Emotional Self-Management: The Art of Tranquility in the 21st Century

'Just think differently and you'll get better,' preaches the COGNITIVE therapy movement. These therapies don't work long-term and here's WHY: Cognitive therapies follow a physical DISEASE treatment design imposed by these medical steps: (1.) track down the cause of the pain or upset, (2.) eliminate its source, either through surgery or drugs. Physical medicine treats each pain or upset with the procedure of elimination. Physical medicine follows the practice that a diseased gall bladder requires surgery and beriberi requires vitamin therapy. The ultimate aim is to eliminate the diseased item -- the diseased gall bladder or the beriberi condition. Mental health, however, is not a diseased gall bladder nor the malady beriberi. Therefore, mental health treatment cannot be approached as a physical medicine issue. Eliminating the source of one's mental upset, in the manner of disease treatment, would require one to get rid, literally, of one's functioning mentality. How can that be achieved? It can't, and herein lies the flaw in the mental health industry's treatment approach: Drugs decommission the insistent, demanding 'thought-voices' (negative directives) of the patient. But these same drugs create their own illness -- TARDIVE DEMENTIA. The inadequacy of shock therapy and drugs therapy has been well documented by Peter Breggin, MD, in Toxic Psychiatry published in 1991 by St. Martin's Press. Breggin is not the only clinician to speak out about the brain damage which drugs and shock therapy cause. John Friedberg's book, Shock Treatment is Not Good For Your Brain, published in 1976, was the basis for Breggin's work. Both MDs agree that drugs and shock do modify the patient's behavior. But this modification is short-lived and acquired at great personal cost to the patient. The long-term solution to mental health problems is not drugs, nor is it the 'search and destroy' design of COGNITIVE medical-model therapy.