Thursday, December 19, 2013

Psychiatric Diagnosis: Core Reactions & Reasons

Influential psychiatrists Sigmund Freud & Patrick McGorry
McGorry is "the guru" of early intervention in psychosis.
Diagnostic categorizations in the hands of the educated & therefore “qualified,” yet still emotionally immature, DO have a devastating affect on many people’s lives.

Please consider:
“First of all, let’s back off a little bit from clear cut diagnostic categories because diagnostic categories are totally resultant of a consensus of a series of behavioral and psychological features; so basically, a fever-type model.

What I’m going to talk a lot about are common cores that seem to transcend diagnostic categories.” _Stephen Porges.


Professor Stephen Porges, is the genius behind “The Polyvagal Theory,” (Porges, 2011) which helped me resolve my experience of “affective psychoses.”

In my own first episode of psychosis (FEP), in my case a euphoric mania, my 34 year journey to understand affective psychosis from the “inside out,” may have been happily short circuited, if I’d seen a mature and empathic psychiatrist, like professor Patrick McGorry, instead of the emotionally immature one, who “reactively” pronounced me schizophrenic within fifteen minutes. Of course he’d read the referral letter from a G.P. “Exhibits signs of schizophrenia,” and sadly so had I, and lacking real-life experience, I trusted doctors back in 1980. So did my family and friends, due to the “paternalistic” nature of human societies.