Posted by dj on September 9, 1999, at 10:16:54
In reply to acupuncture, chinese meds. & depression ???, posted by dj on September 9, 1999, at 9:59:49
Some more from the second article, which got cut off:...
"Perhaps this explains the fallacious claim that 'no mental disease exists in China'. In my experience, having worked in a Chinese hospital, the Chinese are just as prone to neurosis as we are in the West.
There are great advantages in seeing mental functions in this way because, instead of being labeled a depressive, the patient feels that the liver is playing up and therefore perceives the disease in a different context. In the West a depressive may still be stigmatized and considered weak because he, or she, is unable to cope. In China this is not so because the cultural history and social context of mental disease is different, the depressed patient being made to feel that the disease is real and organic, rather than imagined. In spite of the constructive efforts of those who work in the field of mental health in Western nations, the body and the mind are generally still considered to be separate, and those who are unable to keep the mind under control are thought, by some, to have failed.
In acupuncture, the Chinese have a method of effectively treating a proportion of mental disease, which therefore has not been considered incurable, and there has been no necessity to shut all sufferers away in institutions. In the West most of those who are working within the area of mental disease are dealing with diseases that are poorly understood. As a general rule the level of understanding in any area of human knowledge can be judged by the number of theories that are used to explain a single phenomenon. If there is one theory that seems to explain all the facts, for a given observation, then it is probably correct. If many ideas are used to explain the same set of facts then it is likely that most of them are, at best half truths. At present the field of mental health embraces a large number of theories which are used to give opposing explanations for the same basic facts.
Without a defined idea of the origin of disease, treatment is difficult, therefore a wide variety of poorly understood treatment methods are used in mental disease, such as electroconvulsive therapy. Perhaps the lack of social stigma attached to mental disease in China is because there has been some form of consistent explanation, and treatment, for this type of problem for the last 2,000 years. The area of mental disease is particularly interesting as I am sure that there is as much mental disease in China, if not more, than in the United Kingdom, but it would seem that the cultural and medical heritage of the Chinese people has allowed them to deal with it in a different manner from that in the West, and possibly more effectively."
http://www.healthy.net/library/books/acupuncture/acupun8.htm#The Emotions and Mental Disease
poster:dj
thread:11293
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/19990914/msgs/11296.html