Healing behind diagnoses and drugs

in Mind and moon (ECCO, 2022), journalist Daniel Bergener lists the life of two people who have been diagnosed with serious mental illness, including his brother. Both of them found healing not through diagnoses and grains, but by finding meaning in “madness”. They came to see their strange experiences as signs of the deepest layers of the self, and require change.

Challenge the dominant book Psychiatry The narration that sees hallucinations and delusions as meaningless symptoms to be suppressed. Instead, it calls us to think about the meaning of listening really to the mind.

I spoke with Bergenner about the limits of psychiatry, the strength of society, and the radical idea that psychosis It may carry a symbolic meaning.

Justin Garson: One of your book’s topics is that Spirituality Often madness is intertwined, and that our experiences are framing as a spiritual occurrence, instead of brain disorders, may actually help people to navigate them. Is there a sharp line between spirituality and madness?

Daniel Bergner: Simple answer: No. But we have to be careful. If we are exaggerated in emphasizing the lack of ambiguity of this line, we risk two things. First, we risk to reduce suffering that can occur in psychosis – real paranoiaFeeling threat, and feeling controlled by forces that go beyond one’s control. This is frightening, and I do not want to reduce it. Second, I risked the appearance as a romantic in the 1960s on the subject of psychosis. I don’t want to fall into any of those traps.

But of course, if our desire as a society is to keep people in a narrow world of normal life, then we will be blind from pumping spirituality that comes from outside these criteria. We read the prophets of the Bible. We read Jesus. We read the people who will definitely be placed in the psychosis category – and if we still have asylum, they will be placed in that asylum.

As a society, we need to listen better and listen with less fear. We find something very annoying about the real difference that we are setting all kinds of involuntary interventions that show studies over and over again, often a question and destroyed, which steals from different views.

JG: Another topic is that people often heal when they are space to be unique, without fear of judgment. Caroline, one of the characters in your book, found solidarity with other women in the Derby CD, women who preceded her history in psychosis. What is going on around non -clinical spaces such as cylinder or technical groups, or active departments that can provide that healing psychiatry often misses?

DB: Caroline’s work is very innovative. It is deeply involved in the hearing voices network and with the creation of spaces for the people who are led by their minds to alternative perceptions of reality, and spaces for people to exchange their perceptions instead of closing them. This transformation can have a truly useful effect because you are attracted to society rather than pushing outside it. This is a possible solution that people like Caroline, who are very courageous, are pushing towards.

I must explain: Caroline has suffered from every part of the dark alternative reality, sounds, and predatory hallucinations that one can imagine. Sometimes, I will tell people about it and the importance of its existence now, and they will say, “Well, it should not be so dangerous.” This is not true. When I speak to Caroline, you will say, “Can you repeat this question? My voices were very high and I couldn’t hear you.” However, it leads a movement to help people overcome society and recover.

JG: Your book shares stories about people who hear voices and start healing when they change how they are linked to those voices. Instead of seeing them as symptoms of turmoil, they see them as parts of themselves Trying help– Perhaps in a misleading way. This is one of the ideas behind the hearing sound network. Why did this perspective take a long time to become prevalent?

DB: Well, here is a short lesson – no doubt – a very short lesson. Around 1980, psychiatry took a turn towards a medical model. I began to see the issues she deals with as problems that imposed biological. One of the emergency is that hallucinations and alternative facts are meaningless. It is a random chase of the mind, and they have no internal meanings.

This is a terrible mistake. If you start getting hallucinations at the present time, and you start getting hallucinations at the present time, they will be a different hallucination, because we bring different experiences to this moment. This is one of the ideas that Caroline brings, and one of the visions of the hearing sound network. This is neither random nor meaning medicine. They are voices to be interpreted. It may be difficult to explain, but they are metaphors.

She allowed her Caroline’s experience to help others through psychosis. For example, a mother called Caroline during Corona virus disease. She suffers from hallucinations – allocations to cut off her hand, otherwise her child would harm. If she calls a different person, her child may have taken her immediately, and she may have been imprisoned. But the vision of Caroline was: Does this sound try to talk to you about the pressure of being alone as a mother?

I couldn’t get there in a phone call. But somehow Caroline did, immediately. This is a testimony to allergies that can bring the person who has gone through this type of reaction. Caroline brought an insightful look that was free and calm. I brought this woman from a feeling of complete isolation – “Oh my God, if I don’t cut my hand, then my child will be in a terrible danger” – “No, I am a single woman under pressure, doubled from renewable isolation. I am not very strange. I am not a foreigner. Let me try to deal.”

This, for me, says everything. It is one of the reasons that I was honored and I had Caroline as a kind of teachers when I wrote the book.

JG: Near the end of the book, your brother says, “I am lucky because I was crazy enough to refuse to be crazy.” This contradicts the traditional idea that healing begins to accept the diagnosis. What methods can make the acceptance of the name a person worse?

DB: My brother’s story talks about herself. It was a difficult journey away from the quick medical of his way of seeing and existence – something he says was imposed on him in his twenties. But that trip led to really great things. Among them, for him command From a small church outside New Haveen, it is important to communicate in society. It has become a gym in the world around him, and I am very proud of that.

What he says applies on a broader scale: Do not take away. We need to calculate the importance of granting the agency, even when it is difficult to do so. I am always resistant to the idea, that psychiatry, mostly, still sticks to it, that if you do not acknowledge that yourself is sick, you have no insight, an additional confirmation of your disease. But the agency is what we yearn for and need it as human beings. We have to determine our long and long future in the long run, or at least try it.