Wednesday, June 20, 2007

The Importance of Deep Witness And Self Witness : Birmingham And Solhull Mental Health Trust



UserWatch and those who circle around it, and contribute to it, has included a film here from YouTube - We certainly hope it lasts for a time on YouTube . It makes good points within its choice of a sense-fracturing style. Its the film story of a young lady "fashionite" and fashion model who came through 60's and was abused by others , and it uses many film and sound techniques to weld together a sense of some personal completion in her. The value of it feels to be the honest and joined up self echoes and that is the way it reaches into all of us ..Its good art we think .

One might say for a generation of some people who can use it to self reflect that it is a kind of personal and social therapy of witness-self-witness.

We have honestly not seen very much depth to therapy practiced in Birmingham And Solihull Mental Health Trust Arena's. A few patches exist. For the main part we have heard more of practioners locally and in the NHS missing the way to resolve the very large imprinted damages in many Service Users .. And those imprinted damages go back for generations in some of them . But the avoidance of emotional damage and the "emotional historic self" in the way services treat Service Users is a wide strategy .

Talking to a number of Black Service Users and being with them and feeling into their family lives and backgrounds, UserWatch discovers abusive family patterns all the time. Cases of rape of trauma . No its not a drum to bang on, it's just a hard bullet in the face or soul-fact for many .

For the main it lies un-discussed or if discussed in the NHS not resolved, or given a place of a few years of grief-hearing...That would cost money .. Better to spend it on new elements of bureaucracy rather than improve the depth and reach and community acceptance of many that are seriously damaged by culture and family practices . Be damaged and shut up .

So instead the Services help to cover up - de-historicalise patterns - tinker with the fractured feeling and remaining thinker...And see the broken "Feeling Self" as something to suppress rather than hear out into deep feeling witness...

No wonder mental health systems are so loopy and rotational to some of their repeatedly admitted clientele who can barely navigate themselves . No-one is helping them navigate and we doubt most of the quality of the so called practitioners of "therapy" out there .

We agree with New Zealand Psychiatrist John Read's wide assessment of studies into psychosis and his pointing to the causes in a substantial percentage of psychosis that people as adults are the manifestations of fractured and often crazing ill treatment or very bad "care" patterns. Psychosis is an understandable reflexive and defensive outcome in some traumatised people . And we would add some of these patterns of abusive treaments are just culturally passed down as unconsciously bad (without reflective thought or feeling) ways to rear people ..

We also think forms of therapy, which include cogntive elements, but are not solely based around the more superficial Cognitive Behavioural Therapy CBT applications which are being popularised in the UK for cheapness, can be helpful ..

But put poetically, if you were to play the "unmade film" of many Service User's and even show it to them - they would take years to recover from themselves . Years to finally glue themselves together after deep self witness and assisted grief and crying .. ... Now that is equivalent to a deep human authentic therapy effectively, and that is not that available in Birmingham and Solhull Mental Health Trust . Why ?

A complex answer boils down to the National Health Service character and those who run it who in the main can cope by ordinary suppression of feelings and personal pain . The big mistake in the NHS's own mass projections on patients is that over-suppresive feature of our own UK culture is also embedded. Thus we have not developed a deepening culture, and it manifests in a lack of deep therapies for people too. Its hinges too in the NHS economy on the belief that it's cheaper and also better to chemically ice and cognitively tinker about alone...

Well that may well be helpful in the short term, but in the long term the cost is massive because it does not support the echoing damaged real self that is always waiting to be heard and given its place of grief underneath massive fractures and distortions of memory, feelings, and consciousness .


SEE ALSO THE FILM OF: THE HIGHCROFT LIFEBOOK PROJECT



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