Perceived lack of control is a familiar and unsettling experience that we all have. But, when dubious or faltering control—especially over our own minds—pervades, it robs us of the foundation of security, confidence, and predictability.

Change in affect (or emotional state) occurs when feelings of anxiety, depression, stress, tension, fear, anger, and other negative emotions assume prominence in subjective sensation, causing pain, distraction, accelerated worry, and the experience of a “broken mind.”

Kessler’s description of the three main constituents of capture is a cogent summary of the features of mental suffering that pervade a wide array of conditions, syndromes, and symptoms. While it is helpful to organize and codify these themes characterizing mental distress, I would amplify this concept to include the underlying causes giving rise to the development and persistence of the elements of capture.

What Underlies Capture

The following encapsulates the underpinnings of mental suffering and reveals the causes that may lead to healing and release from capture:

1. Poor self-regulation
2. Trauma
3. Habits and lifestyle choices that continue and reinforce the dysfunctional cycles

Let’s review these constituents of capture:

Poor self-regulation refers to the erratic and faulty internal management by the brain and nervous system of the “housekeeping” functions that allow us to regulate our bodies, minds and interactions with the world’s changing circumstances and demands. Functions such as alertness and arousal, mood control and stabilization, perceptions, appetites and satiation, and relaxation and fight-or-flight responses all belong and respond to the brain’s self-regulatory mechanisms. The salience and persistence of symptoms and disorders arise when poor self-regulation predominates. Mood disorders, sleep disturbances, faulty concentration, stress and overreactions, and physical sensitivities are but a few of the problems caused by poor self-regulation.

Trauma includes physical and emotional experiences and occurs when we are caught in an “attack” on one of our “weak links,” whether the attack was intentional, random, or even imagined. The essence of trauma is that it penetrates defenses, seizes upon vulnerability, and leaves us feeling hurt, defenseless, and usually causes us to “relive” in some way the embedded traumatic experience. Traumas include a broad range of impactful experience beyond catastrophic events. The brain and body become overly impressed and “stuck” with the effects of the experience long after the actual event has disappeared.

Habits and lifestyle choices that continue and reinforce the dysfunctional cycles often develop to nullify the pain resulting from traumas, weak resilience, and poor self-regulation. Though they may provide temporary relief, maladaptive habits trap the individual in a perpetuating cycle of quick symptom reduction followed by withdrawal, recurrence of distress, and the compulsive resorting to the increasingly entrenched maladaptive habits. Substance abuse, food addictions, violence, and extremism in behavior are hallmarks of behavioral repertoires that seek to discharge or relieve mental distress.

Pathways to Release from Capture

Behaviors and subjective experiences are formed and strengthened through a combination of internal biochemistry and the forces of environmental shaping—that is, we tend to repeat behaviors that are reinforced or deliver some payoff. Many of the habits we form are deliberate or intentional, while many are also the result of consequences that may be unintended or beyond our conscious control. To a great extent we plan and intend; but, we are also highly influenced by what we can get away with—otherwise interpreted as tolerating the consequences and costs of bad habits and indiscretions.

Therefore, changing maladaptive behaviors and improving well-being requires a fine tuning of internal biochemical regulatory mechanisms along with modification of cause-and-effect behavioral antecedents and consequences.

So much for the technical jargon: how is this accomplished?

Fortunately, there is substantial clinical and research evidence accrued over decades that self-regulation is improved and traumas are healed through training the brain with EEG neurofeedback. This treatment is not only a viable alternative to psychopharmacology, but has proven effective in revamping underlying neural networks and brain transmission patterns that developed faultily through genetic predispositions, various traumas, and the impact of life experiences.

When given valid neurological information in real time regarding its own neurological operation, the brain is able to “rewrite” the internalization and processing of visceral, emotional, and cognitive information in ways make attention and focus much more flexible and regulate the detours and parameters of emotional lability in order to promote balanced affect and improved self-control. Indeed, the very process of diminishing obsessions and narrowness along with better mood leads to better self-control and confidence.

Trauma gets the brain stuck in patterns of reliving memories saturated with painful emotions and lack of resolution. In trauma, the brain acts like the old time phonograph needle playing on a scratched vinyl record and getting stuck repeating the same phrase indefinitely. Training the brain’s flexibility releases this stuckness. And it is better done neurologically than through cognitive explanations and reframing.

