Of Buddhist Retreats and Psychiatric Wards

With respect to Buddhist retreats and psychiatric wards, a few people who attend such retreats might consider them to be similar to psychiatric wards in jest. For humor is the best way to get over the fact that we are born mad and that a Buddhist retreat will cure such madness.

For such madness cannot be cured by medication or by incarceration in a psychiatric ward, but by learning meditation.

In essence, such madness is considered normal in Western society. I think they call it consumerism, and in its extreme, people end up not only packing on the pounds but also stuffing their homes full of knick-knacks only useful in making a homey maze.

However, Buddhism is a toolkit for escaping into reality from the madness called Monkey Mind which all people develop in response to the distractions of their ignorant experience with reality, of which consumerism is a symptom.

What you and I think is reality is merely a consensual pseudo-hallucination.

We can never experience true reality directly because it has been known to leave some people mad, ready to do violence to themselves and others out of fear of the consensual madness we confuse for reality.

Yet the trauma of a child's life adds to this reality's misery leading to mental disorder and other issues. That we deprive a child of useful coping mechanisms is atrocious. Buddhism could provide a very effective coping mechanism, yet the anti-religion police have deemed Buddhism a religion and have borrowed meditation to be used by the willing without the religious trappings.

Sometimes they appears that they teach a form of meditation to the people in the psychiatric wards with medication enhancing the meditative part immensely. All any patient actually needs is a sound therapeutic instructions to help with recovery.

Thus is a psychiatric ward considered a psychiatric retreat for people who have been scarred by their childhood traumas. All we need is to provide a text on psychology to help people recovering from their childhood traumas understand how their mind works.

I've yet to see this happen in a psychiatric ward. Rather than therapy, a psychiatric ward depends on order and the medically expedient way to maintain that order is through sedation. For it seems as though the majority pf patients find a psychology text to be useless in preventing their madness from returning.

I disagree: the majority of patients tend to develop insomnia due to anxiety arising from fear. Insomnia leads to hypomania, which is useful in its overall productivity but once it morphs into mania, it's of no use at all. Once a person enters the psychotic state, there's no use in waking him up to reality, because his psychotic state of mind has built a useful substitute called "psychosis".

In no way does a text on psychology describe this path to madness. Instead, we're told that adequate rest is important to maintain healthy sleep. Yet the chain from fear to psychosis can be easily broken by administering a sedative to promote sleep. However, a few psychotic people fear sedatives because of the manic delusion that they are sane and an underlying fear that adequate rest would ruin their substitute for reality.

Yet few sane people are able to tolerate being awake for 24 hours because of the auditory and rarely the visual hallucinations attendant to sleep deprivations.

Meditation helps in this case, because it provides a way of using the hallucinations to benefit the psychotic. In Vajrayana Buddhism, there are divinities known as wrathful deities. They may represent a person's negative emotions such as anger, desire, fear, lust, and passion. Whatever their description is, it implies that a person who hears of it choose the harmless way of managing it as described in the Buddhist text.

I propose that the visions and voices a psychotic sees are actually his negative emotions, and are quite harmless. Indeed, the most expedient method of handling these hallucinations is to satisfy them by neutralizing them with their opposites while the mindful practice of loving-kindness.

In the rare case where psychosis is comorbid with psychopathic violence, strong sedatives may be recommended because of risk of harm.

Overall, the use of Buddhist psychology in Buddhist retreats would benefit its participants. However, meditation would only be of limited use in out-patient clinic since Western psychology mistakes certain behavioral aspects of Buddhist meditation to be abnormal due to the limits that Western psychology places on the mind i.e. the incomplete bio-chemical model of the human mind.

For the current Western medical model of the mind is inadequate to help Buddhists with their underlying psychological conditions which is more easily explained by Buddhist psychology.

Indeed, when the social model of the human mind is combined with the bio-chemical, this complete model of the mind is best explored with the tool of Buddhist psychology, meditation.

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Originally published: November 1, 2007 1525H
Update posted: February 26, 2013 0943H

Reference:
Welcome to the Vipassana Sanitarium: http://welldoneprocrastinator.blogspot.ca/p/welcome-to-vipassana-sanitarium.html