|
Post by Admin on Jun 24, 2012 9:29:46 GMT
“I have now, after long practical experience, come to hold the view that the psychogenic causation of the disease is more probable than the toxic [physico-chemical] causation. There are a number of mild and ephemeral but manifestly schizophrenic illnesses - quite apart from the even more common latent psychoses - which begin purely psychogenically, run an equally psychological course (aside from certain presumably toxic nuances) and can be completely cured by a purely psychotherapeutic procedure. I have seen this even in severe cases”.
- Carl Jung
Jung & Schizophrenia
Eighty-odd years ago, Jung voiced his deep concern that the powerful, often vivid, chaotic and disturbing psychology of schizophrenia, which he had so painstakingly chartered and honoured throughout the many years he treated and healed schizophrenia sufferers, had not been given the respect and serious attention it deserved. He likewise lamented the appalling lack of knowledge of the psychology of schizophrenia among those of his own profession, a situation which has changed precious little today.
Sadly, however, Jung's vast body of invaluable work has fallen for the most on hostile ground and deaf ears, ironically in psychiatric circles, largely because Jung's respect for 'the reality of the psyche' and its religious, mythic and spiritual needs, dimensions and instincts poses a threat to the materialist bias that underscores drug-based, or biologic psychiatry, but also because his personally demanding and soul-centred approach to psychiatry is radically at odds with the detached 'illusion of expertise' on which biologic psychiatry's mask of authority, presumed sanity, and stagnant wasteland of 'brain chemistry' dogma are shakily grounded.
In place of dry textbook knowledge learned by rote, Jung gives precedence to living primary experience, hence his assertion that we understand nothing psychologically unless we've experienced it. In this sense, the people who know most about schizophrenia are the sufferers themselves, followed closely by those who have 'been there' and have pulled themselves out of a psychosis and so 'know the road'. Such folk, as invaluable 'wounded healers', can therefore often guide others groping along similar roads, or pull people out of the quagmires and tricky labyrinths of psychosis.
Equal Therapeutic Dialogue
In place of the practitioner's mask of fatherly authority, Jung puts the mutual vulnerability, openness, imaginal richness, honesty and trust of the therapeutic dialogue, in which patient and therapist confront one another on equal terms and through which both stand to learn and grow. In place of forced treatment, hasty consultations and toxic psychiatric drugs, Jung puts a trust in nature, unconscious wisdom and the healing which, residing in the 'patient patient', is catalysed and midwifed by the caring therapist. No wonder he poses a threat to those who esteem power, professional detachment, diplomas, diagnostic manuals and drug company profits over the empowerment, equality, freedom, healing and dignity of the patient.
Needless to say, there are other closely related and equally grave moral issues at stake here. For instance, imagine, if you will, that a reputable medical practitioner had come forward with evidence of a safe, natural cure for cancer, but that the medical establishment had ignored the evidence and, worse still, had kept the findings from cancer sufferers for fear of losing income and power through their monopoly over the provision of existing anti-cancer 'treatments', which do not heal. By the same token, Jung - and others who have followed in his wake - cured his schizophrenic patients with psychotherapy alone. The tragedy of the 'mental health crisis' is not only, then, that so many already fragile and wounded people have been damaged and driven to suicide; what is equally tragic is that all along, there have existed natural, re-empowering, healing alternatives to psychiatric drugs; alternatives which biologic psychiatry, the Government, Schizophrenia Fellowships and drug companies have in a morally disgraceful way ignored, or deliberately kept from sufferers and the public."
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 23, 2015 10:15:12 GMT
In alchemy there lies concealed a Western system of yoga meditation, but it was kept a carefully guarded secret from fear of heresy and its painful consequences. For the practicing psychologist, however, alchemy has one inestimable advantage over Indian yoga its ideas are expressed almost entirely in an extraordinarily rich symbolism, the very symbolism we still find in our patients today. The help which alchemy affords us in understanding the symbols of the individuation process is, in my opinion, of the utmost importance.
C. G. Jung, CW 16, par. 220
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 23, 2015 10:21:04 GMT
"Although out reach and crisis services are needed, without a 24/7 front end system sanctuary like Soteria, CooperRiis, Diabasis House, the Open Dialogue or the sanctuary - folks don't have a chance to avoid having their potentially transformative psychosis being aborted with medications and a Schizophrenic diagnosis being laid on them for the rest of their lives. Loren Mosher on alternative approaches to psychosis, was agreed that all the sanctuaries like Laing's Kingsley Hall, John Weir Perry's Diabasis House, Soteria, Burch House, Windhorse, the Agnews Project. And the med free, no restraints, no diagnosis, open door Ward sanctuary; plus the Euorpean and Scandanavian Open Dialogue places- well they ALL basically do the same thing. They provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for a person to go through a psychotic process and come out the other side-'Weller than well'- as Karl Menninger famously said. By being held in the healing crucible of a caring, open hearted setting, the psyche naturally sets it's own course and heals from the early wounds that made a dramatic psychosis renewal necessary in the first place. If instead, a person is labelled as having a diseased brain and medicated into emotional numbness and submission, then the energy and power and symbolic expression of the purposive psychosis simply falls back into the unconscious. Then whenever a loss or trauma happens, the person de-compensates into an ever more amorphous emotional and fragmented daze of so-called chronic psychosis where renewal and healing is far more difficult."
