Psychosophia

[YayaC]

Hello
Some of you may know me or remember me as I used to frequent this forum a long time ago. I still come by from time to time to share a bit from my life and check in.

Today I want to share with you something I’ve been working on.

Throughout my life I’ve been interested in becoming a therapist, it was never a main goal for me but something that I thought I’d probably be good at. After my diagnosis I became even more interested in this and went to study it here in Israel.

While studying, and after being for several years in therapy myself, I found the methods and techniques used to treat mental illness through therapy lacking.

It took me a while, a few years of thinking it through and trying different things to arrive at the conclusion that the type of therapy I was interested in was in fact philosophical therapy.

I started writing and thinking about it and arrived to the conclusion that throughout my battle with mental illness what I needed most was someone to talk to me philosophically about life, about how my life has changed since the diagnosis and since the first episode, what new kinds of ideas and worldviews I had since experiencing the highs and lows of something like manic depression and how to build my life philosophy again after my world being shaken by the illness.

As I said I did spend several years in psychological therapy myself and found it mostly boring and uninteresting. I found no interest in talking about my childhood or my family as I felt that wasn’t the issue at hand. I felt much more interested in talking about things like how to get over the thought that the world is ending, or what to think of myself after realizing I was not the messiah, or how to find a job after realizing nothing had any meaning - philosophical questions about life at the extremes. I did not find any professional equipped or trained to deal with these questions.

After studying philosophy for a while I realized I could probably treat people using this method of looking for the philosophical questions in the patient and trying to find philosophical answers to them. It is a bit like giving life advice but I guess, you could say, in a professional, semi-academic way.

So I had the opportunity to start a group therapy session at a local rehabilitation home not far from where I live. I took the opportunity and started hosting the group as a part philosophical part self-help group.

And it’s going really well.

I would love if any of you would like to hear more about this, or maybe say what you think just about my journey towards this goal.

Maybe just to elaborate a bit, during the group we raise philosophical questions and try to find satisfying questions within the group. The subjects so far have included ‘identity and identity crisis’, ‘violence and its role in mental illness and in life’, ‘what to look for in a rehabilitation environment’, ‘psychosis and creative thoughts’ and a few more.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Best Regards,

[anon84461028]

Sounds like something I would definitely attend. Although those topics seem kind of practically oriented which seems like a bureaucrat played a role in developing the program.

In my own experience philosophy helped me develop cognitively and overcame different problems. One is social isolation, and I found the writing of Ayn Rand helpful, mainly Anthem, in developing a strong ‘ego’. Another philisophical area is direct and indirect realism with schizophrenia being a problem for direct realists. That’s a hard topic to get practically oriented, although working on fostering direct realism might help szs I’m not sure. Another area is thinking life is absurd, so the writing of Camus plays into that, and I have said his writing helps turn existential crisis into a cognitive issue rather than an emotional one, although I don’t know how good the writing is. Another area is the problem with philosophy in sz, namely the introversion and socially withdrawn quality it causes in people, so maybe a topic could be how to address that tendency. I used to be really interest in Foucault and I have forgotten a lot of what I read about him, but I always found the panopticon interesting especially how it relates towards its effects on the individual, and maybe causes paranoia. Thats whats off the top of my head but there are other topics.

[YayaC]

Sounds like you too find interest as well as comfort in philosophy.

For me the way to recovery was definitely a philosophical journey.