1. ABOUT THE HUMAN CONDITION
AND ITS RESOLUTION

 

WTM FAQ 1.34  How does understanding the human race’s condition help with an individual’s depression and psychosis?

 

Full question:

“As someone with treatment-resistant major depressive disorder, I was curious: in what ways do you anticipate these insights will be incorporated into treatment, etc.? Certainly I can imagine that Jeremy Griffith’s message might resonate with some patients with mood disorders that involve undue self-blame, but for those whose conditions are centrally neurochemical/​neurobiological like mine, do you truly see Griffith’s line of thinking as a panacea? Also, comparatively few mentally ill people respond to rational argument in my experience, and I count myself here.”

 

Psychiatrist Dr. Harry Prosen’s response:

While we can expect instances of neurochemical/neurobiological based conditions, in my experience we can’t underestimate how much our psychology affects our biology.

What Griffith is presenting is understanding of the source insecurity that the whole human race suffers from for having destroyed our species’ innocent soul. It is a universal self-blame that his understanding at last provides healing insight into. All human behavior is saturated with that universal insecure, depressing state and resulting anger, egocentricity and alienation that has developed from it, but we finally have the compassionate foundation insight needed to dismantle all that ‘upset’/​psychosis. So the real psychotherapy of our collective and individual psychoses can begin.

I agree mentally ill patients don’t easily respond to rational argument. The nature of their ability to survive trauma and self-blame has been to establish a disconnect between their conscious rational mind and their repressed subconscious emotional distressed state. So that disconnect or denial isn’t easily eroded, but the beauty of Griffith’s treatise is that the healing starts at the macro level of the universal human condition; the healing of the shame and blame that the whole human race has suffered from, which is non-personal and thus more easily confronted, absorbed and accepted. It brings the greater context and love to all human psychosis and suffering, and then, from under the umbrella of that safe position, everyone can gradually work inwards to their particular experience of all the imperfections in human life that have now, finally, been made sense of.

 

Please also see FAQ 1.35 because it has further valuable discussion about understanding the human condition and mental illness.

Jeremy Griffith is currently writing a book titled Therapy For The Human Condition. Since the WTM mentioned the development of this book so many people have been asking for it that we decided to make the book’s early chapters available on our website, as they are virtually completed. As more of the book is written, more will be added to the website.

You can also read more about the real therapy of the human condition that now becomes possible in Freedom Essay 64.