Mind & Membrain

Joanna Wildy

Description

Mind & Membrain is a book that not only reveals the 'missing link' between head impacts, mental health issues and early onset dementia but also offers a new approach to mental health diagnosis and treatment. It will interest patients, carers and practitioners across the whole field of mental health.The book begins with the link between head impacts and mental health issues, and early onset dementia. The statistics are well documented and the link is now headline news for sports such as rugby and football. Yet while knocks to the head of all kinds are commonplace and the consequences for mental health are now recognised, the link remains poorly understood. No one so far appears to have grasped the crucial role of the medically neglected dura membrane that lines the skull, envelops the brain and controls the vital irrigation system of the cranium. "Membrain disorder" gives a name to a common but typically undiagnosed condition where the skull is impacted, the dura responds, and - without preventive treatment - the brain and thus the patient's mental health are impaired, both short and long term. The book, uniquely, explains how membrain disorder can be diagnosed and then successfully treated by a hands-on approach, without drugs or surgery.The book then addresses the current crisis in mental health diagnosis and treatment. Rather than lament the situation, this book offers a solution: an original model for mental health diagnosis. Drawing on complexity theory and biology, the approach generates a practical 'road map' guiding a practitioner to discover the dimension of origin of a mental health issue (rather than seek the closest match to the symptoms in the quasi-official doctors' diagnostical manual, DSM-5). Similar symptoms can have completely different origins, ranging from microscopic molecular imbalances to society-level pressures. With the dimension of origin identified, an effective treatment can be implemented.The book will interest doctors, therapists, manual practitioners and others and give hope to mental health patients, their loved ones and their carers, especially those struggling to find a solution for problems that respond neither to drugs nor talking therapies. Mind & Membrain is written for the lay person and includes personal case histories that bring the topic alive.

Sujets

• Neurosciences
• Neuroscience
• Sciences et techniques

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 05 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781803134048
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright © 2022 Joanna Wildy
www.jowildy.com

The moral right of the author has been asserted.


Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 978 1803134 048

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.


Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd


To Keogh & Georgia


Contents
Author’s Foreword
Introduction

Part One
Membrain Disorder
One
The Skull is a Living Structure
Two
‘Sick Building Syndrome’
Three
The ‘Building’
Four
Head Trauma and Membrain Disorder
Five
How to Treat a Skull
Six
The Unknown Impact of Dentistry
Seven
A Synopsis of Membrain Disorder

Part Two
Complexity and Mental Health: The Dimensional Model
Eight
A New Approach to Mental Health Diagnosis
Nine
Complexity
Ten
The Biomolecular Dimension (D1)
Eleven
The Cellular Dimension (D2)
Twelve
The Multicellular dimension (D3)
Thirteen
The Brain (D4)
Fourteen
The Whole Person (D5)
Fifteen
Societies (D6)
Sixteen
A Multi-Dimensional Diagnosis
Seventeen
Regions of the Brain
Eighteen
A Hands-On Therapeutic Approach for Patients with Psychological Problems
Nineteen
A Proposal

Appendix
A Road Map to Mental Health Diagnosis and Treatment
Glossary
Acknowledgments


