"Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages

will be thought of as including our own."

- G. C. Lichtenberg

Your brave and dutiful LiveReal Editors, valiently exploring the treacherous world of therapy for our faithful fans . . .

(Note: This essay is still, as they say, under construction. So, it's not organized too well, some parts of it don't completely make sense, and in general, we recommend taking it, like everything else, with a pretty big grain of salt. Outside of that, this is the stellar type of literature that you have probably come to expect from your heroic LiveReal Editors . . .)

Comments and feedback:

info@livereal.com

Modern times ring with echoes of therapists:

"Give me your anxious, your sick, your wounded . . .

. . . come to me, all who are unhappy and anxious, who seek clarity and sanity . . .

And with surgical precision, we will transform you into pure, vibrant, strong, and noble creatures, reveal you as the emotional giants you really are, wipe away your suffering . . . armed with an endless supply of positive thoughts, unconditional love and a sackful of pills, we promise health, clarity, and happiness to all are willing . . . so come clients, come!!"

"Umm . . . OK . . ."

The Cure for Suffering?
Why Therapy?
Modern America
DOES THERAPY WORK?
An Overview of Psychology
Do Drugs Work?: The Debate of the Happy Pills
An Analysis of Therapy
Psychologists On Psychology: Evidence and experts
Any alternatives?

LiveReal, in our valiant and unflinching pursuit of the truth wherever it may lie, has undertaken an investigation of a bohemoth monster of a topic, a topic utterly dominating the millions of worried psyches today: Therapy in Modern America.

It has been a knuckle-gripping, mettle-testing, brain-wracking, mind-spinning grapple for our lives, pushing the envolopes of our sanity, emotional stamina, and mental fortitude to the very limits.

Yet, we have emerged, battle-scarred, but intact - (wondering what the heck happened) - but glad to be alive. And definitely a little more sober than when we left off.

So, in our adventures, did we become experts in various therapies? No. Did we find the single, simple, conclusive, definitive answer to all the problems facing therapists and all their victims - um, clients? Nope. Did we earn degrees from Yale, Harvard, or any mail-order hotlines? No'm. Did we emerge with long strings of letters after our names? No way.

But still. . . did we emerge with any questions worth asking, observations worth making, statements worth stating, that might provide food for thought for anyone interested in similar matters?

Maybe so. But then again, we could be wrong.

So, see for yourself!

The Cure for Suffering?

OK, for starters, what's really behind our fascination with therapy?

After all, maybe we can hold down a job, pay the bills, enjoy hanging out with others, we can put up a good front, have a good time occasionally, sometimes feel a moment or two of compassion, or something like it . . .

But still . . . to step back and take sober look at things . . . sometimes it really seems that, well, something's not right. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it's nothing you can quite put your finger on . . . but still, something's not right.

"What's not right. Am I "happy"? Why do I feel like I should be happier than I am . . . What am I doing with my life? Why do I get anxious? If everything's really "perfect," why do I not feel perfect? Why am I depressed? Why am I lonely, even in a crowd, even if they are annoying? Why do I have the compelling urge to sit at home and eat ice cream? Why do I get nervous, anxious, depressed, confused, without really knowing why? Why do I still have a bad habit or two I can't seem to kick? Why does my girlfriend tell me I have "issues"? What does it mean to have "issues?" Is there any way to be more relaxed, cool, confident, certain about the future, at ease with myself and life, happy?

And even further, is there anything more? Is there any higher or better way to feel, or live, or be? Is my current state of mind the best I'm capable of? Is there any chance I could be more happy, more healthy, more real than I am now? How does a person get to be a better person? . . . "

And so on.

In short, we haven't found what we want. And we're searching for it. For "It." We wonder why we do what we do, and many therapists and counselors are ready with explainations for things we want explained, like, how we can lead a better and happier life.

And so, in modern times, the thing to do . . .

. . . is take it to therapy.

After all, now that we've put our trust in an expert, can't we breathe a sigh of relief, and rest easy with full confidence that a professional will help us find the peace, health and happiness, that has seemed so elusive?

. . . right?

. . . ?

Why therapy?

"The therapists transformed age-old human dilemmas
into psychological problems and claimed that
they (and they alone) had the treatment . . ."

- Charles Sykes

A hypothesis:

Some say that maybe around 10% of the population is emotionally and mentally "healthy." These individuals are basically confident, happy, and full of energy. They don't understand why everyone else seems to have so much trouble.

Another 20% or so are, shall we say, "mostly" emotionally and mentally healthy. They may have a few bad habits, a bad day or two here or there, but they push through them by making a firm decision or two, and a good dose of discipline.

The remaining 70% of the population struggles with low energy, shyness, compulsions, headaches, addictions, bad tempers, sleep problems, failed relationships, sex problems, difficulty reading, talking and sharing, and many other challenges.1

This group attempts to solve their problems by a smorgasboard of methods, from positive thinking to hard work, from discipline to distractions, motivational experts to ice cream, astrology to exercise, self-esteem training to herbs, and a score of other methods.

These individuals work on themselves for years and decades . . . but their lives seem to stay the same because they never seem to find the real cause of their condition, or the cure.

This article, hopefully, will help shed some light.

"Bless your uneasiness as a sign that there is still life in you."
- Dag Hammarskjold

Modern America

Modern America is smothered in an avalanche of "therapies" claiming to help and heal, both mainstream and alternative:

. . . this is just the tip of the iceberg. 2

Or, if we stroll through the local bookstore, we are surrounded by offers to

Reparent our inner child/children

Get in touch with your masculine/feminine side

Go through a rebirthing experience

Unleash warriors/geniuses/artists/giants/passion within

Find out what "type" we are

Find unlimited power over ourselves and others

Get in touch with your inner magician/hero/healer/king/psychic, etc

Learn to think like Leonardo da Vinci, Einstein, like an artist, a calculator, etc

Improve our lives with Astrology, Channeling, Numerology, seeing auras, Palmistry, etc.

Meanwhile, on a more serious note . . .

• Fact: More people die from suicide than from homicide in the United States. ³
• Fact: The cost of alcoholism, drug addiction, and "mental illness" was estimated at $273.3 billion in 1988. 4
• Fact: Reports of one in five adults suffer from depression, and 12% of youngsters under the age of 18 take some sort of medication.

A few questions:

Has the number of marital therapists increased, along with the number of divorces?

Has the number of therapists, psychologists, psychotherapists, healers, gurus, psychiatrists and other counselors as a whole increased, along with a decrease in our overall mental and emotional health? Are all these counselors helping problems . . . or are they a symptom of the problems?

With all the talk about gun control, genes, educating, we get lost in a quagmire of genes, policies, laws, legislation, theory . . . Do we sometimes forget that people fire guns, humans take drugs, individuals suffer through the schooling process, people are affected or not affected by the impact of genes, brain chemistry, laws and drugs . . .

As far as psychology goes, it seems there is are many huge reasons for humility. Yet, the wonder is that it is really so rare.

Does Therapy Work?

An Overview of Psychology

The question "Does Therapy Work?" in America as a whole, of course, has no single, simple answer. "It" "works" sometimes, doesn't other times.

And, it get more complicated: the whole field of psychology is in the midst of a huge identity crisis. What kind of therapy, out of the thousands of breeds available, works or doesn't work? If something "works,"does it work every time? How, why? If it works, is it just a placebo? Control groups? What does it mean to "work," anyway? What if some therapies work that have not been studied?

. . . Studying therapy "scientifically" is something like trying to pick up litter during a hurricane - there are hundreds of independent factors in a chaotic fury that it's almost impossible for it to sit still enough to conduct a neat and tidy scientific examination.

At the same time, we have no choice. We said we were going to do it, so we did.

Here goes:

First of all, the field of "psychology" itself (which for our purposes, includes the whole range from general counselers and social workers to therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists), all gather under one umbrella of "psychology," and disagree on practically everything else.

All in all, the field of psychology is like an intellectual equivalent of a meeting of the United Nations, without translators, without any particular reason to get along, and without any compelling effort to bend one's dignity and sink to the level of trying to communicate with and really understand one's colleagues and competitors.

In a sense, the field of psychology and therapy in particular, is more similar to a leaderless adolescent mob than a hard scientific discipline; a tree with many branches, but no trunk. It is something like the "Olympics of academia"; they speak different languages, come from different cultures, have radically different ways of viewing the world, fundamentally different assumptions about human nature, and the only thing many of them have in common is that - well, they are all there, and they occasionally run in the same race.

The field does not seem to suffer from the heroic efforts of certain individuals, which are definitely admirable, as much as it seems to suffer from simple disorganization. What progress would, say, physics make, if every time a physicist made a breakthrough, he would quit his job, write a bestseller, and go into business for himself?

Pick any two figures in the field of therapy and counseling, talk to them about their core beliefs and practices, and there is a good chance that they will disagree with each other about even the most fundamental aspects of human nature. Each of them will say, or at least think in secret, that all the others are, well, missing the point.

And so, there is no agreed-upon model of the mind and human behavior, no agreed-upon definition of "sanity," definitely no agreed-upon definition of mental illness and it's causes and cures - although, for all of these, there are many various advocates hollaring and clamoring for attention.

And that has been our challenge.

And still, we doggedly, relentlessly . . . um, tirelessly . . . pursue our mission:

Does all this therapy WORK?

• Sure, sometimes therapy does "work."
  Sure, occasionally . . . sometimes with specific problems and specific solutions, sometimes when nobody is sure what happens or why - it does happen: clients walk in suffering, walk out healed.
  Sometimes therapy does produce satisfied customers. Sometimes psychologists and psychiatrists are skilled, knowledgeable professionals with an inside track or the working of the mind and emotions . . . and so, mission accomplished. Maybe it helps slightly, maybe temporarily, maybe it's just a placebo, maybe it's not "scientific," but sometimes, it works.
  
  
• Other times, therapy does not work.
  It works in cases, but that does not mean that it's systematic, that there is actually a method behind it all. How many people have spent, and continue to spend, years and years in therapy, thousands in drugs, medical appointments, and insurance claims . . . and still haven't gotten better? How many does it make worse?
  Judging by the numbers . . . this isn't too rare.

"Psychology . . . a nasty little profession."

