mental health – P2P Foundation

Book of the day – Peer Work in Australia: A new future for mental health

P2P Foundation — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 08:00:00 +0000

Peer Work in Australia – A New Future for Mental Health. Ed. by Janet Meagher et al. , 2018

This book is a work of intense dedication, with an imperative and belief that we must document the current situation and focus on developments into the future for peer work in this country. It’s development and production has been a triumph of collaboration; co-produced and written by 29 leading ‘lived experience’ peer workers, lived experience advocates and allies from across Australia.

It consists of a collection of evidence and perspectives collated to reflect and inform the mental health and broader human services and disability sectors on current thinking, practice, literature, activities and challenges of lived experience peer work in this country.

Some of the writers and contributors (plus over 40 other people who workshopped some of the material) have pioneered peer work in Australia. Others have focused on researching and reporting about the efficacy and experiences of peer workers and services. Further perspectives are from the point of view of those allies who opened doors to enable persons with lived experience and peer workforces to take their rightful, respectful place in services. The publication’s development has been financially supported by a collaboration between Mind Australia and Flourish Australia.

Very few realize that the development of peer work in Australia has a thirty-year history. It has evolved from being a disruptive consumer-led practice to being accepted as an important element of good recovery. People with mental health issues, families and service providers now expect peer work to be a part of the mix of support offerings that are available. This book, a world first, seeks to articulate the need for further development of more specialized elements of contemporary peer work practice.

Readers will develop a new understanding of the powerful and deeply meaningful work that peer workers undertake, including being a vital component of a multifaceted team and being agents of culture change. They will see the empathic way in which peer workers walk alongside people who have experienced similar distress and support them without trying to ‘fix’ their situation; rather they support the person to believe in themselves, so that they discover their own solutions, self-agency, self-advocacy, strengths, capabilities and possibilities. Peers achieve this by using their personal lived experience purposefully and their professional experience in ways that no other profession can replicate. Peer work bridges the gap between people accessing services and people who treat, support and care about them.

The book helps explain why Australia has seen phenomenal growth in the peer workforce over the past five years. However, peer work is still a comparatively under-utilised approach to service delivery, and formal peer supervision, career development opportunities and evaluation has lagged behind implementation of peer workforce roles.

“Peer work in Australia” is a valuable resource for decision makers, service providers, policy writers, funders, people accessing mental health services, carers and family members, peer workers, managers, researchers and academics, clinicians, students and lecturers in human services and related areas.

Photo by AlishaV

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Mutiny of the Soul, Revisited

Charles Eisenstein — Fri, 02 Sep 2016 08:24:46 +0000

Over the years, I’ve probably received more mail about Mutiny of the Soul than any other essay I’ve written. The idea of the article has been hugely validating for many readers: that depression, ADHD, anxiety, etc. aren’t chemical malfunctions of the brain, nor spiritual malfunctions of the mind; rather, they are forms of legitimate rebellion against life structures that are unworthy of one’s full participation or attention. They are more symptoms of a social illness than of a personal deficiency. As Krishnamurti said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

I’ve also received my fair share of criticism for the article, mostly along the lines that it is dogmatically anti-medication. These critics say that pharmaceutical meds, while probably overprescribed, have an important role, and it is irresponsible for a layperson like myself with no psychiatric training to flout scientific consensus when people’s lives are at stake.

While I had seen a little of the science casting doubt on psych meds, I was in no position to make a strong argument against them. My piece was coming from an intuitive place: “These can’t be good.” But now the cracks are spreading in the foundation of pharmaceutical orthodoxy. I recently came across the work of one renegade psychiatrist, Kelly Brogan, who argues that depression and anxiety aren’t unlucky chemical imbalances in our brains that can be magicked away with medication, but are symptoms of something deeper. In Suffering: Who Needs It? she writes:

The entire pharmaceutical model of care is predicated on the belief that it is us against our vulnerable, dangerous, broken, annoying body. A body that needs to be chemically managed and put into its proper place of subservience relative to our prized functionality. We are prescribed to suppress and eliminate signs that are actually meaningful messages about our state of dis-ease. We don’t ask “why”, we don’t look to the roots of these symptoms. We just want to get back to work. To feel “normal.”

Later, speaking of psychiatric medications, she writes, “We are told that these medications are ‘fixing a chemical imbalance’ when they are doing anything but. They are suppressing consciousness and creating imbalance.”