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 23, 2015 10:22:09 GMT
Insanity or Enlightenment
R.D.Laing, an unorthodox psychiatrist, emphasised the link between the mystic and the schizophrenic. He stated:
"The mystic and the schizophrenic find themselves in the same ocean, but whereas the mystic swims, the schizophrenic drowns."
I concur wholeheartedly with this observation regarding the connection between the mystic and the schizophrenic, but point out, the so called 'schizophrenic' can learn to swim ... given the opportunity. Often, however, the schizophrenic is dragged under by the very people sent in to help.
Unlike the monks who prepare rigorously and systematically to attain and receive enlightenment, those who experience schizophrenia (the Psyche-sensitives), I believe, have enlightenment thrust upon them. Because we have no disciplined framework or foundation to support us, this imposed enlightenment can be enormously difficult to cope with.
The ether of the planet is heavily charged with humanity's negativity. Psyche-sensitives tune into this ethereal energy and are profoundly affected by it. Our darker thoughts and emotions are often simply a painfully acute empathic response to the ills of the world.
I regard the next step in human evolution to be that of enlightenment and my feeling is that schizophrenia is most certainly an expansion of our psychic capacity. I go further, I regard schizophrenia as not only a personal transformation, but also as part of a global one. A metamorphosis that the sea of humanity is undergoing to lead us into an age of intuition and vision. That may sound prophetic, but as a kindred spirit once remarked to me,
"Where would the Old Testament prophets be today if they lived in our times and in our culture?"
The answer - which should not need spelling out - is in our psychiatric institutions.
In other cultures many that would undoubtedly be diagnosed as schizophrenic if they lived in the West, are embraced by their community as valued individuals who cast light on the dynamics of the Universe and our place within it, as chosen Ones.
The tide, however, is turning in the northern hemisphere and there is a Spiritual Emergence Movement in ascendance that is re-addressing these issues.
One of the many visionaries who have been regarded by their contemporaries as 'outsiders' was Edgar Alan Poe, who would almost certainly have been diagnosed schizophrenic, had such a label been available in the eighteen hundreds. This example was cited in Schizophrenia, Creativity and Spirituality, an obscure essay of the 1980's by Guy Stephens.
A dramatic shift in Edgar Alan Poe’s consciousness, sensitised him to deep cosmological insight and in an inspirational out-pouring, Poe produced a work entitled, Eureka.
The work was published mid-way through the nineteenth century. Coincidentally,the term psychosis was also coined then. At this time atoms were believed to be indivisible, irreducible balls of matter, the solid building blocks of the physical universe. In Eureka it is revealed that matter is reducible to attraction and repulsion. Some fifty years later physicists were to make the discovery that confirms his insight.
He Identified the Milky Way as a galaxy before this had been established by astronomy. He stated the Universe began as a single ball of matter that exploded, preceding the Big Bang Theory by seventy years and also conceived time and space to be one and the same, half a century before Einstein had even been conceived.
Edgar Alan Poe, his revelations, and his book were disregarded and dismissed as irrational, incomprehensible and nonsensical.
One hundred and fifty years on they are the corner stones of contemporary scientific knowledge. An overt reminder of the falsely perceived superiority of scientific analytic experimentations over the validity of an individual's intuitive revelations.
I am not from a religious background, nor do I adhere to any one religious framework or system of belief.
I embrace all religions as possessing components and aspects of truth. Any religious body or individual that declare their way the one and only way I regard as false prophets or more accurately false profits.
I was a devout atheist at nineteen, until via my illumination, I saw and felt the expression of divinity in everything and everyone. I touched the presence, intelligence, beauty and love of the Universal Mind, and know that God is not a reality ... God is reality, or, to express this another way, Everything is, because God is Everything. I do not believe in God; I perceive God. In other words I am aware of the consciousness of the Cosmos. The eyes of truth are watching.
The archives of psychiatric institutions are full of the testimonies of people who have also sensed this. And why are these records retained? As evidence of insanity!
Sages, seers and saints -throughout humanity's history have all received transmissions in the form of voices and had the most extraordinary psychic experiences. Perhaps psychiatrists regard them too as deluded; it would be, by their own limited parameters, the only conclusion to draw.
The other side of the coin, however, is that those who make such judgements and assumptions about others are deluding themselves. It is very convenient for society to classify a section of the community as 'the mad' for it produces the somewhat absurd notion that the rest of the population is normal.
With reference to contemporary psychiatric terminology, The Oxford Companion to the Mind defines psychosis as:
'the misapprehension and misinterpretation of the nature of reality.'
