"Beautiful Minds can be recovered"

The limitless human mind is beautiful beyond words. It also has powerful protective, self-healing and self-regulating mechanisms.

Unfortunately most of these reside in our 'right brain' which is turned off by default. Our 'left brain' is easily overwhelmed and broken when left to fend for itself in intense situations (including toxic workplaces).

The problem is compounded by the lack of 'whole-brain' science and thinking in the revolving-door mental health industry.

This rampant heartlessness likewise pervades every corner of "civilised" society and causes endless and needless human misery, suffering, frustration, and befuddlement on an industrial scale.

In Australia for example, mental illness costs $500 million per day. This excludes the much bigger opportunity cost of not turning our 'right brain' on.

All is not lost though. There is a better way. "Beautiful Minds can be recovered". That is the title of a reprint of the hope filled March 10, 2002 New York Times article by Dr Courtenay M. Harding.

Contrary to popular opinion, helpful therapies exist, and both improvement and recovery are possible.

Dr Harding cites a study where 45% of Schizophrenia patients who had received helpful psychosocial therapy in the 1950s "no longer had signs or symptoms of any mental illness three decades later".

Dr Harding contrasts this with the 2001 movie "A Beautiful Mind" about Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John F. Nash Jr. (Russell Crowe).

In the movie, Nash's "recovery from schizophrenia" is portrayed "as hard-won, awe-inspiring and unusual".

Dr Harding argues that recovery is not unusual, but quite achievable.

Even governments, such as Australia, are taking the same stance, officially, albeit largely still aspirational ("Psychosocial Disability Recovery-Oriented Framework", 2021).