THE FANCIFUL notion of "mind over matter", where the mind can exert influence over the body, is not so fanciful after all. It is possible for the mind to impose lasting physiological changes on the brain to overcome psychiatric problems such as obsessive compulsive disorder.
So argues Prof Jeffrey M Schwartz, one of the world's leading proponents of mind over matter in a psychiatric sense, who was in Dublin yesterday to deliver a lecture at St Patrick's Hospital.
He discussed the complex interplay between mind and brain in a lecture entitled, "The Mind and the Brain, Are They Related?"
Prof Schwartz is a research psychiatrist in the school of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has spent years studying conscious awareness and the idea that the actions of the mind can have an effect on the workings of the brain. "I use obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) as a model for the issue of the relationship between the mind and the brain," he said yesterday evening before the lecture.
The brain is the organ that controls our experience of the world via the senses, while the mind is our ability to be self-aware. In a neuro-psychiatric disorder such as OCD, the brain malfunctions causing us to respond inappropriately to the world, seen in compulsive behaviours such as obsessive washing of the hands and overwhelming fears of contamination or violence, amongst others, Prof Schwartz explained.
About 2 per cent of the population suffer with different levels of OCD at any given time. Few have the innate resources to overcome the compulsions and the lives of sufferers are ruined by the disorder. The typical psychiatric approach was to administer drugs that helped people deal with the compulsions, he said. Yet there was a growing trend towards the use of electrodes inserted into the brain to alter activity in the areas of the brain linked to OCD. This, he vehemently declared, was nothing short of "electric pre-frontal lobotomy" and something that was "inappropriate" and "socially unacceptable to me".
His own research, backed up by many medical studies, had shown that this approach was unnecessary. It was possible to create a lasting change in the brain chemistry associated with OCD simply by imposing the will of the mind.
"What you do is you teach people that the urge to wash your hands compulsively is coming from a chemical imbalance in the brain," Prof Schwartz said. St Patrick's Hospital in Dublin has adapted some of his techniques.
More information about Prof Schwartz's technique is available from his website: www.ocduk.org/2/foursteps.htm or from his book, Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.