The church’s attempts to hide its mental illness

Part II of Personal problems as just another consumer commodity

Thomas Szasz famously wrote: “If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic.”

If a belief in God is evidence of a mental illness, then the church is mentally ill.

I listened to the audio version of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church (FAPC) Pentecost sermon entitled Prophets Wanted: Apply Within. The minister was saying that prophets often make the church feel uncomfortable. It became very clear to me just how uncomfortable mentally ill people make the church feel, if the FAPC sermon is any example. There was not one mention, not one, of the mentally ill*, in the list of people the minister was inviting to be prophets. The minster said that prophets were, inter alia, gays* and lesbians, women, people of different nationalities and races. These groups of people may have a welcome, different perspective, but prophets are in a category of their own.

I am hugely ashamed of my church for failing to acknowledge where the real prophets are located. The church continues to play it safe by making sure that its prophets don’t get anywhere near the church to challenge its cherished notion that prophecy was something Biblical, not modern. There they are, these prophets, babbling to themselves in tongues outside the church while inside the church we are treated to sermons about Pentecost. If there was ever an example of mental illness in action, the celebration of Pentecost would fit the bill. “The first scientific study into glossolalia, that is, speaking in tongues, took place in 1927 when psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, while studying schizophrenic patients, linked glossolalia to schizophrenia and hysteria. He observed that glossolalists tended to have more of a need for authority figures and appeared to have more crises in their lives.”

If there is a link between glossolalists, schizophrenia and the founding of new religions, then William J. Seymour (Pentacostalism), L. Ron Hubbard (Church of Scientology), and George Fox (Quakers), are only a few outstanding examples.

So, there is no huge expectation on my part that the church will actually take me up on my challenge to advocate for the mentally ill. I suspect part of the reason is the close association between religion and mental illness, that the church knows about, but finds too uncomfortable to deal with. Real prophets upset the status quo. I am going to go out on a limb and say something as opinion that I have noticed all my life: There are lots of borderline mentally ill people in church. They try to disguise it, as best they can, but the closer you get to the altar, the more fervent and unusual are the people attracted to that sacred ground. It can be manifested as a love of symbols, rituals and reading the Bible. Put another way, these people’s chakras are open at the higher levels. So, perhaps it is no wonder that mental illness frightens the church because it risks exposing the fervent. It is like a politician going out of his way to vilify homosexuality, only to be exposed later as a practicing homosexual.

As a mother of a son who got labelled “schizophrenic,” I sure could have used the help of the church early on to see so-called mental illness in a positive light. The church is a potential ally, given what it is built upon. I’m not talking about the rock that the early Christian church is supposedly built upon, I’m talking about the church’s intimate affiliation with prophecy/mental illness/spirituality. Everywhere I turned when I was most in need, psychiatry and public ignorance ramped up my fear. I began to catch on relatively early that the church was merely echoing psychiatry because it is convenient for it to do so. Psychiatry practices social control. (I’m beginning to sound more like Thomas Szasz every day.) The church should ask itself if it is helping psychiatry practice social control when it advocates for supportive housing instead of supporting the individual in his quest to get answers to spiritual questions.

Shouldn’t the expectation of society be that “mentally ill ” people become well again and resume their rightful place in the community? Statistics for the mentally ill population show a different picture, that their numbers are increasing and their illnesses are becoming chronic.

I ‘m of the opinion that the tragedy that is playing out daily on the streets and in the current housing solutions, is connected to psychiatry’s insistence up until now that favors medication over understanding. Harvard professor Marcia Angell raises doubts about these drugs: “And what about the drugs that are now the mainstay of treatment? Do they work? If they do, shouldn’t we expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising ?”

In addition to doctors and hospitals, there is a vast network of social service housing projects that oversee management of the mentally ill. The mentally ill who reside outside of the influence of doctors, hospitals and projects, meaning, on the streets, either cannot or will not take their medication. As it happens, recent research is on their side. The medications are increasingly being challenged as ineffective, and their grotesque side effects are evident. But, who actually listens to the “mentally ill?” Apparently not the church.

We, as a society uplift freedom of choice, except for the mentally ill. We say “the customer is always right,” except when it comes to the mentally ill. We are supposed to value a person’s opinion, except when it comes to the mentally ill. We instead put down the mentally ill by saying that they have agnosognosia, the inability to recognize that they have a mental illness.

