Russell Razzaque - Breaking Down is Waking up: The connection between psychological distress and spiritual awakening

BREAKING DOWN
IS WAKING UP

Can psychological suffering be a spiritual gateway?

Dr Russell Razzaque

This book is dedicated to all those I have worked and grown with over the years. Though traditionally defined as doctor and patient, we have, in fact, been assisting each other all along in this journey of mutual awakening we call life.

Dr Russell Razzaque is a London-based psychiatrist with sixteen years experience in adult mental health. He has worked for a number of national and international organizations during his career including the University of Cambridge, the UK Home Office and the Ministry of Justice, and he currently works in acute mental health services in the NHS in east London. He is also a published author in human psychology with several books on the subject, and he writes columns for a number of publications including Psychology Today, The Independent, The Guardianand USA Today.

EVERYONE NEEDS A BANISTER ; a fixed point of reference from which we understand and engage with life. We need something to hold on to, so that when were hit by lifes inevitable disappointments, pain or traumas, we wont fall too far into confusion, despair or hope-lessness. With a weak banister we risk getting knocked off course, losing our bearings and falling prey to stress, psychological turmoil and mental illness. A strong banister will stand the test of time in an ever-changing world, giving us more confidence to face the knocks and hardships of life more readily.

Understanding who we are and how we fit into the world is a quest we start at birth and continue through the whole of our lives. Sometimes these questions come to the fore, but usually they bubble away somewhere beneath the surface: Who am I? Am I normal? Why am I here? Is there any real point to life? Deep down inside we know that nothing lasts the trees, landscapes and life around us will all one day perish, just as surely as we ourselves will, and everyone we know too. But we have evolved ways to hold this reality and the questions it hurls up at bay.

We construct banisters to help us navigate our way round this maze of pain and insecurity: a set of beliefs and lifestyles that help us form a concrete context to make sense of things and, as the saying goes, keep calm and carry on. But, for most of us, the core beliefs and lifestyles that hold us together still leave us vulnerable to instability. The sense of identity we evolve is so precarious that were often buffeted by life onto shaky ground. And, as a consequence, we become prone to various forms of psychological distress; indeed, for vast swathes of society this proceeds all the way to mental illness whether that be labelled as anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder or the most severe form of mental illness, psychosis.

There are as many types of mental illness as there are people who suffer them. One of the reasons I decided to specialize in psychiatry, shortly after qualifying from medical school, was that, unlike any other branch of medicine, no two people I saw ever came to me with the same issues. Although different presentations might loosely fit into different categories, there appeared to me to be as many ways of becoming mentally unwell as there were ways of being human. I have since specialized in the more severe and acute end of psychiatry I currently work in a secure, intensive-care facility but to this day, in 16 years of practice, I have never seen two cases that were exactly the same. And the numbers just seem to be going up. In the UK today, one in four adults experiences at least one diagnosable mental health problem in any one year. In the USA, the figure is the same and this equates to just over 20 million people experiencing depression and 2.4 million diagnosed with schizophrenia, a severe form of mental illness where the individual experiences major disturbances in thoughts and perceptions. The World Health Organization estimates that approximately 450 million people world-wide have a mental health problem.

Beyond these figures, however, are all the people who struggle with various levels of stress throughout life and, all the while, carry a fear at the back of their minds, that they too may one day slide into mental illness. In my experience, this is a fear that pervades virtually every stratum of society. Rarely am I introduced as a psychiatrist to new people in a social gathering without at least some of them quietly feeling, or even explicitly reporting, that they worry that one day they are going to need my help. Such comments are often made in jest, but the genuine anxiety that underlies them is rarely far beneath the surface. There is a niggling worry at the back of many peoples minds that something might be wrong with them; that something isnt quite right. What they dont realize, however, in their own private suffering, is just how much company they have in this fear. Indeed, I include myself and my colleagues among them, too.