Tibetan Buddhist Psychology and Psychotherapy
Tibetan psychotherapy is unlike the Western approach. It is basically related to the Buddhist concept of the mind and its approach to understand the mind and its nature. Especially, it looks to the mind and mental health in its purely philosophical and spiritual bases. Its soft approach and development of human natural psychology gives way to the understanding of many causes of psychological disequilibrium.

The Tibetan Medical psychiatry concept is slightly different from the etiology of three humors, which principally derives from the mind and emotions. The three humors are the internal factors that produce delusions, which then become the basic cause of psychological and psychiatric diseases. Mind is like a mirror, which shows the different appearances of the mood such as serenity or unhappiness. In the Buddhist philosophy, the internal mental delusions are labeled as demons and spirits. Their cause is the misconception and misunderstanding of the mind by the mind itself. Therefore the fundamental point is that in mentally disturbed people, the mind is lost in illusions and it interprets them wrongly, or it sees them as reality.

The Tibetan medical psychiatry, based on the Buddhist philosophical ground, also models the illusion and hallucination appearances and experiences of the patients under the form of spirits and demons. However in the Tibetan psychiatry concept, disorders are also related to external terrestrial spirits or negative energy influences. Gyud-shi, the “four tantras”, describes the external (invisible) forces and evil spirit or demonic influences that disturb the internal environment.

Psychiatric disorders internal factors:
• Basic mental disequilibrium (psychological factors)
• Three humors pathology

External terrestrial forces:
• Evil spirits (demonic forces)
• Microbes
• Intoxication

In this context, Tibetan physicians have made many researches and experimentations, and expressed the cause of the many mild and aggressive psychiatric disorders as being related to the external environment influences. Their descriptions of the causes are more based on the patients’ psychic symptoms than on the Buddhist philosophical concept. Tibetan Medicine accepts that the diseased mind is not only disturbed by psychological imbalance of anger or depression; many other factors, visible and invisible, also influence the mind directly and indirectly through the body contact.

The New Yuthok Institute of Milano (Italy) organizes a three-year course for Western psychologists, doctors and psychotherapists, as well as seminars open to all. For more detailed information or to enroll in these classes, please directly contact the Institute.