Psychiatry: The Myth of Mental Illness

[Music] how much can a psychiatrist tell if a person is crazy or not well that was the subject of a very famous series of experiments that was done back in the 1970s close the rosenhan experiments and these experiments basically turned psychiatry on its head for a while what dr. Rosen then did rosenhan was that he brought a bunch of people together who were not crazy at all including himself a painter an architect the carpenters some housewives some psychology students and he had them make believe that they were crazy and go to psychiatric hospitals and try to get themselves admitted a schizophrenic says manic depressives a Psychopaths and they found an interesting result that none of the psychiatrist's on the staff of the hospital could determine that these people were really faking they weren't psychotic they were fakes so after they just after they revealed the findings of the studies to the psychiatric community the doctor said well give us another chance so doesn't hand said sure so they repeated the study that with one hospital but with 12 psychiatric hospitals and you know it really didn't seem to matter whether the hospitals were these real fancy hospitals for the rich or if they were the low budget hospitals that you know the comment made we go to in all cases they couldn't tell the difference between somebody who was pretending to hear voices pretending to see things that were in there and a person who was genuinely sick what does that tell us about the diagnostic accuracy of Psychiatry you know psychiatry is a big business it's a billion-dollar business that is very much in collusion with the psycho pharmaceutical companies psychiatric medicines what are called psychotropic medicines talking about probably the most lucrative corporate world there is the world of pharmacology of medicines most of the therapy that's recommended probably the single most referred to type of psychotherapy by the American Psychiatric Association the National Institute of Health is a therapy called CBT CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy is a therapy that is almost always given in conjunction with psychiatric medications CBT on the outside seems to be pretty go Kay you know what they're doing is really teaching people how to think in a more positive way who could say there's anything wrong with wanting to think in a more positive way this sounds very very close to what the Torah spouses that we look more to the to the positive rather than to the negative but buyer beware consumer beware what the secular psychiatrists and psychologists considered to be a positive thought and you'll find that in many cases it's very very different than what the Torah sanctions as good positive wholesome and kosher thoughts another difficulty with CBT is that the belief system of the CBT practitioner is inevitably introduced into the relationship with the clients and it's also based on stoic philosophy this is according to a leading CBT practitioner Aaron Beck that the whole thing is based on philosophy that and we don't adhere to any philosophies other than the teriyaki dosa so consumer beware CBT and all of the other secular therapies have some truth to them but partial truth is not the whole truth partial truth is not the ultimate truth the ultimate truth is the only truth that can come from from God so don't sail for partial truth I'm going to talk today about a method of of coaching based on faith a method of therapy based on faith faith that is based on the ultimate truth that's called emunah coaching imagine you an engineer and your job is to come up with a math mathematical calculations necessary to build a big expansion bridge would you be satisfied with estimates or would you want mathematical calculations that are absolutely accurate and true and that you can count on because after all if the calculations are off by just a little bit he could have tragic consequences it's the same thing with a munna the same thing with the type with secular therapy in psychiatry they're only partial truths and a lot of the psychiatric or the bio psychiatric research that's being done isn't even true is yielding results that are not even true at all for example bio psychiatric research it has absolutely no proof at all that depression or other saw their so-called mood disorders have a biological or genetic basis for them there's no proof at all of that they have some evidence that shows that people that suffer from mental illness have brains that look a little bit different than other people's brains that's a correlation but it's not proof that there is a mental illness in that person's brain that's causing them to act differently let them study the brains of Nobel Prize winners or even better yet of spiritual masters and I'm sure they'll certainly find that their brains look different also they have absolutely no evidence as well that the psychiatric medications that they are giving on what is actually making people feel better so you see we need to be on God I'll tell you myself as on a personal level that before my you know on my way to becoming a religious person I went through 40 years almost of what I call traveling in the therapeutic wasteland you know just like the Jews traveled for forty years in the desert in the mid bar in the wilderness I myself was on a personal journey looking for good therapies looking for something I could believe as a psychotherapist as a person who's licensed to do psychotherapy in America in Israel I started with psychoanalysis 40 in psychoanalysis it was fascinating to me particularly because my mother had been a Freudian analyst I grew up with that stuff you know I sort of believed in it sort of like one would believe in a religion you know for it was a brilliant scientist was a brilliant Thea Titian and of course you know my mother you know recommended that I this would be a good thing for me so out of respect