Kelly Brogan also has a book coming out called A Mind of your Own that presents a devastating and well-referenced scientific case against the premises and practices of psychotropic medication. Her assessment: the drugs are worse than useless. Although I had been aware of weaknesses in the scientific justification for SSRIs and other meds, I was shocked at the degree of malfeasance, corruption, and cover-up the book details. It is an indictment not only of conventional psychiatry, but, implicitly, of our current system of knowledge production; i.e. academic research, increasingly corporate-funded, and the political and economic apparatus surrounding it.

Given that modern psychiatry, with its dominant pharmaceutical model, is very much part of said system of knowledge production and borrows its status and legitimacy from that of established social institutions of science and medicine, we should be wary of making too much of Dr. Brogan’s credentials. We should examine, therefore, any tendency we may have to take a book such as this one more seriously just because it is written by a credentialed psychiatrist. To say, now we can reject psychopharmaceuticals because an actual psychiatrist says so, still reinforces the same mindset of deference to medical authorities that led us to believe in psychopharmaceuticals to begin with. Why, to play on the book’s title, are our minds not our own? We (the American public) have abdicated our psychological authority to credentialed experts, diagnostic labels, and standards of sanity and well-being that coincide with submission to prevailing structures of power and privilege. We need to think for ourselves again.

That said, this book has the potency of an insider’s critique, all the more powerful because the author was once a believer herself. It is not the first exposé of its kind, but it is an unusually engaging and methodical one.

The embedding of pharmaceutical psychiatry within larger political and economic structures is apparent from the response to the book, which is backed by a major publisher (HarperCollins). Dr. Brogan described to me the consternation of its publicists at the mainstream media blackout (canceled TV appearances etc.) of the book. Perhaps they should not have been too surprised, given Big Pharma’s heavy advertising budget. Can you imagine a message that psychiatric medication is worse than useless, followed by a commercial suggesting, “Have you asked your doctor about ____?”

It would be a mistake, though, to blame direct financial conflict of interest for the establishment’s resistance to the book’s message. As an important element of the establishment itself, the mainstream media is most fond of crises and scandals that reinforce the legitimacy and the methods of existing authority. A new virus , an E. coli outbreak, an incident of terrorism, an escaped criminal, a university cheating scandal… all these underscore the need for better systems of control. The media takes them up without reservation. The response to issues that threaten the core narratives of our society are a different matter entirely.

Our world-defining stories have a kind of immune system that protects them from information that would disrupt them. The media exercises this immune response by attacking, marginalizing, or ignoring any critique that cuts too deeply. From the perspective of someone standing in the dominant story, these critiques indeed seem crazy; no wonder, because that story sets the boundaries of what is and is not real. Likewise, it seems crazy to question the narrative of “when you are sick, you go to the doctor and he or she makes you better, using the ever-expanding arsenal of modern medicine,” because so much else hinges on that narrative. Question that, and you also must question the political apparatus that is married to that story, as well as the deeper ideology of the onward march of science toward more complete knowledge and the onward march of technology toward more complete mastery. It isn’t just the financial self-interest of television networks and drug companies that is at stake.

The primary narratives of our culture form together a mythology that interweaves the very fabric of normality and tells us what is real. The simplest response to Dr. Brogan’s book is basically that she herself has gone crazy, and in her derangement is irresponsibly attacking the foundations of her profession. She is unhinged, hysterical (yes, this storyline is abetted by the fact she is a woman). There is then no need to directly address the arguments in her book, however trenchant they may appear. If they contradict established truth so violently, then we know, a priori, they must be wrong.

The reader will notice a parallel between the pathologizing of dissidents like Kelly Brogan, and the pathologizing of our personal impulses to resist or violate established social norms. If we take for granted the rightness of the world as we have known it, then to withhold full participation can only be a dysfunction, whether we label it with colloquial terms like laziness or psychiatric diagnoses like ADHD, depression, and so forth. The same fate befalls those who challenge that assumption on an ideological or political level.

