To: K-list
Recieved: 2000/03/03 18:22
Subject: SV: [K-list] Mania and schizophrenia - and psychospiritual dev
From: Elisaveta Meyler

From: "Elisaveta Meyler" <elisaveta.meylerATnospamswipnet.se>

Now, here is a topic that concerns me greatly. I´ve been working - and
still am - in the conventional psychiatric care and mental health care are
for several years. I´ve met and worked with a lot of people with diagnoses
such as schizophrenia, manic-depressive disorder and so on. I´ve done some
research and asked a lot of questions, not least because of my own
experiences and states of mind/soul/body in which I found myself during
different phases of my own psychospiritual development process. I found not
so very few of them resembeling,or even being the same as states in a
routine fashion labelled as 'schizophrenic', 'manic', 'depressive',
'autistic' asf.

These are merely my personal findings and conclusions, but I´ve found that
in conventional psychiatry there´s very little knowledge and a lot of
prejudice, fear and resistance to the 'spiritual' explanations and
components in mental illness or mental disorder. What is badly needed, as
I´ve found, is more knowledge and openmindedness. There are, I believe,
many people caught in conventional psychiatric treatment with heavy
medication and stigmatizing diagnoses attached for life, I´ve seen, and
worked with quite a few myself, who would´ve benefitted greatly from a
different outlook on what was happening to them.

I can highly recommend Ken Wilbers and Stanislav Grofs extensive writings
on the subject. I´ve myself found there being differences in 'mental
disorder' and 'spiritual emergence/emergency', which is a term coined by
Stanislav Grof, where such as the pre-trans fallacy, as Ken Wilber puts it,
and projective mechanisms play a big part. It is very important, though,
from my personal experience, to be very careful with 'labelling' either
oneself or others with psychiatric labels. In my own process I went through
a phase with diagnosing myself with every label there were in DSM, but none
of them fit. What did fit me very well was on the other hand the 'spiritual
emergency', with experiences and results involved. It is far from all
undergoing such processes who have either the strength, or luck, to have
the knowledge I had about conventional psychiatry, and finding the other
outlook as well, and I could´ve easily ended up in a psychiatric ward,
which many spiritual emergency experiencers have. As I see it, the purpose
of people knowledgeable in the are of psychospiritual, or simply spiritual
emergence processes is to bring this perspective into mainstream psychiatry
and psychology for expanded understanding- not the other way around.

All the best
Lisa Meyler
elisaveta.meylerATnospamswipnet.se
http://home.swipnet.se/reality_center

http://www.onelist.com/community/Kundalini-Gateway

DISCLAIMER!

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