for her I pursued it I was interested in it I studied in a psycho Island I the doctorate degree in psychology and I studied in a post doctoral psychoanalytic Institute for four years during the time that I was in us that psychoanalytic Institute training program I was required to undergo a personal psychoanalysis myself which means that I had to lie on a couch four times a week and I did this for nine years and I spoke to an analyst who I can't even tell you to this day what she looks like because she sat behind me and any time I wanted to make any kind of emotional connection to the analyst I was told that I could not that's a violation of the procedure and that's a sign of resistance you're not cooperating with the psychoanalyst I learned a lot about myself in psychoanalysis I probably know more about myself and know more about my unconscious than most people do but it didn't really do me much good because after nine years I really can't say that I was any happier than I was before in fact after those nine years it took me almost another 20 years to get a lot of this analytic theory out of my mind the theory which I had been indoctrinated into which was based on very unclean sources it was just as completely not true and not fair to impose upon a person after I had my jaunt into psychoanalysis I decided that I would try CBT as I said gbt is much less of a problem the source is you know and that is you know it's pretty clean in a way but again it was emphasizing positive thinking and the truth is that not everything is positive ultimately we need to get through some of the negatives to be able to see that everything ultimately is positive that everything that God does is for the best but if I keep looking at the garden and I say they were just there are no weeds here there were no heat weeds here it says flowers just flowers no weeds no weeds I'm fooling myself there are plenty of weeds there and those weeds need to be taken out not you know and removed before I can really appreciate the flowers so my CBT therapy didn't last very long from there I decided I would go you know into hypnosis hypnosis had a great appeal to me because the idea of being able to input ideas into a person's mind into their unconscious mind and the speed at which hypnosis seemed to work especially the the stage form of hypnosis was very appealing very compelling but I soon discovered that even when a person would go into a deep hypnotic state that the mind is not a passive recipient of suggestions that are given to it from somebody from the outside the unconscious mind is dynamic and the end of defense mechanisms they continue regardless of whether somebody's in hypnosis not they may go into temporary abeyance for a while because hypnosis the person's relaxed and they're less analytical to begin with but after the hypnosis is over those defense mechanisms come back and what happens is they repel and they throw out all of those hypnotic suggestions because those suggestions are not things that the person came to himself they would imposed upon him suddenly from the outside it's sort of like you know what adjournment is the body and the body can immediately tell that this germ is a foreign invader and the body's immune system does everything it can to take that germ and expelled out of body as quickly as possible and that's really the same thing that happened with hypnotic suggestions they were expelled from the system because they were recognized as foreign invaders it wasn't respectful to the body it wasn't respectful to the unconscious to be bombarded with all these positive suggestions that didn't make sense the unconscious of the person because the unconscious person's fears and anxieties hadn't been removed at all hadn't been worked out hadn't been resolved it was disrespectful so I had Bandhan hypnosis what's called classical hypnosis the idea that the mind is passive and doesn't have a mind of its own today I moved into what's called ericksonian hypnosis Erikson though that had much more sophistication to it or at least I thought because dr. Milton Erickson who something some people believe is the world's foremost authority and clinical hypnosis he didn't think that the mind was passive at all he recognized the dynamic function of the mind and that there were defense mechanisms in someone and people resisted changed until it makes sense to them Erikson said that the unconscious mind was the seed of a person's creativity and that was very appealing to me it was wonderful to think that I had in creativity and I had intelligence that I wasn't even aware of its residing in the unconscious mind and all I needed to do was to go into hypnosis and access that unconscious creativity bring it out and integrate it into your current present life into your current functioning and you could be an amazing creative healthy dynamic and a live person a well integrated person it had great appeal not only to me but different thousands of other people that became excited about ericksonian hypnosis ericksonian psychotherapy unfortunately that too fell far short from the promises that it made because once a person comes out of hypnosis even ericksonian hypnosis the creativity is that onion revealed is very interesting it's very nice but as a patient someone who was going for ericksonian hypnosis way of looking at the world it didn't give it didn't take away the free-floating anxieties and the existential doubts that I had and why was that because the existential doubts that people have the doubts that North them the anxieties the trouble them deep down they don't go away unless one comes to understand that it it's part of every person it's part of every person's soul to want to be created to be and want to be connected to the Creator everybody deep down recognizes that there is a creator and they recognize that they are a creation not a creator and they want to be in more of an intimate connection with that creator