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A common event is mentioned in all monotheistic religions; The expulsion of Adam and Eve from heaven… Accordingly, God says to Adam and Eve, “You can do whatever you want, but I forbid you to come near that tree.”

Hearing this, the devil does his devil again and convinces Adam and Eve to approach the forbidden tree, and the first people who taste the forbidden fruit of the forbidden tree are expelled from heaven and world exile; millions of years of human life adventure begins on our planet. Could this dualistic narrative be a flare for something other than obedience, rules, prohibitions, good and bad?

The homo (human) genus evolved from hominid (humanoid) apes called Australopithecus (southern ape) in East Africa 2.5 million years ago. During the next hundreds of thousands of years, homo (human) species such as homo rudolfensis, homo ergaster, homo erectus, homo neanderthalensis began to appear on earth. 200,000 years ago, we, Homo sapiens (thinking man), the only human species that has managed to survive until today, appeared on the stage of history. About 70.00-50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens sapiens (human who can think about what he thinks), which is perhaps the closest homo sapiens subspecies to today’s human, said, in all its majesty, I exist too.

100,000 years ago, more than one homo (human) species existed simultaneously in different parts of the world. So what happened to other human species, how did they disappear from the stage of history? Theories such as adverse climatic changes, assimilation due to interbreeding, or the extinction of one human species by another are discussed with their own arguments to clarify this issue.

Homo sapiens began its first migration out of Africa about 100,000 years ago. Sapiens reaching the European continent encountered another human species, the Neanderthals, and this clash of intelligence versus bodily strength resulted in power, and the Neanderthals were able to successfully defend their habitats against the invasion of sapiens. But this fight was not limited to a single round. Homo sapiens, who left the African lands for the second time about 30,000 years after the first encounter, which we should call homo sapiens 2.0 or homo sapiens sapiens, experienced the second encounter with the neanderthals with a much better equipped mind, a more advanced cognitive structure and, as a result, more advanced warfare techniques. It wasn’t good for Neanderthalensis, and cognitively equipped Homo sapiens sapiens, who could think what he was thinking, swept his fellows from the stage of history. Neanderthals continued to live in the next tens of thousands of years, but this human species, whose habitats were declining, descended from the stage with applause about 30,000 years ago.

Why did the genus Homo become sapiens (thinking) and not only sapiens sapiens (thinking what it thinks)?

Let me warn you, the next part of the article contains a lot of speculative comments.

Let’s go back to the story of Adam and Eve, the apple eaten from the forbidden tree is the last bite they eat in paradise and they are expelled from paradise.

There are various theories as to why the first apes decided to stand up. As for the relevance of these theories to the story of Adam and Eve, think of climate catastrophes that lasted for generations, think of nothing nutritious left on the land, brutal conflicts, starvation and starvation due to dwindling nutrients. Imagine one day an ape straightened up slightly and reached for a nut from a tree relatively low to the ground and, out of desperation, tasted this new food, which wasn’t so bad and satiated its hunger so that it could survive longer and mate and reproduce more than other members of the species. This undeniable advantage on the road will first bring the lightly confirmed genetically forward, and in the course of evolution, the straightening will come to the point of being on good foot. But standing up has its advantages as well as negative consequences. In a standing ape, the center of gravity shifts and evolves the body to develop a narrower pelvis.

Problems when a large-brained ape cub passes through a birth canal that has narrowed over time cause an increase in maternal or infant mortality during childbirth. In the process, mothers and babies who gave birth prematurely (it does not qualify the current concept of premature birth, according to our humanoid ancestors, a baby staying only 38-40 weeks in the mother’s womb is a premature birth) live longer, and thus, they can transfer their genetic heritage related to premature birth or being born to other children. In an environment where it has the opportunity to be passed on to generations, the gestation period is shortened until the homo species from human apes come to the evolution process in the evolutionary process and the human offspring begins to be born prematurely. Many mammal babies can walk, run, and feed after a few small attempts at birth, but human babies need absolute care, especially in the first two years of their life, so human babies are born prematurely. This immature birth leads to the absolute necessity of learning, meaning, being in contact with others, helping each other, establishing social bonds in homosexuality. Meeting this absolute necessity can only happen if you have the mental structure to meet it. The necessity of learning and the need for others in order to survive have turned into a springboard in the evolutionary process, and the human (homo sapiens) who can think about 200,000 years ago and the human (homo sapiens sapiens) who can think 70,000 years ago have evolved.

The adventure of the human species on earth may indeed have begun with Adam and Eve trying to get up to reach for that apple on the tree, because whatever we see as human civilization today we owe it to our cognitive capacity, and our cognitive capacity to that first humanoid ancestor, who was perhaps slightly straightened.

vaginismus; It is a psychological disorder that occurs as a result of the contraction of the muscles at the entrance of the vagina (female sexual organ), characterized by the anxiety caused by the perception of pain, and resulting in difficulty during sexual intercourse or the inability to have sexual intercourse.

Although it is thought that vaginismus is seen more frequently in societies where taboos on female sexuality are felt more intensely, its rate in the general population is not known exactly because it is thought that women with such complaints refrain from applying for treatment, so this disorder is often overlooked. Studies have reported that the rate of vaginismus in the general population is between 3% and 13%. While the most common sexual dysfunction is seen in studies conducted in Western societies, there are findings that vaginismus is the most common sexual dysfunction in studies conducted in our country. This is due to the fact that taboos on female sexuality are felt more intensely in eastern societies like ours than in the west, as we have tried to indicate before.

Vaginismus Causes:

As with all other complaints, organic research should be done in a woman who presents with a feeling of pain during sexual intercourse before the vaginismus findings are discussed psychologically. Many sexual organ diseases can cause a feeling of pain during sexual intercourse in women. Many diseases such as vaginal dryness, uterine prolapse (uterine prolapse), infections, endometriosis, genital tumors can cause pain during sexual intercourse in women. Sometimes, in order to avoid the pain caused by these diseases, the woman may appear reluctant to have sexual intercourse and this may be confused with vaginismus. For this reason, the first thing to do is to investigate whether there is another underlying disease that may cause these complaints.

