Physical therapy for mental health

The brain and body are so intimately connected it makes little sense to separate them when conceptualising mental health. The appropriate ‘treatment’ for mental health problems may well be a physical one. When in the presence of someone who is ‘psychotic’, you probably won’t understand their speech content - why not just watch the body?
Tone and rhythm of speech, facial expression, eye and head movement, gestures, body posture and body movement. What would a physiotherapist see? Suppose on encountering someone for the first time you ignore the apparent mental problems; offer just physical relaxation techniques, enforce a regular but limited sleep pattern, strictly control diet and everything else they put in their bodies - and wait. Introduce mindfulness techniques - for better anxiety and stress management, for greater mental awareness as well as physical relaxation. Then what you are left with is someone with communication problems! A blocked ability to empathise, and a limited ‘theory of mind’.

Reintroduce the most powerful communication tool of all - touch! So they can learn, or more often relearn to be intimate with others - healthy others like you. You offer intimacy. You teach them to dance, to play table tennis and pool, for hour after hour - to gain ‘balance’ (physical coordination) and the ability to ‘navigate’ (in space and time) in that social landscape of others. You provide daily massage, so the client cannot deny the world of others. On such a foundation clients can start to learn again. Acute psychiatric units could be reorganised to provide physical not mental care, for the first week to ten days of any admission, only a client's physical signs and symptoms of ill health would be treated.

A cold body is physically and mentally stressed, warmth is relaxation - too hot and you are anxious. The body and mind feedback on each other. Health in body and mind are the same thing. The source of health lies in natural environments - just as nothing in nature can be ugly, only the man-made! We evolved to be outside and on our feet all day, with our eyes resting naturally on the horizon - catching the sun. Depression is entombing yourself all day, with a slumped body posture and nothing but artificial light, consuming more calories that you use up. It’s about having a fixed territory, being stuck in one place and one time, and defending it in both a mental and physical sense. Mental wellbeing is about being happy with movement and change.

It is not a sign of progress that the modern world is able to offer mental health care! It is offered because the need has developed since we started transforming our natural habits and ways of living. Anxiety and the heightened awareness that goes with it, is the normal response to perceived danger - the natural reaction is either fight, flight or to remain motionless (the predator notices first the moving object). In the absence of real danger, anxiety should rapidly fall away. It is normal to fear ‘outsiders’ or ‘strangers’. Anxiety is part way on the continuum from happiness (loss of self-consciousness) to intense fear. Misplaced fear of others in the modern world, or the inability to attribute fear to the right people (or less often other things in the environment) is what makes others appear as permanent strangers, outsiders or simply mad.

Most communication is non-verbal, and cannot be spoken or written down - but can be physically observed and physically responded to. The meaning of any communication is the message received. You can only be conscious of a tiny fraction of what your brain is doing in any one moment - including thoughts and emotions. You can only ‘know’ your character by what you put in your body, and by the kind of people you spend your time with. The best diet for physical and mental health is a pre-agricultural one; the absence of refined sugars, cultivated and ground grains, domesticated animal meat and milk. The inability to navigate with sight, sound, touch, smell and taste, is a fundamental element of what some call psychosis. A lack of balance, not being able to let the eyes rest naturally on the horizon, which is obscured by the built environment, and feel the natural contours below one’s feet, equally obliterated in the modern world, shows in the long term mental as well as physical ‘crippling’ of the body!