FAQ

Q: What do you think of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) classifications?

A: DSM is a classification for diseases and disorders that is helpful for describing patients’ symptom presentations, for the disbursement of medication, and for insurance claim and reimbursement purposes. Today, this science based on a disease paradigm is outliving its usefulness–not because it is wrong, but because it is too narrow a worldview.

Mental maladjustment and suffering is serious and deserves care comparable to all other physical illnesses. However, the disease paradigm has its limitations and inhibits an advance in our understanding of how to build health both for those who are ‘sick’ and those in the general population. Most limiting, the disease model does not attempt to do what all natural sciences must: effectively explain, predict, and measure experiences that build health.

Natural science has already gone through such a paradigm shift over the last century, having been liberated from the Newtonian worldview that dominated science for 350 years. Relativity, quantum mechanics, and Bell’s theorem have provided the world with a far more inclusive and useful paradigm that has led to the rapid advancement of science.

After 150 years of domination by the ‘disease model’ psychiatry must undergo a similar transition. The Lifetrack model is one attempt to define a science of wellbeing. Naturally, all models must be continuously challenged, tested, refined or replaced (criteria for Health Models by Jahoda).  They are mere tools that are a means to accompany theexperience of well-being and a means to measure happiness.

Copyright © 2010 Lifetrack Corporation

Visit the Positive Mental Health Foundation to support a study of human beings at their best, happiest, and most creative form.  Link to us to promote health and happiness.

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Dr. Yukio Ishizuka, a Japanese psychiatrist discusses DSM classifications, the disease model, mental illness and the necessity to move to a model of happiness and health.

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FAQ

Q: What do you think of medications such as Prozac?

Recent studies such as in the Journal of Public Library of Science Medicine suggest that Prozac, the bestselling antidepressant taken by 40 million people worldwide, does not work and nor do similar drugs in the same class. Patients that take it do improve – but those on placebo improved just as much as those on the drugs. Perhaps, the only exception is in the most severely depressed patients, but the authors claim that it is probably because the placebo stopped working so well, rather than the drugs having worked better.

Brain Chemistry Alone can not Explain Human Existence

Even if more effective and side-effect free medications in the future could suppress or even eliminate some stress symptoms such as depression, this does not present proof that the cause of the problem is chemical. Brain chemistry alone will never adequately explain the full human experience. Chemicals cannot replicate past individual experiences, nor can they help a person experience his or her full creativity, a successful close relationship or a meaningful existence.

Rather than becoming a Prozac nation, or indulging in drugs to dullen our sensations of pain, we need to build inner health.  Of course, when necessary, pain relief is humane and can be part of the process.  Regardless of whether we use medication or not,  the ultimate goal is not mere symptom relief, but happiness and health in all spheres of our life.

Medication is Symptom Relief

Rather than viewing stress as something that must be reduced or as an abnormality that can best be addressed by medication (some illnesses do require them such as psychosis, manic-depression, or perhaps severe depression). Yet most often medication is often purely symptom relief. In the process of treating these symptoms we need to view stress as a natural signal of an overwhelmed mind.

Stress as Opportunity for Growth

Dr. Ishizuka believes distressful setbacks are an integral part of a human being’s coping mechanisms. To indiscriminately use chemicals such as Prozac (or more effective medication given most antidepressants work as placebos) is to deprive the mind of its capacity to get distressed when it should. This may be detrimental to our optimal functioning and growth. Where there is nothing wrong with wanting to reduce pain in our lives (sometimes it is necessary and humane), to deal effectively with stress we have to recognize its nature and source. When we do so, we can learn to use stress as an opportunity to build health in the present: a stronger self, closer intimate relationships and meaningful achievement.

Copyright © 2010 Lifetrack Corporation

Visit the Positive Mental Health Foundation to support a study of human beings at their best, happiest, and most creative form.  Link to us to promote health and happiness.

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No matter how resilient or smart you may be, there may come a time when you have reached your threshold for Stress.

Your threshold can be triggered by both positive and negative events in life.

Hate Life ?  Are you at your threshold of stress?

There is nothing wrong about reaching one’s threshold of stress tolerance — even when such a limit is triggered by positive events (new job, fiance, promotion, newly wed). If you are highly resilient and determined, you are likely to push yourself to your psychological limits faster.

Anyone reaching a threshold of stress tolerance faces five basic alternatives.

