YET MORE POSSIBLE “MENTAL DISEASES” of the UGLY and RELIGIOUS

Posted on May 19, 2012 by Ian White
Flyers about more OCD categories

Ugly and Religious Flyers from MGH

 

No, you’re NOT SEEING THINGS! This picture above is not just for the sake of styling this post, these are actual flyers from the Massachusetts General Hospital Psychiatric Department, that make claim that “being normal” and being concerned about how you look (or a little more deeply concerned, perhaps) or being anxious about religious views may be “a disorder”! Just when you think we’ve witnessed the sublime to the ridiculous in the medicalizing of normal life experience, along comes this gem!! And here it is!

Kevin Hall writes in online media “NowPublic” about an issue that if it wasn’t real, one would think was straight out of the pages of Mad Magazine or Monty Python. It appears below.

Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital‘s (MGH) psychiatric department (the people who created child bipolar disorder that led to the drugging of over a million innocent children with dangerous antipsychotic drugs) is now saying that you need “help” if you are “too religious” or don’t like the way you look (see MGH’s attached promotional fliers).

I guess that wraps up most of the world’s population as a psychiatric drug market – as if the current 374 mental disorders ranging from reading and arithmetic disorders, shyness, seasonal disorders and general anxiety weren’t enough.

It’s no surprise that psychiatry would target religion as the majority of these stimulus-response machines in white coats are avowed atheist per survey. Watch out Pope! Yet, any rogues file of psychiatrists who have been prosecuted for medicaid fraud, sex offenses, etc. would show you that they would have little immunity from an “Ugly” disorder.”

As an aside, there’s never been one medical test (blood or urine, CAT scans, MRI’s, etc.) to diagnose or prove the existence of any mental disorder. It’s all subjective – based upon opinion of behavior – which is why they are officially called mental disorders and not “illnesses” or “diseases” in psychiatric manuals. They have been voted into existence by small groups of psychiatrists within the American Psychiatric Association.

Although the concept of drugging the Ugly and Religious appears a bit comical, creating new pharmaceutical markets for phony mental disorders is an extreme danger to society. You may want to ensure that you and especially your children refuse any mental health screenings that regularly occur in public schools and during physical examinations. It’s really just drug marketing. Although MGH’s fliers may appear slightly comical, psychiatry’s targeting of over 8 million US school children for psychiatric drugs is an Ugly Sin.

Continue reading at NowPublic.com: MGH’s new “Ugly” & “Sinful” psychiatric drug marketing | NowPublic News Coverage http://www.nowpublic.com/strange/mghs-new-ugly-sinful-psychiatric-drug-marketing#ixzz1vD1eJ265

Yes, you read it right! There are surreptitious moves afoot by those (no less) who spawned the ADHD myth, to bring this new rubbish to bear and influence the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that all psychiatrists use to diagnose your ugliness or your over-religiousness.

So, what’s new about this? Well, the blatant way in which it is being spruiked is new. For years, many psychiatrists have labeled people with Ego-dystonic Appearance Disorder in order to help fund cosmetic surgery. That was an around-about way of providing a service that otherwise may have gone unattended (if that’s your bag), but now we have this move to diagnose “ugly” – plain and simple!

Oh, no; they are not actually saying outright (yet) that being ugly is a mental illness or disorder, and I would guess that they are not courageous enough (just yet) to accuse of deep religious attitudes as being a mental disorder, but … just wait. This public declaration of “maybe” is a strong implication to the unwary.

In my book, Beat Depression the Drug Free Way, I write about Winston Churchill’s diagnosis – his “Black Dog” as he called depression – when what he really had was alcoholic melancholia! Others through late history: Joan of Arc would have been a schizophrenic because of her visions; Gandhi, paranoid, and God knows how many European artists have been and are psychotic.

C’mon, psychiatric “science” … LEAVE US ALONE!

Posted in Depression and Anxiety | Tagged anxiety, anxious, beat depression, depression, disease, Ego-dystonic Appearance Disorder, mental, obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, over-religious, religious | Leave a comment

LIFT YOUR GAME!

Posted on April 29, 2012 by Ian White

lift your gameWere you affronted by my title? What is it that inspires you? What is it that could inspire you to get the information you need to look after yourself and to make the right choices for you?

