Holistic Recovery from Schizophrenia

Drugging is always easier

From the New York Times

Antipsychotic Drugs Called Hazardous for the Elderly

Nearly one in seven elderly nursing home residents, nearly all of them with dementia, are given powerful atypical antipsychotic drugs even though the medicines increase the risks of death and are not approved for such treatments, a government audit found.
 
While the Food and Drug Administration has warned doctors that using antipsychotic drugs in elderly patients with dementia increases their risks of death, doctors continue the practice because they have few other good choices, said Dr. Daniel J. Carlat, editor in chief of The Carlat Psychiatry Report, a medical education newsletter for psychiatrists.

“Doctors want to maximize quality of life by treating the patient’s agitation even if that means the patient will die a bit sooner,” Dr. Carlat said.

This last remark is priceless. In the case of the “mentally ill,” that would be twenty-five years sooner.

Stardust

I’m hoping Chris will never be normal. I think there is a fairly good chance of that, given the strange journey he’s been on up until now. He should capitalize on this experience, not try to bury it. Let me explain. What I am about to say sounds terribly trite, because we have all heard it before. Can Chris’s and my incredible journey up to now be reduced to one banal thought in my head that it’s better to be somewhere else than swimming along in the mainstream?

Life is too short to want to fit in, to be normal, to be like the next guy. It’s being somewhat abnormal that will get you an interesting life. Sure, I would like Chris to be independent in an area of his choosing, but it’s when human beings stick their neck out, or learn to be themselves, not a copy of who they would like to be, that they have an authentic life. To me, this is good mental health. When you cherish abnormal, you begin to cultivate the brilliance of the personality struggling under the weight of wanting to fit in with social norms.

Chris was so “normal” in his early life that he threatened to extinguish himself, which, thankfully, around the age of nineteen he, in fact, did. He was literally fading away before my eyes — no opinions, no professed talents, no passions or enthusiasms, no color in his cheeks. I wonder if teachers even remember who he was beyond a pale blond boy in a class photo. Teachers remember the risk takers, not the risk averse.

Having extinguished himself, Chris began a long journey to be where he is today, still in the process of becoming an authentic personality, but a personality he is in fact becoming. His voice has temperament behind it. His spoken thoughts are turning towards opinions. His life is taking on a direction I don’t even know where it’s headed, but it’s headed somewhere. He is no longer adrift.

If we, too, are aware, some of the sparkle of our relative’s journey will rub off on us. We all have star power.

How numerology increases understanding

I have posted elsewhere about the value of numerology in understanding so-called mental illness. I believe that numerology is an insightful way of relating to people who are in a mental health crisis. Ancient mathematicians, like Pythagorus, imputed meaning to numbers, based on vibrations and planetary movements. People experiencing schizophrenia see meaning and connections that are not apparent to others. Jung called this synchronicity.

My son, Chris, is quite interested in how numerology has relevance to his life. A few months ago I gave him a book on numerology for his birthday which he studies from time to time. This enables us to have interesting discussions about his personal growth and perhaps an eventual career path. These discussions are much less intrusive than “Well, son, when are you going to be ready to take on a full time job or studies?”

Example: Chris is becoming much more socially outgoing. Sure enough, he is in a personal year 3, the year of becoming more outgoing. He is really opening up to me with his personal thoughts and reflections. This is not something that he did as a child. I am seeing a reconstructed personality emerging.

In numerology, there are nine year cycles. To understand where you are with respect to that cycle, you take your date and month and the current year, and reduce the numbers down to a prime number (11s and 22s being the exception.)
For example, if tomorrow (3)/(5) is your birthday, and you were born in 1965, you are on year three of the nine year cycle.

3 prime number
5 prime number
2011 (=2+0+1+1=4)
________
3+5+4=12=1+2=3
 
Out of curiosity, and based on Chris’s numbers, I revisited the time when in hindsight Chris’s troubles were beginning to surface, to the present day. In 1999 he ended a nine year cycle and began a new one. What I recollect from that year concerning his health is that he began to experience very bad acne. (Dr. Abram Hoffer says that severe acne at this age is often a precursor to schizophrenia. It is a pellagra like condition related to a lack of B3 or niacin.)

