Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…Something you would talk about maybe like a clinical depression. And by the way, we should mention that this field in the 21st century is like a minefield. Yes, very much so. So here’s a very strange bit of historical record. The other distinction, and the distinction we’re grappling with– so we have people who are– whose depression is of such a scale they’re threatening to do away with themselves. They’ve retreated into complete, almost immobility. They’re overwhelmed by senses of sadness and loss and they’re– If they’re religious, then they’re damned to hell and all those kinds of things. So we have this psychosis that we’ve been talking about. We have something also that the ancients recognized: dementia, the loss, really the loss of our mind, as it were. But then we also have other kinds of disturbance of our mental faculties that generally we think of as more minor, but I don’t want to make light of them because often people suffer from these things, genuinely suffer pretty badly. But those things we in the 20th and 21st centuries tend to talk about as neuroses, neurotic diseases, psychotic diseases. In the 19th century, neurosis was a term that meant things rooted in the brain, as you can see from the root of the word, and psychosis was stuff that came from the mind, the psyche. And yet sometime in the late 19th century those things crossed over and so when we talk in the present we do tend to distinguish between the core, really the most severe forms of mental disorder, which would include things like Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, would include very serious depression, would include bipolar disorder where people oscillate either have extreme mania so they’re not getting any sleep. They’re talking at an extraordinary rate. Their behavior is very hard to tolerate, and they’re exhausting themselves, and they may even die from exhaustion if it’s not controlled. And very often that alternates with periods of depression. So that was a category that was captured initially as manic depressive illness and later on evolved into bipolar disorder and then separating out depression and major depression separately. But then there are a whole bunch of other things like, for example, phobias. People can’t go outside because they find it too frightening. Milder phobias: “I can’t get in an airplane because it’s gonna crash,” “I can’t go to school because it’s overwhelming for me.” So school phobia emerges as a diagnosis. A disorder that at first attracted Freud, hysteria. And now we should say you wrote a book on hysteria.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.