Only One Boat –
Oct. 12, 2019 – As Fromm says, it is to the very nature of a society we must look when seeking to understand the sources of mental illness or health. For ultimately, as humans, we are biopyschosocial creates, a fancy word that simply means our biology—including the biology of our brains—is inseparable from our psychological processes or from the social environment throughout the lifetime.
The dynamic nature of what we call mental illness also means that healing is possible— it is the same dynamic moving in the other direction, from fragmented to whole. Healing is not the same as pharmacologically suppressing symptoms. Medications may have a role, as I can both professionally and personally testify, but they are not the answer because they do not address the fundamental trauma of disconnection from the self and from safe and nurturing social affiliations—the disconnection at the core of all psycho-emotional distress and symptomatology. The best case would be that medications allow those who need them the space to do this deeper work.
