Holistic Recovery from Schizophrenia

Faith works

Holy Spirit for Healing: Merging Ancient Wisdom with Modern Medicine (authors Ron Roth and Peter Ochiogrosso) teaches us how to heal ourselves by tapping into the same cosmic consciousness that the great spiritual leaders like Jesus Christ, Buddha and Mohammed demonstrated. Ron Roth was a former Catholic priest and a faith healer for most of his life.

Faith is knowing beyond a doubt that God works through us. I was stunned to discover how quickly I healed myself when I put the principles found inside this book into practice. The authors tell us that we can expect “miraculous,” often spontaneous cures, as long as we act with the confidence of the Divine.

After reading and rereading this wonderful book several times, I finally sustained an interest to begin reading the Gospels. For most of my life I found much of Jesus’s message obscure and often contradictory. The King James Version uses many words today that are archaic and modern versions of the Bible use words that  are simplistic. I discovered by reading this book that the original Greek meaning of Jesus’s words is often much more in harmony with his message. For example, the word “repent” doesn’t mean stop sinning or something bad will happen to you; its meaning is closer to “change who you are.”  Much of our illnesses are created by our thought patterns. When we struggle to heal ourselves of illness, we must change our thought patterns and become a different person.

We receive the ability to heal by understanding and practicing the basics of how God’s love works. (If we have trouble with the word God or Jesus, the authors instruct us to substitute a universal presence or some other Divine deity for whom we feel an affinity.)

God loves and cares for us and doesn’t punish us with ill health or other catastrophes. Many of us think that he does, but this thinking is not the way to spiritual wisdom. A man blind since birth was presented to Jesus. His followers asked which one of the man’s parents had sinned. He answered that “neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him.” And then what did Jesus do? He cured the man of his blindness. These are considered “miracles” to us but they are miracles only to those who are not very knowledgeable in the ways of God, say the authors. Jesus thought with the mind of God and was able to understand the laws of the universe that today we are beginning to learn about as “energy medicine.” Jesus says to us, “as I do, so can you.”

The book instructs us to begin our healing process by purging ourselves of negative thinking, guilt, fear, anger, etc. using meditation techniques that encompass words, breathing techniques and visualizations that spiritually vibrate. Peace, love, joy are three words with high healing impact. These words were used by ancient priests in daily chanting. We visualize speaking with Jesus or another Divine presence and we command/decree that the Divine light, the Holy Spirit enter our mind and body. The Light, the Spirit heals but the body and mind must be primed through practice to allow healing to happen.

Real faith is the energy to command the negative energies out of our lives using the God spirit within us. Decree is an ancient form of command prayer and one of the most powerful healing forces we can use. Decree comes from knowing beyond a doubt that we are a child of the Divine and we channel that Divine power to our authority. It goes against how most of us were taught to pray. Many of us when we pray are actually begging and bargaining with what we see as a fickle God. The authors say this is not the way to spiritual wisdom. Spiritual wisdom comes from knowing who we are (a bigger part of God than we realize) and that we have the ability to act in God’s name. That’s what Jesus did, that’s what the Biblical prophets like Elijah did. They didn’t ask God’s permission, they acted in God’s name.

The authors tell us that decree is something we can do with confidence within a certain period of time, but it is important to practice on ourselves before we go out and practice it on others.

There is a caveat. We are encouraged not to fall into the trap of going into remission (remission is what doctors say when they can’t explain what happened) and then abandoning our fledgling spiritual practices. We need to keep in shape spiritually to be able to handle the problems that inevitably come our way.

How to grow your business

Mary Weiss’s handsome son Mark died in 2004 in Minnesota in a half way house while enrolled in a Seroquel drug trial against his mother’s wishes. He had stabbed himself to death in the bathtub using a box cutter. Being enrolled in the drug trial was a condition of his release from the hospital.