When I wrote Beat Depression the Drug Free Way, I was intent on writing a book that would actually help people through new awareness and the getting of greater wisdom and knowledge. Almost all my writing in the past had been of an academic nature, and here I was trying to ‘get to the people who needed it the most’ by using the sort of literary presentation that anyone could understand.

This led to a conundrum for me. In writing in journalistic style – you know, the old newspaper journalists’ rule, “write as though everybody is eleven years old” – it meant that a lot of detail would have to be left out or edited down to nothing much. And I operated under the presumption that most people were concerned enough about their wellbeing, their health, their lives, to want to spend a little more effort into finding the truth. But, it ain’t necessarily so.

I recently re-built the site that represents the work I do, the Af-x psychotherapy network. I was up against the same problem with that as well. Do I write in the sort of language that allows people to remain in the comfortable style they operate in, or do I want to shock them out of their apathetic style that means that nothing changes for them? To do the latter requires more depth and more detail, I’m afraid.

This seems to be exemplified in the readers of my book. On the one hand, there have been reviews and testimonials that have been ground-shaking; “best thing I’ve ever read about depression.” Like that. And there have been other comments about it being “too deep” or “hard to get through.”

I spent eight interesting and self-educating years tailoring and thinking about this book in an effort to have it accepted by even the most apathetic of depression sufferers, and I arrived at one conclusion. If one wants to remain in the same condition and at the same level as before, then no effort is required. Do nothing and nothing will be done. If one wishes to make significant changes for the better and to pull both feet out of the quicksand, then effort is required. Those are the facts of life.

I titled this post “Lift Your Game.” I make it clear in my book and other writings that the most important aspect of self that will allow the game to be lifted is that one of education – better knowledge – and always question the truth about so-called health information. Health information is more often than not generated by companies who have a vested interest, not in your health, but in the continuance of your illness. Think about THAT, and “follow the money”!

I use the quote of Epictetus often: “Only the Educated are Free.” There can be no internal (subconscious) reframe of old outdated emotional response patterns unless greater wisdom and more commonsense understandings are built through lifting the game enough to allow new information; information that throws positive light on your life rather than a continuation of negative belief.

This is the way I conduct my own therapeutic work, and it’s the way I teach and train professional Af-x practitioners and clinical affectologists. I am adamant that “psychotherapy”, per se is next to useless unless a significant amount of psycho-education has taken place. One must sow new seeds in fertile soil, and in my professional arena, the soil is fertilized with correct and empowering information. Get the truth and lift your game.look into the detail

So, you see, it’s not intended as an insulting slur on your attitude. “Lift your game” is intended to help you understand that trying to change the inner-most emotional patterning from old belief to old belief is useless. It must be from old belief to new belief; and you’ll only get that more positive belief system through ensuring you take the time to absorb it.

The more I find I endeavor to condense important information to the point of an eleven-year-old’s language and attention style, the more the messages are weakened and the less the overall message remains clear. And the overall message? Be important enough to yourself and respect yourself to understand what you are putting into your body, and would it be necessary anyway, even if it were safe?

 In any case, if I have a detailed look at my own personal ancestry, there might be a small line back to Horace, the Roman statesman/philosopher. He and I apparently operate on the same software, as he said, Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio. … “Struggling to be brief I become obscure”.

 

Posted in Depression and Anxiety | Tagged apathetic style, beat depression, belief, beliefs, Epictetus, follow the money, Horace, important to yourself, lift your game, psycho-education, psychotherapy, respect yourself, subconscious, wellbeing | 2 Comments

DEPRESSION AND THE UNBORN CHILD (The ‘PRENATE’)

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Ian White

unborn childThere are two distinct threads to this topic, each as important as the other. One is, the effects that depression of a pregnant mother may be having on her unborn child. The other is, what are the results of certain prenatal experiences on you if you are a current adult sufferer of depression.

You may already begin to see that both those threads of interest or concern are the opposite ends of a spectrum. If, indeed, we can show that human beings establish their emotional patterning – their subconscious personality (or sub-personality) – as early as prenatal time, and we can show that that affect habit-forming set is NOT deleted/ scrubbed out/ erased/cancelled at the time that we start to function cognitively and with words (the verbal emergent period of development) then there is a great case for understanding that who and what we are today and how we function in an emotional way and maintain many mental formations is based on and connected to the experiences gained when still in utero.

What does this mean to us? It means that if we are a depression sufferer today, it may just be that we learned to respond to the world around us as a fetus in the way that is generating and maintaining our present emotional state.