Both Chris and I agree that his most recent hospitalization in 2008 marked the end of his nine year cycle and the beginning of his new nine year cycle. Since leaving the hospital, he has taken baby steps towards discerning his life path by taking a course here, a small job there. He is currently working ten hours a week helping an artist with his projects and tending the artist’s garden.

I find that the numerology perspective helps me to be patient, to see that life is change, growth, and there is a time for everything.

Royal Wedding madness

I have not been invited to the wedding, and to be blunt, neither have you, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the festivities from the comfort of a blog.

I googled Royal Wedding schizophrenia, and here’s the best I could come up with. Diana in heaven feels she’s being upstaged.  (“I’ll haunt it if it kills me.”) Perfect!

At the time of writing, the Royal Wedding Gown is still under wraps, but let’s see what the situation is in trousers. Does the trend to high waist trousers spell the end of the muffin top?

Before we leave the U.K., let’s take home a souvenir of the happy couple, Harry and Kate. To the Chinese, we all look alike.

Try “not” living with mental illness

Here is an extract from the latest NAMI e-mail on pervasive unemployment amongst the mentally ill. NAMI’s statistics reveal that 80% of people living with a mental illness are unemployed.

EMPLOYMENT: A CORNERSTONE OF RECOVERY

While successful approaches such as supported employment have been around for nearly two decades, the staggering unemployment rate for adults living with mental illness remains a national disgrace. Integrated employment remains a key element of recovery despite substantial evidence on what is effective in helping individuals get and keep a job is unavailable in many parts of the country.


NAMI will present a symposium on July 8 featuring nationally recognized experts on supported employment and innovative agencies that have successfully placed people living with mental illness in jobs and continue to assist them keep those jobs. Speaking at this important session is Tony Zipple, the executive director of Thresholds. As a leader and innovator in rehabilitation, Thresholds has served as a model for other agencies. Hundreds of agencies and others in the United States and abroad have adopted parts of the Thresholds program.


Joining Dr. Zipple are Deborah Becker and Dr. Robert Drake, co-directors of the Dartmouth IPS Supported Employment Center. Individual Placement and Support (IPS) supported employment is an evidence-based practice that assists people living with severe mental illness in returning to return to work. Compared to other vocational approaches, people who utilize IPS are almost three times more likely to find a regular job in the community than people who participate in other types of employment programs.

If you’re unable to join us in Chicago, don’t worry! We will feature comprehensive daily updates from the convention on NAMI.org as well as on Facebook and Twitter.
____________________
You have to be in good mental shape to be a candidate for the competitive job market and to hold down a job. If a patient is not able to work in a competitive job market, they are not sufficiently recovered/reconstructed/constructed. (See comments to earlier post.) If the statistics are as dismal as NAMI claims, one must ask, why aren’t these people in good enough shape to seek employment? For many of us, our first instinct is to say “it’s the drugs that stop people from working!” To me, the answer may be found by challenging the prevailing view of “severe mental illness” as mainly a medical problem. Assistance has been directed towards seeing the person as a patient/consumer of services rather than an individual with a unique story. Being an adult “living with mental illness” (today’s version of what recovery means) obviously isn’t helping people earn a paycheque.

Supporting innate personality traits

Here’s a good YouTube clip that preaches a new understanding of baffling behaviors. Isn’t it better to work with these traits rather than against them by labelling and medicating? Now, if you line up the behavior with the numerological significance of the birth date, your appreciation for your relative’s gifts will bring even greater empathy.

Rebirth, resurrection, reconstruction

Tomorrow is Good Friday. The Christian world celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the tomb. For the past few days I have been swirling some ideas around in my head about how I can introduce the idea of beginning to live a life after a death. Those who are struggling with what Western medicine calls “schizophrenia “often express the idea that they have died, they are dead. I have noticed that young men often begin to move beyond through this period around the age of 29 or 30. This is my wish for Chris. Tomorrow he will perform a solo in church from St. Matthew’s Passion,  “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein.” (Make thee clean, my heart, I will bury Jesus.)