The public labors under a false belief that forced medication somehow protects both the patient and others from the carnage that was witnessed in Tuscon last month. Since the truth surrounding drug efficacy and treatment is so hidden from the public, it appears that the real reason behind forced medication in many instances is to help the drug companies and universities to grow their business, shielded from public scrutiny. It may be the only reason, for all I know. What do any of us know from personal experience when it comes to the shenanigans behind these treatment programs?

Mary Weiss finally wrote to Charles Schulz, the head psychiatrist of the program, after receiving no replies to her earlier telephone calls to Mark’s doctors.

It wasn’t until April 28, after Weiss’s third letter, that she received a cursory response, in which Schulz wrote, “it was not clear to me how you thought the treatment team should deal with this issue.”

Mary Weiss was new to what a diagnosis of schizophrenia when it  comes to treatment actually means. How would she have known the kind of treatment her son needed since it is not available in most institutions and has been actively prevented from becoming widespread? She knew that the drugs were not helping him and only making him worse. If psychiatry were doing its job it would have made the kind of treatment her son needed the norm. Psychiatric survivors have been saying for years how best to treat mental distress but they are ignored by the medical profession. Schulz is hiding behind an uncontestable norm in modern psychiatry. Where it gets tricky for him, as it is for so many other psychiatrists, is that he is on record as receiving funding from AstraZeneca to conduct his research. Mother Jones magazine reported earlier that the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota receives $15,000 for every patient enrolled in these trials.

For his part, Schulz says he’s done nothing wrong, and maintains that he hasn’t violated any U of M policies. The FDA, state Attorney General’s Office, and the U of M’s Internal Review Board all found no link between Markingson’s suicide and the CAFE study. Schulz also points out that he started looking into quetiapine before it was even branded as Seroquel by AstraZeneca.

The link between Mark’s suicide and the CAFE study is obvious. The patient wasn’t being helped and his mother’s pleas that he was getting worse fell on deaf ears. There is a plethora of historical information that says that the drugs don’t work. Instead of helping Mark, a human being, like so many psychiatrists Schulz was choosing to help pharma reposition an existing product. If Mark had been given intense psychotherapy, minimal to no drugs with no strings attached, and other interventions such as I write about on my blog, chances are good that the outcome would have been different. Mainstream psychiatry has long known about, and rejected Soteria, but that’s the kind of help that Mary Weiss’s son needed. Today, the Finnish program Open Dialogue looks promising.

“I haven’t been particularly focused on quetiapine, in my opinion, but on the best ways to help schizophrenic people,” Schulz wrote in an email.

Psychiatrists know there are better ways to help “schizophrenic people” but that’s not where the money is.

Thanks to Stephany at Soulful Sepulcher for alerting me to this evolving story, which was originally published in CityPages.

Been taken so long I’m sure the word is “took”

Apologies to Gianna Kali at Beyond Meds for continously mooching off her post ideas, as I did yesterday, but her post today has inspired me once more. Inspire may not be the right word. I’ve got to vent. Dr. Mark Foster is a primary care physician in Colorado who is often a guest blogger at Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America blog. Today he writes about a teenage patient who’s been on Adderall for years. His father is with him in the examining room and expresses consternation after he gets a lecture from Mark about the wisdom of having a kid on Adderall for 10 years. “But, it’s a disease, isn’t it?” he says to the doctor.

Believe it or not, my sympathies here are with the father, mainly because this post about childhood use of Adderall shows how much people have been jerked around by the medical profession when it comes to mental health. Now, we’ve got a chirpy young doctor telling the old man that he’s got it completely wrong. Pa’s been jerked around since before this guy went to medical school, now suddenly he’s getting a lecture that supposedly everybody else knows but him.

Parents and their idiotic ideas aside, doctors have been the willing handmaidens of pharma and have been only too willing to push the idea that there is something called ADD or ADHD and there’s a medication for it. Consider the opposite. Suppose this father initially resisted putting his child on meds. He’d be up against teachers, other parents who have put their kid on meds, perhaps his own family doctor suggesting that “research shows that untreated hyperactivity leads directly to jail,” and the media telling him that the latest research shows how these drugs “protect the brain.”

