DMHP - The Diagnostic Manual of Human Potential

Warmest Greetings

I am moved to post this piece which I found in The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology by Jack Kornfield. It is my experience that hardly a soul, whether in the "mental health" field or not, hasn't been touched personally or with someone we know by a diagnosis arising out of the DSM-IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition . As spoken of here, there are options beyond what we are often familiar with and limited by here in Western culture. We all have much to learn. This is a hopeful reflection of greater possibilities...

Peace & blessings ~ Molly

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Even now, the transcendent domain of human experience is virtually absent from the maps of Western psychology except for a small number of phulosophers and religious specialists. In part this is the legacy of the European Enlightenment, with its elevation of reason, its long effort to separate science from religion. While this separation has brought enormous benefit, it has also left science, and much of Western learning, at sea regarding the inner life. Science developed computers and put us on the moon, it gave us antibiotics and antidepressants, but it cannot guide us i matters of virtue, love, inner meaning, or spiritual understanding.

In the last century, a handful of visionary psychologists from Carl Jung to Abraham Maslow and Stanislav Grof reintroduced these realms to Western science. But it is time to go further. When my wife, Liana, a Jungian, was studying for her psychology exams, she was disturbed by the limitations of the DSM-IV, the standard psychiatric reference text. She was inspired to consider a vision of an alternative manual of positive mental health. With Buddhist psychology as our guide, we could do so. We could take the hundreds of pages of psychological problems listed in the DSM-IV and create a positive counterart called the DMHP - the Diagnostic Manual of Human Potential. In counterpart to the 35 forms of depressive and bipolar disorders, there would be 35 positive forms of emotional and mental happiness - states of contentment, joy, rapture, gratitude, and extreme well-being. In place of aggression and paranoia would be highly developed capacities of trust, love, generosity, and selflessness. In place of hallucinations and psychosis would be the many forms of benevolent visions and sounds. These inner awakenings would be catalogued, from the still small voice of the divine to angelic choirs, from inspiring visions of gods and bodhisattvas to access to creative imagination and illuminated inner realms of understanding and light. In place of sleep disorders and amnesia, there would be extensive descriptions of wakefulness and lucid dreaming. Instead of anxiety disorders, there would be multiple categories of fearlessness, equanimity, dignity, and inner strength. Our psychologists don't speak of these possibilities, and we don't have an understanding of how they can be developed....

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The real blessing appears when we can bring the experiences of the transcendental to illuminate the miracle of the ordinary.

~ Jack Kornfield ~