Holistic Recovery from Schizophrenia

A homeopathic explanation for why people with “schizophrenia” don’t get cancer

Before you read what I am about to say, see the previous blog post on why Dr. Hoffer said people with schizophrenia don’t get cancer. (They have excellent genes.)

I’ve long thought that this group of people don’t get cancer because their mind, not their body, is where they are most vulnerable and that’s where their symptoms will manifest. This is my anecdotal conclusion from observing my own son, although it’s a real ego booster to think he comes from excellent gene stock. His childhood tolerance to physical pain was indeed something to behold. He’s always been a thinker, spending too much time in his head with almost zero focus on his body. That’s why I’ve placed so much effort in the past ten years on finding therapies that stress integrating the body and the mind. I’ve long maintained that when Chris gets physically sick, then I know he’s on the road to balanced health. I’ve cheered every sniffle he very occasionally gets.

I’m reading a fascinating book by Amy Lansky, entitled Impossible Cure: The Promise of Homeopathy. In it she writes about each person’s energetic state as having a center of gravity, a homeopathic concept introduced by George Vithoulkas, MD. The center of gravity is a general zone of susceptibility to certain kinds of diseases.

“In his text, The Science of Homeopathy, Vithoulkas describes the center of gravity as a combination of states or vibratory levels in the emotional, mental, and physical realms. Within each of these realms is a range of diseases, from simple and largely benign, to serious and life-threatening. Vithoulkas maintains that individuals resonate only with those diseases that have an affinity to their center of gravity. For example, a psychotic person’s center of gravity is weighted very strongly in the mental and emotional realm, but not as strongly in the physical realm. This explains why psychotic patients do not get as many minor physical illnesses as other people. While they are very susceptible to stimuli that affect their minds, they are not as susceptible to factors that affect their bodies. In contract, a cancer patient’s center of gravity is very severe in the physical realm, but may be quite benign in the mental realm.”

Impossible Cure: The Promise of Homeopathy, by Amy Lansky, PhD.

Dr. Abram Hoffer on schizophrenia, cancer, and brilliance

“Schizophrenics have excellent genes. I wish I had them. They hardly ever get cancer. Adrenochrome kills cancer cells; I think the gene is nature’s answer to the cancer pandemic. On the psychological side, they’re brilliant: artists, scientists, poets, philosophers.

The problem is, we don’t feed these genes properly. If you have a million dollar car and you put water in the gas tank, is it going to perform very much for you?”

An Interview with Abram Hoffer, from Rob Wipond’s archives

An Interview with Dr. Abram Hoffer

Recovery in a nutshell: Self worth

In this trailer for Art and Craft, a documentary about his life as an art forger, Mark Landis, who was given a schizophrenia diagnosis as a teen, has a lot to say about recovery, if you listen carefully to what he is saying.

Watch this clip then imagine being a young man diagnosed as schizophrenic, whose troubles are compounded when people shun him and consider him useless. He retreats into a lonely adult life of watching television. Were it not for his hospital art therapy class, his talents in copying works of art might have gone unrecognized and he may not have found a calling.

Listen to what he has to say about why he masqueraded as a philanthropist giving away works of famous painters he had forged:

“I got addicted to being a philanthropist I wasn’t used to have anyone treat me like this. . . Everyone was so nice and respectful —things I was quite unfamiliar with.”

“It seldom happened that people were nice to me.”

“We all like to feel useful. Whatever ability we happen to have we like to make use of it.”

“(This documentary) gave me something to do because I’m really just a lonely old shy man.”

Imagine, for a moment, if people close to Mr. Landis learned early on how to draw him out as a human being. He might not be the lonely old shy man he says he is today.

The diagnosis, and the way friends and family react to the diagnosis, sets up feelings of hopelessness and despair for all. How can a solid recovery take hold in this environment?

See also Elusive Forger, but Never Stealing

An excellent course in the fundamentals of recovery:
Families Healing Together

America’s most generous con artist

America’s most generous con artist
By Jason Caffrey
BBC World Service
31 March 2015 From the section Magazine

“As a teenager Landis had suffered a nervous breakdown following the death of his father, and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Art therapy revealed his talent for copying, and he was able to turn out fakes at astonishing speed.”

Read the rest here

Father Hank Nunn of Bangalore

I tried to get in touch with Father Hank at the Athma Shakti Vidyalaya Society a few years ago when I was desperate enough to consider sending Chris all the way across the world for treatment in India. Father Hank’s name does come up from time to time when people are looking for a center that has a minimal to zero use of medications and a more humane view of “mental illness.” Father Hank was influenced by Jaqui Schiff and transactional analysis.

