‘What Happened? What Mental Health is Really About’: Bill Saunders

Here is the Forward of a book written by Perth Clinical Psychologist Bill Saunders, What Happened? What Mental Health is Really About. This is a really important book, essential reading for anyone interested in mental health or psychological wellbeing. I agree with all of Bill’s statements below about mental health.

‘On most mornings when writing this book I’d get up at first light and go for a ‘clear the head run.’ Running is a great way to think; especially about writing. I’d begin the run ‘thinking’ about how to address an issue and then somewhere in the run I would start ‘having thoughts’ that brought clarity.

One day, wending my way back to the beachside house that I was using as a writer’s retreat, I saw the following statement written on a blackboard that normally advertised the local golf club’s menu specials.

“The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.”

I guiltily knew that the message applied to me. I knew that for many years, I had kept quiet about troubling things. I knew that I had, for a couple of decades at least, had a growing disquiet about how we manage mental health. But, I had remained silent. I went back that morning and I wrote with increased vigour. I toughened the book up.

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‘Say ‘No’ to the Fiction of Brain Diseases: Towards a New Psychiatry’ by Robert Berezin, MD

UnknownSome of you will know that I was a neuroscientist for 25 years. I left the field because I did not feel that the idea of so-called ‘brain diseases’ and drug treatments were doing much to help people recover from addiction and mental health problems.

The more I read, the more I feel that parts of psychiatry – not all – has a lot to answer for. Here’s an excellent blog from the Mad in America website, by Robert Berezin from Harvard Universty.

‘During my lifetime I have witnessed the fall of Freudian psychiatry and the ascension of molecular psychiatry. Unfortunately, we have gone from the frying pan into the fire. I certainly do not subscribe to old-fashioned psychoanalytic ideas which had been beset by considerable problems throughout the years. Its practice suffered from dogmatic theories and miscast beliefs, which worked to the detriment of responsiveness to our patients.

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Classic blog: ‘Talking About Psychosis, Part 1: Why Do It?’ by Marc Ragins MD

mraginsThe stuff on Mad in America just keeps getting better and better. Here’s a thought-provoking blog from another of my favourite bloggers.

‘I was taught in medical school and psychiatric residency not to talk to people about their voices and their delusions:  “It will only feed into them and make them worse.”  Nor was I supposed to argue with people with paranoia because they’ll just get agitated and won’t change their mind anyway.

We were taught that the psychoanalysts had wasted a lot of time trying to connect people with psychosis by trying to find meaning in their psychosis.  I was taught that there is no meaning.  All we needed to know about their psychosis was enough to prescribe medications and assess if the meds worked.

The venerable Chestnut Lodge where Frieda Fromm-Reichmann had treated the woman in “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” with psychoanalysis was successfully sued for not providing research-proven meds instead of talking with patients with psychosis.

Beyond that, I was told not to try to relate to the patients in the State hospital because they couldn’t handle relationships and when I left they’d feel abandoned and decompensate.  Most of my medical school class mates were more than happy to follow that advice and left the ward as fast as possible. They already knew that “people with psychosis are creepy and frightening and frustrating anyhow” without having met any of them.

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‘MIA Continuing Education: Help Us Get The Word Out’ by Robert Whitaker

Unknown-1Mad in America (MIA) is one of my very favourite websites and I check it out for new content every day. Robert Whitaker, who developed the website, is one of favourite writers – his books Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America and Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill.

What Bob and his colleagues have done at MIA is amazing! They have really challenged the psychiatry and mental health fields to have a serious rethink about they way things are done. They have challenged the very worrying trend of assuming that all emotional distress is biological and needs ‘drugging’. They have challenged the power of drug companies and biological psychiatry. They are trying to put humanity back into human conditions.

I spent 25 years as a neuroscientist before changing career, because I felt that the field did not have the solutions for helping people recover from addiction and mental health conditions. I was also disillusioned by the misinformation that was circulated in the field and to the general public – and the outright fraud that I came across. Fifteen years of working in the ‘real’ world, I feel that I made the right decision.

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‘Talking About Psychosis, Part 1: Why Do It?’ by Marc Ragins MD

mraginsHere’s a thought-provoking blog one of my favourite bloggers on Mad in America which I first posted on Recovery Stories in July 2014.

‘I was taught in medical school and psychiatric residency not to talk to people about their voices and their delusions:  “It will only feed into them and make them worse.”  Nor was I supposed to argue with people with paranoia because they’ll just get agitated and won’t change their mind anyway.

We were taught that the psychoanalysts had wasted a lot of time trying to connect people with psychosis by trying to find meaning in their psychosis.  I was taught that there is no meaning.  All we needed to know about their psychosis was enough to prescribe medications and assess if the meds worked. The venerable Chestnut Lodge where Frieda Fromm-Reichmann had treated the woman in “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” with psychoanalysis was successfully sued for not providing research-proven meds instead of talking with patients with psychosis.

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‘Full Recovery from Schizophrenia’ by Paris Williams

Full-moon-dark-sky-300x200‘This is the first of a series of blog postings related to my own series of research studies (my doctoral research at Saybrook University) of people who have made full and lasting medication-free recoveries after being diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders.

This is very exciting research because it is one of the few areas within psychological research that remains almost completely wide open. One reason it is so wide open is that most Westerners don’t believe that genuine recovery from schizophrenia and other related psychotic disorders is possible, in spite of significant evidence to the contrary.

Since there are some very hopeful findings that have emerged within this research, I want to begin this series of postings by summing up one particularly hopeful aspect of my own research, which is a group of five factors that emerged which are considered to have been the most important factors in my participants’ recovery process. But before looking closer at these factors, we should back up for a minute…

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