Psychotherapies and psychopharmaceuticals are enormously helpful, and I’m certainly not saying that we should abandon them. But most psychotherapists don’t understand the dialogue of people who are “gifted” (using Jacobsen’s term) or higher-mode. They then insist on leading treatment of symptoms, including pharmacological solutions to treat depressions caused by problems of mode. High moders will get more bang for their buck (or simply time) by addressing the root causes rather than the symptoms of being on a higher trajectory.

Lets assume that coping with the phase changes across levels brings new uncertainties. That seems obvious. Then we must look at the yet more significant challenges of changing domains ( see Luc Hoebekes insights into domains).

Surely those domain changes offer the really significant challeges. They may look like just another change of level, but they are not. For example, as we move from the Level 3 cartesian/newtonian world to the 4th level quantum world, it may be possible to start to lose contact with The Real World of friends and colleagues.

My hunch is that these changes are the ones that do the damage, including bringing the potential of experiencing a crisis.

Many workplaces never offer the opportunity to engage in implemented judgements above level 3, so “gifted” people may experience the loss of engagement at a young age. If we were then to consider the impact of being out of “flow” for a long time, then there is the attraction of reconstructing identity as a coping mechanism. Temporarily a solution, but….

….and so a psychotherapist who does not understand the dialogue, who does not get the conversation, may offer some help. But as time goes on, they may well become just another burden, rather than a blessing.

I definitely agree that the more complex the individual is the more they seem to be affected by “mental illness”; although I am not comfortable with this label. During a discussion several years ago Julian Fairfield described the progression from one level to another as an unraveling and reorganization of the brain not unlike the experience of a breakdown. His description interested me insofar as I believe that there are relationships between what we commonly label a mental breakdown or mental illness and the progression of complexity of mental processing.

In some cases I think that these individuals are disturbed by the unorganized warehousing of data in their brains, or the effects of the stimulus this provides for them in the presence of an inability to rationalize in a cognitive way the significance of the raw data. Perhaps the mind takes in what it can process at some later date contrasted with a less capable individual being exposed to the same data but not distinguishing any significance to it. The data is not warehoused because it has no current or future relevance and as a consequence it causes no disturbance.

Human beings have a propensity to attempt to make sense of/ interpret the occuring world and to assign meaning to what is occuring. It is in the rationalization of what is occuring that the effects though not understood are catalogued in the conscious or subconscious mind for future rationalization, or not, and in the interim there may be consequences that manifest themselves in the behaviour of the individual pending some resolution. The brain is a complex organ with distinct and intricate functions occuring in the archipallium, the palleopallium, and the neopallium. There are disassociated associations that occur and manifest themselves within the realm we are discussing.

The subject matter is compelling insofar as it offers the possibility of moving psychiatry from alchemy to science. Earlier today I was involved in a discussion where I promoted that “mental illness” is an affliction that manifests itself in the social attributes and that pharmacological treatment of symptoms is largely ineffective. If we better understood what occurs in these disassociated associations of the functioning brain we might glean some insight into treatment for “mental illness”.

That’s one reason why a gathering of high-mode individuals would be so useful — a chance to get acquainted, a chance to make connections that can be continued online.