- William James

• What IS Therapy?
  We define "therapy" as one person paying another to heal them of suffering that isn't obviously physical, or somehow, one person paying another to help make their life better.
  More practically, we could say that therapy is a very unique and recent type of human relationship where one person pays another to treat him or like a human being.
  In other words, therapy could be defined as what happens when we pay another person to treat us . . . the way we probably should be treating each other anyway.
  And even then, we sometimes still don't get what we pay for.

"There are many alternative reductionisms.
We are nothing but a pack of idiosyncratic genes.
We are nothing but a pack of adaptations sculpted by natural selection.
We are nothing but a pack of computational devices
dedicated to different tasks.
We are nothing but a pack of sexual seuroses.
These proclamations . . . are all defensible, and they are all inadequate."
- John Horgan

• What Is "Psychology," Anyway?
  There is major disagreement even on this. Is it the science of behavior? The study of personality, or mental health? The study of the mind? The science of the human soul? A modern Tower of Babel?
  
  
• Is "Psychology" Really A "Science"?
  The reason why psychology seems to have such a hard time is because it's standing right on the border between clean, hard science (like math-physics types) and hocus-pocus-unproven-occultist-type-intangibles such as thoughts, emotions, beliefs, dreams, souls, etc that humans get into. Most of the time, they try to get respect from both camps, most of the time wind up getting it from neither, and quietly debate one another on various irrelevancies - trying not to harm each others' self-esteemses, of course.
  At the same time, it would be really nice to think that we trust our "mental health" to proven experts, true scientific authorities, who with mathematical precision, really, honestly know exactly what they're doing. Comforting to think so . . .
  So, psychologists, being human, want to be included in the inner circle of "real" scientists; yet, it's really hard to make "intangible, etherial, ghostlike stuff" as thoughts, emotions, souls and so forth seem "scientific." So therefore, in an attempt to be scientific, they adopt a bias towards what can be measured, tested, observed, and easily proven.
  So, psychologists can have a tendency to reduce all the unscientific, ghostlike thoughts, emotions-soul-stuff down to things like blood pressure, brain chemicals, synapses, and other "hard" things that are accepted in the big brother "hard science" circles, constructing a "myth of expertise." So, they become "scientific," but at a price, the "price" being a Procrustean chopping away of the very things that may well be the vital factor of human experience, and quite possibly, the very reasons why psychology has such a lousy success rate.
  And for those vital, unscientific intangibles playing a part in things, it's nearly always fashionable to scream hysterically "There's no evidence for that!" "That is not proven!""That's all anecdotal!" - because it makes them look more like the hard scientists they want to be. Maybe there's not "hard evidence," - but then again, things haven't been disproven either - so really, we don't know either way. It often becomes a matter of rhetoric.
  There are many things which are very true, that cannot be measured or proven, for which there may never be what some consider to be "proof." But they're still true.
  
  And, for the majority of us, we can't put our lives on hold until scientists do prove or disprove everything to each others' satisfaction. We have lives to live.
  
  
• Questions:
  On the first day of the new century, January 1st, 2000, the Wall Street Journal ran several articles on what the spanking new millenium might hold. For the article headlining "Human Nature," the expert they chose to inteview for the column was Edward O. Wilson.
  This is interesting to us is not because of Wilson's brilliant work in some areas; but rather, the fact that, of all the "experts on human nature" available, Wilson was the one picked.
  Not that he's not a really smart guy, and not that he shouldn't have been picked . . . but still, Wilson, after all, became an expert through studying ants, and eventually generalized his findings on ants to human beings (sociobiology).
  This seems telling that the current dominant model of human nature is that we are fundamentally no different than ants, or at best, ants who think.
  1. Is this telling about out dominant paradigm of human nature? For example, if humans are not fundamentally different from ants, how can so many people/critters (over 90%) claim to be "spiritual"? Are that many of us phonies?
  2. If this is the case, aren't psychologists and psychiatrists, essentially, veterinarians?
     
  3. Every single professional "psychologist" and "psychiatrist" was passed over for being selected as the authority to consult on "human nature." Were any in the psychology/psychiatry field, well, red-faced about this?
  4. After all, if psychologists are not experts on "human nature," what are they?

But, back to our investigation.

Do Drugs Work? The Debate of the Happy Pills

First, we've decided to look at the most popular "therapy" of the modern day, drugs.

A hurricane of controversy surrounds the widespread use of prescription drugs - Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, and others as the primary mainstream "scientific" treatment for conditions of depression, anxiety, and others.

Do drugs work? Yes, they do. They would not have become so popular, with such widespred use, if there was not some truth behind it. They're definitely a move up from, say, lobotomies or bleedings, and at times, they seem to be the only method available which seem to get consistent results. As occasional specific solutions to specific problems, drugs can put a floor underneath a depression, to curb an anxiety crisis, to short-circuit a downward spiral, there are reasons why drugs have won the allegiance of many doctors and patients. Drug companies are making billions because they sell and market products which, at least in some cases, work.

At the same time, many folks state strongly that drugs can sometimes be misleading, harmful, and downright dangerous. A popular trend nowadays is to offer flood of happy pills as the antidote for every unpleasant emotion, the key to psychological health, not as a form of psychological welfare but as the overall cure for everyone, everywhere for the problems every human faces. On this point, controversy rages.

And as far as "scientists" and being "scientific" goes, well, it is easier to study brain chemicals than it is to study human beings.

"As things now stand . . . we don't have a theory of the psychology
of common sense that would survive scrutiny
by an intelligent five-year-old."
- Jerry Fodor, Cognitive Scientist

We all want to know "why we do what we do," because more than we'd like to admit, when you really look into it closely, well, we don't really know.

So when a trusty, insistent authority figure comes along and says, "The reason why you do X is because of X, Y, Z (whether it's chemicals in the brain, synapses, serotonin, evil spirits, bad humors, genes . . . essentially, anything that seems complex, that would require a lot of work and energy to figure out (aren't we busy enough?) anything that seems over our head, difficult to understand, perhaps impossible to disprove, and especially something not subject to immediate verification and evidence - we naturally tend to believe it, especially when it's an easy or comforting answer. After all, why not?

While the following will only be a brief introduction to the main points of this controversy, we can begin with the observation that:

1. Some knowledgeable professionals strongly believe in the current use of medications;
   
2. Some knowledgeable professionals strongly disbelieve in the current use of medications;
   
3. Nearly all agree that, if medication is needed, it should be used along with another type of therapy, such as cognitive-behavioral, psychotherapy, etc;
4. Nearly all agree that if one is taking medication, they should 1) use the medication under the supervision of a psychiatrist; and 2) they should not stop taking the medication too abruptly.

Again, it is recommended that anyone taking prescription medication should not stop taking it too abruptly. Harmful side-effects could ensue.

Many psychiatrists as well as patients and customers claim that drugs are undeniably helpful parts of psychiatry, and have helped many people live more healthy and stable lives. We have absolutely no argument against anything honestly leading to more genuinely healthy and stable lives.

At the same time, let's take a closer look.

"With these antidepressants, you have to understand that

we really don't know what we are doing.

We know these drugs work,
but we don't know exactly how,

and each one is a little different."

- Dr. Ronald A Rubin 5

The Underlying Philosophy of the Happy Pills

We figure a good place to start is to trace the pill-debate back to it's fundamental assumptions and premises, the ground it's standing on, about the mind and brain. Once these assumptions are accepted, trends of pill-therapies evolve naturally. However, these fundamental assumptions are, many say, pretty shaky.

For example, a popular theory many authoritative figures and figurinas assume, implicitly, unquestionably, faithfully, wholeheartedly, and utterly without question, is the hypothesis that "the brain creates the mind," and speculate that "consciousness" or "the mind" is nothing more than the spurious offspring of a pile of brain chemicals.

(Well, that is, all minds except for theirs.)

This line of speculation that "the brain creates the mind" when played out in the real world (a place largely unknown to those who spend their time only in laboratories) often leads to places where they might not have originally intended.

For example, a way this could sometimes play out:

First of all, scientists hypothesize that consciousness or "the mind" is correlated with chemicals in the brain, or that chemicals in the brain "create" our "mind" and conscious experience.

Before long, this becomes someone's pet theory, and they then begin to insist that "the mind" is completely correlated with chemicals in the brain.

Soon after that, they insist that chemicals in the brain are the ultimate cause and ground of everything that happens in the "mind."

Before long after that, they decree their dogma, essentially, that the "mind" is nothing more than chemicals, and demonize, attack, and attempt to discredit any people who say otherwise.

Soon after that, it follows that any kind of "therapy" that doesn't directly treat the chemicals in the brain (by adding more chemicals to them, i.e., drugs) is "unscientific," and so, invalid and ineffective.

So before too long, the only kind of therapy considered "scientific" is drugs.

Not too long after that, drugs are considered the only real method to attain sanity, emotional health, peace of mind, etc.

And not long after that, everyone across the landscape, from first-graders to retirees, (or except for the ones who can't afford it, and of course except for the scientists themselves) - are swallowing pills by the handfuls.

Is that what they really had in mind? Is that, "sanity"?

"How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness
comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue,
is just as unaccountalbe as the appearance of the Djin,
when Aladdin rubbed his lamp."
- Thomas Huxley

After all, let's be honest. Do we really think we were born with shortages of Prozac or Xanax?

The theory goes, essentially, that either the mind is physical or it does not exist. While assuming that the brain creates the mind, the theorists are forced to admit that the brain chemicals are "read" and "interpreted" by something, and they label this exterior, seemingly irrelevant appendage the "interpretor."

What they - or their interpretors - often fail to acknowledge is that the "interpretor" - is, actually, well, "me" . . . and "you," and the scientist positing the theory. Why is it that theorists' "interpretors" get to proclaim that our "interpretors" are irrelevant by-products of brain chemicals, but not their own? And why, then, do they then leap to the conclusion that the only way to help out an "interpretor" is by changing the brain chemicals?

In another way, these theorists insist that anything that doesn't show up on an EEG isn't real, or at least, (as in psychoanalysis, talking therapies, etc) it's some form of "occultism." (Talk about "demonizing" your opponents, literally). It's good politics, but bad science.

And so, they look at the world only through this lens of an EEG, and insist they're seeing the whole picture, and no other view is valid. In other words, horse-blinders are OK, in fact the mark of good science, as long as the blinders are a complex and expensive piece of electrical machinery.

We remember the old cry "You make me feel like an object," although it's often completely allowed if it's done wearing the cloak of "science."

Doctors use fancy gadgetry to look at things that my brain (not me) is doing, and then claim I am nothing but a brain, an object. I may only seem like an object to you; while the the truth is, well, I am also a subject, just like you.

"Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry . . .
particle physics cannot predict the behavior of water,
let alone the behavior of humans.
- Philip Anderson, Nobel Prize winner

They also assume that human beings do not have anything vaguely resembling a "soul," and argue dogmatically against even the possibility of such a thing. Or, at any rate, if there is such thing as a "soul," they say, it is really of no practical importance. Perhaps, however, they should speak for themselves.

In another way, Arthur Eddington tells a story about a scientist studying deep-sea life using a net with a three-inch mesh. After bringing up repeated samples, the scientist concluded that there are no deep-sea fish smaller than three inches in length. Moral: Our methods of fishing determine what we can catch. And if science is selective in it's fishing methods, it cannot claim that its picture of reality is complete.

It is easier and often less expensive, for doctors, patients, and insurance companies, to prescribe a pill than, say, to spend time and energy getting to know a person, much less investing in an actual relationship.

Generalize This:
A human tendency, when we find something that works in one instance or several instances, is to tend to assume it works for everything.

In other words, there is a human tendency to generalize; when a two year-old first learns the word "dog," then everything - a cat, a couch, a table, a sock - he points to and screams, "Dog!"

We don't lose this tendency, and so, the same goes for scientists. If we find something that works in one area, we naturally tend to apply it to other areas, thinking or assuming it will work there too. For example, Freudians first became Freudians, and then used Freudian theory to explain all human behavior; Behaviorists tried to use Behaviorism to explain all human behavior, ad infinitum.

". . . some would argue that our present use of psychotropic drugs
is just as flawed, in that we don't make patients better -
we just succeed in preventing them from bothering us."
- Frank Vertosick, M.D.

Perhaps: Some medications in certain cases, say, genuinely helped some schizophrenics alleviate their symptoms; when it worked in this context, enthusiasts generalized the effect to society at large, and next thing you know, they're drugging every first-grader who doesn't pay attention to the teacher. Perhaps pills are effective in some areas, but not all.

Certain reductionist types look at a rainbow, insist that it's "nothing but" drops of condensation reflecting sunlight, pretend that they don't actually see the rainbow itself (only droplets of condensation), and insist that if you actually see the rainbow, you're being snowed by an illusion.

Often these fundamentalist reductionist types shamelessly assume that the whole is nothing more than the sum of it's parts, and close their eyes to anything but. In other words, they would take a scrap-heap of Mercedes auto-body parts, ignore the mechanic or engineer (say, any intelligence that organized the parts), then look at a bright, shiny Mercedes, and insist that it's only, nothing but, a scrap-heap of parts.

These theorists insisting that "the mind is nothing more than chemicals" can be essentially the same as hunting dogs sniffing around paperbacks copies of War and Peace. After all, all "books" (and minds) are alike to them - they're all the same, right? They're all nothing more than a few pounds of paper and black ink, right?

• Fact:Nearly 50% of doctors spend an hour or less with a child before making a diagnosis and prescribing medication. 6

It is less time and energy consuming, and in other ways, easier to swallow a pill, than to say, engage in therapy, do some serious introspection and soul-searching.

Most doctors agree that pills are overprescribed. Doctors overprescribe them, patients who don't really need them, ask for them. Pills were originally used only for serious cases of psychological suffering; now, however, we have redefined what is meant by "serious." To many, this can mean, well, ordinary human life.

"Right now, of course,
most psychiatrists believe that the major mental disorders are biochemical, physiological, genetic. Now, I've been in this business long enough
to recognize that it's cyclical . . . these beliefs co-vary in time
with the political climate of the culture."
- Roger Chistenfeld, Director of Research,
Hudson River Psychiatric Center.

Scientists have made a great amount of progress in understanding brain chemistry, and have developed drugs which control the symptoms of neurosis, depression, schizophrenia and manic-depression. The effectiveness of these drugs has lead some scientists to conclude that many mental problems are caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.

But still, what causes the chemical imbalance?

What Causes . . . "If you go to the top specialist at one of America's . . . major headache clinics, he might say, 'Headaches occur when neurons in the back of the brain stem become unstable, causing an imbalance of serotonin, thus causing depression of nerve cell function in the cortex and causing the blood vessels in the scalp to expand.'
This sounds very scientific, and it's probably true, but it does not solve your problem. We still don't know what causes the 'neurons in the back of the brain stem to become unstable . . ." - Thomas Stone

Some professionals and many non-professionals assume that a physical chemical in the brain causes emotional states (depression, anxiety, etc).
Yet, because the two may appear together does not mean that one causes the other. Are they causal, or correlational? What about say, chicken and egg? Or, what about environmental conditions that cause changes in brain chemisty?

"Over the past decade scientists have linked specific genes to manic depression, schizophrenia, autism, alcoholism, heroin addiction, high IQ, male homosexuality, sadness, extroversion, introversion, social skills, novelty seeking, impulsivity, attention-deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, violent aggression, anxiety, seasonal affective disorder, pathological gambling, anorexia nervosa, and virtually every other imaginable hu8man trait or ailment . . But the simple fact is that these findings are classic examples of what science writers sometimes call "gee-whiz" stories; the science is fairly simple, and the philosophical and social implications are titillating . . ."
". . . So far, none of the claims linking specific genes to specific, complex behavioral traits and disorders - not one - has been unambiguously confirmed." - John Horgan

• Question: Is it possible that some psychiatrists/psychologists are more comfortable with pills than with people? That some would rather prescribe a pill than talk with someone about, say, real problems?

Chemicals in the brain are sometimes assumed to be the cause of emotional states. The theory goes, the physical is the cause of the mental/emotional. Yet, back in the real world, the process works exactly in reverse: Someone gets in your face and calls you a jerk, you get angry, blood pressure rises, heart pounds, and so forth. Yet, what is the cause of this emotional reaction in this case? The blood pressure rising?

And what caused the blood pressure to rise?

The jerk.

"The dogma that 'mental diseases are diseases of the brain'

is a hangover from . . . materialism . . . It has become a prejudice

which hinders all progress, with nothing to justify it."
- Carl Jung (1948)

Observation:
An abused wife, perhaps, may ask for Prozac and painkillers to help make her happy again. In other ways as well, the hope and promise imlied in swallowing pills can discourage a person from, say, introspection, or examining one's life to find out if anything concrete and changeable might be wrong.

Band-Aids Over Bullet Wounds: Treating the symptoms without understanding the underlying cause may well be putting Band-Aids over bullet wounds. (Come in with symptoms of say, depression, panic, general anxiety, etc. Rather than finding the cause of the problem, they help you forget about - or feel less pain from - the symptom. So, you might still die, but you'll be intoxicated by various drugs most of the time, so the process of dying doesn't hurt as much.)

"Rana Lee remembers the time she went to her doctor
because her husband was beating her. The doctor,
she told a congressional committee,
'prescribed 10 milligrams of Valium three times a day to calm me down . . .
he refilled it for five years, with no questions asked.'"
- Washington Post Health, January 3, 1989
Quoted in Toxic Psychiatry by Peter R. Breggin, M.D.

The "Miracle of the Human Body"
The physical human body is described by even skeptics as a miracle of intelligence and design.
Example: if all the information held in all the libraries of the world were programmed onto DNA, that information would fit on about one percent of the head of a pin. Each cell of our bodies has approximately three billion bits of data coiled within DNA weighing trillionths of a gram.
. . . Yet, according to some psychiatric theory, your body is often downright incompetent.
"Oops! I forgot to squirt enough serotonin in here! Golly!! Oh, wait, swell, here comes the pill salesman with a backup supply. Whew!"

Simplicity verses Complexity:
It is easier to study something you can see, touch, and hear (say, brain chemistry), rather than something you cannot see, touch, or hear (say, more "subjective," inner states such as depression, anxiety, etc).
We all naturally tend to gravitate towards simple solutions more than complex. Because something is more visible, audible, and easy to study, it might be more easy to say that it is more "scientific"or "clinically proven," but that does not necessarily mean that it more important.In other words, because it's easier to study brain chemicals, that does not mean that brain chemicals are more important than, say, child abuse.

Overspecialization?
How many brain researchers have studied in depth, say, neo-Freudian theory? How well do all pill-pushers realize the extent of all other alternatives for mental and emotional health? Do other valid alternative routes have the manpower, funding, marketing muscle, and political connections to communicate this message?

"Nothing but" and Reductionism On Speed
Popular thought, born at bred at the prodding of psychiatrists, seems to have the notion that "thoughts, feelings, emotions are nothing but chemicals and hormones in your brain."
Translation: The works of Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, are nothing but groups of letters of the alphabet. Nothing more. It you say there's more to poetry, literature, and so forth than simple groups of letters - well, you're seeing things at worst, "unscientific" at best.
This "nothing but" mentality also implies that, because your thoughts and emotions are nothing but the burps arising from brain chemicals, they are therefore irrelevant, unimportant, or somehow secondary, or at any rate, there's nothing you can do about them.
Essentially, it's "reductionism" gone rampant. Many scientists define science as only tearing things down into the smallest pieces possible in order to understand how they work. Psychiatrists do this with people, and then wonder why this approach isn't having a blazingly impressive success rate. Humpty-Dumpty, hello.

"If the Prince of Peace should come to earth,
one of the first things he would do
would be to put psychiatrists in their place."
- Aldous Huxley

• Is all suffering inherently bad?
  Take a modern Hamlet, a Nietzsche, Camus, Rilke, Buddha, Dante, Homer, and put him in the hands of a modern psychologist, who drugs them into a narcotized stupor, being well-paid for doing so.
  Sometimes, maybe, soul-searching may not always be a bad thing.
  
  
• Alarm Clocks
  Maybe when you start realize your life isn't perfect, it may well be a wake-up call. If this is the case, the real answer isn't a matter of finding ways to turn off the fire-alarm, it lies in finding ways to put out the fire.

only as far as they are unsettled
is there any hope for them."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

• The Drug Industry
  • Fact: Drug companies make a lot of money selling prescription drugs. 7
    Drug companies, of course, make this money by selling drugs.
    In order to sell drugs, they need to persuade potential buyers that their drugs will be the solution, or will at least help, with the problems they face. If they do not sell their products and the message behind them, they do not make money.
    To go further, many of those involved in the industry point out that there is a well-known cozy relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and the medical industry.
    This is not saying a "vast conspiracy" with ill intentions necessarily exists;
    still, the facts are that simply that doctors and hospitals prescribe pills, and drug companies make money from making pills.
    In many cases, drug companies fund the research studies (which, not surprisingly, sometimes show results that their drugs work well) . . .
    - and then have the drug salespersons use those studies in their pitches to overworked doctors,.doctors who have an enormous amount of information to keep track of . . .
  At any rate, with all this going on, are we getting healthier and happier? That's debatable.
  Are drug companies making lots of money? That's a fact.
  
