This week I sat on my first ever panel discussion for a film festival, arranged by the Awareness Film Festival – they officially selected my film Letitia for 2021. The panel was titled: It’s a Global Thing.

The festival usually only screens in Los Angeles, but due to COVID, this year was a hybrid event, with films screened online also.

I enjoyed the discussion generated by the panel moderator, although I’m not sure I did the subject of my film complete justice in my answers, as the issues are quite complex, and difficult to summarise.

Luckily, I had previously prepared a FAQs section for my press release:

In terms of the global significance panel question, while I previously mentioned I have no art qualifications, I was top of my class for Advanced Level Physics at a top state school in the UK, so I turned to science to answer this question too.

Perhaps not to everyone’s taste, but that’s just the way my mind works.

I mentioned complex systems theory, which overlaps with chaos theory – yikes!

order and organisation can arise ‘spontaneously’ out of disorder and chaos through ‘self-organisation’

A difficulty is, that while cutting edge, there is currently no scientific consensus on how to define chaos or complexity, they are both new (but very active) areas of research.

However, there seems to be a general agreement that complexity sciences are sciences of interconnectedness. That is, they consider that overall behaviours of systems arise out of interactions between the parts over time.

What has this to do with the question asked of me by the panel, that do issues raised by my film have a wider global significance?

Well, the causal mechanisms of extreme altered mental states are currently unknown. There are factors known to increase their risk, however, and from this various suggestions for mechanisms have been proposed. I mentioned in a previous blogpost (Raw Vision, 21st February 2020) social defeat and dominance hierarchy (1,2). The latter suggests subordination at the very bottom of the social hierarchy is associated with behaviours and social withdrawal seen in chronic extreme altered mental states.

Similarly, studies of persons with auditory hallucinations have shown that voice hearers experience a subordinate relationship to these voices that mirrors their other social relationships (3). Cognitive models for command hallucinations explain this using social rank theory (which incorporates the concept of dominance hierarchy) (4).

Studies in animals have shown selectively breeding the most dominant animals of a group increases destructive behaviour over time (5). While we have certainly moved on from the compulsory sterilisation of those with extreme altered mental states, culminating in Aktion T4, a precursor to the Holocaust, is it possible that societies further excluding/increasing disability in those prone to social defeat or with less dominant tendencies (6,7), may shift epigenetic, behavioural, societal and environmental impacts over time?

Whatever the answer, complexity science approaches are considered increasingly urgent (8) because we ourselves, our societies and Earth systems, are considered complex systems, where the parts interfere, co-operate, or compete with each other, and traditional scientific methods that ignore these relationships, may fall short in forming optimal solutions for the ongoing challenges that face humanity.

References

1. Selton JP, van der Ven E, Cantour-Graae E (2013). The Social Defeat Hypothesis of Schizophrenia: An Update. Schizophrenia Bulletin 39(6): 1180-1186
2. Price J (1967). The Dominance Hierarchy and the Evolution of Mental Illness. The Lancet 290 (7509): 243-246
3. Birchwood M (2000). The power and omnipotence of voices: subordination and entrapment by voices and significant others. Psychological Medicine 30(2): 337-344
4. Griffiths SL, Michail M, Birchwood M (2012). Cognitive Theory and Therapy for Command Hallucinations. Journal of Experimental Psychopathology 3(4): 537-551
5. Grandin T (2013). Genetics and the behaviour of domestic animals. Academic Press.
6. Bemrose HV, Akande Io, Cullen AE (2020). Self-esteem in individuals at ultra-high risk for psychosis: A systemic review and meta-analysis. Early Intervention in Psychiatry 15(4): 775-776
7. Catone G et al (2015). Bullying victimisation and risk of psychotic phenomena: analyses of British National survey data. Lancet Psychiatry 2(7): 618-624
8. John L. Motloch, Int. J. of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics. Vol. 11, No. 4 (2016) 563–572: Unlocking Complexity: Big Science Project and Research Agenda