Nexus - 0903 - New Times Magazine-pages

Page Content (OCR)

— QUANTUM PSYCHIATRY — WHERE SCIENCE MEETS SPIRIT QUANTUM PSYCHIATRY SCIENCE SPIRIT WHERE MEETS A 21st century science of mind needs to incorporate the findings of quantum physics and knowledge of non- physical realities into the understanding of mental health and mental illness. A fish said to another fish: "Above this sea of ours there is another sea, with creatures swimming in it—and they live there, even as we live here." The fish replied: "Pure fancy! When you know that everything that leaves our sea by even an inch, and stays out of it, dies. What proof have you of other lives in other seas?" — Kahlil Gibran, The Forerunner ost psychiatrists regard mental disorder as caused by a disturbance of brain chemistry, a view strongly supported over recent years by advances in the neu- rosciences. There is also good empirical evidence that psychological stress can initiate changes in brain chemistry. This has strengthened the development of a bio/psycho/social model of mental disorder, in which genetic and dynamic factors com- bine. Yet the fundamental question of what constitutes 'mind' remains unanswered, for mind has no physical substance. The general view is that mind is epiphenomenal, meaning it is secondary to the function of the physical brain. The brain is thought somehow to generate consciousness. This is not a logical proposition, although it sounds reasonable enough. How can something non- physical be created by something entirely physical? Yet it is an everyday assumption in a world based on the idea of a mechanical, material universe in which the five senses are held to be the only reliable sources of information. I am going to be arguing against this physicalist view of the world, which started with René Descartes and Isaac Newton 300 years ago. Descartes established the golden rule for empirical science, that nothing would be held to be true unless it could be proved to be true, and Newton laid the foundation of a mechanical universe in which time is absolute and space is structured according to the laws of motion. From this time, the split between religion and science began to widen. The Church could no longer claim to understand how the universe worked, and the spiritual and physical worlds drifted apart. During the 19th century, the new science of psychology helped rede- fine the mental world in secular terms. Sigmund Freud (1927) saw religion as a massive defence against neurosis, and even Carl Jung, despite his own spiritual journey, limited him- self to defining the soul as "the living thing in Man, that which lives of itself and causes life" (Jung, 1959:26). Psychiatry is set on proving its bona fides as a science equal to any other, and little atten- tion has been paid to spirituality. Yet a survey carried out by the Mental Health Foundation (1997) showed that over 50 per cent of service users hold religious or spiritual beliefs they see as important in helping them cope with mental illness. They also said they don't feel free to discuss their beliefs with the psychiatrist. I have found that psychiatrists who pri- vately acknowledge the importance of spirituality often feel reluctant to embark on such talk with their patients because it is outside of their training in medicine, psychiatry and also psychotherapy (Powell, 2001). The impact of the Newtonian world-view has been immense. Our scientific model of the psyche has no place for the soul; there is nothing before birth and nothing after death. Everything has to be understood as arising from within this temporary, physical existence, with the human self the only source of consciousness. We are all separate beings, bounded by the envelopes of our skin and moving around in a fixed, impersonal, three-dimensional universe utterly indifferent to our comings and goings. Little wonder that depression is the ailment of the modern world. In the first five years of Prozac's coming onto the market, over 10 million prescriptions were handed out (Kramer, 1994). by Dr Andrew Powell © 2001 Oxford, England, UK Correspondence: c/- Royal College of Psychiatrists, UK Email: sduncan@rcpsych.ac.uk APRIL — MAY 2002 NEXUS ¢ 55 by Dr Andrew Powell © 2001 Oxford, England, UK www.nexusmagazine.com