  
• Cure, For Whom?
  In homes, mental institutions, and classrooms, people are given drugs, which, when they work, make things better.
  But better for whom? Are things better for the person (or child, or patient), or for the teacher, parent, or physician overseeing them?
  "My son used to cause me all kinds of trouble, it would wear me out. Then we saw a doctor, who gave us drugs. After we started drugging him, it was great - he doesn't cause near as much trouble. In fact, he hardly bothers me at all."
  
  
• LiveReal and the Psychiatrist, a (sort-of) Dialogue:

  LR: Yes doctor, why did the Titanic sink?
  P: Because of the density of the metallic composition of the ship's hull.
  LR: Hmm. OK, why was Michael Jordon so good at basketball?
  P: Because his tendons flex when activated by the neuromuscular synapses.
  LR: Hmm. OK, why do people go to college?
  P: Because their knees and ankles set forth a kinetic force which transports their bodies.
  LR: Hmm. OK, why do I like looking at sunsets?
  P: Because the electromagnetic frequency of the rays get interpreted into your corpus collosum.
  LR: Hmm. OK, why do I really dig listening to Jewel sing?
  P: Because the sound of her voice creates vibrations in the air which are interpreted by your eardrums.
  LR: Why do we feel, say, anxiety?
  P: Because of the levels of serotonin in the brain.
  LR: Umm, thank you.
  P: That'll be two hundred dollars.

• The Fable Of Tommy the Soon-To-Be Psychiatrist:
  In school, Tommy hit little Susie with a rubber band. Miss Ratchet sees Tommy, and in a scolding voice, asks him why. Tommy, being up-to-date on the latest in psychiatric thought, replies honestly, "Well, Miss Ratchet, the biosynaptic neurons in my hand released the reuptake-inhibitors of the serotonin of my brain levels . . ."

  Johnny is sent to the principles office.
  The next day,
  A psychiatrist is asked why Johnny hit little Susie with a rubber band. With impressive confidence and authority, he replies deeply, "Well, the biosynaptic neurons in his hand released the reuptake-inhibitors of serotonin of his brain levels . . ."
  The audience claps madly, psychiatrist is congratulated and paid handsomely. He soon writes a bestseller and hits the lecture circuit.
  Moral:
  Don't dodge any question, unless you have a degree and are well-practiced at confusing your audience.

• The Order Of Things
  For example . . .
  You can't really understand a cell by examining an atom.
  You can't understand an organ, such as a liver, by examining molecules.
  You can't understand the economy by closely examining how, say, a liver works.
  Why do we continue to insist that the way to understand human beings is to study biochemistry?
  
  
• The Drug Model
  How it works: A person feels anxiety or another unpleasant emotion, ingests a pill or other substance, and feels relief from the unpleasant feeling.
  Picture: A man stands is expected to do some public speaking, experiences anxiety at the thought of it. He takes a shot of whiskey which relaxes him a bit, he feels a little better, and delivers the speech.
  This is not to claim that psychiatric drugs are no more sophisticated than the shot of whiskey, they might be; rather, this is to point out two things: that the underlying structure of the "psychiatric medication" is structurally and functionally the same (unpleasant emotion, ingest substance, relief from emotion) and so, essentially, is nothing new.
  
  
• Psychiatrists Like to Ridicule
  . . . the old days, when oracles would read the tea-leaves to reveal the mysteries of human nature . . . or even a century or two ago, when established scientists examined the shape of the skull (phrenology) in order to unveil the secrets of character.
  Who knows . . . but perhaps in another century or two, future scientists will look back on the scientists of today, and wonder what we were doing looking so closely for the secrets of human nature in the mush inside our skulls.

"The Humpty Dumpty Dilemma . . . They can break the mind into pieces,
but they have no idea how to put it back together again.
A crucial missing ingredient is plain old common sense."
- John Horgan

An Analysis of Therapy

To discuss many of the "talk" (and dance, and body, and so on) therapies that are out there . . .

• First of all,
  Many professionals, with as many degrees and credentials as anyone else, state strongly that, in more words or less, the whole field of psychology and psychiatry is in a lot of trouble, flawed or corrupt, and quite possibly, in the words of one author, is built from the ground on a "house of cards."
  
  Just to name a few, here is a brief overview of just a few authors and some revealing titles:
  Hans Eysenck, Ph.D., The Decline and Fall Of the Freudian Empire
  Peter R. Breggin, M.D. Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy, and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories Of the New Psychiatry. (In LiveReal Products).
  Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Against Therapy, and Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking Of a Psychoanalyst.
  Ethan Watters and Richard Ofshe: Therapy's Delusions: The Myth of the Unconscious and the Exploitation Of Today's Walking Worried.
  Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D. They Say You're Crazy: How the World's Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who's Normal.
  Robyn M. Dawes, (author of the 1990 winner of the APA William James Award) House Of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built On Myth.
  Thomas Szasz, M.D. The Manufacture Of Madness.
  Dr. Dineen, Tana. Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry Is Doing To People
  
  
• Go into an office
  with a stranger and talk about your problems, doubts, insecurities, worries, and fears, in detail, ad nauseum. How does doing that make you feel?
  
  
• Talk to any stranger
  about your most deep and private thoughts and dreams, while he or she silently, coldly stares at you as if you're a bug, underneath a microscope, with leprosy.
  How does doing that make you feel?
  
  
• The answer you get, depends on who you ask:
  In general, if we talk to:
  A Freudian, he or she will start looking for fixations and childhood traumas;
  A Jungian, he or she will dig for dreams and archetypes;
  A psychiatrist, look for a "neurochemical and hormonal imbalance";
  A Rogerian, they will listen to us very attentively;
  A Behaviorist, they will train us, circus-seal fasion, to change our habits;
  A Cognitive-Behaviorist, will train us to change our habits and thoughts;
  A Humanist, will focus on our potential to be more than what we are now;
  A Family Therapist, will talk to us about our relationships;
  A Transpersonalist, will try to expand our awareness;
  A Synthesist, has a pureed casserole of all of the above.
  
  Each breed of therapist has been trained in their own specialty, and in general tends, naturally, to view things from that perspective.
  
  As the saying goes, "to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail..."

• Different Languages, Models, Definitions . . .
  Psychology has different approaches, different models of the mind, different definitions of happiness and success, different definitions of sanity, all operating under the same banner.
  For example,
  Cognitive therapy - takes people with "irrational thoughts" and trains their thoughts to be "rational."
  Psychotherapy - it's all about taking "the unconscious"and making it "conscious."
  Behaviorism - training people to act the way we think they should.
  Etc. This is fine for psychologists. A good debate on different models of human nature is a pleasure. But as for the patients, clients, and customers, suffering and paying the bills, it's, well, not quite as much fun.
  
  

  "I'm not strong enough to stand the remedies;
  it's all I can do to stand the disease."

  - Moliere
  

• The Towers of Psycho-Babel:
  As a saying sort-of goes, half the world of psychology doesn't know what the other half is doing.
  And if they do know, they think they're nuts. And they might be right.
  Psychiatrists think Jungians are all nuts, Jungians think psychiatry is missing the mark; the same for behaviorists, cognitive-behaviorists, existential psychoanalysts, Freudians, Alderians, bodywork specialists, transpersonal psychologists, humanistic psychologists, inner child ones, family and couple therapists, Adult Children workshops - all have different assumptions, different therapies, different approaches, and different treatments, and all claim to be the one that's "real."
  Some say all this "diversity" is wonderful. Others say it's chaos that's confuses the hell out of anyone else bothering to pay attention.
  
  
• Blind Men and Elephants
  This point is better articulated by an old Sufi fable:
  There are eight men, all blind, touching an elephant. One grabs the elephant's tail; "Elephants are long and thin!" he says. Another blind man touches his stomach; "No, idiot, elephants are like the wall of a barn!" Another blind man grabs the trunk; "No, elephants are like big snakes!" Another man grabbed his ears. "No, they're big, flat, and flappy!" And so on, etc.Just like psychology, they're all right to a certain extent, but they see a piece of the puzzle and not the whole picture.
  
  
• But To the Customer
  It's all the same. It seems that rarely is there a "try-out" period or interview, so that the customer knows what they're getting into.
  For example, they might unknowingly go to a psychoanalyst for something that could be solved in a session by a short-term therapist, or might go to a short-term therapist for something that could only be helped by a psychoanalist - and never know the difference.
  In a way, it could be like buying a car without taking a test drive; sometimes it's like trying to buy a Jeep from a Honda salesman, sometimes is like trying to buy a Ferarri from an insurance salesman. Where the customer doesn't know anything about cars, or car salesmen.
  When you're selling and buying the invisible and intangible, sometimes it's worthwhile to, well, do the homework, and define the context of exactly is going on.
  
  
• "Give 'em a headache, sell 'em an aspirin."
  Many say that that often the process of therapy itself actually creates many of the problems it is claiming to solve.
  Doesn't seem too far out. After all, does talking, at length and in depth, about your deepest problems, insecurities, fears, inadequacies, make you feel good?
  (Counter-point: Of course, ignoring "issues" won't necessarily solve things, either.)
  Some theorists claim that therapy is often simply a process of influence, persusion, or an elaborate procedure of "leading the witness" to where therapists want them to go ("you're traumatized, you're hurt, you need my help.")
  (And actually, some therapists are forthright about this, and specialize in it)..
  
  
• Another variation of the "Headache-Aspirin."
  Another possibility:
  Take a normal child or adult;
  notice a fairly normal, common, everyday behavior, such as not enthusiastically loving the process of homework (because reducing fractions is obviously inherently fun), not being ecstatic at one's job (Who says they don't enjoy typing data into a machine? Step into my office!) - and so forth;
  label that behavior as the symptom of some underlying condition or serious disease, and then prescribe the cure for it.
  Further, in addition to whatever core "issues" cause a person to seek therapy, add on top of that many complex, intricate, elaborate and confusing philosophies and theories (that matter tremendously to the individual, but which cannot be tested, proven, or disproven.)
  Well, it's one way to sell a lot of aspirin.
  