and live in alignment with that basic truth deep down everybody has a spirituality that wants them to be able to connect with the Creator and to fit in that's the only thing that gives anybody any kind of permanent or lasting relief from anxiety from fear from worry from sadness and depression so of course ericksonian hypnosis could not fill the bill from there I went off to all kinds of things I tried primal scream therapy that was a therapy that you know when you go into a soundproof room and the primal scream therapist gives you a baseball bat or he gives you a tennis racket and he tells you that you should smash you know she'd bang it against the pillow something screamed at the top of your lungs and ventilate all your emotions that seemed like you know something worth trying because it seemed to be you know people say it works fast right so you go into the padded room and you scream at the top of your lungs and you let all of your anger and you bang away with the bats from the tennis rackets and you feel great you leave there and you feel wow you feel like so good so clean so relieved and it lasts a couple of days and then it's gone and then you know you're back to way started nothing was resolved because the mind isn't so simple that we can just ventilate and go through what's called a catharsis a relief or ventilation of emotion and that that's enough you know that'll be enough a person could go just kick a tree before throat you know throw something and feel better we know people punch the walls they throw things they don't feel they feel better for a moment but they don't it doesn't solve any problems then there's something called paradoxical psychotherapy I couldn't take that seriously at all that's sort of what's called reverse psychology that's where you you know you tell somebody if who's coming to you who wants to have less anxiety you tell them you know I think for a while you're gonna feel more anxiety you go reverse of the reverse of what they're actually experiencing or what they're actually asking for you sort of prescribed the symptom couldn't take that seriously I don't think most intelligent people can basically you know there was a time where I I tried family psychotherapy that was interesting i sat with the family therapist on the couch and he drew what's called a genogram that's a pictorial view of your family not just currently but back through several generations as far back as you can remember it's called a family tree and the idea of the family therapy was that there's into into those generational problems that exist in the family and they get passed down to the next generation for subsequent generations and the therapists hypothesized that I was reliving a problem that existed in somebody in my family two generations ago of course he has no evidence to support that idea and it was a totally unproductive effort on my part to get better from that type of a therapy the problems that I was seeking to deal with in myself we're not unusually excessive problems and the problems that most people struggle with self-esteem some anxiety you know some feelings of competitiveness with other people what we call normal everyday neurotic household erratic types of problems and so I saw that it wasn't helpful I decided after being so discouraged with all of this you know all the money I was spending on therapy and all the time I was spending on these psychotherapist I decided that it would give psychoanalysis one more try but this time instead of the Freudian version I decided I would use a interpersonal psychoanalysis analyst this is an analyst who believes that the therapy that the relationship his or her relationship with with the client is what helps the client the most what's going to cure the client is having a healthy relationship with a guy who org a woman who has a PhD in psychology who is a health a so-called healthy person and through having what's called a corrective emotional experience with this healthy psychoanalyst I was supposed to become healthy myself well again how do you know that the psychoanalyst is healthy and what's the definition of health so obviously it didn't work okay ultimately I reached a turning point in my career this was about I don't know almost 20 years ago where I saw something written in the book called Dara hashem dara hashem in the way of god the roma cow who was a Jewish rabbi who wrote about 600 years ago he wrote in the introduction to that book that only treatments only ideas that came that would be used to develop treatments from the Torah from the Holy Torah could alleviate completely alleviating cure human suffering the human suffering could could be made to feel better could be eased by some of the therapies that I've been talking to about what it means but none of the therapies that are based on partial truths and are not based on the Torah which is God's God's laws God's way for us to live his ideas given to Moses the greatest prophet that ever lived on Mount Sinai and passed down through generations they could nothing could go to the root of a person's problems except if it came from the Torah that sort of piqued my curiosity in other words these other books they had partial truths they had some value they had some accuracy to that but they were never going to reach deep enough to cure the soul of a person who you know who suffered very interesting idea what I thought was the difference between this book called the Taira and all of these other books and the Rama Kali answered my question he said there's only one difference between the torrents the books and that is the dista Torah God put his special influence on - and he didn't put his special influence onto these other books and if God had not said the Torah is holy then it would just be another book like will of these other books so from there I became very very interested and how we I could use the Torah God's book to be able to help people in my