After understanding that there is no other underlying disease, vaginismus can now be approached psychologically. In fact, the state of anxiety experienced by women with vaginismus; It is not much different from phobic individuals who encounter the feared stimulus. For example, a woman who is afraid or afraid of the perception of pain that she thinks she will experience during sexual intercourse, similar to the avoidance reactions of someone who is afraid of dogs when she sees a dog approaching her, may show similar avoidance reactions by covering her legs or pushing her partner when her partner approaches her during the sexual act. This suggests that vaginismus may actually be a kind of phobic reaction. In women with vaginismus, this anxiety response may occur not only during sexual intercourse but also in situations where external intervention is required, such as gynecological examination.

In a study on the fears of vaginismus patients, 57% of these women feared pain or extreme pain, 18% fear of fragmentation or rupture, 17% fear of penile entrapment or locking, 11% fear of fainting or suffocation. It has been reported that only 18% of those who have a fear of pain or pain experienced a feeling of pain during their first sexual intercourse (1). In another study, it was reported that in women diagnosed with vaginismus, fears such as “the vagina is too small to accommodate the penis and the vaginal walls will rupture during vaginal entry”, “if vaginal entry occurs, they will get a disease”, “get dirty” and “become pregnant” contribute to the development of vaginismus. (2).

Cultural Impact:

Like all other human attitudes and behaviors, sexual attitudes and behaviors are also very open to social and cultural influences. For this reason, the effects of cultural attitudes on the development of sexual dysfunctions cannot be denied. In all human societies, especially in eastern societies, the suppression of female sexuality and virginity have been given great meanings. In male-centered societies, female sexuality can only be perceived as an action performed for the purpose of reproduction and the satisfaction and satisfaction of the spouse. Among the cultural effects that contribute to the occurrence of vaginismus, lack of sexual education, women’s ignorance of their own sexual organs, the exaggerated importance given to the concept of virginity, the fact that sexual experience does not develop gradually but begins with direct sexual intercourse, and taboos in the general understanding of sexuality have an important place. However, nowadays, in western societies, the importance given to virginity before marriage has decreased, and the model of “over-interfering and dependent mother” in child rearing has been gradually moved away; It is seen as a reason why vaginismus is less common than eastern cultures.

In societies where sexuality is seen as a taboo, reliable sources from which individuals can access information about their sexuality are limited. Young individuals who are growing up learn this information from their peers or social media sources whose reliability is questionable, and therefore, the prejudices that develop as a result of sexual ignorance or misinformation; It is clear that excessive anxiety about sexuality, feelings of guilt, unrealistic expectations or fear of failure, and thus sexual dysfunctions. All these opinions; It reveals that a person’s sexual knowledge, religious beliefs, family values and social taboos have a great impact on the emergence of vaginismus.

In the spouses of women with vaginismus disorder, beliefs that they are not wanted and sexually rejected, or feelings of anger, resentment and suspicion can be seen. At this point, it is important to know that vaginismus is a disease, a condition that requires medical intervention like all other diseases. It is not an action that a person does of his own will and will. It is not about whether you want your partner sexually or not, whether you like it or not. The fact that the spouses of women with vaginismus disorder do not personalize this situation is of great importance in terms of both marital relations and the treatment of the disorder due to the pressure it may create on the woman.

Vaginismus Therapy:

Vaginismus is a thought disorder that manifests itself with phobic anxiety symptoms. For this reason, psychotherapy plays a dominant role in the treatment of vaginismus. Vaginismus psychotherapy consists of sex education, teaching sexual exercises and homework. Both of the couples should be present in these therapy meetings, because vaginismus is not only a female disorder, it is a disorder of the couple as a whole, and the male also takes part in the exercise assignments in psychotherapy. In a study conducted in our country, 28 couples were included in vaginismus psychotherapy, and 14 of these couples discontinued therapy after the first interview, and vaginismus psychotherapy was successfully completed in all of the other 14 couples who continued therapy (3). For this reason, continuity in vaginismus therapy is essential for the successful outcome of the treatment.

Conclusion :

Vaginismus is a psychological disorder that is shaped by cultural and social influences and is characterized by fear and anxiety about sexual intercourse. Misconceptions and information about sexuality and gender play a major role in the development of the disease. The leading role in treatment belongs to psychotherapy. The perspective of couples, especially the spouses of women with vaginismus, and their approaches to their spouses during the continuation and process of therapy are as important as psychotherapy itself in terms of treatment.

Resources :

Oktay, M. and Tombul, K. (2003). Psychological examination of 200 Vaginismus cases and their spouses. The New Symposium, 41(3), 115-119.

Crowley, T., Richardson, D., and Goldmeier, D. (2006). Recommendations for the management of vaginismus: BASHH special interest group for sexual dysfunction. International Journal of STD & AIDS, 17, 14-18.

Kabakçı, E. and Batur, B. (2003). Who benefits from cognitive behavioral therapy for vaginismus. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 29(4), 277-288.

Consciousness: Consciousness is the awareness of oneself, of one’s experiences, of his environment, of other people, and of the universe in which he lives as a whole. So, as ‘conscious’ individuals, are we really aware of ourselves, our environment and the universe we live in?

If our sun were the size of the dot at the top of the letter ‘i’ in a book; The Milky Way galaxy would be the size of the United States (U.S.). When we consider that there are 200 billion galaxies in the universe, 200 billion U.S. Are we aware that we live on a planet orbiting the dot of the letter ‘i’ in a universe of the size of an ‘i’?

Well, are we human beings, living on a speck of dust in a universe of this size beyond our imagination, really aware of ourselves, our environment, and other people?

A healthy human brain is an enormous information network with billions of nerve cells and trillions of synapses, interwoven with bonds, with a capacity of about 20 quadrillion operations per second and a memory capacity of 200 terabytes. Turkish thinker Tahir Musa Ceylan said, ‘… it is inefficient for such a sophisticated structure to deal only with the stimuli coming from its own body and its environment. It has brought an exciting perspective to the question we asked at the beginning, namely to the level of awareness of ourselves, our environment and other people, by saying ‘necessary’1. From this point of view, human mental processes are not just a structure that can be reduced to a single brain, but an endless and open system parallel to the infinity of the universe1. Could Einstein have spoken of the common knowledge pool of humanity, which is recorded in our minds when he said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge, because knowledge is limited to what we know and understand at the moment, while imagination embraces the whole world”? Or is Nietzsche pointing out that when we sleep and dream, we go through all the thoughts of humanity before us, that humanity’s common heritage of knowledge is hidden in an unconscious area that is in all of our minds but cannot be reached by conscious effort?

