Native American culture and psychiatry
Native American people are typically diagnosed with higher rates of “mental illness” than white North Americans. Similar findings occur in Australia and New Zealand. Historically Native American people were viewed by psychiatry as primitive, narcissistic, and withdrawn, among a host of pejorative attributes. Early psychoanalytic research leaned heavily on Native Americans to demonstrate primitive defense mechanisms and the inherent deficiencies of being on the margin of civilization. Gustafson (1976), for example, wrote that Lakota people were to primitive to engage in psychoanalysis, being unable to consider that lying on a couch and talking to someone who doesn’t answer might seem ridiculous to members of another culture who had not learned to value this procedure.
Higher rates of depression, anxiety, and other illnesses have been documented among North America’s aboriginal people. However, when Mansur and colleagues (2007), for example, looked at the rates of anxiety and depression on reservations in Montana, they were actually lower than the white communities around the reservation. They explained their findings by the much greater social support and family connectedness existing on reservations than in white communities. Therese O’Nell (2000) went to a Flathead community in Montana, expecting to find high rates of depression. Instead she found a cultural and linguistic mismapping of what Flathead people consider to be a highly desirable state (“to be worthy of pity”) onto what mainstream psychiatry calls “depression.” Flatheads who were worthy of pity did not appear to be depressed in the DSM sense of the word, at least to her.
Native Americans are also accused of having more alcoholism than white Americans, though research shows actual lower levels of alcoholism and higher levels of binge drinking on reserves than their neighboring white communities. Nevertheless, the stereotype of the drunken Indian has become a cultural icon, for both aboriginal and non-aboriginal people. O’Nell describes drinking and being drunk as being a potential source of Indian pride and ethnic identification among Flathead people in Montana. Thacker (2006) describes the historical origins of binge drinking in laws that put an Indian in jail for one day for being drunk and for 90 days for being in possession of alcohol. The law conspired to produce a motto of “when you drink, drink it all”. Dry reserves and still existent laws limit opportunities to learn and practice more responsible, low level consumption of alcohol. Psychiatry has attempted to paint a picture of aboriginal people being genetically susceptible to alcoholism, when poverty actually serves as a sufficient explanation. Social determinants of emotional pain and suffering are readily appreciated on aboriginal reserves (high unemployment, crowded housing, poverty, little social enrichment or recreational opportunities), though psychiatry searches for genetic, deterministic explanations for higher rates of suffering and pain. Given the stewardship of the mental health profession by psychiatrists, resources are directed toward increased access to biomedical care, hospitalizations, 28 day treatment programs, and medications, than to solving the social problems which contribute toward substance abuse on reserves. Certainly, during my four years of working on reserves in rural and remote Saskatchewan, I encountered unlimited funds to send people by themselves to 28 day substance abuse treatment programs and no funds to develop community resources for when they came home. Apparently alcohol policies were managed by competing departments. Health Canada would pay for an unlimited succession of 28 day hospitalizations, but very little in the way of community development and social resources for maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
Historical reports by early explorers and missionaries of North American peoples call forth images of happy, sociable, gregarious people. While we do not want to overly romanticize pre-contact culture, we can say that generosity and hospitality were seen as virtues (see Potlatch cultures). Suicide, except in situations of grave dishonor, was rare. Children were raised in a manner that promoted healthy attachments, as is common in tribal cultures. War, of course, existed, but not on the scale of European battles. Food was relatively plentiful unlike the famines of Europe. Some degree of interpersonal conflict existed, but police are relatively unnecessary in extended kinship systems because relatives keep their relatives in line. Indeed, beliefs about reincarnation and not being able to escape from one’s difficulties through death probably contributed to people working out difficulties in the present, as well as keeping the suicide rate low. Additionally, practices in which the family was responsible for the deeds of its members mitigated against bad deeds lest all in the family suffer. For example, in some communities, if one family member murdered a member of another family, that family had the right to pick a member of the murderer’s family to kill, to maintain balance. In this case, perhaps the threat of retribution was prohibitory. Additionally, the absence of alcoholic beverages over 5 or 6% alcohol probably helped, since current violent deeds are more often than not associated with intoxication. The lack of other substances of abuse and the cultural taboos of using substances outside of ceremony were also contributory to the social fabric remaining intact. The cultural emphasis on healing, balance, and harmony, and the dramatic opportunities for enactment of illness in ceremonies and rituals contributed to keeping the people psychologically healthy. Additionally, the lifestyle of hunter-gathering people was indeed much less stressful than the agricultural lives of peasants in Europe. Some anthropologists have calculated a 16 hour work-week for aboriginal people in North America, with the remainder of their time spent in ceremonial pursuits or social relationships. The social standard of life, including participatory democracy, enlightened childrearing practices, and awareness of the public health importance of hygiene, were much further advanced in the Americas in 1492 than in Europe, with the exception of the empires of Meso-America and South America, in which forced servitude and mass executions on a scale comparable to England of the same time, existed. Life under the Aztec, Incan, or Mayan emperors was not necessarily much better than life in feudal France, England, or Spain. Nevertheless, North Americans enjoyed a reasonably good standard of life, superior in my view to conditions existing in Europe at the same time.
