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The mind/body/soul connection can allow you to heal in ways that prescription medications never could.

My body taught me how to get healthy. It’s a celebratory wonder. No one else knew how to pull me out of the quagmire.

This wondrously animated bag of bones has only ever wanted my attention. The body knows about healing and survival and evolution and when acknowledged that leads to freedom.

Yes, the human beings capacities are awe inspiring. And yet what we do to ourselves here in the west is tragic…we shut down these incredibly intelligent creatures.

I was sick since I was a child. Getting healthy is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done. I had no idea what was available with health. I simply hadn’t experienced it to know.

Conventional medicine made sure I’d be sick from day one. It began with excessive and unnecessary long-term antibiotic treatments which left me vulnerable to the psych med iatrogenic injury later.

I now sometimes have trouble containing my glee as my body and mind starts feeling and understanding what health and well-being really is.

Most significantly I didn’t know I was sick for most of my life. I thought I was healthy. Many people in the developed world today are like this and have no idea that they are not well.

We live in a world where substandard health is considered normal and even healthy and therefore most people simply don’t realize it.

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I was on a combination of six different psychiatric drugs. That included anti-depressants, mood-stabilizer, anti-psychotics, anxiolytics and a stimulant. If you imagine that cocktail must have made me sick. You’re right.

By the time I realized what was happening I was severely ill. And by the time I got off the drugs I was even sicker. It’s referred to as psychiatric drug withdrawal syndrome. The name makes it sound like something that might last days or weeks but it actually left me bedridden and disabled for many years. These drugs change the entire nervous system so withdrawal sometimes means going through a period of far worse hell before coming out the other side. It’s also largely denied by the medical establishment.


Comment: Warning: Psychiatric drug withdrawal effects can persist months, even years after stopping them

What possesses a doctor to prescribe such a cocktail? They simply do not know better. My doctor truly cared about me. He almost killed me too.

I have since learned how to avoid such treatment and help others to understand that their bodies/mind/spirits can help them get well in holistic and wholesome ways too. No one has to get sick like I did.

So, how did it all begin? While in college I had an experience that one might consider a kundalini awakening. No one knew how to work with spiritual emergence in my circle of family and friends so I became subject to psychiatry, which also does not recognize such forms of awakening. Psychiatry knows how to shut down these processes with medications. The unfortunate part is that often means there can be no moving through and healing the content if one never comes off of them.

The weight loss in the photo is really the most superficial aspect of the global healing that has occurred. It’s the only one visible to anyone other than myself and those closest to me and so I share it because it remains a rather astonishing contrast. The weight loss came as a result not of trying to lose weight, but instead learning to get profoundly healthy in general. This is an important distinction since weight loss diets tend to be unhealthy as well as ineffective.

I have had no regrets since coming off drugs. I have a clarity of mind that was at first shocking. My clarity was stolen from me for almost half my life. I have it back and even while still gravely impaired I was grateful for that.

I’ve learned that everything matters. Our relationships with others and the planet, the food we eat, and the air we breathe… how often we move our bodies and the thoughts we nurture in our minds and souls. I’ve come to appreciate our relationship to everything in our environment and our bodies, what we’re born with and how it’s all connected.

I’ve embraced my human nature. It was once diagnosed “bipolar.” I “undiagnosed” myself a long time ago, but since then I’ve come to more fully understand my experience. For me it’s been the capacity to access and delve deep into my psyche. It’s been a deeply rewarding journey to reclaim those parts of me that psychiatry too often tragically misunderstands and therefore denies. It’s a journey of individuation and waking up.

The practices of meditation, yoga and listening to the body in general, have allowed me to develop a deep and growing understanding of the human condition and the nature of our reality on this planet. This has, in turn, allowed me to release anger and blame and simply come to a deep gratitude for being alive. Having had this experience that has brought me to this place without regard to whether they’ve been painful or pleasant. I have learned to embrace that which I have been given. Life is messy and painful and glorious, too.


Comment: The self-healing benefits of meditation

About the author

Monica Cassani has seen the mental health system from both sides – as a social worker and as a person whose life was severely ruptured by psychiatric drugs. She writes critically about the system, as well as about holistic pathways of healing without medication. View her website Beyondmeds.com