Mad in America

Comments by Michael Cornwall, PhD

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• Steven, I’m not sure what the average stay was- probably between 1 and 2 months. I served at a similar med free sanctuary called IWard that was open in the east bay when Diabasis was open in San Francisco. I wrote an article about IWard here on madinamerica that you might be interested in titled- “Remembering a medication-free madness sanctuary.”
  Best wishes, Michael

• Thank you Steven! I think the only way you can get the article by Perry now is via eBay where the Magical Blend issue from 1991-1992 is for sale.
  Best wishes,
  Michael

• Daiphanous Weeping, thanks for your thought provoking comments and link to the video above!

• Sam, many college or university libraries have JHP journals- or becoming a member of the Association for Humanistic Psychology comes with a subscription to the JHP.

• Hi Sam, I’m very sorry I haven’t been available to read or help you with your very important book that shares so much about you and your wife’s healing journey. I’m working so much on a book myself, that I don’t see me being available for many months this year. You might try contacting editorial folks here at MIA, especially those who work on the MIA family initiative. Best wishes, Michael

• Thank you again Birdsong!

• Thank you Birdsong! Yes, receiving merciful love is a deep human need, that when met can help us not enter into extreme emotional suffering- and it can also help relieve our intense emotional suffering if it happens.
  Best wishes, Michael

• Steve I believe there is a deep and abiding need in our male dominator, top down, social Darwinism culture to have a cadre of people tasked with the control of deviance from the entrenched, reactionary societal values and norms, about the open expression of emotion. The 25,000 psychiatrists gladly and lucratively have claimed that role. Psychiatry couldn’t exist as a grossly failed medical specialty that actually kills it’s patients if it wasn’t serving a very basic but inhumane, warped need of society. When Jay got disruptive at college they locked him up and shut him up.
  When 5 year old Mary throws tantrums she is medicated and shut up.
  Of course Pharma and the guild interests of psychiatry, and corrupt research of academia all collude with this oppression out of self interest. Our class system and economic system require punctual, quiet workers to punch in and be good employees.
  So, those who go to far with their anger or sadness or fear get sent to HR or get fired or get meds to stay on the job. It’s dystopian and it’s only getting more chaotic everyday, because as the prophetic Yeats said- “The center will not hold.”
  To that, Psychiatry smiles it’s friendly fascist smile and says- “No, we got this- just increase the daily dose until compliance and silence are restored.”

• Steve I’ve never believed psychiatry is a legitimate medical specialty because it’s false underlying disease model theoretical paradigm is based on a scientifically unproven big lie, as I described here on MIA in my article- “Eyewitness to psychiatry functioning as a conspiracy theory based cult.” My article is based on my 28 years working as a PhD level licensed psychotherapist alongside psychiatrists everyday in the public mental health sector.
  But to your question above, with me not equating victims of psychiatry whose concocted diagnoses like schizophrenia and bipolar are not because of a truly physical illness like cancer- just imagine if the patients treated by the medical specialty of oncology had a 25 year earlier death rate than cancer patients who never had seen a cancer specialist and received chemo, radiation, surgery etc.?
  The headline would read- “If you get treated for cancer, you’ll die 25 years earlier than other folks with cancer who got no treatment.”
  In the year before he died, as his body was increasingly racked with multiple physical medical conditions that he believed had been caused by his nonstop injurious shock treatments and forced injections of massive doses of haldol for many months in the psychiatric hospital, Jay Mahler told me- “Michael, I really didn’t want to die prematurely, to be a statistic fatality of what psychiatry did to me.”

• Steve, last year I wrote a memorial article here about my good friend Jay Mahler who was a psychiatric survivor and human rights activist. He had survived shock treatments that were so harmful that he couldn’t remember his own name for a long time. Psychiatry is a failed medical specialty that injures those it claims to help- it’s “treatments” cause victims to die decades before the national average as you know. Jay told me that he believed the injuries he received from psychiatry contributed to his early death.