These Five Alternatives are: (1) experience more defensive reactions (2) breakthrough (3) retreat/withdrawal (4) suicide/homicide (5) ‘escape’ through addiction or stop-gap measures.

Five Alternatives at the Threshold of Stress Tolerance

Reaching one’s threshold may occur regardless of how resilient or strong one may be.

(1) Stress:

We might experience escalating stress symptoms (anxiety, anger, physical symptoms, depression, and psychosis) warning us that our past experience and current capacity to cope is being exceeded.

Stress is there to warn us that our present capacities are being exceeded.  However, stress may also appear whenever one deviates from a well beaten path, even for the better.  When this happens, stress may cause the individual to resist the very action that is necessary for better long-term adjustment.  This may include becoming far closer to one’s fiance, spouse or partner; achieving what we desire most in life, or becoming at peace with our self.  (See Stress, Stress Types, and Stress Techniques, as well as Life Purpose when facing resistance).

(2) Breakthrough:

Breakthrough involves using a crisis or setback as an opportunity to grow. When we breakthrough and attain a higher level of adjustment in the three spheres (self definition,love definition, work definition), we often free ourselves from distressful symptoms.  When we can not breakthrough on our own, we should reach out for help from others.

(3) Retreat:

We might withdraw or retreat from the immediate source of Stress.  In the context of a close relationship, withdrawal can take the form of de-escalating closeness with one’s partner, separating or divorcing.  In work, in can take the form of changing schools or jobs, asking for an extension, staying home from work.

(4) Alcohol or Drugs:

We might turn to alcohol or drugs in an attempt to numb our stress symptoms and temporarily escape the pressures of reality.  The problem with this ‘solution’ is that after escaping one returns to the same reality, and often with a hangover or addiction to boot.

Addiction to alcohol or drugs is serious.  Not because it may be illegal, but because it reduces or often eliminates the chances that a person can become and remain sufficiently close to another human being.  Since our happiness is dependent on such a close one on one relationship, those who value his or her own happiness and worth need to think twice about this dangerous form of escape.  Drugs consume individuals – destroying the very self it is meant to relieve.  Drugs and alcohol addiction can also destroy those who attempt to love us.

(5) Suicide/Homicide:

Convinced that we are unable to (1) experience more stress (2) breakthrough (3) withdraw, (4) drugs or alcohol no longer provide enough relief, some turn to (5) suicide, homicide, or other violent and destructive action in desperation.

In the mind of someone contemplating suicide the ‘logic’ behind the decision is compelling.  This explains why some individuals go to extremes to make sure the attempt will be successful.  While it is true that the dead and those under the influence of mind altering symptoms may not suffer, they lose the opportunity to breakthrough and grow beyond the limits of their previous experiences.

Both we and our environment changes rapidly; every year, month, week, day, hour, or even second.  Even if outside circumstances do not change, our ‘subjective’ realities can change.  They can do so in such a way that what may have appeared to be a hopeless or intolerable situation may become acceptable.

Suicide is said to be a permanent ‘solution’ to a temporary problem. That is one reason why it is so tragic.

The crisis or problem that causes one to lose perspective, is always a temporary one. Circumstances do change, and if they do not, our perceptions of them can.

Many of those who failed to commit suicide are living proof that the circumstances that once were seen as insurmountable, could be overcome.  Over the past decades ever since the famed Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco was built, some 900 people have jumped from the scenic bridge to their death.  To do so they have climbed over fences and barbed wire in the hope of making sure that their leap will end in certain death.

Miraculously, however, one out of fifty survived.  The survivors accidentally entered the water vertically as they struck its surface.  The survivors suffered multiple fractures and injuries, but did not die.  A study followed the survivors over two decades and found that not a single one of them tried to kill himself or herself again.

Despite compelling reasoning that lead to the conviction that life was not worth living, when a new perspective opened up, the same lives became worth living.

In retrospect, one has to wonder what would have happened to the rest of the forty-nine, if they lived to develop a new perspective on their lives.

Retreat When Necessary and Breakthrough When Possible

Breakingthrough

For all of us, the goal is to breakthrough when possible and retreat when necessary.  To do this successfully, we must accurately assess external realties, inner capabilities and limitations, and the consequences of our decisions and actions in the three primary spheres of life.

