The February issue of Current Psychiatry featured an editorial by Dr. Henry Nasrallah; he is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology at St. Louis University, and said that psychiatrists who were not speaking the new language of the “neuroscientification” of psychiatry would soon be rendered obsolete.
Henry says that we are at the tipping point in psychiatry, giving up the primitive notions that have guided the profession for the past century. We are moving toward explaining our successes and failures in terms of microglial activation, inflammatory markers, aproptosis, S100B, and NOTCH 3. Those who talk about ego strengths, defense mechanisms, resilience,, the unconscious mind, and the human spirit are “clinical dinosaurs”.
Henry speaks for most psychiatric academicians today, who believe the best way to understand the complexity of the human condition is to explain it in terms of neurotransmitters, genomics, and MRI’s. But the truth is that no matter how much we know about the brain, the mind will always have a mind of its own. The language of science can’t adequately explain the mystery and awesomeness that are an essential part of the human experience.
I was introduced to an old Hopi medicine man many years ago who, upon learning that I was a psychiatrist, asked me what I knew about the mind (The Dancing Healers, 1988). At the moment, I couldn’t come up with a brief, pithy, summation so I said that what I knew about the mind I couldn’t tell him in a short time. He responded that if I couldn’t explain what I knew about the mind in a short time, that I didn’t know it. I asked him what he knew about the mind, and he said he could tell me in one word; it was he said “mysterious”.
Brain researchers tell us that the brain is hardwired for mystical experience. We are biologically programmed to experience awe, transcendent states that allow us to see the familiar from a new perspective, to experience the awesome. It matters less how we explain the mechanics of the mysterious, than it does to know it’s important.
To all my academic colleagues who herald in the ‘neuroscientification’ of psychiatry, I say let’s not take ourselves too seriously. Awe is the mechanism by which we tame the ego, and lift our spirits.
P.S. I wrote to Henry and told him I would be in St. Louis in late April and would come free of charge to present to his Department the memoirs of a clinical dinosaur, perhaps entitle it, The Magic and Mystery of Mind Healing.
C
Did you get the invite?
YESSS!! “Mysterious” and awesome and human and animal and divine. “For every thing that lives is Holy.” William Blake
Doc Hammer a dinosaur, then so am I. Schooled in intuitive medicine in a world of evidence based that removes the “Dance”.
Good to hear from you all, and sadly have not yet gotten a response from Henry. :O)
Carl, that should be a compliment to you to be called a clinical dinosaur. And to think you grew up with your experiences in the desert.
Russ
Thank you, Carl, for your “awesome” and mirthful reality-check. We practitioners need some inspired humor as psychiatry plunges ever deeply into the swamp of man’s (and woman’s) “sacred” materialism. Only the dinosaurs seem to suffocate and need to come up for air.
But despite this lofty, biologic posturing, psychiatry remains out-of-step. To quote best-selling author and quantum physicist Gerald Schroeder, ” “In our arrogance, we humans at times forget we have limits that ultimately constrain what we can know.” He has written extensively about how the most advanced cosmology supports the biblical version of creation. That the mind exists, andis not seated in the brain is a given here.
So Carl, I truly appreciate your graceful commentary about such widespread clumsiness from the stewards of the spirit.
Dear Friends: Delighted that we archaic remnants are not taking ourselves so seriously that it keeps us from smiling. Laugh, lighten up, and love where you are, who you’re with, and what you do. :O)
Hello Carl, Though I do not feel myself to be a dinosaur, I will always defer to the mystery. I would also (sooner) defer to psycho-social genetics before neurotransmitters as the source of our mind-full-ness (or lack thereof). I’m doing less (occupational) therapy these days and more family mediations and counseling, and though I enjoy it all, I am still working on keeping my own balance, focusing on today and not requiring of myself that I ‘accomplish’ something every minute. I am happy to see that you are engaged as ever.
Care fully,
Noel
Thanks Noeland delighted you continue to share your gifts and keep your balance. :O)