
Sep 06, 2011, 01:59 PM
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Member Since: Dec 2010
Location: ???
Posts: 7,864
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One of our law students recommended the book Toxic Psychiatry to me a few months ago. This weekend I was in a used book store and happened to see it selling for $5 so I bought it and started reading it. I'm finding it very interesting and thought I'd share an excerpt:
Quote:
"60 Minutes" Dramatizes Psychospirituality in "Schizophrenics"
On July 27, 1986, "60 Minutes" produced a show entitled "Schizophrenia." It was based on biopsychiatric theories, and one of their experts declared, "We know it's a brain disease now. It's like mulitple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease." On the show, vignettes of patients were presented to impress the audience with the bizarre quality of their communications, and hence the absurdity of any psychological meaning or underpinning to their "disease."
The first "60 Minute" patient, Brugo, bolsters his identity with spirituality, as well as religion, and declares that he's "not extinct": "And I'm Croatian Hebrew, which is Adam and Eve's kin. And I have been Croatian Hebrew for centuries and cent--upon centuries. And I'm a Herto-erectus man, and I'm also part Neanderthal, and I mean to keep that heritage, 'cause I'm not extinct."
Packed into these few remarks is symbolism about his desperate need for personal value and dignity, his identification with religion and humanity, and perhaps his awareness of primitive impulses stirring inside himself, as well as his fear of personal extincton. Here is more than enough material to stimulate anyone's desire to communicate with him.
The second patient, Jim, is dismissed by the interviewer because he is "convinced he was shot to death when he was a baby." Yet his brief remarks seem like a metaphor for child sexual abuse by a male: "I had my head blown off with a shotgun when I was two years old. And--and before that, things happened in my crib. I remember all these things and stuff, but I just remember, you know. I remember all this stuff."
A therapist with experience in listening to people immediately would wonder about what lies behind Jim's direct hints about terrifying memories from childhood, not to mention the symbolism of the crib in relation to his present trapped condition. More than one patient of mine has begun with just such anguished fragments of memory before discovering the agony of his or her abusive childhood and its relationship to current entrapments.
Another "60 Minutes" patient, Ronnie, clearly is struggling with his own identity and his separateness or isolation from other people. He, too, talks in psychospiritual terms, again with undertones of possible sexual abuse: "I thought everybody's bodies was connected to mine, and their--their spirits were--I was--I was laying in bed and I played--you know how we live, where, you know, like you're smashing some air for yourself? Well, like, I was smashing every spirit next to me, and the--all kinds of bad things were happening."
Still another patient, Lynn, directly identifies herself with God and with being "different," and clearly tells us that her "wisdom" is more than she can handle. She's practically inviting us to ask her about the inner knowledge she cannot bear: "I've got the wisdom of God in me, and I have to learn how to cope with it. Nobody seems to think you're supposed to survive when you're different. [Crying] But I know--as--like the words in Job said, all I can say was, 'Have pity on me, my friends. I've been touched by the hand of God.'"
Toxic Psychiatry, pp. 23-4
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