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Recovery : Don't Throw the Baby out with the Bathwater

by Tina Sheehan

I am 60 now and can speak from experience. I have suffered every mental illness - multiple personality, manic and mental depression, dyslexia, schizophrenia, both paranoid and schizoaffective disorder. I am cured now by my own efforts and creative intelligence. I was only harmed and kept from doing this by the mental health service ruled by psychiatrists.

My fellow sufferers need to know hour to cure themselves and I hope they will understand how to do this even if psychiatrists do not from this letter. The first thing to understand is that each of us including the so-called sane people has a child in them. I call this side of the personality and mind a child because that part of us has a mind of its own that responds to creativity, spirituality and heart felt feelings and empathy. This child in everyone is necessary to the health and happiness of the whole person. The other self is the adult mind. It is adult only in the qualities it has of the abilities to reason, to be pragmatic, to endure as a carer, parent, or plodder or soldier. Both minds are necessary to the well being and health of any normal adult.

Back when in adulthood the reasoning mind, the parent should be dominant and in control of the mind. The child should be there also at times when spiritual joy in art and music, empathy with nature, love, sexual or aesthetic, is experienced. At times of peace, solitude, calm the child can lead the mind into ecstasy.

The adult logical mind without the child in the background develops into a cruel unfeeling adult without insight and at worst a psychopath.

But for the mentally ill the child is dominant and the reasoning adult slumbers. The trauma of existing in the world without the benefit of reason leads the mind into acute depression or chaos, fantasy and horror.

The cure is to allow the adult to dominate without putting the child to sleep entirely. The psychiatrists use drugs to put the child to sleep or to desensitise the brain so that spirituality, creativity, joy, love and emotions are reduced. This does not produce an aware reasoning adult but an apathetic child. Sometimes with the child so subdued the reason is allowed to dominate but reason without spirituality and joy in life is not the way to exist as a healthy mind. Drugs act on the brain because psychiatrists wrongly assumed the brain is damaged and needs repair so that the mind can function. It is the mind that causes this damage to the brain and not the brain that causes damage to the mind. The use of chemicals to cure the damaged chemical brain is not the answer or the way to cure mental illness. The mind needs to be cured. To cure the mind one needs to apply these methods:

Firstly the child is terrified and feels disorientated in the traumatic world without reason dominant in the mind. Phobias too cut off the ability to reason and control the mind. To cure the mind one must learn logic or study philosophy. Every schizophrenic has the ability to do this when he or she is in a place of beauty or refuge where there is not stress or fears to interfere with thinking.

The second way is to allow the will and belief to live and not to subdue it with drugs. The spirit must be allowed to exhort itself. In the spirit lies the will to live.
Meditation is a way also to still the chaos of the mind. Practice in yoga and meditation will ensure the mind can force all anxieties and fears away and gain peace.

The psychiatrists try to put the child to sleep. This is cruelty at the extreme for the child feels its dying and resists drugs and becomes more paranoid and distressed. The child is right. They are trying to kill it or to stop its awareness of life --so that the other self can take over. I experienced this terror myself.

Depression is another instance of the child asleep. To function as a healthy mind we need both the reasoning and feeling mind - the parent and the child. The adult should be dominant but should allow the child to surface when life is peaceful or when intuition or creative thought is needed.

Unfortunately psychiatrists have mastered the child in themselves and believe we should too to the detriment of the heart's intelligence.

As a sane adult now I can write this letter. I am in control but I am writing about knowledge gleaned from the heart and intuitive understanding and suffering of the child in me. She lives still when I gaze on a flower or hug my dog with joy. She lives in me and I desire to live because of her - through her I experience joy, spirituality and love - through me she sees the world as an ordered safe place with a part of herself that is a strong parent and protector She is not me and I am not her but we need each other to survive.

Fellow sufferers understand not to despise any part of yourself for being child like. Only through the child in you will you experience joy and love. But protect the child in yourself and do not let them subdue you with drugs and electric shock treatment. Short term you may need tablets but do not learn to depend on them as crutch. Don't be afraid to be yourselves and be proud. You are only ill because the child in you is so strong. In other words your ability to be spiritual and to feel with the heart is strong. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. I love all of God's children.

Tina Sheehan