Historical aboriginal views of mind and mental health were quite different from those of contemporary psychiatry (Mehl-Madrona & Pennycook, 2009). These views are being pieced together through interviews with contemporary elders and through written materials collected by ethnologists, physicians (notably Walker and Eastman for the Oglala), missionaries (Father Beuchtel for the Lakota) and explorers. These views as currently reconstructed were more similar to those of the Russian psychologist, Mikhail Bakhtin, and are compatible with much of what is now being called narrative psychology, which, not surprisingly, is the only branch of psychology to have arisen from ethnic and Native studies, women’s studies, and cross-cultural literary disciplines. Aboriginal views held people as fundamentally healthy and whole. Difficulties emerged from learning and living the wrong stories (for the situation at hand). Self was viewed as relational in the sense of multiple selves existing, one for each relationship in which the person found him or herself. No one self was true or primary. Each self had its own voice, which was mingled with the voices of nature, ancestors, spirits, and the like, to produce a veritable symphony of the mind. The community was considered the basic unit of distress when problems emerged and the individuals expressing distress were likened to our now famous metaphor of canaries in the mine. These people were thanked for suffering for the community and bringing into the open the need for the community to heal. Contemporary Dene ceremonies in northern Arizona continue to display this philosophy in which the entire community feels responsible for the sickness of the individual and all contribute to the enactment of a 9 to 14 day ceremony to restore harmony, balance, and health to the individual and simultaneously to the community.
Contemporary North American aboriginal communities retain elements of the above, which is how we are able to piece together their pre-contact views in an archaeology of psychological perception. Nevertheless, the stories of modern culture have infiltrated every aspect of current aboriginal life. Saskatchewan Cree poet Louise Halfe illustrates this in her poetry in which almost every poem has some reference to the dominant white group. Culture has changed. Our working definition of culture consists of all the stories told or having been told in a locale coupled with the results of their performance or enactment. Through contact, colonization, residential schools, education, and commerce, aboriginal people are slowly absorbing the internalizing the stories of the mainstream culture. Pockets of resistance occur as when traditional cultural healers attempt to maintain their practices or scholars piece together a picture of a world view from the past. Nevertheless, contemporary aboriginal culture with regards to mental health is a hodge podge of old views and those of psychiatry (Mehl-Madrona, 2010). When peoples mingle, their stories mingle, thereby co-mingling their cultures, and reducing the possibility of finding a “pure culture” to virtually zero. Waldram (2004) has written about the attempts of psychiatrists and psychiatric anthropologists to fit their definitions of culture onto North American aboriginal people. Mann (2007) tells a sobering story of anthropology defining a South American people as the most primitive on earth, holding the view that they had made no progress from the stone age, when actually these people were contemporary refugees, almost completely eliminated by the Bolivian government and landholders, who were not living their traditional way, but were moving in hiding and in fear of annihilation. Both Mann and Waldram make the point that scholars see what they want to see, that aboriginal people are a means to an end in scholarship, and that people are twisted in every which way to support theories that are probably unsupportable.
Within contemporary North America, indigenous writers are attempting to construct an indigenous theory of mind and mental health (Duran & Duran, 2000; Duran, 2006, Mehl-Madrona, 2003, 2005, 2007; 2008). The effort is to say, if aboriginal people had continued to develop contemporary theories of mind and mental health, what would those be? The challenge to psychiatry is to wonder if some of these theories might be more useful than contemporary psychiatric theory.
Aboriginal theories predictably focus on relationship and community over individuals and pathology. DSM is foreign to aboriginal thought which looks at every individual as unique, being the result of a unique combination of stories, location, family, relationships, and community. The homogeneity which DSM seeks and purports to have found is rejected. Treatment lies along the lines of restoring harmony and balance to relationships and communities and to providing people with better (more practical, functional, appropriate for the situation) stories to live and to be allowed to live through them. Therapies are spirit guided and relationships with non-physical beings are cultivated to aid in the healing process. This acceptance of magic and supernatural beings in healing is viewed as primitive and primary process thinking by mainstream psychiatry, rejected outright. Nevertheless, aboriginal thought has parallels in the social psychiatry of R.D. Laing, Loren Mosher, John Weir Perry, and others, who described superior results for the treatment of schizophrenia and psychosis using social environments instead of psychopharmacology. Additionally, the importance of community has been highlighted by the World Health Organization’s 20 year schizophrenia study, which found better outcomes in third world countries than developed countries, and mostly in relationship to the intact communities and social support found in India, Nigeria, and Colombia. The hearing voices movement is normalizing voices and voice management techniques over diagnosis of psychosis and psychopharmacology, mostly in the U.K., but to a more limited extent in North America. The positive benefits of elders for mental health problems are being described (Mehl-Madrona, bipolar, 2008), though funding is difficult to obtain for studies, since elders are not capable of being standardized or controlled (Mehl-Madrona, 2010) in the manner demanded for interventions in randomized, controlled trials. Indeed, the politics of evidence production works against elders, since valid evidence is obtained from studies in which all parameters are held constant (so the researchers believe) except for one. Obviously this methodology is best suited to study drugs. Consequently drugs have the most evidence to support them, even if the effect sizes are small.
