The book can be ordered on Amazon, but the price is a staggering $122 for a used copy! However, there are two good Amazon reviews that I have reprinted here.

Humanity and “Insanity”, December 19, 2002

By Edith Swanek (Anaheim, Ca) – See all my reviewsThis review is from: The Madness of Adam and Eve: How Schizophrenia Shaped Humanity (Hardcover)

To begin with, I purchased my copy from Amazon.co.uk, the British arm, well over a year ago. Even being shipped from England to the U.S., it’s still probably the best way for an American to buy this great book…

You may have heard various movie characters at various times say something along the lines of “We all go a little bit insane sometimes”.

Horrobin shows pretty convincingly that “we ARE all a little bit insane at ALL times”. In essence, the biochemical manifestations of serious mental illness, when LESS chemically severe, manifest themselves as creativity, imagination, audacity, fixation, obsession, compulsion, etc. A given person might in fact be “3% manic-depressive/bipolar”, “2% schizoid”, “4% paranoic”, etc., and not only function well on a daily basis, but actually function as a great thinker, artist, inventor, or world leader.

Take the “quirks” of major leaders in World War II – from Hitler with his sheer terror at his own flatulence, Stalin drawing 1000 red pencil pictures of wolf heads ever day, De Gaulle regarding himself as “the male Joan of Arc”, Patton thinking he had lived dozens of times previously, and Roosevelt allowing both his own and his wife’s mistresses to live on the same floor, to Churchill greating world leaders in the buff. All “a little bit insane”? Not so very different from the rest of us, each with his or her own eccentricities…and all very, very human.

This book is both intellectually and socially important to the exact extent it forces us to look at humanity and its mental condition as a full range, rather than categories and “cut-off points”.

Most highly recommended!

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For ever changes the way you look at the mentally ill, October 31, 2004

By maximusone “maximusone” (Brussels) – See all my reviewsThis review is from: The Madness of Adam and Eve: How Schizophrenia Shaped Humanity (Hardcover)

David Horrobin argues that, as long ago as 3 million years ago, early man – homo erectus – lived close to and off water – rivers and lakes – and his diet contained a fair amount of fish as well as bone marrow from captured animals (who in turn lived off the water). This fish – and animals living off fish or other aquatic organisms – in turn contained so called fatty acids which allowed our human brains over time to become much more creative. Modern human brains consist to a large extent of fat. Hence also, why humans are so much “fatter” then our closest relatives, the chimps. The essential fatty acids in our diets enabled our existing brain cells to better communicate with each other. But a side effect of this evolution was the emergence of schizophrenia.

At some point around 150,000 years ago, someone must have been borne with a genetic mutation which we now call schizophrenia, although his or her behaviour was more what we now would call schizoid, i.e. light schizophrenia. Horrobin argues that throughout human history schizophrenics were often very gifted people, who were creative, held very strong dogmatic beliefs and had an ability to do whatever it took to get to the top. All qualities that made schizophrenics ideal candidates for dictators, priesthood and artists. As such, schizophrenics played a vital role in human evolution. One of the many fascinating facts described in Horrobin’s book is that there is a strong correlation today between highly creative thinkers – say Nobel Prize winners – and schizophrenia. For many highly gifted people, there is a close relative suffering from schizophrenia

Unfortunately, first the agricultural revolution, with its move away from a diet containing abundant fish oil, and our modern diets, full of saturated fats, the wrong fats for our brains, have turned a condition which had possibly more positive than negative effects into one where the patient is often a danger to himself and others (often the mother).

This book has some amazing implications, such as, the world is not black and white, with 99% being normal and 1% completely abnormal, but many of us are a little abnormal (and few may be “completely normal” ?), or, that mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, manic depression or even dyslexia are all related and people affected by them are paying the evolutionary price for the creative brains of other, normal people, to the extent that there is a strong correlation between such illnesses even within families and the existence of highly gifted family members.

To “Rossa,”

I’m an accounts manager for Schizophrenic.com and PsyWeb.com (part of the Opteama/Deep Dive Media network). We are a growing online network for mental health information and resources.

Our team has invested a lot of effort to ensure our visitors receive the highest quality of information and we intend to continue that service.

We believe a link to your site would be beneficial to our visitors. Conversely, we believe your visitors stand to benefit from a link to our network. Therefore, we would like to add a link to your website, http://holisticschizophrenia.blogspot.com, on www.PsyWeb.com in exchange for a link to www.Schizophrenic.com on your website.

We have other mental health websites on general disorders, conditions, and addictions that may interest you as well. Together we can boost awareness to our online programs with better a link exchange.

Please let me know your thoughts or any questions you may have.

