Literally yes, antipsychotics dramatically altered the course of my life and my becoming as a growing personality. I wouldn't say "ruined" because a lot of soul, insight, and poetic-consciousness still shone through the cracks in me, even while drugged through the entirety of my adolescence pretty much against my will, however I also understand that constantly going on and off different classes of heavy drugs at a period when my brain was still developing genuinely screwed with my acquisition of normal, developmental, psychosocial nuances, and probably changed my structural brain development in many ways, too. I ruminate about it, regret it, but I also know that I cannot change anything and must instead give justice to the me that never was by moving forward in the fullness of hope. Anyway.
All this is just an anticipated outcome of a psychiatry in its own "adolescence" it history, having progressed past the psychopharmacological revolution and subsequently forgetting / revising everything that was understood in the past. Psychiatry is an incredibly young science, but also a novel power structure within medicine. It is scary how much of a dearth there is about everyday prescribing tactics that millions of people are subjected to. The FDA Labels give basically no long term information and even with the extreme bias toward the drug institutions and corps. are still extremely instructive in what they reveal. It is nothing less than a massive society-wide experiment. Polypharmacy, drugs given to infants, children, and teens, people kept on tranquilizers for decades until their brain literally atrophies and rots, combinations, variables, drugs plus electroshock, people getting hundreds and hundreds of electroshock sessions in a lifetime, cumulative exposure to different drugs... a true poverty of knowledge and an erasure of consequences. All while choice, autonomy, and consent, mean literally nothing.
This is true, and I've long thought the same thing. A lot of people who full-on endorse the NPC theory report the same kinds of interactions, and I can't help but think that a lot of them just genuinely are not using the proper interpersonal skills or social contexts to weave into this kind of conversation. Then they are reporting their lack of success in having meaningful talks with someone they may not even know well as evidence of their lack of humanness. That itself is worrying, and irritatingly ironic.
In general, I see the NPC theory (which, let's be honest, is not a "theory" but a memeified version of classic philosophic epistemology thought experiments) as half wrong and half true. It hails from solipsism (itself probably born out by the Cartesian "revolution"), the Philosophical Zombie thought experiment, Chinese Typist problem, AI discourse, bits of neo-Platonic thought like aspects of Gnosticism or hermetics, et c. So these each are all going to be more coherent and grounded didactic means of exploring the problem as an intellectual problem instead of a 4chan ideologue trap.
I can definitely see and feel why the NPC meme is seductive to certain people. It is attractive as an explanation for absurdities of (esp. modern) human behavior while also stripping vast swaths of people of their status as human, which reinforces the ego of the one who endorses it. But it also intuitively feels tempting to believe, which is where the half-truth is, and what I'll get to. It is a plain fact I'll brush out of the way right now that the average human is fucking retarded. And, yes, before you bring up IQ, I almost certainly am learned in psychometric more than you, and I understand how the bell curve and Sigma / standard deviations work, and everything else. But it is true. 100 IQ is retard-tier. Any casual assay of everyday human behavior will affirm this -- which is a big part of why NPC meme seems so attractive. The problem with the memeified theory -- which, by the way, to bring it back to my first response on meds and psychiatry, this is also the biggest issue with psych diagnoses as concepts -- is
that while it may apply to large groups and subsets of populations, it fails and breaks down when one attempts to extrapolate the label to an individual. Anyone who has ever been in a new and unfamiliar social milieu and then poised themselves as receptive and earnest as possible to listen to the stories of many different people and tried to understand them compassionately will know this. Really, what I mean is, anyone who has pushed beyond the sphere of normal interactions to listen to and affirm the humanity of unfamiliar people with untold tales. You should be able to know this.
So, "NPC's" may work when describing groups and populations, but there is no such thing as "Am I an NPC?" or sorting and classing "This person is an NPC!" or otherwise. It's also a bit like "normie" or being normal in that way. Everyone agrees in everyday conversations that there is such a thing as "normal people" when talking about them, yet we also know that it would be a fool's errand to searh out for a picturesque "normal person" or decide whether some persons fit to "normal" or not. These work and derive their effect as concepts, constructs, abstract and movable.
View attachment 27513
Finally, the very important thing to mention though, is Polish psychiatrist (Catholic, tortured by Nazis) Kazimierz Dąbrowski (alias, DA BROoooo-SKI!!1!1!) who developed a theory of mental development that runs totally counter to the mainstream psychiatric beliefs today. The idea of "positive disintegration" also happens to explain the NPC idea very well. I highly recommend everyone here to read his seminal book,
Positive Disintegration, as it is very short, simple to digest, and truly revolutionary as a way to think about mental health, to heal oneself, and to view character and its development. Basically, his idea was that
the large majority of society is made up of people at a personality state of "primary integration", sometimes a level taking on the color of a psychopath, but more often, just meaning: people who experience little internal conflict (as opposed to external), whose values and motives are not questioned, and are completely handed down from and in accord with the values / motives that are either biologically imperative or socially prescribed.
View attachment 27514
The other conjecture of his thesis is that:
the minority of people (often people marked by a distinct "over-excitability" as children or people prone to nervousness and melancholy)
who do break out of this primary integration experience a disintegration process of neurosis, 'psychoneurosis', and/or psychosis, which is almost always misunderstood
as illness / disorder, but which can be called
'positive' because the state of disintegration is absolutely needed for the
disarticulation, transformation, and building-up of the true potential of human personality --
secondary integration -- a state which is responsible for all great genius and nudges forward. The idea is that mainstream psychiatry completely misinterprets the disintegration process as illness, because it is painful and often ugly. They often completely ignore developmental context and shut down the question of "Where could this process be going?" Yet, Dabrowski argues that by considering the temporal direction, by taking into account that the uninterrupted, eventual outcome is a return to integration yet with the wisdom of
true personhood, a state which claims the greatest movements of the human race, one will understand how crucial the process and levels of "disintegration are.
A person may be stuck on unilevel disintegration, and wallow in anguish and descent. Or, they might move through a hierarchical scrutiny and arrangement of values in "spontaneous" multilevel disintegration, where they are most characterized by self-doubt, strong waves of shame and guilt, anxiety, and discontent. Yet this confusion directs a purpose, as yet unseen. This moves backward or forward on to organized multilevel disintegration, where superimposed values / motives are still held in tension, but are chosen in a conscious, concerted effort -- the ideal is decided on, elected, made and built, for and by oneself. The attainment of this is a circle back to the beginning, a stable structure, a wholeness of
secondary integration, the truest and fated birthright of being human.
View attachment 27512
What is crucial, though, and most relevant, is that only a minority of the population will ever even break out of "primitive / primary integration" in the first place. Those that are likely to are a small slice of the pie, those marked by the omen of "overexcitability" in the aesthetic, emotional, imaginative, sensory, creative, intellectual, or kinaesthetic domain. Dabrowski links this enhanced sensitivity in any domain in childhood / adolescence to the development of what he calls
the "third factor" as a kind of drive or pulsing force that triggers the breakdown or disintegration out of the majority in the first place and directs and fuels its advancement and progress through trials on to the level of secondary integration (where only, say, 1% of humans actually attain to, often those the majority exiles at first). He calls it the "third factor" because in a schema of "nature versus culture / nurture", he says, it would be "the third" beyond the overdetermined and inherited domains of biology or societal training. So, it is the domain beyond that, what the soul is undeniably called to, what she becomes, and what it decides for oneself.
Anyway, if you read all the way down to here, fucking thanks, and hope you got something relevant out of it at least. Sorry.