HOLISTIC HEALTH:PSYCHOTHERAPIST GREG White firmly believes that if doctors sat down with their patients and listened to their stories, they would come to a much better understanding of the reasons for their depression, writes SYLVIA THOMPSON
“All illnesses are messengers which have positive and negative aspects to them. A good GP will ask his/her patients what’s happening in their lives and have a chat.
“Doctors who give their patients the label of depression and tell them the pills will sort it out are betraying them in a very fundamental way,” he says.
White, who is a member of the international anti-psychiatry movement, will speak about what he believes are the limitations of psychiatric drugs on Saturday next at the Rude Health Show in the RDS, Ballsbridge, Dublin.
“When cure of disease becomes the central focus, the idea of illness as messenger is debunked. I believe that the primary motivation of Western medicine is control, and while there are notable exceptions and wonderful people who are trying to change the system from within, the majority of psychiatrists work from this model of control,” he says.
Trained in the Jungian tradition of psychotherapy, White says an individual’s experience of madness, anxiety or depression relates to the collective consciousness or wider societal ways of being.
“I don’t see people as problems. And I don’t have any regard for psychiatric labels – except as a starting point. My approach is one of an ‘intuitive feeler’ in that I listen and stay with clients to get an idea where they are coming from and I respond to them from there,” he says.
White trained as a psychotherapist when he was 50, having returned to Ireland after 35 years of living in Zimbabwe and South Africa. “When I first came back to Ireland in 1989, I couldn’t relate to the place at all. The arrogance of a white African seeped out of me, but I was very lucky in that I met some wonderful people in Dublin who empathised with me and knew that I was between two places.”
Four years earlier, White had given up his long-time addiction to both alcohol and cigarettes. He had surgery for cancer of the bladder in England and then returned to Ireland permanently in 1992. At that point, he began his studies in psychotherapy under the tutelage of the Indian psychotherapist, Jassbinder Garnermann.
Nowadays, he promotes the work of Will Hall, the American former psychiatric patient who initiated the Freedom Centre and the Icarus Project, which are American community support and advocacy networks run by and for people who have struggled with mental illnesses.
His talk on Saturday will draw from Will Hall's book, Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs(www.theicarusproject.net and www.freedom-center.org)
In the book, Hall writes: “While not publicised widely by a culture dominated by pharmaceutical companies, alternative treatments, talk therapies and even the placebo effect can often be more effective than psychiatric drugs, without the risks.”
Hall and White both highlight the stigma, discrimination and prejudice that comes with taking psychiatric drugs. “Psychiatric drugs can also convey the false view that ‘normal’ experience is productive, happy and well adjusted all the time, without mood shifts, bad days or suffering. This encourages a false standard of what it is to be human,” writes Hall.
He also details the mental health risks associated with psychiatric medications, including personality changes, increased risk of suicide and violent behaviour.
White is aware there is a lot of concern within mainstream medical circles about patients coming off psychiatric drugs. “The main problem with coming off these drugs is the return of symptoms. Patients need someone who will support them, and the majority of GPs aren’t trained to do so. The best support patients will get is from survivors who have already come off psychiatric drugs themselves.”
He cautions that anyone considering coming off such drugs should do so slowly. “The longer you are on them, the slower you have to come off them.”
White is somewhat optimistic about the recent inclusion of former psychiatric patients in mental health policymaking decisions.
“We need to vest authority with many categories of doctors and carers, as well as conventional ones,” he says. “Particularly, we need to include ‘doctors by experience’, those who have/ had a serious illness, have healed themselves through it and to whom people of sound instinct go to for healing.”
White also subscribes to an approach called Intentional Peer Support (IPS). “This approach looks beyond the notion of the individual’s needing to change and examines our lives in the context of our relationships and communities,” he explains.
“Instead of asking, ‘what’s wrong’, we ask, ‘what happened?’ And IPS relationships are viewed as partnerships that enable both parties to learn and grow – rather than as one person needing to ‘help’ another.”
White says that French writer Albert Camus sums up perfectly what we now need to do to redeem ourselves and each other from collective and individual madness that we create for ourselves: “Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow; don’t walk behind me I may not lead. Walk by my side and be my friend.”
- How to Come Off Psychiatric Drugsis the title of the talk by psychotherapist Greg White on Saturday, at 3pm at the Rude Health Show, RDS, Ballsbridge, Dublin.
www.rudehealth.ie