Holistic Recovery from Schizophrenia

It’s interesting how your mother can tell you something, and you don’t believe it, or at least, you downplay it, and then a stranger tells you something and it makes a deep impression. Last night Chris told me he had been out the evening before and ran into a friend from his psychiatric program days and her brother. The brother said to Chris that, judging from how well he is now, Chris seemed to be doing better than most from the program. Needless to say, Chris was pleased. This remark really boosted his confidence.

I subscribe to a newsletter called Natural News (http://www.naturalnews.com/). Don’t know how I first started subscribing, but it arrives in my in-box daily. I myself have wondered if it is a front for a certain unnamed American politician, whose name keeps cropping up affirmatively in the newsletter. Here’s what the website has to say about itself.

The NaturalNews Network is a non-profit collection of public education websites covering topics that empower individuals to make positive changes in their health, environmental sensitivity, consumer choices and informed skepticism. The NaturalNews Network is owned and operated by Truth Publishing International, Ltd., a Taiwan corporation. It is not recognized as a 501(c)3 non-profit in the United States, but it operates without a profit incentive, and its key writer, Mike Adams, receives absolutely no payment for his time, articles or books other than reimbursement for items purchased in order to conduct product reviews.

Whatever this organization is, many of its news items are right up my skeptical and holistic alley, like this item from today’s newsletter:

“Don’t believe all the goody-goody “mental health groups” that claim to help teens and adults with their brain problems. Many of these are really just psycho-pharma front groups, and CCHR has exposed them all:

(NaturalNews) A highly effective public relations technique is the “third party technique” of creating front groups to endorse or promote the need of any service or product. The first party is the original group or client that would benefit more from increased public trust or affinity. The second group is the public or consumers. A third group is created with a contrived name to appear publicly as a disinterested party endorsing the industry of the first party.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/033453_psychiatry_front_groups.html#ixzz1WWaj0fwt

A link inside the body of the article takes you over to the CCHR (Citizens Commission on Human Rights) for website, which readers of this blog probably already know was founded in 1969 by Dr. Thomas Ssasz and the Church of Scientology. Many people say CCHR is a front for Scientology. Be that as it may, and because I’m catholic in my tastes and opinions, here’s what the CCHR website has to say about these front mental health front groups, who are listed by the way, on the CCHR website.

Certainly any organization claiming to be for the rights of patients diagnosed mentally ill would have as their primary goal, full informed consent in the field of mental health – including full and complete disclosure of all drug risks, the right to refuse treatment, the right to know that psychiatric diagnoses are not medical conditions (evident by the fact there is not one confirmatory medical/scientific test). Above all such groups would provide patients with an abundance of information on non-harmful, non- drug, medical solutions and options considering the dangerous and well documented risks of psychiatric drugs by international drug regulatory agencies.

These groups do not.

Nearly half of the 432 patients at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital have signed a petition or boycotted therapy sessions this month to protest new rules they say further limit their activities and force them to attend programs that don’t help in their recovery, patients and an advocacy groups say.

Read the rest of the here .

Thanks to Susan Schecter for spotting this one.

From the New York Times

“Disaster Was My God” delivers a Rimbaud who forces literary true believers to ponder an unwelcome thought: that artistic ambition may sometimes be, as the guidance counselors say, just a phase that troubled teens — even geniuses — go through.

Review on Amazon
“Disaster Was My God” is a blazing trip through fascinating characters, the tortured trajectory of a brilliant man’s life, and the revolution in poetry brought on by Arthur Rimbaud. Bruce Duffy has a knack for writing about pain and extreme awkwardness in a style that keeps it light and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. The characters in this book, they are characters. Rimbaud is first a child prodigy, then a poet who changes the fundamentals of poetry, then a gun runner in Africa. Duffy finds a way to do what I thought could not be done- connect the seemingly unconnectable dots that form Rimbaud’s life. This book is about a bizarre and unique man, and about all of us. It is about what can happen when we emerge from the unrealistic thinking of our adolescence and bump up clumsily against the adult reality of the outside world. Read the book. He says it better than me. Then there is Rimbaud’s mother, the mother of all mothers, who apparently could have written the book on controlling, narcissistic, queen-of-martyrdom parenting. If I was a Hollywood actress of a certain age, I would be putting this book down, calling my agent, and saying “Get this book. I want to be Rimbaud’s mother.” And finally, Verlaine, who brings Rimbaud to Paris, and is honest enough to admit that he fell for him and got kicked in the teeth. I have never read a funnier tragic book.

