The Families Healing Together course that I am currently enrolled in, talks about turning points for you and your relative.

I think our family is going through one right now. Chris is never home – too busy with his girlfriend. He is also increasingly able to make choices, to voice his opinions. He is voting with his feet. Hooray!

Stories like the one below suggest to the public that (a) getting off prescription drugs doesn’t take long and (b) Adderall is a weight loss drug.

Editor’s note: Perhaps drug companies have a devious sense of humor. The word “addle,” which is embedded in Adderall, means “to make someone feel confused and unable to think clearly.”
(Cambridge Dictionary Online)

From The Daily Mail

And Lindsay Lohan is to be allowed to continue to take the prescription drug during her spell in rehab – at least for now.

On her entry to the Betty Ford Clinic in Indio, California, Lohan was required to undergo a 48-hour drug detox, which she has just successfully completed.

A source told website TMZ: ‘Doctors are currently evaluating Lindsay’s diagnosis and the efficacy of the drug. If doctors disbelieve her diagnosis or the usefulness of Adderall, they will cut her off.’

Lohan has taken the drug for years and believes she cannot function without it.

Her choice of rehab for her 90-day court-ordered stay was said to depend on finding one that would allow her both to continue taking the drug, and to smoke.

In an interview with the Daily Mail just last week she explained: ‘I have severe ADD. I can’t stand still.

‘So I take Adderall for that, it calms me.’

Lohan admitted that she knew the drug could be abused by those keen to experience its side effects.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2320905/Lindsay-Lohan-completes-48-hour-drug-detox-settles-rehab–shes-allowed-Adderall.html#ixzz2SsQa2ysB

Chris has come a long, long way, in many areas of growth, except for one very fundamental one. His sense of self is lagging. Always has. As a baby, toddler, and adolescent, he would be what he thought anyone wanted him to be. He expressed no preferences of his own, just took the preferences of others. I sensed his not wanting to confront or struggle while he was in the womb. (A possible clue: He was born twenty seven days overdue!) In high school, it kind of went undercover. He had friends, activities, school work to focus on. Then, boom, going away to university caused his non-existent sense of self to come tumbling down. My regret is that I should have recognized this a problem that he wouldn’t grow out of without some help, rather than thinking that he would eventually find himself. It’s a huge challenge for him now.

Today is Ascension Day, a holiday in many European countries. Chris knocked on our bedroom door around 9 a.m. to announce that he was going to his piano lesson. “On a holiday?” I asked. Apparently.  Less than an hour later I heard the key in the front door and Chris was back. Why was I not surprised? “The trains are only running on the hour, instead of every half hour, ” said Chris. “So, why didn’t you call me and I would have come and picked you up and driven you there?” said I, knowing full well that Chris never asks for anything that he thinks might cause others even slight inconvenience, which is why he never asks. He used to be endlessly apologetic; if you stepped on his toes, he’d figure it was his fault, but thankfully, less so these days. On the one hand, this particular character trait often reveals a kind heart and generous spirit. The dark side of this trait is not setting your own boundaries.

I got exasperated. “Chris, why do you deliberately sabotage these things? You must have known that the holiday train and bus schedule is always slower, and yet you went through the motions of going to your piano lesson, something you profess to enjoy, seemingly ignoring the fact that you need to plan ahead for the changed schedule. Why are you doing this to yourself?”

Tangled in with all of this is Chris’s huge fear of failure and a perverse perfectionism, so an unwillingness to try too hard.

Chris and I sat down and we went over the pattern of behavior. Chris feels bad, knows it’s a problem, but can’t for the life of him figure out what to do about it. (Eight years of psychiatry and we’re only beginning to crack this one.) “Do you read self-help books?” I asked. “Yes,” he answered.

“Chris, you can begin by small things. (I’ve been giving him this advice for years now, but it hasn’t sunk in.) Start asking people for help. Reach out. You’ll get mainly yes’s, but you’ll also get no’s, so deal with it. And, when your father sees you and asks you how your piano lesson went, what are you going to say?”

“Great?” ventured Chris.

 “You’re learning, Chris.”

Chris has a pathological inability to lie. Telling the truth is admirable and the best policy in most situations, but white lies can be useful protective devices from going into conversations you don’t want to have.

