"Mental" Illness: The Future of Treatment

Liz,
If “men are from Mars and women are from Venus”, if the physical fine tuning of males and females is different, the difference does not negate the known fact that effectiveness of both male and female immune systems is bolstered by positive self-image, realization of personal integrity, recognition of the soul.

Bob,
Below are two quotes. One is from an Italian psychotherapist; the other is from a Russian theologian. I believe you are one of the few individuals here who can see how these quotes allign in healing or even care to see that.
“There is no better therapy than creative expression. If we go digging beneath our calcified, institutionalized personality, plastered in its roles and habits, we find that our self wants to play and create, and we can help it manifest itself. Many of our troubles come about because we do not bring out what we are and would become. Thus we condemn ourselves to an unfulfilled, frozen life. . . .To be creative is to be fully human.”–Ferrucci.
“Creativity is our image of God.”–Berdyaev.
What these quotes mean to me is that we have intrinsic powers of healing, that the peeling away of “roles and habits” does not necessarily entail what some existentialist philosophers describe as horror, nausea and anxiety and that this given power to heal, which is in our genes, is an attribute for survival and is evidence of the soul.

I don’t always agree with popular writing–as a matter of fact, I usually ignore it. But i do think that Immune systems can often be strengthened by positive awareness of what the human mind can accomplish. There’s absolutely nothing wrong, misplaced or incorrect about the power of thought, at least, not in my mind.

On the other-hand, can the will to survive overcome the power of thought?

How’s J. doing?

"When the beauty of the soul is seen, it is invariably considered to be the true identity of the person. It is not an extra layer, an exterior ornament, a chance phenomenon. This beauty, the moment it is perceived, is taken to be the real thing.
“And when people are seen for who they are, they feel affirmed. This is the great secret of good psychotherapists.” (Ferrucci 2009).
Perhaps I’ve been lucky. I’ve had such good psychotherapists and friends who can see beyond the survace ravages of a cronic illness. I’ve met persons who, on first acquaintance, appeared to have hard, ugly faces; but, who, after I knew them for a while, had faces that mellowed and melted into soft, magnetic beauty. This is the experience of seeing a soul.
When I was a child I was amazed, intrigued by all of the faces I met. Growing up, I found that I and they had donned protective, hard as steel masks that hid true identity. I saw others as little more than insatiable appetites that consumed anything other than them. Sometimes with age or illness the mask becomes too heavy to wear. It is shed, allowing the open, vulnerable, beautific vision of a child, the sight of the soft, almost magical beauty of faces.
The psychotherapist who is able to see patients in this way is able to assist in the healing process. Or, if the illness is cronic, is able to reassure the sufferer that his/her inner beauty and essential value remains inviolate.

On creativity and insanity. The folk wisdom about this is encapsulated in the idea: genius is next to insanity. This is not always the case. There may be some truth in the idea that those who suffer MIs are socially ostracized and are thereby more open to personal reflections that are unencumbered by expectations of social roles, etc., and that such openness can evoke creative imagination.
The stereotype of creativity as therapy is basket weaving in the institutions.

Brilliant. :slight_smile:

Might I add that current civilization practically breeds destructive tendencies in individuals too.

Joker,
Thanks for your post. Does your agreement here indicate that you believe the problem of insufficient therapies for MI sufferers is caused by socioeconomic priorities, ethical failings or what?
For therapists who are trying to treat the whole human being please google Thomas Moore, James Hillman, Piero Ferruci, Andras Angyal, etc.
For the holistic trends in psychotherapy google psychoimmunology, ecopsychology, psychosynthesis, etc.

Liz,
As J. reagains more of her sense of a common, communicative reality, her sadness at time lost and people connections forfeited become almost unbearable. So she drifts back into her safe, private world of familiar illusions. Still, I try to offer her nonthreatening, consistent caring. That is working. Nowadays her different personalities all see me as a friend. That’s progress. Together, we baked zucchini bread. That’s progress. The remaining problems have mostly to do with her inabilty to concentrate long about anything she does or thinks. I’m attempting to help her slow down her rapid speed of awareness in order to savor the sheer beuaty of living and sharing in the here and now.

So when we look at the Aztecs of past history sacrificing hundreds of people every year on sacrificial alters in tremendous blood shed, would we describe that entire culture and people mentally ill?

Was Spanish Catholicism their treatment or cure?

What does the normal person or individual look like?

Is normalcy just another term for social obedience to conditioned or coerced expectations?

Joker,
About the Aztecs, no they were not mentally ill. Neither were the Spanish. Both were doing what was considered"normal" within their given cultures. And we cannot rewrite history from the perspective of what we have learned.
What is “normal”? Nobody knows; but, we do know what well-being and personal integrity are about and that these heal us. We do know that love generates life while hatred and fear destroy life. Given the situation in Africa today, we still have much to learn. As Bob will tell you, we improve in understanding by evolving. We cannot look back with what we now know in horror at how primitives behaved. We cannot judge modern primitives through the perspectives of our technological or ethical advancements. We can offer care, love, support, food wherever those needs cannot survive political atrocities.
As for MI sufferers, we can work toward whole human healing even in the teeth of media, religious and political adversities.