And it also is a signal to expecting parent people or couples that there is a time, later in pregnancy – and some scientists argue right throughout pregnancy – when we should be alerted to the necessity of great care of the unborn child. And not only the prenate, but the mother, whose bio-system is shared by the fetus.

This interest and vital concern of mine – that has culminated in the book Beat Depression the Drug Free Way came about early in my own career as an affectologist when I read the work of Thomas Verny; notably his book, The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, in which he shows that the unborn child – the “prenate” – does in fact lead a sentient life before birth; that emotional establishment is taking place that influences personality into adult states.

Later, came Dr Tony Lipson’s From Conception to Birth, from which I extract  this seminal paragraph:

What are the facts? When does the spinal cord communicate with the processing and thinking parts of the brain, the cerebral cortex, where the grey and white matter resides? It is only when the vital connection between the spinal cord processing center, or the brain stem, and the brain itself is made at 22 – 23 weeks that feelings of the senses … have any real moral meaning and form part of experience. The spinal cord can then communicate with the true brain and vice versa, both responding to environment, albeit unconsciously, able to have memory that will influence the person for the rest of its life.

Can I have permission to repeat that? … “22 – 23 weeks … able to have memory that will influence the person for the rest of its life”.

This rapidly developing science of pre-birth psychology is casting a new light on many old problems, not the least of which is adult depression.

As scientific knowledge of life before birth continues to increase, the prenate is revealed to be more sensitive and capable than we ever thought possible and my next post will delve a little deeper into this phenomenon.

Posted in Depression and Anxiety | Tagged causes of depression, cerebral cortex, depression, emotional patterning, emotional personality, in utero, pre-birth psychology, pregnancy, pregnant, prenate, sentient, subconscious, unborn | Leave a comment

ENTIRELY AT ONE WITH ONE’S PATHOLOGY

Posted on April 14, 2012 by Ian White

Throughout the history of modern psychotherapy, therapists have puzzled over why some people simply don’t respond to their treatment, and do not make any mental or emotional shifts away from their problems or pathology. In the last post I took a small excerpt from my book, Beat Depression the Drug Free Way that talked about the anomaly – the incongruity – of people actually knowing that antidepressant medication is harmful, but on the other hand they bury that knowledge and go about their lives still taking the drugs.

This post now is an entirely different issue leading to the same outcome. It is that one of people being so at one with their pathology. This means that they have found some sort of unconscious comfort and ‘belonging’ in being unwell with a mental problem – or in the DSM’s parlance, mental illness or disease.

Here is a small snippet from a message sent to me by someone who would apparently fit that description.

“… how about if depression isn’t something we fight against or don’t like, that we don’t just take with us, but wholly possesses us, yes – coexists with us, whether interminably and pervasively or fleetingly and stabbingly, whether we like it or not? Depression isn’t an alien. Depression is always right at home. It’s totally acceptable, to the most mindful of minds. …”

In philosophical terms, this writer was actually agreeing with the idea of depression not being the big ogre that pharmaceutical companies and society in general make it out to be: that it’s more natural than we give it credit for. But I strongly suspect that this person was presenting to me the idea that he or she was totally at one with the fact that depression lived with them and took over their existence. That implied, of course, that my writings were of no use to this writer; that he or she was not only unlikely to get any use out of the fight depression shout that I deliver, but there was absolutely no desire to say goodbye to what we can only describe as an ‘old friend’ to this person.

There’s no shame in this, of course. I have known many people who function perfectly and carry on apparently normal lives who continue in a perennially depressed state. My job is not to try to change that lifestyle for them. My job, as I see it, is to offer therapeutic and philosophical assistance if they ask and demonstrate a desire to make life different for them. So I do have to wonder why and how a person who is entirely at one with their pathology – who lives with their depression as though it is an old friend – would ever seek any writings that are obviously intended to assist people who have made a choice to end depression.

One of the very important messages in my book is that our belief systems are vital to the end result of how we run our lives and the choices we make. Choosing to remain in a comfortable pathology, while not seeming to make sense to many, makes perfect sense to an affectologist who understands the strange ways in which unconscious mind drivers operate. Be quite clear about your aims.

Posted in Depression and Anxiety | Tagged affectologist, aims, antidepressants, avatar, belief systems, comfortable pathology, depression, drug-free, DSM, end depression, fight depression, natural, pathology, pharmaceutical companies, psychotherapy, subconscious, unconscious drivers | Leave a comment

Why Don’t People Care that Antidepressants are Toxic?

