________________
YOGIC TREATMENT OF MENTAL ILLNESS
Jain Education International
Dr. Swami Vivekananda Saraswati
I am supposed to be speaking about the treatment of mental illness, but I think there is more to it than that. However, I will start off with the approved theme.
The learned doctor yesterday said that in days gone by, it was the priests who treated the illnesses of the body as well as the mind and the spirit. But when the scientific age came along, another group of people took over the treatment of the body and these were called medical practitioners or doctors. In later years the medical practitioners and doctors have branched into the area of the mind as well, taking with them the tools that they used for treating the body, and in the beginning these tools were mainly physical ones. From there they moved to psychological tools, and I want to start by describing some of these to you.
First of all there are certain illnesses of the emotions and the mental state which are caused by physical factors. These may respond to many treatments such as ayurveda, acupuncture, homeopathy, naturopathy, chiropractic and other physical treatment. My training is just in allopathy, so I use these treatments in a limited number of cases. The people I am referring to come into four groups.
The first group are people who have some form of epilepsy and they require anti-convulsants. The second group are people with a condition called schizophrenia, v'ich is a physical, chemical condition of the central nervous system, and they respond to what we call anti-psychotic medication. The third group are people with a condition that you might call manic depression or bi-polar affective disorder, up and down over long periods of time, and these people respond to a very simple chemical called lithium. The fourth group are people with a condition which we call endogenous depression, a type of depression that is chemically caused and is a physiological fact.
294
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