Forgive my naivety, but I was unaware that there was a correct way to apprehend and interpret reality, more to the point I was unaware that there was any consensus let alone certainty regarding the nature of reality at all.
So what is the nature of psychiatry's reality?
Written in the stars of the psychiatric Universe is the word LOGIC. The law that governs their Universe was laid down in 300 BC by the Father of Logic, Aristotle:
A must either be or not be A.
To paraphrase, the world is flat. But as cosmologists and physicists look more deeply into the macro and the micro it is becoming very apparent that the Universe is a multiverse and the truth is, surprise, surprise, that reality is not logical and cannot be interpreted or apprehended logically, i.e. light is both a particle and a wave.
A can B, CDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ(and not A)
The vision that is materialising before the very eyes of scientists is one that has long been seen by mystics. It is dawning that the mysterious Universe is also a mystical Universe.
One can understand why psychiatry has created the classification of psychosis, for if psychiatrists were to accept the validity of the testimonies of those who directly experience the multi-dimensional nature of reality they would have to rescind the law that governs their Universe, which would, in turn, invalidate their own reality and by their own rules and definitions, psychiatry itself would be certified psychotic!
The stars would tumble and fall down from their sky and their ludicrous flat earth would be turned upside-down.
So psychiatry padlocks the doors of perception and pockets the keys. The signs placed upon the doors by the Magicians that once said Welcome have been replaced by the Logicians and now say Wellcome-Glaxo and more false profits are made.
- Aiden Shingler
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 23, 2015 10:24:48 GMT
Transcript of speech by Lars Martensson at seminar "Road to Recovery", San Diego, April 2nd, 2004:
Love, Hope and Brain Science. What does Love and Hope have to do with Brain Science? Simply, that a human mind, a human consciousness, cannot arise and cannot exist without Love and Hope. Therefore a science of the human brain, a science that seeks to understand and explain the characteristic human functions of the brain, the functions that distinguish us from other species, the human mind, human consciousness, – in such a brain science Love and Hope must have a central place.
Birth of Consciousness
Consider a baby with its mother. The baby kicks and screams like mad, oblivious of everything, oblivious of the caring mother above. But suddenly the baby quiets down, the eyes of the two meet, the baby laughs and coos. Now the baby sees the mother and, most importantly, it sees itself through the eyes of the mother. The two are together in a common world. This is how we are born, how we are mentally born, this is the birth of our human consciousness. We are born through Love with an Other.
At that moment the highest functions of the human brain centered in the Frontal Lobe are activated. The baby takes a Leap to a View outside itself. We go on to develop this function and learn to take all kinds of viewpoints. D.R. Hofstadter said: "The Self comes into being the moment it has the power to reflect itself". Thanks to this outside perspective we are able to develop an inner world separate from the outside world, where we can do our thought experiments, a world where we ourselves are the Creator.
Archimedes said: "Give me a fixed point outside and I will move the world!" Similarly we get a new power to move our own world, our inner world, when we make the leap to a point outside ourselves.
The highest function of the human brain, the self-reflective function centered in the frontal lobe which gives us an inner world, an inner light, and power over ourselves – is thus activated in interaction with another human being.
Breakdown of Consciousness: Psychosis
Now, let us move 15, 20, 25 years forward. The baby has become a teenager or a young adult. In the meantime his consciousness, his frontal brain functions, has developed tremendously in richness. At the same time unresolved stresses, strains, inconsistencies may have accumulated in his inner world. Perhaps he or she is very idealistic and finds the world and people simply too corrupt and ugly, and for this reason, or for some other reason, he withdraws more and more. Unwittingly he deprives himself of the empathic interactions that maintain and strengthen his consciousness. Life becomes more and more lonely and hopeless. Anxiety and despair rises. He feels he has an impossible life to live. He breaks down. Becomes psychotic.
This breakdown means that the separate inner world that was created by a view from the outside through empathy with another, breaks down. The inner world merges more or less with the outer world. When inner and outer are no longer distinct, fiction and fact, thought and perception are confused.
In short, delusions and hallucinations and other psychotic symptoms are due to the breakdown of the frontal brain function that maintains a separate inner world and that depends on empathic interactions with other people.
Now we see, not a baby, but a young adult person that kicks and screams, maybe not literally, but figuratively speaking, kicks and screams like mad. When the superordinate control of mind and behavior by the frontal brain is lost in a person with all the physical and mental powers of a young adult the ensuing chaos is, of course, much more threatening and problematic than that of a kicking and screaming little baby. But, the point is that this young adult, despite appearances, is helpless in essentially the same way that a baby is helpless and as much in need of Love and Hope in order to emerge from the psychotic chaos.
Human Responses to Crazy People
When we see or hear a baby cry we, as human adults, are programmed to want to comfort, to feel tenderness and love. Our instincts help us to respond appropriately. Our genetic programming makes us try to give the baby what it needs.
