I was never given an official diagnosis. Back in the early 1980s in the UK no one would have thought to ask what their doctor was writing in our file. It was for them, not us, full consent wasn’t in our consciousness. I had been sent to a psychiatrist at Manchester Royal Infirmary after my 2nd violent mugging; I wasn’t eating or sleeping. I had repeatedly punched the wall in a desperation bruising my hands and spent my days reliving and reliving the terror of what had happened.
My skull had been fractured in a nightclub and then a year later I was ‘jumped’ by three men as I walked near my home at 6 o’clock in the evening. They beat me so hard I ‘knew’ I was going to die. I was now terrified to leave my home and so it had taken several panic attacks just to get to the hospital. I can only guess that she wrote; PTSD, agoraphobia, insomnia? Nobody talked about self-harm back then.
And then it happened again. Two years later I was living in London and while riding my bike home from the theater where I worked, a young teenage boy threw a child’s bike at my head, smashing me into the gutter. I found out later he had broken the top two vertebrae in my neck. My mental health went down fast this time. All those symptoms came back and worse until I was unable to get out of my bedroom, stuck in a world of mental terror. Eventually I reached out to a women’s crisis center who helped me back on my feet. This started a life long journey of helping others out of the darkness.
One of the counselors at the crisis center had asked me a simple but profound question; Are you ready to let go of your story? I was extremely offended at first. What I heard her say was, it didn’t happen, it didn’t hurt and get over it. In my head I was screaming. It did happen, it did hurt and I can’t get over it! But as I calmed down, I realized that what happened to me had become my identity—I was the girl who had been mugged three times. This story I was telling and retelling myself had stopped me moving forward with my life. I had innocently got stuck in the feeling of reliving those thoughts as if it was all still happening. I saw that if I didn’t listen to them, I would be free of it all. This insight started a journey of understanding how the mind works and this is what has brought me freedom and recovery.
The simple fact is that we are always feeling our thinking. I thought I was feeling the sadness and terror of my circumstances, but the events were over. I was now feeling the terror of the memories of them in this fresh new moment. I saw that I was innocently bringing the distress of the past into the present and this was what dysregulating my nervous system now. This is what rumination and anxiety really is. If our thoughts are full or anxious, panicky, catastrophizing thoughts then we aren’t going to feel great. It was so simple that I couldn’t believe it at first. I had agonizing chronic pain in my back and neck for 25 years. Now I see that my body was screaming at me to slow down and come back to this moment where I am safe. As soon as I started to grasp that we live in a thought created world and that underneath all that stressful thinking I was ok, my pain simply went away. The anxiety was innocently keeping the pain going after the injuries had healed.
This simple understanding has helped thousands of people recover from all kinds of mental distress. When each person saw that they had been torturing themselves with their own thinking they recovered too. We all have innate wellbeing. All those natural and understandable human reactions to distressing life situations are actually wisdom trying to keep us safe, we just didn’t understand the signals. We were told that our brains are broken or that we would just have to cope.
But what if you had been told you can never be broken and don’t need fixing?
What if you knew you could recover too?
And when I say recover, I mean fully recover. Despite being told they had a chemical imbalance, or that it was genetic, or that they were damaged and would need to be on psychiatric medications for life, these people who have given me their stories have fully recovered. They are off medications, not needing any further treatments and living their best lives. From psychosis and schizophrenia to bulimia, OCD and CPTSD, they are free of symptoms. Like myself, no matter what they had been through, they found their innate resilience. They discovered that they could never be broken and didn’t need fixing. From Chicago to London, from Sweden to South Africa, these are not flukes but facts of innate wellbeing.
Having a diagnosis is not a death sentence, it’s not even who we are! What if together we could show that anyone can get well no matter what and that everyone, and I mean everyone, has access to mental wellbeing?
Have you ever had an idea pop into your head with such force you feel it? About two years ago I had such an idea, an insight; I have been a coach/counselor for over 35 years now and in that time I and my colleagues have seen many, many clients fully recover, like I did, from all kinds of mental health diagnoses and tragic life events.