What is true for critiques of the existing system also holds for alternatives to it, especially when those alternatives draw from a different basic worldview. On a personal level, the life choices people make outside normal professional pathways seem to others naïve, unrealistic, or, again, crazy. What, you left your Ph.D. program to learn permaculture? You dropped out of medical school to study acupuncture? Those who advocate such choices attract the same hostile incredulity from those who are ideologically threatened by them. If unconventional therapies like homeopathy, acupuncture, functional medicine, herbs, and thousands of other modalities actually work, what does that do to the credibility of the systems that have denied and suppressed them for so long? What does that do to the self-image and future status of those holding high positions in those systems? It is hard to admit one was wrong, especially when one has built a career and livelihood around being an authority. Therefore, paradigm-disrupting alternatives (and not only in medicine) provoke a degree of hostility that only makes sense when we recognize how much is at stake on the level of narrative. “Scientifically unproven” is the favored epithet with which to dismiss them; a neat rhetorical trick which casts their advocates as anti-science while ignoring the influence that money and ideology exert over the institutions of scientific research and knowledge production.

At best, alternative and holistic approaches to depression or anything else are kept in a safe compartment called “complementary,” tolerated perhaps, but certainly not taught in the medical schools, supported by insurance companies, or mandated by school systems. Acupuncture is welcomed, for example, as an adjunctive therapy to chemotherapy. But if someone forgoes the chemo entirely and opts to visit a cancer cure facility in Mexico, well that’s just – you know what I’m going to say – crazy.

A Mind of Your Own offers the equivalent by going beyond critique to offer a multi-dimensional holistic protocol for treating depression, involving diet, body ecology, exercise, and other practices. Clearly these subvert the dominant pharmoneurochemical paradigm, but it may not be immediately clear that they are part of a broader radicalism. After all, whether you “fix the patient” with chemicals or with other methods, aren’t you still helping her adjust to a “profoundly sick society”? That is a criticism frequently levied at so-called holistic treatments for depression. I asked Dr. Brogan to respond. She said:

My whole premise is that depression is an opportunity for transformation and that this transformation is best engaged, for many of us, through sending the body signals of safety; i.e. diet, movement, sleep, meditation/relaxation response. This isn’t a symptom management program. It’s a root-cause-resolution endeavor that seeks to illuminate connections between different bodily systems heretofore conceived of as separate. Acknowledging and accepting this invitation also begets a level of consciousness around bodily integrity that extends to engagement with the medical system, consumerism, and fear around adversity.

Clearly, this approach is not so simple as replacing a Prozac pill with a St. John’s Wort pill. In our culture of separation we like to divide the physical from the psychological, and, depending on our orientation, demote one or the other to secondary status; hence on the one hand the disparagement of certain conditions as “psychosomatic,” and on the other hand, the prejudice against treatments for depression that are “just physical.” In fact, somatic-level changes that require volition and commitment, such as radical dietary changes, may necessarily involve profound changes in the way one engages life and sees the world. Psychological state is not separate from lifestyle state, relationship state, work state, dietary state. Neither are cause and effect separable. Does poor diet cause depression? Or does depression cause poor diet?

The prescriptions in A Mind of Your Own encode a shift in basic worldview, not only diet and lifestyle. It pinpoints a major source of depression in chronic inflammation, linked to common medications as well as unhealthy intestinal flora, which in turn stems from practices that are foundational to the American way of birth and life. From hospital births and C-sections, to antibiotics, statins, and birth control pills, to practically everything in the standard Western diet, much of what is normal, advanced, or modern is actually making people miserable. To make the changes the book prescribes therefore requires a repudiation of norms, and consequently of the worldview that embeds them. That includes the ideology of progress, the veneration of science and technology, and the conception of the self as separate from, and in fundamental conflict with, the external world. Gone, then, is the War on Germs; gone is the regime of pharmaceutical control over body processes.

In contrast, the holistic therapies Kelly Brogan outlines are grounded in a sponsoring worldview of interconnectedness and wholeness, that seeks to cooperate with rather than conquer nature. Part of that worldview is trust in the body’s wisdom and innate healing capacity. No longer is depression an enemy to fight. It is a symptom of imbalance, and the response then is to restore wholeness on every level, including that of work, relationship, and life purpose. Therefore, depression is also a gateway to an expanded normal, that brings the qualities of interconnectedness and wholeness to all aspects of life.

I’m not asserting here that every case of depression or any other malady can be traced directly to something one can change with appropriate will and awareness. Life is more mysterious than that. Despite a profusion of psychosomatic maps of the kind Louise Hay made famous in You Can Heal Your Life, simplistic formulas like “Lung problems are about grief” or “Throat problems are about not speaking your truth” are not always helpful. Any serious disease (by which I mean a condition that makes it impossible to live normally) is an invitation into the unknown.

