Integral/Holistic view & approach to schizophrenia

[Being]

Transpersonal FAQ -

http://www.transpersonalscience.org/tranfaq.aspx

What is the purpose of this FAQ?

This FAQ aims to explain the meaning, nature and significance of transpersonal studies for a general educated audience. It answers commonly asked questions about spiritual belief and practice and offers guidance on academic and professional study of the transpersonal.

What does 'transpersonal' mean?

The term ‘transpersonal’ literally means ‘beyond (or through) the personal’. It refers to experiences, processes and events in which our normal limiting sense of self is transcended and in which there is a feeling of connection to a larger, more meaningful reality.

[Being]

This is an ideal, but i like the description -

How therapy works -

http://www.brantcortright.com/howtherapyworks.html

Therapy 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.

[Being]

Disease Theory of ‘Mental Illness’ Tied To Pessimism About Recovery -

http://www.madinamerica.com/2015/11/...bout-recovery/

Researchers recently completed a first of its kind, large-scale international survey of attitudes about mental health and they were surprised by the results. According to their analysis published in this month’s issue of the Journal of Affective Disorders, people in developed countries, like the United States, are more likely to assume that ‘mental illnesses’ are similar to physical illnesses and biological or genetic in origin, but they are also much less likely to think that individuals can overcome these challenges and make a full recovery.

“Perhaps surprisingly, where illnesses were believed to be ‘not like physical illness,’ they were also considered more amenable to prevention and recovery,” wrote the researchers, led by Neil Seeman from the University of Toronto.

“Respondents from developed countries, despite believing that mental illness was similar to physical illness (and, as a consequence, one would think, treatable and curable) had less hope for a person being able to overcome mental illness than did respondents from developing countries.”

Seeman and his team used a new survey method to gather opinion data on stigma and conceptions of mental health from all countries in the world simultaneously. The online method allowed the researchers to survey over one million people in 229 countries and protectorates around the world for each question. The researchers asked respondents about their experiences interacting with people diagnosed with mental disorders, the likelihood of violence among those diagnosed, whether ‘mental illnesses’ were similar to physical illnesses, and whether people could ever overcome such a condition.

In the developed countries, like the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, 45% to 51% of those surveyed reported believing that mental illness was similar to physical illness while only 12% to 15% of respondents from developing countries agreed with this statement. However, those in developing countries were much more likely to think that patients are capable of recovery.

“A surprisingly low proportion (7%) of respondents from developed countries endorsed the statement that persons suffering from mental illness can overcome their illness.”

The results of this survey buttress previous research conducted by Pescolido et al. in 2010, which found that neurobiological conceptions of mental illnesses, rather than lessening stigma, actually increased the likelihood of social distance and community rejection.

[Being]

You Are Not Just Your Brain

http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/201...ust-your-brain

For some time now, I've been skeptical about the neuroscience of consciousness. Not so much because I doubt that consciousness is affected by neural states and processes, but because of the persistent tendency on the part of some neuroscientists to think of consciousness itself as a neural phenomenon.

Nothing epitomizes this tendency better than Francis Crick's famous claim — he called it his "astonishing hypothesis" — that you are your brain. At an interdisciplinary conference at Brown not so long ago, I heard a prominent neuroscientist blandly assert, as if voicing well-established scientific fact, that thoughts, feelings and beliefs are specific constellations of matter that are located (as it happens) inside the head. My own view — I laid this out in a book I wrote a few years back called Out of Our Heads — is that the brain is only part of the story, and that we can only begin to understand how the brain makes us consciousness by realizing that brain functions only in the setting of our bodies and our broader environmental (including our social and cultural) situation. The skull is not a magical membrane, my late collaborator, friend and teacher Susan Hurley used to say. And there is no reason to think the processes supporting consciousness are confined to what happens only on one side (the inside) of that boundary.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...ot-your-brain/
____________________________________________

IS CONSCIOUSNESS FUNDAMENTAL?

http://originsofconsciousness.com/book/

Consciousness is that inner awareness each of us has. It is the witness to our thoughts, and ultimately, who we really are. In this book, the term ‘consciousness’ will be used to describe any form of awareness, regardless of complexity or degree. But what is consciousness? Are thoughts things? How does the felt world of experience arise from the soft, wet tissue of our brains? Are we no more than our brains? And if so, what is it about brains that permit this experiencing center in the physical universe? Consciousness is the vehicle of all value and meaning. It is the ontological fountainhead, not just of the means to attribute significance, but of significance itself. Without it, there could be no meaning or value in the universe. It is then, in a certain sense, all that really matters. Such centrality sits uneasily with our competing suspicions of the insignificance of life in the cosmos.

