I’ve come across quite a number of similar statements as the one about brain pruning. Older ones usually plainly allege, that “schizophrenics” are sort of stupid, have a lower IQ than the average, “normal” person. – Does my ego find that offensive??… – The newer one’s talk – more “sophisticatedly”, “scientificly” – about reduced cognitive abilities and increased brain pruning, or brain shrinkage. In both cases the stupidity/reduced cognitive abilities usually are seen as a bio-marker of the “illness”.

It’s easy enough to debunk the research findings, or at least the bio-marker idea, where the studies only involve diagnozed individuals who are in the system, i.e. who are on neuroleptics, since these have been proven to cause brain shrinkage. But when I recently came across an article by a psychologist, that stated these findings could be observed even a long time before the first “psychotic break”, I had a problem, and had to mobilize my cognitive abilities.

The conclusion I jumped to was, very much like yours in this post: stress. Caused by, for instance, dysfunctional communication patterns that make it difficult to find meaning, or significance, in the communicated – thinking of Laing’s mystification and the double bind, of course.

Your post adds quite a lot of interesting aspects to my rather superficial thoughts on the matter, that will need a follow-up.

BTW: My own experiences are very similar to yours. The key was to find and decode the meaning. The “tragic” thing though is, that this also meant becoming quite disillusioned about the world we’re living in. Bateson says, that people who continuously have been exposed to double binds tend to see them everywhere. Read between the lines: even where there are none. Indeed, I do see them everywhere in our culture. Not least in the mh system. Like when the individual is discriminated against by theories that attribute an individual’s reduced cognitive abilities to his/her biology alone, and dismiss any environmental/societal factors as irrelevant. While this discrimination then is called “help”.