  
• How to Put Yourself in Business as a Psychologist
  

  Advertise:
  Do you ever feel:
  Fear? Anger? Lonely? Guilty? Uncomfortable? Sad? Happy?
  Or any other human emotion?
  Well you may be suffering from ________ (insert length word here) Disorder.
  It's a "disease,"
  probably caused by genes or brain chemistry.
  But we can help you!! Maybe!!
  Just call (800) ________ (insert phone number here).
  
  Translation:
  You've either got _________ Disorder, and need their help,
  or maybe, you're OK, and you're human.

• In some cases, more harm than good. Much.
  Therapy, by defintion, deals with people at their most vulnerable moments. For certain individuals, well, this provides a certain type of opportunity.
  Meaning, some therapists are criminals. Like, literally. They have gone to jail and all. Just to make the observation that it is possible. Not good.
  
  
• Is your therapist, sane?
  Hopefully so.
  But of course, not necessarily.
  (A little experiment: ask them what the definition of "sanity" is. They may have to consult a book.)

may be the most oppressive."
- C. S. Lewis

• Snapshot:
  A two year-old boy falls down, skins his knee, cries, and four minutes later, has completely forgotten about it and is going about his business.
  An adult falls down, skins his knee, mulls over his possible unconscious reasons for self-sabotage, feels victimized, joins a support group, starts taking Prozac, and spends the rest of his life recovering as a "trauma survivor."
  
  
• What are the Goals
  of therapy? Specific problems? Long-term character changes?
  There are, of course, different medicines for different conditions; but for many new customers just getting into the matter, a "therapist" is a "therapist." It's not their job to know everything else.
  And if a therapist, well, cooks one dish, well, that's what you're going to be served, whether that's what you wanted, or not.
  
  
• Conflict of Interest?
  Observation: If therapists, counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists and so forth were actually completely successful - they would then put themselves out of jobs.
  In other words, while we are not in danger of this actually happening, the interesting part is the potentially tempting conflict of interest: the better they are at their job, the less money they potentially make (they share this dilemma with medical doctors as well . . . and teachers . . .).
  This does not necessarily mean that therapists deliberately "keep people in therapy" in order to maintain a steady income for themselves.
  At the same time, this doesn't mean that all of them are exactly sweating bullets to get us back out the door, either.
  How about us looking into a new commission structure?
  
  
• Digging for Problems
  Many know that therapy can sometimes become a "psychological archeology" type mental goose-chase, rather than focusing on the present time, now; still, it has the possibility of becoming "problem-oriented" ("what's wrong with me?") rather than "solution-oriented," or getting things right.
  
  
• Scene:

  A young intrepid LiveReal researcher (Q) and a doctor (A). Late afternoon. The sunlight wafts through the cracked pale blinds.

  Q: "I'm depressed."
  A: "Well, it's probably at least partly genetic, partly environmental. But we're still not completely sure. We need more research."
  Q:
  A:
  Q: (blinks)
  A:
  Q: "Oh."
  End Scene.

• Once a Victim, Always. . .
  "Instead of teaching victimized people how to become strong and move on with their lives, they encourage clients to adopt the label of 'abuse survivor' and endure a prolonged, self-effacing victimization status for a period of years or even a lifetime." - Michael J. Hurd, Ph.D.
  
  
• Whose Fault Is It?
  Why doesn't a person in therapy get happier, healthier, better, when it doesn't happen? Well, the "blame," most of the time, goes not to the counselor, but on the client. The client, directly or subtly, is accused of not being committed enough, honest enough, strong enough, direct enough, is too repressed, too in denial, too guarded etc, etc, etc.
  So now, in addition to whatever problems we go into therapy with, we are also blamed for failing in our own therapy. Great. That makes us feel super!! (Pass the pills.)
  Of course, directly "blaming the victim" or even implying that the therapy is not working because of the "client" can make the client feel worse, more guilty, more helpless, can make them try harder, become more upset . . . which creates need for more therapy . . . and a whopper of a cyclical pattern.
  Overall, the rule is this: when therapy works, the "expert" is responsible and gets the credit; when therapy doesn't work, the "client" is responsible and gets the blame. Check, please.

"So-called psychoanalysis is the occupation of lascivious rationalists
who reduce everything in the world to sexual causes,
with the exception of their occupation."
- Karl Draus

• Founding Fathers:
  Thought experiment: Examine the real lives of the founding fathers of psychiatry and psychology (Freud, Skinner, etc) - especially about the times when they're squabbling with each other. "Is that sanity, mental/emotional health? Do I want to be like that?"
  
  
• The "Self-Actualized" Club
  Abraham Maslow decided that a group of people he selected were "self-actualized," that is, exceptionally healthy.
  How many of those individuals got "self-actualized" through therapy?
  
  
• The "Tar Baby" Syndrome
  Therapy can become a kind of emotional "tar-baby," which is why many seem to have a natural aversion to discussing the subject at all.
  In other words, once you open Pandora's box and begin getting involved with certain theories, questions, and doubts, they can become obsessive and very difficult to get free from.
  
  It's like asking yourself "Do I itch, anywhere on your body, right now?" Asking yourself, "Did anything happen in my childhood that could have traumatized me?" tends to produce its own effects.
  • Example:
    "You're in denial."
    "No I'm not."
    "See? I told you you were in denial. That's a symptom of ____" (insert scary words here with the word "Disorder" after it).
    "But I'm not."
    "You're proving my point."
    "But I'm really not."
    "People with X always say that."
    Etc.
    
    
• More "Tar Baby" Syndrome - Therapy itself creates the need for more therapy. In other words, a cycle is set up: you innocently enter therapy, wanting to become a happier, healthier person, and
  1. therapy makes you aware of many "problems" with yourself, or "issues" to be addressed;
  2. of course, such issues and problems are assumed to get resolved in therapy. Therefore,
  3. more therapy is needed;
  4. return to step one.

  It can become like a private, personal, inner Vietnam: you enter into war, not really knowing why you're there, lacking a clear objective; it's hard to know who the enemy really is (yourself? your parents? your genes? the culture? life? God?) and no clear exit strategy.
  In another way, it's like a video game: you play, you win some and lose just a liiiiittle bit more, and so, every game you play makes you want to play again, which makes you want to play again . . . . Like playing a slot machine, overall, it makes you want to keep playing .

• "That just proves my point!"
  Of course, even when therapy causes problems, counselors sometimes cites the fact that therapy is "not working" as evidence that more therapy is needed in order for it to work. This is the "frying pan into fire into frying pan into fire" syndrome.
  

"I am still more frightened by

the fearless power in the eyes of my fellow psychiatrists

than by the powerless fear in the eyes of their patients."
- R. D. Laing

• What is Really Working?
  After massive amounts of study and research, scientists have concluded that the relationship between the client and therapist is very important.
  Um, thanks.
  Much evidence states that among popular therapies, the therapist is overall more important than the therapeutic method or technique used. Except in certain specific cases.
  Many researchers have found that all therapies or methods are equally effective, or ineffective. In other words, no real "method" is worse or better than any other.
  Now this is precision.
  Researchers have also determined that training doesn't make you a better therapist. Reearchers have also found the opposite: many therapists with more experience tend to do better than therapists with little experience . . . and conclude that therefore, they must be learning something while it's all going on.
  That's encouraging. We guess.
  That about sums it up.
  
  
• Two Extremes:
  At one extreme are therapists who focus of the inevitable bumps and bruises of life, label them "traumas," lay out a long (and expensive) "recovery path," and guide the client along that imaginary path to "recovery."
  At the other extreme are either 1) legitimate victims who have suffered very real abuse, who are grouped with "therapy junkies" or "victim wannabees", and
  2) real wounds, not just bumps or bruises, that are being ignored.
  
  
• Thinking Positive. huh.
  "Over the past thirty years, psychology journals have published over 45,000 articles about depression and 400 on happiness.^"8
  Talk about thinking positive. In other words, the best way to learn how Bill Gates made billions is to interview the homeless.
  
  
• Procrustes and the Patient:
  To repeat, in some therapies, individual differences are utterly, completely ignored. A therapist learns one trick - for example, hypnotherapy, or cognitive-behavioral therapy - and applies it everywhere, at all times, for all individuals. To a dance therapist, everyone needs to get in touch with their body. To a Freudian, everyone is harboring repressed impulses. To a Behaviorist, everyone becomes a bundle of conditioned reflexes.
  Not that this in itself is a problem, but it becomes a problem for the client when, say, he or she needs a short-term intervention and winds up diving into his childhood, or needs an exploration of childhood and visits a short-term intervention-specialist. You don't go to a plumber for help with your electricity; you don't go to a car mechanic if your toilet is overflowing

"What is poison to one man is medicine to another."

• Articulating Problems
  "I went into therapy because I was unhappy. Now, I'm still unhappy - but I have aboooout three dozen more theories why I'm unhappy."
  
  

". . . A therapist who is incompetent and does no more
than sit in silence and scratch himself
will have at least a fifty percent success rate with his patients."
- Jay Haley

• Chasing Ghosts: The goal of therapy, from the individual's viewpoint, is in some way or another, to feel better, to find fresh happiness, meaning, fullness of life, joy. Yet these things - happiness, "meaning," "joy" and so forth - are personal, subjective, seemingly internal conditions; they cannot be "objectively" seen, heard, felt, measured, or replicated. In other words, The goal of therapy is chasing some"thing" that is at present, practically impossible, by "objective" standards, to detect, like hunting the wind.
  Therefore, it seems to leave a lot of room for mistakes, inaccuracy, and even, well, fraud.
  
  
• Psychology In It's Infancy, or, Adolescent Infancy:
  "Imagine if we were in the state of science where we could reliably diagnose heart disease but knew nothing about the effects of exercise cholesterol, salt and fat, stress, and fatigue. Patients who were diagnosed would be grasping at all kinds of straws that might help them recover. Some would stop all exercise, some would exercise furiously. Some would withdraw from stressful situations. Some would take medication to reduce blood pressure without knowing that their unhealthy diet undoes any beneficial effect of medication. Many would die prematurely; some would get better accidentally; without good controlled scientific studies, medicine would not learn what was causing some to die, some to recover. This is where we are with depression."
  - Richard O'Conner, Ph.D
  
  (. . . and for that matter, almost everything else. There are many good reasons not to be dogmatic yet,.but then again, this doesn't seem to stop anyone).
  