…………………………………

Arthur Rimbaud, the enfant terrible of French letters, more than holds his own with Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde in terms of bold writing and salacious interest. In the space of one year—1871—with a handful of startling poems he transformed himself from a teenaged bumpkin into the literary sensation of Paris. He was taken up, then taken in, by the older and married poet Paul Verlaine in a passionate affair. When Rimbaud sought to end it, Verlaine, in a jeal­ous rage, shot him. Shortly thereafter, Rimbaud—just shy of his twentieth birthday—declared himself finished with literature. His resignation notice was his immortal prose poem A Season in Hell. In time, Rimbaud wound up a pros­perous trader and arms dealer in Ethiopia. But a cancerous leg forced him to return to France, to the family farm, with his sister and loving but overbearing mother. He died at thirty-seven.

Product description
Bruce Duffy takes the bare facts of Rimbaud’s fascinating existence and brings them vividly to life in a story rich with people, places, and paradox. In this unprecedented work of fictional biography, Duffy conveys, as few ever have, the inner turmoil of this calculating genius of outrage, whose work and untidy life essentially anticipated and created the twentieth century’s culture of rebellion. It helps us see why such protean rock figures as Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and Patti Smith adopted Rimbaud as their idol.
 
Disaster Was My God: A Novel of the Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud, by Bruce Duffy
Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: Doubleday (July 19, 2011)

I watched several good films while flying across the pond recently, both of which got me thinking about advertising and image make-overs. The first, L’Amour Fou (Crazy Love) is an excellent documentary about the late, great fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. Go see it if you get a chance. The movie is a mesmerizing look at both Saint Laurent himself and the world of high fashion, and it has English subtitles. I wept when Saint Laurent announced his retirement with words evoking his favorite author, Marcel Proust. That speech alone is worth seeing the film, but there are also glamourous supermodels and glimpses of the jet set of the nineteen sixties.

I laughed when Saint Laurent said that his greatest achievement was putting women in pantsuits, but of course, he’s no oil exec, he’s a fashion designer and pantsuits for women caught the spirit of the women’s liberation movement, so it was entirely appropriate that he said so.

Yves Saint Laurent had his own fashion house, despite being painfully shy and suffering intense bouts of depression throughout his life. He and his business partner and lover Pierre Bergé created and marketed the YSL brand.

Morgan Spurlock, the director of The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, a documentary about product placement, marketing and advertising, is the antithesis of YSL; he’s more of an everyman, more Walmart than haute couture. In one scene in the movie, he goes to Pittsburgh, or someplace like that, to consult with a product placement firm, and the person he interviews helps him to determine how to place himself as a product. She decided after interviewing him that he was playful and mindful.

Seeing both these documentaries naturally got me thinking about Chris. I’m getting to old to be repositioned in any case. I’ve been into just maintenance for the past ten years and I can see years of intensified maintenance work ahead. Chris seems keen for product positioning. It’s a good time for a launch. He’s 27 going on 28, the age of his first Saturn return. His learning that he’s numerologically a number 3, has helped him focus on his creativity as an eventual career direction. He wears hats well. Hey – we can work with this. Musicians look good in hats, so do chefs. As part of his repositioning strategy, he’s now determined to lose weight.  Chris has put on a noticeable number of pounds over the past few months which coincided with his newfound joy in cooking. His lifelong dormant tastebuds have kicked into gear, and he’s making up for it with a vengeance. A fun idea, to think of what brand he would like to be, may help him gain more confidence in the spin he would like to put on his life.

Chris has come a long way, but still doesn’t have a highly developed sense of self. It’s starting slowly, and has been helped by many things such as Tomatis, sound therapy, psychotherapy, the Alexander Technique, and other things discussed in this blog. He told me today that he doesn’t feel ready to take on big challenges, he’s talking about further education, so it looks like nothing big is going to happen next year. It’s so nice to hear Chris being able to express this thought. As a teenager he kept everything close to his chest. If he’s not ready, he’s not ready. Sigh. In the meantime he’s auditioning for a role in the Christmas pantomime, Jack and the Beanstock. Now that’s progress!