Male’s Health in the Objective of Stressology – Beyond the Usual

The second type – is the so-called “standard events” – life stresses occurring within the regular life flow: entering higher educational institution, moving, marriage, birth of children, retirement. Such factors can go unnoticed, but can become pathogenic, stressful.

The third type is “non-standard events” – disease, psychic trauma, criminal prosecution, participation in combat operations. All these factors as a rule injure a person and can result in one of the versions of post-stress disorders.

The afore-mentioned factors that affect mental health are objective. But mental health of modern males is affected by much more subjective factors, such as “self-concept” and “self-control” or the ability to govern himself. People do not often ask themselves who they really are. Each considers his personal definition so natural that he cannot imagine to what extent everything he does (consciously and sometimes unconsciously) or how he percepts himself is conditioned by the conception that he created about himself.

On the example of some literary heroes, it is easier to understand what is being discussed. The Chekhov’s story “The Death of a Clerk” is about a poor clerk who accidentally sneezed in the theater on the bald head of the General sitting in front. Having apologized, he could not help thinking about that “shameful” fact and his whole life turned into sheer misery, which led him to death. Among the novels of Cervantes there is a story about the man who was sure that was made of glass. When somebody approached him he began to scream and pleaded to keep away so that not to break him by chance. He walked along the very middle of the street with fear looking at the roofs scared if a tile would suddenly tear off and fall on him. Once when a wasp sat on his neck, he did not dare either to hit or shake it off out of fear that he would break himself. He refused to have anything tough like meat or fish and going to bed wrapped in straw.

It is artistically exaggerated but a vivid example of the role of self-appraisal and “self-concept” in life, person’s behavior and activity. Mentally healthy people as a rule perceive themselves positively. They are able to aware and acknowledge their shortcomings, identify themselves, perceive their individuality. In their minds there is a temporary succession in the form of memories of the past, awareness of the present moment and look to the future. And they are able to overcome even seemingly impossible.

The brightest illustration to our narration about man as a volitional conscious and self-directed person can be the biography of the outstanding Austrian philosopher and psychologist Viktor Frankl. He appeared in a concentration camp almost of his own free will. Frankl, as a successful doctor-psychotherapist, could take an advantage of his American visa. But he remained in the Nazi Austria together with his parents and brother who did not have such a visa. As a result they all ended up in a concentration camp.

The Dachau Concentration Camp.

One day, Frankl completely exhausted walked through the snow, not feeling frozen legs and thought that that was the real end to everything. And then he, barely alive, created a situation in the head that clarified the meaning of all his previous and present sufferings: as if fellow-psychologists entrusted him with the task to conduct participant observation of the psychology of people in the concentration camp! And when this horror is over, he will report on this theme at the World Congress of Psychologists in a black suit and bow tie. And when he imagined this, he had strength to live on against all the odds. He survived and after the concentration camp he lived for more than fifty years, having become a truly world-famous psychologist and philosopher. And his book about the life in a concentration camp was declared by the USA Congress Library one of 10 books that had the greatest impact on Americans.

It is a vivid example of how a person, changing his view on “here and now”, looking at the situation from the other side, mentally constructing a new “psychic reality” is able to survive even in the hell. Perhaps more than once on the pages of this book we will repeat Frankl’s words “If there is something to live for, one can bear any how”. Often it is really impossible to change and leave the psychotraumatic situation, and then the only way is to create a favorable situation in your thoughts; to design a situation in which what is happening would have some meaning, at least the meaning of sacrifice “for someone, for something; to attach meaning to what is happening”.