  
• Digging Through the Past and Feeding Ghosts
  Some therapies consist of continually dredging up mental memories of past events, and prompt a continuous habit of laboriously digging through the archaology of our memory banks, hoping to find the keystone to our current problems.
  There may very well be times to examine the past and deal with it's effects, especially when it imposes itself on the present moment.
  At the same time, digging into the past can become a futile process in itself. Imagine a hunter examining the footprints, broken branches, scratches, and other clues left by the rare squirrel he is hunting. Examining, scratching his head, and re-examining, while the squirrel is perched happily right on his hat.

  Example:
  You fall and scratch a knee. It's good to take a few moments, inspect the wound, clean it, and put a bandage on it.
  From there, it will heal on its own - unless you keep falling and re-scratching it, or keep picking at it. These wounds heal naturally.
  In the same way, it's very possible that many "childhood wounds," as long as we're not retraumatizing ourselves, will heal on their own and dissolve away . . . so it is better to practice being completely present now than to search for salvation in your memory banks.

  (Counterpoint:
  This theory or method does not work for, say, bullet wounds. Bullets should first be removed before proper healing can take place. In addition, one could easily take this "wounds heal naturally" as an excuse to never reflect, never examine oneself, never think about the consequences of one's actions, or never look into the past for what can lead to valid understanding of one's present behavior.)
  
  "It gave explanations to phenomena that demanded explanations."
  - Steven Hyman, quoted by John Horgan
  
  
• Labels:
  Counselors spend years learning to recognize symptoms, diagnose and label the probable "condition," categorize the patient, (borderline, manic depressive, schizophrenic, or whatever), and recommend treatment.
  In other words, this is primarily organizing and categorizing symptoms and people - which has nothing whatsoever to do with understanding and treating properly what they have organized.
  
  
• (Nudge) Label It, It Makes You Look Smart
  When we label or categorize anything, we are always tempted to believe that we then understand it. But of course, well, we don't. We just have a word for it now. So, a person barks like a dog, thinks he is Napolean, talks continually about how aliens from Mars are plotting to destroy him and the rest of the world . . . ask a psychiatrist, "Why?" Answer: "Because he has schizophrenia."
  "Oooooh, OK! Thank you!! That's why, because he has schizophrenia."
  (pause)
  ". . . but wait a minute, sir, what is schizophrenia?"
  "We don't know."
  "Oh."
  Moral: Sometimes a word is just a word. What the word means is an entirely different thing, altogether.

"There also seems a parallel between the role of the Socratic dialectic
in the education of the intellect and the role of free-association
in the psychoanalytic education of the emotions.
Both are developed from the observation that virtue cannot be taught,
i.e., the truth cannot simply be stated by the teacher
and learned by rote by the pupil
because the results of learning cannot be separated from
the process of inquiry which each individual must live through
for himself at first-hand."
- W. H. Auden

• Defining Yourself By Your Wounds
  Another side-effect of "therapeutic work," is to "define yourself primarily by your wounds."
  In therapy, one can form (or discover) a new "identity," such as "I was abused," "I am a victim of abuse," "I am a survivor," and so forth. This "identity" can grow, and unless kept in check, can drow to dramatic proportions and become cancerous - consuming other aspects of oneself (such as "I am a mother," "I am a father," "I am a businessman") and so on. If one focuses primarily and exclusively on self-definitions taht are born in therapy, those aspects can eventually take over a person's life, and do more harm than good.
  
  
• True, and Irrelevant:
  In the avalanche of stuff to wade through, a great deal of research is very high-quality, very professionally done, very respectable, and totally irrelevant to what we're looking for.
  For example, often books with titles like "How the Mind Works," are successful marketing ploys to grab our attention - after all figuring out how the mind works is what we're after.But, while it might sell the book, it can also be a little misleading. They are often about cognitive psychology, perception, memory, sensation, etc, not about how to understand and manage your own mind and emotions.
  In other words, they don't know how the mind works, not in any practical and complete sense, anyway, as the title implies . . . although you'd almost have to buy the book and read it before finding that out.
  

"Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?"
- Vladimir Nabokov

• Sensitivity: Too far left, too far right . . .
  To use a crude analogy, in riding a bike, one call lean too far left and fall, and too far right and fall. The same dynamic can happen, say, with an issue like "sensitivity": because most of us have often had our fair share of being treated with disrespect, insensitivity and even downright meanness by others, we tend to get into therapeutic circles and become very considerate, veeery polite, veeeeery "nonjudgemental" (at least we act like it) regarding one anothers' feelings.
  Yet, at the same time, when does this cross over into overemphasis on feelings, oversensitivity, and pettiness?
  
  Psychoanalysis ". . . justifies its ideas by reference to its own interpretations. If you want to justify the idea of the ego, you justify it by interpreting what a patient says in the light of ego theory. There isn't any reputable science on the face of the earth that's conducted that way."
  - Frederick Crews, quoted by John Horgan
  
  
• Facts, or Opinions?
  Sometimes therapy is simply one person giving another their personal opinions, advice, biases, prejudices, theories, and speculations to another, under the guise or pretense of it being scientific, proven fact, under the fraudulent pretense of professional expertise.
  Many honest psychiatrists admit that they are not experts on the human mind; they're just ordinary people who have taken a few classes that the rest of us haven't. And if they're good therapists, it's not because of their training (maybe even in spite of their training) - it's often because of just who they are, or something that wasn't, and maybe can't be trained.
  
  
• The "Impending Doom"
  Could it be that therapy encourages and nurtures a constant sense of "doom" that constantly hangs over a client's mind like a black cloud, constantly threatening that they just might go through the rest of their life a fundamentally flawed, incomplete, unnatural individual, suffering from incurable emotional suffering, a defective brain chemistry, or bad genes, due to events beyond their control (genes, hormones, things that happened when they were two, etc) . . . while paying large amounts of money to hear this?
  
  
• The Inner Labyrinth
  Sometimes therapy is an inner labyrinth of infinite regression consisting of an endless supply of defense mechanisms and ulterior motivations. ("The reason why you're really doing this is X. And you deny that because you're repressed. And you've repressed that because you're in denial, which is really because you need control, because you're afraid, but you deny that you're afraid, etc etc etc.) . . . as if you are slowly closing in on some core, deepest motivation, which must surely be pretty awful - when in reality, that's just not the case at all.
  . . . makes it very disorienting, easy to get lost, and greatly increases the possibility of, as the saying goes, getting "devoured by some Minotaur of conscience."
  
  
• Placebo effect:
  It has been demonstrated that when people believe they are receiving therapeutic attention, they tend to show some improvement.

"Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution."
- G. K. Chesterton

• Theorizing "About"
  Therapy can sometimes offer complex intellectual formulas which can sometimes substitute for honest self-inspection.
  (A person can feel he needs to understand all of Freud's descriptions of consciousness, before, say, he asks himself why he acts like a jerk to his wife.)

  Question:
  Is there a relationship between morality and psychological health?
  If so, what?
  And if so, why is this completely ignored?

• Ripples In Society
  Psychologists face many unique challenges that experts in other fields simply don't face, which makes their job much more difficult. For example:
  Pretend for a moment, the entire world suffers from a mild form of, say, heart disease. It bothers everyone, just a little.
  Say a group of the highest-caliber doctors, surgeons, and physicians gather to perform the first-ever open heart surgery.
  They perform the surgery, it is successful.
  They publish their reports enthusiastically.
  The media covers the event.
  The general public hears the reporting, and gets wildly enthusiastic.
  Soon, millions of people begin performing open-heart surgery on their brothers, sisters, and in-laws. Mass chaos ensues. The technique is scandalized, the doctors are demonized and discredited, the reports go in the history books as a huge disaster.
  This isn't too far a throw from what psychologists have to contend with.
  
  
• Testimonials Matter
  "I would be dead without his or her help," "This therapy benefitted me enormously." We hear from many patients and former patients how much benefit they have derived from a certain person or treatment. We hear it from people who are given electroshock, from people on dangerous psychiatric drugs, and from people who have been lobotomized." - Masson
  
  
• Indirect Implications of Theory:
  Example:
  Somehow or other, a person picks up the notion that "Repression causes neurosis." Therefore, assuming neurosis is bad, it follows that if assuming one doesn't want to be neurotic, they should then repress nothing . . .
  So well, heck, the whole concept of "self-control" is sort of repression, right?
  And heck, I sure don't want to be repressed, so therefore, abandon all "self-control" entirely . . . so,
  Sex, drugs, rock&roll is the safest, fastest route to psychological health, right?
  
  
• Memories, Real and Unreal
  Well, of course, all therapy isn't perfect. If it was, why would sites like www.stopbadtherapy.com spring up?
  Along these lines, many say that we have two, and only two, options:
  A) Psychological suffering is caused exclusively by chemicals inside the skull, or
  B) Blame parents as the root of all evil.
  Really, we're not convinced that you really have to necessarily go either route. "Blaming" parents doesn't do any good and can go overboard, and ignoring the very possibility that parenting might be a factor, while it makes fewer people mad, well, it isn't good science. Why blame at all? Why not just focus on getting healthy?
  
  
• In Your Body, Not Thoughts:
  Says body-oriented therapists, "repression happens on a bodily, physical level - so insight therapy, based purely on "the talking cure" and intellectual understanding, does not provide relief.
  
  
• Talk, talk, talk
  Emotions can be spoken about, written about, and even acted out, without being truly accepted, integrated, and felt.Emotions happen on the feeling, visceral level, not on the mental, think-talk level. You've got to go deeper for that.
  
  
• Cognitive Therapy and Thought-Training:
  On the one hand, cognitive therapy definitely works well in certain specific situations. On the other hand, cognitive therapy, or the practice of training thoughts, circus-seal fashion, may be something like trying to tune a piano in a snowstorm.
  The theory is this: "The world is rational, and you become unhappy when, for whatever reason, you begin thinking irrationally; the solution is to retrain you so that you think rationally, because happiness consists of adjusting yourself to a rational world."
  Questions:
  What made a person "irrational" to start with?
  If poison ivy makes you itch, should you learn to stop scratching, or should you get rid of the poison ivy?
  Is life rational, and should we simply adjust ourselves to it? (Um, Don Quixote?) Rational, according to whom?
  Do thoughts determine feelings? Or do feelings determine thoughts? Or does behavior and perception determine thoughts and feelings? Or all of the above?
  What if there is a deeper rationale to humans, perhaps a deeper logic to what we call "irrationality," beneath the surface of a person's behavior and thoughts?
  
