What the Ellison Foundation and I are hoping to encourage is a more holistic approach to psychiatry, in which psychotherapy is put on as rigorous a level as psychopharmacology.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
In my experience, psychotherapy at its best is like dual meditation - it's like a container in which you can be compassionate and mindful toward yourself.
Psychotherapy is a sanctuary; it is a battleground; it is a place I have been psychotic, neurotic, elated, confused, and despairing beyond belief.
My philosophy is really based on humility. I don't think we know enough to fix either diagnostics or therapeutics. The future of psychiatry is clinical neuroscience, based on a much deeper understanding of the brain.
Many psychopaths describe the traditional treatment programmes as finishing schools where they hone their skills. Where they find out that there are lots of techniques they had not thought about before.
This is the front edge of the spiritual, psychological movement and is where the tools of psychology have finally come together to create a mass healing. I think spiritual psychology is the next wave.
Psychotherapy works, and some types of therapy have been shown to be much more effective than antidepressants over the long run.
Psychotherapy is what God has been secretly doing for centuries by other names; that is, he searches through our personal history and heals what needs to be healed - the wounds of childhood or our own self-inflicted wounds.
I am not a therapy person, but I understand what therapy does. It's a way of translating dark thoughts into something manageable.
The dirty little secret of both clinical psychology and biological psychiatry is that they have completely given up on the notion of cure.
'Psychotherapy' is a private, confidential conversation that has nothing to do with illness, medicine, or healing.