A scientific approach towards mental health
It’s not quite common to associate mental health and scientific method as way to manage feelings, emotions, and perceptions. Two people can go to the same event but there can be two complete understanding of that event, one may walk away thinking it was great and the other may have a more negative experience: one event two different perceptions. Everyone will subsequently have different feelings and emotions around topics, again one event two sets of emotions. In psychotherapy there is an endeavour for the counsellor to explore the inner world of the client, finding out how they are viewing the world and from which lenses have they viewed it from. With mental health, understanding the persons subjective experience is important to identify and move forward, however with scientific methods, one is testing hypothesis and carrying out observations, so how does the two marry up? The application of scientific method in positive mental health comes in the form of challenging. Challenging the perceptions, emotions and feelings of the client. These challenges must be applied scientifically, for instance if I have a fear of dogs, a method would be to expose me to a dog then return to my therapist and discuss:
Was the dog aggressive?
Did the dog try bit you?
Did you see any sign of the dog acting aggressively?
These questions allow the client to reflect on the experience exposing their illogical and false thinking. However real they feel that the dog may bit them, the counsellor is asking for any proof that this was so, and usually it is not the case, exposing the unconscious fear. This is where the scientific method really kicks in, challenging the experience of the client. Now, instead of a dog replace it with a fear of outdoors, a fear of your father in law, a fear of cars since a serious car accident, a fear of groups, not getting along with work colleagues which is getting you down, and finally, a feeling of being worthless, which is very hard to shake off. A scientific method can be applied to each one of these, pushing a person to question their beliefs.
Challenging the client’s perception, or your own perception, of the world is vital to question and overcome false perceptions of the world. There are numerous identifiable thinking patterns that are indeed not correct and unhelpful, but they are the go-to place of our mind, a type of quick style thinking that our psychology is very prone to. Here are a few patterns:
Catastrophic thinking: where we think the worst-case scenario will happen even if there is evidence to show the opposite.
Mind-Reading: when we put thoughts into other people’s minds, not knowing these to be true but act as if they are true. One will therefore see that person’s actions as negative even when they may not be.
Labelling: labelling someone is not helpful as it taints your perspective of them. If you think of someone as “no good” you may be very prone to becoming angry and intolerant towards them.
Feelings are not Facts: your experience is not the centre stage of everything. Your feelings may not be the best guide sometimes. Just that you feel low, does not mean all things are bad.
Overgeneralising: we discount the complexity of the way the world works and generalise to our own misunderstanding. An experience of one person does not mean the world is like this.
Black or white thinking: this occurs when we label or categorise someone, or someone’s actions as either bad or good and leave no room for actions that may be in between, in the grey.
We are very prone to these thinking patterns. We may discount something very quickly due to any of the above categories, this is unhelpful towards a positive mental well-being.
Men are not disturbed by things, but by the views which they take of them”
― Albert Ellis
With every event that occurs in our daily life it is followed by a thought about that event, a quick judgement (Catastrophic thinking, Black and White thinking, Overgeneralising etc). These quick judgements need to be challenged and a scientific method needs to be applied. For instance, if a person has a style of black and white thinking, thinking that actions are either bad or good, they may be prone to seeing every action as negative. The person may develop trust issues with meeting new people and their social circle could get exceedingly small very quickly. If we analyse our thoughts and judgements it can broaden our mindset and therefore broaden our coping skills and resilience. Exposing our fallacy is greatly beneficial because you may be perceiving the world through tinted glasses, which may askew your judgements. Its best to test these out and see if you are right or wrong, our mind does not like being wrong, so it is a challenge. Challenge yourself !
Stay Safe