  
• DSM-XX
  One reviewer of the DSM-IV, the Bible of the psychology field:
  The description of schizophrenia "boils down to this: a schizophrenic is a person who thinks very odd thoughts, behaves weirdly, and suffers from bizarre delusions, which suggests that the authors of the DSM-IV either don't know what schizophrenia is or suffer from poor writing skills."

all mental woes can be cured by a daily application

of old Greek myths to their private parts."

- Vladimir Nabokov

• Repair the Nonexistent
  A Transpersonal criticism of conventional therapy is that it is attempting to fix the "ego" which, when closely examined, is in fact, is some "thing" that does not really exist.
  .
• "The Dodo Hypothesis"
  A study by Lester Luborsky uses an excerpt from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:
  "First (the Dod) marked out a race course, in a sort of circle ("the exact shape doesn't matter," it said) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no "One, two three, and away!" but they began running when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out, "The race is over!" and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, "But who has won?"
  This question the Dod could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, "Everybody has won, and all must have prizes!"
  - Lewis Carrol, originally quoted by Saul Rosenzweig (1936), commenting that all therapies seem to somehow produce equivalent results.
  
  
• Me, my, mine:
  Therapy can sometimes encourage and provide fertile ground for a narrow self-absorbed, narcissistic, and even selfish mentality, where everything is and everyone is evaluated according to the impact on one's own mental and emotional health.
  (Counterpoint: Other times, therapy can be the only place where an individual is, perhaps for the first time in their life, allowed to be honestly, openly, healthfully, "selfish.")
  
  
• Sacred-Cow-Making:
  Therapy can sometimes encourage and promote the creation of, well, sacred cows. For example, a person's "self-esteem," or "inner child," every shadow of a feeling, every careless opinion, every ego or vanity can become a fixation, a minor obsession, the measure of all good, or the center of the universe.
  
  
• "You've Got a Serious Problem"
  Some say that therapists can accidentally suggest, and so create, problem conditions which do not actually exist.
  For example, "He/She did something to you, what? That must have been very traumatic. How awful. (Since you've been so traumatized, you'll need a lot more therapy.)"

  Question:
  Do we all reaaly have something called a "conscience"?
  If so, what part does it play in psychological suffering and health?

• Therapeutic Procrastination
  Therapy can cometimes encourage individuals to put their life on hold until . . ."I will really start living when I get better, after I've gotten more self-esteem, when I have accepted my inner child . . . " etc.
  
  
• "There are two ways of 'adjusting' a person . . .
  . . . to his situation without producing growthful change. One is to stabilize the person by the use of medication . . . The other method of adjustment is long-term individual therapy focusing upon helping the person to understand his childhood development situation. Many (people) have been stabilized for years by intensive analysis. Instead of encouraging them to take aciton that would lead to a richer and more complex life, the therapy pervents that change by imposing the idea that the problem is within their psyche rather than in their situation . . ." - Jay Haley, Uncommon Therapy

"Today's psychologists are observing and gathering material
from which a future science will emerge."
- Ayn Rand

• Positive thinking, or delusional?
  If you tell someone they're wonderful when they're not, then even if they believe you - are they better off, or worse?
  
  
• Motivation.
  Therapy works most often for those who are highly motivated to get better, and are determined to make it so. At the same time, sometimes hopelessness and lack of determination are the reasons for being in therapy to start with.
  
  
• Egos Out Of Control
  Occasionally, scientists tinker around in their laboratories and sometimes stumble onto something that is actually relevant to everyday life.
  Say, for example, genetics. They study a few genes, speculate that this might someday have an impact on, say, alcoholism or depression or something. So, they see their golden opportunity to become celebrities and take over the world, and take it, often to the dismay of the rest of us.
  And so, they map out some genes, and proceed to spend days and weeks full of gala, festivities, and huge media coverage, publically clapping each other on the back, congratulating each other until they're hoarse, tooting each others' horns, blowing thick smoke up one another's arses and talking ad nauseum about how galactic, how huge, how immensely staggering the implications are of the work they're doing.
  And soon after, the party ends, they settle down, and life goes on as usual.
  
  

  "But in terms of sheer complexity, particle physics is a child's game
  - a ten-piece jigsaw puzzle of Snow White - compared to neuroscience . . .
  Anyone hoping to construct a unified theory of the mind now
  must cope with an astronomical number of findings,
  many of them with contradictory implications."
  - John Horgon
  
  
• Lean On Me (Not Yourself)
  Quite possibly, therapy itself encourages dependency on the therapist, and so, discourages self-reliance. "The therapist will cure me," and so can potentially encourage individuals to put responsibility for their emotional health into the hands of someone else.
  
  
• The Best Cure for Insanity is, Don't Go Crazy to Start With.
  Psychotherapy and much of modern "psychology" all normally step in, exclusively, after the fact. Perhaps, after tha damage has already been done
  But w hat about, say, prevention?
  For example, psychoanalysis was born in part from asking "How can we 'cure' Anno O?"
  What about a different question: is there anything Anna O could have done to prevent herself from ever needing help in the first place?
  It seems reasonable that, paradoxical as it may sound, that the best "psychology" is that which prevents the need for psychologists to start with.
  
  Enough of this. Let's look at what real psychologists have to say about other psychologists.
  
  

Psychologists On Psychology:
Evidence and experts

At various times, various psychological researchers have had the courage to point their keen eyes and instruments back towards their own profession, and study with scientific scrutiny the question, "Does Therapy Work?"

A short summary of the results: after analyzing many studies of psychotherapy in many different fields, most of the conclusions are that
treated patients do fare better than untreated;

all the different therapies produced only roughly equivalent outcomes;

there is no correlation between the amount of time spent in therapy and the benefits;

there was no correlation between the effectiveness of the therapist and their credentials or expertise. (Healers with degrees from medical school, with Ph.D.'s, with Masters Degrees, with undergraduate degrees, or social workers are all equally effective.)

Here is a partial gathering of what they've found.

Eysenck (1952) - Of the people who remained in psychoanalysis as long as their therapists thought they should, 66% showed improvement; patients treated with other various approaches, 64% showed an improvement; and those who received no psychotherapy but were treated only custodially in instituations, 72% showed improvement.

Three decades after his initial study challenging the claims of therapy, Eysenck wrote that he still saw no compelling evidence that the practice of psychotherapy showed much value. However, he also notes that this lack of support had little effect on the profession, which seems to ignore all findings that disupte the usefulness of its methods.

Luborsky, Chandler, Auerback, Cohen, and Bachrach (1971) investigated the factors that influence the outcome or a course of psychotherapy, such as "patient variables," "Treatment variables," "Therapist variables,"and so forth, have different impacts on how therapies proceed. Their results were not surprising.

Lester Luborsky (1975) - Psychotherapy is worthwhile, those who received therapy generally fare better than those who did not; however, none of the different therapies measured stood out; all were roughly as effective as each other.

Strupp and Hadley (1979) - Halfway sane, compassionate, and honest professors were just as effective as "professionally trained" experts.

Smith, Glass, and Miller (1980) - Therapy can be beneficial, yet, different approaches tend to measure outcomes in different ways. "Psychotherapy is beneficial . . . Its benefits are on a par with other expensive and ambitious interentions, such as schooling and medicine. The benfits of psychotherapy are not permanent, but then little is."

Lohr, Lilienfeld, Tolin, and Herbert (1999) - There are factors common in all psychotherapies which may factor in the effects of therapy: placebo effects resulting from the mere expectation for improvement, demand characteristics, therapist enthusiasm and support, therapist-client allience, and effort justification (i.e., the tendency to report positive changes in order to justify the effort exerted).

So, What are the Alternatives?

So, if conventional therapy has a few issues it needs to work out . . .

What's a person to do in the meantime?

What is the answer, the cure? Well, heck, we don't know. Remember, we're ordinary folks here, no fancy research labs, no white coats, just us and our grit and our Diet Mountain Dew.

For sure, in the course of our travels and adventures here at LiveReal, we've gotten a mean, shovel-across-the-head education in a lot of what doesn't work. But, at the same time, we've run across a few things that . . . well, have really been pretty cool for us. So maybe they'll work for a few other people, too.

So, if we offer a few suggestions, are we saying they're the answer everyone's been waiting for? Are they the ultimate, across-the-board, one-size-fits all solution that will apply for everyone under the sun equally well? Is this the final, end-all that is the pinnacle of the humanity's search?

No. As far as science goes, as far as "psychology" goes, it's still a young field, with a long way to go.

And along these line, anyway, the normal course of events for various proposed answers, cures, and solutions is this:

First, a few scientists or researchers make a new discovery about something (psychoanalysis, behaviorism, drugs, shock therapy, gene therapy, cognitive behaviorism, etc);

Then, there is a lot of overblown hype about what this "miracle cure" will do;

The miracle cure becomes all the rage;

Test trials of the cure over time, with results ranging from fairly good to mediocre to disasterous;

As time goes on, the buzz dies down, the movement loses its gusto, and researchers retreat back to the drawing board;
Life goes on as usual;

The slow progression of "twenty steps forward, nineteen-and-a-half step back" continues.

With that in mind, here are a few alternatives.

First of all, just for kicks, we've sketched out a picture of "the ideal therapy":

A world where,

the customer, after it's all over and done, is well-satisfied;

the customer knows from the start exactly what they're getting into, and what to expect;

it's non-intrusive, non-invasive, non-manipulative, non-coercive;

the patient is in the driver's seat the whole time, yet
also has the benefits of expertcounseling and coaching from a proper authority;

it's inexpensive;

it doesn't take too much time;

payment if necessary at all, is contingent on success, not failure;

it's based on a rock-solid, time-tested understanding of human nature;

it doesn't require months and years of studying obscure texts and philosophies;

it "rings true" and makes sense on a practical level;

it's self-justifying and directly produces tangible benefits;

it eliminates the proper symptoms, and whatever may cause the symptoms;

when helpful, it provides understanding of the origin of the symptoms;
overall, it helps everyone involved become more clear, honest, sane, healthy, strong, and helps us know, understand, and care for ourselves, others, and our place in the universe, a little better.