• David Healy is a world renowned advocate for and practitioner of brain damaging shock treatment. He claims that- “ECT is the most effective treatment for severe depressive disorder.”

• Thank you very much for the encouraging words nickdrury!
  Best wishes, Michael

• Sam Ruck, thank you for writing. Yes, I do agree with Bateson’s supportive words for Diabasis.
  I’ll be on sabbatical until approximately the beginning of July. Please contact me then via my michaelcornwall.com site if you want to share about helping your wife so importantly.
  Best wishes, Michael

• BigPictureAwareness, thanks again for writing. I agree that all extreme states are purposive and necessary when they emerge unbidden in our lives.. Diabasis showed how holding that belief, negated our cultural blindness that sees such natural human, potentially transformative experiences as pathological.
  Best wishes, Michael

• Ritalin and Adderall are classified as schedule 2 dangerous drugs with high risk of addiction. Cocaine, Meth, OxyContin and Fentanyl are also class 2 schedule drugs.

• Any way you cut, philosophy it, relativize it, deny it, ignore it, define it or justify it, it is child abuse. And let’s get real- the pills are purchased and dispensed by parents. But they, the pharmacist, the drug store, the prescriber, the wholesaler, the manufacturer and every politician that voted for laws protecting all of the above are complicit- as are the citizens of our society that voted for those politicians who make the laws that allow and make possible the child abuse. The horror show fact is that our society wants everyone, toddlers included to stop expressing anger, fear, sadness or any emotion beyond a proscribed intensity. Because if the emotions you or the toddler feels are expressed in ways that make people too uncomfortable, a DSM diagnosis and some emotion numbing and silencing drugs are going to be required.

• Thank you Bob for this totally damning article. For over 40 years I’ve practiced as a licensed therapist serving children and families. I’ve never diagnosed a child, teen or adult with ADHD, or referred them for meds. 28 of those years I worked full time in a large public sector mental health system. The question your article begs is- if ADHD isn’t what psychiatry says it is, then what is it? Bob, you know that is the same question I’ve been posing about extreme states for decades. In every instance children( including pre-schoolers) that have seen me who were subjectively experiencing and expressing emotional distress that could have been labeled ADHD and drugged, were clearly causalities of what John Read has proven are adverse childhood experiences.
  Since for pre-schoolers that means those adverse experiences occurred almost exclusively in the family home, then the answer to what gets labeled ADHD is a psycho-social impact that extends out to the toxic social matrix that houses all our families and crushes many families into super stressful, traumatic environments for young children.
  Both academic and practicing psychiatrists have failed both the scientific rigor and moral test of discovering what is in full view.
  Children, teens, adults and seniors all are causualties of our loveless and morally bankrupt society. Because Bob, as old NIMH chief Thomas Insel proclaimed a few years ago that got him excoriated by his fellow psychiatrists- when ANYONE comes in for treatment there will be no medical diagnostic tests done to verify the label given to them- no blood test, no X-ray, no brain scan, no genetic test- no just a pathetic somber search through the pages of the bogus DSM for a label- And this “best practice” done even to toddlers by a failed medical specialty where patients die 25 years earlier that the average.

• Paula was a true force of nature- and her life force was aimed at relieving human suffering in all it’s forms. Her indelible imprint on our lives and her generation will last far into the future lives of coming generations, because the universal message she brought of justice and compassion was so clear and powerful.
  I gratefully got to know her through inviting her to write an article for the Journal of Humanistic Psychology on extreme states.
  Her article- “Another damaging use of the “Schizophrenia” label…and what seemed about to help” was published in December. Paula shared about being with a young person who was labeled, and how she brought her caring and listening to their time together. During many phone conversations I felt her strong presence and unwavering commitment to both fight the dehumanizing power of psychiatry while at the same time be a source of healing to the victims of psychiatric injury.
  My deep condolences to her family, loved ones and friends.
  Michael

• Thank you dear Dina, for sharing the wonderful interview that you and Will recently did with Jay. I hope many people listen and are inspired by Jay as you and I have so gratefully been.
  Best wishes, Michael

• Thank you for Sam, your very supportive comment.