This is the chronological age (28) that numerologists refer to as the first Saturn return, when the planet Saturn returns to the place it occupied when that person was born. It is a time of endings and new beginnings. In 1901 Richard Maurice Bucke, a Canadian psychiatrist, published a book entitled “Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind” after experiencing an enlightenment when he was in his early thirties. He made a study of other spiritual leaders and noticed that they achieved a cosmic consciousness around the the same age.

Skyblue Cure has a remarkable blog where he writes about his rebirth at the age of thirty. I have reprinted some of his writing below because he perfectly illustrates an emotional rebirth and liberation from death.

From Cure: The eye of the Hurricane

I am a person cured of emotional illness and schizophrenia. My life, this personality I have now, started at age thirty. This state of mind, this feeling or awareness of consciousness did not exist before that time.

I remember one day when I was almost 30, I realized that I had become alive! I had been doing significant “work” in psychotherapy and had released and dealt with major memories and emotions from my past. Now, my mind being freed many memories of many little things were welling up in my memory, and I had been emotionally interacting with my current environment.

I was standing in my kitchen and I felt my memories and emotions swirling around me. I felt exhilarated and euphoric, I had the feeling of being in the eye of a hurricane with the powerful winds swirling around me. In a blinding moment I knew!…I WAS ALIVE! AND I WAS ALIVE FOR THE FIRST TIME THAT I COULD REMEMBER IN MY LIFE! The next time I went to group, I told the circle that I had “an announcement to make.” Then I announced that “I am Alive! 🙂

I thought they would think I was irrational. However, the head therapist just came to me and shook my hand and congratulated me for joining the human race. I suppose I would have made more sense to them if I had told my complete experience but nobody really asked and it didn’t turn out to be so important for that moment.

From that moment, the genie was out of the bottle and could never be re-corked. I continued on in therapy for another year or so, but in the end, I realize now, It would have made no difference. I was free and I knew how I had been imprisoned and the process was now natural and unstoppable. It still took some time to unravel and form a complete new personality but that was the moment of birth for me in my life.

From: Reconstructed, Not “Recovered”
The person is at a later stage an adult. They cannot “recover” to being a child which would be the time before the illness started. The cure itself is more than correcting initial problems. It has to also integrate a new personality in a now formed adult. So if the psyche is reformed and the personality is new then there can be absolutely nothing to which can be recovered. To recover indeed to any state pre-cure would mean to go back to a problematic state.
 
The symptoms of mental illness are usually not the problem, they are the attempt at a solution. To cut them out as with a scalpel is to cut out the soul of a person. The problems that cause the illness lies elsewhere, often in their relation to so-called “sane” people which have driven them crazy. To revert or “recover” then actually means that the person abandons his cure and returns to a permanent state of dysfunction. The progression of illness itself is the actual cure, the psyche needs to break and reform. This is a natural process which needs to be assisted not interfered with nor prevented.

Downbeat bloggers

If anybody came to me today asking my advice about how best to treat schizophrenia, who am I to tell them what to do? Anything I say would imply that I have all the answers, and I don’t. From time to time I look at other people’s blogs on schizophrenia, blogs written by people who do not embrace the same “try anything remotedly feasible” approach that I do. I like to look at what the competition is doing.

The competition is rarely upbeat. The competition seems sad, very sad, about their relatives. They are sad about themselves. They have tried everything, done everything, and nothing has worked it seems. Their relatives are still hospitalized/group homed/dead/take your pick.

No two family situations are alike, but I do sense a pattern. The downbeat bloggers (DBs) tend to medicalize their relative’s mental health condition. This means they fully respect the label and, while not happy with the efficacy of the drugs, they go along with the idea that the drugs are essential to their family member’s “functioning,” as they term it. Once they have bought into the medical model, their interests begin to extend outward to urge the community to accomodate their relative and others. It all sounds reasonable, doesn’t it, to want to try to improve society when you have the requisite insight and experience.

