Book title: Staying Sane
Author: Raj Persaud
Publisher: Metro Books
ISBN: 1900512041
Reviewed by: Joseph Maussen, Counselling Madrid
1) The reviewed book
Professionals operating in mental health services seem to agree that there is too little known about how to prevent mental illness. When a person goes to see a psychologist, psychiatrist or counsellor, there is a fair change that this person could have helped him or herself to a certain degree. Key questions, when dealing with prevention, are:
How do I know if I am mentally healthy?
What produces mental health?
How do I maintain mental health?
I find the subject of mental health interesting and important. Millions of people, including myself, spent time practicing sports to produce a healthy body and a general state of well being. This book goes a step further and deeper by explaining how we become more conscious of ourselves and our own mental degree of well being.
2) Overview
This book is about Personal Development. The information in this book shows us how to stay mentally sane. Actually the author says it is not such a positive sign for society that the need for mental health services is growing so rapidly. He therefore made an effort to enable people to become better at helping themselves.
3) Summary
Thousands of years ago being sane meant being physically strong. Nowadays being sane has a large psychological component. As we lack clear guidelines on how to be psychologically healthy this book is about how to become and/or stay healthy.
4) Mental health defined
The 5 characteristics or states of mind of mentally healthy people, according to most psychologists and psychiatrists around the world, are:
- Autonomy
- Accurate perception of reality
- Constructive attitude towards the self
- Integration of personality
- Environmental mastery
4.1 Autonomy
This refers to personal independence, where you feel free to do and think what you like without being too dependent on others or restricted by fears or other incapacities. Some have referred to this as a kind of self-containment which suggests the autonomous are not dependent for their main satisfaction upon the external world or other people, but are more dependent on their own personal resources. So one obvious measure of this would be the ability to be alone without undue distress, and this has been described by some psychoanalysts as one of the most important signs of maturity in emotional development.
Autonomous persons will not react in the same way to an event as the crowd. Instead the autonomous take time to make up their minds independently, and often have no trouble coming out against the majority viewpoint. They do not mind not conforming.
Herein lies a paradox with positive mental health. If you care about others you leave yourself open to be hurt by them. But if you do not care for them you cannot be hurt, while on the other hand you are unlikely to have built the kind of social support found to be helpful in withstanding stress.
To achieve long-term mental health you need to strike a balance and develop the ability the be both sensitive and insensitive as required.
4.2 Accurate perception of reality
This state of mind has long been popular with psychologists and psychiatrists as a requirement of mental health – partly because they are used to seeing people who hear voices and believe they must go to Buckingham Palace to claim their rightful place on the throne. It is also in any case very difficult to decide upon the correct perception of reality – after all, opposing political parties and different religions cannot seem to agree on this. In stead, the characteristic of the truly mentally healthy is the ability to take in the world as it is, particularly when this state of affairs is different from the way you wish it was.
You may need to believe you have done enough revision for your exam – and can therefore take yet another break – but the mentally healthy can see the distinction between what they wish to be the case, and what really is. This has been described as a “relative freedom from need-distortion”.
4.3 Constructive attitude towards the self
This state of mind includes ideas like
self acceptance you have learned to accept your capabilities and limitations
self confidence
self esteem
self respect
self reliance
4.4 Integration of personality
Broadly speaking it means that you do not hold attitudes to the world which are in abrasive conflict with each other. As a lot of poor mental health is attributed to internal conflicts which tear us apart, it makes sense that the positively mentally healthy persons should be relatively free of conflict.
Freud said: “Where Id was, let Ego be”, meaning: suppress your animal instincts and replace them with more civilising processes. However, some therapists argue that if we do away with all our baser urges and are super-rational all the time we became rather passionless.
The real solution is probably some kind of balance between our internal forces: leaving us with the flexibility to be aggressive or passionate as the need arises, and to be in control and calm when required. (existential therapists suggest that the four basic conflicts we all confront are those of:
Freedom, Isolation, Meaninglessness and Death.)
4.5 Environmental mastery
Environmental mastery refers to having a sense of control over your life and destiny and, in particular, to the feeling that you are more in control of your environment that it is of you. One measure of environmental mastery is some sense of personal achievement in the significant areas of life, like relationships, work and solving your problems. However, it is possible to see that success in even these relatively few different areas in life often comes down to mastery of relationships.
5 ) Crisis
Clients often ask why you need to interfere so consciously with your natural reaction to crisis. Why has nature not evolved for us over millions of years of natural selection a more helpful instinctive response to stress? The author suspects this is because, in the animal kingdom, surviving a crisis depends on immediate response, f.e. a gazelle instinctively trying to escape from a hungry lion without thinking too much before starting to run.
A recent study showed that a negative life event of the same severity was twice as likely to cause major depression in people who felt they would be unable to cope with the resulting stress as in those who were more confident about coping.
So, developing good coping skills will help you with much more than simply coping with an immediate crisis. If you learn a coping mantra by heart and get used to using it, your confidence will increase, and this in itself will improve your reaction to stress.
6 ) Relationships
Psychologists term the most powerful form of reasoning “humanistic reasoning” and this is communication which emphasises the human happiness or suffering produced by any type of behaviour.
Assertive humanistic statements are usually of the type “ When you do X, this makes me feel Y because of Z”. Yet what happens when, as is sometimes the case, the person we are reasoning with no longer cares about our happiness? Change for a change concept.
7 ) Tips
Create and develop multiple fields of interest
- relationships with different people with different backgrounds
- work & hobbies
Do not be afraid to make mistakes
- There is a grand term from the psychology of learning – successive
approximation – which makes mistakes sound very wise indeed.
Be kinder to yourself
- You cannot be relaxed if you are always focused on avoiding disappointing others, or not appearing stupid. Excessive high standards point to a potential problem: a major discrepancy between your real self and your ideal self. A big gap might lead to self-loathing which undermines much mental illness.
End book review
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