• Thank you Rosalee, for your very caring comment.

• Thank you very much Maddie, for your great comment and sharing your very important research. Those 2 quotes by Jay about him not being co-opted and the value of working to change the system from the inside out for the sake of those countless people still trapped and dying in it, are very relevant and true I believe. Jay and many of us activists who stayed inside the belly of the beast for decades, fighting for the rights of those suffering from within, also were just as active at leveraging all of the levels of exterior political power to both stop psychiatric abuse and to build humanistic alternatives based on compassion, and the value of inclusion of survivors and others with lived experience.

• Removed – Duplicate comment.

• Thank you J for writing. Jay worked up to the last days of his life to help people avoid, heal or escape the harm inflicted by psychiatry.

• BigPictureAwareness, yes I remember the wonderful Aussie from Esalen! Interesting synchronicity today. Thanks for the links to Wouter Kusters and the earth rotation. Best wishes, Michael

• Thank you Someone Else. It still breaks my heart too. I know Jay’s loved ones and family would appreciate your heartfelt words about him and your condolences.

• Thank you Dorothy. I was very glad to be with you and Jay and many activists at the memorable gathering at Esalen years ago.

• Hi Bob, in my MIA article- “Remembering a medication-free madness sanctuary” I share about I ward, the 20 med medication free first episode extreme states/psychosis program that served hundreds of people for 8 years! I worked there as therapist for several years. It replicated the same hugely successful results of the NIMH Agnews Project, the gold standard randomly assigned, double blind first episode research, where at 3 year follow up the large cohort of people who got placebo vs those who got Thorazine had a 70 percent lower re-hospitalization rate. Iward was opened as a public sector system diversion program based on the powerful Agnews med-free efficacy results. At the same time, Diabasis House, Jungian John Weir Perry’s San Francisco based program was opened too, based on the Agnew’s results. I did my doctoral follow-up research on Diabasis. Soteria house was also open here in the SF Bay Area then. Loren Mosher’s work there also proved that a non-medication, non pathologizing approach to extreme states works!
  So, as you know I’ve long shared your frustration that mainstream psychiatry has always rejected the facts before their very eyes, that non-medication, humanistic oriented alternative services for people in extreme states can and has been proven to be effective as the Harrow research also proves.
  The big disease model lie that human emotional suffering is caused by a bio-genetic broken brain is what props up psychiatry- and as my latest MIA article shows, that lie is unshakable from within the psychiatric echo-chamber. My article is- “Eyewitness to Psychiatry functioning as a conspiracy theory based cult.”

• Many thanks to all who have commented and expressed your reactions to my article.
  Best wishes,
  Michael Cornwall

• Hi Craig, thank you for your comment! Yes, as I mentioned in my article above, Dr. John Weir Perry shared Jung’s very personal dream work story about Jung’s mother-in-law with me, that Jung had confidentiality shared with John in Zurich in the late 1940’s. Jung had known Perry since the early 1930’s and had written the forward to Perry’s classic 1950 book- “The Self in Psychotic Process.” I did my doctoral research follow-up study on John’s medication-free extreme state sanctuary- Diabasis House, and we were friends for about 20 years. I wonder if Emma’s mother was symbolized in Jung’s recurrent nightmares of a menacing dragon because he knew that she was enraged with Jung for openly having an affair with ex-patient Toni Wolfe while Jung was married to her daughter Emma!

