Ian and I discussed Chris today. It went like this:

Ian: Where was Chris last night?

Me: He was at his course.

Ian: What course was that?

Me: A computer technician course. He took the intro in August.

Ian: Good.

END OF DISCUSSION.

From http://www.psychquotes.com/

“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well – by creating the international child of the future”
(Dr. Chester M. Pierce, Psychiatrist, address to the Childhood International Education Seminar, 1973)

“We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our Sunday and day school teachers, our politicians, our priests, our newspapers, and others with a vested interest in controlling us. ‘Thou shalt become as gods, knowing good and evil,’ good and evil with which to keep children under control, with which to impose local and familial and national loyalties and with which to blind children to their glorious intellectual heritage… The results, the inevitable results, are frustration, inferiority, neurosis and inability to enjoy living, to reason clearly or to make a world fit to live in.”
(Dr. G. Brock Chisholm, President, World Federation of Mental Health and first Director General of the World Health Organization)

“…Jesus Christ might simply have returned to his carpentry following the use of modern psychiatric treatments.”
(William Sargant, British psychiatrist, 1974)

Several years ago I joined an on-line schizophrenia support group. I was beginning to change my ideas about the diagnosis and I joined the group to meet people in a similar situation. We live in a European city where we are not fluent in the local language and this has limited our reaching out. The only people I knew going through what Chris and I were going through were part of the bi-weekly support group run by the hospital program that Chris attended. Since I was not fluent in the language, contact with other parents was virtually non-existent.

I stayed with the on-line support group for about two years. It ultimately served to harden my holistic position. The regulars in the group were wonderful people struggling daily to cope with what they saw primarily as a disease needing medication. I quickly began to feel quite out of place. The members defined themselves by their diagnosis. They lectured each other on the need to keep on the medication and did not agree with the few people who suggested that there might be another way. It was heartbreaking to see where the medication had brought many of them.

There was one young woman who was approaching her thirtieth birthday. She lived by herself in a rural area. Her father stopped by from time to time to do repairs, but for most of the time she was alone, and this was not a good thing. It pitched her further into psychosis which broke through every so often in the messages she wrote. Her loneliness was overwhelming. She was on so many high dose psych meds it made my head spin. Who enabled her to get to this position? She saw a psychiatrist once a month, but only for a med check. This young woman was very articulate, even through the meds fog. On occasions when she lapsed into psychosis, the group’s verdict was to urge her to change or increase her meds. If she was clearly psychotic while on meds, shouldn’t it dawn on the members that the meds might be the problem here?

The overuse of meds seemed to be a problem mainly in the United States where so many factors collude in giving people lots and lots of pills and little access to psychotherapy. It was mind boggling to see how badly off these people really were. Multiple pills, multiple diagnoses. Nobody seemed to question whether they truly were all of the labels. “I’m schizoaffective and OCD, with depressive features.” No, you’re not, I am thinking. You merely have problems that have not been properly addressed.

I began to feel badly for even opening my mouth about an alternative view. Why? Simply because many of the members were my age and at this advanced age, reminding people of what might have been seemed downright cruel. They clung to their diagnoses because to do otherwise might open up regret. The type of people that were in the group tended to be ones who drew comfort from feeling bad. “My brother jumped off a building in the 1970s, said one member, “and he’s been in a wheel chair ever since! That’s the reality of untreated schizophrenia, don’t you get it? Don’t talk to me about getting off the drugs!”

I left the group, not wanting to feel bad about a situation I knew I could do something about.

Chris is doing well. Ian and I stick to our vow to not discuss Chris under almost any circumstance (the low Expressed Emotion thing). Chris has enrolled for another night course in computer technology, having finished the two week intro while Ian and I were away in August. He was asked, and forced to turn down, a request to join a rock band because unfortunately it interferes with his night course. He continues his once a week voice lessons and sings in the church choir.

He sees the sound shaman once a week. The shaman, in addition to working his magic on Chris’s chakras through sound, has suggested to Chris that he might want to put some of his energy into finding a girlfriend. Can a girlfriend come before a paycheck? We’ll see. If he does find a girlfriend, she might be attracted by his cooking skills. He’s becoming quite good at feeding the family on a nightly basis and he does a lot of the grocery shopping.