The idea that the human mind is fed from a species pool has attracted the attention of not only psychiatrists or psychologists but also neuroscientists and has been the subject of their research. Neuroscientist Prof. C. Keysers states that there is an area outside the conscious mind in the human mind where many important processes related to social cognition take place, saying that ‘it is as if our brains are wired to turn us into social animals. Humans are social animals, strongly interconnected through their minds’ 2.

Famous zoologist Richard Dawkins, in his studies with cuckoos, states that as soon as the cuckoo hatches, it carries the other eggs in the nest that it sees as rivals to itself and throws it down from the nest. . What better explanation for this than Dawkins’ statement that ‘a body is really a machine programmed by its selfish genes’? Dawkins puts forward the theory of ‘meme’ in the light of his studies, and talks about the existence of a kind of sociological genes, which he calls ‘memes’. The word ‘mem’ is derived from the Greek word ‘mimeme’, meaning ‘imitation’ in Turkish. Examining the way caddis beetles make their nests, Dawkins expressed the idea that the knowledge of how these insects should use stones, even in which softness, is coded through genes. it does. He likens this transmission to the way genes pass between bodies through the germ cells and replicate themselves in the gene pool, but that memes float in disorderly freedom in the primordial soup instead of the neatly matched, chromosomal arrangement of contemporary genes, Dawkins said. can be defined as a possessed entity, there are two things we can leave behind when we die; genes and memes. We are gene machines built to pass on our genes to the next generations.

Dawkins expresses his astonishment with the theory of the ‘meme’, which is claimed to mediate the transmission and evolution of cultural traits, by saying that ‘we biologists have embraced the idea of genetic evolution so much that we tend to forget that it is only one of the possible types of evolution’3.

Tahir Musa Ceylan, while claiming that our brains are the organs of the society and not of a person, and that they were created by the community, he states that “the beginning of any human being alive today is not the moment of birth, but the beginning of the species”1. When we consider the related words of Einstein and Nietzsche that we mentioned before, this thought of Ceylan is not without foundation. In line with Nietzsche’s thought that sleep is a tool that connects us to all humanity before us, Ceylan says, “dreams are not just replaying experiences in the object world while awake, dreams are the blending of the records of the common self with the information carried from the object world”. He draws attention to an intergenerational knowledge link 4.

The ‘Undiscovered’ Unconscious:

Thoughts that mental processes may be related to common species records began to be expressed in the world of psychiatry with the concept of “collective unconscious” by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. Jung said, ‘every civilized human being, regardless of the development of consciousness, remains an archaic (oldest, original) human being in the depths of his soul. when we follow it, it is the product of a development that shows innumerable archaic features,’ he refers to the relationship of mental processes with common species records5. As can be expected, this concept has been subjected to harsh and cynical criticism from the scientific community when it first emerged, but now, as we have tried to explain, Jung’s ideas are being discussed by respected scientists in today’s science.

Species Partnership:

Man, despite all his physical limitations and weaknesses, is at the top of the food chain, controlling the planet he lives on and the other species living on the planet, and not content with that, he is the most advanced species in the universe as far as we know. So how did we manage to do this when our physical strength and limitations are incomparably weaker than many other species on our planet?

Is it simply the awareness of being conscious that the only thing that distinguishes human beings from other species on the planet and makes them superior? Our answer to this question is partially yes. Being aware of being conscious has given humanity the ability to monitor the feelings, thoughts and behaviors of itself and other people and even other species, make predictions and take precautions. But given our physical frailty as a species, in addition to this ability, the ability to act as a whole is necessary for humanity to climb to the top of the food chain. An instinct for partnership that organizes human beings as a whole as a developed structure can turn physical weakness into species advantage. As soon as a gazelle cub is born, it can walk or even run after a few tries, but it takes at least 1 year on average for a human baby to walk. At this point; According to Tahir Musa, the origin of the partnership instinct in human beings lies in the joint effort for the survival and care of the human offspring, and the evolution of this effort over generations to an instinctive character and to the instinct of partnership. characterizes their heads as a structure that can be seen but holding hands and moving as a whole under water, and emphasizes that the difference between people is only as much as the calluses, which are formed by holding the load from the front or the back while carrying a table, formed on the back of one and the chest of the other1.

According to Jung, as the individual ages, he melts into the collective psyche he came out of, drop by drop, like the Uroboros biting his own tail, the beginning and the end intersect with each other in human life, according to this idea; death is not an end, it is just a transit stop, a return to the ‘eternal stream’. This understanding leads to the idea that the meaning of human life cannot be solely in the hands of individual interests, and only thanks to this idea, despite our physical weaknesses, we can show a species development6.

We can find concrete, tangible proofs of the idea of generic partnership that we have explained so far in our own body. When a person experiences an emotion or performs an action, there is a neural firing in his brain, however, there are such specialized cells in our brain; When someone else we observe experiences an emotion or performs an action, it shows electrical activity as if our own body is performing that emotion or action, these cells are called mirror neurons, these cells respond to the behavior and emotions of the people around us, as if they were a physical part of us. they hold a mirror, they kind of socialize us2. World-renowned Hindu neurologist Ramachandran expressed the importance of these nerve cells by saying, “I guess that the discovery of DNA will revolutionize biology, mirror neurons will make in psychology.” Tahir Musa defines mirror neurons as the main biological structure that causes us all to keep a common rhythm and behave like limbs of a single living thing1. The functions of mirror neurons on internalizing the emotions of others help us to understand the existence of moral values, Keysers says in his book empathic brain; ‘Helping others through mirror neurons means helping ourselves, and we feel good from a shared joy. Against this; harming others means harming ourselves through a shared pain’ 2.

