By Ahmad Fakir Muhammad

In most cases of mental disorders, the cause can be traced to how a child was treated in his early years. Overbearing parents, exaggerated expectations, parental neglect, taunting peers, silent and non-supportive society, etc., are some of the situations some children face and develop one or other mental disorder.

When a child is discouraged, maltreated and victimized, there is a likelihood, as an adult,  he may develop a mental disorder. Mental illnesses are the result of a long process where an individual is continuously wronged and he finds it hard to express his emotions.

Here are some snippets from my case-files along these lines for the study and research of those interested in the subject.

“A” is a 32 year old young man from a well-off family. His mother comes from a poor family. His Nani (maternal grandmother) was a convert to Islam. His mother was called a Bhagori (a female who runs away with her paramour) in the family as his father had contracted a love marriage with her despite opposition from family members. At a very tender age, A was taunted as a son of a Bhagori. Later, he was raped. This led to trauma and never-ending mental distress in the following years for which he came to consult me.

“AK” comes from an aristocratic family. He was admitted to a cadet college against his will. There was a rape attempt at the college, resisted and thwarted but his friends did not buy that the attempt was frustrated. The episode was taken out of proportions and the patient was ridiculed. A ubiquitous sense of shame made him to withdraw from his friends, relations and society, leading to a mental disorder. Two disappointed love affairs later in life made his condition even worse.

MO, a physician, currently working with a Karachi Hospital and doing MCPS in ophthalmology, has been struggling with a mental disorder for many years now. His problems started in childhood. His Chacha, who was a school teacher, would subject him to jokes in front of his colleagues and they would laugh at him. Poor MO felt insulted but could not do anything.

Of course, there are other causes as well such as shocks, traumas, living in a constant state of fear, disappointments, injustices, etc.

The doctors, in most cases, make the problems worse. For example, a leading psychiatrist of Karachi treated a patient for two years and kept on changing his diagnoses as well as medications from time to time. First, it was anxiety, then depression and later OCD. The prescribed medicines kept on changing in accordance with the “updated diagnosis”! The sad part is that the patient was also prescribed an injection that is not approved for marketing in several developed countries including its country of origin, Denmark.

How does homeopathy treat mental disorders?

Homeopathy does not classify symptoms under broad nomenclatures as OCD, Depression, Bipolar disorder, Phobic disorder, Schizophrenia, etc. Rather all the symptoms of a patient are taken, analyzed and graded in accordance with their importance in the patient’s history and a remedy corresponding to the totality of the patient’s symptoms is prescribed, taking care of the causal factor if established.

Related: Homoeopathy in mental illnesses