Transactional analysis “offers a theory for child development by explaining how our adult patterns of life originated in childhood. This explanation is based on the idea of a “Life (or Childhood) Script”: the assumption that we continue to re-play childhood strategies, even when this results in pain or defeat. Thus it claims to offer a theory of psychopathology.”(Wikipedia)

Thank you Taylor and WordPress!

Today I migrated my old blog from Blogger to WordPress. I’d been putting off the decision to migrate for quite a while because old habits die hard. It was just so much easier not to have to deal with what seemed like an overwhelming task. My youngest son Taylor, a web designer, took over the project. He used one of the WordPress templates, and tweaked it to reflect my design preferences, which if you compare my old blog to this new one you will see that the new design is a deconstructed version of the old one. (Yes, I know I could have done all this myself, but my priorities for the past few months were to finish my memoir of healing. I’m almost there.)

Why WordPress? Because I was jealous of everybody else’s WordPress blogs. They looked professional. Blogger’s limitations made my blog look increasingly “homemade,” which is fine in one sense (looking “sincere”) but not going to cut it when it comes time to promote my book: Holistic Recovery from Schizophrenia: A Mother and Son Journey.

By switching to WordPress I have a better look, better indexing and an optimized search engine.

Please bear with me over the next few months as I learn to navigate my way around. I’ll also be restoring some of the pages from my old blog that are missing right now.

You can find me now at rossaforbes.com So much easier than holisticschizophrenia.com which depends on people’s ability to spell SCHIZOPHRENIA AND HOLISTIC. You won’t believe the number of people who think “holistic” starts with a “w.”

My Mysterious Son: A Life-Changing Passage Between Schizophrenia and Shamanism

No, not my (Rossa’s) mysterious son, but author Dick Russell’s
My Mysterious Son: A Life-Changing Passage Between Schizophrenia and Shamanism. 
I am now confronted for the second time with the repercussions of my dawdling for years with my own shamanism memoir. In the amount of time it’s taken me to learn how to “write good,” Dick Russell and Rupert Isaacson (The Horse Boy) have beaten me to it. Both authors deserve the highest praise for sharing their fascinating healing journey with their own sons and introducing the world to the shaman’s way.

What follows is my Amazon review of My Mysterious Son


This is a great book – schizophrenia’s long awaited answer to The Horse Boy (autism). The author/father fully “gets” how to understand and work with the life passage that the Western world calls “schizophrenia.” As a mother of a gifted young man of 30 who has been given the schizophrenia label, I, like the author, came to adopt a more shamanic understanding of his purpose in life and went to great lengths to find modern day shamans, or guides, if you will, who could help my son.

To understand schizophrenia and find the right kinds of help, a good place to begin is by suspending disbelief. You’ll need plenty of that if you go the shaman route. Shamans can work wonders, especially in tandem with parents who have the right attitude. I admire the author for being willing to stretch his belief system, something that many parents aren’t prepared to do. The received wisdom of the past several decades tells us that schizophrenia is an unsolvable problem and the problem is within the brain, not with the weight of ancestry or in finding a spiritual path. “Schizophrenia” is mysterious and mutli-faceted. By definition, treating it must be done with imagination. Humor, too. 

The path is long, so why not enjoy it? Both father and son consult the famed African shaman Malidoma, who reminds the father of the upside of schizophrenia. “I mean . . . Being with a person like Frank, there can’t be a dull moment.” So true, if you enter into the spirit of it, as the author has done.

The quantum physics view is intrinsically the shamanic view. It’s all about shifting energy and outcomes based on the viewpoint of the observer. In this case, the parent, Dick Russell, is the observer who decides to shift his viewpoint about what is normal after having several discussions with the noted psychologist, James Hillman. Accepting a new normal that validates spiritual and extra-sensory experience is the crucial ingredient to gradually pushing your relative toward interesting normalcy, and should be the cornerstone of treatment. This means radically overturning the current medical approach that insists that the delusions are meaningless and not to engage with them.