Common Self:

The knowledge gained from the life experiences of previous generations is transmitted from generation to generation, just like the inheritance of eye color and hair color. We can see this by examining the reflexes of a newborn baby. For example, let’s take the search-sucking reflex, when you lightly touch a newborn baby’s cheek, he opens his mouth and turns his mouth to the touched side, this is a necessary reflex for the baby’s feeding, it allows the baby to find the breast, as if the baby has the knowledge that it will be fed by a breast from the moment it is born. Tahir Musa explains this as ‘man is not a picture drawn by objects on an empty table (tabula-rasa), on the contrary, there is a picture of the earth in him’4. So what is it that draws this picture inside the baby? Let’s answer this question with the words of Tahir Musa, the owner of the concept, ‘The answer to this is the common self. The common self is a deep and extensive knowledge of the earth passed on by the billions of members of the human species who have lived in the past, and the baby has all of this knowledge as it comes to earth’4. As we explained before, humans transfer the information they receive from objects to their genes with their epigenetic mechanisms, so the genetic structure is the only and first structure as an extraordinary information load. Dawkins expresses this in the words that ‘the only kind of beings necessary for life to arise anywhere in the universe are immortal replicators (heredity materials)’3. This immense knowledge, which arises from life experiences throughout human history, enriches the common self by participating in the chain of inheritance from generation to generation. Tahir Musa, while evaluating the formation of the common self; He defends the idea that ‘this immense knowledge, which has flowed for thousands of years and enriched with the experiences of humanity, has an opinion about itself, the common self, the common self is the integrative sum of the self-impressions (in a sense, the selves) of every individual belonging to the human species that has ever lived’1. The common self is the whole of the common knowledge of human history, which is present in every human being at the fetal stage. According to Jung; If the individual can open this field of knowledge in his own psyche or reach the awareness of this knowledge, he will get rid of isolation and integrate with the endless cosmic process6.

Generic Happiness:

One of the questions that mankind is most curious about is the question “Are we alone in the universe?”. In order to find the answer to this question, developed western countries make new researches with billions of dollars of investments every year. 200 billion U.S. Is the lonely human being, living on a planet orbiting the point of the letter ‘i’ in a universe of the size of the universe, aware of his own personal loneliness while seeking a cure for his cosmic loneliness? What do you see when you look at people’s faces while walking on the subway or bus, or walking around a street? Happy faces? Or thousands of unhappy worlds disconnected from each other? Are we aware that we are getting further and further away from the partnership every time we press the buttons, while we hide behind our own concrete world and struggle helplessly in the grip of virtual reality? Happiness is in partnership because only when we realize that we are a part of human beings as a species will we become branches growing on the trunk of the same tree instead of being torn from each other, fallen to the ground, turned yellow, and scattering like leaves. That’s when we will be able to act as a species and eradicate hunger, poverty and wars, instead of small African bodies waiting in line for a glass of water, we will see the smiling faces of the happy children of the black continent in photographs, or no father burying his son instead of sharing happiness at his wedding. will not have to in the Middle East.

Conclusion:

The personal opinion of the author of this article is that; These studies of species partnership will not only lead to groundbreaking discoveries in neuropsychiatry or genetics, but will also be a guide for all humanity as a species to survive, evolve towards more advanced and open the door to species happiness.

Resources:

Ceylan T.M. Common Self Neurophilosophical Grounding. Istanbul: Details Publications, 2012.

Keysers C. Empathic Brain. A Eper (Trans.), Istanbul: Alfa Publication, 2011.

Dawkins R. Gene Is Selfish. E Karaarslan (Trans.), Istanbul: Kuzey Publications, 2014.

Ceylan T.M. Object Self Psychophilosophical Integration. Istanbul: Details Publications, 2013.

Jung C.G. The Undiscovered Self. B ILHAN, C.E. Sılay (Trans.), Istanbul: Barış İlhan Publishing House, 2010.

Jacobi J. C. G. Jungian Psychology. M Arab (Trans.), Istanbul: İlhan Publishing House, 2002.

A panic attack is an unexpected, spontaneous condition accompanied by palpitations, sweating, tremors, feeling short of breath, chest pain or tightness, dizziness, lightheadedness, numbness, tingling, and an intense fear of death, fainting, or going crazy. .

People with panic attacks apply to the emergency services of hospitals with complaints such as “I am having a heart attack”, “I am drowning”, “I am paralyzed”, “I am going to faint”. Necessary medical screening is done in the emergency services, no finding is found to explain the symptoms and it is thought that the person may be having a panic attack and the person is referred to a psychiatrist. While some of these referred people apply to a psychiatrist, some still apply to cardiologists and internists with the thoughts that they still have a heart disease despite the evaluations made in the emergency department, because according to someone who has a panic attack, the symptoms they experience during an attack are literally a heart attack or a stroke. It may be the same as the symptoms of a stroke, but there is a big difference, a panic attack is a symptom mimic, it only mimics situations such as a heart attack or stroke, and the vital organs of these people, such as the heart, lungs, nervous system, are mostly completely healthy. So where is the problem?

First of all, the thing to know is that panic attack is not a disease, it is just a symptom. People who are completely healthy and do not have any psychiatric disease can have a panic attack at some point in their lives, this is like coughing, now ask yourself: is coughing a disease? No, cough is a symptom, a lung patient can cough, a person who has water in his throat can cough, panic attack is just like a cough, it is a symptom, not a disease. Well, if it’s not a disease, why should I go to a psychiatrist?

If a person isolates himself from social life due to panic attacks or for fear of having a panic attack, cannot enter the society, cannot go to the cinema, cannot take the bus, cannot use the elevator, cannot stay at home alone, this is a disease and it is called Panic Disorder and a psychiatrist should be consulted.

Panic disorder is a condition seen in 1 or 2 out of every hundred people in the community. Panic disorder is a disorder that can be completely treated and whose recurrence probability is minimized with appropriate cognitive therapy.

If you have symptoms such as chest tightness, shortness of breath, palpitations, tremors, sweating, dizziness, nausea, drowsiness, and if no disease can be detected despite frequent visits to the emergency services, consulting a psychiatrist may save you from these frightening experiences.

Autism is a developmental disorder that presents with findings such as limitation in social interaction, significant delay in communication level, limitation in interests and repetitive behaviors in children.

This disorder usually begins to show signs before the 36th month, and it is 4 times more common in boys than girls. While the incidence of the disorder was 1 in 500 in 1995, the current figures are reported as 1 in 80. The main reason for the change in the incidence of the disorder over the years is the fact that families can scan and notice the symptoms more easily due to the increasing social awareness of autism.

In studies on the cause of autism, a clear mechanism that can explain the pathology of the disorder has not been revealed yet. There are many reasons for doubt in this regard. The most prominent reasons are that there may be a defect in the chemical substances that carry messages between cells in the brain or in the anatomical structure of the brain.