But how do our instincts make us respond when we are faced with an adult person who is unreasonable and out of control because of a breakdown in frontal brain functions. We are apt to respond with anger. Our impulse is not, what it would be with a crying baby or child, to approach, to hold, to comfort, to cherish. We get out of the way, if we can. Everybody withdraws. Normally young people have a rich and intense social life, but when a young person breaks down and becomes psychotic, he or she very soon finds himself in a social vacuum. If you cannot withdraw, for example, because you are in the same family, you may quite naturally respond with overt or covert anger, and thus worsen the loneliness, hopelessness, and lovelessness that caused the psychosis. Thus, this young person may be trapped in a vicious circle.
Neuroleptic (Anti-psychotic) Drugs
Now, remember the baby kicking and screaming like mad. We saw the transformation when the eyes of baby and mother met in love. The baby turned happy and quiet, just cooing and laughing. There is another way we can quiet babies. We can give them a tranquilizer, a so called antipsychotic drug, a neuroleptic drug. Give such drugs to children. Surely crying and other troublesome behaviors will be reduced. Maintenance neuroleptic treatment is also effective in preventing relapse into troublesome behaviors.
Yet we are all convinced that with drug free care after a few years the children will be in better shape than if they are given drugs. Similarly, people in psychosis will be in better shape if they are given love and understanding rather than drugs.
The main effect of these drugs is to inhibit the reward system, the pleasure system, of the brain by blocking dopamine receptors. The drugs deprive a person of the emotional energy that drives crazy behavior. By the same token, however, the drugs deprive a person of the emotional energy that drives any creative activity. For example, we saw how the crazy little baby turned happy and quiet, just cooing and laughing with mother. That transformation could not have occurred if the baby had been given a neuroleptic, an antipsychotic drug.
In other words, the drugs prevent activation of the frontal brain. In short, the drugs suppress troublesome behaviors, but at a high price. They suppress trouble at the price of blocking recovery.
Reverse Psychiatry
But is recovery possible? Isn’t schizophrenia a chronic, lifelong disease? Yes, in general, at least with the drugs. Almost everybody who gets the diagnosis is stuck both with the diagnosis and the drugs for life. But is recovery possible without the drugs?
I will return to that question. But first we will make a trip to the Swedish city of Falun and talk with Goran Andre, a psychiatrist. In the early and mid 1990s he was head of psychiatry in Falun, and responsible for psychiatric services for a population of about 60,000 people. During a four year period 1992 to 1996 all first time psychotic people in this area were taken care of in a novel way that is also practiced, more or less, at some other psychiatric centers in Scandinavia. Goran describes the four cornerstones of the Falun method a follows:
1. Psychosis is seen as a crisis. A crisis to be overcome. 2. A session with the whole family is arranged within 24 hours. 3. Neuroleptic drugs are avoided. In fact, hardly ever used. 4. Hospitalization is avoided. In fact, hardly ever necessary.
Each one of these principles is contrary to the usual routine in psychiatry. In normal psychiatry a psychotic patient is hospitalized, separated from the family, and finally, after some time, released with maintenance neuroleptic drugs. The family is "educated" to help make sure the patient takes the drugs she "needs." In short, the psychiatry in Falun is an upside down, a contrarian psychiatry, a REVERSE PSYCHIATRY.
What happens in Falun is that the people around the patient, the ”family,” are gathered as soon as possible for a session with the team. The team consists of the psychiatrist, Goran Andre, a psychologist, and two other people. They meet in a living-room type setting. By family is meant whoever is significant in the life of the patient. The experience of the team is that people will come, even if they have to travel from far away.
In this situation, everybody, not only the patient, is filled with anxiety and despair. Together with the team the family gets an increased capacity to contain and solve problems. It is often found that the patient emerges from psychosis during this first family session. The patient is almost always able to return home with the family the same day. If needed, one of the team members may come along home and stay the night with the family.
Psychosis Outcome with Reverse Psychiatry
Now the remarkable outcome. During these four years the Falun team took care of 37 first time psychotic patients. Normally about half of first time psychotic persons get stuck in their psychosis, become chronically psychotic, and get the diagnosis schizophrenia. You do not get that diagnosis right away; you get it after some time when you seem stuck in psychosis. The remarkable outcome is that during these years there was not a single new case of schizophrenia in the Falun area. In a population of 60,000 people in four years you expect about 30 new cases of psychosis out of which about 15 graduate to schizophrenia. In Falun there were ZERO, instead of 15 cases of schizophrenia. This fact indicates that most, if not all people, who become schizophrenic with normal psychiatry, would overcome the psychosis with the Falun REVERSE PSYCHIATRY. In other words, with the right help at an early stage the development from psychosis to schizophrenia may be prevented.
