A Unified Theory of Mental Illness: How Everything from Addiction to Depression Can Be Explained by the Concept of “Capture”

Kessler’s the­o­ry is already encap­su­lat­ed com­plete­ly in the the most basic tenets of Bud­dhist theory/science of mind: we attach to things, and what we attach to (and how strong, etc.) depends on our per­son­al kar­ma. Kar­ma not as some mys­ti­cal motive force bal­anc­ing uni­ver­sal moral­i­ty, but kar­ma as causal­i­ty, and the par­tic­u­lar set of causal­i­ties (whether bio­log­i­cal, envi­ron­men­tal, soci­o­log­i­cal, etc.) going back to the begin­ning of things and before (let’s wor­ry about the begin­ning­less begin­ning anoth­er time). Lit­er­al­ly every­thing that has every occurred any­where in real­i­ty bring­ing each of us to where we are along with all that that con­strains or allows at this very moment.

Like Kessler’s the­o­ry, this is the prin­ci­ple behind all men­tal dis­tress­es.

It’s true, but Kessler is at least 2500 years behind the curve, and I think it’s incred­i­bly like­ly that some peo­ple had it fig­ured out even before the Bud­dha even if they did­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly come up with a com­pre­hen­sive and prac­ti­cal a sys­tem to pass that under­stand­ing on to oth­ers. Pre­lit­er­ate human­i­ty or pre­hu­man hominids may even have had it large­ly nailed
down with­out ever think­ing about it for all we know.

P.S., When he claims that spir­i­tu­al­i­ty tries to dis­tance stim­uli, Kessler is mis­tak­en. Some might, but in Bud­dhism (or at least the Zen with which I am most famil­iar), the ide­al is to work more and more towards allow­ing the expe­ri­ence of all sen­so­ry input with­out attaching/capturing them. Work­ing towards expe­ri­enc­ing what­ev­er is with­out get­ting caught by our ideas of it. That’s why so much of the foun­da­tion­al prax­is of Zen is about learn­ing to spot your­self cap­tur­ing, and then let­ting that go when­ev­er this (hope­ful­ly grow­ing) aware­ness becomes present. Based on one’s own kar­ma (chain of causal­i­ty), and the fact that most of us share a lot of it (we’re humans who have pret­ty sim­i­lar bod­ies, hor­mones, brains, we’ve lived exten­sive­ly in the 20th and/or 21st Cen­tu­ry world of things, etc.), it turns out that for a lot of peo­ple that the first step in the prac­tice is remov­ing as many of the stim­uli that are pre­vent­ing the abil­i­ty to work towards that as pos­si­ble, but that’s just part of putting your­self in a place where you can learn what you need to learn to take on more and more stim­uli with­out cap­ture, aka attach­ing.

P..S.S., In regards to bipo­lar, which I suf­fer, Bud­dhis­m’s take on Kar­ma inte­grates any what we see as chem­i­cal restric­tions as real. They are as valid a links in the chains of one’s own trail of causal­i­ty as any oth­er thing, and seen as some­thing that is a part of a par­tic­u­lar per­son­’s own path of prac­tice (e.g., my prac­tice of learn­ing to exist while let­ting go of attach­ments includes the need to mod­u­late my chem­i­cal process­es, per­haps via this med­ical insur­ance, see­ing that doc­tor and try­ing this med­i­cine). I only men­tion this, because I agree with Deb­o­rah that there are bio­log­i­cal and chem­i­cal com­po­nents to many con­di­tions. I will add, how­ev­er, that I have found bipo­lar dis­or­der mas­sive­ly dis­torts and strength­ens cap­tures, so it still find the cap­ture/at­tach­ment-based sys­tem of view­ing men­tal dis­tress to be true even when deal­ing with under­ly­ing chem­i­cal or neu­ro­log­i­cal process­es.

