Monday, February 8, 2010

Psychiatric home remedies

From The Master of Lucid Dreams, a psychiatrist's introduction into the ancient shamanic practices of Uzbekistan.

There is only one experience in daily life that unites action and perception, past and present in the same way as lucid dreams do. It is the experience of orgasm. Its unity can be also used for healing the memory demons but it is not our way of practice.


The orgasm kind of healing cure doesn't need a partner and can be done in the privacy of your own home. Some would say you don't need a psychiatrist, you just need a good lay or a spare hand.

Dr. Wilhelm Reich constructed something he called an orgone energy accumulator in 1940. This was based on the work he had done with Freud's theory that traumatic events block the natural flow of energy in the body, leading to neurosis and other illnesses. The orgone accumulator involves putative (non-measurable) energy (biofields or chi). Reich was found to be in violation of the United States Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act and ordered to destroy all the machines and references to these machines. In 1956 he was found guilty of violating interstate commerce laws and jailed. He died in jail the next year. Flat earth people of the world unite!

Today, you can order orgone accumulator building kits and have them shipped anywhere you like. I understand that they are used in hospital settings. They are slowly gaining acceptance in the world of complementary and alternative medicine. Authors William Burroughs and J.D. Salinger would sit for days in one (although presumably not together). The actor Orson Bean, of all people, wrote a book Me and the Orgone about his experience with orgone therapy. He claimed that orgone therapy fixed what ten years of psychoanalysis had been unable to achieve. Wiki call the book "a strongly personal account of a man who gets a second chance at a personal sexual revolution, feeling his body beginning to change, feeling freer and more alive, and also seeing his relationships transformed."

So, it seems to me a rather simple way to get rid of the demons of trauma while embracing who you are is to get laid, masturbate, sit in an ozone machine and/or embrace your lucid dreams. These ideas are generated and being acted upon by consumers, not psychiatrists, who are finding their own solutions to mental and physical health.

4 comments:

  1. It strikes me that I've heard quite a few - taken the privacy of the matter into account, at least - people tell about a, to them, mysterious increase in libido during crisis. And, uhm, to be honest, I know all about it, me too. An increased libido, by the way, is also a symptom of a Kundalini awakening.

    And isn't it thought-provoking that one of the numerous "side" effects of psych drugs is that they decrease libido, more often than not to zero. Talking about that these drugs suppress trauma release.

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  2. By the way, thanks for orginally recommending the book. It strikes me as totally odd that psychiatrists aren't encouraging lucid dreaming. And, wouldn't a lot of us be better off if sex therapy was more widely available? It is hard to attract the sexual attention of the opposite sex when one is psychotic, but it seems to me a good orgasm would fix a lot of people.

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  3. Sex therapy, or bodywork in general. The other day, I listened to Will Hall's talk "Trauma And The Body", and it sort of opened my eyes to what I've all the time felt was missing, looking back at my own therapy-experience, that wasn't entirely CBT, as in cognitive..., but widely so. All that I've achieved concerning body awareness, and resolving tension and blocks in my body, was left to coincidences, and my own intuition. No help with that part of it from common talk therapy - probably least of all from the cognitive kind. I wish, therapists would at least mention the importance of the body in trauma, even if they themselves aren't/don't feel competent to work with that.

    On this chart it says that chronic pain is a symptom of un-discharged traumatic stress. A lot of the people I know with a "schizophrenia" label also suffer from chronic pain, often in the shape of arthritis. Back in 2003, right before my last crisis, I was no longer able to bend in my right knee due to arthritis. Right now, I sit here cross-legged in front of the screen. I haven't experienced any pain or stiffness for one and a half year now. And I don't take any drugs. I've only one explanation... But I think, most people would say it's a coincidence, or that it was misdiagnozed. Like they usually say, you're just in remission, or you were simply misdiagnozed when you've recovered fully from "schizophrenia".

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  4. You are right. Body work is a neglected part of therapy. I noticed early on that Chris's body was becoming more and more awkward, almost mechanical in some respects. Yet, therapy doesn't address this. The Assemblage Point shift that I have written about reminds me of the chart you linked to. Low center of energy, depression, high center of energy mania, hyper-activity, etc. Most of the therapies that I am foisting on Chris are aimed at getting the body/mind intergrated. I have to do this outside of psychiatry, which doesn't seem to "get" it and if often actively hostile to it.

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