Mental illness is understandable if you view it as a response to psychic pain or trauma. The problem is, psychiatry has abandoned getting to know its supposed customers in favour of the much more lucrative diseased brain model of mental illness. You hear the mantra everywhere: Medications will help the mentally ill. Except, by and large they don’t. The side effects overwhelm any supposed benefits the drugs are supposed to deliver and lead to a life span that is twenty-five years shorter on average**. The false claim that medication is the best way to treat mental illness has been exposed on many fronts, most recently in Robert Whitaker’s book, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. Psychiatrists has been so focused on pretending they are real doctors (able to prescribe) that they hardly even pay lip service to psychotherapeutic interventions.

If the church really wants to help the mentally ill, a positive perception about what mental illness is may go a longer way to helping the mentally ill than cleaning up the streets and putting people in housing where medication is mandatory. I am asking the church to re-examine whether institutional solutions are helping or hindering recovery of the individuals who are sleeping on the church steps.

There is an old Chinese saying, “Be Careful What You Wish For,” which means that what you get may be exactly what you didn’t want to happen and/or have unintended consequences. Churches profess to help the mentally ill in ways that can more cynically be interpreted as wanting the mentally ill off the streets as a social service to everybody else. They have convinced themselves they are doing God’s work, but are they? In the case of the mentally ill, it may never even occur to the church that the mission they were really put here to do is to listen to and uplift their own, which today would include the so-called mentally ill. Ask any minister, priest or rabbi how many mentally people they come across on a yearly basis who are lurking around the church entrance or creating disturbances in or around the building. They’re there because they are on a spiritual quest. When my son Chris was wandering around the streets of our city, looking dishevelled, fully medicated, living with his family and attending a psychiatric program, he often was seen hanging around a different church than the one we go to. Street prophets like Chris have not been welcomed at church since organized religion began to stamp out pagan beliefs and issue edicts about how the Bible is supposed to be interpreted.

Churches should rethink where their real expertise lies. Rather than align itself with mainstream psychiatry today, which it is doing by supporting the institutions over the individual, the church could be a leader as an advocate for the dignity of each individual.

The Village Voice has a sad story about two individuals who live together in a privately run adult care home for the mentally ill in Coney Island, New York. Churches, if you are reading this, ask yourselves, are you helping the people or are you helping to clean up the streets for the rest of us so we don’t have to pick our way over vagrants on our way to church? Put yourself in their shoes. If they are there because they refuse to take medication, then they have a point that needs to be listened to. If they are there because the family has abandoned them, then help families to appreciate and support their family members. Does it ever occur to someone to ask the customer what he or she would like? I doubt their solution would be a warehouse for the mentally ill in Coney Island. A great way to help would be to become the people’s advocate, to advocate along with the therapy and skills that they need to lead independent lives.

Here’s what the church can do to advocate for the mentally ill. I’m not asking it to do anything other than begin to change its perception of what mental illness is:

Read the words of the prophets and then ask why those guys were different than these guys today.

Ask how come Jesus cured the demon possessed, and yet psychiatry claims there is still no cure for schizophrenia or bipolar, only management.

Ask yourselves who you are serving.

Respect what the supposedly mentally ill person is telling you.

Learn more about mental illness by reading books written by people who disagree with the status quo. Do not take the view of mainstream psychiatry at face value. They are not your constituents.

Challenge the cosy relationship between pharmaceutical companies, doctors and research institutions through letter writing campaigns and other means.
_________________
*From Wikipedia: Following controversy and protests from gay activists at APA annual conferences from 1970 to 1973, as well as the emergence of new data from researchers such as Alfred Kinsey and Evelyn Hooker, the seventh printing of the DSM-II, in 1974, no longer listed homosexuality as a category of disorder. But through the efforts of psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, who had led the DSM-II development committee, a vote by the APA trustees in 1973, and confirmed by the wider APA membership in 1974, the diagnosis was replaced with the category of “sexual orientation disturbance”.
**http://www.mindfreedom.org/kb/psychiatric-drugs/death/mortality-in-people-with-mental-disorders/view

Personal problems as a just another consumer commodity

Part I

Prophets Wanted. Apply Within is the title of the upcoming sermon posted on a sign on the front entrance of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church (FAPC) in New York City. I debated with myself about whether to march in and ask to speak with the author of the sermon or if I should just walk by. This was too good an opportunity to pass up, so in I went. The young woman at the reception table said the minister was not available so I opened the door to the main area of the church and found a pew to sink into. The cool interior of the church was a welcome respite from the rising heat wave in the city. I grabbed a visitor’s card and scribbled a short message to the minister.