The future of aboriginal world views in psychiatry is uncertain. Psychiatry has largely directed itself to biology as a means of explanation and treatment. Aboriginal world views explain human biology as a result of the enactment of story and the living of social relationships. Psychiatric epigenetics support these views but have not yet caught hold. Psychiatry attempts to explain unusual behavior as the primary result of damaged or disordered brains, while aboriginal thought seeks to explain brains as being formed by social environments and relationships, leading the primary cause of a disordered brain to be relational and social. Psychiatry has a huge pharmaceutical lobby behind it. In support of aboriginal world views is their sustainability. Drugs are far more expensive in developing countries than are human relationships. Certainly this is true on North American reserves and First Nations communities. Perhaps it is also true for mainstream North America – that the billions of dollars being spent on psychotropic medications would be better spent on jobs – for people to have therapeutic social relationships with those who suffer and are in pain, instead of physicians or physician extenders quickly prescribing very expensive medications of questionable value (see University of Ottawa meta-analysis of antidepressants and CATIE studies).
Certainly the mainstream dialogue of the Obama administration (or the Harper government) has focused upon providing services driven by existing philosophies to everyone (access to care) versus questioning the utility of currently offered services. Especially for aboriginal people, relationship based services may be more beneficial and cost-effective than disease-based services. I suspect this is also true for people of all ethnicities. I suspect that the current health care system is unsustainable in the sense that the headlong rush to develop newer, better, and different drugs is enormously costly, not to mention the manufacturing and marketing of these drugs. I suspect that a relationship model for mental health is far more sustainable and affordable in the long run (though not perhaps in the first three months for psychotic and mood disorders). What if the elders are correct, and that giving people intensive attention and care when they are in crisis is more effective than drugging them and seeing them monthly. What if intensive healing experiences (the enactment and psychodrama of ceremony) is more effective than the professionalism of white-coated doctors and nurses? What if keeping people at home in their communities is more effective (cost and benefit) than hospitalizing people and putting them in mental health care homes, away from family and those who know them. What if those who know us are far more beneficial without any training than those who don’t know us regardless of the depth of training? These are questions that contemporary aboriginal elders pose, which psychiatry ignores (the American Psychiatric Association rejected this year proposed symposia on indigenous models of mind and mental health and on psychiatrists working with traditional aboriginal cultural healers). The power balance currently allows such dismissal. Will this always be the case? I suspect that the health care crisis will have to get much worse for government to begin to question the value of the care we deliver instead of asking the question of how to improve access to the care we give. It will require a late-to-develop understanding that the care as we now deliver it, is unaffordable. It cannot be provided for everyone in either Canada or the United States. Currently Canada solves the problem with high taxes, long waits for elective or semi-urgent procedures, and long waits for specialist care. The U.S. solves the problem by denying care to the uninsured and the under-insured. However, the cost of providing care to everyone will be insurmountable. Here is where aboriginal models of mind and mental health might benefit contemporary society – in providing workable means of providing care than are sustainable and cost-effective, even more beneficial to reducing pain and suffering than the models that are currently dominant.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Friday, January 2, 2009
Love 2009
My son is struggling with love. He's 15 years old and suffering deeply. I tried to get him to write poetry, but he wouldn't, so I wrote three poems about his situation. I'd love some feedback. I sort of like them. They seem to fit my son's suffering.
Lewis
Autumn Rain Storm
Outside, the rain tumbles down. The leaves
Wash away in its tribulations.
On the far side of the creek, woodchucks shiver
In dream dens – afraid of their homes being flooded
By the deep rain.
On the news, three houses float away on the river,
Disappearing in its raging, but,
Sitting beside my fireplace,
The falling, churning water seems so cozy.
The water tumbles -- submerging, rolling liquid. The rain’s
Great crushing noise is fearsome and powerful.
On the near side of the creek,
Rain is the wrinkled and dissonant tears of the aged,
The sky crying for the newly born,
The sadness of birth and death, the drum beat of the
Songs of death and terror – but in the end
It is just Rain.
Love is a Storm
I have been waiting for the calm in the storm, of
The hush in the pain and loneliness, when you sleep your
Wild dreams, one day closer to the cold graveyard of winter
While snow flakes drift down, circling the trees, in full view of indifferent
Ravens, preening their feathers, basking in the reds and oranges that
Hug the horizon. The sun has retired to its house in the West, the clouds
Appear to be burning; the vanishing tongues of flame, misty fog layers,
shredded pink
Clouds above the heavy glowing sky;
That peculiar smell of
Soon to be falling snow, the air pregnant with the potential of storm. Love
Is a storm waiting to be unleashed and a relentless quest for hate;
The clumsy and slow movements of the prey running out of options.