The process of an individual going through maximum distress to reach optimal wellbeing provides a rare opportunity to understand the structure of personality and its functioning.  In the experience of Dr. Ishizuka, the greater the distress, the greater the opportunity for a profound and life changing breakthrough.  In Lifetrack therapy, breakthrough is accomplished through breakthrough intimacy, the process of becoming far closer than ever before to another human being.  If you are single or alone, then you will be helped or encouraged to find someone with whom you can work.

For those seeking more help to overcome stress, see Stress, Overcoming Fear,  Stress Types, and Stress Techniques (four key steps to health).  For those overwhelmed, reach out to others and do not hesitate to seek professional help.  In the United States, one can call 911 if one has suicidal thoughts or go to your nearest emergency room.  In both cases, you will talk to a mental health professional.  A friend or loved one can accompany you. As a health care consumer, you are entitled to ask as many questions as you need, ask for reasons behind any decisions, ask for a second opinion, and be involved in all decisions regarding your care.

While it is true, that most states do have laws requiring that individuals who are in imminent danger of harming themselves be hospitalized for a period of time in order to provide psychiatric treatment (even if they do not want to be hospitalized), in most states this hold period is 72 hours.  This period can be re-assuring when filled with panic or depressive thoughts.  It may be a turning point, one that assists you in the relief of suffering, and opens a door for building a new life of meaning.

One should not take a chance with the beauty and fragility of one’s life.  Taking action by asking for help can lead to new insights and relieve suffering.

There is only one of you here in this world.  You are here for a reason; a beautiful one. Reach out and get help.

Copyright © 2010 Lifetrack Corporation

Visit http://www.PositiveMentalHealthFoundation.com to understand individuals at their best, happiest, and most creative form.  Link to us to promote health and happiness.

Read more about stress symptoms of stress and anxiety, overcoming fear, five stress symptoms (stress types), stress techniques, health and happiness, and insights fromLifetrack therapy or life purpose.

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When we face new challenges that exceed our existing capacity to cope, previously successful patterns of thought, feeling, and action become ineffective.

To breakthrough these obstacles one should follow four key steps:

Four Key Steps

Practice taking 4 key steps.  These steps can help you make a breakthrough to reach higher levels of adjustment.

Each step is important.  The quality of each step depends on what precedes it.  The effectiveness of your action depends on your capacity to decide.  This in turn is based on an accurate perspective and recognition of realities.

When you fail to recognize realities, perspective is biased, and your decision or resulting action does little to reduce distress and build health.

1. Recognition

When experiencing stress one has to recognize which of the five stress types one may be experiencing (anxiety, anger, physical-symptoms, depression or psychosis).

Awareness of Your Inner State

• Is one of the five stress types stronger than the other?
• Are you experiencing a mixture of the five?
• Are the stress symptoms escalating as in the hierarchy of defense?
• As you ignore each of the defenses in turn , does another distressing symptom come to replace it?

Naturally, when faced with physical symptoms, you should first consult a physician to rule out physical illnesses.  Once you have ruled out a physical cause for the illness, take a close look at how you are choosing to live your life in this present moment.  Is there room for improvement in your sense of self?  Close relationships?  Work?

Notice when the stress arises.

Intimacy and Stress

• Are you experiencing stress in the context of a close relationship that is just beginning?
• Are stress symptoms arising in marriage intimacy or as commitment increases?
• Are you frustrated in your capacity to find love?  To keep or build love?
• Do you feel like you get scared or ‘mess things up’ just as you are becoming closer and happier?
• Do you fight just after a nice night out together or finally some time alone?
• Is it as you become closer that you encounter a setback?
• Is there one dimension of intimacy (intellectual-social, emotional, physical-sexual) that is harder for you to become close to than others?
• Is the experience of being intimate with one person in all three dimensions (intellectual-social, emotional, physical-sexual) difficult or impossible?

Achievement and Stress

• Do you find yourself making work excuses to stay home from work?
• Do you dread what you do?
• Are you overwhelmed by work goals, a difficult boss, an impossible job?
• Is there little sense of satisfaction from what you do all day?
• Are you always thinking of work first?
• Do you only feel a sense of mastery at work and feel that time spent elsewhere is wasted? Are you seeking your purpose in life through work alone?
• Do you think that when you achieve a goal, you will allow yourself to be happy?