We can examine the symptoms of autism under four main headings. The first is the findings of inadequacy in social interaction, which are the absence of eye contact or very short eye contact during mutual communication, the findings such as not looking when called by the name, which can become clear enough to raise the suspicion that there may be a hearing problem by the families, and giving the impression of not hearing. However, another autism symptom group is significant delay in communication level. Speech is delayed in these children, language development is behind, it may be noticed that they are inadequate in using body language or understanding body language, these children have difficulty in understanding the feelings and thoughts of others. The third symptom group is the limited interests of children with autism. These children are mostly indifferent to games and toys, they do not play imaginary games, generally families complain that they do not play games with their peers, children with autism tend to spend time alone. The last symptom group is repetitive behaviors such as hand clapping, flapping wings, waving, swaying, and turning around, which can be easily recognized from the outside, and these behaviors are generally resistant to change. In addition to these symptoms, symptoms such as hypersensitivity in the senses of vision, hearing, smell, taste or touch, insensitivity to the sense of pain, hyperactivity or inactivity, and insensitivity to dangers may be seen in these children.

The way of communication is of great importance in the approach to children with autism. It is necessary to speak in clear and short sentences in a language that these children can understand. For example, instead of saying, ‘You shouldn’t throw garbage in the room, everyone hates it, pick up the garbage and throw it away cleanly’ should be more clearly directed to ‘trash’. In fact, our requests can be explained with pictures and an easier communication can be established in this way. During communication with these children, methods such as using a lot of mimics, adjusting the tone of voice with ups and downs, leaning up to eye level, talking by looking at the child’s face are beneficial. Families can help these children increase their social skills by playing imaginary games such as housekeeping, feeding toys, sleeping, bathing, taking toys to the imaginary doctor, taking them to the barbershop. The last important issue in the approach to children with autism is to ensure their safety. As we mentioned before, these children may show insensitivity to the feeling of pain and danger, and may experience tantrums. In order to prevent the child from displaying hurtful behaviors towards himself or the people around him, the physician you consult may start drug treatment when necessary.

From the moment we enter the movie theater, we step into a new world in the magical atmosphere of 7th art. At the door of the hall, the fights of daily life are left behind and we find ourselves in completely different lives from the moment the movie starts. We can be rich, poor, full of love or hate in our own life, it doesn’t matter, as long as we sit in that seat, we become ‘He’ if the character on the screen is ‘Who’. We rejoice, grieve, love or hate that character. How can we explain this situation better than Yusuf Atılgan; ‘In our time lives a short-lived creature unknown to past centuries. A person out of the cinema. The movie he saw did something to him. He’s not just a self-interested person. He is at peace with people. It is hoped that he will do great things. But it dies in five to ten minutes. The street is full of people who do not leave the cinema; With their sullen faces, indifference, and sneaky gait, they take her between them and dissolve her.’ But this transformation is not limited to the face of the screen that reflects on the audience. Those in front of the camera, namely the actors, take on a new character and transform with each new scenario. It no longer matters what kind of person that actor is in his own life; Whatever character written in the script is, the actor turns into him, he becomes. He laughs, cries, loves or hates it like the character he plays. A motion picture changes and transforms the lives it touches on both sides of the screen, albeit for a certain period of time. In this article, we will deal with the other side of the veil, trying to understand a life transformed with each character he plays in front of the camera; The life of Peter Sellers, who said, “I play my roles very well in movies, because I have no personality, there was a me behind my mask before, but I had it removed by surgery”…

Peter Sellers was born in England in 1925 as the only child of a stage artist mother and a pianist father, despite the widespread belief that he was French due to his magnificent performance as French Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther series. His real name was Richard Henry, but his family called little Richard by the name Peter, which they gave to their child, whom they lost in infancy, and he was called by this name throughout his life. This situation is not a very unfamiliar situation for Turkish readers reading this article. There is always someone we know who bears the name of an older sister, brother or uncle who died at a very young age. This name choice, which seems very ordinary and insignificant, may actually have a deep meaning for the person who bears that name. Every person comes to the world as a new ‘living’ and wants to be perceived as such. Otherwise, to think that you came to life to fill someone else’s place or to keep someone else’s spiritual memory alive can cause deep fractures regarding one’s place and importance in this life. As a result of such a situation, the person named, most likely, learns the story of his name in family conversations at a very young age and may enter into questions about the place of his existence in the family. As a result of this questioning, the child may think that he is not loved ‘as himself’ but that he is loved as long as it reminds him of the existence of someone else, and this situation can turn into thoughts of worthlessness that will affect the person’s whole life, thus laying the foundations of many psychiatric diseases, especially depressive disorders. In such a case, it may not be enough for a person to just exist, so that the person may feel obliged to prove that he exists only as himself, not as a broken memory of someone else. This sense of obligation can turn into exaggerated attitudes and behaviors to convey the message that I am here and I am here too. No matter how old he is, he is a child trying to show those around him that his existence has meaning only when he is accepted as himself. We can often see traces of this in Peter Sellers’ life story. For example; Sellers wants to convey the message that I am here by getting the most beautiful woman in the environment, which for him is Sophia Loren, who was perhaps the most attractive woman in the world at her time. When her little girl asks one day, ‘Daddy, don’t you love us anymore?’ she says ‘I love you but I love Sophia Loren more’, or she wakes up her son in the middle of the night and asks, ‘Do you think I should divorce your mother?’ with similar attitudes to his wife. He behaves and tells his love for Sophia Loren as if he was a friend, not his wife. All these behaviors are pure and belong to the mind of a child, no matter how old he is. She is a little, unhappy child who has never grown up. He gets married, has children of his own, but approaches his children as a peer, not as a parent. When his son damages the paintwork of Sellers’ newly bought car, he winds up in his son’s room and in turn crushes his son’s toys by jumping on them, because, according to Sellers, his son damaged his toy and he gets even by damaging his son’s toys.