It seems to me that the con­cept pro­vides one way of con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing the phe­nom­e­na described, find­ing a way to bring them under a sin­gle rubric. Then, when faced with a sit­u­a­tion, one can (among oth­er ways) look at it through the lense of “cap­ture.” That might sug­gest ways of treat­ment to change the tar­get or break the bond.

“Cap­ture” seems to me can be viewed sim­ply as a con­cep­tu­al tool, a way to cat­e­go­rize expe­ri­ence along a par­tic­u­lar dimen­sion or point of view. And it might well turn out to be a pro­duc­tive way of look­ing at things. It would­n’t be the first time that look­ing at things in a new way led to inno­va­tions and advances.

So now every­one’s vic­tim, well no, causal­i­ty is supreme, it has no adher­ence to blame. Their is no vic­tim, just per­cep­tion, there are no bad guys or good girls, its all rel­a­tive. Every action has its oppo­site, its just sim­ple arith­metic in the end. We per­ceive things as ill­ness or dis­’ease’ but its only a per­cep­tion. Truth is always sim­ple, nev­er com­pli­cat­ed by emo­tives or feel­ing.

Dis­cern this real­i­ty, we are not our emo­tions. They mere symp­toms of cause, loss of inno­cence through trau­ma is a para­mount cause of psy­cho­log­i­cal imbal­ances in peo­ple, not words like: “dri­ven, ener­gy, restlessness,or phas­es like lead­en de-moti­va­tion”. I do agree that ill­ness is not a mood dis­or­der or a men­tal imbal­ance its cause is usu­al­ly spir­i­tu­al in nature, not always but usu­al­ly.

I’m a ther­a­pist with 13 years expe­ri­ence work­ing with a wide range of men­tal ill­ness diag­no­sis. It is com­mon for peo­ple to cling to sim­plis­tic defens­es like “you are blam­ing the vic­tim” when an hon­est approach is pre­sent­ed, but I can assure that no, it does­n’t mean you are blam­ing the vic­tim or lack­ing com­pas­sion when you come to terms hon­est­ly with the real­i­ties of what is know and not known about men­tal ill­ness and addic­tion.

So I appre­ci­ate the hon­esty here about 1) there is no sup­port for chem­i­cal imbal­ances or sim­plis­tic dis­ease mod­els explain­ing men­tal ill­ness diag­no­sis and 2) drugs used in treat­ments essen­tial­ly damp­en stim­uli, they don’t treat dis­ease. Refresh­ing and clears the way for an open dis­cus­sion and explo­ration about how to actu­al­ly help peo­ple (who can cer­tain­ly choose to damp­en their expe­ri­ence with med­ica­tions but need to under­stand it as such).

How­ev­er Kessler is just repack­ag­ing some sim­plis­tic think­ing as a break­through to grab some of the mar­ket­ing of titles such as Blink and Tip­ping Point. There’s no break­through here. It’s obvi­ous that peo­ple with prob­lems suf­fer from the prob­lem of focus­ing on their prob­lem, and the solu­tion has always been to dis­cov­er what exact­ly they are focus­ing on, what the his­to­ry and sto­ry behind the lead­up to that focus is all about and how it works.

Com­mon sense ther­a­pists and sup­port com­mu­ni­ties call that lis­ten­ing close­ly to a per­son to help under­stand them as the way to help them. If re-pack­ag­ing this as “cap­ture” and seek­ing the deep roots of pre­vi­ous “cap­tures” and the steps to how “cap­ture” works can ori­ent us more to deep lis­ten­ing to the expe­ri­ence of clients, then great. But it’s not some great psy­chol­o­gy the­o­ry break­through, it’s a buzz­word for some­thing that should already be obvi­ous when you just step back from the hype and diag­nos­tic con­fu­sion and just take the time to lis­ten with car­ing deep curios­i­ty to peo­ple’s imme­di­ate present moment aware­ness and the back­sto­ries and mean­ing that got them to it.