Joker, you’re trying really hard to prove that mental illness isn’t an illness, rather that it is a sign of a psychotic, terrible society and hatred of originality. You’re not taking into account that mentally ill people were living long before the “big, bad corporations” and “governments with their oppressive laws” and “slave societies” existed. Mental Illness is not a sign of cultural or societal degradation, the “broken system” or other external influences. Perfectly happy people get sick, massacre their families, not because of that deeply traumatizing car crash, or their mother dying, or their rights abused by the authority, no, because they heard the wrong tune on the radio or have seen the wrong color, just like that, out of the blue. No previous signs of aggression or ill behavior, a great example would be Andres Breivik, the Norway shooter. A perfectly nice, calm citizen, wealthy, with a job, no repressive childhood memories of abuse as far as we know, and yet, he kills those children under a cover of political doctrine: that’s that wrong tune on the radio, the “psychotic seed” as I like to call it, just needs nourishment and the right type of “climate” to grow, extreme fundamental ideas are doing a great job at that. I suspect you are “bias” in this topic, blaming the world for not accepting you, because if the theory that mental illness is actually not a condition which needs treatment, but rather a symptom of the wrongdoings of society is true, then you can rest, knowing that it isn’t your fault for being who you are, but rather the society you live in.

Interestingly people who are considered mentally ill in the West fare better in cultures that do not follow the psychopharmcological model.

nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magaz … wanted=all

Unfortunately, as the article goes into, because of the money involved the americanization of mental illness is slowly reducting these alternative approaches to what we call mental illness.

That’s a very interesting article, Moreno, Thanks for posting it. There’s a lot there to think about before deciding which way to go without disrupting the thread.

Septimus,
Thanks for your post. I don’t think the article Moreno cites completely negates your take on this matter.
Moreno,
Appreciated the article. Here’s my “however”. To prevent harm to self and others some intervention becomes necessary. Drugs are the closest we’ve got so far to addressing these problems. While I agree about the Americanizational influence on how to see MIs as it affects other cultures’ attitudes and folk wisdom, I must recognize that there are some standards of criteria that are necessary to consider before anything can be done. I don’t believe we in America are totally without these. Perspectivism is nice, liberal and holistic; but, it does not get down to the real matter of what can we do, here and now, to help the mentally ill regain self-esteem, which appears to be square one of recovery.

Liz,
If J. has multiple personalities, she is not schizophenic. D.I.D. (google multiple personality disorder) for this current diagnostic term) is not shown on MRIs to include brain damage. Schizophrenia does show brain damage. The problem I’m getting into at this stage of learning is finding that most of the severe forms of psychosis have identical symptoms. Lack of her family’s consideration of me as someone willing to help, I can only listen to what J. says. She claims 14 personalities. I’ve seen three distinct ones. One is a child, very innocent. One is a fundy evangelist. One uses words the other two wouldn’t consider using.
J. had mentioned “schizophrenia” as something someone told her. Her constant thirst and need for “booster” shots to maintain some sort of stability seem to indicate schizophrenia. Her different personalities do not.
I see from the two persons who have joined our discussion that the social context is very important in determining how we think and what we do with sufferers of MIs as well as being influential in how MI sufferers see themselves. While these ideas may interest those of us who enjoy some sort of “standardized” normalcy, they do little or nothing to inform us about what we ought to be doing to address the here and now problems.

The point of the article is that thinking of these people as MI and treating them within the whole psychiatric pharmacological models seems NOT to work as well. This might indicate that their standards of criteria are better.

Back in the late 50s early 60s white suburban women were beind medicated in extremely high numbers. It was inconceivable to the medical community that there was anything they could have a problem with on a general level, so individual women were pathologized. A look at Mad Men might give a useful perspective to what might have been depressing these women.

It is in the pharmacological industry’s interests for us to view people as individuals that are broken - they have bad DNA, they have a disease.

Humans spend billions of dollars medicating themselves via these companies, rather than actually dealing with the sources of their problems, many of them societal.

It is like doctors giving every patient pain killers and sending them home.

That is our current approach to suffering.

And so a primary feedback loop from citizens is being cut off.

It is not a society for the people, clearly. It is the opposite.

But actually they do. One could for example integrate the way families deal with people who would be diagnosed over here in our own interpersonal practices.

There is also a whole wealth of approaches to dealing with people with DID who have tended to have undergone incredible abuse. They are not ill. If I hit your arm and it bruises, the bruise is not an illness. DID is what happens to brains/minds when they have underone traumatic stress, generally for long periods of time.

The medical model will view their brains as abnormal and suggest medication, as if the person has a genetic or other disease. This is philosophically idiotic.

(note: I am not saying medication cannot help in certain cases/situations, but the current model is philosophically weak and scientifically naive.)

Moreno,
I concede on your points well taken. I admit that the neuroscience/reductionist model, coupled with psychology is naive, or at best inadequate.
My concern is where do we go from here?
I admit that schizophrenia is a personality disorder. As such, it involves not only brain chemical malfunction, but also a lifetime of interface between self and culture, self and society and self and family. Culture evolves over centuries and offers little hope of immediate change. Society is primarily concerned with its own preservation, not with that of individuals whocannot contribute to it. Family is torn between hope and despair over the quick fixes or lengthy therapy currently offered. Self is the victim.

i dont think schizophrenia is a personality disorder…