Ideas of Love
Our ideas of love
Slay us
In the blackness of night,
Like a procession of candles
In a moonless night
Or a single fire
On a moonless beach
Pretends to show us the Way
Instead we plunge into a dark void,
One candle in the darkness,
Perilous descent, along
A long sloping stone wall,
Searching for a name
For this place
That we called love
At the end is a massive silence,
A profound emptiness,
A circular darkness,
A cold and icy void
From which we must ascend
From which we must rescue ourselves
From which we must transform.
Lewis
Autumn Rain Storm
Outside, the rain tumbles down. The leaves
Wash away in its tribulations.
On the far side of the creek, woodchucks shiver
In dream dens – afraid of their homes being flooded
By the deep rain.
On the news, three houses float away on the river,
Disappearing in its raging, but,
Sitting beside my fireplace,
The falling, churning water seems so cozy.
The water tumbles -- submerging, rolling liquid. The rain’s
Great crushing noise is fearsome and powerful.
On the near side of the creek,
Rain is the wrinkled and dissonant tears of the aged,
The sky crying for the newly born,
The sadness of birth and death, the drum beat of the
Songs of death and terror – but in the end
It is just Rain.
Love is a Storm
I have been waiting for the calm in the storm, of
The hush in the pain and loneliness, when you sleep your
Wild dreams, one day closer to the cold graveyard of winter
While snow flakes drift down, circling the trees, in full view of indifferent
Ravens, preening their feathers, basking in the reds and oranges that
Hug the horizon. The sun has retired to its house in the West, the clouds
Appear to be burning; the vanishing tongues of flame, misty fog layers,
shredded pink
Clouds above the heavy glowing sky;
That peculiar smell of
Soon to be falling snow, the air pregnant with the potential of storm. Love
Is a storm waiting to be unleashed and a relentless quest for hate;
The clumsy and slow movements of the prey running out of options.
Ideas of Love
Our ideas of love
Slay us
In the blackness of night,
Like a procession of candles
In a moonless night
Or a single fire
On a moonless beach
Pretends to show us the Way
Instead we plunge into a dark void,
One candle in the darkness,
Perilous descent, along
A long sloping stone wall,
Searching for a name
For this place
That we called love
At the end is a massive silence,
A profound emptiness,
A circular darkness,
A cold and icy void
From which we must ascend
From which we must rescue ourselves
From which we must transform.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Creativity and Madness 2008
I'm here at the Hilton Waikaloa on the Big Island of Hawai'i for the Creativity and Madness conference. I gave two talks about narrative concepts, one about the relation of narrative philosophy to Native North American philosophy, and the other about Narrative Neuropsychology -- how the brain comprehends, processes, stores, recalls, and tells stories. It turns out that stories activate virtually the entire brain. Stories can concatenate in the anterior temporal poles and therefore become smaller units of information for processing in the dorso-lateral preftontal cortex.
Anyway, let's stay in touch on these narrative ideas. They'll eventually reach the west cost of north america where they may chance the worldl
Anyway, let's stay in touch on these narrative ideas. They'll eventually reach the west cost of north america where they may chance the worldl
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Christmas 2008
Hello Everyone and Mele Kalikimaka (Merry Christmas),
Since my last post, I have been on Thom Hartmann's radio show in Portland, Oregon, which was really fun, since I got to speak for over an hour about Christmas depression. Then, an evening lecture at the New Renaissance Book Store in Portland. I'll be back in Portland, April 9-11, 2009, again on Thom Hartmann's show (April 10th) at the New Renaissance, April 9th, and speaking on Native American Health Disparities, Friday evening and all day Saturday.
Now I'm in Hawai'i. I got to sit at my new desk at Argosy University on Monday, which was fun, and I went surfing today, which was intimidating. I finished my new book, Narrative Psychiatry: healing mind and brain in a social world, and sent it to the publisher. I also got my papers graded for my last class at the University of Saskatchewan.
Today, I'm working on a book chapter about healing intergenerational trauma. I'm reflecting upon how children absorb the impact that events have upon their parents without ever having to experience these events. Residential schools had that impact. Generations of children who never attended residential school got the full impact through their parents. How does that happen? We learn the stories that our parents tell. We learn to perceive the world in this way. We then react to the world in this way and that resets our physiology.
Here's the abstract for the article:
Trauma to indigenous people has been more the exception than the rule during the era of colonization. Entire cultures were virtually decimated by disease (smallpox, hepatitis A, etc.) and forced to accept one sided treaties to avoid starvation. This phenomenon frequently occurs among Aboriginal populations who were forced to endure forced assimilation at the hands of European settlers. Among the British-derived colonies turned nations, the residential school phenomenon forged new waves of abuse that are still reverberating. The introduction of residential schools in the late 1800s emphasized the suppression of Aboriginal culture and institutionalized intergenerational trauma. The residential school experience led to increased feelings of fear, anxiety, helplessness, and increased maladaptive behaviors related to alcoholism, family discord, and high suicide rates (Bryant-Davis, 2007; Duran, 2006).