Posted on April 13, 2012 by Ian White

apathy Today’s post I take from a small section of my book Beat Depression the Drug Free Way: Getting Better by Breaking the Myths. This little piece reflects a concern that many, if not most, therapists have for the general apathy that people seem to have for just how much damage SSRI antidepressant drugs can do to the brain.

I have used here a short excerpt from Jonah Lehrer that is succinct and “a real truth.”

………..

“All Truth passes through Three Stages:

First, it is Ridiculed…
Second, it is Violently Opposed…
Third, it is Accepted as being Self-Evident.”

Reading Schopenhauer’s quote might shed a little light on the issue of “do I care?” The answer is, “It takes time.”

The great puzzle and the challenge is that we human beings take the line of least resistance. It’s a puzzle because we should recognize that we are not making choices regarding what color to paint the kitchen wall, or what television show to watch; we are making choices that affect our health in sometimes very grave ways. It’s a challenge because it often results in those attempting to expose the lies and myths ending up being reviled and disparaged by the very people they are trying to help.

Here is a portion of an excellent piece written by Jonah Lehrer from the blog, The Frontal Cortex. It speaks of a human preference for an easy immediate result rather than a longer-term end result that requires some resilience and tenacity.

THINKING ABOUT TOMORROW

The lure of instant gratification is hard to resist: when we want something, we want it right now. Of course, maturity and reality demand that we learn to wait, that we postpone our pleasures until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. And so we stash money in our savings account, and forgo the SUV for the sake of climate change and don’t eat the entire pint of ice cream. We resist the tug of immediate delight for the sake of even more delight in the future.

That, at least, is how we’re supposed to behave. The problems arise with a mental process known as delay discounting, which refers to our tendency to discount the value of a future reward as a function of its temporal distance. (Rewards that are farther away are discounted more heavily.) Consider this experiment led by Samuel McClure and Jonathan Cohen, which involved putting people in an fRMI machine and making them decide between a small Amazon certificate that they could have right away, or a slightly larger gift certificate that they’d receive in 2 to 4 weeks. Cohen discovered that these two options activated very different neural systems. When subjects contemplated gift certificates in the distant future, brain areas associated with rational planning, like the medial prefrontal cortex, were more active. These cortical regions urge us to be patient, to wait a few extra weeks for the bigger gain.

On the other hand, when subjects started thinking about getting a gift certificate right away, brain areas associated with emotion (like the midbrain dopamine system and nucleus accumbens) were turned on. These are the cells that tell us to take out a mortgage we can’t afford, or run up a credit debt when we should be saving for retirement. All they want is reward, and they want it now.

………..

For the majority of us, opting for the immediate reward not only brings with it some form of chemically–induced masking of symptomatic discomfort, but it also means that we do not have to face the fact of self-responsibility and all the work that a new state of accountability entails.

It seems that people don’t care about the facts that are before their very eyes because the contract that they would have to make with themselves to bring about change is ‘just too hard.’

So, ending depression and fighting depression perhaps requires a little more than a touch of therapy or an intention to do so. It may very well take COMMITMENT on your behalf.

Posted in Depression and Anxiety | Tagged antidepressants, apathy, beat depression, depression, end depression, fight depression, SSRI, truth | 2 Comments

Beat Depression book: Translation News

Posted on April 6, 2012 by Ian White

After discussions with, and agreements with interested parties in Sweden, Russia and Greece, it is now likely that my book, Beat Depression the Drug Free Way: Getting Better by Breaking the Myths, will be translated into both the Russian language and the Greek language.

Anaxagoras, Greek rational humanist

Anaxagoras, Greek rational humanist

This leads to online availability of the book in Russia and Greece. Both countries have experienced an onset and increase in the rate of depression, most notably Greece as a result of the recent social measures culminating from their difficult financial relationship with the rest of Europe.

Rather than seeing a huge rush of pharmaceutical companies to exploit the unfortunate collective emotional problems in those countries (with Italy and Spain close on their heels), the preference would be to see a natural healing brought about by a greater understanding of depression, and stem the flow of antidepressants that would damage the population’s mental health more and make pharmaceutical interests richer than they already are.

I will be reporting on progress with translation as they come to hand.