Since in normal psychiatry most patients would receive neuroleptic drugs, I asked Göran how many of the 37 patients got the drugs. He estimates that perhaps 1/4 of the 37 patients have received a neuroleptic drug some time or times, when, he said “we have thought the drug might be of help." By 1998 one or two of the 37 patients were taking the drugs. In normal psychiatry, typically about 20 of the 37 patients would be getting neuroleptic drugs at that point in time. In other words, all or almost all of the Falun patients had escaped the usual fate of psychotic patients, the fate of being stuck in the neuroleptic drug trap.
Because GA was chief of psychiatry these years in Falun he was able to ensure that ALL first time psychotic patients were directed to the psychosis team. Thus, there was no selection of patients. Therefore we can be sure that all those 10 or 20 young people in Falun who were destined to become chronic schizophrenics if they had been treated by normal psychiatric methods, were saved from this terrible fate – we can be sure they were among the 37 patients seen by the team. "We were all wrong!"
You would think these results should have been written up in a proper research paper. Of course. Goran and his team are dedicated professionals, but they are not academic people writing research reports. Obviously, if the academic psychiatric establishment had been truly interested, the continued work of the team would have been protected and the data would have been evaluated and published in the psychiatric literature. I am sorry to say, that did not happen.
The Falun results vindicated views I had presented a decade earlier, in the mid80s, when I argued, among other things, for a legal right to drug free care. Let me quote Loren Mosher, whom you will hear later today. He said “In psychiatry, the powerful, established gate-keepers - a group composed almost entirely of academic - conservative - psychiatric - research mafiosi - can be relied upon to reject unfashionable research.”
What is true in America is true, also in Sweden.
A senior psychiatrist, my friend, who also knew what made his colleagues tick, said to me in the mid80s: “Lars, you have to realize, if you are right, all they have done all their life is wrong.” When did you hear the people in power admit: “We were all wrong!”
The Problem with Psychiatry and Psychiatrists
What was happening in Falun? Why was there no schizophrenia? Even the members of the team are wondering. Goran told me that "What we are NOT doing may be more important than what we are doing." Ulf Wamming, the psychologist explained: "Never leave a first time psychotic patient alone in a room with a psychiatrist!"
Why? What is it about a psychiatrist that is destructive? What does a psychiatrist do? Let us think for a moment about what typically goes on between a doctor, the expert, and a patient, the non-expert. The doctor tries to understand what the patient's words suggest about the disease. The doctor has ideas and thoughts that he does not share with the patient. With a psychiatrist, while the patient is talking the doctor is really looking for psychotic symptoms. He has ulterior thoughts. This professional attitude may be OK when the concern is a disease of the body. But it is very problematic with a psychotic person.
Let us compare the relation between doctor and patient with the relation between the mother and the baby at the moment the baby is mentally born by the leap to an outside viewpoint. That leap, we understand, is only possible because of the empathy, dedication, openness, total presence of the mother. There are no ulterior thoughts, no manipulation. This is love. Human consciousness is born in Love.
The task with a psychotic person is, as we noted, similar to the task with a baby. The task is to activate the frontal brain function that underlies human consciousness. When the psychotic person makes the leap to an outside viewpoint through a fully empathic mutual relation with another, at that moment the psychosis is overcome. The person is whole again.
We noted that human beings are programmed to respond appropriately with care and love to a crying baby. But with a crazy adult our spontaneous reaction is not care and love, rather it is withdrawal or anger. The professional attitude is not the answer. The professional attitude is also a kind of withdrawal, a kind of anger management.
If we understand the task that the psychotic person faces in order to become whole again, and if we want to make it possible for him or her to get the faith to dare that vital leap, the recipe is: Be there, but not aloof and observing, and not intrusive, but fully present with a pure and open mind. So, what the patient needs is more or less the opposite of what a psychiatrist is trained to give. Some 20 years ago when I had been giving a speech in Denmark a psychiatrist in the back of the room asked: It is nighttime. I am on duty in the emergency room and I have this very strong, big, violent, psychotic man. Do you say I should not give him a neuroleptic drug?
The answer that came out of my mouth was: “Let us start with the problem, not with the system.” Within the existing system, of course, the psychiatrist may have no alternative.
In our society we expect to do our jobs with a professional attitude and between 9 and 5. Maybe there will be some overtime etc., but still, our involvement is limited. We can do a lot of things this comfortable way. But there are essential tasks that demand more. For example, in wartime we may be expected to risk our lives. If a person is drowning in the river, the only way to save that person may be to jump in and share the danger. If it is my child, or someone else I love, I probably will jump in.
There are tasks for which our system, our way of doing things is inadequate. Doing psychiatry the way we do other kinds of medicine is totally inadequate.
Conclusion
It is an unbearable horrible tragedy when a young person, often a gifted, sensitive, creative young person is drowning in psychosis. Today I have focused on the experience in Falun, but time permitting I could have marshaled much other evidence that most, if not all, these young people can be saved, saved from the psychosis, and saved from the drugs – saved to live the lives they were born to live.
