B5 – Mental Health and Illness – A Holistic Perspective
Reflecting on early Biography Training Programs in the 1990s and our work in teaching or consultancy professions ever since, we felt the need to make Mental Health an integral part of our training for two reasons:
Firstly
to teach students how to recognise common mental health issues, and strategies to manage mild to moderate symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress. Anybody working with clients will meet people almost on a daily basis, presenting with such tendencies.
The course Mental Health Challenges offers information and tools to recognise common mental health issues.
Secondly
to help avoid the misinterpretation of the phenomena of a Spiritual or Developmental Crisis as being symptoms of serious mental illness. Rudolf Steiner addressed such possible misinterpretations in his course to Medical Doctors and Priests, originally published as Pastoral Medicine, and re-translated and published as Broken Vessels.
We explore how to differentiate what Caroline Myss calls: “healthy” spiritual madness from psychotic episodes.
Finally, we explore how the apparent division between Religion and Psychology is overcome with a modern understanding of Spirituality.
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