Is the Scientific Approach Harming Society?

In my research on YouTube I came across a lecture on Schizophrenia and thought that might be fascinating. But the more I listened, the more I realised that this man was discriminating against a minority group. Let me explain.

Research is based on a group of volunteers being tested to determine normal behaviour. Now let’s unpack that. Volunteers means that they are probably empathic in nature and want to help mankind by participating in research. So we have a biased group to start with, and we are determining acceptable behaviour based on empaths. Secondly it is assuming that all people are equal in their backgrounds. The participants in a lot of this research are university students, and often psychology students. This group is definitely not representative of society. Any population used in research are going to be a biased sample. They are either going to be willing participants for altruistic or self-serving reasons, or they are unwilling participants in a controlled environment. Neither is representative of all society. And therefore, neither can provide a basis of normal.

Now let’s look at the concept of normal. It is a middle range of acceptable behaviours based on a judgemental society. It says that anything fitting into this range is okay, and anything outside of the range is a possible risk to society or my ego because I might be upset by your behaviour, like your honesty. But that is based on the perspective that society is the only benchmark that is acceptable.

We also need to look at who determined social standards. Men have dominated leadership, business, rules, education, science, health, economy and basically the infrastructure of our society, and set it up to suit themselves. They have designated anyone that is not like them as inferior or defective. They believe themselves to be protectors of society and they love to problem solve and fix things. This completely dominates their perspective and how they interpret things. And as a rule, they were financially in the better half of society, and did not have to live in the streets and beg or steal to survive.

They also lived in the part of society where conditioning and pretense were rife. If you watch any show depicting the behaviours and expectations of "polite" society prior to 2000, you will see a very strong conditioning putting males as superior, females as weak, and stoic as the expected emotional state. Anyone that did not fit this model was either eccentric (male or powerful female), or insane (female or not needed male).

A schizophrenic can be diagnosed by delusional behaviour, hallucinations and not following social rules. A medium who can see the dead would be classed as delusional. A clairaudient who hears spirits would be having hallucinations. A psychic who thinks they can give messages from the spirit world would be anti-social. Any of these people in the past would have been diagnosed with schizophrenia or some mental disorder. They would be shunned and treated differently by society, making them feel rejected.

But they have learned to modify their behaviour, to shut off their psychic side, to behave “normal” in society. And society has become more tolerant of the idea of psychic abilities. But what if a person could not shut off their psychic abilities? What if they lived between the two realms and struggled to “normalise” in this one? Normal is dictated by what society will tolerate. Once witches were burned because society didn’t tolerate them. Now they live in peace, so long as they don’t try to mainstream their beliefs.

Harry Potter series helped normalise psychic abilities, but many still call them woohoo and believe it is all made up. In Harry Potter these non-believers are the Muggles. Perhaps the huge success of this series was its ability to flip what is normal and give the non-normal validity. Does this mean that the narrow view of normal is not actually the norm? That many people are hiding their abilities because they would be discriminated against if they admitted to them? That there are a lot more psychics out there than we know and that not having psychic abilities is actually the abnormal? Are scientists the Muggles?

Christians believe in miracles, but to a psychiatrist the person is delusional. We apply the signs of mental illness to people as it suits us. But we rename these same signs when we want to believe in something.

Not all people are the same when they come into this world. Let’s begin with soul age. If a young soul is new to earth and this is one of their first life experiences, they are going to be more fearful. Now if we put a new kid into a classroom they will be fearful. How they are treated in that classroom will determine how they behave. This is the same for the new soul coming into a family. But when that soul develops anxiety, we say they have mental illness. But it is not mental illness, it is an appropriate response to the environment they were born into.

Maybe it is not a new soul, but a soul that has just finished a life where they died in traumatic conditions. Maybe they were bombed in a war and died suddenly. They will struggle with loud noises and could still be a bit disoriented. But in our endeavours to classify them, we will say they have anxiety and are “dreamers” or have learning disabilities.

What if a soul has come back for the same lesson a number of times, and they want to finish it this time. But they get into the story and realise it is going to be harder this time, and they feel despair. They may go into depression. This is normal and if they had a life coach, they would feel a lot better, but they are alone and facing this difficult journey all over again.