They can be saved. Therefore they must be saved. If we understand and face up to the actual problem we will have no patience with the existing system of psychiatry. Love opens the road to recovery: Love instills the Faith to dare the vital leap. Love gives the Hope that the impossible life IS possible, after all.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 23, 2015 10:27:07 GMT
Acknowledging The Survivor: Exclusion, Trivialisation and Denial
Exclusion, Trivialisation and Denial; Society’s refusal to Acknowledge, Honour and Integrate the trauma and human rights violations experienced by the psychiatric survivor.
By Grainne Humphrys.
In looking at exclusion I would like to use the systemic lens. That which is excluded creates imbalance and so, I believe, as a society we become imbalanced at a collective level when we refuse to acknowledge difficult and painful truths within our society. Nowhere is this felt more keenly than by the psychiatric survivor. As a so-called ‘civilised’ society we collude in our collective trivialisation of both the violation of human rights of this marginalised minority group and the trauma, pain and silencing of this group. This I believe is our last great civil rights movement.
The ‘treatment’ of distressed individuals with labelling and drugging is simply not acknowledged publicly by society at large, and if it is, it is trivialised and skimmed over. It is given lip-service but it is, by no means, acknowledged at a profound level. In order for survivors to deeply heal they need deep acknowledgement. This has not yet occurred publicly by the mental health professionals (bar a few) or the general public (look, for example, at the recent acknowledgement of abuse survivors in the Ryan Report, and the watershed and paradigm shift that created. This was painful but healing).
The book 'Deprived of Our Humanity’ by Lars Martensson should be compulsory reading for all people going into the psychiatric profession as doctors and nurses – though reading it may raise many questions around whether they want to continue working in that system. What is happening on a daily basis in many hospitals all over Ireland is barbaric and a crime against our humanity and it is simply not acknowledged. Why is this? Why does it feel so threatening for people to acknowledge this truth? By not acknowledging it, we are adding fuel to an unimaginable well of pain and a raging fire of frustration and anger. Perhaps we are experiencing collective guilt at witnessing and knowing about such violations (however much we push this knowledge to the back of our minds, it taps into our own fear about survival). Through our turning a blind eye though, we render the psychiatric survivor invisible. Perhaps it just doesn’t feel safe to acknowledge their experience.
I would like to coin a new phrase; ‘lip-service-providers’. We are all lip-service-providers to the psychiatric survivor. I believe if the deep pain of survivors is truly acknowledged the house of cards will fall, the domino effect will be set in motion. It is not a pain many of us can identify with (though it does tap into our own pain of being human). Neither should it become a pain competition. The pain of the psychiatric survivor is, however, a very particular kind of pain; it is the pain of being silenced over and over again. It is the pain of being erased, tortured, silenced and rendered powerless. It is unimaginable for most of us, a violation of our basic human rights we take for granted. It is just not within our realm of experience and this too has to be acknowledged. In attempting to compare our pain we deny theirs and add fuel to a justified anger, we simply cannot compare or understand or fathom it, because it is not within our range of experience. It is another subtle way of denying their experience.
We want the psychiatric survivor’s raw pain to be packaged into a more easily digestible form, a socially acceptable and ‘appropriate’ way. It follows that we don’t allow the sheer depth and range of their experience. It is not because the survivor doesn’t have a voice, they do, but they are just not allowed to really use it in whatever way they so choose or wish to, or we will reject it. In effect, we cannot hold or contain their pain as a society or as a group. We collectively repress their experience due to our difficulty in facing and acknowledging this truth about our capacity for man’s inhumanity to man. We re-package their experience and present it in a ‘safe’ and ‘politically correct’ form, brushing over it and side-stepping past it. We are repelled by their anger, it upsets our civilised sensibilities. It infringes on our safe bubbles of imagined democracy that we have created.
At a deeper level it is our failure to acknowledge the original trauma before people experiencing distress and overwhelm enter the psychiatric services that hurts vulnerable people the most though. We hurt them three times; by ignoring the original trauma and then by labelling and drugging (in effect, denying) the trauma. We then hurt them again by not allowing them to express their anger at this violation of both their human rights and their right to their trauma. We label the layers and I believe it is that is what we feel most guilt around because we collude with psychiatry. We all know collectively deep down and subconsciously that there is no such thing as ‘chemical imbalance’ but trauma is taboo in our culture. This really taps into our victim/ perpetrator energy, our inherent fragility as humans, our fear of the unknown, our primal instincts. Our hiding behind a veneer of ‘respectability’ separates us from those experiencing crisis and overwhelm. We don’t want to look trauma in the eye. But acknowledging this trauma truth holds enormous power and depth of healing if we can do it. We do an enormous disservice to the psychiatric survivor in not revering and honouring their experience.