 

Posted in Depression and Anxiety | Tagged antidepressants, beat depression, collective emotional problems, depression, drug-free, emotion, end depression, greater understanding of depression, Greece, Greek translation, heal depression, natural, Russia, translation | Leave a comment

THE ANTIDEPRESSANT CULTURE

Posted on March 25, 2012 by Ian White

Antidepressant Danger

OK, so the pills represented above don’t look like the antidepressants that you’re taking right now, if you are. But there’s a certain part of them that does! Yes; you got it! The impressed image.

In my book, ‘Beat Depression the Drug Free Way’, I write significantly about just how this image does relate to your antidepressants and why it is that you should take notice. Or, maybe, looking at it from another angle, why you should not ignore the toxic properties of SSRI antidepressants and their older forbears, tricyclic antidepressants.

Readers of my book will already know that I have put together a case for you to give yourself the gift of knowledge about these drugs. You will perhaps have read that I do not say, “Say NO to drugs” but that my cry is, “Say KNOW to drugs.”

Taking the view that we are all adults and it is not my position to instruct anybody about anything that has to do with their own responsibility to take care of themselves, I find it inconceivable that folk seem not to care what they put into their bodies and systems. But then, there’s another chapter section in the book that talks of that dilemma. It is “Why Don’t People Care?”

So, if you take antidepressants and one of your own remarks is, “But I have been prescribed these pills and the doctor always knows better than I”, then there’s good cause to stop and wonder at just how the medical profession is complicit in the ‘sell more drugs’ industry that marches on inexorably with the depression banner taking pride of place.

End depression through awareness and knowledge. I echo previous posts of mine here when I say that our culture is hell-bent on pathologizing and medicalizing every aspect of human behavior, and there’s a pill for everything – or so they would have us believe.

Perhaps a start to your own concern about antidepressant use to suppress awareness of your life can be found in the following excerpt from my book …

… … … …

It does not take research; it takes history to know that any introduction of a chemical into the human bio-system requires great caution and vigilant management, and in any case, constitutes an intoxication of that system. Ancient Greek herbal practitioners were well aware of the degrees to which the herbs they prescribed and administered were simply lowered doses of an otherwise poisonous substance. Eli Lilly is the company that produces Prozac, an SSRI antidepressant, and is the world’s largest manufacturer and distributor of psychoactive medications. Yet, its founder, Colonel Eli Lilly, a pharmaceutical chemist by education, said in 1876, “Any drug without toxic effects is not a drug at all.”

Colonel Eli Lilly

Colonel Eli Lilly

What? What was that? Does it bear repeating?

 “Any drug without toxic effects is not a drug at all.”

 … … … …

Toxic means ‘poisonous’. Amongst the many medications that Eli Lilly produces today, perhaps you can recognize the most prominent: – Zyprexa, Prozac, Cymbalta, Prozac, Methadone.

There’s an absolute wealth of information available online about the toxic side-effects of antidepressants, so I return to my earlier plea; “Say KNOW to drugs!” and think about it. Don’t become a subject of something that Adolf Hitler was fond of saying: “What luck for the rulers that men do not think.”

 

Posted in Depression and Anxiety | Tagged antidepressants, beat depression, Cymbalta, depression, depression industry, drug-free, Eli Lilly, Eli Lilly and Company, end depression, fight depression, Methadone, naturally-occurring depression, Prozac, side effects, toxic, wellbeing, Zyprexa | Leave a comment

DEPRESSION PROPAGANDA MAKES YOU DEMAND ANTIDEPRESSANTS

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Ian White
antidepressant medication

Antidepressant Medication

I hope you’ll ‘get’ the analogies here in this post. I want to give you a short insight into what we are all up against in terms of legitimacy or otherwise of the depression “disease” issue.

Let’s look at the machinations that are going on behind the scenes of the depression industry. The whole industry that we might refer to as the commercial business of developing mass social need for antidepressant medications is driven by a public relations scheme that defies belief. And it’s easy to understand when we start to know that early last century, the ‘public relations industry’ was born on the back of the theories and propositions of Edward Bernays. This gentleman happened to be the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and was introduced to Freud’s theories relating to the unconscious and ways to influence the ‘collective’ unconscious. Bernays was the author of the 1928 book Propaganda.

For Bernays, the public relations business was less about selling things than about creating the conditions for things to sell themselves. When Bernays was working as a salesman for Mozart Pianos, for example, he did not simply place advertisements for pianos in newspapers. That would have been too obvious.

