While Psychiatry Slept

Overview

Where has the imagination gone in current psychiatric practice? While Psychiatry Slept dares to ask this question. It challenges psychiatry's literalistic theories and demonstrates how the imagination is always revealing itself through nighttime dreams, physical symptoms, hallucinations, delusions, and synchronicity. Using material from actual patient cases over his thirty-five years as a psychiatrist, the author weaves a collection of fictional stories showcasing the vibrant realm of the imaginal—that region between mind and body—returning psychotherapy to its original meaning: "therapy of the soul."

Reviews

"While Psychiatry Slept gives you all the pleasures of a novel and yet may reset your psychological thinking in a profound way. The characters are so real that you can love and hate them, the ideas so challenging to a high-tech medical world that you sense heart and soul returning." —Thomas Moore, author, Care of the Soul and Ageless Soul

"Mecouch envisions a new future for psychiatry. Using creative dreaming and storytelling, he describes a most imaginative and useful way to work with mental 'illness.' Fun, engaging, a must-read for everyone interested in human nature."  —Amy and Arnold Mindell, Ph.D.'s, authors, Riding the Horse Backwards

"My heart soared reading this brilliant book. Mecouch does great honor to the soulful psychiatric tradition of Jung, Perry, and Laing.... A guide to truly meeting the human suffering of madness and a vital antidote to our era's debilitating epidemic of 'evidence-based medicine' and its failed fantasy of mind as malfunctioning machine." —Will Hall, host of KBOO-FM's Madness Radio, author of Outside Mental Health: Voices and Visions of Madness

Author Biography

Dr. George Mecouch, D.O. is an osteopath, board-certified psychiatrist, and medical director of a community mental health center. He also maintains an analytically oriented private practice and is an adjunct assistant professor of psychiatry. He has authored numerous articles for online journals, blogs, and psychology journals with a special emphasis on dreams, Jungian psychology, and psychosis. He lives in Vancouver, Washington.