RENEWING OUR LIVES

Author's personal history Stan Papenfus was born in South Africa in 1943, and grew up in Cape Town, where he experienced a fusion of cultures including African, Asian, and European. His wife was a singer of traditional African jazz music. However, in order to marry her they had to travel to Swaziland, as a marriage between a white man and a black woman was forbidden in those days. It was illegal, prohibited under Mixed Marriages Act (1949, repealed in 1985). Later the couple smuggled their son across the border from Swaziland into South Africa.

Today Stan Papenfus lives in Northern Ireland, where he joined the Bede Griffiths Sanga. When he arrived he worked as a clinical psychologist in psychiatric hospitals, and founded groups to manage anxiety, panic and stress. He is a committed Christian and a follower of the New Testament.

Papenfus' experience and education Stan Papenfus trained in psychiatry, psychologies, psychotherapies, sociology and anthropology. He was also a musician and writer, and supported people to overcome psycho-spiritual crises. In South Africa he conducted ethnographic participant observation studies, by pretending to be a patient in a psychiatric hospital in Swaziland, and then wrote up this research for his PhD (1972). As a 'patient' living on a ward under observation, he discovered many human actions were considered by staff to be diagnostic of mental illness. This experience made him want to find ways of dismantling not only apartheid in South Africa but also apartheid between patients and staff in psychiatric hospitals.

In his 20s he had a mystical experience, where his personal self ceased to exist: "I knew the balance and harmony of God to be infinitely and eternally present". His mystical experience took him to a level of ultimate reality and truth. At the time of this experience he studied medicine, but after his mystical experience he developed radical insights into ways mental health patients were treated. When he worked as a nursing assistant, he realised it was possible to compare the domination of patients to the racial control of people under the apartheid regime.

Proposition His book stands out: he proposed that the way patients were treated in psychiatric hospitals was similar to how black people were classified under apartheid practices in South Africa. Today he claims there are radical alternatives to the way past psychiatrists treated hospital patients, and he offers us alternatives to what he terms 'psychiatric colonisation'.

He questioned assumptions around 'chemical imbalances in the brain' which he suggested do not exist at all. Furthermore, he claimed that pharmaceutical companies used unscientific strategies for testing the psychiatric drugs they offered, and suggested that fraudulent offerings of medication globally ruined millions of lives each year.

He called for traditional bio-psychiatry to be replaced with social psychiatry, as his observations highlighted there was always a social aspect to mental distress. He suggested biomedical models of mental distress dehumanised patients. His book proposed alternatives to psychiatric colonisation, and offered us transformative ways of addressing mental distress. His work was committed to supporting vulnerable people and those exploited in society.

Structure of the book Papenfus claimed this book was a journey, which offered a tapestry of threads around stories he gathered while in hospital as a pretend patient. He offers us deep understanding of how the medical model of mental illness failed patients who were mentally distressed, and denied them their humanity. He claimed modern psychiatry failed to recognise a patient as their self, rather it focused on what was wrong with them. It is a long book, full of stories and anecdotes which are good to delve into.

The author invites us to consider whether it was possible to live authentic lives under apartheid. His spiritual quest was to discover how any person could feel authentic inside the psychiatric hospitals of South Africa. During apartheid, black and white people could not sit together in a park or in the street. Places were labelled "whites only" or "non-whites only". They could not travel together, nor eat together, nor attend the same schools.

Mystical experience of Unifying Consciousness While he was 21 studying medicine in Johannesburg, Stan Papenfus had a mystical experience, where he entered the essence of all reality, a state of non-duality beyond good and evil, and experienced total truth and unconditional love. However, when he tried to write about this experience, he didn't have any words. He had transcended his own personal reality, and discovered implicate order. He wrote "consciousness of ourselves in a culturally self-limiting context can be understood only if we are also able to transcend this context and its power over our self-limiting mindset". In his mystical experience there was no separate self, no ego.

Stan used spiritual principles gained during his mystical experience to support people in mental hospitals. After his experiences of "Unifying Consciousness" he left medicine to study psychology and social anthropology. He considered it his duty to explore how one set of people could define and dominate another, and how groups agreed to and maintained this domination. In order to gain experience, he worked in psychiatric hospitals to gain a better understanding of the separate worlds of staff and patients, and he firmly believed that the relationships he saw in psychiatric hospitals mirrored apartheid.

In the same way in which under apartheid black and white people were separated, patients in psychiatric hospitals embodied their diagnoses, and became outcasts to normal people: "I took what I called psychiatric colonialism to be a microcosm of the macrocosm in which we lived." He writes (p. 30) "the medical model of mental illness, like apartheid, is an ideology that claims to substantiate a whole hierarchy of positions and counter positions, diagnoses, classifying, defining, and controlling, all in the name of ostensibly rational and scientifically proven facts."