• Hi River, in my experience because everyone has such different needs as they attempt to be a caregiver for people in emotional suffering, I don’t really have advice, but I’ll share a bit of what I’ve needed and still need.
  For me, feeling merciful love for myself without negating that crucial love with toxic guilt and shame for my human failings and limitations, is needed. I also need to risk pursuing deep connection with people who can really love me. I need to reach out to every source of sacred, benevolent, loving and healing energy that I can find to sustain me. I need to closely embrace the terrifying fact that my next breath may be my last. I need to be like a soldier whose paradoxically liberating minute by minute duty is to protect and love me and mine, while facing the fact that my next breath may be my last.

• Thank you Peter, for sharing such a valuable message of heartfelt caring! Reading it brought feelings of reassurance and hope, that it’s possible to begin to relieve the suffering of trauma and alienation we all experience in varying intensity in life, through claiming our right to feel the healing presence of self-love and love for others. You have for decades fought against the incredible harm done by the failed institution of psychiatry and the human rights violations of inflicting ECT, psychosurgery, brain damaging drugs and pathologizing labels on countless people.
  But during all those years of fighting the harm done by psychiatry, you also held out and practiced the alternative vision of caregivers offering empathic and compassionate support for people in emotional pain and suffering.
  Thank you my friend for your tireless commitment to both protecting and loving countless people, as your vocation continues to shine in this article here and now.

• Thank you Rosalee, for your comment and encouraging support!

• Hi Bob,
  What stands out very strongly for me in Zel’s story is him asking you- “how do you think I felt?”… about being diagnosed and drugged- and him saying- “no one ever asked or ever seemed interested in how I really felt” about being sexually abused and traumatized as a child and labeled as schizophrenic- and- “ no one ever asked how I felt about being fed drugs.”
  As a therapist whose primary commitment is always to provide a safe relationship where all such feelings can be expressed and received with compassion, I’ve served many people with very similar histories as Zels for 40 years. It is so tragic that in the last days of his life he still was asking for someone to listen to and receive his feelings, his emotional pain- emotional pain that kept being multiplied by the injurious human rights abuses of psychiatry, but by his own report, emotional pain that never was sufficiently received with compassion.

• Thanks for writing here Scuffed Analyst!

• Thank you All for commenting above.
  Best wishes,
  Michael Cornwall

• I was blessed to know dear Julie through personal phone conversations and correspondence. She was such a truly caring person and champion of human rights. What a loss to us all.

• Bob, I’m glad to be one of the presenters in the upcoming MIA system change webinar. Reading your blog post question about the possibility of remaking psychiatric care, I remembered a conference 7-8 years ago in North Carolina where you spoke after being on the road for months talking about the issues with leading psychiatrists that you raised in your book “Anatomy of an Epidemic.” As I recall, you said you were exhausted and discouraged- that you were possibly reaching the painful conclusion that even the most prominent psychiatrists from some of the most prestigious universities that you’d interacted with, were seemingly not capable of the basic intellectual and ethical honesty necessary to even consider the validity of any serious questioning or challenging of their entrenched belief system.
  I must say, I remember I said to myself as you spoke – “I’m sorry Bob had to spend so much time and energy to discover that god-awful reality!”
  I’m grateful to you and everyone here who struggles for compassionate caring for all who are suffering within and without of the psychiatric system.
  I started my struggle with the psychiatric disease model in the 1970s and at some point realized the only way I could keep it up was to absolutely believe revolutionary change was possible as I’d experienced at Iward, knowing Mosher of Soteria and working with Perry of Diabasis while at the very same time accepting that things would very likely only get worse- but that each day I’d just fight to the best of my ability until they threw dirt in my face.
  In solidarity, Michael

• Thank you Fr. John, for your very informative comment. The FDA press release on the Monarch eTNS device cited in our article also states that the electrical current reaches the part of the brain “associated with ADHD.” I don’t believe there is such an area of the brain, but the FDA confirms that the electrical current is penetrating into the brain. I don’t believe in the validity of DSM diagnoses such as ADHD or in the psychiatric disease model of human emotional and spiritual suffering.
  Dr. Breggin and I share your concern that harm to the developing brains of children won’t be proven until after the damage has been done. However the reported “side effects” to children in the very small, non replicated research study are headache, sleep disturbance, jaw clenching, and fatigue. These effects already point to potential harm being done to the frontal brains of children according to Dr. Breggin.
  I’m reminded of RD Laing warning that-
  “The so-called side effects of psychiatric drugs aren’t side effects. They are the damaging effects!”
  The Monarch eTNS “side effects” should not be downplayed either.