It went something like this:

Hello – I am sorry I will miss your upcoming sermon on Prophets Wanted: Apply Within. Would today’s church recognize a prophet if one walked through the door or would it urge this person to see a psychiatrist and get on medication?

That was the abbreviated message because I had to hurridly sketch my point on the back of the visitor’s card. I ran the risk of looking like a bit of a nutter myself with handwriting crudely scratched from the pencil I found in the pew. I signed off with my pseudonym Rossa Forbes and added as an afterthought “mother of a prophet,” in case it looked like I was making a personal job application. I added my e-mail address and URL.

So, in case anyone from FAPC is reading this post, here’s what I am fumbling to say: We all know that churches are at the forefront of community outreach programs, and your church newsletter The VOICE has an excellent issue this month devoted to all the work your members are doing at shelters. But I think your church and the church at large has forgotten or suppressed something very fundamental — the prophets of yesterday, the Jonahs, the Elishas, the Ezekiels, would today be locked up and heavily sedated. Today’s prophets are devalued. Their gifts of hearing voices and seeing visions frighten people. Given the church’s longstanding affiliation with The VOICE of prophecy, shouldn’t the church be at the forefront of changing the public’s perception? The so-called mentally ill have messages and few people are listening. A simple shift in our collective thinking, to value, laud and encourage people who are struggling with forces from God that are very distressing when not properly understood, would go a long way to help people do on earth what they were put here to do. In this population you will find the poets, writers, artists and musicians, a.k.a. our prophets.

Instead, churches are preoccupied with the problem of “homelessness,” a word which has become synomymous with mental illness. To quote from The VOICE:

“Permanent supportive housing is the most cost-effective and lasting way to address homelessness,” Rev. (Kate) Dunn says. ………By supporting temporary shelter options for local street homeless, while advocating for permanent supportive housing, we have an opportunity to create a powerful witness in our backyard.”

I disagree that homelessness can be addressed by permanent supportive housing. That is an attitude that everything can be fixed if you buy the right product. I know that permanent supportive housing has great appeal to people because “homelessness” seems like a social wrong that throwing housing at will fix. But does it fix the real problem? People are homeless because they have personal and family problems that have manifested themselves to the breaking point. Many are on the streets because they refuse to take medications that pharma and psychiatry at one point in time managed to convince the public would keep them out of institutions! Many of these people have received the label “schizophrenic” because they hear and see things that we do not as we go about our consumer driven lives. Modern psychiatry has embraced the “consumer” at the expense of the individual and no longer wants to hear about anybody’s existential or spiritual crisis. They have convinced people they have a brain disease, one manifestation of which is to believe you are a prophet. Nobody believes in prophets anymore, least of all the church, which is weird, frankly, given the longstanding affiliation between the two. After all, it is probably safe to say that schizophrenics have founded most of the new charismatic Western religions, e.g. George Fox (Quakers), William J. Seymour (Pentacostalism), L. Ron Hubbard (Church of Scientology).

Part II of this two part story will look at supportive housing for the mentally ill run by a church community on Long Island. My point is not to criticize FAPC and all the other churches for doing what is popularly thought of as a good work. Rather, it is to look at where the reality of treating the so-called mentally ill has led us in the absence of holistic support to the individual. Here is a link to the article Two Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, that is in this week’s The Village Voice.

Medications’ unintended side effects as seen by the parent

These are just a few side effects that come to mind.

