Aug 13, 2016 12:55 AM
Spiritual Emergency
https://aeon.co/essays/treating-acute-ps...he-anguish
EXCERPT: [...] Should we even think of acute psychosis as a disorder? Actually, I no longer think so. I like the term used by the transpersonal psychiatrist Stan Grof: spiritual emergency. Acute psychosis is certainly terrible and dangerous. It can feel unbelievably awful; some people kill themselves when gripped by it, and a very few kill others, too.
Grof’s term implies that this kind of radical breakdown is a terrible bid for self-healing by a person whose life has come to be completely unliveable. It often erupts when some unbearable catastrophe unhinges a person (in Martha’s case, it was the death of her eldest child, in about the most horrible way that one could imagine).
Grof thinks that the healing must involve a new integration of deep, inner parts of the person and deep, transpersonal forces beyond the person. It involves new connections between the secret self and others – between the conscious self and the self beyond consciousness nowadays referred to as ‘spiritual’. When this new integration happens, it is pale and misleading to call it a ‘remission’. It is a remarkable achievement. Like the sobriety of a recovering alcoholic, it is always a work in progress. A post-psychotic man told me recently, looking back on himself before his madness: ‘It had to break down. I was too arrogant. I couldn’t see it, but it wasn’t working, it all had to change.’ At present this man is a successful artist and a leader in a vital artistic community.
Unfortunately, in developed countries, where psychopharmacology is the coin of the realm, there are few resources grounded in alternative views.
[...] Is acute psychosis a brain disorder? Hypothetically yes, but no evidence exists. [...] there actually are no demonstrable differences between the brains of psychotic and non-psychotic people. We might be told that there is no physical test that will discriminate these groups. But the words ‘not yet’ are always added, since psychiatry seems to have faith that such a test is around the corner. This faith is robust: in the age of psychopharmacology our humanity is reduced to our brain, and all problems can be salved if not really solved with pills.
But I have grave doubts. [...] I have the deepest regard for the profession of psychiatry. [...] We are told that it is an astonishing success story. This is partly because success is judged by the quick alleviation of symptoms, and this alleviation is measured by the gold standard of a six-week, randomised, double-blind trial. In six weeks, antipsychotic drugs, both the older and the newer varieties, look very good. Crazy thoughts and experiences and emotions quieten down enormously. Acutely psychotic people make others around them feel intensely uncomfortable, and after six weeks on the meds they often become much easier to be around.
Fewer patients have been followed over the long-term, but one large study from the United States National Institute of Mental Health found a higher incidence of new breakdowns in the drug-treated than in those treated with placebo; the greater the drug dose administered, the higher the rate of relapse. Not only that, but when relapse occurred, the symptoms tended to be worse than ever before. [...] Surely, the ultimate goal would be a functional life, drug-free. But the data here are discouraging....
What happened when a Muslim student went to Cambridge in 1816
https://aeon.co/ideas/what-happened-when...ge-in-1816
EXCERPT: Two hundred years ago, there arrived in London the first group of Muslims ever to study in Europe. [...] As the six young Muslims settled into their London lodgings in the last months of 1815, they were filled with excitement at the new kind of society they saw around them. [...] As the weeks turned into months, the six strangers began to realise the scale of their task. They had no recognisable qualifications, and no contacts among the then-small groves of academe: they didn’t even know the English language. [...] The university was only one of many places that Salih and his fellow Muslim students visited during their four years in England, questing for the scientific fruits of the Enlightenment. The encounter between ‘Islam and the West’ is often told in terms of hostility and conflict, but Salih’s diary presents a quite different set of attitudes – cooperation, compassion and common humanity – and, in preserving the record of an unexpected relationship with the evangelical Lee, unlikely friendships. Written in England at the same time as the novels of Jane Austen, Salih’s diary is a forgotten testament, and salutary reminder of the humane encounter between Europeans and Muslims at the dawn of the modern era....
https://aeon.co/essays/treating-acute-ps...he-anguish
EXCERPT: [...] Should we even think of acute psychosis as a disorder? Actually, I no longer think so. I like the term used by the transpersonal psychiatrist Stan Grof: spiritual emergency. Acute psychosis is certainly terrible and dangerous. It can feel unbelievably awful; some people kill themselves when gripped by it, and a very few kill others, too.
Grof’s term implies that this kind of radical breakdown is a terrible bid for self-healing by a person whose life has come to be completely unliveable. It often erupts when some unbearable catastrophe unhinges a person (in Martha’s case, it was the death of her eldest child, in about the most horrible way that one could imagine).
Grof thinks that the healing must involve a new integration of deep, inner parts of the person and deep, transpersonal forces beyond the person. It involves new connections between the secret self and others – between the conscious self and the self beyond consciousness nowadays referred to as ‘spiritual’. When this new integration happens, it is pale and misleading to call it a ‘remission’. It is a remarkable achievement. Like the sobriety of a recovering alcoholic, it is always a work in progress. A post-psychotic man told me recently, looking back on himself before his madness: ‘It had to break down. I was too arrogant. I couldn’t see it, but it wasn’t working, it all had to change.’ At present this man is a successful artist and a leader in a vital artistic community.
Unfortunately, in developed countries, where psychopharmacology is the coin of the realm, there are few resources grounded in alternative views.
[...] Is acute psychosis a brain disorder? Hypothetically yes, but no evidence exists. [...] there actually are no demonstrable differences between the brains of psychotic and non-psychotic people. We might be told that there is no physical test that will discriminate these groups. But the words ‘not yet’ are always added, since psychiatry seems to have faith that such a test is around the corner. This faith is robust: in the age of psychopharmacology our humanity is reduced to our brain, and all problems can be salved if not really solved with pills.
But I have grave doubts. [...] I have the deepest regard for the profession of psychiatry. [...] We are told that it is an astonishing success story. This is partly because success is judged by the quick alleviation of symptoms, and this alleviation is measured by the gold standard of a six-week, randomised, double-blind trial. In six weeks, antipsychotic drugs, both the older and the newer varieties, look very good. Crazy thoughts and experiences and emotions quieten down enormously. Acutely psychotic people make others around them feel intensely uncomfortable, and after six weeks on the meds they often become much easier to be around.
Fewer patients have been followed over the long-term, but one large study from the United States National Institute of Mental Health found a higher incidence of new breakdowns in the drug-treated than in those treated with placebo; the greater the drug dose administered, the higher the rate of relapse. Not only that, but when relapse occurred, the symptoms tended to be worse than ever before. [...] Surely, the ultimate goal would be a functional life, drug-free. But the data here are discouraging....
What happened when a Muslim student went to Cambridge in 1816
https://aeon.co/ideas/what-happened-when...ge-in-1816
EXCERPT: Two hundred years ago, there arrived in London the first group of Muslims ever to study in Europe. [...] As the six young Muslims settled into their London lodgings in the last months of 1815, they were filled with excitement at the new kind of society they saw around them. [...] As the weeks turned into months, the six strangers began to realise the scale of their task. They had no recognisable qualifications, and no contacts among the then-small groves of academe: they didn’t even know the English language. [...] The university was only one of many places that Salih and his fellow Muslim students visited during their four years in England, questing for the scientific fruits of the Enlightenment. The encounter between ‘Islam and the West’ is often told in terms of hostility and conflict, but Salih’s diary presents a quite different set of attitudes – cooperation, compassion and common humanity – and, in preserving the record of an unexpected relationship with the evangelical Lee, unlikely friendships. Written in England at the same time as the novels of Jane Austen, Salih’s diary is a forgotten testament, and salutary reminder of the humane encounter between Europeans and Muslims at the dawn of the modern era....
