We are very pleased to be able to launch our latest website, lift-depression.com.
The site is primarily aimed at depressed individuals and any family affected by depression, it is also aimed at professionals responsible for treating depression, such as GPs, psychotherapists, counsellors etc. and those responsible for providing mental health services at government level.
The more people who know about the link between worrying, dreaming and depression, the sooner rates of depression in the population will begin to fall.
I hope you get a chance to explore the site, and if you have any feedback or a reciprocal link request don’t hesitate to get in touch via the contact form.
The connection between molar memories, autism, trauma and compulsive anger outbursts are just some of the fascinating topics covered in the exciting fourth publication in the ‘Essential Help in Troubled Times’ series – Release from Anger. The clearly-written book explodes many common myths and gives effective strategies to curb anger outbursts or excessive rage. It also reveals important facts about the causes, effects, triggers and behaviour patterns of anger and aggression, and explains the difference between healthy anger (a natural survival strategy) and destructive anger.
Release from Anger is also packed with clear advice and practical real-life examples of how to deal with inappropriate anger, whether yours, a client’s or someone else’s. It explains what happens, both mentally and physiologically, when anger suddenly erupts, looks at anger as an addiction and explains the reasons behind many compulsive outbursts.
It also shows you how effective communication skills, verbal and non-verbal, can unlock trance-like anger states and defuse aggression in even potentially violent situations.
Vital information that could save your life
— Why anger is essential for survival and what it does to our bodies
— How excessive anger can affect our physical and mental health
— How to avoid the common triggers for anger
— Why venting angry feelings will not make anger go away but is actually more likely to increase it
— How to predict anger outbursts in yourself and others
— The connection between anger and depression, and anger and trauma
— Why talking about angry feelings rarely helps, especially for men
— The importance of effective communication skills
— How to use your body language to reduce the emotional temperature of a situation.
Videos about the Human Givens approach are included in the Guerilla PeaceFair in Norwich tomorrow, Thursday 15th May, if you’re in the area, do drop in!
“The world is changing, how do you feel about it? The Guerrilla Peacefair is a conscious community event. You are invited to engage with cutting edge musical and visual artists, controversial film, community strengthening organisations and mindful discussion.
Musical performers include ‘I am error’ a conscious alternative rock band (www.myspace.com/philcritten), the imaginative ‘True Adventures’ (www.myspace.com/trueadventures), and local hip-hop Deftex MC ‘The Anthropologist’ (www.myspace.com/deftexuk).
We will show film clips of potentially enlightening information and media that has surfaced outside of the mainstream; the various themes concerning the nature of reality, manufacture of consent and concealed information. Excerpts from films like ‘Zeitgeist’, ‘What The Bleep Do We Know’, ‘Human Givens’ and ‘End Game’ are going to shown along with other contentious and thought provoking material.
Guest Speakers include democratic education promoter Michael Newman, a representative of Norfolk Education & Action for Development, Neil Kramer, a speaker on human consciousness and the nature of reality, amongst other things.
There will also be communal activities, a live painting experience and stands from local organisations and charities, and the chance for people to air their views with freedom and honesty in the discussion area.
In 1985 Benjamin Libet performed a study which shocked the scientific world. He showed that the preparatory brain activity that occurs as you make a ‘free’ choice about something is actually made a few hundred milliseconds before the decision reaches your conscious awareness.
In other words, your brain makes a decision before you do, and ‘free will’ is an illusion.
How he interpreted his data drew criticism from his peers. Some thought that the tiny amount of time in which this brain activity occured was too short, and could be accounted for by innaccuracies in how his participants reported their decision making.
However, a study by Chin Siong Soon et al, published in Nature Neuroscience this month has replicated Libet’s results by using modern brain imaging techniques, a more accurate way of measuring decision making in the brain:
“There has been a long controversy as to whether subjectively ‘free’ decisions are determined by brain activity ahead of time. We found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 s before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness. “
“Participants had their brains scanned while they decided to press a button with their right or left index fingers. Participants referred to a constant stream of changing letters, visible on a screen, to indicate when they’d made their decision. Around ten seconds before participants reported making their conscious decision, patterns of brain activity in two areas correlated with the decision they would go on to make. These regions were in the frontopolar cortex and the parietal cortex.
