Description

One in four people in the world today will at some
point suffer from mental illness. Increasingly,
traditional drug based approaches to treatment are
being seen as, at best, short term solutions, and at
worst, completely ineffective and often producing
dangerous side effects. Consequently, there is now a
desire within the medical profession to find a more
holistic cognitive approach to the treatment of
mental illness, one which treats the patient''s body,
mind and soul. The Stoics claim to go far deeper in
their treatment of mental suffering than any modern
drug based, or even modern psycho-analytic approach,
to mental illness: they propose to work directly on
the human soul itself. The desire of the Stoic
Philosophers
was to unite each individual''s soul with the divine
order of the universe, with individuals achieving
a ''God-like'' view of themselves and their human
predicaments within the cosmos. This is an attempt
to assess the Stoics'' claims, and to see if we can
extrapolate psychotherapeutic methodology from their
ancient wisdom in the fight against
mental illness.