Thursday, June 9, 2011

Psychiatrists and Spiritual Emergence

As you may know, if you have read this blog in the past, I am a psychiatrist by training.  I no longer practice it.  


Today, I look back on all the psychiatrists I have ever known......in training, colleagues, people I became friends with, etc---all of them.


We are strange birds.  Even Grof.  We are a varied and unusual lot.  We kill ourselves often.  We have the highest suicide rate in all the specialties of medicine.  I have never met a psychiatrist that did not strike me as very "other."  The older crowd in Psychiatry still believes in some of what they say.....they believe in the "diseases" that the profession invented and "treats."  


I do not believe that "psychiatric disorders" are diseases (despite what was drummed into my head for 4 years in residency), be they proposed to be caused by genetics, or environmental toxins or "schizophrenogenic mothers."  


     There is not one shred of evidence to show--for example, with a blood test, or with other technical analyses we use in the rest of the medical field, or a brain scan, that can diagnose or really even corroborate a psychiatric diagnosis.  In Med school, they actually teach the prospective psychiatrist, "you are normal! When the patient's beliefs or behavior significantly differs from your's, THEY are sick."  I'd like to chime in that no one is "normal," --it is just a statistical invention.  Normal is an idea akin to the terms "sane" or "insane," which are legal terms but used regularly in everyday parlance.


Many, if not most or all, people that have  what psychiatry pejoratively labels "psychosis" are actually going through a healing process.  A healing process for the mind and soul.  It might not be pretty, or understandable easily to others, as each of these events is unique to the person it is occurring in.  But, I contend that most, if not all "psychoses" and many "cyclic mood disorders" represent Spiritual Emergence.  


The classic reference book is Spiritual Emergence by Stan and Christina Grof.  It is one of many books now written about the phenomena.  One simple way of putting it re: spiritual emergence, is "we are not just our bodies, we are not just our brains, our brains are not our minds, and the mind and spirit are intertwined."  Eventually, usually via some painful or traumatic event (s), the person--that is, the spirit within the person, begins to show itself to the mind of the brain owner.  The brain owner starts to find out he/she is much more than "they told you," or that s/he ever could have imagined.  It is, by definition, mind-blowing when this occurs.


  Traditional psychiatry views this as "illness" which "must be shut down immediately or they will be like that forever!" 


So, most people get shut down by the system.  They put you through the torture mill--maybe a few times--maybe for life.  Stigma, isolation and emotional pain make the torture drugs they inject people with, like haloperidol et al, all that more horrible.  


But, it never quits.  Shut down or not, the spirit will not be stopped.  It must be assimilated by the brain owner once this process starts---all the new information and ways of learning that the Spiritually Emerging individual is experiencing must be accepted and the person learns how to live with an expanded consciousness.


  New psychiatry must teach this and change the approach of the field if it is to survive and not just be a poison-pushing Big Pharma whore.






2 comments:

  1. I had a manic episode due to a spiritual emergency in January this year, in Houston, USA. I was hospitalized and diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder instead. I want to get a differential evaluation done by a psychiatrist who has experience in Spiritual Emergencies, to counter the bipolar diagnosis. It is of vital importance to me as my husband wants to divorce me on account of relapsing nature of bipolar disorder. Could you please suggest me a psychiatrist in this stream?

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    1. If I were still in active practice I would suggest me, but i am in California. I suggest Google searching the "Spiritual Emergence Network," which was/is a list of psychiatrists and psychologist so-oriented. Another approach would be to ask Stan Grof himself. He is in Northern CA, and may know a psychiatrist in your area, as alas I personally do not. Read up on it as much as possible, and DO NOT ACCEPT the "certainty of a lifelong diagnosis." If often most certainly is NOT, even if for a few years someone's mood etc fit Bipolar disorder exactly, it has been known to suddenly go away and never return. Psychiatry is most imprecise and dependent upon the skill and artfulness of the practitioner as well as his/her flexibility in approach and lack of accepting the status quo. Love and light, Andre Lange MD

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