tiltbillings wrote:danieLion wrote: And I know the cognitive distortions of LABELING (by calling me "lay person" derogatorily), JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS/MIND READING (charging me with "OVER estimating" and accusing me of having a "fixed belief" without evidence beyond your imaginative inferences), MAGNIFYING (your experience and "expertise" over mine) while MINIMIZING (my experience and credentials over yours).
You are a direct health care provider?
Define "direct health care provider." This is reminiscent of a belief in the sovereignty of the medical profession.
If you've not read the following, you might find them helfpful:
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The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry by Paul Starr
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The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine by James Le Fanu
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Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself--And the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future by Harriet Washington
And even if I'm not a "direct health care provider" by your defintion(s), the point was that credential dropping is the fallacy of argument to authority in this context.
I don't care if you're the Editor in Chief of JAMA: it's obvious to anyone with the ability to think critically that most if not all of the cause(s) of depression are mind produced and that the Buddha taught the same thing.
I'm astonished so many people find that far fetched.
In the introduction to Rev. Sumedho's
The Way It Is, for instance, Rev. Sucitto, translates
domanassa in the dependent
origination (a.k.a, The Second Noble Truth which postulates that
dukkha--of which
depression is a form--
has a cause) formulation as
depression.
Why are we so uncomfortable to admit that the Buddha and CBT have a lot in common?
Rev. Sucitto's not.
Sayadaw U Tejaniya's not.
Rev. Tejaniya wrote:
What Are Defilements?
Defilements are not only the gross manifestations of greed,hatred, and delusion but also all their friends and relatives, even the very distant ones!! See if you have ever had one of the following--or similar--thoughts cross your mind: “Those lights should not be on at this time of the day!” “His behaviour is so irritating.” “He should not have done that.” “I could do it a lot faster.” “I am a hopeless meditator; my mind cannot even stay on the rising-falling for one minute.” “Yesterday my meditation was so good; today I am all over the place.” “Wow, this was a wonderful sit; now I need to be really mindful so I don’t lose this feeling.” “I must stay in the Dhamma hall; others will think I am lazy if I don’t.” “I need an extra portion of potatoes today because it’s good for my health.” “Yuk! The salad has onions in it.” “No bananas again!” “He is so selfish, so inconsiderate.” “Why is this happening to me?” “Who is responsible for cleaning the toilets?” “Why is this yogi walking here?” “They shouldn’t be making so much noise!” “There are too many people here; I can’t meditate.” “Someone is sitting in my seat!” “She is so pretty!” “He walks so elegantly!”
All such thoughts are motivated by defilements!! Don’t undeestimate them!
Have you ever told someone you were not angry even though you clearly did not like what he had done? Do you sometimes talk negatively about your boss, a member of your family, or even a good friend? Do you occasionally tell a dirty joke? Do you habitually sweet talk people into doing things for you? Do you automatically raise your voice when someone does not agree with your point of view?
All such talk is motivated by defilements! Watch out for it!
Have you ever knocked really hard on someone’s door, or refused to enter a room simply because someone you dislike was in there, or jumped a queue, or used the shampoo someone left in the bathroom,or made a private call using your employer’s phone line, or done any similar actions – all sort of unthinkingly?
All such actions are motivated by defilements! Become aware of them.
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Don't Look Down On The Defilements: They Will Laugh At You, Part I (pp. 7-8)
Just look at all those congitive distortions--and in a description of mind from a contemporary Theravadin meditation master! In case you forgot what cognitive distortions are, here are the ten most common:
1. All-or-nothing thinking: You see things in black and white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.
2. Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
3. Mental filter: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water.
4. Disqualifying the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they "don't count" for some reason or other. You maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.
5. Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.
-Mind reading: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you and don't bother to check it out.
-The Fortune Teller Error: You anticipate that things will turn out badly and feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.
6. Magnification (catastrophizing) or minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else's achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow's imperfections). This is also called the "binocular trick."
7. Emotional reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: "I feel it, therefore it must be true."
8. Should statements (musterbating): You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn'ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. "Musts" and "oughts" are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.
9. Labeling and mislabeling: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: "I'm a loser." When someone else's behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him, "He's a damn louse." Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.
10. Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event for which, in fact, you were not primarily responsible.
From: Burns, David D., MD. 1989. The Feeling Good Handbook. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc.
I presume a lot of the problem here is that because most people have not read their Hume on causality (Cf.
A Treatise of Human Nature and
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; and for John Searle's scathing critique of Hume's views see
this; see also
Kant and Hume on Causality) they think that if they just find a cause or causes then they can find a cure. But as any
good congnitive behavioral therapist (one of the things I mean by "good" is that they never or very rarely dispense the semi-poisounous toxic chemicals known as anti-depressants) will tell you, overcoming depression is not
easy. The desire for easy answers is perpetuated by unfounded beliefs in the efficacy of modern scientific and western philosophical causal analysis or, in a word, delusion.