Half an hour later Chris asked me if I would drive him later today to a rendez-vous outside of town.

“With pleasure.”

“Oh, I should have said please,” said Chris.

“Why don’t you temporarily abandon ‘please’ while you build up a better sense of self? I said.”Look at your brother.” I pointed to Alex, who had just groggily emerged from his room.”Huge sense of self, doesn’t do anything that doesn’t suit him. He can be a pain in the ass, but he at least he gets what he wants.”

We both laughed.

Eve Ensler is the brilliant author, playwright, feminist (the list goes on) who is best known for The Vagina Monologues, which she wrote and performed along with countless other well-known women. She is currently on a book tour to promote her memoir, In the Body of the World.  Eve is an incest survivor whose writing focuses on the female body, violence and sex, so it is ironic that much of her recent history is taken up with her struggle with uterine cancer.

from The Globe and Mail
“She has a theory about what may have made her sick: The sexual abuse she suffered as a child, as well as the countless stories of horror she has heard over the years, may have contributed. So she has made a decision: She’ll still listen to those stories as she signs books or meets people at fundraisers, but she is not seeking those stories out any more.

“I just can’t. I have to protect myself,” she says. “I feel like I spent 15 years absorbing the stories. And I’m committed. I signed up. I don’t need to be convinced any more.”

Wise woman. She listened to the messages her body was signalling. To survive, she stopped dwelling on things that make her sick. There’s a message here for anyone. Eve Ensler also contributed a terrific chapter to Goddess Shift: Women Leading for a Change. (See the book elsewhere on this page.)

From Wiki
“This is a ravishing book of revelation and healing, lashing truths and deep emotion, courage and perseverance, compassion and generosity. Warm, funny, furious, and astute, as well as poetic, passionate, and heroic, Ensler harnesses all that she lost and learned to articulate a galvanizing vision of the essence of life: “The only salvation is kindness.””
 

I have registered for this course even though I feel that in many ways, our family is on top of our situation with our son, Chris. (I hope Chris feels the same way, too.) But, I can’t presume that I know everything there is to know about recovery from major psychiatric conditions and that there is nothing left to learn. I had to cobble together my wisdom over many years without access to resources that offer a positive perspective of recovery.

If you or someone you know might be interested in learning about the family recovery perspective through a weekly online course, please encourage them to consider enrolling.

Recovering our Families
8 Weeks of Hope and Healing

Our fully facilitated, interactive online course supports individuals, families, and friends who are recovering from or working with mental health challenges, trauma or psychiatric diagnoses such as schizophrenia, major depression, bipolar, anxiety and other disorders.

May 8, 2013 – July 3, 2013
Register Now, Space is Limited

During our 8-week course, individuals, families and supporters will explore key recovery concepts including:

1. Sharing our experiences

2. Exploring recovery fundamentals

3. Understanding mental health

4. Harnessing the power of hope

5. Using a strengths-based approach

6. Building relationships amidst psychosis

7. Creating healthy boundaries

8. Celebrating recovery stories

Our classes are open to anyone working with emotional distress – individuals, families, friends and mental health care providers. Group discussions, exercises and reflections will be guided by our family recovery coach in a password protected, media-rich closed group website to encourage safe sharing and healing in a supportive community.

About Us
Families Healing Together provides interactive, online family mental health education designed to help families and individuals transform the experience of emotional distress, psychosis and other challenges that may have psychiatric diagnoses. Our strengths-based recovery approach helps families move from distress, fear and confusion to greater sense of well-being, wholeness and connection. Families Healing Together is a collaboration between Family Outreach and Response, PracticeRecovery.com and Mother Bear CAN, three organizations dedicated to helping families recover from mental health challenges through healing power of community.

Course Title: Recovering Our Families

Next Session: May 8th – July 3rd 2013

Duration: 8 weeks

Facilitator: Krista MacKinnon

Time commitment: As little or as much as you can invest. To receive benefits from the course, a minimum of one hour per week is be required.

Cost: $150 USD

Register Here: Paypal Registration

Common sense seems to be returning now that pharma is coming more and more under scrutiny. Keep in mind that lowest effective dose applies to psych drugs, too, and it may be more than half the minimum dose.

