Interview with Prof. Dr. Emmy Van Deurzen - Pt. ii

---FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY--- I've got a lot of questions to ask you but I don't think you have time for that. Alright. Ask me one question that you didn't have on your sheets there. Right. One question. Well, probably because I had so many existential issues myself as a child, growing up in the Netherlands after the war and you know, with parents who nearly died in the war. Who had been starving and you know, very difficult circumstances in the Netherlands and so I grew up with great awareness of the dangers in the world and the dangers of war, and the dangers of hunger in the world. So I had lots and lots of big questions in my head from very tiny onwards. And I just became very interested in how philosophy can help us live more ethical lives, more moral lives. And so I wanted to study that. I wanted to understand it better. And when I realised that there were people out there in psychiatric hospitals who needed that kind of help, I had sort of found my path. Can I ask you one final question? M--making the world a better place. Yes. One final question. [laughs] Alright, what do you think— let me see—do you think it is crucial for psychiatric treatment alone or.. yeah, do you think it is crucial for psychiatric treatment for maybe clients or do you think clients can work on their problems or whatnot alone with Existential Therapy? If we get to people early enough, you can do it by just talking and understanding, learning and developing. But if a person has been kept in a situation where there is too much stress on them, and their personality gets bent by that as it were, and they start living in fear, and they start taking medications for that, then you get layers and layers and layers of distress on top of each other. And it becomes much, much harder to ease that just by talking. So sometimes people do need to take some antidepressants for a little bit to give themselves the calm that they need. But actually there are much better ways to find that calm than--than to take medication. So, I think, you know, actually the East has given us many good ways like tai chi and yoga and various martial arts - I'm very good at that as well, and just the art of relaxation and massage and things like— there are much better ways to achieve that than to give medication and then if on top of that, the person gets introduced to thinking through their problems and discovering what they're able to do, then you got an absolute winner on your hands and then people don't need to medicalise their problems in living. They can work them out with a little bit of help. Thank you very much for the informative insight. Copyright © 2014 S.N.A. Rahman All rights reserved.