Schizophrenia, Maslow's Hierarchy, and Compassion Focused Therapy.
I have experienced psychosis for 20 years. The main symptoms are voices and delusions that interact and reinforce each other. I have written a lot about my illness over the years in a series of autobiograhical books called "The Stages of Schizophrenia" (Chipmunka publishing 2007) I have had numerous medications including risperidone and clozapine as well as 2 years of cognitive behavioral therapy. In 2005 I relapsed, and having tried many things already, it was decided by my community psychiatric nurse to refer me to a psychologist at my local (mental) hospital. I have been having compassion focused therapy (CFT) I began to understand the process in terms of how we might use compassion within the various parts of the mental health system to help the self growth of patients on Maslow's model of the hierarchy of need. This has been a lengthy and ongoing process as I shall now describe. We know from Maslow's hierarchy of needs that safety needs must be met before emotional needs and emotional needs before self esteem and esteem before self actualization. From Gilbert's CFT model (Paul Gilbert Compassion Focused Therapy, Routledge 2010) we know that threat interferes with our problem solving, insight, personality, and emotions. The reason it does this is because the brain needs to provoke a physical response to defend or protect itself the fight flight response, submission, etc. What has all this got to do with schizophrenia? The 2 main symptoms of my schizophrenia are hearing critical voices and having paranoid delusions. This illness attacks self development on the Maslow tree in 5 key ways.
Schizophrenia bulletin