What if I collected their stories?
What if I could show you how we recovered?
To get started I sent out emails to clients. My own experience with violence, anxiety and paralyzing chronic pain have led me to see that there is a common thread with how we all process these life experiences and so my client list is wide and varied.
Next I emailed colleagues asking if they had clients who would be willing to share their stories and for any case studies they would like to offer.
Finally I posted in a few Facebook groups dedicated to this philosophy of innate wellbeing.
The response was overwhelming. A steady stream of amazing individuals from all over the world replied with incredible openness to share their stories of hope and resilience.
I asked everyone for about 2000 words and gave them the choice of writing it themselves or I could interview them and transcribe it for their approval. I also gave them the choice of keeping their full names, changing their names or being anonymous. Most opted to use their full names and were happy, even proud to share the good news. In the end I transcribed and edited over 60 stories of recovery!
What did I discover?
The first thing that jumps out at you is the depth of human resilience. Resilience is often touted and sold as something we need to acquire from the outside. A product that needs to be learned or improved on, as if it’s a thing. We love to ‘thingify’ stuff. But what these stories show is that it was there all the time, its innate, it was just covered up by years of innocent stinky thinking.
Like Judy Nahkies’ story of suicidal ideation. After years of terrifying suicidal thoughts, she had finally researched how to die without anyone knowing it was suicide. In a final attempt to distract herself she went out to her New Zealand paddock to clean out the horses and put on her headphones to listen to YouTube. When the video ended another random one started with one of my colleagues. Michael Neill, a world class coach and best-selling author. He talked about the fact that we all have innate wellbeing and are always feeling our thinking. Annoyed and desperate, she tried to switch it off but her hands were too muddy. So she is stuck listening to something that profoundly shifts her thinking and saves her life.
Another story tells of a young woman from Toronto who had drunk her way out of high school and was living on the streets cutting herself so badly she regularly needed stitches. After multiple psychiatric wards she hears that she has innate mental health and that she can never be broken. She takes exams and gets into University only to be told that her mental health record prevents them from offering her a place. So she goes back to the hospital to ask for a recommendation. She had left with 10 diagnoses including learning difficulties, borderline personality disorder and PTSD and multiple medications. She is now off all meds and the doctor doesn’t even recognize her! For the first time in this doctor’s career he writes a letter saying that a patient has fully recovered. This young woman recently graduated with her master’s degree and is considering applying for her Ph.D.
The power of insight.
In each of the stories you hear over and over again that the person had an insight, a shift in their thinking. Willpower and techniques only get us so far. How many of us have promised ourselves to eat less, meditate more and sooner or later flake out. If willpower doesn’t work for lifestyle changes, how on earth will it help with desperate and constant destructive intrusive thoughts? These people changed because of profound insight, a sight from within. Something shifted them into a fresh new perspective. Why does a woman with years of psychosis or a man with full blown alcoholism change? Because from this fresh new perspective it doesn’t make sense to them to think and behave in that destructive way anymore.
Too simple I hear you say?
I am going to go out on a limb here to say that if you open the DSM to any page I guarantee you that the diagnosis started with prolonged stressful thinking. No one wakes up one morning and suddenly washes their hands 100 times. No one suddenly has a panic attack out of nowhere although it might feel like it. It always starts with some hurt feelings, resentment or unsolved grief or upset. Fueled by insecurity many innocently dive off the cliff into despair. Some will cope with these unbearable thoughts and feelings with secret rituals, others by abusing alcohol, food or drugs. I coped by screaming at myself to “shut up!” Others cope by violence to themselves or others and ultimately, when it’s just too much to bear, hiding out in an alternate reality is a kinder escape than the unthinkable.
What if they knew that they didn’t have to listen to that thinking? What if I had known back then that I am not my thoughts and just below the surface of the nightmare I was safe and it will pass?
