DIY Therapy, lifetime fitness, Mindfulness at work, diy therapy

This post is still being added to and edited. If you have any suggestions, or if anything is missing or unclear, please leave a comment below. Thanks.

DIY Therapy is a do-it-yourself approach to mental health and emotional wellbeing.

One of the central ideas driving my blog is the notion of DIY Therapy. We should be reclaiming responsibility for our mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing by doing more for ourselves, not assuming that the health care system will do it for us.

We seem to have forgotten that for most of our history the human race has had to sort out its problems without the current systems and mental health apparatus. The history of the mental health business is a fascinating one (see Ellenberger, below, if you want to know more), and it has made great strides in understanding and treating mental illness, but not all psychological distress is ‘mental illness’ (and not much of it is ‘illness’ at all, in the sense that it can be treated like one).

Perturbed and disturbed

There is a whole range of things that disturb people and interfere with their quality of life, productivity, wellbeing, happiness, or whatever. Sometimes these are caused by challenging or tragic life events, sometimes they are of a more existential or spiritual nature.

A broken leg requires particular treatments (fix the leg, manage the pain), is it right that we treat a broken spirit in the same way?

Inevitably, we all encounter the trials and challenges of life, where an event or set of circumstances can temporarily knock us back in some way. Perhaps we become depressed or anxious, perhaps it is something less tangible like a pervasive sense of worry or the feeling that something is missing. These are just examples, there are many aspects to this and the list of life events that people can struggle with is a long one.

Because of the way our thinking has been shaped about anything we see as having mental or psychological origins, when distress occurs we seem unwilling or even afraid to accept and work through it. We either suffer in silence or, if we seek help we scuttle off to the doctor (who knows less about us than we know about ourselves), in the hope of a remedy.

Seeking expert help is a sensible step, but it may not be the most approriate one. Because of the way society has taught us to think about the common emotional and psychological diffiulties (by classifing them as ‘mental health issues’, for example). it’s easy to forget out natural resources.

From the DIY Therapy persepective we have all we need to deal the common problems of life. One of the ideas driving my blog is that the over-psychologising of life leads to a state of helplessness with regard to our psychological and emotional wellbeing.

Medical models

Since its inception around a century ago the psychology industry has played the role of breathless handmaiden to the medical profession. Matters of the mind have been medicalised and psychologists (to include therapists like counsellors and psychotherapists), have increasingly emulated the medical model and sought its recognition, in some places even seeking permission to issue prescriptions for medication.

Understanding how we behave and how we function psychologically has therefore been seen as the domain of specialists. This has led to a burgeoning mental health industry with associated sub-specialisations, both in the classification of emotional and psychological distress, and in its treatment.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (also known as DSM-5), a manual published by the American Psychiatric Association lists over 300 “currently recognised mental health disorders”. As for treatment, it is widely reported that there are over 400 approaches to psychological therapy (200 in the UK). All these figures seem set to grow.

Meanwhile, in keeping with this, the rest of us have come to believe that, if we are troubled, we must seek a medical or quasi-medical route out of our problems. This reaches tragic proportions when normal reactions to the business of living are classified – and therefore treated – as illnesses (see DSM-5).

Organisations like MIND in the UK and others elsewhere work valiantly to tackle society’s stigma and unhelpful attitudes towards mental illness, but they won’t do it alone. We must remember that we are society, so it is our attitudes and beliefs they are talking about (of course, not yours or mine, we are OK, aren’t we?).

Back to the idea

One of the ideas driving this blog is that the over-psychologising of life leads to a state of helplessness with regard to out own psychological and emotional wellbeing. There is no doubt that mental illness exists and that in such cases the mental health professions do a brilliant job (though they are increasingly stretched and can’t cope for much longer). But ‘mental health’ covers a wide spectrum, and while at one extreme medical treatment may be necessary, from the other end of the spectrum, and for a large part of it, there is much we can do for ourselves.

So the idea behind DIY Therapy is that we reclaim our psychological and spiritual wellbeing. To do this we normalise much of what has been seen as ‘mental health issues’, accepting that unhappiness and its derivatives are part of life, and relearn the tolerance and skills that will help us through them.