Majority of Psychiatric illnesses are Psycho-spiritual Crises

Psychiatry regards biological imbalance of chemicals & neurotransmitters in brain as the cause of all mental illnesses. This perspective of disregarding everything else and assigning only biological imbalance as the cause, itself can be regarded as delusional. Even though science has successfully proved to some extent the correlation between the chemical imbalance and consequent psychiatric impact, there is still huge gap where psychiatry fails to answer many questions. For example the psychiatric drugs do not always show the same intensity of impact on various patients. And not always the same drug works on all the patients.

   On the other hand, Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology has always spoken about “Soul – Centered” approach to psychiatry. He had shown exceptional willingness to renounce rigid theories, preconceived ideas, control & authority. With this perspective we can always trace a spiritual aspect to be one of the root causes for majority of psychiatric illnesses.

  Although in all possibility we cannot compare our human body with a computer, but just for analogy if we consider our human body as a computer, i.e. Physical body – Hardware, Soul – Software, then what we understand is psychiatry as a science is just focusing on “Hardware” alone, while totally & conveniently disregarding any malfunction at the level of software as the root cause. Some speak about psychotherapy as a supplement to some extent, but if we speak in the earlier terminology, what psychotherapy does is again tries to repair the CPU – Brain. What if the problem is rooted deep, at the level of programming i.e at the level of Soul?

  From the spiritual perspective, psychiatric illnesses are an outcome of a repressed soul. Either the soul is being denied its expression or the soul is being forced into doing something, which is horribly against the spiritual beliefs of the individual soul involved. And this outcome of psychiatric illness is a brutal expression of disgust by the “repressed soul”. This somehow points that the spiritual crises, the values and the needs of the soul, spiritual experiences are not being addressed & validated.

  Summing up we can say psychiatric drugs provide a relief from the symptoms but this is just like a “band aid” work at the superficial level, while the actual problem lies deep. In few cases these drugs can further deteriorate the condition to make it further hopeless, sick and dis empowered. Instead of treating these illnesses as just an abnormal brain chemistry, regarding them as a psycho - spiritual crises can be more appropriate. Showing empathy, patience, willingness to see beyond preconceived ideas, understanding of psyche, intuition & crisis of the soul can prove highly beneficial in the long run.