What about people on the spectrum? Why do their differences make them abnormal? If a soul had a number of incarnations in other realms, and this is their first time on earth, they will be different. Maybe in the other worlds there were no social cues, and normal behaviour for them was very different. It may have been an underwater world, or a world where everyone could fly, or a place where other life did not exist. They find these human bodies difficult, and the senses are hard to adjust to. Just because we can’t drive the body the way the scientists want us to does not make us defective.

Science creates a benchmark based on choosing everyone like the scientist as the normal, and everyone not like the scientist as abnormal. This is the bias in their research. No scientist wants to publish a study saying they are weird and do not fit into society. They are more likely to publish a study to find lots of weird people like them and prove this is normal and everyone else is weird.

Now science does not believe in spirituality, other worlds, souls and all of these things because you can’t prove it. If it can’t be proven, it doesn’t exist and is someone’s delusion! This is the problem of modern day psychology. Their scope of understanding is based upon an assumption that the person does not exist before birth, they are affected by events in this life only, and that normal is growing up to be a research psychologist.

Spirituality believes that we have many lives, that past lives affect this life, and that there is no normal. Everyone is unique and this is okay. When we change our perspective to see everyone as normal, no matter how diverse they are, we work from a different paradigm. A schizophrenic is not mentally ill. They are a human who thinks differently. If this is causing them trouble, then we need to get to the source of the harm. Were they traumatised by something, are their brain chemicals out of balance, have they suffered brain damage.

There is a video in the Resources of a neuroscientist/psychiatrist (yes an out of the box one), who uses brain scans as part of his diagnosis. He had a patient that was a young boy who had violent urges and was a potential risk to society. The traditional psychiatrists were ready to sedate and lock him up, to protect society. He did a brain scan and found a cyst. After treatment, the boy lost all of his violent urges and became a pleasant chap. He focuses on restoring the brain and thus reversing the behaviour problems and so called mental illness.

How many people are suffering from trauma, chemical imbalance or physical disease and being written off as abnormal and therefore a problem for society. They are medicated to reduce their risk of offending the “normal” people. But they are quite normal and many are harmless, even in their “abnormal” state. Most mental disease is a collection of symptoms that was classified with a label by a “normal” person. Yes, there are patterns, but not all patterns have the same cause. A circle is a ball, a hoop, an orb, a tunnel. It is many things. Just because it is a circle does not mean it is defective because it does not fit the criteria of a “normal” persons limited classification system.

When we stop classifying people, we realise that they are humans struggling with some form of reality. Maybe it is the abusive family, or the system that is trying to make them fit in, or the trauma from past lives, or the fear of the future. When we put their circumstances in context, they are very normal, it is just their circumstances do not fit into our classification system.

How many people walk around with labels that limit them. ADHD, autism, mental illness, genius, savant, learning disabilities, behaviour problems. Now learning disabilities is one I hate. Is it the person who is disabled or the system that disables them? There is no one way fits all when it comes to learning. Even the education system recognises that there are different learning styles. And yet our schools are set up to teach one style only. Now if a child has come from a home where they live in fear and are facing serious neglect and abuse, would they be ready to learn? Of course not. But when they don’t learn, we tell them they are the problem and have a learning disability. They do, it is their parents and home and the school that is too busy to help them!

Once classified, you lose your identity. Are you still a person, a brother/sister, daughter/son, a friend or student. No, you are schizophrenic, mentally ill, autistic, ADHD, learning disability. Your classification becomes your identity. Like a warning sign telling society – beware!

What if we accepted that everyone is different and some are very different to ourselves. That some people are struggling with things so they are not at their optimum, but they are still humans just like us. What if we changed ourselves to accommodate others, instead of expecting everyone to fit into our “normal”. The autistic child does not give you a hard time for being different, but we ostracise them because they do not fit our expectations.

Open your mind and understand that there is no normal. See the world from the eyes of the new visitor, without judgement or classifications. Just accept people as they are and adjust your expectations to accommodate their differences. Diversity is wonderful, and we are all who we are meant to be for our life here on earth.

