PSYCHIATRY ALMOST DROVE ME CRAZY

"I am a survivor of severe psychiatric abuse. There was a year or so in the early 1980’s when I was in and out of psychiatric hospitals at least four times. During my visits to the hospital I was in the midst of a spiritual awakening that I was struggling to contain that was triggered and complicated by extreme psychological abuse at the hands of my father, who was a very sick man. I was suffering so deeply from the psychic violence perpetrated upon my mother and me by my father that it was making me “sick.” One of the most difficult parts of my ordeal in the hospitals was not being listened to by the psychiatrists, either about the abuse by my father or the spiritual awakening. Spiritual emergences/emergencies oftentimes become activated because of a deep experience of wounding, abuse, or trauma....."

This is the beginning of a very interesting article by Paul Levy, a pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence.

The full page can be found here: http://www.awakeninthedream.com/wordpre ... e-crazy-2/

Its possible that recovery from psychological abuse could take on many forms including things doctors would still only think to prescribe meds for, then the question is what do they differentiate and how? My guess is the guy was labelled psychotic, and the problem with that is people with psychotic illnesses are strongly discouraged from talking through any of their experiences, its a question of "take your meds and shut up".

30 years ago the medication-only attitude might have been worse than ten years ago, idk, but I have no idea whether talking through psychosis is bad for it because it encourages people to "leave reality further" or whether there's some value in it if its done the right way.

Again this one is a guessing game, but my best guess is that attitude stems not originally from the idea of distraction but traditionally from the standard of "discouraging abnormal behaviour". Its an awkward question.

Back when I was going in and out of the hospital (due to the effects of the psych drugs themselves) I always thought it was wierd that no one ever asked "whats wrong , whats going on in your life..." I used to wait thinking that part is coming and I would get a chance to explain it but it never did .