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This is a 'letter' I wrote to the psychiatric profession, published in the BPS Transpersonal Journal in 2018.

It relates a little of my personal journey with spiritual psychosis and psychiatry and aims to communicate the truth that recovery from extreme states is possible.

And that embodied mindfulness-based approaches, human connection practices and trauma work have an important role to play in the future of therapeutic psychiatry.

This essay evolved out of a concern that the current practice within psychiatry to categorise human suffering as pathological mental illness and normalise passive pill taking, rather than encourage therapeutic journey, has the unintended negative consequence of preventing people from recovering.

And the psychiatric encroachment into normal human life suffering will create future epidemics of serious mental illness.

In the UK, we live in a social democracy.

This means that as a healthy society, we allow different world views and respects minority groups as far as possible.

Society members are respected as well as having legal human rights and we allow freedom of choice.

Somehow when it comes to mental health, this maturity in our society has been discarded.

Instead, we have coercive practices and a totalitarian focus on chemical treatment without respecting that many people do not want this.

This essay introduces the philosophy behind the sensitiveBeing project, which is that a healthy self-identity is essential for well-being and recovery from what we generally call serious mental illness.

Lack of such self-identity may underlie the difficulties people experience.

I attempt to formulate a secular mindfulness for mental health with this project which may fill the current void.

In summary, if I identify as a mentally ill person, that is what I am and will remain. To successfully undertake a journey of recovery you need to start from a place that is essentially recovered.