The concept of inter-generational trauma relates to trauma that is inflicted upon a subsequent generation by the behaviors engendered by the effects of trauma on the older generation. Intergenerational trauma results in the transferring of emotions related to a traumatic experience from one generation to another. This trauma can be direct through parents re-enacting the abuse they received upon their children. It can be indirect through the transmission of an expectation for being traumatized and behavior patterns that result from trauma without directly abusing the child. In this chapter, we will consider how inter-generational trauma arises, persists, and will ask how it has been healed and it can be further healed in aboriginal environments in North America and around the world.
Since my last post, I have been on Thom Hartmann's radio show in Portland, Oregon, which was really fun, since I got to speak for over an hour about Christmas depression. Then, an evening lecture at the New Renaissance Book Store in Portland. I'll be back in Portland, April 9-11, 2009, again on Thom Hartmann's show (April 10th) at the New Renaissance, April 9th, and speaking on Native American Health Disparities, Friday evening and all day Saturday.
Now I'm in Hawai'i. I got to sit at my new desk at Argosy University on Monday, which was fun, and I went surfing today, which was intimidating. I finished my new book, Narrative Psychiatry: healing mind and brain in a social world, and sent it to the publisher. I also got my papers graded for my last class at the University of Saskatchewan.
Today, I'm working on a book chapter about healing intergenerational trauma. I'm reflecting upon how children absorb the impact that events have upon their parents without ever having to experience these events. Residential schools had that impact. Generations of children who never attended residential school got the full impact through their parents. How does that happen? We learn the stories that our parents tell. We learn to perceive the world in this way. We then react to the world in this way and that resets our physiology.
Here's the abstract for the article:
Trauma to indigenous people has been more the exception than the rule during the era of colonization. Entire cultures were virtually decimated by disease (smallpox, hepatitis A, etc.) and forced to accept one sided treaties to avoid starvation. This phenomenon frequently occurs among Aboriginal populations who were forced to endure forced assimilation at the hands of European settlers. Among the British-derived colonies turned nations, the residential school phenomenon forged new waves of abuse that are still reverberating. The introduction of residential schools in the late 1800s emphasized the suppression of Aboriginal culture and institutionalized intergenerational trauma. The residential school experience led to increased feelings of fear, anxiety, helplessness, and increased maladaptive behaviors related to alcoholism, family discord, and high suicide rates (Bryant-Davis, 2007; Duran, 2006).
The concept of inter-generational trauma relates to trauma that is inflicted upon a subsequent generation by the behaviors engendered by the effects of trauma on the older generation. Intergenerational trauma results in the transferring of emotions related to a traumatic experience from one generation to another. This trauma can be direct through parents re-enacting the abuse they received upon their children. It can be indirect through the transmission of an expectation for being traumatized and behavior patterns that result from trauma without directly abusing the child. In this chapter, we will consider how inter-generational trauma arises, persists, and will ask how it has been healed and it can be further healed in aboriginal environments in North America and around the world.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
I want to tell the story of being kicked out of Canada, since it's one of the more bizarre experiences of my life, but it's also a message that Creator has a different plan for me. To my complete shock and amazement, on October 15th, I got a response from Canada Immigration in Los Angeles about my application for permanent residency. I had just been declared "criminally inadmissible" to Canada because of a traffic violation in Arizona in 2005 for which I paid a $200 fine. I had a misadventure with a red light late one evening when no one else was around. I didn't realize that the U-turn green arrow (which always followed the red light) was turned off after 9:30 pm and I habitually turned, only there wasn't a green arrow like in the daytime and a cop was sitting there and bingo! Little did I realize this would someday make me a "criminal" in Canada. The ticket dropped from my record after three years and I have a clean driving record now in the U.S. What's even more funny was that the same Immigration people knew about this from the time I entered Canada and it was no big deal for me when I got a work permit in 2005 and in 2007. Apparently policy changed, or this is what I was told by a Saskatchewan provincial judge with whom I became acquainted. The new policy as of July 2008 is to treat all traffic stops in the U.S. as "felonies" in Canada. Strange.
So that's a long way of saying I had to rethink my life plan. Besides focusing more on teaching rather than clinical practice (I'm teaching psychology now at Argosy University and anthropology at Johnson State College), I'm throwing my creative energy into the newly formed Coyote Institute (for Studies of Change and Transformation) which is a way to blend and re-energize indigenous wisdom with the post-modern world. Anyway, our two main current projects are 1) the Hahokah Project, which is to create a healing circle in every living room in the world, and 2) the Traditional Healing Project, which is to create a network through Second Life of traditional healers from around the world who can connect with each other and can also be reached by anyone interested in traditional cultural healing. We're slowly building all this at www.coyoteinstitute.org.
Lewis
So that's a long way of saying I had to rethink my life plan. Besides focusing more on teaching rather than clinical practice (I'm teaching psychology now at Argosy University and anthropology at Johnson State College), I'm throwing my creative energy into the newly formed Coyote Institute (for Studies of Change and Transformation) which is a way to blend and re-energize indigenous wisdom with the post-modern world. Anyway, our two main current projects are 1) the Hahokah Project, which is to create a healing circle in every living room in the world, and 2) the Traditional Healing Project, which is to create a network through Second Life of traditional healers from around the world who can connect with each other and can also be reached by anyone interested in traditional cultural healing. We're slowly building all this at www.coyoteinstitute.org.
