Having worked in the health and mental health arena for many years, I was greatly impressed by the scientific method and the desire of my colleagues to “fix others’ ailments” – a noble and honorable cause to say the least. At one time in my professional career, I too looked to understand my clients and diligently undertook my responsibility to “fix them”.
After about 20 years of this practice, I began to notice two trends. Firstly, it could be very stressful carrying the burden and responsibility for fixing individual clients. While I had many successes, I’m not sure it was all due to my professional brilliance. In fact the more I thought about it, the more I came to conclude that it was more about what the client was doing and how they began to observe and respond to things in their lives differently. My second observation was that many clients handed sole responsibility for their recovery to me. Even some of their family members came to pass the responsibility for fixing their stuff to me. As Ivan Illich, author of the Medical Nemesis would have commented, “learned helplessness at its best”.
Illich put it this way;
“In a morbid society the belief prevails that defined and diagnosed ill-health is infinitely preferable to any other form of negative label or to no label at all. It is better than criminal or political deviance, better than laziness, better than self-chosen absence from work. More and more people subconsciously know that they are sick and tired of their jobs and of their leisure passivities, but they want to hear the lie that physical illness relieves them of social and political responsibilities” (Illich, 1976).
The awakening for me really occurred after studying ontological coaching and being profoundly impacted by the notion of the human observer. This notion is based on the concept that as human beings we all live our lives in a perceptual reality that incorporates things we notice and many things we fail to notice. We engage in the world utilising a perceptual system of noticing that is habitually trained. This is eloquently captured in the following formula:
O + A = R (Observations + Actions = Results)
While this point is not in the rocket science category, it emphasises the power of observations and how we can change our observational perspective to generate a broader range of actions and obtain different results.
I often reflect on how our way of observing the interactions we have with health professionals impacts our actions and the results we get. For many of my clients, I have noticed a habit where the client has stopped trying to observe what is happening for them in the internal world of their being and are more than happy to have the health professional define what is and what it means for them. While definition and diagnosis is important, sometimes the process of defining and labeling can lead us to fix our observational perspective. For example:
Contrast the differing meanings of the words “disease” and “dis-ease”. “Disease” – a medical condition, a specific disorder and /or problem in society. “Dis-ease” – a disturbed state of feeling. I often wonder which one comes first and which one we are likely to notice. The words and labels we choose not only define meaning they lead to specific actions in the future. If you change the words, often you change the meaning, the explanation and the action and outcome. What happens to the word “disease” if we add the prefix “non” to it? We get “non-disease”. What does that mean? Well that’s where the British Medical Journal can help us. “Non-disease” means “a human process or problem that some have defined as a medical condition but where people may have better outcomes if the problem or process was not defined in that way.” (Smith, 2002)
Below you will find a table listing of the top 20 non-diseases as voted by the readers of the British Medical Journal in 2002:
Top 20 non-diseases in descending order of “non-diseaseness”
- Ageing
- Work
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- Boredom
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- Bags under eyes
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- Ignorance
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- Baldness
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- Freckles
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- Big ears
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- Grey or white hair
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- Ugliness
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- Childbirth
- Allergy to the 21st century
- Jet lag
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- Unhappiness
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- Cellulite
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- Hangover
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- Anxiety about penis size/penis envy
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- Pregnancy
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- Road rage
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- Loneliness
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Interestingly enough, at the time of writing this article in 2010, many of the non-diseases are now routinely treated through a range of medical interventions. So now we have reached a point in our evolution where we are treating dis-ease as well as disease. In my mind, this approach fosters the growth of learned helplessness and decreases our human learning and adaptive capacity. Is it any wonder that by 2020 depression is predicted to impact 1 in 4 Australians and become our major health challenge?
So what is to be done? How can we become better observers of our health and well being (our way of being)? The answer to this will largely depend on the observers we are. Can I invite you to observe yourself from a different perspective? How might a different perspective support a different explanation and response?
If we turn our focus 180 degrees – how can we focus on “learned helpfulness” (a state focusing our intention on ways of wellness and helpfulness)? Just imagine if every morning, during your morning shower, you asked yourself the question;
“In what ways will I practice learned helpfulness in my life today?”
References
Ivan Illich, Limits to medicine, Marion Boyers, London, 1976.
Richard Smith (editor), “In search of non disease” BMJ, 2002, April 13: 324 (7342) 883-885
