People in the medical model don't address the spiritual

by Valerie
(USA)

Hello,
I was glad to find your website. I am 45 year old female who had an onset of psychosis at 43 and was hospitalized 3 times for psychosis. No one has made an official diagnosis but they think its bipolar. I am on bipolar meds and they do help my mood swings to be less dramatic. I guess my question is more of a statement about the care I have received or not received. My experience with psychosis was so profound. I was in full blown hallucinations audio and visual. They were all religious themed some of heaven some of hell. No one addressed this with me during treatment. My psychiatrist that I've had ignored the fact that I had been in a whole different world and I wanted to really know what happened to me not a sterile diagnosis of Psychosis NOS. No one validated the importance of faith in my life and how this came out in my psychosis. So, I just wanted to say thank you for your web page. It shows me that someone does know there is a connection. I think I should book a session with you ;)

Ben's reply:

Thanks for your post. I'm glad the site has been helpful to you. I'm not surprised, but continually saddened to hear that people's inner experiences are so utterly ignored. These experiences, psychotic episodes or mania or whatever you choose to label them, can be profound, devastating, shattering, life changing, debilitating or enlightening. There is meaning in our experiences - always. To disregard that meaning is to reduce a person to a physical body without a heart, mind and soul. And a Psychiatrist is by its very name, a doctor of the psyche - which means the soul/mind!

Never abandon your inner self.

I wish you the best!

Ben

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Aug 31, 2017
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A doctor with bipolar
by: Micah

Hello, I wanted to share this with you.
It's an excerpt from a story by a doctor in the bipolar section of this site. The link is also at the bottom in case you want to read his whole story, it's quite entertaining actually.

"Medical education does not prepare psychiatrists to deal with spirituality in human experience. In shaping human lives, spirituality is at least as powerful (and as subject to compulsiveness) as sexuality, and just as irresistible when intensely felt. It is expected that psychiatrists will be able to take sexual histories competently, but spiritual histories seem to be another matter. It saddens me to report that physicians were the main obstacle that I had to overcome on my quest for a hope-filled view of the world.

When confronted with manic patients, psychiatrists ought to ask themselves, "Could this be a spiritual emergency?" When no medical illness or drug intoxication is found, this possibility should be carefully ruled out before a medical model is imposed on the situation. There are features in the territory of human experience that are deleted from the professional maps that psychiatrists use. Those maps must be revised. DSM-IV should include "religious or spiritual problem" in the differential diagnosis of manic episode. Physicians who do not think about it when appropriate may do their patients grave harm."

Written by doctor Edward Whitney
Original article at:

http://ps.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content

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