Concept of Ubuntu Papenfus introduces readers to the concept of "Ubuntu": the essence of being human and basic to all human relationships. He wondered how he could be a free person in a psychiatric hospital when patients were not. He explored how humans had lost their consciousness and their love of God. At the same time, he noted the case in psychiatric hospitals that as long as there was one group of people defining and dominating all other groups, then these hierarchies could be used to create 'psychiatric colonisation' (p. 67). He writes: "psychiatry invokes the concept of 'the medical model of mental illness' and the idea of 'redressing a chemical imbalance in the brains of mentally ill people', so creating a whole underclass of human beings, considered alien to the rest of us" (p. 68). He claims that psychiatric colonisation was the practice of "medical science creating 'mental illness", rather than us all being integral to each others' lives.

Structure of book The first few chapters introduced us to Papenfus' life in South Africa, and his insights into hierarchies of being human. The early chapters talk about his existence as a student and white man who wanted to marry a black South African woman, and how he received permission from Swaziland's Minister of Health in order to experience being a pretend patient in a psychiatric hospital. His texts set out the minutiae of interactions with others. At the end of each chapter are a series of helpful points and principles which summarise the content for the reader. Some of his suggestions seem similar in concept to the work of the new/ancient principles of Open Dialogue in the west.

Psychiatric Colonisation and Ubuntu From Chapter Eight onwards he explores psychiatric colonialism and how it relates to apartheid and white privilege. He insists that we need to acknowledge what is happening in psychiatric hospitals: i.e. that categorising and controlling patients outweighs their well-being. He wants us to use open systems to achieve shared understanding, like the New/old Open Dialogue in the West. He calls this Ubuntu or deep democracy.

Papenfus identified one key problem: biomedical psychiatry assumed that disturbed patients were suffering from a biological medical condition, whereas he insisted that there was no abnormality to be found in the bodies or brains of mental patients. "No test of blood, urine or biopsy has been able to identify any biologically-based mental illness" (p. 113). He points out that we have medicalised life and personal problems. This means that a person's psychological problems were "defined as symptoms of mental illness despite the fact that no abnormality exists in the brain or body". "…No chemical imbalance has ever been demonstrated." He suggests that we need to reconsider patients as people with problems. The key problem was that staff stopped treating people as if there was any relationship between themselves and their environments: staff assumed patients were sick.

These insights affected him deeply: "Psychiatric colonialism shamed me beyond measure, as I faced my apparent inability to do anything about the whole colonised population, worldwide" (p. 122). He continues: "the ideology of bio-psychiatry, aided and abetted by a multi-million pound drug industry, creates colonies of de-humanised people, around the world" (p. 143). In his book all statements and comments are well referenced throughout.

Chapter Nine forms a long narrative (100 pages) describing his becoming a pretend patient in a mental institute, in order to see what it was like first hand, to be subjected to psychiatric colonialism. He participated in day-to-day life, moment to moment. His aim was to understand what was going on in order to transform and enhance patients' lives. His quest "led me to become one of the wretched of the earth" (p. 142): when one entered these institutions, the meaning, purpose and value of human life was suspended. While he was a 'pretend patient' he meditated to clear his mind, and received a realisation of pure awareness, inner peace, and bliss, then he explored how to offer meditation so patients could use it for their personal transformation.

Ways Forward He stresses the importance of listening to a person's narrative, which offers multiple perspectives influenced neither by rigid points of view nor dogmatism. In later chapters he offers us a series of exercises to use for ourselves or train others: harmonising body-mind, accepting universal self. He gave us a series of exercises to release tension, resolve conflict, and to become conscious of how we feel. Then he invites us to observe a state of grounded personhood, to master anxiety states.

In later chapters Papenfus offers strategies and exercises that readers can follow to enhance their well-being, to retrieve Ubuntu, the essence of humanity. He emphasises Ubuntu as where we cease to separate ourselves from others. As we open our feelings to each other, we enter a higher state of consciousness, which allows a profound sense of divine presence. People were heard and accepted by all those present.

Overthrowing Psychiatric Colonisation Papenfus suggests that in order to overthrow psychiatric colonisation we need to acknowledge the fraudulence, the manipulation of scientific method, and false reporting. He repeats that no data has ever been provided to link psychological states to brain dysfunction. He stresses that there were no mind brain correlates to mental illness: it is always functional rather than biological (p. 491). Everyday life has been medicalised: "the medical model of mental illness, biochemical imbalances, and so on, are used to fraudulently justify psychiatric colonisation. As a result, the authentic meaning, purpose and value of human life is undermined" (p. 494).

Stan Papenfus suggests that psychiatric colonialism is spreading, worldwide, and he fears that "psychiatric medication directly causes all kinds of impairment of brain and body functioning" (p. 501). He claims that scientific standards are routinely compromised and research reports are fraudulent (p. 498). He insists that psychological problems are not illnesses, and wants us to understand psychiatric colonialism, so that we can work together, with compassion, to move forwards. What strategy might we use at the Scientific and Medical Network, to explore his proposition, discuss any insights, and create change?