So, back in the real world, for anyone is looking for a few alternatives to therapy, drugs, and suffering . . . here a little of what we've found.

1. You already did it.
   There's a pretty darn decent chance that if you read and absorb what's in this article, you're way ahead of the game already. Thanks to LiveReal and the gut-crunching research of your faithful LiveReal task force, you are now well-armed with insights that, if applied correctly, hugely decrease the chances of you spending years and thousands on fruitless, dead-end, insanity-inducing drugs and therapy sessions.
   So, congrats, and good work!!
   
   
2. Shop Around.
   This isn't meant to give the impression that there are no good therapists (or drugs) out there; there definitely are good therapists (and maybe drugs) out there. But at the same time, "let the buyer beware." It may be very worthwhile to have a Good-Will-Hunting-style shopping trip, where many different options are tried, before you find one that fits. Don't hesitate to shop around.
   
   
3. Consider the Possibility
   that deep down, underneath it all, even in your darkest most secret, most unpleasant moments . . . that fundamentally, you are OK, capital "O," capital "K," and there is absolutely nothing at all really wrong with you.
   With that in mind, consider as well that there's a lot of work to do.
   
   
4. Know Thyself.
   To take it further, along the "Physician, heal thyself" line of thinking, this is a "Willis, learn how your own mind works" line.
   
   In other words, "self-knowledge" isn't a matter of studying genes, textbooks, hormones, brain chemcals, or really, anything else; it's a matter of studying you, the same way as it is for studying "me." "Self-knowledge" isn't just for gurus perched on mountaintops any more. With all the material and information readily available today, we are already much more psychologically astute, for better or worse, than we used to be.
   
   In a sense, every person already is their own depth psychologist, motivational coach, insight therapist, counselor, philosopher, etc - now it's just a matter of getting good at it, and there is a wealth of information available to make it a more safe and pleasant journey overall. That's what we're on the search for here as well.
   
   In another way . . . every person is already a scientist, they are their own laboratory, and the experiments they run is the story of their life.
   
   So, it seems there is good reason to talk to and learn from other people, and compare notes on which "experiments" work, and what the results have been, so we can learn from each other.
   
   This also parallels the notion that while there may be some areas it's best to safely trust to experts and authorities, such as insurance, taxes, and so forth, your sanity and emotional health should be the last to be abdicated, and with the greatest amount of scrutiny and consideration, instead of the other way around.
   
   
   
5. "Be still," or something.
   A mark, perhaps "the" mark of a good scientist lies in the ability to be clear, objective, and unbiased; to have an open and nonjudgment yet discriminating, not-easily-fooled attitude, is really the ability to see things the way they really are instead of the way we'd like them to be; to see directly, without spin, personal interpretation, or anything that clouds or colors a direct perception and of the way things are.
   
   This "ability" is something that, seems like, can be practiced and cultivated.
   
   This gets into the area of something like, for lack of a better word, "concentration." Concentration, dispite popular opinion, isn't something you get from a pill; it's something more like a golf swing, that is practiced, honed, and developed. Proper concentration, perhaps a type of mental strength, can sometimes be a practical, real way to stave off phantoms of fear, anxiety, guilt, depression, tension, etc, if we're just able to slow our pace and be still enough to stop and look at them.
   
   Along this line, many people say that the the root of unhappiness and confusion lies in the inability to actually, literally be "still," as in, being able to go into a room alone, with no distractions, nothing to do, and to sit there, being present, and let what happens, happen. And they say, to break away from unhappiness, do just that. We spend weeks and months working on our golf game, our draperies, our physiques, but rarely spend any time on our minds. It's pretty simple, definitely not expensive, and quite possibly one of the hardest things to do on the planet.
   
   
   "I have discovered that all of man's unhappiness
   derives from only one source -
   not being able to sit quietly in a room."
   - Blaise Pascal
   
   

   " In the realm of "meditation" or "contemplation," many different words are used to describe the same essential things, and as often, many of the same words are also used to describe very different things. This is especially true for areas of "meditation" and "contemplation." It is sometimes a chore to separate the wheat from the chaff.
   
   We definitely do not recommend everything that operates under the banner of "contemplation" or "meditation" (see Caveat Meditator) and there are many varieties and numerous breeds of various "meditation" techniques available. "Meditator beware," indeed. Still, many meditations claim to have no impact on emotional healing and strength, while some folks also say that a great deal of real "emotional healing" lies in this ability to "be still" or develop attention; some thinkers believe this is the missing link in psychoanalysis (Jack Kornfeld, or Mark Epstein, see Thoughts Without A Thinker, etc).
   
   The practice we personally recommend is in the LiveReal Products section, "The Classic" and How Your Mind Can Keep You Well by Roy Masters. This technique is definitely not the only one available, it is not the only one that works, it might not work every time for everyone, and is not meant for every individual with various unique needs. Yet in our experience thus far, it is effective, and in general, applicable to many. Like anything (most things), it can all definitely be misused, misunderstood, misinterpreted, etc, yet it still seems effective in ways that other ways are not. The tape itself is meant only to be used a few times and then thrown away once the practice is learned. And, you can't beat the price (compared to an hour with a therapist), and it's definitely "non-intrusive."
   

Disadvantages: Requires, if just beginning, a willingness to try, persistence, work, responsibility, time, effort, and more persistence, more work. No easy solutions, no magic carpet ride through life.
Advantages: Just maybe, it's simple, low-risk, very inexpensive (as in, "free"), easy to learn, self-validating, completely within your power and control, it works, like becoming your own boss, there's freedom, opportunity, adventure, and responsibility, and plenty of others to compare notes with.

"Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest,
but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time.
One of the most baffling experiences occurs."
- William James


1. Roy Masters and "Advice Line Overnight"
   Roy Masters is a little-known, widely misunderstood, often ignored guy who is way ahead of his time.
   
   In our experience, to state our biased, unscientific, personal opinion, well, Masters just makes a lot of modern psychologists look like drooling, wet, saggy-diapered babies. Masters, while very human, is a really good-hearted grandfatherly-type figure who understands a heck of a lot about human nature.
   
   And in what is more than our opinion, he has many real cases of helping people overcome addictions, deal with emotional and marriage problems, and much more.
   
   On the other hand, he's probably one of the more easily misunderstood men on the planet. When anyone first listens to Masters, the standard procedure is to experience something like the following:
   first, shock; then, surprise, then, more shock; then indignation, then decide he's X; then decide he's Y; then call him A, B, C, and D, then grant that he has a point, then dismiss him, then grant that he does have a unique perspective, then, at some point, say "wow, he's talking about me," then something like, "wow, he's right on . . ."
   
   Masters' books can be somewhat hard to decipher, he isn't immune to getting on a political rant or two, he comes close to almost having his own kind of language, he has no hesitations about being blunt with his thoughts . . . but for those who sincerely want to know, and are able to hear him . . . well, we think it can definitely be a worthwhile experience.
   
   At any rate, if someone would really just like to check out someone who may just know a lot about what's really going on, check him out yourself. (www.fhu.com).
   
   (Not to mention, you can't beat the price. (As in, "free.") He even has a 1-800 number in case you're too lousy to make your own phone bill - check that against $150 an hour.)
   
   
2. Cure By Crying and Other Cool Stuff . . .
   Certain first-person case studies, while not strictly "scientific," do sometimes offer very clear and definite clues which can act as signposts to what kind of promise future psychology may hold.
   
   For example: A guy suffers continually from depression, nervousness, insomnia, headaches . . . he deliberately embarks on an investigation to cure himself of his problems, finds a concrete, deliberate method which he practices, works, hones, and perfects, and eventually succeeds in curing himself . . . and now he is no longer depressed, nervous, or any of the above, but is energetic, positive, upbeat, confident, outgoing, and overall, at peace with himself . . .
   
   Situations such as these offer a few clean, self-justifying cases which (while "anecdotal" and not yet strictly "scientific" according to some) do leave large clues for those wishing to follow similar footsteps.
   
   When a person says "It worked for me," we think they should not necessarily be ignored.
   
   
3. The Diamond Approach.
   Championed by A.H. Almaas . . . www.ridhwan.org. In our opinion, definitely worth looking into.
   
   
4. LiveReal.com
   LiveReal is, of course, no substitute for professional psychologists, counselors, and psychiatrists, etc, when the situation is calls for it.
   
   On the other hand, maybe LiveReal can help out a little. Our mission is to find the the cream in the crop, the wheat in the chaff, the babies in the bathwater, and gather them here, so you should be able to find some decent reference material on the site, a few good products to buy, maybe a partly-sane person or two to talk to. Well, least, we're working on it.

Note: This "article" is a living, breathing, discussion forum and dialogue-in-progress, which will continue to be amended and updated, if necessary, as further information, studies, and reports come in.

Talk about it:
info@livereal.com

"I wished,
by treating Psychology like a natural science,
to help her to become one."
- William James

Psychology Arena

Home Page

Sources and Additional Reading

Breggin, Peter R. Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy, and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories Of the New Psychiatry.

Caplan, Paula J., Ph.D. They Say You're Crazy: How the World's Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who's Normal

Carlson, Neil R., Psychology: Third Edition
Crews, Fredrick. Ed., Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront A Legend

Dawes, Robyn M. House Of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built On Myth

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¹ Taken from Cure By Crying by Thomas Stone

² "Two researchers estimated that 'in 1990, Americans made 425 milion visits to providers of unconventional therapy at a cost of approximately $13.7 billion.'" Margaret Thaler Singer and Janja Lalich, Crazy Therapies (195).

3 National Center for Health Statistics. Between 1990 and 1996, 216,631 Americans committed suicide. During the same time, there were 161,020 murders committed in the United States.

"There are fewwer than 20,000 murders a year in America and about 30,000 suicides." (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics, "National Vital Statistics Report," Vol. 47, No. 9)

5 Dr. Ronald A Rubin quoted in "Selling Happiness: Inside the Therapy Business" by David D. Kirkpatrick, New York Magazine, May 15, 2000.

6 Ken Livingston, "Ritalin: Miracle Drug or CopOut?" Public Interest, Spring 1997.

7 "Sales of the antidepressant medication Prozac totaled $2.8 billion in 1998, an increase of 10 percent from 1997. (Eli Lilly and Company, Lilly Corporate Center, "1998 Annual Report")

⁸ Martin Selignman, cited in Trish Hall, "Seeking a Focus on Joy in Field of Psychology," New York Times, April 28, 1998.

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