Lewis
Monday, December 8, 2008
Dear Anyone whose Reading,
I'm restarting my blog after several months hiatus.
What's new!
We've started Coyote Institute (for Studies of Change and Transformation) in earnest!. How exciting. We're a Mississippi Corporation and are applying for non-profit status. You can learn more about what we're doing on the google discussion groups for coyotemedicine and coyotewisdom. We're planning a non-hierarchical organization with a governing council of seven people. In a very real sense, we're trying to build a tribe and are fostering the growth of dens all over the place. Before we achieve non-profit status, we can still accept your help through another non-profit who's nursing us along from pup-hood to adulthood.
Also, my website has changed to www.mehl-madrona.com and, as well, there is a developing website for Coyote Institute at www.coyoteinstitute.org.
Coyote Institute has two initial projects (and more as the various dens dream and plan and vision and sing and dance):
1) Hocokah Project. We want to encourage everyone everywhere to be part of a healing circle. We will have information on the Coyote Institute web site about how to start a hocokah, how to manage a healing circle, how to have leaderless leadership, and more. We will have a discussion group for working out difficulties and reporting successes, a place for collecting stories of results and outcomes (also known as research), and a directory of circles that people can join.
2) Traditional Healing Network. We are seeking to create a cyber-community for healers from all around the world, so that healers can communicate with each other, can network, can be found by people anywhere who are drawn to their healing system. We envision healers "studying" themselves, a break from the usual way they are studied by anthropologists. By that we mean healers reflecting upon their approaches, what they do, how it works, why it works. I am especially interested in diabetes and in so-called "mental illnesses", but others may have other interests. We are considering a software platform called Second Life for managing these connections.
I'm personally really interested in re-visioning research so that people themselves ask questions of relevance in collaboration with each other, as opposed to our current academic framework.
Of other relevance is my move to Argosy University in Honolulu, Hawai'i, where I'll be the Director of their Psychopharmacology Program and also an Associate Professor. This January I'll be teaching Neuropsychology, Quantitative Inquiry, and Stats Lab. In the summer, I'll be teaching Narrative Psychology. More later.... I'm getting winter tires and they just got placed onto the truck and it's ready to roll.
Lewis
I'm restarting my blog after several months hiatus.
What's new!
We've started Coyote Institute (for Studies of Change and Transformation) in earnest!. How exciting. We're a Mississippi Corporation and are applying for non-profit status. You can learn more about what we're doing on the google discussion groups for coyotemedicine and coyotewisdom. We're planning a non-hierarchical organization with a governing council of seven people. In a very real sense, we're trying to build a tribe and are fostering the growth of dens all over the place. Before we achieve non-profit status, we can still accept your help through another non-profit who's nursing us along from pup-hood to adulthood.
Also, my website has changed to www.mehl-madrona.com and, as well, there is a developing website for Coyote Institute at www.coyoteinstitute.org.
Coyote Institute has two initial projects (and more as the various dens dream and plan and vision and sing and dance):
1) Hocokah Project. We want to encourage everyone everywhere to be part of a healing circle. We will have information on the Coyote Institute web site about how to start a hocokah, how to manage a healing circle, how to have leaderless leadership, and more. We will have a discussion group for working out difficulties and reporting successes, a place for collecting stories of results and outcomes (also known as research), and a directory of circles that people can join.
2) Traditional Healing Network. We are seeking to create a cyber-community for healers from all around the world, so that healers can communicate with each other, can network, can be found by people anywhere who are drawn to their healing system. We envision healers "studying" themselves, a break from the usual way they are studied by anthropologists. By that we mean healers reflecting upon their approaches, what they do, how it works, why it works. I am especially interested in diabetes and in so-called "mental illnesses", but others may have other interests. We are considering a software platform called Second Life for managing these connections.
I'm personally really interested in re-visioning research so that people themselves ask questions of relevance in collaboration with each other, as opposed to our current academic framework.
Of other relevance is my move to Argosy University in Honolulu, Hawai'i, where I'll be the Director of their Psychopharmacology Program and also an Associate Professor. This January I'll be teaching Neuropsychology, Quantitative Inquiry, and Stats Lab. In the summer, I'll be teaching Narrative Psychology. More later.... I'm getting winter tires and they just got placed onto the truck and it's ready to roll.
Lewis
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Bugs
I am sitting in the shadows of Mt. Mansfield, in Stowe, Vermont, waiting for my son to wake up. We're going to a sweat lodge in Weybridge, Vermont, that we built last weekend. This will be the second time this lodge has been used. We'll leave at 0930, so I better wake him up at 0900. It's 0830 now.
I just finished three intensive retreats (one partial week), the other two, a week, and more than a week. I wanted to talk about the power of community for healing, the way that we have so much more power for healing. When we had three people together it was more than twice as powerful as two people. Five people were even more powerful. We forget that in conventional medicine when we try to keep people alone in little rooms with us.