The second important condition for mental health is the ability to control oneself – self-control. That is to control your thoughts, feelings and actions, not to yield to the power of your drives, desires or emotions, to keep them within the socially acceptable limits, to resist the pressure of others, to be able to establish and maintain relationships with surrounding people, to hold back angers, postpone funs if necessary. A common source of self-control violation is excessive excitement and strain, fatigue. Some people when experiencing violent anger, fright or enthusiasm have spasms, foam on the lips, involuntary urination, sometimes defecation. With the loss of self-control the memory does not fix person’s behavior and state, everything happens at an unconscious level, and therefore, a person does not remember what he did, when was “outraged”. Decline of self-control often occurs in conditions of collective excitation – in the crowd, in a riot, in mass panic. Strong emotional reactions remove self-control and increase person’s suggestibility. In a person who is not able to cope with internal strain, it can erupt like a volcano in the form of aggressive impulsive action. In a crowd people are so absorbed in each other and the object of hate that they lose personal identity and commit acts of unnatural inner “self” that later becomes a source of internal stress.

When determining mental health in each specific case, it is necessary to take into account peculiarities of ethnic culture, existing customs, religious orientation, behavior patterns of the society, age, situation. “You can diagnose a broken leg not knowing the patient’s cultural background, but to call the Indian boy psychopath because he says that has visions in which believes is a great risk. In a peculiar Indian culture the ability to experience visions and hallucinations is considered as a special gift, blessings of spirits and the ability to summon them is deliberately stimulated as something attaching prestige to their owner” (I. Kon).

Ignorance of the language and linguistic characteristics can lead to various incorrect diagnostic conclusions. Thus, after the Spitak earthquake the majority of those who experienced first hours and days in Leninakan were in the state of psychogenic trance, emotional shock. Later telling about themselves, they noted with surprise that had felt nothing. They were looking for an explanation for this in the fact that possibly helicopters scattered some powders so that they should not have gone mad. In the scientific publications of visiting specialists this was regarded as mass psychosis with hallucinations.

In modern person intrapersonal conflicts play a great, if not a leading role: discontent with a wife, work, chosen specialty, place of residence and so on. This discontent often becomes a source of irritation, strain, hot temper, bad mood. Frequently it is a subjective evaluation of reality, personality nature of intrapersonal conflict. In this case there is a great probability of its chronicity resulting in one of versions of deadaptation disorder of mental health. To live in harmony with yourself is the main criterion for providing mental health.

LIVE IN CONSENT WITH YOURSELF IS A STATE, PROVIDING NOT ONLY MENTAL AND PHYSICAL HEALTH, BUT ALSO A FEELING OF FULL VALUE

OF LIFE AND ITS SENSE

Ada Tadevosyan at Noravank, 2015.

SYSTEM ADAPTATION APPROACH
TO THE PROBLEM OF HEALTH-ILLNESS

The story of life is not more than a movement

of consciousness veiled by morphology.

Teilhard de Chardin

Nonlinear open systems, which include a person, at all levels are carriers of the universal evolution, which ensures that life will continue its motion into increasingly new dynamic complexity regimes. Microcosm and macrocosm are aspects of a single evolution and human evolution is its important component, and the most complex one. The author of the theory of nonlinear open systems Ilya Prigogine points out that human systems are considered as creative worlds with incomplete information and changing values rather than as “mechanisms” or something from the standpoint of equilibrium. With such an approach, human values and meanings rather than being ignored, perhaps, for the first time reveal their true role – to act as parameters of order, opposing the destabilizing effects generated by the social system itself. In addition, there is such a level of research systems, when the not very popular word “system” can be quite adequately replaced by the more euphonic concept of “integrity”.

Most of the systems that are of interest to us, are open – they exchange energy or matter (it could be added: and information) with the environment. Biological and social systems undoubtedly belong to open systems, which means that any attempt to understand them within the framework of a mechanistic model is deliberately doomed to failure. V. E. Klochko (2014), the author of the theory of psychological systems, underlines that he studies a person with his capabilities in the environment in which he lives. The human psyche, according to his point of view, does not “reflect the objective world” but allows a person to create his own reality while exchanging with the external environment. All open systems live by exchanging information and energy with the outside world. But it is not a random exchange, but rather a self-selection based on the principle of correspondence. The interaction occurs where compliance is found as the reason for the selective interaction of a person with the environment targeted at finding in the world something “his own, which has not yet become his own”. Where there is a correspondence, a meaning is born. Thus the sense reality is born.

