Author: Paris Williams


Rethinking Mental Health: Towards a Holistic Organismic Paradigm (Part 4 of 4)

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Figure 1. Part Four: Supporting the Natural Health Process After outlining the basic needs and many of the possible types of nourishment barriers that can appear (in Part Three), the final, and of course, most important part of this model is exploring the implications for supporting an organism’s health. While this same basic model can… Read more »

Rethinking Mental Health: Towards a Holistic Organismic Paradigm (Part 3 of 4)

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Photo by Peter McDermott. Part Three: Towards a Needs-Based System of Diagnosis When we look closely at the current mainstream diagnostic and support system for so-called mental disorders today, the utter absurdity of it quickly becomes apparent. We have a system composed of literally hundreds of discrete “mental disorders” (those listed in the DSM), all… Read more »

Rethinking Mental Health: Towards a Holistic Organismic Paradigm (Part 2 of 4)

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Figure 1. Part Two: Towards a Holistic Organismic Paradigm To better understand this emerging paradigm, it will help if we come at it from two different angles—a deep exploration into direct subjective experience, and an exploration of the most essential qualities of living organisms and living systems. Exploring the Fundamental Building Blocks of Subjective Experience… Read more »

Rethinking Mental Health: Towards a Holistic Organismic Paradigm (Part 1 of 4)

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We find ourselves in very interesting times with regard to our understanding of mental health. We find ever more heated, passionate, and polarized discussions taking place with regard to the so called mental disorders—how or even whether to try to classify them, which factors are generally helpful in recovery vs. which factors are generally harmful,… Read more »

The –Mental Illness” Paradigm: Itself an –Illness” That Is Out of Control

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For those of you who haven’t read this recent story in The New York Times,  I highly recommend it. It is essentially a woman’s (Linda Logan’s) rich and moving autobiographical account of her struggle with “bipolar disorder.” The main message that I imagine most people will take away from this story is that the current… Read more »

Rewriting the Paradigm of Psychosis

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Photo by Mariordo Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz With the most recent schizophrenia/psychosis recovery research, we discover increasing evidence that psychosis is not caused by a disease of the brain, but is perhaps best described as being a last ditch strategy of a desperate psyche to transcend an intolerable situation or dilemma. To better understand how… Read more »

For humanity, having a “choice” doesn’t mean getting an “easy way out.”

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Potatoes grow automatically. We have to make choices. When pondering the dilemma of being a human being and a member of the human race in these increasingly chaotic and radically shifting times, I sometimes feel overwhelmed trying to make some kind of sense out of it all. We find ourselves filled with so much awareness… Read more »