It’s an old debate about whether mental health affects physical health. This is a discussion that sometimes comes to aphoristic generalizations. Again and again, unlucky adventurers took advantage of human suffering at the most vulnerable moment of patients and relatives. In recent years, however, medicine does not seem to be shifting naturally towards such dangerous, unscientific practices, but towards a philosophy characterized by a more holistic approach. Dr. Gabor Mate in his book When the Body Says No. The Hidden Cost of Stress presents such a perspective on the relationship of human biology to stress and its consequences. This is not one of the well-known simplistic “self-help” books, but an attempt to explore and at the same time tell the story of an adventurous journey through the maze of interrelationships between physical and mental health. The book comes out the day after tomorrow by Key Books, translated by Maria Kukiadi. “K” pre-publishes an indicative passage.

HM.

pre-publication

How can stress turn into illness? Stress is a complex patchwork of physical and biochemical responses to intense emotional stimuli. Physiologically, emotions are electrical, chemical and hormonal reactions of the human nervous system. Emotions affect—and depend on—the functioning of our most important organs, the good functioning of the immune system, and the actions of many of the biological substances that circulate in the body and affect physical functions. (…) Repulsion – shutting off emotions from the conscious level and forcing them into the unconscious – disorients and confuses the body’s defenses to such an extent that for many people, the defenses end up going the wrong way, destroying health, instead of helping it , protects.

“The view that illness and death are personal faults is the worst way to blame the victim,” noted a key column in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1985. “When patients already bear the burden of disease, we should not burden them with taking responsibility for the outcome.”

We cannot separate the mind from the body, Socrates said almost two and a half millennia before the advent of psychoneuro-immuno-endocrinology!

We will return to this difficult question of whether the patient ends up being blamed for something. Here I will remark enough that it is not fault or failure. These words only muddy the waters. As we shall see, the accusation of the one who suffers, apart from being morally unthinkable, has no scientific basis whatsoever.

The NEJM article confuses guilt with liability. Although each of us is afraid of being blamed, we would all like to be more responsible, that is, to be able to respond responsibly and consciously to situations in our lives, and not just react. We want to make decisions about our lives: to have control, to be able to make decisions that affect us. Without awareness, there is no real responsibility. One of the weaknesses of Western medicine is that we have reduced the doctor to an authority, while the patient is too often simply cured or cured. Thus, people are deprived of the opportunity to be truly responsible. None of us is to blame if we succumb to sickness or death. Anyone can succumb at any time, but the more we learn about ourselves, the less likely we are to become passive victims.

We must look at the relationship between mind and body in order to understand both sickness and health. Dr. Robert Moder of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto has written about the mind-body relationship in illness. “When we try to understand and answer the question about stress,” he told me in an interview, “we are more likely to lead to health than if we ignore this question.” In the process of healing, the smallest piece of information, every grain of truth can be very important. If there is a connection between emotions and the body, not telling people about it means depriving them of the opportunity to use an important tool.

And here we are faced with a lack of language. Just talking about the relationship between mind and body is like implying that two separate entities are connected to each other in some way. But in life there is no such division, there is no body that would not be the mind, there is no mind that would not be the body. The word “mind-body” has been suggested to describe the actual situation as it is.

The theory of mind and body is not new even to the West. In one of Plato’s Dialogues, Socrates refers to the Thracian doctor’s criticism of his Greek colleagues: “This is why Greek doctors do not know the cure for so many diseases; they are ignorant in everything. The greatest error of our time in the treatment of the human body is that doctors separate the mind from the body. We cannot separate the mind from the body, Socrates said – almost two and a half millennia before the advent of psychoneuroimmunoendocrinology!