Sellers was a guest on The Muppet Show in 1977. While having trouble deciding which costume to wear, Kermit; He says, ‘You don’t need to stress, we’re backstage, you can be yourself here.’ Sellers replies, ‘I’ve never been myself, Kermit.’ In fact, this answer is like a summary of Sellers’ life story. It is a boat, a boat in which all the characters he plays are filled, but when those characters get off the boat, only an empty boat remains. Sellers seems to lack a point of reference from which he can evaluate himself. In the psychiatric literature, the organized integrity of the individual’s emotions, attitudes and behaviors is called the self. The self is the center of reference for one’s self. It is the view of the subject ‘I’ about the object ‘I’. The mental picture of oneself is the reference point. Early parental relationships play a key role in the development of this reference point, the self. At this point, in order to better understand Sellers’ self-structuring, it is necessary to mention his relationship with his mother.

Peter’s mother, Agnes Doreen “Peg” Sellers, is a Jewish stage performer. Agnes is a devoted mother to her son, of course, the fact that she lost her first child has a big impact on this, as she has always called little Richard ‘Peter’ by the name she always thought of giving to her deceased first son. When the definition of “a devoted mother”, which seems to be innocent, is examined in depth, it can be seen that it can actually leave not-so-innocent effects on a person’s life story.

Imagine a newborn human cub, unable to perform basic vital functions such as feeding, relocating, cleaning, protecting from dangers without the help of others. Considering this biological inadequacy, it is inevitable for a human infant to develop an attachment to its caregiver from the first days of its life. The caregiver is not only a resource that satisfies physical needs, but also the first object that meets social needs. This first object is often the mother. The mother is the first dependency of the human offspring, which is connected with ties that get stronger as the needs are met. This bond is the first indicator of how change-resistant personality patterns that affect a whole later life will form.

The mother’s task is not only to meet the needs of the baby, but also to provide the baby with experiences of solitude and calm environments where he can stand alone so that he can develop a healthy ‘self’. Only in this way, the mother, who is the first object, turns into a transitional object and becomes ‘other’. This break is necessary for self-development. If a baby is not allowed to gain his own experiences in his development, it will not be possible for him to develop a healthy self, which is a set of experiences of his own. Think of an overprotective mother, a mother who has just learned to walk, who is constantly chasing her baby, who is trying to stand by staggering, holding her without falling, never letting her stand up after falling… She cannot develop a knowledge based on her own experience that it is safe, what she knows is only her mother’s experience, what is dangerous and wrong for her mother is dangerous and wrong not because she has experienced it herself, but because her mother thinks so. The reactions he gives when he encounters other objects are not experienced by himself, his reactions are shaped by his mother’s attitudes. In such a developmental system, the reference point is the mother. In other words, there is no reference point of one’s own, a healthy self-development, and as a result, it is inevitable for a person to be a feather in the spectrum of psychopathology from neurosis to psychosis.

Peter Sellers’ penultimate film is a masterpiece known to moviegoers as ‘Being There’. Sellers wanted to act in the movie adapted from a novel so much that he begged Jerzy Kosinski, who also wrote the script of the book, to play the lead character Chance. The movie is about Chance, who spent his whole life in a room reserved for him in the garden of a mansion, without any contact with the outside world, and everything he knows about the outside world consists of what he learned by watching the television his boss gave him, after the death of his employer, Chance was publicly condemned to wander the streets confused and aimlessly. His life story goes back to when he was proclaimed ‘the unpretentious and pure new representative of wisdom’. If the mother figure is substituted for the television in the life story of this character, who does not have a past and does not worry about the future, and whose views about the world consist of what he watches on television rather than his own experiences, it can be better understood why Sellers wants to play this character so much.

As a result, when the life story of Sellers, who took his place among the unforgettable in the history of cinema and caused people to leave the movie theaters with a smile on their faces, is examined on the other side of the screen; Behind his smiling mask there will be a sad child with an empty painting hanging and never allowed to grow up.

King regards to Peter Sellers,

The term ‘depression’ is one of the most used medical terms in daily life, for this reason; It has been the subject of many misunderstandings and misconceptions. It is highly probable that almost everyone will hear the phrase ‘I am depressed these days’ from their mouths at some point in their lives. So, is every state of feeling sad, every bad mood, depression? What is depression? What is not? How is it treated? Let’s look at the answers to these questions together:

Depression

Having a depressed mood almost every day for at least two weeks, and at least one of the states of no longer enjoying or enjoying the activities that they were previously interested in and enjoyed doing, which is also almost every day and throughout the day When accompanied by symptoms such as loss of appetite, increased desire to eat, sleeping more or less, fatigue, exhaustion, feeling worthless, medically it is called depression.

As can be seen here, the state of malaise we all feel from time to time and depression are completely different concepts.

How Often Depression Occurs in the Community?

Studies have shown that the prevalence of depression is between 5-9% in women and 2-3% in men. The lifetime probability of having depression was determined as 10-25% in women and 5-12% in men. Depression in first-degree relatives increases the risk of depression up to 3 times.

What are the symptoms?

• depressed mood
• Loss of interest, reluctance, lack of pleasure
• Increase or decrease in the desire to eat, weight changes
• Sleep disturbance (difficulty falling asleep, waking up frequently, having nightmares, sleeping too much)
• Feelings of worthlessness, guilt
• suicidal thoughts
• Irritability, intolerance
• Decreased sexual desire
• Weakness
• slowing down movements
• Hearing voices, seeing dreams
• Skepticism

How Is Depression Treated?

Depression treatment is like a table with four legs. If one of these legs fails, the treatment of the disease is interrupted. The situation that needs to be determined first is to understand whether depressive symptoms are the results of any other medical disease, the incidence of depression is high with chronic diseases, especially hypothyroidism (underactive thyroid gland), diabetes, the thing that needs to be done is to perform the necessary tests and to treat the findings of this disorder. . (For example: treatment of thyroid disease, treatment of diabetes) If there is no other medical disease or the existing disease is under control, life events that are thought to cause the onset of depressive symptoms are examined. Many times, depressive symptoms begin after a family argument, death, loss, or financial difficulties, and it is not enough to try to treat depression with medication if the main problematic life event is not understood.

If the symptoms persist despite the correction of the underlying life event, if there is no stressor (negative life event) or if the person has significant and severe depression symptoms, drug treatment is preferred. What needs to be done in this regard should be to comply with the treatment protocol of the physician you apply, not to change the dose of the drug without your doctor’s approval, and not to stop the medication without your doctor’s approval.

