I have always believed that the sources of human distress lie in an individual’s story and the research facts presented in my recent article ‘A Crazy Idea’ spoke for themselves regarding there being no evidence for a biochemical basis to human misery. Whilst I have no doubt that those professionals who subscribe to the notion of mental illness are well-intentioned, there is the conundrum that they do not appear to have kept abreast of research findings. The position that needs addressing is that physicians either don’t read the research literature or they do read it and ignore it – in both situations there is a case to be answered. It seems that it has taken over two hundred years for psychiatrists to begin to realise that the causes and cures for human desperation be in relationship, not in biochemistry.
Read moreADHD – The Facts Speak for Themselves
Before 1980 no distressed children or teenagers were labelled with the ‘brain-disease’ attention-deficit with hyperactivity psychiatric disorder. Neither were young people medicated prior to 1980. In 1980 nearly one million US children were labelled with ADHD, such that ADHD could be found in every classroom. Five years later that number had doubled. Today, some 3.5 million American children are medicated for ADHD resulting in one in every twenty-three American four to seventeen year old children being medicated. This phenomenon has been replicated throughout the Western world.
Read moreIs Psychotherapy a Viable Alternative to Psychopharmacology?
In last week’s column it was shown that psychiatric drugs worked, not for their chemistry but because of psychological factors. The main psychological factors are the relationship between the psychiatrist and the client and the client’s expectations of getting better. For those psychiatrists who practise as psychopharmacologists, drugs are supposed to work because of their chemistry, not because of psychological factors. This latter situation challenges the use of psychotropic medication in the treatment of people’s troubled and troubling behaviours. This is not the case for psychotherapy.
Read moreThe End of Mental Illness
From my earliest days as a Clinical Psychologist I never believed that individuals became mentally ill; indeed, the concept of mental illness or insanity never made sense to me. Nevertheless, I worked in British and Irish psychiatric hospitals and psychiatric community services that were run on the premise that people’s troubled and troublesome behaviours had a biological/biochemical basis and clinical psychology was seen as offering support (not therapy) to individuals to accept the hopeless and incurable reality of their mental illness. In the face of considerable pressure to conform, I refused to cooperate and gradually set up psycho-social clinics separate from those of psychiatry. Eventually, I left the psychiatric services and set up in private practice and continue to work with people who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia or bi-polar depression or personality disorder or endogenous depression or attention-deficit disorder (ADD) or attention disorder with hyperactivity (ADHD) and other such hypothetical conditions.
Read moreThe Wisdom of Resistance
Howard Gardiner, the cognitive psychologist, who claims we possess several different kinds of intelligence (a claim that I have a different opinion about, as I believe he confuses knowledge with intelligence), has also developed a seven-step approach to changing people’s mind-sets. The final step of his hypothetical 7 step approach is when he encounters what he calls resistance from the person whose mind-set he wishes to change. Gardiner is not alone in his notion regarding people being resistant to change. In the psychoanalytic-psychotherapeutic literature there is frequent reference to clients being resistant to therapy.
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