Another elegant and rapid way to relieve trauma is through Voice Technology (an advanced form of Thought field Therapy). This transformational method quickly and completely eliminates the fundamental cause of negative emotions and traumatic fixedness by reprogramming and eliminating the disruptive perturbations in the thought fields that harbor the trauma. This treatment takes only minutes, often releasing years of capture that have produced phobias, obsessions, and past traumas.

Dr. Kessler’s categories of capture—narrowing of attention, perceived lack of control, and change in affect or emotional state—are adequately relieved through improving self-regulation, resolving traumas, and replacing maladaptive habits with more functional adaptive ones. The treatments I described go a long way toward restoring and developing internal neurological balance and regulation, thereby building self-control, confidence, and the wherewithal to modify habits (supported and augmented by professional guidance).

Diminishing Mental Suffering

As Kessler and many others have made clear, there is abundant mental suffering in the population that is entwined with violence, disenfranchisement, economic inequity, and a host of social ills. One could argue that mental suffering is both cause and effect. In a pitch to diminish the amount of mental suffering at individual and collective levels, I exhort broad scale efforts to address the following:

Identification and early intervention

It’s well known that early identification and appropriate intervention relieves suffering and minimizes or averts the development and proliferation of emotional and behavioral troubles. We have the tools to recognize early warning signs and to intervene on behalf of at-risk individuals and the potential negative impact on society. Troubled people tend to be unproductive and draw massive resources to clean up their damage and to support and deal with them after their acts.

Though we can’t predict every person who goes off the rails and hurts himself or others, we can much more effectively spot and intervene before the difficulties accelerate and manifest. Early identification and intervention should be much more systematic and routine.

Effective, accessible and affordable treatment

Mental health treatment in this country is woefully inadequate. Sorry to say, but it is true. The prevailing first line of treatment remains harsh prescriptive drugs with horrible side effects and a poor track record of healing. At best, psychopharmacology is a band-aid, triage, or a blunt-edged chemical control that keeps some people from going crazy and the imbalanced ones from becoming more unhinged. At times, such medications can helpful and even life-saving. But they are no substitute for internal self-healing and development, best achieved through more effective, enduring, and natural methods.

Psychotherapy (usually talk therapy in some form) is expensive, lengthy, and spotty in efficacy. Insurance companies are miserly in paying for therapy, restricting, denying, and limiting amounts and types of treatment.

By the way, try to find a therapist taking new patients: wait times for an appointment are often months—and, lately, that has been for a remote video session. Desperate inquiries for therapy appointments are often unreturned. Inquiring new patients are told that new patients are not being accepted while at the same time, insurance companies are rejecting applications from therapists seeking to be in-network, telling the therapist applicants that the company “has no need for psychologists at this time.” Really? No availability for patient appointments, but no acceptance of additional therapists?

There should be universal access to the treatments that have been proven through clinical practice (and research) for decades. How can insurance companies get away with denying or restricting advanced and proven treatments like neurofeedback? Why is this treatment not primary, referred and recommended, rather than left to patients to search for when nothing else has worked?

Social policy and supportive funding

We cannot lay this insufficiency solely at the feet of the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance companies, or the elephantine progression of medicine in the treatment of mental health. Sure, they are all contributors, and they validate and reinforce the notion of “fringe” for proven treatments. This drives up costs, limits accessibility, treatment options, and patient awareness. It is unfair, primitive, and both immediately and ultimately far more costly in human suffering and dollars.

We need to provide universal access at no cost or very low cost. COVID vaccines are heavily promoted and free—because of the consideration of a public health crisis.

Mental suffering is endemic. It is indeed a public health crisis. And we can’t mask it!

Personal acknowledgment and responsibility

Let’s not forget the peculiar dynamic that often characterizes mental health issues: though most sufferers are acutely aware of their distress and greatly desire to be rid of their symptoms, many mentally unbalanced people deny their problems or blame others around them. Obviously, they are very hard to live or deal with and are reluctant to seek help. Complicating such situations, our culture offers differential sympathies to “hard” diseases than to mental health issues (see my article, Different Responses to Mental Health Crises and Cancer Crises). Thus, between the influences of personal denial and societal minimization, the many millions caught in capture have no viable exit strategy.

In describing the issues surrounding mental health suffering and providing insight and practical strategies for relief, it’s my hope that many more individuals can be released from capture.