1. Continously nagging an adult to take something that makes him/her feel bad
2. Worrying constantly about him/her not taking the meds
3. Being dismayed at the weight gain
4. Disagreeing with your spouse about whether medication is the way to go
5. Getting confused about behavior you are seeing. Is it the person or is it the medication?
6. Continously buying new clothes (on the way up and on the way down)
7. Not being able to tolerate alcohol when everyone else is able to
8. Fighting with the psychiatrist over the efficacy of the medication

There is no chemical imbalance, nor has there ever been

The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?
Marcia Angell
New York Review of Books

Excerpt from review of
– The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth (Irving Kirsch)
– Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (Robert Whitaker)
– Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry – A Doctor’s Revelations about a Profession in Crisis (Daniel Carlat)

Second, none of the three authors subscribes to the popular theory that mental illness is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. As Whitaker tells the story, that theory had its genesis shortly after psychoactive drugs were introduced in the 1950s. The first was Thorazine (chlorpromazine), which was launched in 1954 as a “major tranquilizer” and quickly found widespread use in mental hospitals to calm psychotic patients, mainly those with schizophrenia. Thorazine was followed the next year by Miltown (meprobamate), sold as a “minor tranquilizer” to treat anxiety in outpatients. And in 1957, Marsilid (iproniazid) came on the market as a “psychic energizer” to treat depression.

then yada yada yada ….. But over the next decade, researchers found that these drugs, and the newer psychoactive drugs that quickly followed, affected the levels of certain chemicals in the brain.

more yada yada yada … Thus, instead of developing a drug to treat an abnormality, an abnormality was postulated to fit a drug…..That was a great leap in logic, as all three authors point out. It was entirely possible that drugs that affected neurotransmitter levels could relieve symptoms even if neurotransmitters had nothing to do with the illness in the first place (and even possible that they relieved symptoms through some other mode of action entirely). As Carlat puts it, “By this same logic one could argue that the cause of all pain conditions is a deficiency of opiates, since narcotic pain medications activate opiate receptors in the brain.” Or similarly, one could argue that fevers are caused by too little aspirin.

But the main problem with the theory is that after decades of trying to prove it, researchers have still come up empty-handed.
Psychiatrist and author Carl Jung would not subscribe to the biochemical imbalance theory were he alive today.

These forces did not originate in our patient out of nowhere. They are most emphatically not the result of poisoned brain cells, but are normal constituents of our unconscious psyche. They appeared in numberless dreams, in the same or a similar form, at a time of life when seemingly nothing was wrong. And they appear in dreams of normal people who never get anywhere near a psychosis. (1939)

Misunderstood and then misdiagnosed

I do most of my thinking for this blog while I’m walking to and from work. The motion and fresh air stimulate my thoughts. As I walk, I ruminate about something I heard or saw the day before.

 The bipolar disorder satire that has been seen on so many blogs, the one where the computer animated woman keeps telling the shrink how crummy she feels on the medication and he keeps repeating that she needs the medication because she has “the bipolar disorder,” and it goes round and round from there. She tells him that she was feeling very upset because of a family tragedy when she was admitted to hospital and he says “that’s the bipolar disorder.”

What interested me recently about this clip was that the patient says she is on 10 mg of Abilify for “the bipolar disorder.” A few months ago I half jokingly told Chris (on 5 mg Abilify) he was depressed, not schizophrenic, because I discovered that Abilify was now being prescribed as an add-on treatment for depression. But he can also be bipolar, if that’s what he prefers, because Abilify is also for bipolar disorder. (A real wonder drug!) Who’s to say Chris isn’t bipolar? When he was first admitted to hospital, the doctors gave him only a 25% chance of being bipolar, but, as we know, doctors are often wrong, especially when it comes to psychiatric diagnoses.

Of course, I am being facetious, because the labelling is meaningless in the first place, but the blurring of diagnoses logically comes about because the same drug is used to treat supposedly different conditions. This is an open invitation to pick the diagnosis you would prefer to have. If a choice has to be made, wouldn’t a patient want to join the higher status group of people like Britney, Catherine and Mel, who supposedly don’t have schizophrenia, they have “the bipolar disorder.” Is it logical to claim that if you are no longer on Abilify, you no longer have the bipolar disorder/schizophrenia/depression?

Along the same lines of my muddled thinking on Abilify, here is an excerpt from Pamela Spiro Wagner’s blog, which relates how her friend  assumed that he was schizophrenic, based solely on the fact that he was prescribed Trilafon. The doctors never questioned this diagnosis once Joe told them what he was. They accepted what Joe told them as fact, without doing their own thinking. This is a very sad story, and unfortunately, it’s an all too frequent one.

