In due course I will be introducing you to “Transpersonal Hypnotherapy” and how it challenges Western Medicine’s paradigm of Mental Illness and Treatments,  together with trauma theories and their repercussions for understanding the relationship between body and mind.

We begin today, however, by contributing to the prising free of the theoretical basis of the mind & body relationship pathologically speaking and indeed, of any speaking at all, by those who have tragically misunderstood it and built an edifice of pretty consistent disaster.

1. Psychiatry is in Crisis

For many years now Psychiatry, as the State Arm of the control and treatment of the distressed and functionally disabled or distressing (I.e.,  the  ‘mentally ill’ and ‘psychotic’), has been under examination and critique – and protest – by many groups in America, the UK and Europe at the very least.

Drop the Disorder, a group begun in 2016 and emanating from the West Midlands, is just one example of what I’m talking about.  Jo Watson, et al, began their project by challenging the appropriacy and efficacy of psychiatric ‘diagnoses’ as pathologising and disempowering labels that attach to the social identities and indeed the personal identities of those receiving them.  They, and many many other groups with similar or related projects, argue that the diagnostic protocols of psychiatry fail to contain great planks of the actual causative factors of mental health difficulties and symptomisations.

This is, as said, just one English example of the plethora of groups that may be identified as critical of psychiatry.

Still: the State founded, funded, publicised and awarded institution that is Psychiatry blunders on, supported by commercial bodies of pharmacology whose revenues evidence a significant dependence on their joint success as well as by our Governments, also tied in financially with the wealthy pharmaceutical companies, therefore their interests.

Does this justify the ignorance and arrogance informing the treatment by Psychiatrists of a significant proportion of our societies’ members world wide?

Or render them non-responsible for the huge waste of lives and economic potential achieved by their grasp and legally enforceable restraint and treatment of the people involved?

Crunching the numbers isn’t within my present task, though undoubtedly I need to pull it within a task in the very near future. What is certain, without a shadow of a doubt, is that  mental health suffering in Europe is indexibly related to several factors, each of which deserve further study: climate; faith; and  the funding status and confidence in Psychiatry (as represented by DSM and other publications that evidence strong influence from America and England and rooted in the writings of German psychological/medical ‘scientists back in the nineteenth century).  Its confidence in chemical ‘medicines’ in any applicable form dates to the 1950’s.

Let’s be clear here: humanity in any documentarily checkable form dates back arguably about 5000 years in a history of the species running back immemorially further for that reason. The concept of madness and mental illness as we observe or experience it today is no more than 170 years old, albeit that the vehicles for its promotion as possibly the greatest and most expensive weapon of dominant social power dates back to the later years of the 17th century though properly speaking was not truly established until well into the 18th century.

In other words the focus on the existence let alone the plight of the “mentally ill” was impossible since not conceived until mid-late 17th century and as a commonplace concern or happening was simply NOT until the 19th century when even then the identified suffering numbered in the uk less than 1000.  Whereas in 2016, for example, over 60,000 were involuntarily confined in psychiatric hospitals and were obliged, if necessary by force, to take medications proven to have “side effects” depleting their functionality. In England the population was not multiplied by anything like the percentages required to make that figure comparably equal. On the contrary since the mid 19th century the population of those recorded as functionally disabled by mental illness has grown disproportionately, year on year, until now it is in a genuinely critical state.

An article published in The Guardian about six months ago reported the direct and indirect costs of mental illness to weigh in at £94b per annum, according to a recent report by the OECD.

Financial costing is a cool calculator.

But how about counting:-

  • the number of hours in despair?
  • the number of children losing one or both competent parents?
  • the number of grandparents beside themselves in grief and worry in relation to their younger family members?
  • the number of hopes dashed on the precipice of a life long disabling diagnosis beneath the paralysing effects of neuro-effective mobility blockers and other forms of motivational and cognitive weapons?

Inflammatory language I hear a lot of you protest.

Indeed.

If, however, you have ever lived for a time taking psychiatric medications prescribed for one of the the more serious psychiatric diagnoses, or are related or otherwise closely ‘attached’ to anyone who has been, or still is, then I imagine you may understand exactly what I’m driving at.

Nonetheless, the counting of governmental moneys, procured after all by the minimally “wounded walking” as well as the “fine and dandy”, is a reasonable indicator of suffering and its’ cost to human life. But like any map or chart it fails to delineate let alone “colour in” the human price paid by each individual sufferer and their hugely suffering, way-laid and adored family members and their ‘true blue’ devoted and adored friends.

It would be wrong at every level to assume that the mentally ill population do not incorporate a hefty proportion of people whose disabilities are made incalculably more difficult by the pain they endure as they watch, within their drugged haze of a disconnecting ‘chemical dungeon,’ the difficulties endured by their beloved children, parents, other family members,  partners, pets, friends and siblings..   To add insult to injury, these “bystanders”, in their own position of fear and desperation (and so willing dependence on the directions of the ‘powers that be’) place upon them assertive and sometimes almost aggressive pressure to”keep taking the medication”.

Sometimes it takes Courage to Breathe.

In my next entry on this blog I will tell you the story of my healing in relationship with a Transpersonal Hypnotherapist as well as introduce you to the theories of the pivotal role of the polyvagal nervous system in the healing of trauma instigated mental-emotional and functional suffering.

Thank you for listening (reading).