We have a lot of challenges in the modern world. Epidemics, crises, problems at home and at work, self isolation etc. cause a lot of people to stress out and struggle from mental issues and diseases. With that struggle people seek for a relief and a way to stay active and happy in that complicated environment even with all these challenges which drop on their head.
While the desire is completely reasonable and positive the way how people approach their mental problems is often beyond reasonable. Big number of people take medications, smoke a pot or drink alcohol. While these ways help to reduce problems in a short run they basically just hide symptoms and make people more unhappy in a longer run.
To understand why that happens let’s look into the mechanism of mental disease. It starts with some traumatic event: whether it’s a stressful situation or a problem which needs resolution. Each such event creates a neurological charge in a brain responsible to resolve the situation. The charge forms itself and then starts to form links with other mental blocks in a brain like memory and thinking. In this way when the person is doing something they automatically get reflection from those links and get reminded that they have an issue they need to resolve.
Now what happens when the person drinks alcohol or takes medications? Basically these links in brain are temporarily muted. They don’t go away on a long run but the person can forget for a short time about their problems and get a temporary relief. What is the problem with that approach? First of all, it’s not permanent. To keep it effective a person needs to take it for a lifetime. Secondly, they affect other brain links, not necessarily connected with the original issue. That can make a person ‘asleep’, for example when making important decisions in their life. Third effect is a dependency. Now a person can start to fear to withdraw because the problems will definitely return. That fear makes a person return to a drug each time and even take bigger doses. Lastly, and probably the most destructive from all of those, is a presence of serious side effects which can destruct human body.
What is the better way to treat the mental disease? In fact, if comparing it to medications and drugs it’s quite the opposite. Instead of taking shortcuts to take the full trip to problem resolution. It can take a few days or even weeks but the effect will be permanent. There are a few components of successful resolution from psychological perspective:
- Understand that there is a problem
- Understand the nature of the problem
- If problem can be resolved – find a way how to do it
- If problem can’t be resolved – accept it
Brain will only discharge when the problem is reviewed and a solution is made about it. Sure it can take some time to get to it but comparing it to permanent time required for medications and their side effects it seems like a walk in the park, right?
Anyway I wanted to also present a few links to show the picture from academical point of view. For example:
- Anxiety – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear#Management. It says “Cognitive behavioral therapy has been successful in helping people overcome their fear.” and “Exposure therapy has known to have helped up to 90% of people with specific phobias to significantly decrease their fear over time”. 90% – not bad right?
- Insomnia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insomnia#Management It says “Non medication based strategies provide long lasting improvements to insomnia and are recommended as a first line and long-term strategy of management”
- In the same article “Insomnia” you can read that for example benzodiazepines “have demonstrated effectiveness in sleep maintenance in the short term but in the longer term benzodiazepines can lead to tolerance, physical dependence, benzodiazepine withdrawal syndrome upon discontinuation, and long-term worsening of sleep, especially after consistent usage over long periods of time”
As you can see the non-medication psychological techniques can be very effective and can serve a really great deal in managing of many kinds of mental diseases.
