Spiritual point of view on psychiatric ilnesses

[dreki]

I was wondering...

What is the spiritual point of view on psychiatric illnesses? Is it something that can be cured by the mind and will? Is it something that people have the mind power to overcome? Or are psychiatric diagnosis "real" and therefore incurable? Can people with really, really bad experiences or people that are diagnosed with a heavy diagnose overcome the illness somehow or are people with mental illnesses permamently ill? What are your experiences and thoughts on this?

I used to believe that I had many different mental illnesses and was living in fear, cause a lot of unexplainable things happened to me and I thought I was unnormal and crazy. Until I began dealing with my fear and with my belief of what I thought was real and it turned my world completely around. Not that I was waaay out, I just had a lot of anxiety and the only thing that helped me, was beginning to get a more soulful/spiritual perception of fear. I'm still working on it although I think it will take some time to remove my fear completey.

So there's an explaination of fear in spirituality, but how does it explain psychosis and that people lose touch with the "reality" - whatever that is anyway... and people with depression etc. Is it something they can change without the help of e.g. medication?

[Margaret]

I don't think medication was supposed to be the end all in the fight against mental illness. I believe the person was expected to work on the issues that caused the illness, the medication relieved the more severe symptoms while this was taking place. However, when the person is hearing voices and obeying those voices without any thought as to his/her own welfare, I would not want to be the person to take away the meds if they are helping. I have seen imaging of the brain, where a doctor can point out the abnormalities. So I think there is definitly a chemical issue present in most severe psychological illness. Strangely enough I had a psychiatrist who became quite seriously disturbed while I was seeing him. He had a bachelors from Yale in Theology and his medical degree from Harvard. While I was in treatment with him he told me he was communing with the animals in the zoo. He believed that there is a nerve that is disconnected when a baby is held upright. This nerve enables a human to perform all kinds of miraculess endeavers. He believed he had reconnected this nerve. About three years after I stopped treatment he died of a brain tumour. I can only think that the tumour had caused the thought process that his brain was following. It is seems odd that he didnt recognize that there was something wrong.