‘Oh my God! You went to a psychiatrist?!?! What happened?’ people exclaim in absolute shock when they hear of people going in for counselling or psychiatric help. Rightly so, the conditions in India and perhaps even around the world concerning Mental Health isn’t most encouraging at this point.

40 years ago, Dr. John Grinder and Dr. Richard Bandler challenged most practices in psychology and psychiatry. They questioned diagnostic procedures, treatments as most interventions didn’t produce Results elegantly, for the client. And there have been several cases where after treatment, overtime, the conditions get worse. Be it people who suffer different from lifestyle related diseases such as Stress or depression or serious mental illness such as bipolar, schizophrenia etc., psychiatry and psychology approaches abroad and in India have not made as much progress in approach and effectiveness as much as the field of physical medicine (allopathy) has progressed.

The fundamental problem of Psychiatry approach is the increasing similarity of treating an individual based on set of symptoms and ‘box’ing them into one of the known disorders. There are more dangers to this approach than good. For example: 10 people who have been diagnosed with OCD or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder do not exhibit the same symptoms. And it is the difference the calls the need for different treatment to each of these 10 individuals. A small arc of a behaviour cannot be considered as sufficient for treatment. And given the level of education of people in general regarding mental health, if a child has been diagnosed by a practitioner as having OCD, then the paranoid parent goes all out to gather more information about this disorder and ends up reading about a lot of different symptoms. For a few moments, the parent has accepted the diagnosis of their child having OCD. Possibly, in reality, the child does not have OCD! Maybe, the child only has a small arc of what OCD actually comprises of. But the dangerous research and paranoia of parents and their consequent interaction with the child with the mental presupposition that the child has the whole basket of symptoms that an OCD patient is supposed to have, itself induces the remaining symptoms in the child.

Worse is when the patient is administered psychiatric medication for disorders as it hampers with the mental states through the infusion of chemicals and even if consumed in small quantities, the side effects in the long run increases, which calls for more medication. Eventually, even what started off as a ‘small’ disorder, ends up becoming a problem much larger than it should have, in the first place.And the people contributing to such an outcome include the Practitioner (psychologist, psychiatrist) and the web of relationships the patient is entangled in (it could be immediate, family, friends etc. and their assumptions about the diagnosis and what it means). Each and all of these interactions have hypnotic effects on the patient, in an extremely harmful way.

Even more alarming is the continuous increase in the number of cases of misdiagnosis in this field. Misdiagnosis leads to wrong medication or over medication and both have extreme adverse effects on patients.

The very diagnostic tools still being used such as Rorschach Ink blot test, or the typical personality identifying tests such as MBTI, INFT tests, MMPI etc. were developed even earlier than the 1980s. Since then, so much as changed and these tests are not reliable anymore. Moreover, several tests are questionnaire based – and you and I know, how the answers being keyed in by the person can change with mood and time! Most people are not honest with the tests and these diagnostic methods are extremely archaic now!

Some approaches seek to identify the ‘root cause’ for the problem. The process or root cause identification is unfortunately, far from fool proof! Memories are only memories, and can be distorted easily. Sometimes, patients have attention seeking behaviourswho exaggerate or distort memories even intentionally. Human beings are far more complex and it is almost impossible to finalise with 100% accuracy that ‘x’ incident is the cause for ‘y’ problem. Even making such baseless conclusions does not help the patient actually address the problem and come out of it.

When Dr. John Grinder and Dr. Richard Bandler, founders of the field of Neuro Linguistic Programming challenged these approaches over 40 years ago, initially they faced severe resistance from the Psychologists and Psychiatrists until they proved other approaches to be more effective when employed properly. In fact, 1982, Marshall University challenges one of the co-founders of NLP about the effectiveness of NLP. They brought to him, 3 of their most challenging clients and Bandler had not met them before. Bandler performed interventions with all 3 clients with different problems in less than 30 minutes each and these clients were interviewed 2 years hence and it was found that not were they completely rid of the problem, their whole life has transformed so much that each of these clients became really successful in their domains.

NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) is an interesting approach that looks at ‘how’ a person manages to get themselves to experience the mental states and disorders that they currently do. What are the internal processes, and patterning, that is leading to the current symptoms. And they re-program new processes to handle the disorders. The field of NLP evolved by modeling what ‘works’ in various practices of healing and therapy and stripping off the rituatals and arriving at patterning and processes that allow a well-trained Practitioner to use their 5 senses to diagnose much more than what is being ‘said’ by the patient, verbally. It gives very precise methods of information gathering with regard to internal processes and test conditions to verify if the diagnosis is correct.

NLP does not look at ‘Why’ the person has a particular problem, it looks at ‘How’ a person creates a particular problem. Every disorder is a result of carefully executed patterns by the brain which are triggered in various circumstances. Understanding these patterns cannot be done at a general level. It has to be Individualistic.

A blood test can confirm whether a person has malaria or dengue. But diagnosis for Mental Health is far more complex. Skills of astute sensory calibration, identification of internal processes creating the problem etc. is the need of the hour, rather than go by a symptom based approach or pre-set obsolete tests and treatment.

Everything in the world is getting personalized to the difference of each individual, including medicine, then why not evolve the mental health facilities to also distinguish the individual differences and holistically help a person?

About Author:

Harini Ramachandran is an expert of Personal Change and is endorsed as one of the finest in Neuro Linguistic Programming by its Co-creator Dr. John Grinder under whose guidance she has worked on several challenging cases with extraordinary results. Together with another stalwart in NLP, Antano Solar John, the duo creates models of excellence in different fields by identifying geniuses, coding the difference that makes the difference and makes it available to common man. Together, Antano& Harini founded School of Excellence in 2011 with the vision to Create Generations and Generations of Excellence.

Harini has delivered personalized change for over 2000 individuals in the last 4 years including medically challenging cases. Top celebrities, National award winners and CXOs of large business organizations consult her for personalized change at individual and organization levels. In addition, Harini also works with tone-deaf and rhythm-deaf people to help them sing soulfilly on pitch and on rhyth.

Antano& Harini are evolving ‘Excellence Installation’, a signature methodology that combines the art of NLP Patterning, Coaching and Conversational programming to create immediate and geneative behavioral changes. Currently, Antano& Harini are focused on building the technology, business and education necessary to scale the available of Excellence Installation and make Real Change available in Real Time to 1 million individuals by 2020.