Self and Stress

• Are you filled with negative thoughts or a situation that replays itself over and over in your head?
• Do you feel stuck in a role that you do not care for?
• Do you feel anxious as you lose your attachment to unhappy life events?
• Are you ‘in touch,’ ‘at peace,’ or ‘in control’?
• Do you experience outbreaks of anxiety, anger, physical-symptoms, depression or psychosis for seemingly small things?
• Do you feel out of control or filled with underlying anxiety?

Recognition: By placing our experiences in the context of the three spheres, we can improve our ability to recognize and understand our subjective response to life’s experiences.  When stress signals surface it is important to take this first step promptly, or the stress signals may escalate on the hierarchy of stress.

2. Perspective

Once you recognize that you are experiencing stress symptoms in one or more of the three spheres, you will need to gain perspective.

To do that effectively you have to first accept realities (positive and negative).

That is you need to accept the situation ‘as is’.  To be in the moment with whatever is occurring rather than denying its presence, wishing it could be otherwise, or thinking of anything that you could have done to make it any different from it the present.

When the current moment is painful, you may wish to avoid this at all cost.  But, if you wish to breakthrough you will have to come to terms with the present.  To do so, allow yourself to feel the emotion, even a painful one.

When you have loved, or worked hard for something and are disappointed by loss, it is natural to feel pain and hurt.  When you have lost a loved one, loss is particularly painful. Although some grieving is important and necessary, when we replay the loss over and over in our mind we suffer over and over.

Accept the Present

To change stress into an opportunity for breakthrough, we accept the current challenge, however difficult. If we do not, we only create more anger, anxiety, physical symptoms, depression or psychosis.  Only after acceptance of the negatives can we take positive action (action not consumed by stress or negative energy).

When we learn to accept the moment, even a painful one, a new perspective arises. The challenge then becomes an opportunity for breakthrough.

Learn to Stop Negative Thoughts Replaying in you Head

When you replay the events that triggered stress in your mind over and over, you increase or accentuate symptoms of stress.

To calm the mind, you need to recognize that those negative thoughts are not you. Thoughts are subjective and respond to something that may be occurring in your life, but thoughts are not the objective event, nor are they you.

When a negative thought arises, look at it as if you were watching it from the outside. Do not judge the thought.   The thought is a subjective interpretation of an objective event. It is not the event itself, nor is it you (you are something far greater).

While you cannot always change your external environment or a difficult reality in your life, you can change the way you think, feel, and act about those same realities.  In this area (the subjective response), you alone have control.

By accepting the moment, however difficult, you can change the inner subjective experience of pain and suffering.   If you can learn to accept the inevitable negatives in your life and increase the positives, you can take full advantage of your leverage over the subjective factor.

Perspective: By accepting reality ‘as is’ one can take positive action from a state of strength.  By building one’s three spheres despite the inevitable negatives in one’s life, one can emerge from a challenge transformed.

Track Inner Health and Happiness to Gain Perspective

For those experiencing distress, tracking oneself (in each of the three spheres) and viewing graphs of one’s progress, can help to improve one’s ability to recognize patterns in thoughts, feelings, and actions over time.  Tracking helps you to accept what is without replaying it over and over.

The act of self rating helps you control the inner subjective experience of life that contributes to our happiness or distress.  As one rates oneself (this takes 5 minutes), one can better understand and accept the present realities.  One can use the data to view graphs on our inner state.  In doing so, we can look back and gain perspective on past patterns.

We rate ourselves to make the present more alive.  To become conscious of the subjective factor and the areas of our life that contribute to well-being.  Even if you may not yet know how to interpret the scores, the very act of rating psychological spheres that determine your inner health can open a new perspective.

Tracking inner health is a tool.  Accept the ‘bad’ you cannot change.  Build on the ‘good.’

To build inner health, we must gain perspective on our whole life, to learn to accept the inevitable negatives in any one sphere, and to increase the positives.

Stress Exercises to Gain Recognition and Keep Perspective

If you want to track yourself, use the Lifetrack positive health adjustment sheet found in the Ottawa journal download LifeTrackTherapy (3 MG).

3. Decision

By asking yourself where you stand in relation to the five alternatives, you can improve your ability to breakthrough to higher levels of well-being.

Will the decision you are about to make, move you towards:

• Breakthrough?

• Withdrawal?

• Addiction?

• Stress?

