“Accept what is in front of you without wanting the situation to be other than it is.”
This quote serves me as a sort of mantra during the somewhat uncomfortable and unfamiliar territory of working with hospitalized mentally ill patients, who are overwhelmingly medicated on major antidepressants and antipsychotics. But how do I do dance therapy with a heavily medicated patient, or a group of heavily medicated patients? Will the drugs prevent or slow any therapeutic progress in the expressive arts? Are the "numbed" patients able to feel deeply, able to express themselves artistically?
At the library yesterday, I picked up
Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation, (2008)by Charles Barber. Here is a quote from it:
"In our particularly American zeal for simple explanations, quick fixes, and overwhelming the enemy with technology, we've too quickly lost sight of the centrality of social and environmental factors. And despite undeniable progress in the pharmacological realm, the enduring truth is that the human factor, and the human approach, remains critical to healing."
For more interesting reading, here's a link to another article about the perceptions of the mentally ill, printed in the
Utne Reader.
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