________________
It is my experience that these people still respond well to yoga practices but, because of the state of mind that they have when they are in the acute phase of illness, they need the chemicals to stablize them. When they are stablized, they have the motivation and the presence of mind to do the yoga practices which then ensure that they will get off the drugs quickly, and that is important. There are other physical treatments such as convulsive therapy which is used very little nowadays. In my opinion these are the four conditions in which it is still valid to use physical treatments for a certain period of time. However, yoga should be used in conjunction with them, and patients will accept the yoga practices and go through them very conscientiously.
In the second group we treat the emotions. Here we find one of the biggest traps in psychiatry, because if we just treat the emotions with drugs, it is symptomatic treatment rather than therapeutic treatment. In symptomatic treatment, we have the problem of addiction and habituation to those drugs for the following reason. If I am feeling very tense, anxious or depressed, and you come along and pop a pill in my mouth and after about ten minutes I start feeling better and after twenty minutes I am feeling absolutely wonderful, then the next time I am feeling bad, I want you to pop another pill into me.
You have heard of Pavlov's dogs? Pavlov was a Russian physiologist who worked on conditioning and experimented with dogs. He would ring a little bell and give the dogs something to eat, ring the little bell again, and give the dogs something to eat again. After a while when he rang the little bell, the dogs would salivate because they thought a meal was coming. He had conditioned the dogs to salivate and from then on, every time he rang the little bell, the dogs would salivate. So this idea of swallowing a pill to feel better is a conditioning process and it is habit forming.
The second point about symptomatic treatments is withdrawal. Any substance that is taken into the body which has any effect on the central nervous system will have the opposite effect when it is wearing off. If I feel anxious and I take valium (diazepam), in four or five hours when it is wearing off I will be more anxious than I was before I started. So what do I do? Of course, I go and take another diazepam.
295
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