While using anti-depressant medication, the first 10 days can be troublesome, during the first ten days and sometimes in the first month, you can see the effects of the medication, gastrointestinal complaints, drowsiness, anxiety and excitement. It should be known that it may be one of the expected side effects, that these complaints will disappear after a certain period of time, and it is the right option to continue drug treatment, but if the complaints have become unbearable, then it will be the right option to consult your doctor and review the treatment.

How Long Should Anti-Depressant Treatment Take?

One of the most common misbehaviors is to reduce the dose of the drug or stop it completely without the approval of the doctor, when the complaints are felt to decrease. If you want your depressive symptoms to go away completely and the risk of recurrence to be minimized, your treatment should be continued for one year with the current drug dose, from the moment all your complaints have regressed.

Depression’s low mood, reluctance, not enjoying life, introversion, crying, irritability can often be easily noticed and may lead you to consult a psychiatrist with the thought of “Am I getting depressed?” However, depressive illnesses may not always begin to manifest itself by playing the drums and horns.

That is to say, depression is actually a syndrome that progresses with disruptions in separate mechanisms belonging to many different organs in the body, rather than being a disease of only a particular organ.

For example, with depression, disorders in the secretion of cortisol, which is known as the stress hormone in our body, and disorders in the levels of the hormone called melatonin, which plays an important role in the sleep-wake system and related bodily events such as regeneration and reproduction, may develop. In depression, an increase in the amount of cortisol secreted during the day or a decrease in the levels of melatonin secreted in the dark can negatively affect many body functions. The most important of these is the sleep-wake cycle. Patients with depression may experience a shift or delay in the sleep-wake cycle. The person begins to have difficulties falling asleep at night or wakes up very difficult in the morning, the transition to wakefulness becomes difficult.

We may not have a noticeable demoralization, reluctance, or intolerance, but sleep disorders that begin insidiously, that is, difficulties in falling asleep or waking up, can be the first signs of a depressive illness. For this reason, if you have started to have problems with falling asleep or getting out of sleep, although you always go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, I recommend that you consult your psychiatrist to be evaluated in terms of depressive disorders.

The sickly color of the city turned pale and reduced the will to live in people. In fact, outsiders say that the gloomy weather suits this city very well. For those who live here, it doesn’t really matter. They spend the day in the evening without complaining about each other’s same lives every day. My days are not different either, in your absence. I get out of bed at my best. “My eyes have lost the light.” so said an old friend. I carry a soul that is too tired to look in the mirror and my body feels heavier than it is now. I hate all the time that is late. I hate you. I curse the pain that I have been forced to live, and I get used to my absence like the pain of a rotten tooth turns into pleasure. You are everything I was deprived of as a child. You were everything. You were my everything. Now you’re just a vague memory of a lost love.

“Finished !”. With five letters, you passed like a cylinder over four years. You closed the door, didn’t even take the elevator, maybe you were afraid to change your mind while waiting for the elevator. What did I do to make you hate me enough to choose to take the stairs to the 7th floor?

The seasons have changed. In the rest of the night, I can’t count how many times, the sun was born in your absence. I am in the polyclinic; A woman who sacrificed her husband of 3 years to an honor killing in front of her children 2 months ago, washes her memories with tears, I am ashamed of my hatred for you, when I see that the woman in front of me still does not hate life. “My children,” she says, “I must live for them.” You didn’t leave me even a child, you just said a name, “Loya” on a night washed with wine. “If we have a daughter, let’s name her Loya”. You left the name of our unborn and never-to-be-born daughter. That woman is right not to hate; At least she left her child, the savage custom that took her husband away, what’s left for me? Just a name; Loya I don’t even know the meaning, at least if you said what it meant and just left, I hate you for leaving me a baby girl name that I don’t even know the meaning of and will never have.

My phone is ringing, my mother is calling, the phone is no longer on silent, there is no more sex to be interrupted by sound at night. “How are you?” he says, to the question that he already knows the answer to in his voice, maybe there is hope of getting a different answer this time, “Same” I say, “I’m in a bad mood, I’m very tired today, I will go to bed in a little while”. “Have you had your dinner?” he says, “I ate.” I say, “I’m 32 years old and I’ve been able to eat for the past 26 years without needing to remind you.” I say to myself, I hang up with half-hearted greetings. I also hate my mother, if she wasn’t so obsessive, if she didn’t always try to control me; ”What did I eat? When did I eat? What did I wear? am i cold? Am I hungry?” Maybe I wouldn’t be so attached to you, or at least I wouldn’t see your face in my tears. I guess I hate all women. From you… From my mother…

I am in the polyclinic; A man rushes in and says, “Doctor, run, brother, it’s very bad, we were able to bring him to the emergency room by force.” he says hastily. I’m going to the emergency room. Someone in their early 30s shouts, “Let me go, I don’t want to live,” tied to a stretcher. “Me too,” I say to myself, “I don’t want to live, but I’ve come to give you the will to live”. With the effect of the benzodiazepine circulating in his veins, he now wants to die more calmly. I take the man to the interview room, who wants to die in his early 30s, he tells, “I loved him very much, my teacher, he went away, I didn’t realize he broke up with me, he cut my life with a knife; Before and after him, I can’t live without him, my teacher, how could this heart only know how to love him, how could he hate it? Will he now look at someone else, hold someone else’s hands the way he looks at me? I hate it for holding my hands”.

At that first moment, you think you can’t live, it’s as if your breath is gone, your lungs are deflated, your heart beats reluctantly, but it is lived, time fills your lungs with the breath he blows from his cruel lips, you can breathe again and serotonin is enough to make your heart beat eager, whether from chocolate or from an antidepressant…

I’m lying darling, my heart is in my hands waiting for you to find it just as you left it, it hasn’t beaten since you left. What season took you away? When did you accumulate at the corner of my eye and my hand went to these lines? “This will be an impossible love story.” I said and you were smiling with your head on my shoulder, snowflakes falling on my window glass. Now my window has changed and I’m looking at the snowflakes without you. Have the showers of my heart stopped? Did I ever tell you not to go? Or go… Was it your intention to justify yourself that I can’t even think of your face? I am doomed to an endless absence of you. I miss you a lot.

Dr. Mustafa TATLI

Psychotherapy; It is the general name of the techniques that aim to solve the cognitive, emotional and behavioral problems of individuals through verbal interviews with a trained professional and to protect and improve the mental health of individuals. Throughout the history of psychiatry, different types of psychotherapy have been developed in various periods, shaped according to the conditions of that period. Holistic, dynamic, cognitive behavioral, existential, Gestalt and interpersonal psychotherapy are the main types of psychotherapy.

