In a year-long training program, NHS practitioners in the UK immersed themselves in Open Dialogue (OD), a radically different approach to mental health care that emphasizes inclusive, patient-centered communication. Newly published research on this program finds that while the training was transformative, fostering personal growth and new ways of working, practitioners faced significant challenges integrating OD into a system dominated by traditional treatment methods.
Eleftherios Anestis and Timothy Weaver from Middlesex University London led the study, which was published in Frontiers in Psychology.Ā The authors explain the tension between OD and current mental health care systems this way:
āUnlike other approaches that favor professionalsā expertise and a directive approach, OD emphasizes the importance of generating dialogue and collaboration between the service-user, their informal family and social network, and the professional team characterized by a flattened hierarchy. During network meetings, OD practitioners avoid rushing into a diagnosis or conclusions and are expected to have a greater tolerance of uncertainty in terms of risk.ā
āThe main role of practitioners is to foster an inclusive dialogue wherein every member of the network contributes (polyphony) with the aim of cultivating an intersubjective understanding of the crisis and promoting shared decision-making. In this context, psychiatric knowledge and treatments may be utilized but in a more person-centered manner that respects service usersā perspectives, voiced needs, and preferences.ā
While participants reported feeling empowered and better equipped to support patients through dialogue and shared decision-making, they also encountered significant barriers in applying OD within the rigid structures of the NHS. The study underscores the tension between innovative, person-centered models like OD and the conventional biomedical approaches that dominate mental healthcare, suggesting that broader systemic changes are needed to fully realize the potential of Open Dialogue.
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Alas, this development of Open Dialogue in the UK will not save the UK from it’s current spiritual and emotional collapse. It was ranked second least happy nation on Earth by the World Happiness Index, over 10 points behind Yemen, Syria, and Ukraine. Watch. The floods of psychological distress have already battered and destroyed the Mental Health system which can barely even get people in for a diagnosis, let alone any treatment, and these floods threaten the teetering NHS also which is in a state of collapse owing to mismanagement, partial privatization and the unwillingness to fund to the level necessary to maintain it, let alone improve it. There is a period of economic austerity coming and in the meantime race riots rip through the country for the first time in British history. Everyone is miserable in the UK and everything is broken. Ask British people if anything is working well in the UK and I would be surprised if you receive any positive answer. But next to America, there is relative cultural sanity in the UK. Sure, everyone’s brain is more or less totally disempowered and overcome by a culture of experts and opinions, but not quite deluded and totally destroyed by conspiracy theories or ridiculous, absurd and toxic affiliations to guns and to the American flag and the worship of the very ruthless economic, political, cultural and economic vampires who consume us like Donald Trump and Eckhart Tolle who are two cheeks on the same demonic ass (long story). And I don’t care to elaborate. OK then if you insist.
Tolle calls himself enlightened, which implies the flowering of human understanding and the transforming of his life and teaching through the wisdom that springs only from the love and compassion that also flower with this understanding. But Eckhart Tolle – you are an evil flower, and I will tear the petals off of you. We are replete with commentaries on consciousness, mind and spiritual life but commentaries are just words, and you call this ‘knowledge’ and ‘knowing’, but what can knowledge, being a mere representation of what is, like a map of what is, KNOW anything? Does my map of London know London? OBVIOUSLY NOT. same too with the phenomena of our own consciousness WHICH IS THE ONLY GATEWAY TO THE REAL. NOBODY COULD DISPUTE THAT AND NONE OF THE PROMINENT TEACHERS EVER COULD. So what value has these word maps of consciousness and life in understanding the real thing, which can only, obviously, manifestly be understood through patient and uninfluenced observation? Not even infinite maps are useful in understanding the actual physical environment of the Earth, and same too with the self-understanding that all the great teachers agreed is the only route to freedom and truth, because YOU ARE THE ACTUAL TRUTH, and the ONLY truth it is possible to understand because you ARE your consciousness and everything else is a mere happening with in it. It is the only real which is the only thing we ever need to understand to reach truth, freedom, and the love that flows from it.
But people who attain a psychopathic peace like Eckhart Tolle and then accumulate over $80 million in the bank while much of the world starves, who has enormous social status, who eats meat and has sex and enjoys a celebrity lifestyle amongst other cultural and economic vampires has not had their lives transformed by love, and the poverty of his teaching is proof that the wisdom that is brought about only through compassion and love is entirely missing. But we are so infantile, so conditioned, so much like factory farm animals who believe they are living the life they were meant to lead, that we actually believe listening to verbal commentaries by idiots like this one is the same thing as the growth of you own understanding of life, which can only take place by observing and understanding YOURSELF, which is to say YOUR life, YOUR world, YOUR consciousness, YOUR reality.. Instead you listen to verbal diarrhoea for self-appointed experts in your reality who tell you what to do and how to behave and what attitude to adopt and what to think and how to meditate etc. This is manifestly light years from the observation and understanding of what you actually are in freedom, but they don’t want you to be free. They want your attention and your time and probably also as much of your money as you can be persuaded to part with. And they call this enlightenment. It’s exploitation. OBVIOUSLY. It does nothing but condition your brain and make you immature and delusionally dependent on a spiritual vampire who will never help you, only extract from you. Sorry but this is the truth.
Can a teacher help me observe and understand the nature of my own thinking, the movement of feeling and sensation within me, the phenomena of imagination and non-ordinary experiences, and of silence and of disturbance, of all the phenomena of conscious my life, or does everything a teacher tell you about such phenomena condition and prejudice perception thereby adding to the very problem it purports to solve? Obviously the latter, which is a terrible indictment on absolutely every prominent spiritual teacher alive including most obviously Eckhart Tolle who preaches nothing but ‘practicing presence’ which has basically been instructed to billions of human beings this past 5,000 years providing a clear demonstrable history of failure as people get conditioned by instruction and knowledge and TRYING TO PRACTICE MEDITATION which is an absurdity, because meditation is simply awareness of what actually is, and there is only ever awareness of what actually is, whether it be world/sensation, or imagination, or thought, or whatever it may be. So how could we ever even begin to require being taught what only ever is, and why would we ever need it today?
It is precisely because of spiritual and psychological and intellectual and social authorities that we need to learn the IMPORTANCE of the awareness of what is as opposed to our own intellectual processes, because we have been conditioned by authorities who claim to know, and therefore this has set off the knowledge accumulation tendency of the socially conditioned mind. If we were never told that it is other people who know and you cannot know, which was always a complete fiction obviously, then we would never have become enslaved by their words, practices, instructions and knowledge, and we would never get lost in the conditioning by these things which prevents the undistorted observation of ourselves as we are, distorting what we are by artificial practices designed to ‘get somewhere’ when awareness of what is is ALWAYS EVER HERE. So see the absolute insanity and absurdity of it all.
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From 1979 to 1982 I worked in a Psychiatric hospital in London England. Back then we had a revolving door treatment plan as the longer patients were in the hospital the worse they got. This was blamed on the institution, The fact that the nursing staff under the direction of the medical staff were running the institution was not seen as relevant. I am shocked that over 40 years latter these experts in mental health have failed to realise that inclusive relationships work better than alienating relationships especially after the Harding Longitudinal study was published in 1987.
https://psychrights.org/research/digest/effective/APAMonV31No2.htm
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