This is an organic brain illness which produces the unwanted behavioural symptoms as well as other symptoms.
There are lots of causes. One is the extension of human life. The body can live far longer than the brain, especially with the number of harmful and pleasurable chemicals people use. Our emotions, originally designed for use in the African savannah plains to protect humans, are not designed for modern day life and this too can wear the brain down.
The taxing grind of work also wears down the brain - or does it? I'm obsessed with neuroplasticity as a hope for overcoming organic brain problems and I don't know enough to say whether it is a pancea to dementia and other behavioural and emotional disorders. I can imagine the constant firing of synapses as the brain works through problems of daily life, from reality processing to high level cognition, would wear out a circuit eventually but the brain is also heavily over-engineered.
Simple brain exercises may not tax the brain in the same way that stress, intense concentration or high intensity reality processing (e.g. playing a fast paced computer game) puts the brain in top gear. The problem is the latter may be what's necessary to overcome dementia rather than light brain exercise. A mind gym and a body gym may be akin. Too much can be harmful in the short and long term.
There are other solutions and changing society/culture is one of them. The demon of psychiatry has allowed the suppression of aggression or other undesirable traits using the idea that these are somehow illnesses. This allowed cultures to develop without seeing aggression exist - they become suppressed using psychiatric drugs.
This error has spread to childhood and it is a dark time for the human race, as thousands of murdered elderly people found out in the UK and perhaps hundreds of thousands worldwide who were all killed by the unnecessary use of the chemical cosh.
The solution which would protect children is the same as what would protect the elderly from death through the management of undesireable behaviour: automotons need to get used to undesireable behaviour.
The example I might give is a poor one. I played rugby at school. Most children in the UK play non-contact sports or ones with limited pain and physical contact such as football. Rugby is a violent and dangerous sport. I loved it. We would play in freezing weather in shorts. We'd be covered in mud. There was lots of pain involved. Some people got serious injuries. I needed treatment for A&E for a damaged tendon and a dislocated shoulder if I remember right, all from rugby at school.
I went to a posh school and lots of posh kids would never have had to live the life I've lived nor risk what I've risked in terms of violent harm. I was more prepared for violence and agression because I played rugby. Aggression was important to the game. A prop forward would have to run at a line of the opposing team all set on taking the ball off them. This risked physical contact and harm but was part of the training I got. On the streets this meant I could take a beating and go into placres without fear of pain or harm whereas other people from my microculture - specifically university - feared to walk amongst those I would consider friends.
This poor example is about convey the possibility of conditioning to allow culture to accept aggression and other unwanted behaviour. I should have explained how living with my grandfather as he got old meant that I was conditioned to see aggression as normal. I chose something else because I was bored. This is the possibility for all mental disorders like dementia. The unwanted behaviour isn't unwanted when people can learn to accept and deal with it. The tool is acceptance of normality instead of pathologisation of abherronce and difference.
It means we never ever medicalise the human condition nor consider human behaviour as something to be automatically suppressed.
Bah. At my station now. Back to the fucking ward.
Sent from my smartphone
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