My first encounter with western psychiatry started in Ireland, thirteen years ago, when I came from India. It was the ‘advanced’ psychiatric training in this part of the world that attracted me to coming here. However, within a few months of starting my training, I realised that what I was learning was the de-humanisation of ill people.

There appeared to be a lack of hope in the psychiatric services, among both the consumers and the providers of the services. In the name of ‘professionalism’, patients were categorised under labels and treated with medication with a ‘take it or leave it’ attitude.

There are methods available to treat mental conditions that do not involve medication.I believe that such methods provide a more humane and natural way of treating mental illness, free of unpleasant or often toxic side effects. However, the psychiatric establishment has been unwilling to explore seriously any treatment that does not rely on drugs. It prompts me to ask whether psychiatry has got it wrong.

A New Practice

Twelve years ago, in 1993, I worked briefly with Professor Ivor Browne, as his junior, in St. Brendan’s Hospital, Dublin. Ivor had the reputation of being a genius on the one hand and an eccentric on the other. He worked with victims of sex and emotional abuse at that time, using breath work and hypnosis.

It became apparent to me then, that there was more to psychiatry than medication. So I decided to learn hypnosis, even though it was a field of which psychiatrists in Ireland were scared. I did an advanced programme in hypnosis with a well-known school in Cork, under a non-medical person. This was the best training in hypnosis then available in Ireland.

By the time had I finished my training in hypnosis, it was obvious to me that hypnosis and meditation could help to alleviate the sufferings of psychiatric consumers. So I decided to set up my own practice with the intention of using hypnosis and meditation, along with my medical background, to help mentally ill clients.

As I had earned a Diploma in Psychological Medicine from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, I decided to set up my practice in Dublin. That was ten years ago.

I was in a strange situation. I did not register with the Medical Council, so I could not practice as a prescribing psychiatrist. Yet I had post-graduate qualifications in psychiatry. I was not a psychologist because I did not have qualifications in psychology. But I did have the skills to practice psychotherapy. I therefore decided to make the best of what I had.

I began to explore the mechanisms of breath work, meditation and hypnosis. I very soon realised that the psychiatrists and neuro-scientists were overlooking a simple physiological phenomenon.

Nature’s Way

In the human body, the hormonal system works on a feedback basis. This means that if one hormone increases in the blood, another hormone will stop it from being secreted further. This is also true of neurotransmitters, the disturbance of which is believed to cause psychiatric conditions. (I call them ‘conditions’ because most of them are temporary and reversible, contrary to current beliefs in psychiatry).

Most western psychiatrists believe that the only way the disturbances in such systems can be corrected is by giving drugs to patients. They believe that psychotherapy can help only to a limited extent, to support people on drug treatment. But few have dared to ask how and why psychotherapy should be so limited, or if its effectiveness could be extended. Psychiatrists insist that they are a scientific profession, yet in failing to explore psychotherapy in a scientific way, they are failing as scientists.

My own logic, however, was simple. Nature operates on the simple principle that each problem contains its own solution. The hormonal feedback system, mentioned above, is an example of this. The principle also applies to neurotransmitters. Thus, if something in Nature causes an imbalance in the neurotransmitters in the body, Nature must have it own way of reversing this imbalance. I had to learn Nature’s way for myself, through scientific exploration and experience.

Relaxation and Imagery

The Internet was a useful tool in my initial research. It helped me to discover how other practitioners around the world had succeeded in treating psychiatric conditions without using drugs. I combined this with my own research.

By 1997, one year after setting up my own practice as a medical hypnotherapist, I had acquired a good scientific knowledge of how almost all functional psychiatric conditions could be treated with little or no medication. That year, I delivered a paper in the USA to a conference of the American Society of Experimental & Clinical Hypnosis, on working with emotional distress.

A person who suffers with a psychiatric condition like depression, anxiety, insomnia or any addiction, has had subjectively distressing experiences. The emotional impact of these events disturbs the hormonal and neurotransmitter system in the body. The irony is that the emotional impact stays in the memory even when the events are not consciously remembered. It affects the person’s thinking and behaviour and can give rise to a psychiatric condition.

All psychiatric conditions are preceded or triggered by stressful life experiences. Such experiences create a state of ‘hyper-arousal’ in the body. Psychiatric drugs suppress this arousal state. This also has the side effect of slowing the person down physically.

However, drug-free methods can just as effectively calm the state of hyper-arousal, using relaxation and imagery exercises. A person becomes successively more relaxed, as the emotional impact of each distressing event is neutralised. For instance, doing ‘silent screaming’ – or mental screaming – for only three minutes a day, can bring relief in about two to four weeks, to a person on any kind of psychiatric medication. It can sometimes take only a few sessions to deal with lifetime issues.

Drugless Psychiatry

Three years ago, I wrote a paper on Drugless Psychiatry and presented it in London at the annual conference of the World Forum on Mental Health. By this time, my first book, The Stress Barrier, had been published in Ireland.

I was then under the illusion that professionals in Ireland would be curious to learn new techniques and the scientific basis for the drug free treatment of psychiatric conditions.

However, I soon took a low profile with my work, as I came to realise that the Psychiatric Establishment was too closed and too bound up with self-interest, to look at anything alternative – even if that alternative was science-based.

I consider my own work to be an original Irish scientific innovation, yet its components are not all totally new as they include some pre-existing methods used in novel ways. I call it Subjective Emotive Brief Therapy.

Scientific Alternatives Ignored

Each person has a subjective emotional response to any experience. Thus, what one person finds extremely traumatic may be less so for another. Work in trauma by other psychiatrists, especially in the United States, shows that the interaction of the individual with the environment is as important in the causation of mental illnesses as genetics or family history. Genetics determine the vulnerability of the individual, which can vary from time to time. But it is the environment that provides the triggers for disturbing the neuro-hormonal make-up of the body.

A big chunk of psychiatric research is based on twin and adoption studies. However, there has been no study of the physiology, or body functions, of the individuals involved. It is presumed that genetic components are the only factors responsible for their psychiatric conditions. This ignores the impact of physiology on psychiatric conditions.

For instance, our senses play an important role in teaching the body to remember experiences. These experiences are stored as memories. This process occurs through our emotions, in which neurotransmitters and hormones act as catalysts. Each emotional experience is therefore a physiological, or bodily response, to external stimuli; and it affects both our thinking and our behaviour.

It therefore follows that if you change the way we respond emotionally – or physiologically – you can change thinking and behaviour. To this end, psychiatry uses medication to suppress the emotional and behavioural responses.

However, there are also scientific psychotherapeutic techniques for changing these responses, with little or no medication. This is supported by existing scientific research showing that counselling and psychotherapy can alleviate mental suffering. Psychiatrists argue that psychotherapy cannot be scientific. I strongly dispute this on the evidence of the research literature and on the basis of my own work.

I have been developing and using drug-free psychiatric alternatives in my psychotherapy practice, in a scientific way, for the past ten years. But it disappoints me that the psychiatric establishment feels so uncomfortable with scientific techniques developed by myself, or by others, that avoid reliance on drugs. I believe that mentally ill patients, their families and the community at large, suffer as a result. Drugs can be helpful, but complete reliance on them is misguided.