Alert 38 : People Helping People Cannot and Should Not Be Professionalized and Legalized
We need therapeutic diversity by redefining the whole field into the simple concept of people learning to help each other.
I open my April 11, 2018 radio talk show with this added emphasis to my Mission Statement: That people helping people can and should lie outside the conventional designations of psychiatrist, psychologist, or even counselor and therapist. That humans and humanity have survived through helping relationships, including helping each other with all kinds and degrees of emotional struggles.
This is an aspect what I call The Heart of Being Helpful—that therapy is inseparable from principles and ideals which cannot and should not be regulated, and that helping one another is a task for all of us, and not just professionals.
People can learn to help each other, whether they are psychiatrists or former psychiatric patients, or people who are functioning well or barely at all. We are all the same in that we struggle to have a good life, and all of us can do our best to help one another. There must be no more professional/governmental monopoly on who can help whom.
My talk show guest on April 11, 2018 guest is Daniel R. Berger, PhD. Daniel all the training and knowledge, and he knows more about conventional psychiatry that most psychiatrists do; but he has not been captured by professionalism. He illustrates diversity in therapy by acting on his Christian beliefs to be his own kind of helper, a man who breathes his Christian faith into everything he does, from his trenchant and highly informed critique of modern psychiatry to his Biblical approach to helping people with even the most serious emotional overwhelms, including psychosis.
I hope this hour with me and Daniel Berger will further open your mind and heart toward a better a life, and to a vision of how much better off the world would be without mental health authorities and professionals capturing the field people helping people.
Peter R. Breggin, MD