“Integrity” is the unity of man and environment. If we use the terminology of I. Prigogine, then we can say that all systems are complex and contain subsystems that constantly fluctuate. Sometimes a separate fluctuation or a combination of fluctuations can become (as a result of a positive feedback) so strong that the organization that had existed before cannot withstand and collapses. At this critical moment in the bifurcation point it is practically impossible to predict in which direction the further development will occur: will the state of the system become chaotic or will it shift to a new, more differentiated and higher level of order (I. Prigogine, 1986). Having reached the bifurcation point (fork), the essence of which is more vividly illustrated by a fairy-tale knight standing at the crossroads, dissociation (from Latin: dissociation – separation) of a single path for 1–2–3… takes place.

V. Vasnetsov, “The Knight at the Crossroads”.

Dissociation is the universal principle of development both in the physical and biological world. Dissociation in the field of psychosociology is specific, since in the bifurcation point the choice can be “random” or be defined by the Logos according to the principle “might be so, might be differently”.

The further presentation of the material is based on the two, from our point of view, fundamental provisions defining life, human health and illness.

7. The leading role belongs to the pervasive evolution as a result of the implementation of the basic function of living systems (including humans) – function of adaptation in a constantly changing world. The mechanism of dissociation (splitting), which is universal since provides adaptation and development of systems of both biological (SBA) and psychological adaptation (SPA) of a person should be recognized as the main mechanism of adaptation.

8. Dissociation is particularly evident in the psyche, the evolution of which seems to occur according to the principle “maybe this way and maybe some other”, creating the impression of dominance of “randomness” in psychology.

This principle is based on the theory of randomness and its role in the evolution. However after discovery of the Einstein’s theory of relativity (three dimensional space + time), “randomness” as groundlessness loses its meaning. The frequency of “randomness” in nature – as “coincidence” depends on the category of time during which we are searching for causal relationships in a three-dimensional space, causing the emergence of something new. The narrower the diameter of the considered temporal causal world, the more “randomnesses” there are. As the considered causal space-time expands, the more open become causations of a particular phenomenon and emergence of something new. Clearly appears “PATTERN OF RANDOMNESS”.

Moreover, it is not only in physics, but especially in psychology. The pattern of randomness in the field of psychology and psychopathology opened to us Freud, who wrote that adult problems are rooted in his early childhood, discovered the role of early childhood psychic trauma on the subsequent formation of personality, behavior and activity.

Dissociation. In psychiatry and psychology dissociation means decay.

In psychology, this mechanism is referred to the protective mechanisms of the psyche, meaning “detachment” from personal unpleasant experiences that is manifested by different memory changes (amnesias). In psychiatry, analogue of dissociation has long been known under the name of splitting – schizis. Hence the name of the mental disease schizophrenia. Schizophrenia (from the ancient Greek. Σχίζω – Split and φρήν – mind, intellect).

Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939) for the first time used the term in 1908 when describing schizophrenia. Splitting was considered a specific sign of this mental disease. One of the founders of the scientific approach to research of dissociative phenomena, an American psychiatrist Morton Prince (1909–1975) characterized dissociation as “a basic regulating element of the normal neuro-mental mechanism”.

Van der Kolk, Van der Hart and Marmar (2000) include the term “dissociation”, in general terms, to the processes of information processing and determine the dissociation as a way of its organization, as break of connections between certain areas of the contents of memory, their relative separation and independence. Rycroft (1995) in the “Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis” defines dissociation as 1) a state at which two or more psychic processes co-exist being not connected or integrated; 2) a protective process leading to a particular state. West (1967) defined dissociation as a “psychophysiological process whereby flows of information incoming, stored and outgoing are actively deviated from integration with its usual or expected associations”. Many forms of dissociative states and their prevalence give the reason to believe that they occupy an important place in the functioning of the psyche and possess great value in terms of adaptation to changing environmental conditions.