This is what each of these 60 people saw with such clarity that they didn’t need to act out any more. They saw that they are not their diagnosis or their thinking and that it always passes.
Drs. Caspi and Moffat in their 2018 paper, “All for One and One for All; Mental Disorders in One Dimension,” published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, state that “empirical evidence has now accrued to suggest that a single dimension is able to measure a person’s liability to mental disorder.” These eminent doctors are agreeing that there is ONE cause for all mental suffering!
What is the one cause?
The one thing that derails us into mental health issues is an innocent misunderstanding of the role of Thought. I say innocent because we all do better when we know better. Knowing that you don’t have to take your own thinking seriously and that any discomfort or anxiety will pass is priceless.
Our bodies are made with incredible wisdom to heal, well so are our minds! Our minds are designed with an alarm system and all these diagnoses are actually signals trying to get our attention. Agitation, urgency, doubt, are telling us that we need to slow down and come back to the moment. In every single diagnosis, the suffering starts with an innocent misunderstanding of the role of thought.
I have just been asked to co-author a research paper based on this data. Using these case studies, we will present this evidence to show that maladaptive repetitive thought leads to chronic mental stress. Not chemical imbalances, genetics, or trauma. Understanding this is profound and life changing, it is the way back to our innate mental health.
What is beyond a diagnosis?
Contentment, love and connection. A life of freedom, wellbeing and hope.
You discovered that an identity appeared as victim, and how unhelpful this was: how could any diagnostic identity be any different? You are a victim of depression, of anxiety, of PTSD, of psychosis etc: is there any insight or meaning in these statements? We are just applying a descriptive label, which is not an understanding of the primary phenomena at all, but part of the technique of psychiatry, a profession which processes cases like yours rather then understands and treats the primary phenomena, except in this case where they enabled self-insight. It is this self-insight that heals and liberates but how many psychiatrists promote that? It isn’t really in their portfolio.
But the problem is that again, we build an identity out of the labels ‘mentally ill’ and the various ‘illnesses’, but identifying with a psychiatric description as who you are is, obviously, itself a form of total social insanity. You are what you actually are, a complex human being with a complex psychological life: that is the fact. Saying “I am this or that” is always a mere conceptual statement and has only a distorting effect on your sense of reality, wherein who you think you are becomes absolutely decisive in shaping your reality. We just don’t understand and can barely perceive how insane it is to have ANY kind of identity AT ALL, because then it is the brain and body identifying with a word and social concept: we are not and never can be a word or social concept. The difficulty is in communicating the utterly devastating consequences of this identification for ones sanity, clarity and intelligence. If you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about then I’m afraid this is exactly what I mean. I hope I’m not being offensive because MERELY SEEING THIS FACT CHANGES IT. But you have to SEE it, i.e. perceive it, not take my word for it, otherwise it’s still merely intellectual and conceptual.
Can you see that the pathology of identity that had its roots in social violence and prejudice has become the cause and grounds for all kind of divisive conflicts within society? We COULD all be human beings, i.e. the complex phenomena of the human body, heart and mind and life. Instead you are a black man and I’m a white man, which implies another kind of human being, even though skin colour is about as superficial and ought to be as inconsequential as hair colour. While heterosexuals regard themselves as normal human beings, I am supposed to be gay, lesbian or bisexual, a different kind of person. Even the identity as male and female has violent consequences because it denies the feminine in men and the masculine in woman, and confuses HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS ITSELF by making it believe IT is male and female, when it is obvious to any clear and self-reflecting minds (admittedly a rare thing) that CONSCIOUSNESS is not male or female: it has masculine and femanin and neutral qualities. You can see this in yourself so it’s not a theory! Thought is genderless because words are neither male or female, and if it says “I am male” this is a mere conceptual statement which has no truth or reality because thought doesn’t have a penis or vulva: it doesn’t have an XY or YY combination of chromasomes, and obviously, obviously, awareness itself has no gender. Sensation has no gender. Perhaps there are movements of feeling which can be regarded as masculine or femanine, but not male or female because that’s a biological matter. So see how any identities confuses and distorts perception and our sense of self. Social labels are never understandings of reality and are obviously never actuality, only words. Believing you are such a label, then, is obviously a totally insane and quite unbelievable thing to do if you think about it.