We need to search deep inside ourselves and our hearts as to why we feel so threatened by the psychiatric survivor’s pain. This is not an easy emotional task, it requires deep and difficult work. Survivor’s anger can be as much about not having their pain and experience acknowledged by us, as about the abuse of their human rights within the psychiatric system. This, to my mind, is the crux of why change and deep healing cannot occur because;
(1) We cannot fathom their pain (2) We feel threatened in some way by this pain (3) We deny it and put it into shadow
The facts are there, the recovery stories are there but we barely give the facts lip-service. We need to wake up to these facts. We get distracted by frameworks and models and politics and language and all the trappings of our minds. We have one set of rules for us and another for the psychiatric survivor. We skirt around the issues that really count (like acknowledging feelings). I believe this is because we are afraid of that depth of emotion. Indeed as a culture we trivialise our emotions and are afraid of them. We are governed by logic and rationale which moves us away from our hearts and the language of our souls.
Psychiatric survivors are not acknowledged. In fact, my feeling is that they are put into collective shadow and their pain is trivialised and even patronised. In order for us all to integrate as a society, we need to open our hearts and create a space for all those who have been excluded, put aside our own pain, to acknowledge their pain (that we cannot even begin to imagine because, quite simply, our human rights have never been violated to such an extent. This is a fact we need to acknowledge. This is our work, not the survivor’s). I believe our difficulty in acknowledging the survivor stems from our fear of acknowledging our collective perpetrator energy. The survivor is a precious reminder of our ability to deny our perpetrator and how blocking this aspect off, we prevent integration and deep healing. The survivor has much to teach us, their lessons are gifts, but like all difficult lessons, many of us turn away and resist the challenge for true growth.
Labelling, forced drugging, coercion, incarceration is a barbaric violation of what we hold most dear, our human rights, our right to be human. The fact that it is then called ‘care’ is a denial of what it really is. I stand in awe of people who survive this system. The way it is then glossed over and trivialised by people further adds to that denial. This actually fuels and reinforces anger (is it any wonder?) It excludes the survivor and their experience. It is a culture of covert abuse.
We should not pretend that we can understand or fathom this pain, be it lost years, chemical damage or unimaginable trauma, just as we cannot understand what it is to be in a concentration camp or to be a victim of war. We need to allow survivors their pain, we need to acknowledge it and bow down to honour it. This movement (of the soul) towards acknowledging a difficult and painful truth will ultimately heal us at a societal level and allow psychiatric survivors the journey home to their rightful place within society.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 23, 2015 10:28:38 GMT
"Those people who, through their expression of pain or confusion, fall into the arms of the 'helping professions', perhaps becoming psychiatrically diagnosed as psychotic or neurotic or 'inadequate personalities', have in my experience almost all arrived at their predicament through an entirely comprehensible, rational and (of course with hindsight) predictable process.
If you run over a pea with a steam roller you don't blame the pea for what happens to it, nor, sensibly, do you treat its injuries as some kind of shortcoming inherent in its internal structure, whether inherited or acquired.
Similarly, if you place the (literally) unimaginably sensitive organisms which human babies are in the kind of social and environmental machinery which we seem bent on 'perfecting', it can be no real surprise that so many of them end up, as adults, as lost, bemused, miserable and crazy as they do.
The only surprise, perhaps, is that so many pass as 'normal',"
David Smail Taking Care
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 23, 2015 10:28:58 GMT
The Butterfly Collector
Born into the world, a butterfly, exquisitely sensitive, vulnerable, beautiful, fragile.
She takes to the air to celebrate creation, the gift of her life, and to express and experience the birthright of freedom.
The collector (Prof: mg, od, ect, xyz, cert, psych, etc) interested in, fascinated by, ignorant of, the way of the butterfly, nets her and takes her from the natural environment back to his laboratory.
In captivity, she is disorientated and fearful. She struggles to be free.
He observes her, recording the 'peculiarities of her behaviour', important for his research.
He administers a measured chemical solution, hydrochloric acid.
Heavily sedated, she ceases to struggle.
He examines her psychedelic wings, 'intriguing'.
He inserts a sterilised needle into and through her thorax and pins her to a one-dimensional surface…. her spirit breaks.
He attaches a label to her.
He is satisfied. She is categorised.
She is placed within a case and displayed behind glass.
He has his prize…another one to add to his collection.
How clever he is.
What an extraordinary specimen.
- Aiden Shingler
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 23, 2015 10:40:46 GMT
Another Country
There is another country, Not far away, In fact it is very near. Mental Health Professionals learn all they can about this other country, Talk to people, its observers and residents, But mostly its observers. Read books and papers about it, Attempt to learn its language, But its borders are closed to most of them, They cannot visit it. They meet us at the border. We tell them about our country, But they do not believe us. They say, ”This is not true, it is all delusion.” But remember, they have never visited our country. We say there are wonders there, And horrors too. Heaven and Hell. But they do not believe us. They say, “This is all delusion.” We have very little industry or commerce in our country. Only art, fantastic art, insight and our own peculiar wisdom. They take pity on us. They give us food and shelter. But they expect us to obey the rules of their country, Like some benevolent conqueror. They want us to learn their industry and commerce, But this is the death of some of us. We are far happier producing our fantastic art, Or simply dreaming. They would like us to become Like the residents of their country, Like them, But many of us are not interested in playing their games. We often escape back to our own country, Where life is easier, less pressured, more inviting. Then they try to coax us back, Full of good intentions and well-meaning, But we are often far happier in our home. There is another country, Not far away, In fact it is very near.
