Response to “Thinking About Our Work: What Do We Mean by ‘Mental Health’?”

Abstract

Response to “Thinking About Our Work: What Do We Mean by ‘Mental Health’?” Justin Hecht1 issn 0362-4021 © 2017 Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society group, Vol. 41, No. 2, Summer 2017 155 1 Lecturer, Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, and private practice, San Francisco. Correspondence should be addressed to Justin Hecht, PhD, CGP, FAGPA, Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco, 401 Parnassus Ave., San Francisco, CA 94143. E-mail: justin@justinhecht.com. I would like personally and professionally to endorse the spirit and substance of Lee Kassan’s brief comment on the problems with the increasing medicalization of psychotherapy. I’d like to do so in the context of my personal life and my professional thoughts. As I was thinking about how to respond, I thought about how I spend my weekend, and how this relates to group psychotherapy. My partner, Erik, and I are lucky enough to live in the Sonoma County wine country, north of San Francisco. It’s a beautiful, tranquil region of vineyards, redwoods, and (in good years) rivers. On most Friday mornings, I go to a serene old church in Santa Rosa and meet with a group that ranges in size from six to 10 people. The church was built from two giant redwood trees and has a soft, warm glow of reddish brown. (I like to think that the spirit of the tree is with us somehow.) We sit in a circle and meditate and pray and take turns reading from the Book of Common Prayer. All of us are seeking comfort, guidance, and direction from something larger than ourselves, and we help each other out, sharing bits and pieces of our lives. Something in me senses that I am walking in the footsteps of many, many generations of my ancestors. Even though the old scriptures don’t always make complete sense to me, the feeling of belonging, tradition, and continuity is deeply healing, grounding, and sustaining. On most Saturday mornings, I drive along the Russian River to Guerneville, a funky old frontier town popular with bikers, and go up a winding, narrow road to a cabin with a bamboo-floored Zendo in the basement. There, I sit in silent meditation with a group that also ranges from six to 10 people. After we sit in silence for 156 hecht 35 minutes, we take a brief break and hear from Tony, our priest, a gentle ex-hippie whose life experiences help him translate the dharma into relevant and helpful talks. We also share helpful advice about propane deliveries and water levels. I’ve come to think of these two groups on Friday and Saturday mornings as very much my psychotherapy groups. Psyche, after all, is the Greek word for “soul,” and therapy means “to heal, to wait on, to attend to.” All of us in these two groups are seeking to heal or attend to our souls. When I was in Philadelphia for graduate school, I used to like to go to Quaker meetings, where I would sit with the friends and wait to speak “until the spirit moved me.” I mention these three kinds of experiences because I believe that they represent the archetypal roots of group soul healing—group psychotherapy. As Kassan writes, most of us have known times of disconnection and unhappiness in our own lives. And most of our clients seek to work with us to alleviate the pain that they are facing , to grow in wisdom and in hope that we will be able to provide a perspective on what ails them. It’s my feeling that when we medicalize this very human need to connect and to work on our souls, not only do we objectify our clients in a harmful way but we also lose our own connection with our ancestors, our traditions, and our innate human need to be part of a healing circle. My hope is that we can embrace the ancient archetypal roots of what we are doing and, in so doing, be present in a deeply soulful way for those who seek our assistance. ...