• Death?

  Breakthrough when possible, withdraw when necessary.

4.  Action

After acceptance of the situation ‘as is’ and recognition that we are far more beautiful and profound than the anxiety, anger, physical-symptoms, depression or psychosis that may pervade us, we gain the perspective on the whole of our life and not just one life event.

We emerge capable of making decisions in a state of  health.  Effective action follows.

Effective action comes after successfully taking the other three steps.   If you have an accurate recognition of what builds health, a more informed perspective, decision, and effective action will flow.  In other words, if you have recognized what determines your well-being, gained perspective on how to achieve and maintain it, and have decided to take steps to change, then you are ready for effective action.

Action that comes from acceptance of a situation is stronger than action driven from any negative energy or positive hopes for future happiness.

Copyright © 2010 Lifetrack Corporation

Visit http://www.PositiveMentalHealthFoundation.com to understand individuals at their best, happiest, and most creative form.  Link to us to promote health and happiness.

Read more about stress (symptoms of stress and anxiety), five stress symptoms (stress types), stress techniques, and alternatives of the threshold of stress (don’t hate life).

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Since symptoms of distress can be overwhelming, the Lifetrack model categorizes stress symptoms (including psychiatric symptoms) into 5 broad categories and teaches us how to recognize them as escalating warning signals that the mind is overwhelmed by the challenges it faces.

According to Dr. Yukio Ishizuka, stress is not a disease or the cause of suffering but a natural and inevitable consequence of the interaction between one’s pattern of personality and life’s challenges.

Stress signals us that our ways of thinking, feeling and acting — our personality — is inadequate to handle the challenges we currently face.  The symptoms of stress often will persist and escalate until we are forced to pay attention.

Five Stress Types

At different moments in life, one may encounter symptoms of stress. One can experience anxiety, anger, physical symptoms, depression or psychosis — or a mixture of all of them. They can be triggered by an event, or our perception of an event, in our self, intimacy or achievement spheres.

All signals of stress have the same mission: to force you to reach out for help.  It is important to recognize that regardless of how bright, strong and resilient you may be, if the challenges you face are more than you can handle at one time, any of the five symptoms may manifest. Which symptoms you experience depends on your innate characteristics, vulnerabilities, and earlier experiences of successful or unsuccessful coping.

Anxiety

Anxiety can mobilize you to do what needs to get done. However, when you are constantly anxious, you may be getting a signal that something is wrong.

Anger

If you are forced to do what you feel too difficult or uncomfortable, irritability and anger may join or replace anxiety. While anger can mobilize you to take action, when out of control it becomes counter-productive.

Physical Symptoms

If you are unwilling or unable to accept that you are under stress, physical symptoms may be the only way to force you to slow down. Even if you believe that your illness is psychologically induced, it is always important to seek medical advice.

Depression

A depressed mind shuts down, protecting itself much like a fuse designed to blow when overloaded. Depression usually forces people to reach out. Efforts to achieve “the impossible” are replaced by preoccupations with the distressful symptoms of depression.

Psychosis

When other distress signals such as depression are ignored or not tolerated, psychosis may be triggered. Thoughts, feelings and actions become incoherent, confused, inappropriate, ambivalent or paralyzed.

Someone who experiences psychotic symptoms loses his or her capacity, to think, feel and act coherently and would not be able to recognize the symptoms of psychosis nor to rate himself or herself until medication has returned the mind to normal functioning.

Psychotic symptoms must be treated by professional help.  Medications are essential to control such symptoms.  Once controlled, the individual can then return to the same challenge of becoming closer to another human being, developing a sense of self or achievement.

The Hierarchy of Stress

The five stress types (anxiety, anger, physical-symptoms, depression and psychosis) can sometimes be experienced as a hierarchy of stress.

As a first defense the mind may experience anxiety.  If anxiety is not heeded, the mind may then experience anger.  Should that too not be heeded, physical symptoms may develop.   For some depression could follow.  And for others, psychosis.

Not all individuals experience a hierarchy of symptoms.  Some have a mixture of the five. Others have a clear ‘preference’ for one of the five stress types that seems to effective in slowing them down.  Each time a symptom works in the past or is successful at stopping us from a stressful situation, it may become embolden, and re-occur at times seeming to manifest itself as a disease.

