Ivan Bogachev

Psychological defense. Do you know what that is? Are you sure? Are you sure sure? All right. Let's scroll through a list of common defense mechanisms together and see what's in there.

Denial is a structural part of reactive patterns of behavior (9) and (14) suitable for prey. Repression is a result of a memory dissociation. Rationalization is a step in decision-making, commonly misjudged due to relative irrationality. Projection is a side effect of filling gaps in communications. Regression is that deep fall when your reality checker discards too many programs at once...

The list continues, but it's already obvious that "defenses" as a category include special cases of fundamentally different processes. They don't necessarily depend on stress, can happen naturally or as a result of a severe malfunction, and for the most part don't even come from a self-preservation mechanism!

As far as I understand, the idea of a defence was established prematurely, using a duck test, and nobody double-checked the results. It's compromised in the same way as hallucinations.

Today, we design information processing machines from scratch and know what has to be inside, but Freud didn't have the same knowledge a hundred years ago. He accurately described certain phenomena and then wrongly classified them as the same thing.

Our field was poisoned, but nobody noticed that at the time, and now various professionals develop universal anti-defense techniques to free their clients from shackles, fail to cover a bunch of unrelated technical problems, and usually end up with yet another unfalsifiable version of mindfulness, also known as "just help yourself by yourself".

It's time to change the way we think about defenses.

Instead of seeing faces and meaningful reactions to stress in every donut, eyeballing their healthiness, and trying to avoid the bad ones, we should turn everything upside down and start to think like proper mechanics.

We're supposed to study a system's design first, learn what should be happening, and only then diagnose and fix it if needed. We don't interpret your soul. We make it work.

You can mix our table of 16 patterns with CBT, bait-therapy, demystified Jungian archetypes, and even statistical mind games in the same session if the job requires that. It's fine. Every tool has a purpose. What's not fine is projecting your intuitive feelings onto the bleeding machine.

Not all "defenses" are defenses. Don't trust the duck!

When talking to the patients with major psychiatric diseases, the first thing you notice is how they dislike their pills. Medicine makes you feel worse. Head becomes puffy, fuzzy, and it's hard to think. That's what they say. All of them.

What if they're not wrong? If a hundred patients in a row say the same thing, then maybe they're onto something. Let's take a look at antidepressants and antipsychotics. What do they actually do?

Both groups of drugs target data channels. These are attempts to perform man-in-the-middle attacks on the brain. Information is being transferred through pathways by neurotransmitters, and we're trying to intervene in the least delicate way possible.

Antidepressants work by flooding the system with noise. There are several approaches, but in all of them we force bits of information to re-appear in the channels in a chaotic fashion.

Concentration of neurotransmitters goes up, doctors celebrate, but new data in there isn't well-structured. It's a mess. Will it stop you from making bad decisions? Maybe. Will it make you think clearly? Definitely not. In computer science we even have a term for this. Garbage in, garbage out (GIGO).

Antipsychotics block signals from reaching their destination. It can prevent you from using damaged sequences of information when making decisions, but it also prevents you from using just about everything else, leaving you "empty-headed".

Also, as expected, things don't disappear just because you blocked signals from entering some part of the system. Data spills around, gets in adjacent channels, and rogue signals start to cause all sorts of side effects all over the brain.

For decades, we exploited more or less the same approaches. It's quite obvious that they are questionable. They can't work as a precise cure for anything in principle, yet here we are.

I think that we should pay more attention to the logic behind our medicine. Levels of neurotransmitters and electrical activity are interesting things to discuss in vacuum, but we're always looking at the processing of information.

Hardware. Software. Chemistry. It's all the same at the end.

P.S.: In other words, instead of compromising the whole system with a hope that "it'll be better next time", we can concentrate on debugging, fixing unresolvable conflicts in data, and developing precise medical interventions to fix wiring issues and maintain specific switches if they get stuck or wobble too much.

When we deal with emotions, or, better to say, with different states of the system, we inevitably understand that some of them are temporary by design. They can't last.

This opens a door into a field of interventions that we may call bait-therapies. We incite the system, trigger some active response, and wait until it ends. After that, there is a gap, a period of time when the same response can't be reactivated.

That gap can be abused in various ways. You let a person cry a river, until one can't cry no more, and then you talk. Or you make a ritual doll that represents somebody, cut its eyes, rip the head off, and throw it into a fire.