The difference between an allopathic therapy and a holistic therapy is that the former rejects that invitation and seeks to return the patient back to normal, back to the previously-known, while the latter accepts the invitation and opens the door to examining the whole of his or her life. That means that any therapy, whether pharmaceutical, herbal, or dietary, or even the application of colored lights and crystals, can conform to the allopathic mindset if it is reduced to a formula that effaces the unique individuality of the recipient.

The “whole of one’s life” extends to include that person’s relationships to others and to society. If we are to take Krishnamurti at his word, then this epidemic calls for therapies that are social, economic, and political, and not just physical or even mental. In other words, there is a political dimension to the epidemic of psychiatric illnesses. They alert us to a society that is indeed “profoundly sick.”

I believe that we can take Krishnamurti’s aphorism a step further. To be well in a profoundly sick society, one must contribute to the healing of that society. A Mind of Your Own would not be complete if it sought only to give advice to individuals seeking help and ignored the system that is harming them. Just as there is a political dimension to the depression epidemic, so also must any truly holistic book on the subject carry political implications.

On a sociopolitical level we face a choice that echoes the allopathic/holistic distinction: Do we attempt to “fix the patient” – our ailing body politic – or do we accept the invitation into the unknown? So far, the choice has mostly been the former. For example, after the 2008 financial crisis, we bolstered ailing financial institutions with “injections” of liquidity to keep the system going, rather than transitioning to a post-growth ecological economy. After the November terror attacks in Paris, France and the EU strengthened the security state, rather than moving into a post-imperial geopolitics that no longer seeks to maintain dominance. In the fashion of an addict, we address failure by doing even more of the same, hoping that more competent management of the situation will buy time for some miracle to happen.

Addressing psychiatry, A Mind of Your Own welcomes the invitation into new territory that the failure of pharmacological psychiatry offers. Will the profession accept that invitation? Will we accept it, when it comes, as individuals? Will we accept it as a civilization? As one of the defining diseases of our time, depression afflicts us on a collective level as well as a personal. Jimmy Carter identified it as “malaise.” It is hard to deny the signs: the going-through-the-motions, the lack of vision and direction, the feeling of being trapped in an intolerable but inescapable situation, a premonition of doom that swings from anxiety to panic to numbness, the feelings of powerlessness, the loss of agency, the deflation of former goals and ambitions. It was a telling moment when George W. Bush, hoping no doubt to rekindle that adventurous can-do spirit of the previous generation’s moon missions, announced the goal of a manned landing on Mars. Hooray, a new goal to incite our passion! It didn’t work, did it? Most of you probably don’t even remember the announcement. Inflated versions of old aspirations aren’t going to help. The old story that generated those aspirations is dying. It is time to stop fighting the invitation into the unknown that depression offers on a personal and collective level.

The age of the separate self is coming to an end. We can no longer stand to live in its boxes. I look forward to the day when psychiatric medication goes the way of lobotomy, electroshock therapy, straitjackets, and padded cells, to be followed by the demise of their kin in every realm: prisons, state surveillance, pesticides, genetic engineering, forced schooling, military occupation, confinement feedlots, the War on Drugs, economic austerity… the whole apparatus of domination and control. That is why, although it focuses on a small part of the bandwidth of suffering on this planet, A Mind of Your Own is a revolutionary book. I hope it reaches the many revolutionaries-in-the-making among the depressed, the anxious, the addicted – everyone who rebels against the story that rules our world.

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The Mental Disease of Late-Stage Capitalism

The Rules — Fri, 06 May 2016 08:57:12 +0000

I’ve been talking with a lot of my friends recently — in private where they felt comfortable letting their guard down — about the dirty little secret no one is supposed to talk about.

The shame people feel when they can’t find a job…

…or pay their bills.

…or go to the dentist.

…or that they have to move back in with their parents.

…or they can’t afford to have children.

We are supposed to pretend, in this stupendously individualist culture, that it is our fault. The buck stops here. I am responsible for my failings in life.

Of course this is demonstrably not true. We are merely living through late-stage capitalism and our parents lacked the foresight to warn us about it. When a population explodes — as the human one did throughout the last century — eventually all manner of social institutions become over-crowded. From there, it’s simply a numbers game.