To imagine the range of dissociative manifestations, contemporary researchers both theorists and experimenters use the concept of dissociative continuum. According to this concept, the whole spectrum of dissociative phenomena is located along a certain continuum, at one end of which are placed normal symptoms of dissociation, often encountered in everyday life, while at the other end of this continuum are “heavy” forms of dissociative psychopathology, observed in patients with dissociative disorders, post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD), schizophrenia.

Normal dissociative processes in daily life are manifested as absent-mindedness, scattering or absorption in any occupation. More abnormal states, but not yet symptoms, are trance states, for example, with deep hypnosis.

The problem of dissociation with its manifestation variations becomes a leader in understanding the changes in the psyche, determining the key tendency in shaping the mentality, world-view and behavior in a person’s life. It is one of the leading mechanisms in the development of a variety of clinical manifestations. Studying the dynamics of dissociative relationships, in fact, is the core of psychoanalytic counseling.

Interdisciplinary approach. The desire to examine a modern male’s life in an attempt to understand the cause-effect relationship between the factors determining the current state of males’ health and their relatively early mortality compared with females’, logically led to the choice of an interdisciplinary approach that allowed us to consider the studied issue from the positions of psychology, physiology, neurophysiology, neuroendocrinology.

Humanistic psychology or the “third force” in psychology as a scientific trend emerged in the fifties of the twentieth century opposing itself to the two already existing trends – behaviorism (behavior psychology) and psychoanalysis. It treats a person as an open self-developing system that has phylo- and ontogenetic history. In each of us there lives a great story – the history of the life of mankind, about which C. Jung figuratively has written that behind each of us, as behind a running wave, the pressure of the ocean of world history is felt. Small history is an individual real life story of a specific individual. In key moments of each history there occur quantum leaps determining subsequent development of a person. Thus, in the great history these are development and improvement of the higher nervous activity (HNA), appearance and development of the second signal system, consciousness, mental adaptation; in the small history these are age crises, overcoming mental traumas. These crucial points (critical periods) are like “waking-up experience”, refreshing perception and behavior after which a person “acquires new space, new skin, new start and new life; even at the age over 75” (I. Yalom, publ. Eksmo, Moscow, 2014, p. 511).

Now scientists are engaged in “a riddle of neuroevolution” with its basic question: “How in the ways of biological evolution have emerged mind and human brain?” The problem of neuroevolution connects biology to psychology. And today, scientists realized that the main efforts of the evolution of the animal world have been spent just to create the human brain. They found the genes responsible for the key functions of the brain – learning and memory formation. It is in the course of natural selection, which affects functions and structures increasing survival or reproduction, that population changes in the gene frequencies associated with these functional systems occur.To understand the psyche as a function of certain dynamic organization of the brain structures, it is necessary to understand how these structures and their organization emerged in the course of biological evolution. It is part of the problem of morphological evolution. By the molecular cloning techniques it became possible to calculate that out of approximately 80–100 thousand genes composing the genome of the rat about 50–60 thousand are expressed in the brain, the expression of more than half of them being brain-specific. In the usual state of the brain these genes are “silent” but as soon as there is something that requires memorizing, they are activated and then, having done their work become “silent” again. But unlike other somatic organs, many of these genes are activated in the brain again in the situations of novelty and learning.

The two phases of the evolutionary cycle – maturation and adaptive modifications of functional systems providing survival, are closely related at the level of gene expression regulation mechanisms. In fact, the processes of morphogenesis (biology) and development never cease in the brain, but only pass under the control of cognitive and volitional processes (psychology). This similarity makes you think about the intense evolutionary interactions and transitions between these two domains. There is the reason to believe that it is the study of these interactions that can answer one of the most complex and challenging issues of modern science – how in the course of phylogenesis the brain became the organ that determines not only behavior, activity, health, illness, but also the evolution of genome.