Unlike Libet’s study, which reported non-specific preparatory activity, the current experiment showed it was possible to use brain activity to discern which of two options a person was going to choose from, well before they consciously knew which choice they’d made.”
Yesterday mental health charity Mind announced the shortlist for its annual Book of the Year Award. The award, now in it’s 27th year, celebrates writing that contributes towards a greater understanding of mental health issues in all their forms. The seven short-listed titles range in genre from fiction, memoir and psychology, presenting both personal experiences of mental health problems and mental distress from the viewpoint of the intimate spectator. Fear, hope and perseverence feature in works that explore what it is to observe, fight and recover.
It is a great honour for everyone involved in the human givens approach that An idea in practice: using the human givens approach has been shortlisted for this award. The book, published to coincide with the 10th anniversary last year of the coining of the phrase ‘human givens‘, is a compilation of articles, case studies and practical information on how the important insights from the human givens approach is benefiting education, mental health and social services. It also includes chapters on what the human givens approach can bring to ethics, and how Joe Griffin’s insights into ‘molar memories‘ are helping to resolve previously intractable cases.
The other shortlisted works are:
One Unknown by Gill Hicks
The Mistress’s Daughter by A.M Homes
Why do people get ill? by Darian Leader and David Corfield
Minding by Chris Paling
The Father I had by Martin Townsend
The centre cannot hold - a memoir of my schizophrenia by Elyn Saks
The winner will be announced on 15th May at the Mind Awards ceromony to be held at Kingsway Hall Hotel, London, hosted by Mind’s president Lord Melvyn Bragg.
On this enlightening CD, Angela Austin talks to Ivan Tyrrell about how the human givens approach brings clarity and effectiveness to both understanding and supporting those on the autistic spectrum. The number of people diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is increasing: there are many reasons for this, and much work is being done to investigate the causes of autism. However, for those who are dealing with children and adults with ASD on a daily basis, the question is, what do we do?
As the first principal of Hillingdon Manor School, hailed for its effective pioneering approach in working with children and young people with ASD, and their parents, Angela has extensive knowledge of what works and why. The approach she developed is based upon the human givens and, when commenting on the school, Ofsted said that it is “very effective in meeting the needs of the pupils”, that “pupils and staff clearly enjoy coming to the school” and that “parents appreciate the close working partnership.”
On January 31stHuman Givens Nederland launched its program of activities in the Netherlands with a 2-day Introduction workshop in Amersfoort, a city not far from Utrecht and Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. This introductory workshop was followed by a third day on Post-Traumatic Stress disorder and the ‘rewind technique’.
The 10 participants who took part in these workshops were from many different walks of life – counselling, coaching and therapy, social work and teaching, from business and studies at university.
With a natural balance between learning about the theoretical principles behind the Human Givens ‘organising idea’ and actual ‘hands-on’ experience in some of the Human Given techniques, the participants felt they had a much better sense about these strange new ‘Human Givens’ that seem to be being imported from the U.K.!
The HG Netherlands team stated: “We are looking forward to many more of those delighted exclamations that came to us during these first workshops. It was a real pleasure for us to watch as each person started realising, for him or herself, just how universal and immediately applicable the Human Givens ideas are in all our different walks of life and living.
We know, without a doubt, that the Human Givens organising idea translates perfectly well into Dutch and the Dutch culture – and into any language for that matter!”
Many thanks and congratulations to all the HG Nederlands team: Jenny Wakelin, Marieke Uiterwijk, Renée van der Vloodt, Robin Temple and Sander van der Velde for making this new enterprise such a success, and good luck for the future of HG Nederlands!
This week, Professor Irving Kirsch and his colleagues at the University of Hull released the long-awaited results of an extensive meta-analysis of clinical trial data for new generation antidepressants. Their findings were splashed (in simplified terms) over the front pages of most of the major newspapers: “Antidepressants do not work”.
