It is important to make my position clear before I start this brief discussion: I am not opposed to medication to help sufferers with mental problems such as depression or anxiety. My position is that there is need of other interventions combined with medication when medication is indicated and that to truly recover a person needs to put a lot of work. Therapy, knowledge, good nutrition, exercise, adequate sleep, social support are all important. Medication can save lives but it is true that the minimum dose that works should be the aim of good psychiatrist and doctors understanding that when the sufferers begin to work diligently towards recovery, medication become a crutch and a support that can slowly be reduced to a possible and workable minimum and, in some cases, eliminated completely when the sufferer gains the adequate skills to do so.
After years of studies and research, and after having helped many people as an online helper, I came to the conclusion, contained in this post, that Mental Disorders are no “illness”. We are currently failing to help people adequately and causing much up evil along the way. I need help, I need the help of influential people so that we can change the world to ensure a better future for our children and for humanity.
In this post, I would like to suggest ways in which actors can help their world to better understand what we mistakenly call mental illness but which, in reality, is a disorder, I think of it as human suffering, and we can help most people to recover.
I want to change the world. So here is the problem that I would like people to know, particularly actors that have some influential power in society.
The term “illness” is a term used to describe a virus that can be identified in order to treat the illness. In so called “Mental Illness” we have a serious problem: that is that we have not identified any viruses and also we have not identified the precise source of the problem. If we do not know the exact causes of something like Depression, for example, we cannot call it an illness. For those that claim that the problem is genetic there are inconsistencies here too: genetics are an expression that happens both in biology and in the environment. We don’t know to what extent mental disorders are biological or environmental. Many believe that both forces are at work. Yet this is no clear indication of origins for us to use the term “illness” since we are not sure to what extent the problem is environmental and to what extent it is biological.
To give an example, people can develop depression due to a number of environmental factors such as loss of a job, loss of one’s house, loss of one’s partner or experience of trauma. If someone verbally abuses me till I become depressed, say for example that I am a child, then this is not illness but trauma that can be helped with therapy, by discussing and working on the experience and the problems. Medication can sometimes help, it certainly helps many people, but it must be used carefully and the sufferer has to do a lot of work to achieve some sort of recovery.
A mental disorder such as Depression, but any mental disorder for that matter, is not an illness but a disorder and some would use human suffering. The problem with the use of “illness” is that it is good for those that like to treat the problem as illness, prescribe drugs, and solve the situation temporarily. This does more damage than good in many cases. We therefore have children medicated for ADD in ever increasing numbers; we have people suffering Depression when all they need is not anti psychotics but much milder drugs; and we have serious cases of mental disorders made much worse by potent drugs which side effects we do not know. I am not against medication when administered in the right doses and for the right reasons: but I see a different outcome where the wrong medication is often given; when people are over-medicated; or people and children on medications when they should not be. There are countless articles and literature from respected professionals speaking about these grave problems.
What can actors do? They could start to look at “The Open Dialogue Method” of Finland to find out that the Finnish have eradicated Schizophrenia from their society not by using drugs alone, but by using a new method that helps the person and does not see the person as an illness. Please do look into this the uTube film-link is provided below
We are going the wrong way, we are actually increasing mental disorders in our world simply because of ignorance.
Today we are coming to understand how schizophrenia happens and what to do about it, particularly in first episode cases, but not just by focusing on biology but also working on the Mind and Spirit of the people. The film below will testify to this inconvenient truth. We fail to take the advice of the Finnish people simply because, in many countries of the world, profit comes before people.
The situation seems to be getting worse where we see more and more people medicated and more and more cases of so called “Mental Illness” Something is wrong in this picture.
Here is a film on the Open Dialogue Method. Thank you for reading this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDVhZHJagfQ
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