#035 Reframing Mental Health with Dr. Terry Lynch

Dr. Terry Lynch joins me this week. Terry is an Irish mental health educator, physician, psychotherapist, best-selling mental health author and provider of a recovery-oriented mental health service. Terry is one of a significant minority of mental health professionals globally who have become aware that the current prevailing approach to emotional and mental health care is seriously dysfunctional and unfit for purpose. The prevailing understanding of and approach to emotional and mental health is fraught with misinformation, inaccuracies and fallacies, fuelled primarily by powerful vested interests. The dominance of global mental health information, education and treatment that derives from the distortions that are endemic within the prevailing mental health (mis)understanding greatly restricts the potential for healing and recovery. Terry favours a truly holistic approach to health and wellbeing including emotional and mental health, within which truth and fact are prioritized rather than beliefs, dogma and biases. He questions the repeated emphasis on the brain in relation to mental health; the diminution of the importance of the mind, the human psyche; the emphasis on 'mental illness' rather than the centrality of life, existence and life struggles; the chronic failure to recognize trauma and its many effects within the prevailing approach to mental health. The medicalization of human distress is not working. It is fundamentally counter-productive. In the public interest, a significant paradigm change is urgently required. https://doctorterrylynch.com