Homeopathy and Mental Health Care von Harry van der Zee, Rezension

erschienen in Spectrum of Homeopathy 2/2010

Homeopathy and Mental Health Care – Integrative Practice, Principles and Research

Homeopathy and Mental Health Care – Integrative Practice, Principles and Research

Ideally a reviewer should be someone who has familiarity with the subject and scope of the book due for review. In this instance, when this review was commissioned, I was told the title of the book and I responded that I was hardly qualified to do this review, as I have no experience of mental health care. The reply to that was that as homoeopaths we all have experience in aiming to bring about mental health, so all should be well. That was an unmerited assumption!

This is not an easy-reading book, with lots of tips about remedies to use in ‘mental’ patients. It is instead a scholarly, academic, and broad-ranging study of Mental Health Care. This is, therefore, a remarkably difficult review to write. This is, quite simply, a remarkable book!
Christopher Johannes and Harry van der Zee are the compilers, and also the author of one chapter apiece. As they say in their preface “This anthology was born out of a desire to start positively addressing some of these issues and concerns ... [for] those books that we do have dealing with homeopathy in mental health care tend to be specialised handbooks of detailed case approaches or applied homeopathic philosophy intended only for the practising homeopath. They do not really offer the larger, contextualised and integrative picture of how homeopathy applies to mental health care, and they do not offer the greater snapshot of the issues we need to deal with to take homeopathy in mental health care further.” In the previous paragraph, the compilers deal with the point that homeopathy, both in the popular mind and among professionals, is thought of as useful in certain limited contexts but not as a modality with a valid application in mental health, not least because of the lack of an appropriate “existing evidence base of empirical research.” So, in this book they have sought to draw on their team of contributors’ “richness of experience for including coverage and contextualisation of issues pertinent to meaningful areas of integration and integrative process, research, theory, ethics, and possible future directions.” This last sentence exemplifies why it is so hard to review this work.
 
The book consists of three sections. Section 1 is called Introduction; Section 2 Integration, Case Applications and Therapeutic Process; Section 3 Research, Ethics and Theory.  Each section consists of several chapters, all helpfully preceded by an ‘Abstract’:

Section 1 comprises chapters 1 to 4, covering the role of homeopathy in reducing the global mental health burden; the homeopathic healing process, transformational outcomes, and the patient-provider relationship; holistic, spiritual benefits of homeopathy; and ‘was Hahnemann the real pioneer of psychiatry?’

Section 2 has more specifically to do with homeopathic treatment, and several chapters do contain homeopathic case studies. This section comprises chapters 5 to 16, including the homeopathic treatment of children, of multiple personality disorder, of post-traumatic-stress disorder, and of patients taking psychotropic medication. The compilers each appear as authors in this section: Christopher Johannes contributes a chapter called ‘The Homeopathic Counsellor – Beyond the Remedy’; and Harry van der Zee one called ‘Healing Collective Trauma with Homeopathy – Applying the Genus Epidemicus Approach to Trauma’. There is a chapter on Carl Rogers’ person-centred approach, on integrating psychotherapy and homeopathy, on the Jungian perspective, on homeopathy as a tool for personal evolution, and a clinical diary of the treatment of mental diseases. The final chapter in this section approaches homeopathy from a ‘new’ angle, with the intriguing title ‘Using the Tools of Traditional Chinese Medicine Diagnosis to Prescribe Homeopathic Cases in Psychological Cases’.
Section 3 broadens the scope of the book. Of these last four chapters, the first asks if homeopathy is useful in psychotherapy, the next covers research issues in homeopathy in mental health, the penultimate considers ethical and practical implications for homeopathy in mental health care, whilst the final chapter (no 20) – just like the last chapter of section 2 – brings in new material under the title ‘Neuro-Psychical (Dis)Orders and Homeopathy – Biophotonic Connections’.

There is an alphabetical index of topics at the end, preceded by something very welcome for those wanting to try to find any homeopathic tips, namely an alphabetical index of remedies referred to in the book, with page references. The remedies are mostly single ones, with a large number of familiar ones; there are some unfamiliar ones too, such as Amethyst Immersion and Quartz Crystal (from the Gems work of Peter Tuminello), flower essences, such as Raven Essences, a few proprietary remedies such as Peter Chappell’s PC remedies and a combination known as L72 or ‘Anti-anxiety’ which, amusingly for those who do not approve of combinations, was found by researchers to be ineffective against anxiety but statistically beneficial in insomnia!

A little taster to end a formal review of a seminal work!