Thank You,

Opteama Health
269 S. Beverly Dr.
Beverly Hills, CA 90212
________________________
Dear Opteama,

Thank you very much for contacting me about linking our sites. I am not inclined to do so for the reasons which I will list below. I hope you take this in the spirit it is intended, which is to educate and inform, not to denigrate.

1. My philosophy of schizophrenia is not mainstream. It is deliberately anti-mainstream. The reason is quite simple. By reading about and paying attention to what former schizophrenia patients had to say, and to people who never wanted to buy into the medical model of illness, I realized that the best chance people have of “cure” for this supposed “disease” is to distance themselves from the medical mainstream.

2. In tandem with this point about distancing from the medical model, one has to be an uncompliant patient, to be the type of patient who does not consider themselves a patient. This isn’t just me or former patients who think this. I have heard doctors say this from time to time. Their patients who were no longer “schizophrenic” were the ones who weren’t good patients to begin with. This only stands to reason. More and more scientific evidence is emerging about the long term effects of being medication compliant when it comes to neuroleptics, e.g. people die on average twenty-five years early. A quick check of your website showed me that the advice given out is to follow the doctor’s orders and take your medication.

3. I do commend your website for being dedicated to schizophrenia. However, there are many people who object to the use of the word “schizophrenic.” The reasons vary, but one objection raised is that the adjective is deliberately used by the medical community to equate schizophrenia with diabetes and being “diabetic.” The medical community has promoted the myth started by pharma that people diagnosed with schizophrenia need their medications just like a diabetic needs insulin. This is absolutely untrue. The falsehood was revealed in an interview with a pharmaceutical executive in Robert Whitaker’s 2010 bestseller, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.

4. I do have a link to another medical community on my website that I plan to eventually take down. I was asked to link to their site very early on in my blog and I did so, figuring there was nothing to lose. However, I have been unable to find my own blog on their site, and the only way I can do so is to go to my account and trace it back from there. This explains why I get no traffic to my site from their site. Nobody can find it! However, I will post your e-mail and link and my response as a one-off on my blog today.

In short, thank you for contacting me with your offer. If your site changes in future to allow easy access to a more proactive, positive and innovative view of schizophrenia, offering real alternatives to the mainstream, feel free to contact me again.

Yours sincerely,

Rossa Forbes

I remind myself from time to time that the reason I started this blog was to put a positive spin on schizophrenia as a means of helping others.

When I first got into the SZ business, I used to read other people’s personal stories to see where my son was in comparison. I came away discouraged. For example, someone recommended  early on that I read Mark Vonnegut’s book, The Eden Express. Now, that’s a wonderful book, I think Vonnegut Junior is a better writer than Vonnegut Senior, but not a writer I would recommend to someone who is looking for encouragement in overcoming their mental health crisis. Better to read it as a spot on evocation of the hippie era. Mark Vonnegut recovered quickly enough to write a book and then went on to medical school at Harvard after taking a lot of preparatory courses. (He was a religion major as an undergraduate. No surprise there.) Vonnegut remarks in his book that a person going through a mental health crisis is in no shape to take on challenging work for at least a year. Well, I looked at Chris with hope in my eyes after a year and he was in no shape to take on any kind of work. Naturally, I became discouraged. I began to think that Chris was not going to make it. This thinking doesn’t move anyone forward.

Three years went by. Finally, Chris had a small but significant breakthrough after our Family Constellation therapy, and he decided he wanted to take a month long summer physics course at a university in another country. He made all the arrangements himself and returned home after the course was finished having spectacularly failed the course. He had a good time socially, so Ian and I hung on to that bit of progress.

More time passed. Chris’s ventures into academic courses were sporadic and underwhelming. He suffered another relapse and was back in the hospital for three months. Another two years went by.

At some point, I stopped looking at what others were saying about their own progress and paid more attention to the progress that was in fact happening in our own particular case. I stopped being panicky about Chris failing to meet his milestones (as if he was a toddler) and concentrated more on the big picture. I took up yoga and meditation to quiet my mind and to stop the incessant negative thinking. I gained some distance and objectivity.

Negative thinking and fear is terribly destructive for all concerned. Comparing, what-iffing, and self-recriminating actually prevents healing. Helping your relative where you can and leaving him alone to find his footing works wonders.

I don’t think Chris would be where he is today if I had put my faith in traditional medicine or science to sort him out. Science hasn’t a clue about schizophrenia,  but it pretends it does. This is scary. We are fortunate in that Chris’s psychiatrist, Dr. Stern, reserves her fifty minute hour to actually talk with him. I consider her a psychiatrist in the old fashioned sense. She’s not a pseudo-scientist. But, the idea is not to have a long term relationship with any psychiatrist . The only way to avoid that fate, I figure, is to not put your eggs all in one basket. Psychiatry doesn’t cure schizophrenia. I look upon it more as a useful pressure valve.

The patient cure themselves.