• Great point Jim! It’s an important question you raise about why so many caregivers defensively shield themselves from the emotional pain of those who have turned to them for solace and compassion.
  The fact that such clinical emotional distancing is what caregivers are taught to do in grad school, is also very telling about how the whole profession is built on the rigid belief system that claims that the emotional pain and suffering of “patients” is qualitatively different than the emotional suffering that the clinicians experience in their very human lives. I’ve personally known dozens of mental health professionals during the last 40 years and their pain is the same!

• Thank you for writing April!

• Thank you for your very important comment Jo Ann Cook. I’ll be doing a webinar here on MIA on November 19th, about helping children, teens and parents in distress via counseling, that can empower them to avoid accepting psychiatric diagnoses and to also oppose medications being prescribed for children and teens, as they all resist the pressure you describe by school staff, child psychiatrists and other prescribers.

• Hi 30-watt-lightbulb, thank you for your comment. Dr. Breggin recommended you check out the “Anti-depressant drug scientific resource section” on his Breggin.com website for access to articles on AD drugs and children.
  Best wishes,
  Michael

• Thank you to everyone who commented above and contributed to this discussion.
  I’m glad to see when doing a Google search for Monarch eTNS, that this MIA blog article is on the first, main Google search page. I hope people who are urged by prescribers to put one of these electrical devices on their children’s heads all night long, will see our blog article here on the psychiatric abuses of children, if they search Google for information on the new FDA approved Monarch eTNS device.
  Best wishes,
  Michael

• Thank you Miranda, for this really valuable article! It shows how much the decades of the psychiatric, NAMI and drug company propaganda about the chemical imbalance lie, and that psych drugs are the cure, have influenced the full media spectrum, and all areas of our lives.
  Even Rolling Stone is promoting psychiatric drugs!
  I hope you can get your article to Copper, Cuomo and the editors of the other media outlets too.
  Michael

• Thank you Catalytz for your encouraging words and for the link to the valuable article on brain anatomy and the drawbacks of using imagining scans.

• Thank you for your comment Julie!

• Hi Rachel and Steve- yes it’s cronyism and rampant big business power over government. The FDA Chief Gottlieb had formerly been a partner at a leading venture capital firm, and the HHS Chief Azar, who oversees the FDA had been a pharmaceutical company executive and lobbyist.
  So much for draining the swamp!

• Hi mental, I’ve been active as a human rights activist fighting against the human rights abuses of children and people of all ages inflicted by psychiatry, for over 40 years. To read about my own harrowing lived experience of extreme states, I have an article here on Madinamerica called- “Initiatory Madness.”

• Thank you JeffreyC! I hope your powerful comment is read by many people here.

• Thank you for your strong comment Pauline!

• Thank you mwatkins55 for importantly sharing about your eye opening time as a medical student at an adolescent clinic. I wish I knew of a progressive national parent support organization that is an alternative to the ubiquitous NAMI presence. Maybe a reader here will have and share such information. The public system I worked at in the SF Bay Area had some good parent groups that were helpful and not stigmatizing.

• Thank you Stephen- I think the FDA corruption also has to do with both the FDA Chief Gottlieb, and his superior Azar at HHS were previously pharmaceutical industry executives and lobbyists.

• Thank you Stephen- I think the FDA corruption also has to do with both the FDA Chief Gottlieb, and his superior Azar at HHS were pharmaceutical industry executives and lobbyists.