I think back to that researcher and wonder how much of his life has been wasted classifying and discriminating against people because they didn’t fit into his expectations. That as soon as he formed those criteria, he shut down his mind to all the wonderful diversity of life and stopped looking for ways to help the person who was struggling. I think of the amount of harm his system has caused people, where they have been classified, medicated, shoved into a box and excluded from many aspects of society. Where the classification was the end of the journey, not the beginning of the exploration. Science is about being curious. It is about never having an answer, because the more you learn the less you know. Beware of a scientist that has answers. They only have a closed mind and have stopped searching. This causes harm to everyone.

But it is not his fault. Science began when men of wealth were the privileged class, and the only ones allowed an education. These early scientists set the benchmark and biased their future research by restricting it to people of higher education. There was an inherent bias in all of their studies because of their privileged position and the gender bias. They perceived everything from the perspective of a privileged white male and the arrogance inherent in that.

Science has always been dependent upon a benefactor. It was the business man, the philanthropist, and the aristocrat who had agendas. They needed to make profits, they wanted to make society more like them, or they wanted to have more luxury for themselves. Psychiatry started because men wanted to get rid of their unwanted relatives and couldn’t lock them up in jail, so they had them committed to an institution.

Psychology started because men wanted answers to their own mental problems and they learned to blame it on their mothers. The fact that it was men doing the science meant that they defined their success by having answers and logical conclusions. But a woman knows that there is always many facets to a story and some we will never know. A father says a child is naughty, but a mother sees the reasons behind their naughty behaviour and the extenuating circumstances and fact that she still loves them and wants them to feel safe and be looked after. She would not want to put them in an institution and compartmentalise their illness as there is so much more to it than that.

Our treatment of humans and interpretation of the science is changing as we bring the feminine energy into the equation. We see it is not so clear cut, that there is more to the story and that needs to be unravelled. In the masculine paradigm, you had to suppress until you couldn’t, and then there were consequences. In the feminine paradigm you don’t need to suppress, in fact it is better if you don’t so we can get to the real story.

I see mental illness as a lot of victims who were not able to tell their story, and when they tried they were not heard. Victimhood is a consequence of not being respected as a human. Science is about observation and listening. It is seeking to get to the truth and then looking for the next truth and the one after that. It is many layers of unpacking story upon story. If we stop at the first layer, we do nature an injustice. Medicine does this when they treat the symptoms without investigating right down to the root cause. The root cause is the reason the person is suffering, and they will continue to be dysfunctional until the root cause is addressed.

Diagnosis is one of the greatest errors of modern medicine and it comes from the scientific need to classify. Masculine energy thinks that once it has a diagnosis it can move into the treatment. But the feminine energy knows that diagnosis is only a first step in the process and can lead you down the wrong treatment path if you have jumped to conclusions too early. Masculine energy says a tap is a tap. But feminine energy says that its function, aesthetics, position and height all contribute to the experience. This is why masculine and feminine energy should work together to find an effective solution for each individual person.

We need to reverse the masculine dominance in science by bringing in the feminine energy of recognising nuance. This means treating diagnosis as a suggestion, not an identity. It means opening up the story to find the many possible layers and recognising the stories as the problem, not the person. It means treating the environment that damaged the person as well as supporting the person through their own healing. We are here today because we diagnosed and medicated and did not heal.

When you see children in school that are misbehaving or dysfunctional, it is because of their environment. Their parents are also dysfunctional, and they are this way because of their own stories. They were either raised in dysfunctional environments, or they have not learned the coping skills they needed for the stresses of their adult life. Sedating this person with medication does not make them better or change the environment their children are living in.

When you see children that are abused and turning into victims, you have created a dysfunctional adult. When you see children that are anti-authority, you have created a dysfunctional adult. The problems in schools are because we have so many dysfunctional children in the classroom. We did not support their parent’s generation or the generations before as a society. In fact, society has made it worse through stress and toxicity.

When a teacher can’t run a class because of the number of dysfunctional children in the class, there needs to be a change in attitude. We need to change the schooling to unpacking the stories and teaching them coping skills from the first day they start school. We need to extend the support into their environments, and not blame the parents for their dysfunctional children. We need to move the scientific energy we put into research and classifying to supporting and deconstructing the environment that harms so many.

When I look at that team of scientists that were so proud of their work on studying mental illness, I wondered if they would have more job satisfaction in prevention and healing at the root cause. I know I would, and I know that a lot of future generations would prefer to know how to prevent schizophrenia, rather than how to diagnose it.