[Rest in Links]

[Being]

Is Consciousness More than the Brain? | Interview with Dr. Gary Schwartz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-6hosFAObI

[Being]

This has profound implications to the areas of mental health -

A Radically Empirical Approach to the Exploration of Consciousness, Alan Wallace -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csAjZ1MwhPE

For centuries, theologians and philosophers have proposed a wide range of hypotheses concerning the origins and nature of consciousness and what happen to consciousness at death,
without reaching any consensus. Over the past 140 years, cognitive scientists have likewise proposed a diverse array of definitions of consciousness and theories attempting to solve the mind-body problem. Materialists have tended to dominate such discourse, with some arguing that subjective states of consciousness must be equivalent to brain processes or their emergent properties, while others deny the very existence of subjective, conscious experience. Virtually none of these theories lend themselves to scientific validation or repudiation; they do not appear to moving towards any kind of consensus; and they all lack of any rigorous means
of investigating subjective states of consciousness firsthand. In other words, they have all overlooked a key element that initially set “natural philosophy” apart from all other branches of philosophy and theology in the 17th century: the precise, rigorous observation of the
natural phenomena under investigation. While all subjectively experienced mental processes and states of consciousness are undetectable by the instruments of technology, they can be
observed with refined attention and introspection. William James, one of the foremost pioneers of experimental psychology and neuroscience, proposed that introspection should play a central role in scientifically exploring the mind. But ever since the rise of behaviorism in the early 20th century, his radically empirical approach proposal has been ignored. Buddhist contemplatives,
on the other hand, have adopted this radically empirical approach for millennia, and they have established a large body of consensual knowledge. Thus far, their methods and discoveries have been almost entirely overlooked by the scientific community and the general
public. It is high time to correct this oversight.

[Gem]

Just though I'd add this interesting blog by a prominent mental health advocate who is diagnosed with a mental illness

http://www.maryohagan.com/blog/two-a...ental-distress

[Gem]

Originally Posted by Being

Is Consciousness More than the Brain? | Interview with Dr. Gary Schwartz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-6hosFAObI

That was an interesting philosophical piece, which in this context, raises the question, does the persons biology cause their experiences of distress, or, does it merely enable such experiences?

It also raise the fact that a person's spirotual dimension is largely excluded from the bio-medical discourse.

We have always had scientists who promote a more holistic person, but since the bulk of literature in this age is 'brain science' (much of which is funded by pharmaceutical companies), the holistic view becomes buried.

Now that we accept the bio-medical model is not making any progress, and is causing harm in many cases, the more holistic narratives are becoming predominant. I think you do good work promoting these.

[Being]

Originally Posted by Gem

We have always had scientists who promote a more holistic person, but since the bulk of literature in this age is 'brain science' (much of which is funded by pharmaceutical companies), the holistic view becomes buried.

Now that we accept the bio-medical model is not making any progress, and is causing harm in many cases, the more holistic narratives are becoming predominant. I think you do good work promoting these.

Thank you. There is massive opposition to it all. i regularly get attacked & banned from mental health forums trying to discuss these areas.

i do think it makes sense to take a more integral/holistic understanding & approach to these areas.

[Gem]

Originally Posted by Being

Thank you. There is massive opposition to it all. i regularly get attacked & banned from mental health forums trying to discuss these areas.

i do think it makes sense to take a more integral/holistic understanding & approach to these areas.

Yes. Of course we have to understand what it means to a person to experience what they do, and take the person as the whole of themselves. A person might experience symptoms and receive a diagnosis, but that person is much more than a 'schizophrenic'. We need to understand 'what its like' for a person, and, what recovery means to them. We have to engage in supportive relationships of family, friends, peers with similar experiences, and also, deeper more meaningful therapeutic relationships - because we're dealing with living people who already have a lot of strength, and we have to restore their choice and human dignity - Not disempower people as specialists or as a society. If a person has the support that they as an individual need, which is mostly social support, and given their freedom to choose their life path, which is their own vision of recovery, then there's hope. The bio-medical model is essentially hopeless as people become victims of their illness (which are often said to be incurable)... which is perverse, because there are no biological markers for mental illnesses. This is a travesty, because the distress is a real thing that people experience, but the 'mental-disorders' language is completely mythical - yet paraded as knowledge!

What we need most of all is to give voice to 'consumers' (which is such a capitalist way of describing a person), and consider them to have valuable expert knowledge about mental illness, and make that knowledge known in the mental health specialist discourse, which is so valuable, because this empowers 'consumers' to shape the future direction of the mental health profession itself.

We can help people to direct their own lives for the better as individuals, and enhance their right to participate in their society, and furthermore, empower them as leaders and peer helpers in the mental health field, and receive their help in shaping the future directions of the mental health profession.