Holistic mental health
Holistic health and nontraditional medicine have been in Eastern culture. Also, Malidoma Some in the book Of Water and the Spirit has advocated for Holistic mental health. However, in the recent decade, the Western world is implementing holistic health and medicine. Two organizations American Holistic Health Association and the American Holistic Medicine Association, are promoting holistic health and medicine as an approach to creating wellness. Creating wellness would involve encouraging people to integrate the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual aspects of self and take an active role in health care decisions and healing. In the Western World, mental health is not conceptually fundamental to physical health, and comprehensive health is therefore not attained.
Holistic health care in the Western World follows and observes four tenants. Holistic medicine incorporates both traditional and alternative therapies for infection prevention and treatment and optimal health. However, alternative therapies and medication are medicine outside the norm. Besides, alternative medicines and therapies such as herbal healing, acupuncture, and therapeutic touch, which involve mental health, are not covered in health insurance due to their nontraditional nature. Lastly, holistic wellness and treatment include not only a person’s physical body facets but also mental and emotional, spiritual aspects. They are implying that physical and mental health are inseparable and separable. Thus, without mental health, there is no health.
However, most health professionals in the western world do not openly endorse the tenants of holistic health. The American medical system is technocratic, where the mind and body are separate. The body is a machine that, when it fails or breaks down, it needs fixation. The body needs a physician to manipulate and fix it rather than allowing the body in collaboration with the mind to repair itself. When the body is a machine, the fixer prescribes the best remedy without involving the patient’s opinion and feeling in the issue. In a technocratic model, the authority and responsibility lie with the doctor, not the patient, leaving the patient with no choice because the doctor is right. The technocratic model contrasts sharply with the holistic model. Hence, it minimizes the holistic mental health and wellness of the people in the Western world.