Mathemanica: Chaos Theory as a Descriptor of Bipolar Disorder
 
We can anticipate what a direct linear model will do.  A non-
linear model, though attractor bounded, is complex and
fanciful.  Psychiatry today uses a linear model to describe
human functioning.  Patterns called the mental illnesses are
the result of this linear application to a non-linear system. 
Thom has already suggested schizophrenia as an instance of the
cusp of catastrophe theory.   I'm using popular mathematics to
integrate and transform mood swings.
 
Diagnostic manuals take many pages to identify bipolar
disorders as continuing occasions of melancholy or mania.  My
theme is that a higher order theory takes us beyond the
uncomfortable particulars and proximate causes.
 
Generally accepted practice treats bipolarity with chemistry,
counseling, and censure.  Today, chemicals and electric shock
reset brain parameters to suppress the existing pattern. 
Drugs substitute for the unstable brain's own reordering plan. 
We do not post as liability the evidence that these anti-
experiential medications provoke exacerbations.  We charge
stress and events when drug treatment fails and use more
drugs.
 
Today, both cognitive and interpersonal counseling assume
causal, linear individual responsibility.  Auto-centric ideas
of control and accountability are prominent and the inevitable
reductionism empowers the past.  The approximations of first
order formulas cartoon complex individual people.  
 
A language has to limit and control.   We name the excesses of
our paradigm.  Today, stigma flourishes as nomenclature terms
ego variations grandiose or lost in self-esteem; families,
dysfunctional; relationships, co-dependent; existence,
addictive.  
It doesn't matter if our perceptions are accurate, the primary
goal of any existing system is still to maintain itself as is. 
Close-to equilibrium systems have no real sense of time
because they do not change.  They keep returning to their
attractor.  In far-from-equilibrium states, new systems
continually emerge. 
 
These dissipative structures, like our brains, maintain their
character by remaining open to the flux and flow of their
environment.  A chaotic brain is a healthy brain.  Behaviors
are the results of perturbations that all natural system go
through.  Resultant chaos is a vector to new order.  
 
Human system survival is deeply threatened by seeing a like in
turbulence.  We cannot tolerate our individual or group
distress.  We do not step back to recognize the immanent order
in recurrent instability.  We interfere.
 
We are so frightened that we interfere with force.  We arrest
the process.  We bind in the chaos physically and
pharmacologically.  We transplant a foreign pattern and
disallow rejection.   The turbulence is covered over, but
still there.  Treated least restrictively with anti-action
agents, the chaos eventually evanesces and the returning
disequilibrium is held in fragile balance.  We do not allow
natural process.  Resonances of the cycles of bipolarity are
summed together to total chronicity.  Leftover is the
bewildered customer locked in the mental health unit.
 
Social fabric is sailcloth and gossamer.  Weave in the
filaments of sociology and law.  Class issues, right of
choice, due process, denied competence all add to the threads
of crimes and illnesses.  The system bunches.  We change
spindles at each failure to get desired results.  We regularly
use system survival to define aberration at the expense of the
individual self-solution.  
 
A human life has the same real detail and infinite length as
any fractal.  We force fit a simpler curve by projecting our
own waywardness onto the target group.  Then we say they need
treatment and offer up these-our-deviants in the name of the
larger good.  We gain a great sense of competence from letting
ourselves believe we have controlled the uncontrollable.  We
call this munificence; we nibble of the sacrificial lamb.
 
The large impact of any initial condition in an iterative
system makes the search for local causes only useful in the
near term.  Bifurcation is inevitable; anything can toggle the
switch.  Built in resonance and periodicity swell and curl. 
Manic solitons collide in unassigned probabilities.  We seed
the storms with anti-psychotics.  
 
A complex system not analyzable into parts, chaos is high
order choice.  The form is a non-linear model with an
implicate order that has implicit coherence as a necessary
condition.  The process is extraordinary, exquisite, elegant
and unforeseen.  Irreverently, we overlook the majesty.
 
copyright 1989 sylvia caras
 
 
 
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