A US psychiatrist believes satisfying relationships are vital for mental health. Padraig O'Morain reports
Irish psychiatrists are harming the mental health of young Irish people by treating them with psychiatric drugs, according to the US psychiatrist, Dr William Glasser.
Glasser's system of counselling, called Reality Therapy, is widely used in Ireland, especially in addiction and education settings.
Ireland is spending "millions and millions of euros a year on drugs" for a form of treatment which is, he says, "a losing proposition". By contrast, mental health education would cost little, he told The Irish Times.
"I don't concern myself with people in the psychiatric profession," he says when asked what other psychiatrists thought of his message.
He is in Ireland to address the European Reality Therapy Convention in UCD on the theme, Mental Health not Mental Illness.
His book, Reality Therapy, published 40 years ago, is still in print. His latest book, Warning: Psychiatry can be hazardous to your mental health, has a foreword by Dr Terry Lynch, the Limerick-based GP whose 2001 book, Beyond Prozac - Healing mental suffering without drugs, was a bestseller in Ireland.
Glasser believes people should be educated in the principles of mental health and that these principles are not complicated.
"I think mental health can be taught in the same way they teach people to reduce smoking and buckle their seat belts," he says. "Take all the mystery and pseudo-science out of it."
The key to mental health is satisfying relationships, he believes. In his decades of providing therapy he has never come across a client whose problems did not stem from unhappy relationships with family or others or even, in a minority of cases, "from having no relationships at all".
The greatest threat to satisfying relationships, he says, is our genetic need for power.
We have genetic needs for power, belonging, freedom, fun and survival, he says. The need for power is the one we do not share with other creatures.
"We are social creatures but we have evolved too far," he says. "We have evolved to the point where we are so clever we could wipe ourselves off the face of the earth. We have evolved with a need for power."
In relationships, the genetic need for power leads people to try to control each other by such means as criticising, complaining, punishing, bribing or rewarding.
Glasser suggests that people replace these with "caring habits" such as supporting, listening, respecting and negotiating differences.
Of the caring habits, he says, "I think the number one is respect."
If one or the other spouse in a married couple loses respect for the other, "then you are in a very serious situation".
"We have to learn that the need for power is in our genes but we don't have to use it to destroy relationships," he says.
The genetic need for power can be seen at work in international relationships too, he says.
"The war in Iraq is about power. Each side is saying, I know what's right for you. First we killed them and now they are killing us. Everybody thinks he is doing the right thing."
Not getting along with other people is the key source of mental health problems, according to Glasser.
"If you can get along with other people you have a chance for happiness.
"Without it you have little or no chance for happiness unless you enjoy destroying people."
Glasser will address counselling students at Trinity College Dublin prior to the UCD conference.
"The one course they do not teach in Trinity College or any place else from kindergarten to old age is how to get along well with each other," he says.
There is no downside to teaching people how to get along well but "there's a tremendous downside to giving people psychiatric drugs and calling them mentally ill and stigmatising them for the rest of their lives".
In the US, "You can't find a teenager who is in some kind of psychological situation and getting some kind of help who is not on at least five psychiatric drugs. It's crazy."
There is no physical evidence in the brain to prove the existence of mental illnesses, he says.
If a person is depressed and hearing voices, "his family says he has something wrong with his brain. He has nothing wrong with his brain."
The person can be helped to recover "with support from his family and friends, and perhaps some counsellors".
Psychiatrists prescribe drugs although "no one knows what any strong drug does in any mental kind of situation. We don't know how they react."
It had been argued that treatment with psychiatric drugs would bring about a decrease in suicide, he says, but instead, unfortunately, suicide has increased.
But the use of psychiatric drugs persists because "billions of dollars are available to the people who make the medication".
Glasser, who was born in 1925, developed Reality Therapy in the late 1950s and early 1960s when helping psychiatric patients to move from hospital life to the community and, later, when working with girls who were in detention for delinquent behaviour.
He began to visit Ireland at the invitation of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors in the early 1980s.
Since that time, thousands of people in teaching, addiction services and counselling have trained in Reality Therapy and its theoretical underpinning, Choice Theory.
"You can't turn around in Ireland without bumping into somebody who understands Choice Theory," Glasser says.
The theory behind Reality Therapy was originally called "control theory" but this was changed to "choice theory" almost 10 years ago at the urging of Irish practitioners of Reality Therapy, he adds.
"They said we can't live with the name Control Theory anymore. We have been controlled too long," he says.
The European Reality Therapy Convention takes place from July 6th to 9th inclusive.
Anybody interesting in attending part or all of the conference can get details at www.wgii.ie or by ringing the William Glasser Institute Ireland at 041-9887564.