“Kirsch and colleagues found that there was a statistically significant benefit in the use of SSRIs over placebo - but that the difference was smaller than the standard of ‘clinical significance’ set down by the UK’s National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) for all but the most depressed patients. … Interestingly, the team also found that patients’ response to placebo across all the trials was ‘exceptionally large’ - an indication of the complexity of the disorder. It was only the fact that the most severely depressed patients showed a much lower response to placebo that made the drug response clinically significant in this group of patients.”
By carrying out a meta-analysis (a statistical review of many trials which combines all the results into one overall conclusion), Kirsch and his colleagues were attempting to discover any trends that have not previously shown up in individual studies.
One of the reasons this latest research is so significant is that it also included a number of previously unpublished studies which Kirsch obtained from pharmaceutical companies under the Freedom of Information Act. By so doing, Kirsch says that his meta-analysis avoids the data bias caused by pharmaceutical companies selectively reporting only positive results. Although these additional studies had been submitted to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), not all of them were made available to NICE when it was drawing up its guidelines.
An interesting, related article (’It doesn’t work, but do it anyway’) in the forthcoming issue of the ‘Human Givens’ journal discusses the limitations of the current ‘Gold Standard’ of evidence-based healthcare – the randomised controlled trial (RCT) – and how easily the results from such trials can be distorted to mean almost whatever the agency funding the trial wants it to mean (whether they choose to publish the trials or not).
MindFields College welcomes Kirsch’s research as it throws more light on whether SSRIs are as helpful as is often maintained and supports the position we have maintained on antidepressants for many years. However a caution is needed as antidepressants have been shown to be demonstrably beneficial for certain patient groups, particularly those with severe cases of depression, and until we have enough people trained to treat depression effectively by other methods, such as human givens therapy, they still have a helpful role to play in relieving distress.
Fundamental to truly effective treatment of depression – whether therapeutic or pharmaceutical – is a solid, scientific understanding of what depression is, and what perpetuates it. See: www.hgi.org.uk/archive/Depression
Watch Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell passionately summarise the development and importance of the first bio-psycho-social model of mental health and wellbeing – the human givens approach – on the inspiring introductory talk given at the beginning of the Human Givens Diploma Course in January 2008.
The human givens approach draws together the latest scientific understandings of how our innate guidance systems work to get our needs met and offers unique knowledge and insights into human functioning not currently available elsewhere (http://www.hgi.org.uk). For example, it contains the most comprehensive and scientific understanding of dreaming and the REM state currently available (http://www.why-we-dream.com), which has opened up explanations for what happens in the mind-body system in many areas, including depression, psychosis and hypnosis. The approach has also provided original insights into explanations for addictions, autism, and trauma.
We hope you enjoy this video and will show it to others who might find it interesting.
For the last 18 months the Human Givens Institute Emotional Needs Audit (ENA project) has been running, collecting data on how the emotional needs of the population of the United Kingdom are being met.
Anyone can take part, and with over 4,500 respondants so far, we are able to extrapolate the results into millions of people to see how secure, in control, part of a wider community, competent, mentally or physically stretched people feel, as well as how well their needs for attention and privacy are being met.
We’ve just complied the latest results as of 12th Feb 2008 and you can click on the picture to view them:
The results are surprising seem to be indicative of an increase in anxiety in the UK. For example, almost 40% of people feel insecure in one major area of their lives, and 30% of people say they are not being physically or mental stretched in ways that make life meaningful.
If innate needs — the human givens — are not being met, which the survey is designed to find out, people are likely to be stressed and frustrated which can develop into anxiety or anger disorders, depression and, in some people, lead to psychotic episodes and more serious mental breakdowns.
MindFields College exists to deepen our collective knowledge of the science of human nature - the human givens - and to apply that knowledge to improve effectiveness and raise standards in healthcare, education and social care policy throughout the country.
This blog serves to promote knowledge and discussion of these ideas, and also to give insight into the company that works to do this - for feedback, comments and suggestions please email: eleanor at humangivens dot com