Just a few decades ago, scientists believed that the brain is unchanged and “programmed” and that most forms of its damage are incurable. The book by Norman Doidge “Brain Plasticity. Startling facts about how thoughts can change the structure and function of the brain” (translation, publ. Eksmo, Moscow; monograph, 2011, p. 539) – is a remarkable and hopeful description of infinite capacity of the human brain to adapt. Dr. Doidge, a prominent psychiatrist and researcher, was struck by the transformations occurred with his patients.

Discovery of the fact that thoughts are able – even in elderly age – to change the brain structure and functions, is the greatest achievement in neurology for the past four centuries.

Norman Doidge suggests a revolutionary view on the human brain. He talks about brilliant scientists, promoting yet a new science of neuroplasticity, and about astonishing successes of people whose lives they have changed. He gives examples of stroke patients recovering their facilities; the case of a woman born with a half of the brain, which reprogrammed itself to perform the functions of the missing half; stories of overcoming learning disabilities and emotional disorders, increasing the level of intelligence and restoration of the aging brain. His first reports contradicted the generally accepted view about the brain and its functioning, so he began studying the new science – neuroplasticity. He wrote: “The idea that the brain is capable of changing its own structure and functioning thanks to the person’s thoughts and actions – is the most important innovation in our ideas about the human brain since its anatomy and work of its substantive structural unit – neuron was first outlined in general terms. This is a revolution!

Revolution associated with the brain neuroplasticity, among other things, cannot but exert influence on our understanding of how love, sex, grief, relationships with people, education, addictions, culture, technology and psychotherapy are changing our brain…”. But neuroplasticity is capable of forming both flexible and rigid behavior – the phenomenon of “plastic paradox”. Plastic change once occurred in the brain structures as a result of its fixation may interfere with other changes. Only the understanding of both positive and negative impact of plasticity on our brain allows us to fully realize the limits of human capabilities.

His discovery was based on the work of, first of all, Alexander Luria (1902–1977) – famous Russian psychologist, one of the few major theoretical psychologist and experts, well-known in the West. Luria proved the plastic possibilities of “higher mental functions” as far back as in the 40-ies of XX century. During World War II, he worked with a group of colleagues in rehabilitation of wounded with severe brain injuries (contusions and brain injuries). Then the psychologists achieved striking results: completely hopeless and paralyzed people began to move normally, walk and talk. He obtained practical results that were quite expected! They corresponded to the known in the Soviet Union since the 30-ies theoretical developments proving plasticity of brain and psychological functions (the work of physiologists N. A. Bernstein, P. K. Anokhin, brilliant psychologist L. S. Vygotsky, fundamental works on the psychology of S. L. Rubinstein, A. N. Leontiev and others) and only confirmed the psychological concepts in practice. A. R. Luria became the founder of quite a new direction in the world psychology – neuropsychology^[2].

Paul Bach-y-Rita was an American neuroscientist in the middle of the last century, whose most notable work was in the field of neuroplasticity. Bach-y-Rita was one of the first to seriously study the idea of neuroplasticity (although it was first proposed in the late 19th century), and to introduce sensory substitution as a tool to treat patients suffering from neurological disorders.

Paul Bach-y-Rita was one of the first who has discovered that our sensory systems have a plastic nature, and that in case of damage of any of them, the other from time to time can take over its functions. Paul Bach-y-Rita called this process “sensory substitution” and developed methods for bringing it into operation, as well as devices that give us “extrasensory perception”. Having discovered the possibility of the nervous system adaptation to the vision via chamber of eye, not the retina, Bach-y-Rita gave blind people the greatest hope for the emergence of retinal implants that can be introduced into the eye surgically. This is the ability to adapt and suggests that the brain is plastic, i.e. is able to reorganize its sensory-perceptual system. In 1977 by means of a new technique it was proven that (contrary to the Brock’s statement that a person speaks with the help of the left hemisphere) 95 % of healthy right-handed persons processed the language information in the left hemisphere, while the remaining 5 % – in the right one. 70 % of lefties process this information in the left hemisphere, but 15 % do so with the help of the right hemisphere, and another 15 % use for this both hemispheres (S. P. Springer and G. Deutsch, 1999).

