Broken Brains or Wounded Hearts: What Causes Mental Illness

Rating:
Summary: Truly and Wholly Healing
Review: Noticing than when he paid attention to the emotional pain that existed alongside a client's behaviour, the client's symptoms of paranoia disappeared, psychologist Ty Colbert realised that her behaviour was not "dysfunctional" but functioning quite effectively to protect her inner woundedness.

This contrasted strongly with proponents of the biopsychiatry who present models of supposed biological-defect or chemical-imbalance. They sound quite convincing until Dr Colbert looked deeper into the actual research and found the claims to be very weak indeed. Meanwhile, the list of so-called "mental disorders" keeps increasing as does the medication of them. In this model, pain is denied, symptoms surface, but are seen as the product of a defect and are suppressed medically.

Over 15 years he developed the "Emotional Pain Model" detailed in Broken Brains or Wounded Hearts - What Causes Mental Illness (Kevco, 1999). It represents a desire to take the mystery out of mental illness and provide a clear path for the future, allowing the reader to develop a proper understanding of any and all emotionally troubling conditions.

Dr Colbert proposes a three-phase model for eliminating emotional disorders and developing emotionally healthy children: People are taught to ientify feelings and resolve conflicts; Symptoms are seen as indicators of an overload of emotional pain; Non-medical, non-abusive healing environments are developed.

This book is an important contribution, validating an approach to therapy that is truly and wholly healing. As he says, "To see emotional disorders as diseases to be drugged is to hide from our own pain, as well as the pain of the afflicted .... The more we see and understand their pain, the more we will be able to see our own pain and become unafraid to reach out."

Rating:
Summary: A clear critique of biopsychiatry
Review: This book is very easy to read. It boils things down, but it is not simplistic. It incisively refutes the theoretical underpinnings of biopsychiatry, including the flawed and mis-stated studies which purport to show that "mental illness" is inherited, the simplistic and virtually unsupported chemical imbalance theories of "mental illness," and the myths and hype surrounding psychiatric drugs.

Colbert's own view of the causes and cures of "mental illness" is just one way of stating a general truth, but it zeroes in on the reality of what "mental illness" and its "cures" are all about. As he states at pages 116 and 117:

"1. We all hurt each other at times, both unintentionally and intentionally.
2.We all need others to heal those hurts.
3. We all deny to some extent how we hurt others, and how we need others to heal our hurts.

People create exotic theories about the causes of strange behavior and emotional disorders, because it's too uncomfortaable to admit our basic human need for each other, and because we don't like to face the fact that we can hurt and be hurt by our fellow humans....Let's not hide any longer behind our fancy theories and our often abusive cures. Let's learn what it takes to attend to and heal wounded hearts."

This may sound like wishful thinking, but Colbert makes plain that the real wishful thinking is done by biopshciatry, an edifice of mutually supporting empirical and logical errors, held together mainly by its adherents' own determination to be convinced of thier own preconceptions.

I have read twenty-five books on this subject, most more technical than this one. The beauty of this book is that it accurately conveys the essence of a technical subject without itself being technical.

Rating:
Summary: Alternative healing for mental illness, without medication
Review: This book opened a new life for us. A close relative has suffered two years with schizo affective illness (between schizophrenia and bipolar). He's tried medications that disabled his brain to such an extent he couldn't function creatively or even normally, hospitals that take all control from the ill individual, and psychiatrists who see you for 10 minutes and prescribe a new medication. He's now in a clinic that uses no medication, probing the emotional-spiritual crisis that brought on all these symptoms of mental illness. this book explains these two radically different ways of looking at mental illness and opens a path to real healing and a productive normal life. He's in charge of his life now because of Ty Colbert's insight into the "wounded heart." His brain isn't broken at all; he's beginning to understand the crisis that drove him. A "10" rating isn't high enough.