So, I often do get angry because I know we’ve really been had and almost no person in a position of medical authority who families turned to in the past twenty years was curious enough or responsible enough to question the sales job.

Why are people with Aspergers’ syndrome considered mentally ill?

I just don’t get why Aspergers is categorized as a mental illness. It’s in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, so it must be, but I still don’t get it. I “get” why schizophrenia is considered a mental illness, although I don’t agree with labelling it as such. It’s all so confusing, really.

Here’s a story from the Ottawa Citizen about a mother who is not able to hospitalize her son because the Asperger beds are full, but there are spaces at the hospital if you fall under another mental illness category. Note that Aspergers used to be something rare. Now, by bed count alone, it appears to have overtaken traditional “mental illnesses” like schizophrenia in a spectacularly short period of time.

The real reason for being admitted to mental health facility may simply be that your family can’t deal with your behavior any longer. In the absence of helping the whole family find a better way of coping, the one with the label gets time out in the institution and the ones without the label get time out at home.

Unconditional love

I’m reprinting this extract of Grainne Humphreys own story of renewal which was posted today at Beyond Meds. I urge you to read the post in its entirety because it shows you how recovery without drugs looks. Recovery without drugs looks very weird, but if more people were aware of the breakdown and renewal process, perhaps there would be more understanding that this is something that people have to go through, and they can do it without unnecessary recourse to the heavy duty artillery of drugs and doctors.

That being said, Grainne writes about how difficult it was for her family to be round-the-clock crisis managers. I can identify whole-heartedly with this, because I was emotionally and physically exhausted from being on call 24/7. Had the decision been mine alone, Chris would never have been placed back on medication. In this respect, it appeared easier for Grainne to have a drug free recovery, since her mother seemed to be the sole decision maker here. No messy arguments with a spouse over medication, no ultimatums.

Grainne attributes her healing to unconditional and unwavering love . I would like to stop here and reflect on that. Let’s assume that it is normal for a mother to love her child even if that love is imperfectly carried out. It is the conditions that we place on others that cause them and us stress. I think family members can bring about the kind of healing that mental trauma needs if we simply stop judging the other person and have the confidence to let them get on with their own growth and rebuilding in their own time in a controlled setting.

The things that healed my mental distress were the unconditional and unwavering love of my mother, my family and friends and the community I lived in. I was kept safe by this body of people. I am blessed with a tolerant and very loving family and a tolerant and loving community, something which to this day I do not take for granted. I now recognise this as a privileged position to be in. My mother and my step-father, Sue King, Carol James and Giana Ferguson being a few of my hands-on 24/7 team, taking it in shifts to be responsible for me, keeping me housed and fed and, if possible, occupied. My mother wanted to keep me out of hospital and off medication. The reality of this is her home became an acute crisis centre and I was a major disruption to the quiet routine of their lives. Obviously, this is not an ideal situation and it would be wonderful if there were places people could go that did not force medication on you if you didn’t want to take it to prevent the medicalisation of what is essentially a human experience. In the beginning I needed round-the-clock attention as is the case with anyone in an acute crisis and when this experience is not blocked or suppressed with drugs it is an enormous work-load for those involved. Saying that, my short time in hospital further down the line was not a bad experience – I was admitted after a suicide attempt – however, I later discovered that I could have been discharged but I was kept in to give my mother a break. In effect, for her mental health. This gives you some indication of the strain she was going through. No doubt, I was lucky that the psychiatrist who worked at my local hospital at the time I was admitted was progressive and humane. I escaped labelling and drugging, though I know this was down to luck and circumstance and who took care of me during my crisis.

My manuscript is available

These days my blog is taking a back seat to my efforts to tidy up the memoir I am writing. I belong to a local writers group who has arranged for members to show a sample of their work to a live literary agent in mid-February. The reason I am writing a book about Chris’s and my experience with holistic healing is because a book is often the best way to get your message across to a lot of people. Even regular readers of this blog may forget the back story or are not able to trace the reason why I believe certain things about recovery. A book follows a logical path and is a handy reference guide.