Want that awesome job? Stack your resume next to the hundreds of other people applying for it. Hoping to get into college? You’ll have to pay out the nose in student loans (if, that is, you were fortunate enough to get through admissions). Thinking of buying a house? You’re too busy paying rent in a skyrocketing market of housing prices.

But yeah, be sure to blame yourself. It’s obviously your fault.

Seriously though, we should have seen this coming. Build an economic system based on wealth hoarding and presumed scarcity and you’ll get what was intended. The system is performing exactly as it was designed to. That is why wages have stagnated in the West for 30 years. It is why 62 people are able to have the same amount of wealth as 3.7 billion. It is why politicians are bought by the highest bidders and legislation systematically serves the already-rich at the expense of society.

A great irony of this deeply corrupt system of wealth hoarding is that the “weapon of choice” is how we feel about ourselves as we interact with our friends. The elites don’t have to silence us. We do that ourselves by refusing to talk about what is happening to us. Fake it until you make it. That’s the advice we are given by the already successful who have pigeon-holed themselves into the tiny number of real opportunities society had to offer. Hold yourself accountable for the crushing political system that was designed to divide us against ourselves.

The mental disease of late-stage capitalism is shame, the devastating feeling that we failed ourselves in the Land of Opportunity.

This great lie that we whisper to ourselves is how they control us. Our fear that other impoverished people (which is most of us now) will look down on us for being impoverished too. This is how we give them the power to keep humiliating us.

I say no more of this emotional racket. If I am going to be responsible for my fate in life, let it be because I chose to stand up and fight — that I helped dismantle the global architecture of wealth extraction that created this systemic corruption of our economic and political systems.

Now more than ever, we need spiritual healing. As this capitalist system destroys itself, we can step aside and find healing by living honestly and without fear. They don’t get to tell us how to live. We can share our pain with family and friends. We can post it on social media. Shout it from the rooftops if we feel like it. The pain we feel is capitalism dying. It hurts us because we are still in it.

But those billionaires who rigged the game don’t get to tell me what I should or shouldn’t say to my friends. If I am struggling financially it is because the financial system is morally corrupt. This truth is a mantric elixir — repeat it to yourself every time the habits of your mind whisper that it is your fault.

You are not to blame for the wealth hoarding of others. That is one burden you don’t have to carry any longer. Be healed. Find your strength. Speak your truth. And let the cascades of change unfurl across society.

We cannot begin the work of building new economic systems until we take off the mental shackles of the old ones. So let your shame fall away. Remember your pride in learning and growing as a person, loving life and other people, being with friends, and pursuing your dreams. Then hold tight to these feelings as you set clear intentions about how the future must be different from the past.

We can do better. We must do better. It might be true that capitalism as we know it is going the way of history. I say good riddance. Whatever good it might have done is in the past now. Moving forward will be a grieving process — and each of us needs to pay close attention to the feelings inside of ourselves. We are the capitalist system right now. But not for long.

The pain we feel is like that tugging of skin for the serpent as it sheds an outer layer. Deep inside ourselves we are human beings, which is about so much more than the money we have in the bank or the things we buy at the store. As we shed ourselves of the immoral economic ideology of insatiable greed (that has made the elites around the world very sick indeed!), let us remember our true nature and begin to heal.

Onward, fellow humans.

Cross-posted from The Rules.org and written by Joe Brewer.

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Messages from the Immaterial Commons: 2) Professional Wisdom and the Abuse of Power

Denis Postle — Fri, 10 Jul 2015 11:00:08 +0000

The PsyCommons and its Enclosures – Professional Wisdom and the Abuse of Power.

First published in Asylum

Commons, commoning and common goods, apart from their intrinsic value, can wake us up to the extent to which valuable human resources have been enclosed for exploitation or social control. Enclosures such as copyright, land, patenting (and bottled water), have surged into view. Less apparent but equally important are the enclosures of some of the emotional, intrapsychic aspects of the human condition. Advertising, branding and marketing will have to wait for another day, what follows is an outline of how the enclosures of professionalized psychology demean, damage and exploit the common resources of the human condition.

Origins

I have long been active in the resistance to state regulation of counselling and psychotherapy. I wrote and published well over 300,000 words on the eIpnosis web site plus a couple of books, (Postle 2007, Postle 2012) opposing what I saw as the capture by the state of counselling, psychotherapy and psychology.

