Mental health treatment has moved on…
I’m reading a book at the moment called Doctoring the Mind by R Bentall, and it was written in 2009. In mental health treatment, that could be construed as out of date, but the author says some interesting things, which I will come to in a minute.
But firstly, one thing I would like to point out is that there is currently plenty of criticism for alternative medicine. Even though herbal medicine has a more robust therapeutic track record than many, there exists a kind of dismissal of the practice of herbal medicine, because of some of the ‘quaint’ ideas of the past. An example of this is how we treat a fever, a subject that I will write about in another post, but which eschews the current practise of downing paracetamol as soon as a temperature rises one degree above ‘normal’.
However, all medicinal practice should move on and develop as new information comes to light, while at the same time keeping physiologically sound protocols which work and ‘do no harm’. Herbal medicine now benefits from modern scientific trials which bolster its use and indicates specific plants for a broad range of therapeutic actions – plants we use routinely and plants we have never heard of. So, dismissing herbal medicine because herbalists may have used leeches in the past [though I think that was the doctors], or because Culpeper used owl’s feathers, or because they mixed up weird brown concoctions which tasted foul, is trivial and out of date.
Which brings me to Doctoring the Mind.
Let’s just consider how the medical profession has treated some forms of mental illness in the past. Bentall describes one of the ‘most frightening of the early physical treatments’ that was first performed in 1935. This was a surgical procedure where crude incisions were made in the skull, and the frontal lobes of the brain were severed from the posterior regions. This was totally experimental and involved stunning the patient with electroshock, then employing a hammer and an imitation icepick to produce a lesion. It was initially based on experiments performed on primates.
One of the most famous recipients of this procedure was Rosemary Kennedy, sister of JFK. Whose initial problem was ‘unruly behaviour’ as a teenager, which later manifested as mild intellectual impairment as a woman. After the operation in 1941, she was left incontinent, unable to utter only a few words, and remained in an institution for the rest of her life.
In contrast to severing lobes of the brain, herbal medicine supported a much gentler approach to some forms of mental illness, and I quote,
Nervous Debility
Train yourself into the habit of meeting emergency with calmness, never giving way to brooding and worry. Do not forget that lovely saying: ‘I have had many troubles in my life – most of them have never happened’; turn your thoughts outwards to other people and things instead of ‘inwards’ towards yourself. The Famous Book of Herbs, 1948.
These two approaches obviously weren’t aimed at the same mental health problem, but it seems to me that digging about in someone’s brain to stop them being unruly or having an intellectual impairment is overkill.
It highlighted something that I think Bentall was trying to say, namely that modern medicine always wants to go in with the big guns. Nowadays these big guns are the use of psychiatric drugs instead of incarcerating sufferers in large asylums and subjecting them to cruel and ineffective treatments. Bentall was a Professor of Clinical Psychology, with years of research into the causes and treatment of mental illness when he wrote this book, so he should know.
Are modern, powerful, psychiatric drugs safer than using hammers and an ice pick in the brain?
Bentall argues that the pharmaceutical industry has ‘systematically distorted’ trial data to promulgate a ‘wildly over-optimistic’ impression of what psychiatric drugs can do. In fact, he makes an interesting statement in his preface.
Psychiatrists have been blinded to the adverse effects of these drugs in much the same way that they were blind to the effects of the crude brain operations and other extreme remedies used in the middle years of the twentieth century.
The Famous Book of Herbs quoted above contains specific suggestions for herbs that could be used for mental distress as well as tips on how to alter your thoughts – a bit like CBT…
So, please don’t dismiss herbal medicine because of antiquated ideas. Modern medicine has plenty of those too…
If you would like to explore the possibilities of using herbs for mental health problems, join my HerbWorks membership at £9.99 a month for health tips and herbal Q&As.
