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PROMOTING EMOTIONAL HEALTH AND CLEAR THINKING
Editorial: Volume 10, No. 1 — 2003
Something's cooking ...
These are stressing times. In societies, as in the surface of the earth, pressure builds to a point where change is forced upon us. Old constructs cease to hold us together. Cracks appear. A quake or explosion inevitably occurs. We need greater flexibility of thought to survive. But people are largely uninterested in this and remain unprepared for thinking beyond whatever outdated doctrines of our time they are familiar with. This makes us all more vulnerable, infects government and institutions and the way we bring up and educate our children.
An international project called Intervening with Disturbed Adolescents (IDA), led by Professor Keith Topping of Dundee University, has found that professionals working with severely disturbed teenagers miss opportunities to help them because they stick to ineffective methods that they like or have used for a long time, rather than employ newer approaches that work. “There is a good deal of rhetoric about the need for evidence based professional practice, not least to help ensure that public revenues are spent effectively, but in many cases this appears to be wishful thinking,” comments Professor Topping.(1)
Readers of this journal will need no reminding that the effect of harmful ideas can be cruel and long lasting, as in the practice of psychotherapy where some practitioners still cling to long overturned ideologies derived from Freud and his followers. Even today, they believe that delving deep into depressed thoughts and feelings is the way to ‘help’ someone out of a depressed state, completely ignoring or oblivious of all the evidence that such ‘insight’ therapy prolongs and deepens depression. (See page 37 for a disturbing account of one woman’s experience of psychiatry and psychotherapy and, on page 46, a nursing assistant’s illuminating account of her work in an acute psychiatric unit.)
Depression is on the increase, which is itself a symptom of the pressures building in our environment, and everything should be done to help people out of it as quickly as possible. New knowledge ought to be welcomed.
That is what is offered in Human Givens: a new approach to emotional health and clear thinking, which was published last month. This book is full of new organising ideas of huge relevance to practical people working with distressed, disturbed and damaged children and adults. It also presents a bigger perspective on education and the future of our kind of culture (see page 2). Such is the demand for this book that over 1000 copies were sold prior to its publication.
In this issue we also feature an interview with Clive Bromhall, author of The Eternal Child, another groundbreaking book that further illustrates the difficulties people have in letting go beliefs that masquerade as science (see page 24). Bromhall has identified something which, now that he has done so, seems so blindingly obvious that his insight overturns just about every existing idea about how human beings evolved. It is a scientific bombshell that in one leap explains an enormous amount about human development and behaviour, from why we walk upright and are ‘hairless’ to our strange variety of sexual behaviours and our intelligence and creativity. But, to date, because it requires looking at humanity from a different perspective, his work is being studiously ignored by the scientific community.
New insights and deeper understanding, however, cannot be quashed forever. What is required is that enough discerning people, however few at first, and however much they are derided, are prepared to think outside the box.
The Editors
1. For further details, see IDA Project website: www.dundee.ac.uk/psychology/ida
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