And now we have every kind of divisive political, social, national, racial and even now neurological based merely conceptual identities, dividing us all and shattering the unity of society, of our own brains, our own intelligence, perception and understanding because they pepper our sense of reality with socially conditioned non-facts. You would never believe how much more clear you see the world if you dropped all your concepts, opinions, judgements and identities which are socially conditioned distortions to perception, a kind of disease of the brain called social history. The brain made it and then it conditions and destroys the intelligence of the organism, turning into a dissempowered, unhappy, striving and therefore productive socially conditioned human being, preferably a production line human being, a good worker, a good slave producing and maintaining the lives of the wealthy and powerful. It is a vampire society and it’s teeth is in your social conditioning, in your brain.
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I find this interesting because I was that resilient person until I complained about being ‘swatted’.
Then a hospital administrator and a consultant psychiatrist began ‘work’ on me to “fuking destroy” me….. and 13 years later not a day of my life has been worth living….. so much for the Charter of Healthcare Rights huh?
So I get where your coming from, in a way it’s what Viktor Frankl and Co were speaking about….. but what about thee Null Hypothesis…..
Guantanamo Bay would be one place I would imagine could induce such despair that no amount of positive thinking’ would heal an individual…….. even worse for the likes of those who were ‘falsely accused’?
I guess the torture (and I realise people don’t like this term associated with ‘mental health treatments’ because the ‘patient’ label changes what would be torture into ‘treatment’ in the same way heart surgery isn’t an assault) I was subjected to lasted for nearly a year…. mostly psychological which is a little more difficult to prove….. the mental ‘bruising’ not there for people to see. And it is so easy to call the damage being deliberately caused by these ‘mental health professionals’ who prefer an alternative reality an illness which requires brain damage. And how many others are prepared to cause that damage when they prefer the alternate reality too (mainly because it will benefit their careers, sycophants are so loved by the State that tortures).
So you write; “They beat me so hard I ‘knew’ I was going to die.”. This is the aim of such treatments as waterboarding…… taking people to that place you went over and over and over and over making sure they KNOW they are going to die, at the hands of the people ‘treating’ them.
You were fortunate in some ways that the State treats the people who harmed you as criminals, my torturers are treated as ‘heroes’ who have police assist them is rectifying any discrepancies in the documentation via “editing”…. that’s the bit where they take the crimes out of the legal narrative, and insert forged documents for ‘reality control’…..the torturer has now acted with lawful sanction because of the “editing”, and the abuse becomes ‘medical care’.
I guess the real shame is that there have been glimpses of the person I once was, before being tortured….. and I had forgotten how much people actually liked him. What would ‘repair’ that? Truth….. but instead our State Premier (U.S. has Governors) prefers to utter with known fraudulent documents to keep these people in place. He responds to the truth with manipulation….. shifting the focus from their vile behaviour, to my reaction…… “sorry that you still feel bad about your (insert human rights abuse euphemism here)”…. as I say they call it “editing” so torture is now ‘treatment’.
I don’t suppose it matters to a demagogue?
“When states are democratically governed according to law, there are no demagogues, and the best citizens are securely in the saddle; but where the laws are not sovereign, there you find demagogues.” Aristotle
With a Chief Psychiatrist who rewites the law to remove protections afforded the community and enable arbitrary detentions, and a Premier who refuses to even examine the facts because they don’t like the truth……. I wish them well for their limited future.
I guess what I am saying is that what you describe, can also be reversed…. which is what I was subjected to by people disguised as ‘mental health professionals’ supporting criminal colleagues. Resilience only lasts for so long.