practice how I could use God's book and be loyal and committed to only using what came what I could find in God's book that would be able to help people and many of the people who I was not able to help with these are the methods the main method that I was trained in being psychoanalytic therapy was not able to help many of the many of the people that I came to that were coming to me and it was very frustrating for me as a therapist so basically I started to get interested I started to see that some of the root causes of the psychological symptoms and I was seeing in people well based on things that I never read about in the secular psychological literature for example people have this great deep feeling of uncertainty we're living in a world and I think you'll agree is a very uncertain place and people want to have a feeling of being certain in a place it's very very uncertain how does the one how does one do that you know well the secular approach is to ignore the fact that the world is uncertain the secular approach is to just give the person a lot of encouragement and belief that if they just keep plugging along and they keep analyzing themselves well they keep pumping all kinds of positive messages into themselves that they're going to be able to deal with this uncertain world where good things seem to happen sometimes - not such good people and things seem to happen to good people seemingly bad things so mm-hmm our approach a faith-based approach looks at this in a very different way we acknowledge that there is an uncertainty to the world because the world is not in our hands to control we can't control the weather we can't control the economy we can't control other people's opinions of us we can't control the behavior of other people these things are out of our control so we humble ourselves we admit that all of these things that beacon being controlled by God not the and that we have no way to be able to affect them no matter how strong our will is a husband can change his wife a wife can't change her kids we can't force people to be different than they are we can learn to influence them by using wisdom and we teach wisdom but by accepting and learning that we can't change or dominate over conditions and circumstances that are out of our control we arm people with the greatest blueprint for living life the greatest template that you can install in your mind for a happy life and that is what it's talked about in a holy book with Pirkei avos and this one teaching there that says make pray that your will you know that God's will be will become your will what does it mean to make God's will your will and then your will will become God's will and then the will of others people will become your will what does this mean it means that if your blueprint for life is all-inclusive in other words if you take God into consideration in what God's will is and that you have the flexibility now that a munna beach coaching or faith-based coaching gives one now you have the ability to fit yourself in to whatever circumstances God is sending at you whatever tests or difficulties and you learn to see them as opportunities not as something that you battle against that you go against but opportunities to be able to fit yourself into in the best possible way to accept and work with and then God makes your will his will he sees that you pass the test and he sees that now there's no reason to test you anymore and of what your will is what you want is something that's normal and reasonable and something that God has no reason to deny you no reason to want to deny you he gives it to you free and clear as a free gift that's how we deal with the uncertainty of life you know the secular theories the the scientists that study behavioral science study people they pant they don't differentiate between the mind of a person who has faith faith in a creator and the mind of a person who doesn't have faith in creator they don't distinguish a different shape of those between those two different types of minds and a mind with faith sees the world very differently than a mind without faith a mind that has faith as I said looks at the world as being functioning on divine providence that means that everything literally everything that's happening he sees as being orchestrated from above orchestrated from a higher power from a creator and he knows that whatever is happening has some meaning has some purpose he understands that suffering as well has a purpose it hurts it's painful the person of faith feels no less pain but he no lady can quickly turn that pain into a purpose and a meaning in a sense lessons that pain right away helps them to understand that there's a message for him in the difficulties that are going on in his life so cognitive dissonance is a psychological concept probably one of the most highly studied things in social psychology cognitive dissonance it's just a fancy way of saying doubts a person who has dissonance was conflict in his mind he's in a state of doubt well we have ways of getting people out of doubt right because the reason that they're in doubt what is it that this takes a person away from all of these therapies take a person away from their certainty they believe in the Creator right and eat anything that secular that takes the person will take a person away from the Creator is obviously putting their faith in something that is not the Creator they didn't that come from the Creator it will possibly came from the Creator but not completely and it weakens a person's doubt about the creator himself and that goes against this we said human nature because it's human nature to want to connect with the Creator it's human nature to want to understand and know more about the Creator it's human nation to want to live in a bond in a connection all day long breath by breath with the Creator that's human nature that everybody has that that make that desire like that yearning so that is