In one incident, the author noticed that Franklin’s delusional talk grew worse after the family pediatrician was impatient with his ramblings and tried to correct his faulty thinking. Haven’t we parents all done that? It doesn’t work and is demeaning all around. Had the author not met James Hillman, it may have taken him a number of years to stumble onto a very basic treatment modality — namely, people in extreme states respond well when others treat them kindly and respectfully and try to engage with, not “correct” their delusions, which are not really so delusional if you pay attention to the content of what is being said and enter into the spirit of engagement. Criticism makes the delusions worse. Why is this simple concept of acceptance and engagement not taught to family members, who are on the front lines of support? My experience tells me that there is a mental illness industry composed of doctors, psychologists, social workers, etc. who do not want to dilute the value of their time and expertise by having families do the work they are paid to do. More people would recover sooner if this information were shared. My son’s doctors were adamant that the delusions were to be ignored. The National Alliance on Mental Illness, which began as an understandable reaction to the parent blaming of earlier decades, is also responsible for hiding this recovery tool. Better to blame the brain than blame the family by insinuating that how they interact with their relative can be improved upon. My son spent eighteen months in a day program, was hospitalized for three months on three separate occasions, and yet I had to find out this information by doing my own research.

Getting a solid footing on the recovery path may not just be limited to accepting and engaging in the new normal, especially when it comes to a diagnosis of “schizophrenia.” Being non-judgmental in thought, word, and deed may only take you so far. If you believe, as the author does (and I do) that there are genuine paranormal experiences at work in schizophrenia, then feed the beast! Your son or daughter is already dancing in the realm of the spirits so why not go the distance by bringing in guides who speak their language? Warning: Many shamanic practices involve engaging with the spirit of the ancestors. Are you wiling to suspend your disbelief and brave enough to go there yourself?

There is a wonderful scene in the book when the author’s ex-wife (Frank’s mother) invokes the spirit of her ancestors, not in a clearing in the middle of the African jungle nor in a far flung corner of Siberia but in an ordinary suburban house in Maryland. Magic can happen anywhere, even in suburbia, it seems.

My Mysterious Son will have a powerful impact on what is considered acceptable “schizophrenia” treatment in the years to come. Read it. Enjoy it. Learn from it.

Rossa Forbes is a contributing author to Goddess Shift: Women Leading for a Change

A Theological Interpretation of Mental illness-A Focus on “Schizophrenia”

originally posted on the Beyond Meds blog

JANUARY 11, 2015 BY 

by Elahe Hessamfar

A book: In the Fellowship of His Suffering: A Theological Interpretation of Mental Illness – A Focus on ”Schizophrenia”

fellowshipMy precious daughter, Helia, was diagnosed with “schizophrenia” fourteen years ago at age of 23. Her illness was sudden and shocking to all who knew her. Helia had a good life by all worldly standards.  She was stunningly beautiful, with a kind and sweet personality. She had recently graduated from one of the country’s top universities.  She had a good job and had recently been promoted.  She lived in NYC, the city she loved, was about to be engaged to the man she deeply loved, and was very involved in her local church.  She was a devout Christian who had had a major conversion experience while she was in college, and whose life was centered on her faith in God.
Read more here

Interview with Ann Cluver Weinberg, author of The Danny Diaries


Ann Cluver Weinberg is a South African writer. In this 2013 interview she discusses how the diagnosis and the gloomy attitude of the doctors was an impediment to helping her help her son. I so identify with what she went through:

“I was frighted and I was frightened by the doctors being so frightened themselves. I thought doctors and psychologists ought to calm you down but these ones were saying “do you know, Mrs.Weinberg, you have got here a very disturbed boy!”

Read my review of The Danny Diaries here. There are two parent memoirs about schizophrenia that capture my own understanding of how to help someone transition through psychosis to recovery. The Danny Diaries is one.

Person of the Year – Corinna West

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“If you want to know how young black people overcome adversity, we’ve got over 400 videos up on the Poetry for Personal Power You Tube channel.” (Corinna West)

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLePxiZ4YtCeC0OhvrPpWT85owrVIu4aQ1

Corinna West is the one woman dynamo behind Poetry for Personal Power, a mental health social inclusion campaign that encourages young people struggling with mental health issues to get up on stage and communicate. She founded Wellness Wordworks in 2008 to show how the recovery community can provide internet skills and business opportunities to their peers. I’ve always been impressed with Corinna’s entrepreneurial and community leadership skills. She seems to have zillions of “I can do” ideas in her head. Corinna’s enthusiasm for social change is infectious, not to mention she’s got a master’s degree in pharmaceutical chemistry with lived experience, having survived homelessness and 12 psychiatric diagnoses.

An amazing woman.