There’s a revolutionary shift taking place in UK mental healthcare, from a biomedical to a trauma-informed approach. But every new model has its potential limits and flaws.
Read MoreThe old religions said life inevitably involves suffering. The new religion of health and well-being says ‘you should be happy and healthy. If you’re not, that’s a disorder. Here’s some CBT or some pills. Now you should be happy and healthy.’
Read MoreNathan Filer’s excellent new book, The Heartland, humbly points out the flaws in psychiatry’s definition and treatment of schizophrenia. But it still shares psychiatry’s habitual contempt for spirituality.
Read MoreTrauma begets trauma, and it builds up through the generations like a mountain of shit. Can we shovel it away…or use it as compost?
Read MoreSpiritual emergencies are moments of awakening and ego-dissolution which can be both ecstatic and deeply disturbing, even quasi-psychotic. With the right tools and support, we can navigate them to a richer and more meaningful life.
Read MoreMilan Scheidegger is one of the most interesting young researchers in psychedelics, because he integrates several different perspectives. He's a clinical psychiatrist at the University of Zurich, who's spent a decade studying the effect of psychedelics on subjects in a laboratory, and on a meditation retreat.
Read MorePsychosis. Scary word isn't it? These days we think nothing less of a person if they publicly disclose they get depression, or anxiety. We applaud them for being brave, although they're not really risking anything.
Read MoreDepression is the leading cause of ill-health worldwide, but therapy is little known or practiced outside the West. If psychotherapy is going to become more popular in the non-western world, it needs to build bridges and find cultural parallels in local spiritual traditions. This is totally doable.
Read MoreLife can be stressful in Kolkata - the crowds, the poverty, the heat, the constant cacophony of car-horns. And that's just for me, a pampered western tourist. So how do the locals cope? More to the point, to what extent do locals seek therapy for mental health problems like depression, or for general life advice? To find out, I interviewed two Kolkata therapists, Mansi Poddar (left) and Charvi Jain (right), both of whom have successful local practices.
Read MoreOne of the things I want to argue in my next book is that ecstatic experiences have been pathologised in the secular west, to our detriment. People still experience ecstasy - by which I mean moments where we go beyond the self and feel connected to something bigger than us, usually a spirit but also sometimes another individual or group - but we lack the framework to make sense of such experiences.
Read MoreA few months back I was giving a philosophy workshop in a mental health charity. It was one of my less popular events - only one person turned up, a Romanian man who had recently moved to the UK and was finding it tough. We talked about Socratic philosophy, about the idea of engaging your inner voice in a rational dialogue, and the man (let’s call him Anghel) quietly told me that he heard voices.
Read MoreOne of the things that has happened in our culture over the last 300 years is the shift from theology to morality to psychiatry. Conditions that were once deemed vices are now considered diseases. Gluttony has become obesity. Despair has become depression. Lust has become sex addiction.
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