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Oct 12, 2008, 04:24 PM
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Member Since: Feb 2007
Location: The place where X marks the spot.
Posts: 1,848
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"...85% of our clients (all diagnosed as severely schizophrenic)
at the Diabasis center not only improved, with no medications,
but most went on growing after leaving us."
- Dr. John Weir Perry
Stress may cause highly activated mythic images to erupt from the psyche's deepest levels in the form of turbulent visionary experience. Depending on whether the interactions between the individual and the immediate surroundings lean toward affirmation or invalidation, comprehension of these visions can turn the visionary experience into a step in growth or into a disorder, as an acute psychosis. Based on his clinical and scholarly investigations, John Weir Perry has found and formulated a mental syndrome which, though customarily regarded as acute psychosis, is in actuality a more natural effort of the psyche to mend its imbalances. If the upset is received in the spirit of empathy and understanding, and allowed to run its course, an acute episode can be found to reveal a self-organizing process that has self-healing potential.
Treatment or Therapy?
The medical model of handling the acute "psychotic" episode comes under the classification of what is known as "treatment," which implies doing something to the patients to relieve them of their symptoms, even to cure them. The alternative paradigm I am proposing is based on the concept of a "therapy" that gives respectful heed to the psychic process underlying the symptoms.
The original meaning of the Greek word therapeia was a "waiting upon" or a "service done" to the gods, with implications of tending, nurturing, caring and being an attendant; in time the word was applied to medical care. The original connotation is pertinent to the handling of acute "psychotic" episodes, since the persons going through them are in a state of being overwhelmed by images of gods and other mythic elements. Hence a therapist does well to "be an attendant" (therapeutes) upon these mythic images so as to foster their work. "Treatment" strives to stop what is happening, while "therapy" attempts to move with the underlying process and help achieve the creative aim implicit in it.
Visionary experiences of various kinds, including acute episodes, have a tendency to take six weeks to accomplish their inner aims. It is intriguing to reflect on the connotations of this, for this number is recognizable as forty days, with all this time's connotations. Pacing is an important phenomenon that invites our scrutiny. Our experience indicates that in the acute episode the more floridly disturbed the persons are, the more rapidly they move through it. Intensity seems to correlate directly with favorable outcome. The persons who are frightened, overwhelmed with imagery, and engrossed in their preoccupations are the ones most likely to have a favorable inner experience, from which they emerge with significant change.
When we admit individuals who are at the very onset of their episode and again, at the height of their disordered state, they may be fragmented, often mute, with scattered bits of ideation passing across the mental stage. At this phase of the process the mental content is a hodgepodge and the ego has quit the field, lost in the deep interiors of the psyche. Listening to an individual at this time gives kaleidoscopic glimpses of mythic themes that often leave the listener bewildered. Yet if we sit quietly and attentively with a person in this state for only two or three times, we may find the fragments coalescing into a story that gradually begins to move forward.
Source: Trials of the Visionary Mind
See also: Psychosis as Purposive: The Far Side of Madness
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~ Kindness is cheap. It's unkindness that always demands the highest price.
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