I wondered about the kind of world we would have if medicine were more like intensive retreats than it is. We would need to make a big shift in how we think about illness and practice medicine. Current medical practice is primarily aimed at doing whatever it takes, mostly with drugs and surgery, to create a physiological state in which we can’t see physical evidence of disease and the person stops complaining of symptoms. It’s an “anti;” approach. We use antibiotics, anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, analgesics, anti-anxiety agents, etc. Most of our classes of medications can start with the letter “a”. How would medicine look different if we saw illness as an aspect of life, part of the human stories that we live, and not necessarily an external evil attacking us that needs to be destroyed or attacked back. I suppose our current metaphor is the immune system, in which natural killer cells absorb invading bacteria. What this model fails to take into account are the many healthy relationships we maintain with micro-organisms. The environment is not as unfriendly as contemporary medicine imagines. I suspect that what we do with our antibiotics is to kill our friends and strengthen our enemies, perhaps a parallel to what has happened in the various Gulf Wars.
What amazes me is the current terror people seem to feel about germs. I'd like to stimulate some discussion around this. I know people who claim to have had various infectious that my medical training says is impossible. Some have been cured with homeopathic injections, others with months of intraveous antibiotic therapy, others with ceremony and ritual and no antibiotics at all. I think homeopathics have other effects than just ridding the body of germs, some of those effects being quite profound. I have injected Traumeel for joint problems and have been impressed with it and/or the placebo effect associated with it. I got some old ladies in Tucson off steroid injections (which I know are bad for joints) and onto Traumeel injections. Was it placebo or Traumeel? Only God Knows and she's not telling.
Anyway, does anyone know about this approach to illness of using cotton balls to look for germs and then devising remedies energetically (I assume they use a computer system that puts the desired energy into solution) though I don't know. Dr. Schultz is one of the people involved and then there is a person named David in Colorado who makes remedies also. I probably should have gotten more proper nouns from my friend, but didn't.
So here's my question, to myself and anyone reading this, and I found out, as I mentioned in my last post, that some people do read this, because Mothering Magazine read my blog, which actually really touched me. When are germs good and when are germs bad?
I suspect there are some really bad germs that are probably human created, like HIV or Ebola virus. I suspect we have done something to the environment to facilitate the creation of super bad bugs, because I don't think nature would be so stupid as to create something so lethal.
But what about worms, parasites, spirochetes, etc.? We know that children in Third World countries have virtually no asthma or juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. The argument is that their parasites shift their cytokine balance in such a way that they don't get these conditions because the resources are needed to fight bugs and parasites. However, children in New York City, which I suspect is the most germ-fearing city on earth, have tremendous high rates of asthma and JRA. Is it actually healthy to avoid bugs or does it hurt us in other ways? Are bugs our friends?
That's what I meant by the "anti" paragraph above. It seems we're against all life but our own and perhaps our own lives require the lives of our invisible friends to be whole. What if we need germs to be well! My New York friend talked about her doctor seeing spirochetes and staphyloccus in her live blood cell analysis. I had trouble believing that given my training. It seemed that she would be dead if she spirochete or staphylococcal septicemia. Nevertheless, I could believe that immune cells could float around in blood that have encountered these critters at some time and have memory of them. But that's not what the live cell analysis people were claiming.
Leo Omani, who is a healer on Wahpeton Dakota Reserve in Saskatchewan tells his children to tell their children to eat dirt because it will make them healthy. A lot of elders in Saskatchewan believe in the healing power for young children of eating dirt. Could dirt have had protective factors that made it less likely to get TB or smallpox?
I suspect that most of what we do with our medicines is kill the friendlies and encourage the growth of the super-bad-bugs. I know that the death rate from infection began to decline in 1856 with the improvement of plumbing and its implementation and that the slope for the rate of decline didn't change with the introduction of antibiotics on a widespread basis. The argument would be that those we save with antibiotics are balanced out by those we kill with antibiotics (Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, anaphylaxis, overgrowth of Clostridium, etc. etc.). I never cease to be amazed at how physicians hand out antibiotics. I suspect it would be better if they were over the counter like Mexico so that everyone could buy penicillin, ampicillin, etc., and might stop there, because the physicians hand out samples of things like Levaquin or even more powerful new drugs. They do this for conditions that probably won't respond to antibiotics anyway, though all patients expect them now. The name says it all -- "against life."
My friend in New York hesitates to even shake the hand of those who might have bugs. She wants everyone she knows to get checked for bugs and treated. Of course, the treatments might be helpful independent of the bugs, and perhaps homeopathy played a large role in her recovery. I don't know.
I do find my New York friends who are afraid to walk on grass for fear of bugs somewhat amusing. What a state when people are afraid of grass. (It might have deer tics hiding in wait to ambush the unsuspecting humans).
But what about all the bugs who do abound -- hepatitis C is an example of a virus that deserves respect. Those bugs can cause dreadful disease, though I know people who are living well with hepatitis C and have learned to accomodate it to them, and them to it.
Thoughts?
I just finished three intensive retreats (one partial week), the other two, a week, and more than a week. I wanted to talk about the power of community for healing, the way that we have so much more power for healing. When we had three people together it was more than twice as powerful as two people. Five people were even more powerful. We forget that in conventional medicine when we try to keep people alone in little rooms with us.