another reason that all of these therapies take people away from the Creator weak in the bond and that's causes doubt it causes a deep Naurang doubt and anxiety you know there are there are there's another ecology called existential psychology existential psychologists you know they talk about the problem of is it of existence they talk about that distance is very painful and difficult for the human being how can a person deal with existence right they're talking about how to give you will exist at an existence where there's no God because there's no God in existential psychology so they're saying how do you cope how does a person cope with these with the idea there's something they're gonna die how does a person cope with all of the choices that you have in life how do you know what choices to make how do you know what are the right choices for you where do you get the wisdom and the peace of mind and security to know that you're making the right choices and that you're using your life in the right way and you're living your life in the right way how does the person know that when he gets the end of his life that he'll feel as though he had a good life that it was a that he will he'll feel that satisfaction and fulfillment or instead of feeling a deep sense of regret you know a person doesn't know when when his last day is gonna come that's the uncertainty that's built the basic uncertainty the basic doubt that's built into everybody's life so these are the problems of existence these are the basic fundamental problems that existential psychology studies the problem of how do you exist these annoying existential concerns existential problems that don't go away that every human being experiences as soon as his brain develops to the point where he understands what's going on he has he has some connection to reality the human being understands unlike the animals that his time in this world is limited and that ultimately he's gonna have to leave this place this being the central fact of human beings existence he needs some way of being being able to deal with this fact he needs something that will give him solace that will be soothing to his soul that will give him some certainty and security and a way of moving forward in spite you know to be able to resolve this deep anxiety really what is a of death a death anxiety and many people who don't believe that they're afraid of dying who deny the fact that they are afraid of dying really really are they're in denial of it and they just running around like gerbils on a wheel trying to stay as busy as they can jumping from one activity to another from the Internet to the cell phones and back to the iPads and television set and racing to make more and more money on that escalating treadmill going going going going and a lot of this hyper activity that we see amongst people today people can't still people can't stop themselves they'll always need to keep busy a lot of this is that they're running away and trying to keep away ward away the unconscious snoring concerns that who knows when life will end who knows when it will all come to an end and after all is said and done what was the meaning of one's life what was all about well we have ways of helping people to deal with this deep lowering anxiety we are we have ways of people you know because the basic anxieties people have is that they're dying and that's not true there is no such thing as death that's a that's also false concept there's only a death of the body and the body was never alive to begin with the body came from the earth it returns to the earth but before the soul which is alive came into the body the body couldn't do anything and when the person leaves the body the body can't do anything then either because the soul goes on ultimately to heaven and to another body to a perfected body which comes later on and the Holy rabbis they write about something about that body and what it looks like it's sort of a body of glass so to speak no big nose really for sure what it looks like but it's a perfected purified body a body that will be unable to be impure ever again and lives forever so there's no such thing as death there is a world to come there is another life there is another body that are people that people get but people don't get this explanation now when a person is first told some of these ideas it takes our time before these ideas become internalized in the person and the person can start to feel very calm and very good as a result of the knowledge that they're gaining the spiritual knowledge that they're gaining but once they gain that knowledge and once they develop a relationship with Hashem with God and once they have strategies and tools that they can use to be able to deal with the adversity of life and deal with the difficulties of their lives then they have something that they can use forever and that they can teach to their children and their grandchildren you know one of the most limiting things most limiting beliefs another falsehood is that people need all kinds of things you need to buy things and have things and own all kinds of material things that they don't really need why do they buy them why do they want them because they want to have that sense of comfort they want to ease that deep anxiety that really everything is not okay that really that's a very scary existence really we don't know what's going to happen from one moment to another the political climate and the international climate the nuclear situation it makes it brings out deep anxieties and people and they have to deal with that in one way or another if they don't have healthy spiritual good ways of dealing with those things then they have to turn to all kinds of other mation nations all types of ways of being able to soothe that primal anxiety that deep anxiety so need to buy things you need to surround themselves with comfort and they need to feel that they can control life by buying