Copyright © 2010 Lifetrack Corporation

Visit http://www.PositiveMentalHealthFoundation.com to understand individuals at their best, happiest, and most creative form.  Link to us to promote health and happiness.

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Fear and love, love and fear go together.

Some experience fear as a fear of people, others as a fear of bad love that ultimately disappoints, still others as fear of failure or fear of death.

Fear and love accompanies each other, as we push ourselves far beyond a previous best level of intimacy, self or achievement.

Only, after we push ourselves several times beyond a previous best, does fear lessen.  As such, fear should not stop us as we build inner health.  Our goal is not to lessen fear at all costs, but to experience inner health and happiness despite fear and initial resistance.

Fear and Love: Fear of the Unknown?  Fear of People?

Stress or fear can be encountered as we build inner health beyond a previous best level of achievement, intimacy or self.

In the Lifetrack model of positive mental health, Dr. Yukio Ishizuka defines and measures fear as the five stress types (anxiety, anger, physical-symptoms, depression or psychosis).   Some experience this fear as a fear of love, a fear of the unknown, fear of death, fear of people, others as a fear of success (fear as one move towards a desirable goal).

In achievement, fear may take the form of feelings such as ‘ I don’t want to work ‘ or ‘ I have too much work ‘, or simply being fed up with ‘ endless weekend work .’  A need to trim work, a creative and increasing number of work excuses, or the loss of work motivation are all signals that one is exceeding one’s capacity to cope.

In relationships, fear may be experienced as you grapple with the question of whether and when is a relationship over, a fear of people, a fear of bad love, a fear of love hate relationships, being overwhelmed with marriage life, intimacy in marriage, fear of commitment, or growing marriage intimacy.

Hate Life Itself ?

Do you hate life itself?  The incapacity to be at peace, in touch or in control of one’s self prevents one to live laugh love.

To overcome fear one must learn to love again, to find meaning in what we do, and a sense of lightness in life.  One does this by building intimacy, achievement and self at much higher levels than a previous best– despite fear.  This is not easy and when an individual is depressed this often involves professional help.  It is important to seek help early and not wait until when is no longer willing or able to reach out.

To overcome fear one must understand the nature of fear or stress (stress definition), the types of fear or stress symptoms (stress types), and (stress techniques) to overcome challenges.  The perspective that fear or stress can be an opportunity for a breakthrough is the first step to changing one’s life (going far beyond ‘ I hate life ‘ to a new experience of wellbeing.)

Copyright © 2010 Lifetrack Corporation

Visit http://www.PositiveMentalHealthFoundation.com to understand individuals at their best, happiest, and most creative form.  Link to us to promote health and happiness.

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When we encounter a challenge in our Self (self definition), Intimacy (love definition), or Achievement sphere (work definition) that is either positive or negative, we can experience Stress or Fear.

In the Lifetrack model of health, individuals rate their peaks of stress as they relate to changes in their sense of self, intimate relationships and achievements.

This helps us understand not only the nature of stress, but how we can use challenges to overcome symptoms of stress and anxiety.

Five Stress Types

Symptoms of stress can be varied.  For simplification Dr. Yukio Ishizuka groups them into five major stress types: anxiety (symptoms of stress and anxiety), anger (stress and anger), physical symptoms (physical symptoms of stress), depression (depression stress), and psychosis.

Regardless of how bright, strong, or resilient you may be, if the challenges you face in life are more than you can handle, one or more of the above symptoms may manifest itself.  These symptoms may not subside until you respond to the source of distress.

Observe them and recognize that these distress signals are there to alert you that you have surpassed your stress threshold in one or more of the three spheres.  You may have to slow down and re-assess what is causing stress.  Only after a proper recognition of realities can one gain perspective and take positive action to build inner health.

As overwhelming as such symptoms may be, they are temporary.  They are not you.  Seek a proper recognition of realities, perspective, decision and action that build health.  If you cannot bear the suffering or are not able to breakthrough, reach out to loved ones, to your spouse, a friend or a professional.

Stress Definition

Negative Peak: Negative peak experiences within a given rating period.

Anxiety: Thoughts, feelings and actions that signal anxiety, nervousness, tension, worry, and fear.