I am reminded of the guy who tortured Saiid Qutb….. he claimed that they all talk in the end. It’s just a matter of hitting the ‘right note’. And what better way to disguise your State sanctioned torture, than calling it ‘healthcare’
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I agree totally. I never experienced psychosis until i was prescribed psychiatric medications. Then I was labelled and then i had a child with a husband who did suffer psychosis naturally and i had no choice but to continue with it because the threat of social services hung over us and if we didn’t comply then my son might have been taken from us. As it was he always went to family. He was never abused but the upheival uprooted him and he too was vulnerable and he is walking down the same path as me diagnosed and prescribed.
He said he has only had one good psychiatrist who told him that antipsychotics should only be prescribed to people who actually become psychotic. As it is they are first port of call psychotherapy being unobtainable because it is considered to take too long and is too expensive. I wonder what is too long?. A lifetime? Or full recovery in a matter of a couple of years?
I have been attempting to become meds free for the past 15 years and have had the neighbours from hell and was witness to police corruption. Seems now at the age of 74 I might just be able to break free. My son however will never be free and there is a question he might be homeless after i die.
There has never been any peace in my life. I now know why. Because it started with my family and now my only child is in jeopardy. I have my thoughts and no matter how positive i try and become it seems others in my past and present are bent on my destruction.
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“The power of insight.“
The significance of that sentence cannot be overstated. Psychiatry LOVES to accuse Mad people of “lacking insight”. We’re told we don’t know what we need or want, or that we need or want things that don’t exist. A new attack is probably being made against the people you have helped: They have the things they need or want, while not deserving any of them. Fortunately, they’ve secured one of those things – no psychiatry in their lives. As a result, they probably move comfortably from day to day, never asking themselves if toxic people approve of their liberty and longevity. Good for them. And, kudos to you for helping them build good lives.
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“What Is Beyond a Diagnosis?
That depends on whether or not you take the “diagnosis” seriously.
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“The one thing that derails us into ‘mental health’ issues”, Chana Studley, is psychiatric dogma, not “an innocent misunderstanding of the role of thought”. The most dangerous political movement in the world is the ‘mental health’ movement (Dr Keith Hoeller). You have transitioned from prey to predator.
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So inspired by your writing both personally and as something to share! I currently am recovering from a health issue and the only thing that kept me me going in my quest for healing was knowing that, despite how I might feel and others might think, I was healthy and capable of resilience, even in the face of diagnostic pessimism that turned out to be misinformation. Thank you for your insight and authenticity!
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I’ll tell you what usually is beyond a diagnosis – years of absolute fucking misery. And they call it treatment. This isn’t some academic problem to be approached through conceptual binoculars – this is a stark and blatant fact. Another stark and blatant fact is that except for a few commentors with real traumatic experience you lot are as USELESS AS STUFFED TOYS in recognizing the fundamental problem which is OUR MISERY, OUR HEAL, OUR TRAUMA AND VIOLENCE ON AN INDUSTRIAL SCALE. For you lot it’s just an intellectual talking shop and if it doesn’t gain the true gravity and comprehension of scale of suffering and scale of fraudulance, illusion, error and violence of this absolutely enormous in scale and utterly catastrophic and destructive and completely bogus and false grift of psychiatry and psychopharmacology, then you will one day wonder how you could have been either so blind or so cowardly or so conditioned that you actually believed it was more important to behave like professionals or experts rather then unmask with honesty and bravery the true dimensions of this incalculable harm. Unless we start to see and feel this issue like a real human beings we’re playing with words as a form of entertainment and cathartic egoistic or emotional self-expression
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“What is beyond a diagnosis?
Contentment, love and connection. A life of freedom, wellbeing and hope.”
Marx could have written something similar. Capitalism offers freedom, wellbeing and hope to few of us. It could, but the accumulation of capital is it’s main aim and that precludes meeting most of our needs. Psychiatric diagnosis is the attempt to individualise and distract from the social causes of misery, Psychiatrists are one type of, “Special bodies of armed men,” that are needed to maintain capitalism.
We do not need to think of ourselves as sick, we can instead think we live in a sick society.
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