Theos-Talk Archives (May 1996 Message tl00855)

At 04:28 AM 5/15/96 -0400, you wrote:
Bee:
I'd just like to take a few lines to introduce a new topic in our thread of
discussion vis a vis schizophrenia and "Mental Illness" as a whole. I don't
know if over there in New Zealand, you all have hears of Dr. Thomas Szaz (I
THINK that's the right spelling) who is a very highly respected but very
unorthodox Psychiatrist who has written several books on this subject. I
don't know if they're available in New Zealand but I assume they must be at
least "special order able".

Dr Szaz's premise is that there is absolutely no such thing as mental
illness and that largely it is our perception of the "mentally ill" and our
treatment of them that is the entirely cause of such problems that exist. I
know that he also discusses schizophrenia in these books and you might find
a new point-of-view refreshing and perhaps illuminating in some areas. I
don't know if he's fully correct in his views or not, but sometimes looking
at things from another angle helps. It might also be useful to your daughter.

You know, up until about three months ago I ran an open, fully public,
Shamanic Healing and Teaching circle out of my home. Over the several years
during which we did so, we had a lot of people whom Dr. Szaz would have said
were "differently oriented" come to our home, and many of them were sad, and
some of them were frightening. One of my students was Chief Psychiatrist and
a major local facility and another a RN with a Master's Degree in
Psychiatric Nursing (she's now a Nurse Practitioner dealing with
Epidemiology AIDS) and the two of them were regularly warning me about a new
attendee being "dangerous". But I did find out one thing, if you accept the
person at face value, and attempt to meet them "half-way" between their
perception of reality and yours, you can make headway. It's slow, it's
painful, and there are many "back slidings" but it does help. The people
I've worked with are so used to being totally rejected as "crazy", that when
you accept what they say as simply their personal but valid to them
experience, they stick around to talk some more.

If there can be considered to be a "theosophical" approach to dealing with
the "differently perceptive" I think it has to be both open and
non-rejective. As a Psychiatrist-Neurosurgeon friend of mine, Dr. Ramamurti
Mishra once said to me: "The important thing to remember in dealing with
psychiatric matters is that one never really knows who is crazy..the patient
or the Doctor". I have had clear experience of hostility melting before
openness to listen. I don't know if this can help you in your particular
situation because there have developed certain patterns of attitude that
perhaps prevent openness, but I would hope it could help, for I would dearly
like to.

alexis
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