more stuff and having more stuff it gives the person the illusion that they that they're in control that they can regulate you know the quality of their lives it gives them a you know it's like putting a bandaid on on the issue you know if I possess things you know if I have possessions if I have money that I can control I can influence my life in some major way I can influence other people in some major way I can satisfy myself I can fulfill my own desires without God without turning to spirituality it's a delusion it's a false belief it doesn't really soothe that existential anxiety that deep Naurang uncertainty that people have people have nothing to believe in if they believe that the philosophy and the psychology that the secular world offers them is true according to them a person is basically going to believe have to believe that he's always going to be essentially what he is he's always you know biography is destiny that if you were born into analyst in you know in a you were born into tough circumstances and you developed into a tough type of a person a person with a problem that it's pretty hard to get rid of that problem you know or if you have a certain level of intelligence well that's just basically who are you gonna be you're always going to be a person with lower intelligence or average intelligence so person believes that whoever they are is what they going to be but we don't believe a person of faith doesn't believe that at all that's really a lack of faith that the a person can't grow it's a lack of a growth mindset to believe that a person's always gonna be what he is what he was it's a very you know deterministic way of thinking we think that a person can always change why because a person has connection with God hat is connected to a world of infinite possibilities after all God is the infinite resource he's got all the resources he's got everything and he has he can God we believe can alter nature and we are part of nature so God can do anything he can move his little finger so to speak in heaven and he can make a person new he can make you new he can elevate you you can elevate your personality to a level that you never thought was possible and you can function at a level do things and accomplish things that nobody ever thought that you could and that goes for many of the psychiatric diagnosis people that get a very poor it's called a poor prognosis that means they're told that you know where the family is told you know your loved one is schizophrenic he's gonna pretty much always be that way this we don't really have a cure for it maybe we can manage it with medication maybe he needs to live in a residence or a psychiatric facility so he's not going to be dangerous to himself with other people or if a person has a severe mood disorder what they call the mood disorder what they think is a by a depression it's caused by biology or chemical imbalance person is told look you no need to be on medicine for the rest of your life the doctor may even say listen I suffer from the same problem I have bipolar disorder also manic-depressive illness be like me take meds for the rest of your life and just live with it but a person with faith knows that when you're connected with God you're connected with infinite possibilities you're connected with the world of resources that goes beyond what's natural you're connected to something that's above natural law you connected to supernatural lore if you will and that's why we see by utilizing god's book utilizing the torah to help people even with severe psychiatric difficulties that these things alleviate in situations where for more than 30 years I never saw them alleviate and I've seen miracles I've seen tremendous miracles in these types of cases that are so so severe so so difficult for regular doctors psychologists psychiatrists to treat so mr. Shem we're going to continue with this we're going to continue next week to tell you about really the best strategies for dealing with ignoring anxieties and difficulties of life huh we're gonna really tell you more about what all this means but right now if you have any questions we'd like you to call us because we have a toll-free number that you can call from anywhere in the world it's one seven one eight five seven seven to nine seven five if you call one seven one eight five seven seven to nine seven five and you call anytime between 2:00 in the afternoon and 11 o'clock at night Israel time just push one extension or extension one and speak to our secretary Aaron and he can set you up with a consultation to speak with myself or with our female homeowner coach he can give you any information on any of the immunotherapy or Munna coaching services that we have our books our programs how you can also be yourself become a certified professional Munna coach a faith-based coach he can send you information you can set you up with a consult right away call that number if you need any help yourself or anyone you know any loved one you that you have needs immediate help call us one seven one eight five seven seven two nine seven five extension one Aaron you should all be blessed to have everything you need you should have all of the money you need you should have all of the health you should need that you need you should have great marriages you should have wonderful relationships with your children relationships and most of all you should be blessed with faith faith in the one true God and to be able to develop a relationship with him the merit of that we should all soon see the coming of the true Messiah the building of the third and final Holy Temple in Jerusalem down the street we should see it soon in our days I may [Music] you

Channel: Breslev English

Views: 5,378

Rating: 4.431818 out of 5

Keywords: psychiatry, mental illness, psychiatric diagnosis, diagnosis

Id: ITb7XLGNcjA

Length: 47min 12sec (2832 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 25 2018