Instead, Bernays persuaded reporters to write about a new trend: Sophisticated people were putting aside a special room in the home for playing music. Once a person had a music room, Bernays believed, he would naturally think of buying a piano. As Bernays wrote, “It will come to him as his own idea.”

Just as Bernays sold pianos by selling the music room, pharmaceutical marketers now sell drugs by selling the diseases that they treat. The buzzword is “disease branding.”

Once a branded disease has achieved a degree of cultural legitimacy, there is no need to convince anyone that a drug to treat it is necessary. It will come to him as his own idea.

But it is hard to brand a disease without the help of physicians, of course. So drug companies typically recruit academic “thought leaders” to write and speak about any new conditions they are trying to introduce. It also helps if the physicians believe the branded condition is dangerous. And, of course, it falls to Big Pharma’s writers to make depression dangerous. Then by default, we need a drug to treat it!

If all drugs were harmless, disease branding would be relatively harmless, too. But no drug is completely benign, as Eli Lilly (founder of one of the biggest drug companies in the world) said, “Any drug without toxic effects is not a drug at all.” So it crosses the border from untruthful and mischievous to damaging and socially destructive.

Bernays said that if anyone doubts the marketers, attack their character and/or their intellect.  On a side note, a few years later, Bernays helped popularize the notion of women smoking cigarettes.  Not being one to turn down a challenge, Bernays set up the advertising format which lasted for almost fifty years ‘proving’ that cigarettes are beneficial to health. Bernays never strayed from his fundamental axiom to ‘control the masses without their knowing it.’ He believed that the best PR takes place when the people are unaware that they are being manipulated.

I feel that I don’t need to say more. Big Pharma’s public relations machine has built the piano room for you, it’s your choice to acquire their piano or not. In any case, I sincerely hope you’ll investigate further for your own long-term safety. At least, remain aware.

Includes excerpts from Beat Depression the Drug Free Way: Getting Better by Breaking the Myths.

Posted in Depression and Anxiety | Tagged antidepressant, antidepressants, beat depression, Big Pharma, causes of depression, depression, depression industry, disease, disease branding, drug-free, drugs, Edward Barnays, Eli Lilly, fight depression, Freud, Lilly, medication, medications, myths, propaganda, subconscious | Leave a comment

DEPRESSION AND SELF-LOVE DO NOT LIVE IN THE SAME HOUSE

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Ian White

Emotions in Balance websiteIs wisdom always confined to ‘the academic’? Absolutely not. For instance, I bet you do not often accept or think that there is more wisdom contained in your body, your mind, your neural networks, your endocrine system, and on and on, than you could ever get from a psychotherapist or psychiatrist. This is the realm of study of affective unconscious processes. And if you need reminding, you might go to the Af-x website to find out how perfectly fabulous you really are!

Zen Buddhists agree with all that. Humanistic philosophers agree with all that too. But there is also wisdom to be got from outside yourself and your intricate storehouse of self. Why confine everyday wisdom to those who have doctorate certificates and licenses displayed on their walls? They are not the ‘keepers of the gate of knowledge and wisdom.’

I am in the habit of reading mystery fiction. It helps me balance out the focused technical work I do. Last night I was reading my current book by Swedish author Liza Marklund. This was immediately after writing a lesson for the Af-x Training program on ‘therapeutic goals and can they be generalized?’ So my mind was in low cruising altitude with this subject. And lo and behold, I came across this passage: …

……………………

     Society’s fixation with success and ecstatic joy are the polar opposite of real         happiness. We have all become happiness junkies. Constantly striving for more – aiming higher – will never make us happy with our lives.

     Success and well-being are actually far less interesting than failure and misery. Real success gives you a feeling that borders on the erotic, an obvious, well-trodden path to the stars. But real failure has many more nuances and depth. It forces you to analyse and reflect, to focus inwards instead of upwards, and eventually leads to a more worthy life. At best, well-being breeds tolerance and generosity, but more often just jealousy and a lack of engagement.

     The secret of a happy life is being content with what you have. To stop scrambling higher, and find peace instead.

……………………

Now, this is from a fiction novel, and I certainly do not advocate that one should stop trying for success in life. But there is some graduations of wisdom in the passage that refer directly to the relationship that we can have with depression – something that I repeat over and over in my book, Beat Depression the Drug Free Way.  What the person in this story was saying is that while we strive for ‘a happiness’ that we don’t actually define – or can’t define – then of course, we never reach it.

