How to treat difficult mental illnesses

  Some time ago, I taught a class on “Psychotherapy Practice” to students of applied psychology. First of all, I told them about a case I treated 15 years ago (for more details, see “Heart Language – Cases of Psychological Counseling”, published by China Medical Science and Technology Press in 1999): an adult female with a slow onset of illness against the background of certain psychological factors, whose main symptom was a sense of “deformation” in a certain part of her body. She first sought medical treatment in Beijing for two years, and received outpatient or inpatient treatment (including various psychotherapeutic and non-psychotherapeutic methods such as suggestive therapy and medication) in many famous hospitals, but all of them were ineffective. After returning to the local hospital, a doctor actually provided him with “surgical suggestion therapy”, but it also failed. However, the patient expressed his belief that the surgeon would be able to cure him and asked for a second surgery. The doctor had to beg me for help. The patient’s family’s money was lost, so it was a “miserable situation”!  I asked the students to discuss in groups how to treat this. The diagnosis was “suspicious” and there was no problem; however, there was nothing that could be done to treat it.  So I inspired them to think about the problem in a dialectical philosophical way, that is, how to promote the transformation of the primary and secondary conflicts. Finally, Shi Xiaowei comprehended and proposed the idea of first guiding the patient to integrate into society, solving the problem of survival and downplaying the treatment of symptoms. Oh, it’s the same way I handled it 15 years ago! I feel sincerely relieved. If I hadn’t been fortunate enough to receive inspiration and training from Professor Wenxing Zeng at the University of Hawaii School of Medicine, I might still be fumbling around, or even blindly following various “therapies” like the “counselors” in the society these years. I may even be like the “counselors” in society these years, blindly following various “therapies”. In fact, the method is not important, what matters is the clinical thinking!