One cause of our mental woes?

It's the last post in a week of #MentalHealthAwareness-related Daily Reminders, and I'm going to conclude it with a very short video that I think summarises the Innate Health approach to mental health & wellbeing.

Now the video that follows should perhaps come with some sort of advisory rating (how about ‘EG’ for Existential Guidance)?

😂

Because if you’ve had psychology training or a medical education like I did, or you’ve maybe just gone through life not ever really questioning the authoritative proclamations of the medical profession, the pharmaceutical industry, the media and most people you’ve ever met (because, why the hell would you?!) then it might come across as a bit bonkers. Or weird. Or heretical. Or insensitive.

(A bit like the rest of this week's posts, eh? 😉)

But I want you to slow down properly (it is Sunday, after all), literally forget everything you think you know about mental health and mental illness and watch it with a quiet, open mind:

So, in the spirit of genuine, consciousness-expanding inquiry, I’m going to paraphrase the question again, until you answer it, for yourself at least:

If people did not believe any of their thoughts 📦 in any given moment (and so did not act upon them), could mental ‘illness’ exist?

Put your own thinking to one side for a moment and just rest with that proposition. Could the answer be staring us straight in the face?

And lest you think this is just me going off on one, the mention of “Factor P” in the video is in reference to landmark paper from the American Journal of Psychiatry, called All for One and One for All: Mental Disorders in One Dimension, in which the authors relate their statistical discovery of a single, unifying factor for all psychiatric diagnoses that were observed in a five-decade study of a population-representative birth cohort of 1,000 people, which tracked pretty much every aspect of their lives for 50 years!

It's a fascinating, eye-opening read, and some colleagues of mine drew the obvious link to the 3 Principles (in similar terms to the video above), in a separate commentary paper.

For the curious, I'll link to both of these, below (these links take you straight to the online PDF versions):

Wrap up

Now, because I know that you're busy people who probably don't want to be reading academic papers, I have put together a ‘Topic Deep Dive’ video mini-masterclass on mental health that pulls together all of this week's Daily Reminders and gives you:

• A plain-English tour of the standard ‘medical model’ of mental healthcare (Biological-Psychological-Social) and why, for all its clinical utility, it keeps us trapped, focusing on symptoms, rather than causes
• An explanation of Caspi & Moffitt's landmark journal paper “All for One and One for All: Mental Disorders in One Dimension” - and the profound implications of a single general factor underpinning all mental illness
• A look at the thoughtful ‘Inside-Out’ focused commentary piece on the article, from 3 Principles teachers Tom Kelley, Dr Bill Pettit, Jack Pransky & Dr Judy Sedgeman, that takes these scientific findings one step further
• What the Innate Health understanding has to say about the root cause of all psychological suffering
• Why the answer lies in simplicity, not ever-increasing complexity… and what that means for mental healthcare in practice
• Loads more!

All this week's clips have been lifted from it and it's all done in the usual Giles Ego Construct 📦 style: lighthearted and plain-speaking, with a smattering of helpful readings, funny bits and geeky video overlays (I love putting these things together for you).

So if you're interested in mental health, for your own sake, or because you have loved ones, clients or patients with mental health issues, then this is an informative, relaxing, perspective-shifting 40 minutes you'll be glad you spent.

It's in the store now, on the link below – when you've watched it, drop me a line and let me know what you make of it!

💝

Giles

• What actually is ‘Mental Health’?
• Are we looking in the wrong direction?
• Looking upstream, to simplicity and root causes 📽️
• The role of biology in mental health
• A new definition for mental health 📽️
• What about mental health diagnoses?

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