that you can, Greg, but I think you should. There’s a strong argument for should here. All right. Yeah. I want to really echo that and also say that there’s another through line that I think runs, well, through your exposition and explanation of depression from this perspective that will tie it back to what we’ve talked about before, about attachment theory and personality theory, the trait perspective. Because if I were to summarize it and condense it, I would say that everything that you’ve really said about depression implies that during depressive states or episodes or periods, there’s a kind of investment in security-based behaviors, right? And there’s a kind of withdrawal from exploration going on. And so, right, in the absence of security, withdrawal should be the appropriate response, more often than not, with all things being equal. But there’s something that crosses the threshold of pathological when it comes to the kinds of withdrawal that we see happening in depression. Okay. How does this relate to optimal gripping and relevance realization? I was thinking about the opponent processing between stability and plasticity, right? Where when you find yourself in depressive states or episodes, you’re really not in a plasticity sort of mode of functioning. In other words, you’re more concerned with keeping things as they are so that you don’t mess up more or lose more than trying new things to make things better, let’s say. And if we link that to attachment, then we can sort of ask ourselves, how does the absence of security that is implied in the person’s depression reflect an absence of secure attachment figures in their lives? And I would say that what ends up happening in therapy, when it’s done well, I think, is over time that the patients come to feel more and more secure by way of the relationship with the therapist, right? And this is Urban Yalm’s own words, right? That the relationship itself is the vehicle for change in therapy. Insofar as we sort of become surrogate mothers to our patients and that encourage exploration of the world both outside of themselves and within themselves, that they’ve really been caught up in sort of long-standing patterns of avoidance and withdrawal instead. So the relationship itself acts as one of the factors that corrects their relationship to, again, the world in themselves and holds them away from an over-emphasis of stability and security to one of exploration and classicity. And I’ll just quickly state, as somebody who worked a lot with college students, okay, the transition from home to college is rife with this problem if you have attachment insecurities and trait neuroticism. Okay, so you drop into a totally new environment, you have all this hope, oh my gosh, when I go, it’s gonna be great. And then you’re overloaded with chaos, and then you over anticipate threat. And when you’re overloaded with chaos, lacking insecurity, and over anticipate threat, what do you do? You’re hot. Okay, so you go back to your room, and you’re just sort of like, oh my god, in the first six weeks is when everybody sinks up. So you get everybody’s, oh, and the new friendships are all, and you’re like overloaded. So you go, and then you’re waiting, and eventually you want to wait to get stable, and then you’ll find enough security to go out and connect with people, and then you realize, oh my god, everyone’s house already has friends. Okay, so now because I needed a conservative, I then, I minimize my likelihood of exploration, I minimize my likelihood of connection. Now when I get stable and I’m finally ready to go, then there’s nothing out here. Everyone’s already paired up, and I’m the odd man out. Okay, so by six weeks in, this homesickness, this felt sense of, oh my gosh, that’s why I try to tell everybody, you come in six weeks, try to overcome. You’re almost always better to err. If you’re temporarily anxious and you care a little bit, and you tend to that, overcoming that and leaning into the exploration and connection, and minimizing the threat of getting a little rejector, or going to a group that you don’t really like, okay, that’s not nearly, that’s not an existential threat. To ask somebody, hey, you want to hang out, and they say no, that doesn’t mean you’re dead. Okay, and you know, try the next person, you know, maybe they’ll say yes. So I really try to encourage individuals, precisely because that’s an actual transition period where I see over and over again, they transition into it, and their security needs, and the threat needs, drive them into this, and then all of a sudden the opportunities for investment are down, and now you’re really going to start to get depressed, because you’re like, feeling trapped. Well, gentlemen, I have a heart out, so we’re going to have to wrap things up, but this is, was enormously rich, and I think the way it’s going to segue into Bishop’s model of well-being, I think you’ll relish the connections of the convergence, but I wanted to thank Greg, especially for taking us through his excellent work today. Yeah, actually the last thing I’ll just say is that I would argue that you can invert well-being for optimal functioning, look at depression as an inversion of it, subjective level, at its functioning level, at a biological level, at the inner relationship, the environment, at the values of what we want to see, the more severe depression you get, the more basic at the bottom of, you know, the inverted continuum of eudaimonia. Okay. Thank you. All righty. Thank you. Rock on.