Anger:  Thoughts, feelings, and actions that are angry, unfriendly, hostile, and mean

Physical Symptoms: Any and all physical symptoms and feeling of illness

Depression: Thoughts, feelings, and actions that are negative to the point of being beyond your control

Psychosis:  Thoughts, feelings, and actions that signal inconsistency, confusion, inappropriateness, ambivalence or paralysis

Note on Psychosis:

Psychosis as defined here can be even applied to the ‘healthy’ mind.  Traditionally psychosis is used to describe the ‘mentally ill’ ie. a person talking to himself or herself out loud or experiencing visions.  Most of us have fortunately never experienced such a painful state (although many ‘healthy’ people when placed under enough stress such as a battlefield do).

Even healthy people think to themselves.  You may be aware of a voice (your own thoughts) constantly replaying what you should have done yesterday or will not get to do tomorrow.  For most of us, this is normal.

However, negative or inconsistent thoughts when playing over and over may contribute to paralysis, confusion, scattered behavior or exhaustion.  When we obsessively think about what to do next or what we should have done yesterday, our ‘inner voice’ is out of control.  We can rate this ‘loud’ inner voice in the Lifetrack scale as ‘psychosis.’  This state can occur in ‘healthy’ human beings. When trained our state of mind can be clear and in the present moment, free of such incessant noise.

Someone who experiences traditional psychotic symptoms (frightening visions, or cannot distinguish the inner voice from outer voices) may lose his or her capacity, to think, feel and act coherently.  He or she is not able to recognize the symptoms of psychosis nor to rate himself or herself until medication has returned the mind to normal functioning.

Psychotic symptoms must be treated by professional help.  Medications are essential to control such symptoms.  Once controlled, the individual can then return to the same challenge of becoming closer to another human being, developing a sense of self or achievement.  Due to the nature of the symptoms, however, such individuals need a strong support system and most must continue medications even when feeling well.

Copyright © 2010 Lifetrack Corporation

Visit http://www.PositiveMentalHealthFoundation.com to understand individuals at their best, happiest, and most creative form.  Link to us to promote health and happiness.

Read more about overcoming fear, five stress symptoms (stress types), stress techniques, and alternatives of the threshold of stress (don’t hate life).  In Lifetrack therapy the objective is not the mere elimination of stress symptoms, but building inner health and happiness.

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Stress Symptoms, Symptoms of Stress and Anxiety, Stress Types
Definition of stress types, stress anxiety, stress symptoms or symptoms of stress

http://positivementalhealthfoundation.com/symptoms-of-stress-and-anxiety/

Dr. Yukio Ishizuka was born in 1938 in Hakodate, Japan.  He experienced WWII as a child and grew up during the American occupation.  It was a time of cross-fertilization of ideas of East and West.

In 1961, he entered Keio Medical School in Tokyo, where he taught himself English and founded the Japan International Medical Student Association (JIMSA) with the support of Dr. Taro Takemi—the long-standing President of the Japanese Medical Association and a well-respected physician and nuclear physicist.  Upon his graduation from Keio, Ishizuka informed Dr. Takemi of his plans to pursue post-graduate training in the United States.  “You should not return to Japan,” advised Dr. Takemi.  Yukio Ishizuka understood that he was being set free.

In 1965, the young graduate left Japan to complete a rotating internship at Jefferson Medical College Hospital in Philadelphia.  The following year, he was one of 25 physicians accepted for residency in psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center of Harvard Medical School.  Elated, Dr. Ishizuka took a trip to Europe on a two-week discount ticket, spending much of his savings in the process.  During this trip he fell in love with a French woman, Colette, who would follow him to the US several months later, marry him, and inspire much of his work.

Towards the end of his residency in Boston, Harvard Professors Elvin Semrad and David Riesman encouraged Dr. Ishizuka to undergo further training in psycho-analysis.  Dr. Ishizuka briefly considered going to Mexico City to study under Erich Fromm.  Unconvinced, however, that psychoanalysis could enable people to become healthier and happier, he left psychiatry and was hired by McKinsey, and international business consulting firm.  After several years of consulting for McKinsey in Paris, Amsterdam, Toronto, and New York, he did mergers and acquisitions.  It was during his fourth year of mergers that one of his work colleagues became depressed.  Dr. Ishizuka’s rewarding experience helping his friend led him to return to the field of psychiatry in 1976.