The idea is to DEFINE your goal in life and what you want to achieve as your ‘ideal sense of self.’ Marklund must have read my mind, as she echoes what I say. Your ideal goal in life should always be underpinned by the quest to ‘be content’. Your ability to accept yourself, no matter what life hands you is the key to going on to achieve happiness and contentment. And the starting point to that is what all good therapy should have as a person’s goal. That goal is expressed when you look at the top of this post and read the words on the girl’s hands in the picture – and above all else, love yourself. You deserve it.

This, then, is the way that depression loses its consuming power over you. If and when you are able to get to the point of saying, “yes, I have depression just like everybody else and a little deeper from time to time, I do depression just like everybody else, but I am growing to accept it and allow it to lose its power,” well, THAT is when you will know you are setting your sights on a more peaceful life.

Writing this post reminds me also of a quote from Noam Chomsky, who said, …

“It is quite possible – overwhelmingly probable, one might guess – that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology”.

Posted in Depression and Anxiety | Tagged affective, be content, contentment, depression, emotion, emotional balance, happiness, peace, relationship, self-love, sense of self, success, unconscious, well-being, wellbeing, wisdom | 1 Comment

The AVATAR of DEPRESSION

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Ian White

therapeutic_maskI’d like to introduce you to a character, at left, that you will probably see quite a lot of if you follow this blog and the blog on my soon-to-be-published website. “Soon to be published” means that it will replace the old and tired www.EmotionsInBalance.com site that describes the revolutionary approach, Af-x Psychotherapy.

In my book, Beat Depression the Drug Free Way, I address the fact that every person who attends psychotherapy, counseling, talk therapy (whatever you want to call it), in all probability, shows some sort of face to the therapist that is not his or her authentic subconscious self. In my Af-x therapeutic work, I have proposed that much of what drives us at the deepest emotional (response) level and maintains our personality, our self-beliefs, and our day-to-day existence is non-verbal.

And when I say  non-verbal, please accept that I mean it in its literal sense. The problem with ‘therapy’ (as we know it) is that in almost every case, it relies – not just heavily, but entirely – on your ability to verbalize your problems, your life, your experience of depression and where it may have come from in the first place. If we look at the clear signals and data that are offered us by affective neuroscience, we now know that our emotional (affect) matrix and the way we set ourselves up to experience the world are laid down long before we have the ability to form words and cognitive ways of self-recognition. Depending on who and what you believe, we set up our emotional self-assessment at anywhere from 24 weeks into gestation to some time into infancy. In any case, long before what the neuroscientists call the “verbal emergent stage”.

Since we then have no words, yet unconsciously REMEMBER the reactions that worked in our best interests (then) and form repetitions of those reactions and quickly build habits of them at unconscious level, science shows that we become who we are – at least as an emotional being – at a time when we ‘had no words.’ This, then, attests that the building of our emotional habits are what is called “state-specific” – existing today, more or less, in the state in which they were specifically learned and cemented in our subconscious character.

So it follows that if we are reacting and forming self-assessments today out of remnants of that learned before words, then they defy verbal description. I hope you are starting to see the circular reasoning I’m applying.

The whole of the work of Af-x Therapy proposes that (a) much of the deeper subconscious emotional patterning that is driving depression cannot be described, analyzed, actualized, using words as the tool for reporting, and that (b) in our society, in post-Freudian times, we labour under the cultural habit of thinking we HAVE TO use words to describe our problems and the causes of our problems; in this case depression.

We enter the therapist’s rooms holding in front of us the face that tries to do what we believe it should do. … talk. And when we find we can’t actually delve deeply enough and ‘words fail us,’ why, then, we confabulate – try to make it up, either consciously or unintentionally.

This is why our friend in the picture above is significant to both therapists and clients in the world of Af-x Psychotherapy. He represents the authentic unconscious affect person hiding behind the mask that our culture and our professions have insisted he build. The tape over the mouth represents the dynamic of Af-x, where the client is disallowed from talking to the extent of wandering away from the true affect subconscious self.

As I said in the beginning of this post, you’ll see a bit of him in the future as I from time to time mention the Af-x ‘mind over chatter’ dynamic. He represents that AVATAR – the self-built representation that is constructed to fool both therapist and client alike.

Posted in Depression and Anxiety | Tagged avatar, confabulation, counseling, depression, psychotherapy, subconscious, talk therapy, unconscious | Leave a comment