Since the earliest days of psychiatry, every diagnostician has inevitably asked some version of the question "How do you feel?" Feelings are what hurt the patient, and the therapist is drawn to them, wanting to fix the hurt. But feelings are not the cause of the problem. They are the result; the outcome of an enormous amount of brain activity including perception, attention, consciousness and the brain functions.
Naturally a person's emotional state is an important consideration because that is the means by which the brain communicates to itself qualitative aspects of experience. But the many advances in neurology indicate there is almost always a biological root, or at least a biological contribution to every "mental" disorder.
Depression, rage or anxiety may be the symptom which drives the patient to seek treatment but the cause of the suffering is often a neurological deficit which cannot be reached, much less changed, by conventional insight-oriented psychology or psychoactive drugs.
If a clinician asks a patient "How do you feel?" he is only working at the surface. Instead the primary diagnostic question must be "What is your world like?" In this approach the clinician investigates, together with the patient, how the latter perceives the world, relates to the perceptions, becomes conscious of them and understands them, and how he or she brings the many brain functions to bear on this understanding.
This approach requires a radically different model for analyzing human experience that delves below the emotional surface of feelings whilst recognizing that emotion conditions the whole process. The model consists of four 'theatres' of exploration.
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