Guest Post by David Stephen
The campaigns to end stigma and discrimination about mental health are an important step towards care. There are articles about men’s mental health and how the experience of mind can be heavy for men, with evidence along academic performance, economic burdens, substance abuse and suicides.
How Does the Brain Decide Mental Health for Men?
For men, opening up is better, but there are responsibilities that cannot be relinquished. Talking may ease the mind, but having to face more, and worse, deepens the struggle—making some see little benefit with talking.
Talking is also not unusual if the candidate with whom to discuss is right. This may have led some to certain corners or crowds, finding acceptance and ‘support’.
There are several suggestions about men’s mental health that point to factors like social, environmental, economic, political, upbringing and so forth, excluding the key factor, the brain. The brain is what determines every moment of mental health or problem, with or without an aligning external factor.
The brain is the ultimate support for men, where explanations of why, what, how and where can be developed on academic performance, economic burdens, societal expectations, substance abuse and suicides.
It is common to have experiential contradictions, like feeling differently from what is obtainable in the immediate environment. It is also normal to have experiential matches with the environment.
It may often seem like the environment decides for the brain, but the brain decides what the experience should be at any moment.
The same word that should help or hurt may not in one moment, but do some other time. The thing that should cause fear may not at one time, but do at another. The things that should be okay for everyone may not be, for all, at all times.
It is the brain that says, by its constants.
Constants in the brain are things unique to it. The constants build or construct higher constants for experiential interactions.
There are specific cell types and molecules in the brain. They construct quantities and properties that decide what is experienced.
It is these quantities and properties that explain why anything feels the same or different from the external, why something feels like a burden or not, why substances seem to help or not, or why addiction festers and so on.
In the brain, theoretically, quantities are thoughts. Properties are memory, with extensions including feelings and reactions.
It is the relay of quantities to what properties and the degree that say what that experience is, for work, school, habit, interest, mood, cravings and so on.
This is how the brain should be understood for the basis of male’s mental health, as a direct approach away from saying solve this about school, or work, when those would still become subject to constants in the brain that may express delight for some, or depression for others, at any moment.
In brain science, it is established that all senses converge at the thalamus, except for smell that does at the olfactory bulb. They are both hubs for sensory processing or integration before relay to the cerebral cortex for interpretation.
It is theorized that sensory integration or processing is into a uniform unit, quantity or identity, which is thought or its form. It is what becomes the version of senses to the brain. Anything external exists in the form of thought to the brain.
It is what is used for thinking, memories, inner speech, subvocalization, imagination and so forth.
Interpretation is propounded to be knowing, feeling and reaction. Knowing is memory, where thoughts are stored in large and small forms. Large stores are collections of what is common between small stores.
For example, delight, depression, anxiety, fear, desire, hate, love, hurt, sleep, pain and so on, are all large stores. Small stores collect the most unique information on any particular thing.
Small stores relay in sequences to large stores. Small stores can be prioritized or pre-prioritized. They have splits that decide expectations or anticipation. There is also a principal spot for large stores where just one goes.
Mental Health
It is the quantity—thought, relaying in a transient store to resident large stores in memory that decides what is experienced in that moment. It could match with inputs or not, it could also happen without inputs, but the destination determines experience.
It is the property acquired that means stability or not. There are emptiness, loneliness, boredom, dissatisfaction, violence, anger, abuse, intoxication, misery and so on, that are properties that can be acquired in memory. There can be thought on anything, but it is the properties acquired, by degree that sets off experiences.
There are those who don’t find a good or early substitute from a property they once had for balance, causing them to go off.
This can become a mental health kit for men, more of a DIY, to know the mind for quantities and properties, to guide thoughts and actions against risky and consequential properties.
In moving mental health forward, there is more to be done for the architecture of the internal world, than just seeking complex changes of the external world, which would still remain subject to the determinations of the internal world.
See more breaking stories here.