Here is an excerpt from The Globe and Mail.
Canadians overmedicated because MDs unaware of drug risks, experts say

ADRIANA BARTON The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Apr. 25 2013, 6:03 PM EDT
Last updated Thursday, Apr. 25 2013, 6:23 PM EDT

But more often than not, McCormack said, the dosage is too high. A phenomenon he calls the “unintentional medication overdosing” of Canadians is due to a systemic flaw in the drug regulatory process, he said. To prove that a medication works in clinical trials, drug companies select a dose high enough to generate a response in the majority of patients. The studied dose becomes the marketed dose – and the dose that most health professionals choose, he explained.

Studies to determine the lowest effective dose are rarely conducted. Nevertheless, many drugs work in much smaller doses, with fewer side effects, he said. For example, when the antidepressant Sinequan was introduced as a sleeping aid, the studied dose was 25 to 50 milligrams. Years later, however, a follow-up study found that 1 milligram of Sinequan “was effective for sleep,” McCormack said.

Unless a condition is severe or life-threatening, he said, patients should ask their doctor about starting with one-quarter to one-half of the marketed dose, and then increasing the dose as needed.

Driving to a doctor’s appointment today, I rounded a corner and thought I saw one of the mothers from Chris’s old recovery program about to cross the street. It’s been eight years since Chris and her son were in the program, and I wondered how she and he were doing. Did she manage to overcome the sadness that every parent in the program seemed to share about the hopes of their child’s recovery? Does she no longer believe in the medical model of psychosis that the program reinforced? I wonder.

I haven’t been posting much in the past few months, because, well, I feel increasingly awkward writing about my 29 year old son like he’s in kindergarten. “Chris’s first day at school, Chris tied his shoelaces today, etc. ” For crying out loud, he’s 29 and “mommy” should take a back seat, even if Chris isn’t the driver of the car. It just isn’t seemly on my part, at my age, to be so involved in being a mother to someone Chris’s age. Chris still doesn’t drive a car, BTW, as his problems came on just as he was taking young driver lessons. Hopefully, he will eventually decide to learn to drive and I can actually climb into that backseat.

However, I’m determined to show to parents and interested parties what the journey has been like, from the mother’s point of view, and the journey continues, as it does for all of us.  We still need to be find support for our situation when most of us aren’t in close physical contact with relatives of those with lived experience. So, here goes.

The goods news is that Chris had been meditating for over a year, is involved in his amateur theatre work, continues to take voice lessons, and has a girlfriend.  That takes a lot of the heat off me. My job has been to increasingly encourage Chris to take the lead in his own health and to speak up for himself. Maybe I’m way off base here, but I wonder how many 29 year old males are really motivated to get curious about their own health and research what to do about it? “I’m tired of doing all the legwork, Chris,” I whined last night (for the umpteenth time). There are self-help groups all over the net and YOU should be involved in them. I shouldn’t always have to draw them to your attention.” This last statement was uttered because Chris still occasionally struggles with hallucinations when he is alone during the day. And, being alone during the day with most of your activities skewed to nights and week-ends is a breeding ground for paranoia.

Another interesting development is that Chris and Dr. Stern are working on switching his medication to one (Risperdal) that affects fewer neurotransmitters than his current medication, Abilify. Abilify affects seven neurotransmitters, while Risperdal affects “only” four. Perhaps one reason Chris was recently not successful getting off the Abilify than he might have otherwise been if he were on a different medication, was that more neurotransmitters were implicated in the withdrawal. But, handling the meds are between Chris and Dr. Stern, and the switch is something they have apparently been discussing for a while. He’s been on Risperdal before. It was the medication that he was given when he was hospitalized for the first time. Chris said, and I agreed, that not one of the drugs he has used was particularly effective, but there you are.

Ian and I are still waiting for the day when Chris will work towards getting a university degree or announce he’s taking some course of action/training that will lead to employment. He tells me he is quite afraid of sitting in a classroom, which is odd, since he seems to have no trouble being on stage or singing solos in church. This is the big frustation point for us as his parents. We, of course, want him to move on to independence and self-sufficiency.

Edith Schaeffer, together with husband, Francis Schaeffer, founded l’Abri, an evangelical Christian center in Huemoz, Switzerland. She was 98.