Barbara and Joshua Cohen in 1980 opened the Arrowsmith school in Toronto. Then, very few have taken the idea of neuroplasticity and believed that the brain can be trained as muscles, giving it loads, so the work of Barbara rarely found understanding. She developed various training exercises for different patients. There are exercises for people with disorders of the frontal lobes of the brain. These people differ from others in impulsion, or have difficulty with planning, developing strategies, determining priorities, setting goals and their achievements. They are often considered disorganized, frivolous and incapable of learning from their mistakes; whereas Barbara believes that many of the “flighty” or “unsociable” people have problems with the weakening of certain brain functions. Exercises for the brain transform people’s lives.

Among experts in neuroplasticity with a serious track record in the world of the natural sciences, Mertsenih, to whom belong the boldest statements in this area, is well-known. He believes that in treatment of serious illnesses such as schizophrenia, brain exercises can be as effective as drugs; that the brain plasticity exists since the birth of the person until his death; and that a radical improvement in cognitive^[3] functioning – how we learn, think, perceive and remember – is possible even in old age.

“The brain does not just learn; it always “learns to learn”. In the view of Merzenich, our brain is not a soulless vessel that we fill; it is more like a living being, able to grow and change due to proper nutrition and training. Before him, the brain was regarded as a complex mechanism that has severe limitations in terms of memory, speed of information processing and intelligence. Merzenich proved the fallacy of these ideas. He came to the idea that, perhaps, plasticity is the main property of the brain, which has evolved in the course of evolution to give people a competitive advantage, and that this can be a real “miracle”. His most recent patents were granted to promising techniques enabling to develop language skills without tedious memorization. Merzenich argues that under the right conditions, practicing a new skill can change hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of connections between nerve cells in our brain maps. If you simply perform those dances that learned many years ago, it does not help you to keep the motor cortex in due form. So that your brain can continue to live, you have to learn something really new requiring high concentration. In fact, to introduce human (not an animal) into the study, does not require artificial rewards and punishments. Motivation for learning creates a natural for a person interest to a new, interest in life in general. If such interest does not disappear in adulthood, it serves as a “reward” for full-fledged work of the brain.

In the last decades experimenters actively worked in the same direction. During this time, the laboratories of Rosenzweig and other scientists obtained a lot of data showing that stimulation of the brain causes it to grow virtually by all possible ways. They came to the conclusion that mental training or life in stimulating conditions increases the total volume of the animal cerebral cortex by 5 % and by 9 % – the volume of those regions that are immediately stimulated by training. Trained or stimulated neurons form 25 % more neural branches increasing also the number of connections per neuron and blood supply of the brain.

The results of pathoanatomical studies in humans indicate that training increases the number of neural connections, thereby neurons expand, causing an increase in the brain volume and density.

The method of monitoring brain mapping helped John Kaase and co-workers to overcome the prejudice of specialists against existence of brain plasticity in adults previously disseminated among researchers involved in visual perception. He charted the visual cortex of an adult and then blocked the access to the information incoming from the eye retina. With the re-mapping he managed to demonstrate that only in a few weeks new receptive fields emerged on the map of the damaged area of the cortex. One of the reviewers of the Science rejected the article describing the Kaas study, considering his results impossible. In the end it was published (J. H. Kaas, L. A. Krubitzer, Y. M. Chino, A. L. Langston, E. H. Polley, and N. Blair. 1990. Reorganization of retinotopic cortical maps in adult mammals after lesions of the retina. Science, 248 (4952): 229–31. Merzenich assembled the scientific evidence for plasticity in D. V. Buonomano and M. M. Merzenich. 1998. Cortical plasticity: From synapses to maps. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 21: 149–86.