By John Excell
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 23, 2015 11:02:43 GMT
John Weir Perry -
Trails of the Visionary Mind The Far Side of Madness
Lord of the Four Quarters Self in Psychotic Process Roots of Renewal Heart of History – Individuality in Evolution
Some others -
Jung – Symbols of Transformation (Collected works 5). Anton T Boisen – The Exploration of the Inner World. John Watkins – Unshrinking Psychosis. Schizophrenia: The Positive Perspective: Explorations at the Outer Reaches of Human Experience - Chadwick, Peter
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 24, 2015 12:37:58 GMT
Will Hall: Healing is Human Nature We followed Will Hall, mental health advocate and counselor, to Vermont where he was conducting a “Train the Trainers” Harm Reduction workshop with Oryx Cohen. All the participants were people with lived experience who wanted to help others navigate their mental health crisis. During the workshop we sat down with Will and he spoke with us in his typical articulate manner about avoiding isolation, finding meaning in the experience and the importance of feeling extreme emotions – approaches that could be helpful to anyone and especially someone in a mental health crisis. crazywisefilm.com/2015/09/23/will-hall-healing-is-human-nature/
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Oct 20, 2015 11:39:45 GMT
More than two million people in the United States have a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and the treatment for most of them mainly involves strong doses of antipsychotic drugs that blunt hallucinations and delusions but can come with unbearable side effects, like severe weight gain or debilitating tremors. Now, results of a landmark government-funded study call that approach into question. The findings, from by far the most rigorous trial to date conducted in the United States, concluded that schizophrenia patients who received smaller doses of antipsychotic medication and a bigger emphasis on one-on-one talk therapy and family support made greater strides in recovery over the first two years of treatment than patients who got the usual drug-focused care. www.nytimes.com/2015/10/20/health/talk-therapy-found-to-ease-schizophrenia.html?_r=0
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Oct 21, 2015 8:00:01 GMT
MIA's Article on all this - Results of a large government-funded study call into question current drug heavy approaches to treating people diagnosed with schizophrenia. The study, which the New York Times called “by far the most rigorous trial to date conducted in the United States,” found that patients who received smaller doses of antipsychotic drugs with individual talk therapy, family training, and support for employment and education had a greater reduction in symptoms as well as increases in quality of life, and participation in work and school than those receiving the current standard of care. www.madinamerica.com/2015/10/landmark-schizophrenia-study-recommends-less-drugs-and-more-therapy/
|
|
|
Post by snowstorm on Oct 21, 2015 10:42:45 GMT
Well, the recommendations are a step in the right direction. Bit disappointed that the NY Times has to mention that Congress is debating any connection between mental illness and mass shootings in an article about sz, because what would the average reader make of that link? Congress should be debating the ready availability of guns.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Nov 11, 2015 11:02:17 GMT
This is an ideal, but i like the description - How therapy works - www.brantcortright.com/howtherapyworks.htmlTherapy creates a safe, accepting atmosphere to explore our life. The quality of the therapeutic relationship is crucial: just as our wounding occurred in relationship, so healing occurs in relationship as well. No one can do this alone. We can’t see our own defenses because they are unconscious. Everyone needs another person skilled in understanding unconscious defenses in order to work through them. I view psychological healing within the larger context of spiritual unfolding. It is a journey into the painful shadows of the psyche in which we discover our hidden light. Psychotherapy generally begins in some kind of pain or baffling lack of fulfillment. Although the person may be outwardly successful, inwardly there are struggles in things such as relationship, intimacy, health, stress, meaningful work, compulsions, anxiety, depression. In the context of a healing therapeutic relationship, the “night sea journey” of therapy leads from pain, frustration, and fragmentation to increasing enjoyment, vitality, and wholeness. It is a movement from alienation or isolation to authenticity and greater connection, from a shaky sense of self and self-esteem to feeling centered and valued, from darkness to light. Therapy stands on three legs, each of which provides an important window into the psyche: Our current life situation Our past relationships and family wounding The client/therapist relationship Current psychotherapy research emphasizes the importance of the body’s actual, felt sense as key to getting out of our heads and into our lived experience. Following our heart’s deeper guidance leads us within. Wrapped in the dark camouflage of our wounds lie jewels, waiting to be discovered. Drawing on the psycho-spiritual wisdom of east and west, a relational, embodied approach to psychotherapy allows us to touch our tender, wounded sides for healing and growth, leading to a life of deep relationships with others, creativity, meaningful work that engages our skills and talents, and connection to our deepest spiritual center.
|
|