I was intermittently aware that over a long period, sustaining dissidence can result in the unconscious absorption of the ethos and even the methods of what is being opposed, that we could come to mirror what offended us. A devotion to critique can defend us from the awkward realities of devising and implementing a positive programme

I made one or two half-hearted attempts to quit but the momentum of the rush to regulate tended to pull me back. My 25+ years of effective practice, framed in a rigorous form of civic accountability (Independent Practitioners Network) counted for nothing; the Health Professions Council was set on preventing people like me from practising.

However as with any headlong political campaign, a pause is as good as a rest and a couple of years back I woke up to a realisation that my vantage point on the psychological professions, some sectors of which are still seeking the endorsement of their expertise by the state, was from outside. I had quit. A quite painful collapse of solidarity has followed.

I had long seen the UK psychology organisations, UKCP, BPS, BACP along with the BPC as walled gardens of professionalized therapy, gated communities with a very high price for entrance. But now this vision reversed direction, I saw these professions, not as oases of nourishment and care, but as something deeply problematic, they were enclosures, enclosures of a commons of ordinary wisdom and shared power, that enables three quarters of the population to get through life without the help of the psy professions. I called it the psyCommons,

The psyCommons

In recent years confidence in the state and markets has increasingly looked misplaced.

Whether it is at home, at work, or in local and national government there have to be better ways of organizing ourselves than those we presently struggle with.

They seem daily more and more toxic, inequitable and unsustainable.

One promising option is to look beyond Markets and the State and to revive and revalue the idea of the commons – the atmosphere, the oceans, rivers, forests, seeds, the internet, and our genes – our common heritage, and one that comes with some well understood Commons-style governance.

The psyCommons, a self-sustaining feature of the human condition, is an addition to this list of commons.

The psyCommons presently identifies two human capacities: rapport, the combination of eye contact, gaze, gesture and body language on which relationships ride; coupled with the phenomenon of learning from experience. – how we change, survive, recover and flourish. Feedback from a colleague suggested I add chat – what we say to each other and to ourselves – how we make sense of what is going on in our lives

Between them these three capacities generate the shared power and ordinary wisdom we need to be psysavvy, to be able to shape how, and with whom we share our lives.

The psyCommons initiative seeks to build a framework for the validation and promotion of ways in which we can all become more psysavvy.

That said, it is important to remember that, as I mentioned earlier, something like forty five million people in the UK get through life without needing help from the psychological professions. However, becoming psysavvy doesn’t yet receive the attention that we give to physical fitness

In recent decades, we have greatly benefited from better nutrition, better public health and a much more aware approach to bodily self-care.

Tens of thousands of people are capable of running the 26 miles of a marathon, over twenty thousand cyclists capable of riding a hundred miles, recently passed the end of my street.

Huge numbers of other people run a little, cycle a little, swim a little, dance a little.

The body part of the bodymind is increasingly well taken care of. We are living longer.

This article argues that becoming psysavvy, psychologically savvy, is as important as paying attention to physical fitness.

But there are obstacles in the way of this.

Enclosures

As daily life unfolds, our psyCommons of ordinary wisdom and shared power meets innumerable influences that shape how we relate to each other and how we do or don’t learn from experience. For example: Religion, Science, and Capitalism.

While much of what was for centuries taken to be god-given, such as sin, has moved towards being seen as a human construction, the absolute truths of religion still have wide appeal.

Science, despite the narrowness of its remit, continues to be perceived as a source of truth rather than as a very highly specialised form of learning from experience.

Alongside this, capitalism rewards monetary value, and denigrates and ignores local ‘use value’. Market fundamentalism blinds us to alternatives, and dismisses the social damage it causes as ‘externalities’.

While these contribute work, technology, wealth for some and a place to hold our wedding, they also tend to deform and distort the daily life of the psyCommons.

But more on them another day, because there are also the professions: The law, the military, academia and medicine; portfolios of expertise about our ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’ and ‘have to’s.

All the foregoing create and sustain Enclosures of the psyCommons. They define territories of the psyCommons, patent them, copyright them, privatize them, academicize, bureaucratize them. They build fences, install gatekeepers and charge for access.

The psyEnclosures owned and operated by the psychological professions that are the focus of this article have a central role in the life of the psyCommons, I believe they impoverish and demean and damage the psyCommons.

