Right. That was what motivated me, as I said in Supplementing actualism with conventional methods, to approach MBRS at a certain point in time, and my good experience with it. And that’s why I do support to try other ways to improve/get better, at least for those who cannot do it with AF alone or before doing it.
True. But this is why I referred to ill, “ill”, healthy and “healthy” people, meaning that we all live in a continuum where divisions are unclear and changing (DSM III, DSM IV, etc), frequently misdiagnosed, mistreated (a lot of drug interests involved, and at the same time a lot of disinterest) and many of whose symptoms are mixed with other causes you mentioned in other post:
I still think that stress and unhappiness is primarily a ‘self’ issue. The ‘self’ isn’t necessarily reducible to physiological processes.
So many of those who have even been well diagnosed and well treated can still do a lot to deal with the stress, fear, anxiety, unhappiness produced or interpreted by their self.
Notice that I did not recommended AF as a treatment or a practice to psychotics, but rather I wanted to exemplify what can be achieved even by people diagnosed as such with techniques such as neither expressing nor repressing, paying attention to the senses, Enjoy And Appreciate This Moment Of Being Alive, etc. This was my case also.
As you made it clear to @rick that Richard was referring to symptoms rather than diseases, I also referred to how certain symptoms can be dealt with (even harsh ones, such as those alluded) rather than how to deal with the diagnosed desease or label (although now I will comment a bit on this).
Indeed, but there is something else, always clarifying that what I refer to are individual cases experienced by specific people, the exposition of which could serve others, but without making universal assertions or recommendations:
Not only I think that the self uses the symptoms and diagnoses to act a role, to strengthen or feel self-pity, etc. In many cases I think that it can also be the main cause generating those very symptoms and those diagnosed mental illnesses. I have come to see a good deal of mental problems (including more common and less exotic ones such as depression, panic attacks, obsessive-compulsive syndrome, etc. -which I have incidentally also suffered from on a severe level and been diagnosed with-), as another layer that the self constructs and superimposes on reality, similar to the way the self constructs and superimposes reality on actuality.
This is not to say that it does not build on physical predispositions or inclinations, DNA, etc.; on the contrary. But I say there’s a lot we can do in spite of it, often in spite of what medicine considers to be the only paths, and even of what often assumes is possible or impossible.