Having been taught to approach complex problems as a whole by defining and measuring ‘objectives’ critical for organizational survival and success, he returned to his own field eager to understand the existing criteria for positive mental health.  Instead, he found a growing list of mental diseases and disorders (Diagnostic Statistic Manual of Psychiatry).  Whether one suffered from anxiety or depression, successful psychiatric treatment demanded the elimination, reduction, or containment of disease.  To be healthy is not to be sick.  There was little if anything on positive mental health, well-being, and happiness.

At that time, Dr. Ishizuka remembered the work of the American psychologist Maria Jahoda, who in 1958 published “Current Concepts of Positive Mental Health.”  The monograph introduced guidelines for the evaluation of models of positive psychology.  Unfortunately, in 1976 little work had followed.  No model of positive psychological health was developed or tested with patients.  It was his mentor, Dr. Jack R. Ewalt, the man who was in charge of the study by Jahoda, who pushed him and others not to give up on health.  As Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Ewalt continued to challenge his students to question prevailing medical doctrine and conceptions on health by learning directly from patients, rather than using their own words to define and treat illness.

Dr. Ishizuka, drawing both on the East and the West, his experience in psychiatry, and most importantly, his patients, developed a science of health.  That paradigm incorporates both an understanding of the mind in distress and optimal well-being.  Over the years, he used and tested the model with different nationalities and people from all walks of life.  Rather than examining stress, disease, and illnesses, Ishizuka asks different questions of his field: What is the objective of therapy?  What does it mean to be well? How do we measure wellbeing as a part of a cycle of life?

The model of human personality and experience that he developed incorporates man’s search for self, the need for intimacy and the quest for achievement.  It also incorporates peak positive and negative experiences and an understanding of physical health.  The tripod model has withstood the demanding criteria put forth by the American psychologist Maria Jahoda in 1958 on “Current Concepts of Positive Mental Health” for the creation of new models of health defined in positive terms.  Dr. Ishizuka’s work helps us to build health far beyond a previous best level of health, happiness and optimal adjustment.  Working to overcome a fear of the unknown, he has defined and quantified the subjective nature of wellbeing and one working model of positive mental health and human personality (objective subjective).

Dr. Ishizuka’s has been using, refining, and testing the model of positive mental health with over 2000 patients in the last 35 years of his daily practice.  With a good sense of humor, a great sense of balance, and over 40,000 session hours examining millions of graphs on health and happiness, he has fine tuned a science of health and well-being.  His approach on healthy human beings has been presented to numerous fields including economic man, war/crisis/health, national health, Japan and organizations.

Today through his busy private practice, he continues the work that Dr. Ewalt incited him and other residents to undertake.  He hopes that insights that arose during Lifetrack therapy can contribute to each person’s life purpose ; the experience of much higher levels of self, intimacy and meaningful achievement.   Through this website and future books he hopes to share with other psychiatrists, psychologists, practitioners, academics, and most importantly the general public.

Dr. Yukio Ishizuka graduated from Keio University Medical School, Tokyo, Japan in 1964.  He completed his residency in Psychiatry at Mass Mental Health Center, Harvard Medical School in 1969.  He is the founder of Japan International Medical Students Association (JIMSA), which received the coveted Japanese Health Culture Award in 2007 by the Minister of Japanese Health at the Japanese Imperial Palace. Happily Married for 44 years with three children, he is also a member of the Salmagundi Club of N.Y. as a resident artist.

Visit the Positive Mental Health Foundation to support a study of human beings at their best, happiest, and most creative form.  Link to us to promote health and happiness.

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Happiness and Health
Dr. Yukio Ishizuka, A Japanese Harvard trained psychiatrist presents a new model of Health and Happiness. Explore a science of happiness, the cycle of life, life purpose, objective subjective, stress types, and a life way that integrates both East and West.
http://positivementalhealthfoundation.com/about/yukio-ishizuka/

Happiness and Health, Excellence and Well-being
Dr. Yukio Ishizuka, a Japanese Harvard trained psychiatrist who left psychiatry to work at McKinsey (management consulting) and later mergers and acquisitions, returns to his field with a new question: what does it mean to be well?   Explore individual and organizational excellence and wellbeing.
http://positivementalhealthfoundation.com/about/yukio-ishizuka/

Happiness and Health
Dr. Yukio Ishizuka, A Japanese Harvard trained psychiatrist presents a science of happiness, a new life way or life purpose.
http://positivementalhealthfoundation.com/about/yukio-ishizuka/