Letter to Galway Advertiser re. "New mental health model is the way forward says Labour TD"

The following letter wasn't published.
It was written in response to the following article in the Galway Advertiser published on 8/08/13: http://www.advertiser.ie/galway/article/62896/new-mental-health-model-is-the-way-forward-says-labour-td

78 Lower Salthill,

Galway,

13/08/13

Dear Editor,

Derek Nolan is to be praised for highlighting the area of mental health as reported in last week's Galway Advertiser, "New mental health model is the way forward says Labour TD."

As he states the area has "been stigmatised and neglected for years." He talks about the Vision for Change mental health model and it's emphasis on caring for people in the community as opposed to locking them away in institutions. This is to be welcomed but I would add a few words of caution about this model of care.

Simply moving people into the community while adhering to the traditional biomedical psychiatric model, i.e. a pill for every ill will not work in my opinion. Professor Ivor Browne in a recent interview in the Irish Times said, “The system is worse now: instead of being contained by walls, people are contained by drugs."

People need alternative therapies as opposed to drugs. The chemical imbalance theory on which psychiatry is based is a fallacy. This pays no attention whatsoever to any trauma a person may have experienced in their life and especially their childhood. In general the only help people are offered by the psychiatric profession is which colour pill to be on or more commonly what combination of pills to take. Furthermore to try and "help" people through psychotherapeutic methods such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy while neglecting their biographical history does not work either. To quote Prof. Browne again, this time from his paper "Psychological Trauma or Unexperienced Experience," he states "In persons who have a history of unresolved traumatic experience, it is not only useless but cruel to try and help them, through cognitive or behavioural methods, to change their attitudes and living patterns, when they are exploding with unresolved painful experience."

I know what I am talking about because when I was caught up in the psychiatric system over 20 years ago as an out patient, I was trapped inside the walls of my mind, walls that were more impenetrable than the Great Wall of China. It was only through the process of psychotherapy and dealing with my "Unexperienced Experience," through holotropic breathwork that I became the free and happy person that I am today,

Thomas Roddy