I used to work with kids excluded from school – they all had files inches thick – what really dumbfounded me was that none of the experts they met actually listened to them.
 
 The psychiatrists tended to believe their bad behaviour was due to chemical imbalances, the analytically trained therapists interpreted their unconscious drives, the clinical psychologists don’t have any mandatory therapy themselves and tend towards quick fix CBT solutions, and the educational psychologists don’t have the experience of in depth emotional conditions, and hence tend to come up with very shallow solutions ( measures should be taken to deal with his anxiety,)  said the statement of one of my pupils – this of a boy whose mother was cutting herself in front of her son to blackmail him to get his Dad home – but then the boy didn’t trust them enough to really tell them what was going on. 
 
Does this remind you of the five blind men and the elephant ?
 
 In the West we are – if we are completely honest – unable to approach our own minds – we have got to the point where we see there are just different stories about it, but don’t know how to take that extra step. In my view the Buddha took that extra step two and half thousand years ago and his discovery of mindfulness is now beginning to impact western psychologists in a big way. But they all too often don’t understand it – just because mindfulness cant actually be understood – it can only be surrendered into – allowing oneself to not know, and from there simply listen and watch the way in which our perceptions and conceptions and feelings arise and pass like waves in the ocean.
 
But psychiatrists are sadly stuck in the past and unwilling to give up their belief that they have the answers – and with that of course the kudos and the money.
 
Phillip Hickey is a retired psychologist who blogs with great clarity about the way psychiatric diagnoses depend on an assumption there is such a thing as a mental illness – and that therefore they as doctors have the right to diagnose it and treat it.
 
In his blog at behaviorismandmentalhealth.com, he writes
 
“Psychiatry’s most fundamental tenet is that virtually all significant problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving are illnesses that need to be studied and treated from a medical perspective.  What’s not usually acknowledged, however, is that this is an arbitrary assumption.
In common speech and within the medical profession, the word “illness” indicates the presence of organic pathology: i.e. damage or malfunction in an organ.  Historically, mental illnesses came into being, not because some scientist or group of scientists had recognized and established that problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving are caused by an organic malfunction, but rather because the APA had simply decided to extend the concept of illness to embrace these kinds of problems.  For the record, some problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving are known to be caused by organic pathology, and I exclude those from the present discussion.
It is not superficially obvious that other problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving are actually illnesses, and there is a strong burden of proof on those who adopt this position.  Psychiatry, however, has never proved this assertion, but nevertheless continues to expand its diagnostic net in the same way that it started – by fiat. …
 
Client’s daughter:  “Why is my mother so depressed?”
Psychiatrist:  “Because she has an illness called major depression.”
Client’s daughter:  “How do you know she has this illness?
Psychiatrist:  “Because she is so depressed.”
The only evidence for the illness is the very behavior it purports to explain.  Unlike diagnoses in real medicine, there is no actual illness behind the DSM symptom lists to provide genuine explanatory value.
 
For another blog by a UK psychiatrist who also says that
“Psychiatry has its head in the sand: Royal College of Psychiatrists rejects discussion of crucial research on antipsychotics,” seehttp://joannamoncrieff.com/blog/
 
In saying that there are no mental illnesses, this is not to deny the very real suffering mental conditions create – but ti does suggest they require UNDERSTANDING, and true listening on the part of the therapist and the client…