I’ve placed my nearly completed book on the authonomy website so that anybody can read it and comment on it. Authonomy books are not so easy to read on the screen and, unfortunately, book chapters cannot be downloaded and printed. But it’s there if you would like to get Chris’s and my “back story.”  If you do go to the site, it would be helpful for me if you registered an account and then placed my manuscript on your bookshelf. Your doing so will create a wider audience for my message. Registering your account doesn’t mean you will be flooded with e-mails from authonomy; in fact I rarely receive them.

I have another book suggestion for your shelf. A Moment in Time effortlessly weaves together today’s high level of interest in “new age” dynamics, quantum physics, alternative healing, and the backlash against “Big Pharma.” Set in the late 1990s, it describes the global paradigm shift that is currently under way and follows one woman’s struggle to adapt to change. Her experiences place her at the forefront of new understanding about quantum realities. If you liked The Celestine Prophecy or Dan Brown novels, you’ll find this one promises to deliver much more. 

Need a good laugh?

2011 NAMI Convention: Need A Good Laugh? is the subject header in the newsletter I received today from NAMI. Imagine my thrill when I saw that the first newsletter item was Anosognosia. I thought to myself, prematurely, as I discovered, that NAMI has finally figured out what a crock its belief in anosognosia is. Well, as you can see, anosognosia to this organization, continues to be no laughing matter.

Dealing With Anosognosia

Anosognosia, or the inability to perceive that one is ill due to impairment to the brain’s ability to process certain data, will take center stage at the 2011 convention.

Dr. Xavier Amador, who spoke on anosognosia to a standing-room only crowd at last year’s convention, will return to address the subject again on Friday evening, July 8. Anosognosia has been identified as the single biggest reason why some people living with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder do not seek treatment or do not comply with prescribed treatment.


Dr. Amador, a clinical psychologist, professor at Columbia University and founder and director of the LEAP Institute, will address this thorny problem, explain how it differs from denial or simple stubbornness and help family members and others begin to learn how to deal with it.

NAMI, a collectivity of hand wringers which could stand a good injection of laughing gas during its conventions, takes up the serious matter of laughter as newsletter item 2. I’m bored already.

Need A Good Laugh?

Debbie Ellison, certified laugh yoga leader, will present a special session at the 2011 NAMI Annual Convention on the benefits of laughter for individuals who live with mental illness. In this fun, hands-on session, you’ll learn how laughter:


increases the “happy” chemicals in the brain and fosters a positive and hopeful attitude;


decreases depression, stress and negative thoughts and feelings;


improves many chronic medical problems; and


makes you feel good.


The session is part of the convention’s Wellness Center–information and activities designed to increase well-being.
 
Notice (above) that NAMI likes them certifiable.

Collective insanity

Here’s an interesting perspective by Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy on yesterday’s State of the Union address.

To one degree or another, the nation appears afflicted with “generalized anxiety disorder,” which the NIMH says shows up as “exaggerated worry and tension, even when there is little or nothing to provoke it.” . . . My fellow Americans, ask yourself: How strong can the state of the union really be if our minds are so unsound?
 
Note to readers: Most of you are located in North America, specifically the United States, which is why I don’t bother to explain what the State of the Union speech is. I don’t have any political affiliation, and I’m not even particularly interested in US politics. I like to pick and choose what is interesting to blog about and I don’t endorse any one political party. (Like the old joke, it only encourages them.) I used to be very involved in politics, both as a paid worker and as a volunteer, but that was then and this is now. My passion these days is schizophrenia. Seriously, that’s about it.






What’s the rush here?