• Thank you Steve. Good point about the iatrogenic public health crisis. Going to grade school and beyond in the 50’s seems almost idyllic compared to what it’s become the past 30 years, as social and economic stresses have coincided with the rise of psychiatry and DSM pathologizing of childhood and adult behavior. The enormously successful and sinister business plan of the drug companies to supply drugs to every living creature if possible has brought us here now where this electric brain device is approved by the FDA without a moment’s compunction.

• Thank you Rosalee!

• Yes, 30-watt-lightbulb! I often wish the people who come up with and prescribe these harmful “treatments” and medications would have to endure them themselves and see how it feels.

• Very Good point dmshanin83!

• Thank you for writing Ann and telling of your experience as a Special Education teacher.
  Yes, the language in the FDA press release sounds like it’s a promo written by a PR firm.

• Thank you Gerard!

• Thank you for your important comment and the link Someone Else!

• Thank you for weighing in PacificDawn!

• Thank you for your important comment Berta! For sure, revolutionary change in our external society and broader culture is as necessary as is inner healing.

• You’re welcome!

• Hi Ellabelle,
  I think Steve McCrea’s answer about trauma is a good one.
  Yes, I use the term extreme states as it refers to what gets called Psychosis, but I mention that the qualities of emotional, spiritual, soul-depth, archetypal and existential suffering can be active during extreme states too. Many times people in extreme states are experiencing the immense sadness and/or overwhelming anxiety that you mentioned too.

• Thank you Rosalee!

• Hi Alex, in my experience the trauma and emotional wounds from my past that caused the intense suffering of my extreme states over 50 years ago, still vulnerably live deep inside me, and can be activated if I’m not careful to focus on what and who I need and allow in my life, and to also focus on what and who I don’t need and won’t allow in my life.
  That process may be similar to what you’re saying about coming into the present.

• Thank you for your comment CatNight. I was able to always be an outspoken activist while working inside the system for 28 years as a dissident therapist. We had a strong group of us who had our own lived experience of extreme states that constantly fought against psychiatric power and NAMI political power- and we often succeeded in getting peer run services funded. We also got a civil service employee, peer counselor job class enacted in the 1990’s that was fully in the union with full benefits. Many of those original peer staff who were the true leaven that served to really transform the system from the inside out, have now been retiring with a full pension and benefits as new peer staff come on board.

• Thank you for writing Laura, it’s great to hear from you my friend! I’ve read many of the wise and inspiring, essays on healing trauma that you’ve written on your wonderful blog site. Please share a link to your site here if that feels right to you.
  Best wishes,
  Michael

• Hi adikanda, I’m sorry but my initial reply to your comment several hours ago got stuck in moderation because I corrected a typo. I hope it’s posted soon. I very much appreciate what you’ve written above.
  Sincerely, Michael

• Hi adikanda, thank you for writing and raising the question about the section in my article linked above- “Remembering a medication-free madness sanctuary” where I recounted my experiences doing family therapy in 1981 with young adults experiencing extreme states for the first time at the I-Ward sanctuary. I described how I was trying to figure out how the larger toxic social matrix impacts families ala RD Laing, as I talked about how I believed if one parent could bring an unshakable love forward for their struggling young adult, then that could be enough to help them weather the storm into young adulthood. But then I also wrote-

  “Freud said that ‘nothing is more important for the healthy development of a child than the loving and protective presence of their father.’ At least one parent needs to be there and hold the child in their heart as the apple of their eye. Even then, the lack of the other parent’s love can be a big enough wound that the developmental hurdle of young adulthood requires that madness to occur.”