I wondered about the kind of world we would have if medicine were more like intensive retreats than it is. We would need to make a big shift in how we think about illness and practice medicine. Current medical practice is primarily aimed at doing whatever it takes, mostly with drugs and surgery, to create a physiological state in which we can’t see physical evidence of disease and the person stops complaining of symptoms. It’s an “anti;” approach. We use antibiotics, anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, analgesics, anti-anxiety agents, etc. Most of our classes of medications can start with the letter “a”. How would medicine look different if we saw illness as an aspect of life, part of the human stories that we live, and not necessarily an external evil attacking us that needs to be destroyed or attacked back. I suppose our current metaphor is the immune system, in which natural killer cells absorb invading bacteria. What this model fails to take into account are the many healthy relationships we maintain with micro-organisms. The environment is not as unfriendly as contemporary medicine imagines. I suspect that what we do with our antibiotics is to kill our friends and strengthen our enemies, perhaps a parallel to what has happened in the various Gulf Wars.
What amazes me is the current terror people seem to feel about germs. I'd like to stimulate some discussion around this. I know people who claim to have had various infectious that my medical training says is impossible. Some have been cured with homeopathic injections, others with months of intraveous antibiotic therapy, others with ceremony and ritual and no antibiotics at all. I think homeopathics have other effects than just ridding the body of germs, some of those effects being quite profound. I have injected Traumeel for joint problems and have been impressed with it and/or the placebo effect associated with it. I got some old ladies in Tucson off steroid injections (which I know are bad for joints) and onto Traumeel injections. Was it placebo or Traumeel? Only God Knows and she's not telling.
Anyway, does anyone know about this approach to illness of using cotton balls to look for germs and then devising remedies energetically (I assume they use a computer system that puts the desired energy into solution) though I don't know. Dr. Schultz is one of the people involved and then there is a person named David in Colorado who makes remedies also. I probably should have gotten more proper nouns from my friend, but didn't.
So here's my question, to myself and anyone reading this, and I found out, as I mentioned in my last post, that some people do read this, because Mothering Magazine read my blog, which actually really touched me. When are germs good and when are germs bad?
I suspect there are some really bad germs that are probably human created, like HIV or Ebola virus. I suspect we have done something to the environment to facilitate the creation of super bad bugs, because I don't think nature would be so stupid as to create something so lethal.
But what about worms, parasites, spirochetes, etc.? We know that children in Third World countries have virtually no asthma or juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. The argument is that their parasites shift their cytokine balance in such a way that they don't get these conditions because the resources are needed to fight bugs and parasites. However, children in New York City, which I suspect is the most germ-fearing city on earth, have tremendous high rates of asthma and JRA. Is it actually healthy to avoid bugs or does it hurt us in other ways? Are bugs our friends?
That's what I meant by the "anti" paragraph above. It seems we're against all life but our own and perhaps our own lives require the lives of our invisible friends to be whole. What if we need germs to be well! My New York friend talked about her doctor seeing spirochetes and staphyloccus in her live blood cell analysis. I had trouble believing that given my training. It seemed that she would be dead if she spirochete or staphylococcal septicemia. Nevertheless, I could believe that immune cells could float around in blood that have encountered these critters at some time and have memory of them. But that's not what the live cell analysis people were claiming.
Leo Omani, who is a healer on Wahpeton Dakota Reserve in Saskatchewan tells his children to tell their children to eat dirt because it will make them healthy. A lot of elders in Saskatchewan believe in the healing power for young children of eating dirt. Could dirt have had protective factors that made it less likely to get TB or smallpox?
I suspect that most of what we do with our medicines is kill the friendlies and encourage the growth of the super-bad-bugs. I know that the death rate from infection began to decline in 1856 with the improvement of plumbing and its implementation and that the slope for the rate of decline didn't change with the introduction of antibiotics on a widespread basis. The argument would be that those we save with antibiotics are balanced out by those we kill with antibiotics (Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, anaphylaxis, overgrowth of Clostridium, etc. etc.). I never cease to be amazed at how physicians hand out antibiotics. I suspect it would be better if they were over the counter like Mexico so that everyone could buy penicillin, ampicillin, etc., and might stop there, because the physicians hand out samples of things like Levaquin or even more powerful new drugs. They do this for conditions that probably won't respond to antibiotics anyway, though all patients expect them now. The name says it all -- "against life."
My friend in New York hesitates to even shake the hand of those who might have bugs. She wants everyone she knows to get checked for bugs and treated. Of course, the treatments might be helpful independent of the bugs, and perhaps homeopathy played a large role in her recovery. I don't know.
I do find my New York friends who are afraid to walk on grass for fear of bugs somewhat amusing. What a state when people are afraid of grass. (It might have deer tics hiding in wait to ambush the unsuspecting humans).
But what about all the bugs who do abound -- hepatitis C is an example of a virus that deserves respect. Those bugs can cause dreadful disease, though I know people who are living well with hepatitis C and have learned to accomodate it to them, and them to it.
Thoughts?
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