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“The individual must be conceived as inserted in a network of interpersonal relations in order to define psychological phenomena.” Vpizzini.

I think this is a very good point. As we have discussed at great length in this course, everything in our life is relative, and has meaning and the ability to be defined only because we relate everything to everything else. We can NEVER think of people outside some frame of reference, some normative reality. To strive to do so may be to free ourselves from one kind of tea kettle reality, but at the same time it is merely adopting another one. Maybe it is one we have previously been unaware we believed in, but it is a normative reality nonetheless. I think it is important to recognize this fact, and to recognize that “change” as a measure of health is just as normative as any tea kettle reality. In adopting change as our ultimate criterion, this assumes we are able to look at certain behavioral characteristics of people, quantify those behaviors such that we can understand them as characteristics attributable to people, and then observe ways in which they change. We will always be making assumptions and qualifying feelings, emotions and mental states, as being one way or another, and this will always result in us believing that one way is “wrong” and one is “right.” As Adi and Ryan both recently discussed in their posts, striving to continually adopt new meaning, and to continually question one’s assumptions about life seems to me an excellent guiding force that could be at the root of mental health. To be able to realize that what one previously believed was limited and normative, and to adopt a new view of the world – which itself will be limited of course – seems an excellent goal to strive for.

Yet even as I write that, I realize I don’t even really know what that means anymore. This course has taught me so many things about how I want to change my view of my mental states, and about how I would like to strive towards my own personal new understandings, but it hasn’t really given me much of an idea about how I can interact with people who haven’t taken this course to help improve their mental health. I think a good starting off point is to find some way to make a larger audience of people actually believe some of the concepts many of us just assume to be true at this point in the course. That we create meaning; that most of what we do occurs without the involvement of our conscious mind; that conscious story telling does have the ability to affect the brain in just as powerful, if not more powerful, ways as drugs. I agree with what Yona said that everyone can benefit from therapy. However, I don’t think that having sessions with a therapist is the best way to accomplish this. I think we need to put more money/effort/legislation into getting these ideas to be part of every child’s education. If everyone in the world could take this course, I think we could greatly decrease the need for therapists.