  Your life-long devoted love for your son is very present in your powerful comment above.
  Best wishes,
  Michael

• Hi Cathy- that’s a very important question, thank you. I’ve been with many people years after their period of extreme states who naturally are still traumatized by the often terrifying and demoralizing ordeal they went through. Often then, them focusing on what their emotions are now about their previous intense extreme states and what caused them, and how they were often mistreated when they got “professional treatment”- plus it’s valuable for them to see how their current dreams are providing deeper understanding of possible integration of extreme state trauma, and how even a deep healing in the psyche can emerge.

• Thank you Annette for your very moving sharing. I’m so glad you found what you needed at Open Dialogue to be free! Best of wishes for everyday of your journey forward.
  Michael

• Thank you Marsha- me too!

• Hi rasselas.redux- in the article I briefly describe what I think an extreme state might be- “complex multi-dimensional human emotional, archetypal and spiritual suffering”- That’s based on my own experience of such states and from time spent with people. There’s a link above too to my Diabasis House research where I explore your important question “what is an extreme state” in much more depth. An MIA article called “Responding to madness with loving receptivity- a practical guide” also focuses on how I view extreme states.
  Best wishes,
  Michael

• Thank you again Alex! Good to hear from you as always. Your faith is inspiring. I hope you’re right that light and love are capable of ultimately being more powerful than their polar opposites-
  More powerful for both healing individual people and for stopping the mass destruction movements of war and every kind of planetary destruction that seem to threaten life on earth.
  Best wishes,
  Michael

• Thank you again Krista! I’m very glad you survived the anaphylaxis. I hope many people read your comment that reveals the ethical and legal psychiatric wasteland you challenged. It made me think that the medical oath and credo first principle- “First do no harm” should in truth be- “First protect your license and your deep pockets!”

• Dear Fiachra, I agree. The “system” in place has failed and is injurious instead of helpful.

• Thank you Krista for your encouraging words. I’m glad you escaped the gladiator-school and that bitterness isn’t with you. Best of wishes for the days ahead.
  Michael

• Yes, madmom. To me some days it’s more palpable than others.

• Thank you so much Rosalee!

• Thank you again Bippyone. I think Steve’s suggestion sounds good too. I hope they stop messing with your meds as you say, and that you are released soon. Best of wishes,
  Michael

• You’re welcome Dannytheworld- thanks for reading it and for your comment!

• Thank you kindredspirit for the book on empathy recommendation- it sounds very interesting!

• Thank you for writing Bradford! I agree with your important point about broadening our view about the complex dynamics we’re discussing.

• Thank you for writing JanCarol!
  Come to think of it from what you wrote, maybe when empathy occurs and “the whole person he was sensing” happens- “but there was cruelty not compassion in response,” it sheds light on how multi-functional empathy may actually be for humans. Maybe because the capacity for empathy doesn’t restrict empathy to be limited to only being followed by compassion, there has been even a human evolutionary value to having been able to quite quickly sense where “the whole person” right in front of us “lives inside.” Are they dangerous? Do they come in peace? Are they hiding something?
  Tuning into the full person right in front of us empathically- their emotional micro-expressions, eyes, body language, voice and the meanings being expressed via their uttered words, all are registering and being weighed.
  How we respond to all we empathically learn is not narrowly limited just to compassion.
  Maybe that’s not unfortunate as I said in my article, because at times empathically sensing where a person may “live inside” may give us the knowledge we need to run for cover!

• Thanks for your comment Rosalee! I remember now that I actually wrote an article here on MIA in 2014 that’s titled- “What’s wrong with you? Nothing. What’s happened to you? Something.”

• mik, I’m very sorry your shrink was not there for you in the caring, related and compassionate way that he should have been.

• Thank you Bippyone, and for your important comments below.

• Thank you for your comment Danzig666.

• Thank you again BigPictureAwareness for your wonderful comment. I’m glad you shared about how valuable the Polyvagal Theory can be in understanding and heightening the processs of inner knowing and empathy.

