The field of psychiatry, at least historically, has attempted to reduce the vast and colorful expressions of human experience to the binary categories of illness and health. What if it were more complex than that? As a physiologist-turned-therapist-in-training, I take a lesson from our immune system in the way that I approach diagnosis.
When a virus invades our bodies and we get sick, we often forget that the symptoms we are experiencing- headache, sore throat, upset stomach – are the product of our immune system fighting the pathogen and healing the body.
At IPI we teach that the mind-body-spirit is a whole and interconnected network that inherently carries all the tools to support wellness. Like the immune system, the psyche wants to heal and does its best to protect and safeguard the vulnerable parts of self. For example, “getting sick” or “having an illness” requires our own activated immune cells to stimulate an inflammatory response. In a similar way, might the symptoms we call “mental illness” be the result of mind-body-spirit doing its best to work through transformative change?
When I think about labels like “mental illness,” I find myself questioning the disease model, the traditional medical model. While I do believe it can be helpful to have a name for what we are dealing with, I also wonder whether or not we might find compassion for the “illness.” What might be evolutionarily (or socially, or personally) adaptable about certain symptoms or behaviors, given the complex genetic, family history, and life experience that each of us embodies?
One hypothesis, for example, is that depressive symptoms might have been adaptive across cycles of seasons and hunting/foraging during the Paleolithic era of human history. Depressive symptoms may have supported a period of withdrawal, rest, rejuvenation. Rumination would have been useful for reflection and planning new strategies between the community’s next pursuit. Perhaps this same evolutionary system gets activated during a period of helplessness, disconnection, and disengagement in the modern world.
But the stress of the modern world doesn’t cycle like seasons; in fact it seems to keep accelerating. Our stress systems don’t get a chance to cycle off unless we force ourselves out of the overstimulating assault on our attention and power. Some questions to pose: how might depressive symptoms be trying to serve someone, when assessed with a particular person’s life history? What are they signaling, what is their function? Similar to parts work, I’m curious about the symptoms’ roles in safety, protection, and survival.
Sometimes, we know exactly when and where we acquired a pathogen, just like when we can link a traumatic event to our suffering. However, in other forms of trauma, it can be difficult to pinpoint the exact moment, and perhaps we’ve been worn down through a number of contextual factors,as in chronic stress. When our immune cells trigger inflammation, the process of “feeling ill” may be painful. Emotional “illness” is just as painful.
In some cases, healthy, necessary acute inflammation doesn’t subside and actually causes further damage (as we saw with COVID-19 hospitalizations as well as long COVID); similarly our psychospiritual defenses may not always resolve in a direction toward health. It is possible that our attempts to heal, both physically and psychologically, get us stuck in a sort of chronic condition. When the body-mind-spirit’s response to insult (as with the immune dysfunction of long COVID) creates more imbalance, intervention may become necessary to support the system to restore balance.
Trusting that our deeper selves are wired for wellbeing instills compassion for self and others, and empowers the body-mind-spirit in contrast to the conventional model of mental illness. In psychedelic-assisted therapy, the concept of innate wisdom of the self has been called the “inner healing intelligence.” Cultivating a deep connection with the inner healer, often more accessible during a psychedelic-assisted therapy session, can play a major role in building the foundation of a vibrant, meaningful life. Integration of mind-body-spirit parts can help open up the channels to the inner healing intelligence.
I like to orient toward the internal trust that our networks of mind-body-spirit are doing the best that they can – given genetics, development, and lifestyle – to support themselves through struggle or overcoming trauma. Using this framework, perhaps “illness” may be redefined as the mind-body-spirit’s innate attempt to seek wholeness in response to an unsupportive environment. (I’ll take a note here to point out that a lot could be said about this from a social justice standpoint, such as social disparities in access to resources, discrimination, and stigma–but that’s for another blog). If we view the self as innately adaptive, flexible, and whole , then we can understand how trauma and diagnostic symptoms may be seen as self-preservation mechanisms that somehow forgot to switch off.