Chris continues to whittle away at the medication while seeing Dr. Stern twice a week. For those who are new to this blog, a large part of my energy was spent in the beginning fighting to get him off the medication. After being off the meds for a few months, he relapsed, although not due to the withdrawal. He went back into the hospital and was put on meds once again, most unfortunately. I argued again with the doctors to get him off them. Chris is now in the process of handling his own medication withdrawal. I noticed the other day that he seems more at ease with people, although, he still tends to stand while others are sitting, making it slightly socially awkward. I expect that to dissipate over time, but I do not feel it is meds-related.

He’s thinking hard about where he wants to go in life. There are a few open houses coming up with programs that he might want to pursue. I hope he goes to them.

Chris has also started to complain that he feels that all he does is errands for us. Good. I hope he is waking up to the idea of striking out on his own, becoming his own person, ditching the ties that bind.

P.S. I forgot to mention the vitamins, as Duane noted in the comments to this post. We have a more relaxed attitude toward the vitamins than previously. Chris is no longer taking 35 vitamins a day. That was becoming a bit of a tyranny. (See: The tyranny of vitamins). Instead, he has scaled down to the Dr. Hoffer basics – NADH instead of niacin, vitamin C, a vitamin B, and recently he has started taking 4 omega 3s per day.

I used to work for pharma. It was only a summer line job at the pharmaceutical firm where my father worked, but it was in pharma. Back in the 1970s, the firm was the biggest employer in the county. Actually, it was just about the only employer in the area that paid decent wages. Those unionized paychecks went a long way to covering my living expenses through four years of university. Almost everybody we knew worked at the company in the company town – my friends’ parents, my parents’ friends. Pharmaceuticals were king. People liked pharma. One of the firm’s big sellers was a hormone replacement drug that mother and her friends all swore by. In their opinion, it was even better than Tupperware. (I only remember one of my mother’s friends developing breast cancer.) There was this unbridled post-war belief that advances in technology and pharmacology was only going to make our lives better and better.

I worked on the production line, wearing a hairnet, white coat and sensible shoes. The job involved either inspecting pills or sterilizing bottles on a daily basis. Here’s a picture of how to load the hopper. I like routine jobs. You know what to expect.

The example set by my parents is how attitudes are developed about one’s own future health concerns. My parents believed that the daily intake of vitamins allowed them to flourish well into their eighties.

This was the era of the television show Laugh-In and the Farkle Family sketches, where a lot of the fun focused around the double sounding alliteration of the letters F and PH. The president of the pharmaceutical company in our town was an unassuming little man named Franklin F. One of my high school friends who also worked on the line had us all in stitches when she came up with the expression “Fine pharmaceutical firm you have here, Frank.” That’s how everybody in that country and in that era felt about it, too. Pharma was fantastically fine back then.

I began writing about Chris’s and my experience in mental health care five years ago when it suddenly clicked with me that a diagnosis of schizophrenia was the beginning of a fabulous journey, although not one without peril. It occurred to me to write a book to sound the drum for an alternative way of thinking about an up-until-now dismal diagnosis. Five years later and I am still at it. Seventy-five thousand words but just about done.

What I’ve written is sort of a do-it-yourself look at alternative mental health but in the form of a memoir. It can also be seen as a coming of age story regarding waking up to the delusion of the pharmaceutical cure. My book has been professionally edited three times. I  realized early on that my writing skills were rusty from being on the mommy track for so long (grocery lists and notes to teacher). It was just about ready two years ago and then Chris had a relapse. Being a holistic convert, I took it in stride as a necessary step on the road to self-awareness on both our counts. The relapse also allowed me to add some interesting new chapters on yet more therapies and approaches.

Most of the therapies that I have written about in my book are not known to be applied to a diagnosis of schizophrenia. That’s part of why what Chris and I are doing is so interesting. It’s all new territory. I also personally underwent these novel therapies so that I could get a better grip on what I was writing about. I, too, have benefited from the healing effects of the therapies.

I am at the point where I could really use some advice about how to market this book. I am perfectly prepared to go the self-publishing route because it involves no rejection letters and not as much work as chasing agents. (I have already received a few rejection letters, so I feel I must be getting closer to a published book). I can also put it on Authonomy, the author’s website where other writer’s critique your work in exchange for your critiquing theirs. My book would be available to anyone who simply signs up for an account. What I want to do is to get our story to a larger public. I’ve gone the blog and Twitter route as a way of getting a strong “platform” as they say in the biz but also as a way of sharpening my writing skills. I don’t know how strong my platform really is, but it looks good in a query letter.

If you have any ideas that I may not have considered, please feel free to contact me about them. No idea is too small, too big or too eccentric, trust me.