I believe that Joe was misdiagnosed for many many years with schizophrenia, when in fact he had had Asperger’s from childhood. Now, that’s a long story in itself and though I could make a case for it, I cannot prove it. But I am not the only one who knew him well to notice that he never once exhibited signs of psychosis or even real delusions or true paranoia. Furthermore, from what I gather, the only reason the diagnosis came about or “took” was because he was put on Trilafon by a well-known psychiatric incompetent who was later “defrocked” and when Joe looked the drug up in the PDR and read what it was used for, he concluded that that meant he must have schizophrenia. From then on, so his story was, he told subsequent doctors this diagnosis, and apparently they simply took it on faith. In fact, for all the years thereafter until his terminal illness of ALS, the one doctor he saw not only never questioned this, but also never even reconsidered his absurd concomitant Dx as bipolar, even though Joe clearly had one of the most placid temperament possible and certainly wasn’t the slightest bit moody. No one so far as I know ever even considered that there might be something else going on. Even when I once went with him to see his non-medical therapist, did she really seem even to want to think about the possibility, as if it might be too much trouble…Perhaps, though I cannot recall, it was too late, if in fact this was after Joe’s ALS diagnosis.

But as I said, that is a long story, and not being a doctor, I suppose I can’t make the diagnosis, except that as his closest friend, I do and I feel that a great injustice was done. Not only was he saddled with a serious psychiatric diagnosis, and a stigmatizing one at that, but that particular neuroleptic medication rendered him much too tired to work as an engineer. All his adult life that was what he really wanted to do. Work. But the drug sapped his stamina…Worst of all, although eventually on Zyprexa which helped what might have been poor social skills due to Asperger’s, after he had been on it for years it caused the diabetes that ultimately cost him his life.

So what is schizophrenia? I’ll let Jung have the last word here. These are actually two quotes. I have added the second shorter quote to show how to cure a schizophrenic. (I like how he adds “provided one’s own constitution holds out.” How true!)

But even so one can bring about noticeable improvements in severe schizophrenics, and even cure them, by psychological treatment, provided that one’s own constitution holds out [in my own experience, I have had situations where I continued the long-term psychotherapy of several patients in inpatient state hospital settings, later transferred into my practice, in which I was physically attacked, reported to have sexually molested the patient , etc, to very positive outcomes, e.g., to the point where family thought their family member was originally misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, never having to return to the state hospital after many years of residing there, etc]. This question is very much to the point, because the treatment not only demands uncommon efforts but may also induce psychic infections in a therapist who himself has a rather unstable disposition. I have seen no less than three cases of induced psychoses in treatments of this kind.

A schizophrenic is no longer schizophrenic… when he feels understood by someone else.

– Carl Jung

Where are the holistic schizophrenia mommy bloggers?

Faithful reader Duane has pointed out to me that I seem to be unique in my being parent of an adult child with a schizophrenia diagnosis who has such a postive view of schizophrenia while holding a highly critical view of the medication approach. It’s lonely being me. Don’t get me wrong. There are people like Becky and Stephany, but they belong to a sub-group of mothers fighting the good battle against childhood psychiatric labelling and drugging. Most of the others (we tend to be women) appear to endorse NAMI and the finding the right drug approach.

Where are the others like me who are blogging? Not just mommy bloggers but daddy bloggers, too. One day I would like to join the “in-crowd” of my own choosing. I have a long history of rejection. Even as far back as high school I never made it to the “popularity table” in the cafeteria. When I moved to that school district, the table with the cool kids was full, and I sat with the rejects, as I termed them (not me). I knew it was not cool to be there. One girl wore a hair net. Why a hair net, I had no clue, not that I bothered to ask. I just sat there eating my baked beans and Vienna sausage and fluffy white roll, just a table away from all the fun.

So, if you are willing to step up to the plate and begin your own blog, or you can twist someone else’s holistic arm to start one, I’m all for it. We’ll become the in-crowd, for once. It’s only a matter of time. Check out Blogger or WordPress. You can be up and ranting in about half an hour.

Popularity table