It seems to me, however, that the DBs don’t want to change themselves, they want to change their relative, and failing that, to change others.

If these bloggers were more cheerful about their own family member, I could be persuaded that they were on to something that might work for others.

In order to arrive at this blast of insight, I took the advice of former patients, who are almost unanimous in their condemnation of the medical model. I strongly suspect that the reason the downbeat bloggers don’t ask former patients for their advice is because they do not believe mental illness is curable. There are no former patients in their mindset. There are only the misdiagnosed former patients. DBs are doomed from the beginning if this is how they feel.

Obviously, there is a place for professional help. However, the goal is to distance yourself and your relative as soon as possible from becoming overly dependent on professionals’ advice and their hold on your life. The idea is to empower yourself by believing in the innate human ability to rise above adversity. People actually can cheer themselves up by empowering themselves. Nobody is born mentally ill. People become “mentally ill.” If a relative is troubled, this is an opportunity to examine your own life, to see how your thoughts become actions that have an impact on others. I often think that the person with the mental illness is the person who has managed to escape from somebody else’s power over their life. They have checkmated the person. They have put them in their place. It’s really odd and unproductive (albeit creative), but it works.

The middle-aged, always ripe for picking

There’s the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, famous for medicalizing human nature as mental illness treatable by drugs. Then there’s NAMI, famous since 1979 for finding customers for pharma. Now there is The National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer’s Association, two more of pharma’s good buddies. Where there is fear, there is pharma.

From the New York Times

For the first time in 27 years, the definition of Alzheimer’s disease is being recast in new medical guidelines that reflect fast-mounting evidence that it begins ravaging the brain years before the symptoms of dementia

The guidelines, to be issued Tuesday by the National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer’s Association, divide the disease into three stages: a phase when dementia has developed, a middle phase in which mild problems emerge but daily functions can still be performed, and the most recently discovered phase, in which no symptoms are evident but changes are brewing in the brain

The drive to diagnose Alzheimer’s before it has progressed into profound dementia is also reflected in a bill introduced in Congress this month, which would create specific Medicare cost codes for Alzheimer’s diagnosis, including steps involving discussions between the patient’s doctor and caregivers, a recognition that keeping family members well-informed can result in better planning and care.

“Early diagnosis is really the key to this,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and a sponsor of the bill. “Oftentimes family members notice the symptoms in their loved ones, but it’s only years later that they get diagnosed or understand what resources are available.”

The drive to diagnose Alzheimer’s before it has progressed into profound dementia is also reflected in a bill introduced in Congress this month, which would create specific Medicare cost codes for Alzheimer’s diagnosis, including steps involving discussions between the patient’s doctor and caregivers, a recognition that keeping family members well-informed can result in better planning and care.


“Early diagnosis is really the key to this,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and a sponsor of the bill. “Oftentimes family members notice the symptoms in their loved ones, but it’s only years later that they get diagnosed or understand what resources are available.”

I remember my father turning to me with tears in his eyes, asking me if there was any medical breakthrough that I might know about that would help my mother with her dementia. I was not able to offer any help. I was going through my own struggles with Chris’s recent diagnosis, and didn’t have a clue about how to help him, either. By the time I read about what Dr. Abram Hoffer had to say about dementia and schizophrenia, my mother’s dementia was well progressed. I took Dr. Hoffer’s advice for Chris and me. We both got results. All this to say, that when pharma trumpets a new discovery, chances are there is another option that doesn’t involve expensive medications that produce undesirable side effects. I have no idea if my intake of megadose B-3 and other vitamins will prevent dementia in the end, but neither do I have any idea whether pumping myself full of pharma’s latest bright idea will prevent it either. The first option is cheap and non-invasive. The second option raises concerns.

Rather than sit in fear of early dementia, why not check out what Dr. Abram Hoffer has to say about megadoses of niacin (vitamin B-3) as a way of preventing dementia/alzheimers? Here is a link to a previous post that goes into a bit more detail as to what is involved in the niacin treatment. Anyone seriously wanting to pursue what Dr. Hoffer has to say about dementia can do further research through Hoffer’s books and references on the web.