How so?

psyEnclosures

As the grip of heritage religion on the psyCommons loosened, the medical profession began to replace it, and some doctors began developing psychological knowledge. To protect and promote their knowledge and expertise, psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychology built professional enclosures.

These psyEnclosures, owned and operated by professions that had branched from medicine, brought with them the medical ethos – illness, deficit, dysfunction, diagnosis and treatment.

Unavoidable aspects of the human condition such as bereavement, anxiety, attraction, disappointment and resistance to oppression and even sexual diversity, were seen as ‘illnesses’.

The idea of ‘mental illness’ and its mirror image, ‘mental health’ was born.

Privileged access to countless meetings with clients enabled the psyprofessions to mine the psyCommons and to extract and process the raw material they found. This raw knowledge was then refined into a variety of expert systems for dealing with the mental illness that the professions had discovered. Or had created?

All of this extraction and refining was, and still is, held in the tightly policed professional enclosures of psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy and counselling. As occupations they work hard to be indistinguishable from the professions that enclose them.

These psyprofessions claim exclusive ownership of the expert systems they have developed. In the UK and elsewhere they have sought, and mostly succeeded, in having the state endorse their possession and stewardship of this knowledge.

While there are undoubtedly lots of caring, generous practitioners, what matters here is the downside of the psyprofessions. They install a widespread belief in the rest of the population about the nature of human condition difficulties.

That they are a dangerous territory.

A wilderness, full of mystery and threat. Monsters lurk and swamps can trap the unwary.

If we have taken up residence in this psywilderness, or look to be about to do so, the community resilience and resource of the psyCommons tends to be evaporate; ‘qualified’ ‘expert’ help is likely to be sought via referrals to the gated communities of the psyprofessions.

This presumption of danger, and the need for rescue is very important, it generates a society-wide taboo about valuing and understanding the emotional and imaginal aspects of the human condition.

People know, we all know, that a diagnosis of ’mental illness’ in our medical records invokes a near impossible to erase stigma. Unsurprisingly, human condition difficulties are commonly denied or concealed.

Because of this, access to professional psy knowledge and expertise is usually the result of, and often requires, a crisis.

A crisis that may often be prolonged and consolidated by the treatment.

There are many exceptions but the gaze of the professional psypractitioner, especially those in the NHS and allied services, has been trained to see deficits, dysfunction, pathology and illness. ‘Evidence-based’ normalcy measurements are likely to be followed by diagnostic ‘category fitting’, and biochemical treatment of symptoms tends too often to follow

The psyprofessions tend to ensure that as clients and patients – we enter their enclosures as supplicants. Passive acceptance of the psyexpert’s gifts is presumed. Power sharing is absent. Professional expertise rules.

This is not to deny its capabilities but to underline how paradoxically; it contributes to the impoverishment of the psyCommons of ordinary wisdom and shared power.

Capturing and holding knowledge about the human condition in the psyprofessions and the shame and secrecy due to contact with, or entry into their Enclosures, inhibits the diffusion of this knowledge back into the psyCommons.

So far as we ensure that human condition distress is seen as illness rather than as pointing to a need for community support, for re-evaluation, or political change – we can expect to find dependency and despair.

And there is another downside to the psyprofessions enclosures. Psychological service provision from them can never match the amount and cost of human condition distress that is likely to be manifest in this or any other psyCommons.

The professions who have built and who live in, and off, the psyEnclosures, seem content to maintain this condition of scarcity.

Why is not hard to find, it sustains political and economic leverage.

As we heard earlier, physical fitness, being savvy in knowledge and practice about the body part of the bodymind, is increasingly commonplace. Complementing this achievement with a matching increase in psy-fitness, becoming psySavvy, seems timely and achievable.

Through dissolution of the psyEnclosures and taking back the psy knowledge that came from us, that belongs to us, the psyCommons could become abundantly psysavvy.

Let’s do it.

References

Postle, D. (2007) Regulating the psychological therapies from taxonomy to taxidermy PCCS Books

Postle, D. (2012) Therapy Future: Obstacles and opportunities – introducing the psyCommons Lulu.com

Independent Practitioners Network http://i-p-n.org

eIpnosis http://ipnosis.postle.net

Video version of this text: The psyCommons and its Enclosures – Professionalized Wisdom and the Abuse of Power. http://youtu.be/pxuFnUuLqyc

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