Cognitive behavioral psychotherapy differs from other psychotherapies in terms of its basis. Cognitive behavioral therapy is based on the basic assumption that the way we perceive and interpret events changes our emotional and behavioral responses. The Greek philosopher Epictetus made a kind of basic summary of the cognitive behavioral theory by saying, “It is not the events that disturb people, but the way they perceive them.” This idea, which has been expressed throughout history, has been reinterpreted and conceptualized by contemporary psychiatrists and psychologists in the 20th century and has become a current form of psychotherapy used in today’s psychiatry.

In cognitive behavioral psychotherapy, not only the current problems of the patients are tried to be solved, but with the skills taught in the therapy, the patients acquire methods that they can use against their mental predicament throughout their whole lives. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, short for CBT, provides great benefits to patients in the treatment of many psychiatric diseases, especially generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, depression, and phobias. In studies, it has been proven that CBT is as beneficial as drug therapy for patients when compared with drug treatments for the same psychiatric illness. comes out. While there may be a possibility of recurrence in time after the complaints of the patients regress with drug treatments, the possibility of recurrence of the disease in the long term is minimized even after the therapy is terminated, since the basic source of the problem is addressed and the patient is taught the ability to solve the problem with CBT.

I can’t live without him, we complement each other, I’m incomplete without him, I can’t imagine a world without him… These expressions, which we all hear or say personally in our daily life, may not be so innocent after all. Ranging from ‘I’m nothing without you’ to ‘it’s mine or the black soil’, these sentences can be the seats of a dangerous seesaw with suicide on one end and murder on the other.

A person can hardly survive alone when all is well. Let’s think about the evolutionary development system, imagine that you are a healthy hunter-gatherer. You know which plant is poisonous and which is non-poisonous, and you have the muscle development maturity to hunt small land animals or fish, but imagine you broke your foot, or simply caught a cold and are very weak, if you don’t live in a commune that is your death sentence. For this reason, man, by nature, does not tolerate loneliness. Because a crowded community is a shelter, a safe harbor where the individual can meet his physical needs in every condition and situation. For this reason, we want to have others around us in order to survive, the feeling of loneliness is disturbing because it creates the possibility of not being able to meet physical needs rather than a thought of spiritual singleness.

Imagine a newborn human cub, unable to perform basic vital functions such as feeding, relocating, cleaning, protecting from dangers without the help of others. Considering this biological inadequacy, it is inevitable for a human infant to develop an attachment to its caregiver from the first days of its life. The caregiver is not only a resource that satisfies physical needs, but also the first object that meets social needs. This first object is often the mother. The mother is the first addiction of human beings, which is connected with ties that get stronger as the needs are met. This bond is the first indicator of how change-resistant personality patterns that affect a whole later life will form. Every newborn carries a sense of ‘fundamental anxiety’ characterized by fear of abandonment by the parent. The methods of coping with this basic anxiety belonging to the early stages of life determine the attitudes of the individual in the bilateral relations that he will experience in the later periods of his life (1).

A mother who is warm, sensitive, ready to meet the needs of the baby and not rejecting will be able to provide the necessary environment for the baby to have a “secure attachment” with himself. In ‘secure attachment’, the individual feels the confidence that the ‘other’ will be there in times of need, and this lays the groundwork for the consistent relationships he will establish in the future (2). But with a reactive, emotionally distant mother, the infant forms a relationship in the form of an ‘ambivalent attachment’. Individuals who encounter this attachment style in the early stages of their lives may experience inconsistency in their relationships in the future, and the people around them may complain that they are excessively passionate and jealous (1).

The duty of the mother is not only to meet the needs of the baby moment by moment, but also to provide the child with experiences of solitude and calm environments where he can stand by himself so that the individual can develop a healthy ‘self’. Only in this way, the mother, who is the first object, turns into a transitional object and becomes ‘other’. This break is necessary for self-development (3).

This relationship that a human baby establishes with its first caregiver, which is usually the mother, is like a road map with fine lines, in which very delicate balances are observed. If this path can result in a healthy individuation, the person can become the subject of coherent relationships. Otherwise, if individuation cannot be completed in a healthy way, it is inevitable to be a feather in the spectrum of psychopathology ranging from neurosis to psychosis.

Addiction is an irresistible, unavoidable desire for an object or person. The person exposes himself to the object to which he is addicted with increasing doses or frequency and experiences feelings of deprivation in the absence of the object to which he is addicted. Although the person knows that the object to which he is dependent is harming him physically or psychologically, he cannot prevent himself from continuing this situation. This can manifest itself in a drug addiction, sex addiction, gambling addiction, or addiction to a person.

Addiction is like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Take someone who is addicted to a person. The person he is close to can be a parent, child, friend or lover. The relationship with this person is a one-sided relationship that cuts off the addict’s connection with life, just like in drug addiction. The basic emotion felt in dependence on a person is fear, the fear of losing ‘that’ person… He does his best not to lose the person to whom he is addicted, his own value judgments and worldview do not matter, he does not exist anymore, ‘he’ exists. If ‘it’ exists, ‘it’ does not exist. This shift from being an individual to being nothing starts to frighten the addicted person, narrowing and squeezing their living space. When this situation is noticed, the dependent person cannot resist the increasing fear of losing and tries to increase intimacy without realizing that he is enslaving in a vicious circle. In the end, the thing he fears most happens, his addiction causing him to lose ‘it’. Fear of loss has cost the loss like a self-fulfilling prophecy. From that moment on, the person develops a great hatred and anger in proportion to the dependence he feels on the person he adores, which only serves to drive the lost person further away, and now the addicted person has entered a vicious cycle of self-feeding hatred-deprivation.

The solution lies in questioning the reality of the sense of nothingness. Nobody is everything to anybody. Everyone is everyone’s thing. Whether ‘he’ exists or not, ‘me’ exists. When the ‘it’ is out of my life, what’s left is me and I am the source and cause of the new ‘it’s.

Resources:

Carver C, Scheier M. Perspectives on psychology. Cambridge University Press 1998: 281-282.

Karen R. Becoming attached. Oxford University Press, New York 1997.

Winnicott DW. Game and reality. Metis Publications 1998: 10-11.

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