• Hi Judi. Thank you for your powerful comment.
  So many times over the decades I’ve had people describe their initial immersion into the psychiatric disease model gulag and how the deepest core of their naive and innocent selves was veritably transformed. They described a gradual indoctrination into a new form of social and self-identification being systematically created around them in their transformed world as a “mental patient” and also intensley inside them as the almost seamless and inescapable “grooming process” as you say, begins, advances and succeeds.
  I tried to shed some light on this insidious and ritualistic process in my MIA article- “Does the psychiatric disgnosis process act as a degradation ceremony?” Another article focuses there too- “Does a psychiatric diagnosis have the impact of a medical curse?”

• I agree Steve! Thanks for your comment.
  I tried to describe part of the dynamic you’re importantly highlighting when I gave examples of how psychiatric dogma-bound mental health professionals use their empathy skills to get insight into a person’s emotinal experiences, so that they can then diagnose/label and “treat” that person according to the clinician’s distorted psychiatric disease model belief system. In that closed echo chamber trap as you say, the clinician can not have real caring and compassion because treatment compliance is demanded based on the clinicians self-anointed superior status of professional, unquestionable authority to diagnose and insist on drug treatment, or other potentially invasive or forced treatment.

• Hi Rachel777, thanks for your comment!
  Since empathy is defined as “Having the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation,” then feeling empathy can be both the necessary prerequisite for then feeling caring and compassion, but empathy also can be used to tune into another person’s inner experience in order to gain knowledge about them that can be used to manipulate or exploit them without feeling caring or compassion for them.

• Thank you again BigPictureAwareness for your wonderful comment contribution and for the great info on the new Peter Kingsley book on Jung!

• Thank you too Alex! Yes, as you say so importantly, the multiplying, cumulative trauma that’s fueled by the clinician’s own emotion avoidant projections and projective identifications, plus the whole monolithic presence of the psychiatric disease model “treatment” system of denying and silencing emotion with medications- can easily crush the life and spirit of anyone-
  Until they are almost against all odds able to escape the trap.

• Thank you again Alex, for your great comment! I’ve long believed that the whole edifice of the psychiatric disease model of human emotional suffering was and is a massive cultural creation constructed to defend against the truthful emotional expression of individuals of every age in our society. Our culture fears emotional truth so much that we’ve tasked, co-created and funded the psychiatritric disease model to legitimize the control of every citizen’s subjective truth. That control is always exerted in the name of doing what’s best for the “deviating” emotion expressing person in our midst.
  In this light, all those clinical assessments, diagnoses and forced or imposed “treatments” are as you say, fueled by the objectifying projections that places pathology “out there”- residing in the person suffering emotional pain.
  The same unacknoledged unconscious inner fear that prompts a politician to induce fear in others via projective identification, also prompts the diagnosing “mental health” clinician to need to have the emotionally suffering person in front of them to embody the clinician’s fear of their own emotional suffering, so the clinician can safely go on telling themselves that they are beyond ever feeling the emotional pain that they diagnose in others.
  I remember in grad school when a professor defensively responded to me in front of the class after I’d suggested that I believed that any one could end up in an extreme state if a threshold of trauma and loss occurred to them. The professor declared- “Michael, I could never become psychotic no matter what ever happened to me! I have completed a rigorous training analysis and my ego strength is now developed to the point where I’m impervious to ever becoming overwhelmed as you are claiming is possible for anyone!”
  The whole class turned and looked at me, waiting for my answer.
  I said- “ For your sake, I hope that’s true.”

• Thank you for your comment Julie! It’s wonderful to hear about the empathy and patience you have with your customers.
  Best wishes, Michael

• Thanks for your comment BigPicture Awareness! Your great included quotes about perception and reality remind me of one by Orwell- “To see what is in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle.”

• Thank you for writing boans. It does feel to me like the soundtrack to our lives these days is made up of a whole chorus of both manipulative unconscious projective identifications as I noted, plus a constant stream of very conscious and intentionally produced political propaganda aimed our way from every part of the political spectrum imaginable.