Author’s Foreword
The title of this book ‘ Mind & Membrain ’ describes the direct relationship between the mind, the health of the brain and the state of the membrane system that lines the skull and envelops the brain. The technical name for this overlooked membrane is the dura mater , or dura for short. The dura is a living, reactive and responsive system that has a strong influence on the behaviour and long-term health of its occupant, the brain. Any impact to the head, however slight, can cause a disturbance of the dura and in turn of the brain. Mental health problems can be a consequence – and these problems can be successfully treated. As such, the brain-membrane link deserves some long overdue attention!
The person whose pioneering work laid the foundation for this concept was William Garner Sutherland (1873–1954). WGS, as he is known, was one of the second ever generation of osteopaths to emerge from the USA in the early 20th century. He stood apart from the rest of his colleagues whose interests followed those of the ‘founding father’ of osteopathy, Andrew Taylor Still (1828–1917), namely the study of the spine and general body. 1 WGS, by contrast, was fixated on the skull. It was a lifetime’s work for him – tireless, relentless anatomical exploration and self-study over decades.
Doubting the accepted view that the skull is a single, fixed and solid structure, Sutherland painstakingly prised apart the 22 individual bones of which it is composed. He did this with tweezers, not a crowbar as one might suppose, revealing the extraordinary intricacies and delicate engineering of the different joint lines sitting between the collective bones of the skull. Situated directly beneath this remarkable piece of engineering and connected with it via anchorage points lies a dynamic cranial membrane: the dura mater. The dura is an active, responsive system. It is the state of this membrane system, in response to the positional relationships of the different cranial bones, that influences the health of the brain for reasons that will become clearly apparent.
On voicing his discoveries to fellow students and colleagues, WGS was ridiculed. Undeterred, he persevered with his research, pushing his independent studies on relentlessly. “I undertook” he writes, “to devise experiments, duplicating the effects of traumatic events as precisely as I could….” His scientific equipment over the years included an American football helmet, a wooden butter bowl and baseball catching mitts, plus an assortment of chamois leathers, bandages and flexible rulers. He adapted his equipment for each experiment and took to wearing his self-constructed skull-exploring equipment for days at a time. He used the various items to exert pressure from outside-in onto different parts of his skull, thus mimicking the results of various types of head injury. He did this to self-observe how a continuous pressure on the different areas of the cranium influenced his physical health – and also his mental health. 2
The effects he experienced were extraordinary, not only physiologically, but also psychologically: “One experiment” he records, “left me ready for a stay in a mental hospital….”
In 1988, nearly a century after WGS began his experiments on the skull, I completed four years of undergraduate study to become an osteopath in the UK and decided to enrol on the postgraduate programme for osteopathy in the cranial field; that is, osteopathy which has a particular interest in the head. This is the specialist field that has developed over the last century directly from WGS’s work.
And so begins my own story – a continuation of a particular aspect of William Garner Sutherland’s work: his discoveries relating the skull and underlying membrane system – which together constitute the housing, the environment, of the brain – to mental health.
My postgraduate course started with a five-day programme of anatomy lectures, with practical hands-on sessions among the students after each lesson. Anyone who works in this field will appreciate that this is a lot of time to have untrained hands probing your head and face. The intensity of the course took its toll and by the end of the five-day introductory course I was starting to feel mentally very unwell.
From the start of secondary school, I had struggled with what I call low-grade depression and fluctuating moods. I found life from eleven to eighteen purgatory, if I am honest, but had always put it down to various understandable factors in my life – the see-saw of intense emotions and experiences typical of the teenage years.
During my twenties I suffered again from exaggerated mood swings; these were emerging as my nemesis. However, after that five-day introduction to the postgraduate programme, the depression and the struggle with my feelings that I had experienced on and off became significantly worse. The episodes were intensive and dark and went on for months. Eventually I decided to withdraw from the course.
A few months later, by sheer good fortune, I found someone who could help me. I was working as a tutor and practitioner at the British School of Osteopathy when I came across Carol Plumridge, a colleague with a great deal of experience in cranial osteopathy. She offered me a treatment. It took just one session with her skilled hands working on my head for the persistent depression that I had been experiencing since the fateful course to lift. The darkness turned to light, the world changed from a hostile to a friendly place and the treacle that I had been walking through turned to air. The whole experience made me understand the strength of this hands-on cranial therapeutic intervention: a power for bad when one is treated incorrectly, but a power for the utmost good if treated well.
Three years on from my initial attempt, I enrolled again on the postgraduate programme for osteopathy in the cranial field. I was by now far more observant and aware of my vulnerability and I found I could become the objective observer as untrained hands practised their poorly managed skills on my head. Strangely enough, a bad reaction to a hands-on experience can reveal more than a positive reaction. When you feel better from a treatment, there is a tendency to forget the initial discomfort. If you feel worse after a treatment, you remember it. And there it was, day four, with twelve sets of untrained hands explor