F.D.A. is Studying the Risk of Electroshock Devices

Extract below from the New York Times

“It’s a treatment for the most severe form of depression,” Dr. Kellner said. “It can really be life-saving.” … The treatment costs $1,000 to $2,500 a session, and typically involves three sessions a week for two to four weeks, Dr. Kellner said. The fee includes the services of a psychiatrist and anesthesiologist. The equipment itself costs about $15,000 and may last years.

Hmm. When doctors like Dr. Kellner say electroshock treats the most severe form of depression, this raises questions with me and it should raise questions with others. When I think of someone suffering from “the most severe form of depression” it brings to mind someone who has a long history of depression who is perhaps suicidal. This person has exhausted all other forms of treatment and has discussed the pros and cons of electroshock at length with their doctor.

Here’s a more likely scenario for administering electroshock, based on what happened to us. A young man (e.g. Chris) is admitted to hospital for first episode psychosis. He does not have a history of depression. He is put on respirdal or some other antipychotic along with a tranquillizer. He, at some point within a short time of being admitted, falls into a psychic slump and begins to ask existential questions. Maybe he is told, like Chris was, that he can resume his classes while checking in at night to the hospital. He quickly figures out he can’t cope with classes, leading to feeling, well, depressed. Perhaps his family is an ocean away (as we were) and suddenly, life begins to really look black. He refuses to eat. The doctors call the parents and say that they will administer electroshock if things don’t improve. Being clueless about electroshock, they readily agree. Nobody informs the parents that electroshock is still considered controversial.

All of this happened within a month of Chris entering the hospital with no history of depression. One month! Not a lifetime of struggling to cope with the worst of depression. Situational depression I would call Chris’s case. As it happened, somebody spoke to him and he perked up enough to avoid electroshock. What was also avoided was the insurance bill, which, according to this article, would have run anywhere between $6,000 and $20,000. For what? For something that human concern could have cleared up for free?

Postlude

Postlude: For behold, darkness shall cover the earth  (G.F. Handel) Soloist: Christopher Forbes

On Sunday Chris sang the Postlude in church, accompanied on the organ by our choir director (his voice teacher)

This is a lengthy, difficult piece. He got a standing ovation.

Two weeks ago Chris had a one hour telephone counseling session with career intuitive Sue Frederick. Blending numerology, astrology and her own intuition, she introduced the idea to him that he was, among other things, a non-traditional healer and suggested several scenarios that he should consider: Acting, healing, sound therapy and psychology. She’s big on using your pain as your fuel. She could definitely see him on stage.

Then, seemingly out of the blue last week, Chris’s sound therapist called to ask Chris if he would be interested in enrolling in his new course in sound technology. Of course he would! Last week Chris also attended the first rehearsal for Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury. He’s in the chorus.

Chris gets discouraged at times because he thinks that he doesn’t know what he wants to do in life and life is passing. He’s thinking he’ll never catch up. I suggested that he drop the pretext that he is not on his life path and consider the evidence that he is already on it and has put years into it.  I’ve suggested to him to stop worrying about making money through traditional career choices, but that he should consider upping his game by taking more voice lessons and maybe some acting lessons.

Here’s a recap for newcomers to this blog. In my blog I try to convey a positive message for parents whose child has been given a diagnosis of schizophrenia. The road through recovery is often longer than we would hope, and there are ups and downs. Chris is now 27 years old. He did not finish his undergraduate university program. He left university seven years ago and has been living at home ever since. He doesn’t have have a job. So far he has activities.

If you are new to schizophrenia, seven years seems like a long time not to be employed and to be living at home with Mom and Dad. This is probably not what you are hoping to hear. Some people recover relatively quickly using megavitamins, but a lot do not. There are many complicating reasons why instant recovery does not happen and my blog demonstrates many of these reasons. For people like Chris, and very likely your son or daughter, recovery takes time, a lot of time. I learned the hard way what happened to Chris when I grew impatient with his progress. I delayed his recovery through my impatience.

In order to do right by recovery, rather than focusing on a timeline, think of your child and yourself as embarking on a long, but exciting journey. Getting it right can’t be rushed.