the limping shrink

It doesn't take a genius to know that there are different types of people. We only need to think about our own family. Or about the patients we will be seeing in today's clinic. How each person has their own striking qualities and their own (to us) annoying tendencies. It is evident to anyone with enough experience of people. Some of these qualities have been systematically proven as reflecting real physiological differences between people. Highly sensitive people, and introversion vs extraversion spring to mind. So why is psychiatry practised as if differences of this fundamental kind are irrelevant to their mental health and recovery? Why are we apparently reluctant to systematise these qualities and investigate their relationship to mental health issues and their treatment? None of us can see ourselves Jung (a psychiatrist himself) had an interesting take on this. In his 'Psychological Types', in the very first page of the introduction in fact, he notes that ' In...

  https://www.piqsels.com/en/public-domain-photo-zbxum/download/1280x800 Twelve Retirement Challenges Retirement is something many of us look forward to with increasing impatience as it gets closer. Like a long-awaited holiday we chafe against the daily grind and get excited and make lots of plans, not expecting life after work to be a walk in the park. But when we finally get there we may find that it's a bit more like a walk in the mountains. It's not all downhill, there are some demanding climbs and some bleak crags to negotiate too. Apart from financial issues, which are covered ad nauseam in almost all the other blogs about retirement, there are certain challenges that are not so often discussed in any detail, that many if not most people find need some attention. In early retirement, many of us will find one or more changes to or uncertainties in our lives that are potential obstacles to our retirement joy.  1. Learning to relax into our new freedom We may have been thin...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_a_baby_in_a_Moses_basket_(AM_75894-1).jpg This is my first memory:  I'm 4. My father and grandmother are at the dining table talking about names. What shall we call him? I don't remember ever seeing them talk to each other before. And they've certainly never sat at the dining table when it wasn't a mealtime before. My mother is asleep upstairs, well out of the conversation.  I go through the door to the drawing room, a door that sticks and has a metal handle with a dent in it. I like it in there - it's usually the warmest room and it has a rich red Turkish carpet that makes it feel warm even when it isn't. I sit on my haunches in front of the fire and feel it turn my front to melting jelly and my back to frosty glass. Some time I will need to back off an inch or two but for now I watch the way the flames hover and melt above the logs. The conversation next door continues. My grandmother is old and wise and even...

https://www.flickr.com/photos/fugitivesavant/16114825602 When you say people with severe mental health problems are difficult to connect with, you can be sure they're thinking the same about you. The difference is that in you work in mental health services it's your job to make it easier for them, not the other way round.

Adult emotional development The idea I want to explore today is that while the tools of psychiatry have been collected together because of their effectiveness in making people less distressed or less behaviourally disturbed, they are from a variety of different basic philosophies that don't fit together in any other way. Because of this they are not very useful if we are trying to divine fundamental truths about the human condition. And fundamental truths are what I am after, in order to have an integrated basis from which to provide help.  Psychiatric tools have been partially helpful to the individual or to society. They have, as is natural, been subverted in one way or another by capitalism or state control or whatever. But the basic problem remains that in psychiatry we don't have a reliable framework for understanding all human distress that points to solutions for individuals.  One of the biggest and most persistent complaints from outside the system is the transition fr...

                        The jade jaguar throne in the middle of a pyramid  in Chichen Itza Mexico                                                         https://www.flickr.com/photos/paulmannix/ When I went to Mexico with a friend in my 20s I refused to go into the pyramid to see the jade jaguar throne because in my imagination all I could see was what it would feel like not to be able to get out again because of the queue. When I was first conveyed into a doughnut-shaped scanner in my 30s I was persuaded to do it without a tranquillizer and despite the operators best attempts to talk me through it I left before it was finished. I even had a problem wearing a hat while skiing because of the feeling of pressure, of being restricted.  So when...

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.” ―  Aldous Huxley ,  Island