Yes, it brings peace.

The person gets into a position where cold-blooded logic is the only thing that works, because everything else is either recharging or waiting for other kinds of maintenance. This is when you may suggest something and make a discussion.

Some psychological approaches, like gestalt-therapy or art-therapy, use this trick when working with traumas. You allow patients to live within a simulation, talk to an empty chair or draw an imaginary world, and experience various extreme states of their psyche. After that, they get a relief of sorts and learn something. We may see that as a successful session.

However, this trick doesn't solve any problems. It just allows you to exaggerate a part of your patterns of behavior without interacting with real everyday environments. It's not enough.

The pattern repeats. It's a loop. Fish bites the same bait again and again. You can stay in therapy for years with zero progress, just replaying the same situation over and over.

If you want to get out, you have to do stuff. Not just live through your emotions. It's a meaningless goal. They'll get back at the next iteration of the loop anyway.

Break a pattern. Choose another one. Get a new set of values. Build a new life. The bait will become irrelevant at some point. You don't hide or deny it. No. You just don't get triggered anymore. You have other priorities now.

This exit from therapy should be obvious, and yet I see tons of examples where people don't get there. Changes that they get from their therapy don't last. They get back with a new disturbing story that looks almost like the one before.

Your job as a therapist isn't baiting. Make sure that your client is changing and not just getting that temporary peace of mind. That apparent stability is a bait for you.

Recently, I witnessed an interesting discussion about natural selection. The vast majority of participants supported an idea that depression provides benefits to our species. We were selected to be able to have it from time to time.

The main argument was that an organism in depression saves energy and reduces risks by not participating in dangerous endeavors and interactions. It's a simple survival strategy.

There are bits of evidence that support that story. It seems convincing. However, if we interpret it from the perspective of my work, we may come to a different conclusion.

Complexity of systems increases with time. Combinations. Mutations. You know the drill. It's a long process. We get our 16 patterns of behavior eventually. We can do various things and can work efficiently in different circumstances.

Flexibility of behavior may or may not be beneficial on its own, but it becomes extremely important when we build the next levels of complexity. Groups. Societies. Civilization. We need all our patterns of behavior to construct the world we know.

There is an issue, or course. Sophisticated system of patterns requires switches. Small and fragile. They can be destroyed by force. They can get stuck or start to wobble. This is where we get a variety of malfunctions, depression included.

Psychiatric diseases are inevitable at our level. We weren't selected to have one disease or another because it's cool to be sick. We just became too complex to avoid them.

Species with simple designs, with one pattern to follow, if any, would be immune to depression. No switches. No problems. However, their civilization will require symbiotic connections between many species with different default patterns.

Technically, it should be possible, but these species will have to share their communication protocols and synchronize their long-term goals. It's a tricky task, especially for biological systems that depend on random mutations in their evolution. Chances won't be in their favor.

I think we should be careful when speculating about natural selection and the benefits of having diseases. It's easy to convince ourselves of something because it sounds good, but completely miss the engineering aspects of that phenomenon.

It's much more interesting to design different species from scratch and see all the technical limitations. It becomes obvious that sometimes systems are vulnerable by design.

In the fields of psychology and psychiatry, we have a lot of problems right now. Causes of major diseases are not really determined. Symptoms are vague and hard to differentiate. Treatment often looks like an alchemy. Maybe it will work. Maybe not. Who knows. Maybe another will work.

Psychological theories allow some very loose interpretations, where chemical processes behind the processes in the psyche should be very precise. In neurochemistry, we have a lot of scattered pieces of information, but they don't explain how all these things work together.

We definitely need some fresh eyes. So I started a project that is supposed to bring new approaches, new ways to interpret collected information, to the world of psychiatry. I use ideas from completely different fields, from ancient philosophy to modern computer science and engineering, to shake things up a bit.

The first part of the project was published as an evolutionary theory of behavior. This is a framework that connects parts of the psyche, basic impulses, observable patterns of behavior, diseases, and related effects in social groups, attaching everything to one purely mechanical model.

The second part of the project is a search for this model, or a similar one, in the field of neurochemistry. Instead of trying to explain every little fact on its own, I look for a similar graph of connections between things. My main hypothesis is that if we can connect things from the outside, a similar graph of connections should be somewhere on the inside. If we find it, it will show us the exact places where the diseases begin.

This is a long shot.

I know.

But it's worth trying.