Four Noble Truths and The Medical Model
Broadly speaking, differences between traditional Buddhism and contemporary institutionalized Western psychology can be conceived in terms used in the following table.
| Buddhism (Four Noble Truths) | Western psychology | |
| problem | suffering (dukkha) | significant distress, disability, pain, loss of freedom, suicidality |
| etiology | craving (tanha), ignorance (avijja) | conditioning, genetics, biology, childhood development, socialization |
| goal | Enlightenment (bodhi), Nirvana | normal or higher functioning, lack of initial symptoms |
| treatment | Noble Eightfold Path | counseling, therapy, medication, systems advocacy |
Read more about this topic: Buddhism And Psychology
Famous quotes containing the words medical model, noble, truths, medical and/or model:
“The entire construct of the “medical model” of “mental illness”Mwhat is it but an analogy? Between physical medicine and psychiatry: the mind is said to be subject to disease in the same manner as the body. But whereas in physical medicine there are verifiable physiological proofs—in damaged or affected tissue, bacteria, inflammation, cellular irregularity—in mental illness alleged socially unacceptable behavior is taken as a symptom, even as proof, of pathology.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“Upon Saint Crispin’s day
Fought was this noble fray,
Which fame did not delay
To England to carry.
On when shall Englishmen
With such acts fill a pen,
Or England breed again
Such a King Harry?”
—Michael Drayton (1563–1631)
“There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.”
—Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)
“Mark Twain didn’t psychoanalyze Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. Dickens didn’t put Oliver Twist on the couch because he was hungry! Good copy comes out of people, Johnny, not out of a lot of explanatory medical terms.”
—Samuel Fuller (b. 1911)
“...that absolutely everything beloved and cherished of the bourgeoisie, the conservative, the cowardly, and the impotent—the State, family life, secular art and science—was consciously or unconsciously hostile to the religious idea, to the Church, whose innate tendency and permanent aim was the dissolution of all existing worldly orders, and the reconstitution of society after the model of the ideal, the communistic City of God.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)