Why It's Extremely Likely All Psychiatric Diseases Are Self-Taught

The stack of things a person learns—especially children—is extremely large. It's a stack of billions and billions of things. Some are good, some are bad. Imagine showing up to your family every week to present what you've learned.

Among all those billions of things, you're bound to learn things that aren't beneficial in the long term. These things aren't immediately visible. For instance: you teach yourself not to speak up. You teach yourself to suppress your emotions. You deny your sexuality. You push certain thoughts away. Everybody makes mistakes like that.

The problem is this: these things aren't visible to others. And you're likely to forget them yourself too. You forget that you self-taught (voluntarily or not) those behaviors.

So what happens? They become visible indirectly—but 20 or 30 years later.

• You suppress bad emotions? You also don’t feel the good ones. So you get depressed.

• You control emotions or suppress shame about sexuality? Now you develop an eating disorder.

• You don’t want to feel sadness? Now you have an alcohol problem.