Or, this is what your government wants you to believe about mental illness. It’s strictly brain-based.

The NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health) invites you to visit our table at the NAMI 2011 Annual Convention

Chicago, IL July 6-9, 2011
Exhibit Booth 106 – Southeast Exhibit Hall
Location: Chicago Hilton
720 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL60605Now available to view on the NIMH website:

Brain Basics

A self-guided education module that uses images and animation to show how the brain works, how mental illnesses are disorders of the brain, and ongoing research that helps us better understand and treat disorders.

Mental Health Statistics

A resource that represents an extensive collection of our best statistics on the prevalence, treatment, and costs of mental disorders. Equally important are sections that have been included on mental health-related disability and on suicide.

Featured below are several publications that may be of interest. All NIMH publications are available at no cost.

Suicide in America: Frequently Asked Questions

A brief overview of the statistics on depression and suicide with information on depression treatments and suicide prevention.

Learn more about this publication.

Brain Development During Childhood and Adolescence (Fact Sheet)

A fact sheet that describes the past, present and future of research on brain development.

Learn more about this publication.

About Us

The mission of NIMH is to transform the understanding and treatment of mental illnesses through basic and clinical research, paving the way for prevention, recovery and cure.

Our Location

6001 Executive Boulevard, Room 8184, MSC 9663
Bethesda, MD20892-9663
Phone: 301-443-4513
Toll-free: 1-866-615-6464
TTY: 301-443-8431
TTY Toll-free: 1-866-415-8051
Fax: 301-443-4279
E-mail: nimhinfo@nih.gov
Website: http://www.nimh.nih.gov

We also invite you to view NIMH Science News about mental health.
For the latest NIMH research news and funding opportunities, subscribe to a NIMH e-mail newsletter or RSS feed.

Haven’t registered yet for the NAMI Convention?

NO PROBLEM — YOU CAN REGISTER ON-SITE AT THE CONVENTION:

Just come to the on-site registration desk located on the lower level of the Chicago Hilton.You can register for the full convention or just for one day. On-site registration will be open Wednesday – Saturday.
Visit www.nami.org/convention for details on registration fees. You can also download a complete program schedule to help you plan your time at the convention.

These are just a few side effects that come to mind.

1. Continously nagging an adult to take something that makes him/her feel bad
2. Worrying constantly about him/her not taking the meds
3. Being dismayed at the weight gain
4. Disagreeing with your spouse about whether medication is the way to go
5. Getting confused about behavior you are seeing. Is it the person or is it the medication?
6. Continously buying new clothes (on the way up and on the way down)
7. Not being able to tolerate alcohol when everyone else is able to
8. Fighting with the psychiatrist over the efficacy of the medication

The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?
Marcia Angell
New York Review of Books

Excerpt from review of
– The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth (Irving Kirsch)
– Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (Robert Whitaker)
– Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry – A Doctor’s Revelations about a Profession in Crisis (Daniel Carlat)

Second, none of the three authors subscribes to the popular theory that mental illness is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. As Whitaker tells the story, that theory had its genesis shortly after psychoactive drugs were introduced in the 1950s. The first was Thorazine (chlorpromazine), which was launched in 1954 as a “major tranquilizer” and quickly found widespread use in mental hospitals to calm psychotic patients, mainly those with schizophrenia. Thorazine was followed the next year by Miltown (meprobamate), sold as a “minor tranquilizer” to treat anxiety in outpatients. And in 1957, Marsilid (iproniazid) came on the market as a “psychic energizer” to treat depression.

then yada yada yada ….. But over the next decade, researchers found that these drugs, and the newer psychoactive drugs that quickly followed, affected the levels of certain chemicals in the brain.

more yada yada yada … Thus, instead of developing a drug to treat an abnormality, an abnormality was postulated to fit a drug…..That was a great leap in logic, as all three authors point out. It was entirely possible that drugs that affected neurotransmitter levels could relieve symptoms even if neurotransmitters had nothing to do with the illness in the first place (and even possible that they relieved symptoms through some other mode of action entirely). As Carlat puts it, “By this same logic one could argue that the cause of all pain conditions is a deficiency of opiates, since narcotic pain medications activate opiate receptors in the brain.” Or similarly, one could argue that fevers are caused by too little aspirin.

But the main problem with the theory is that after decades of trying to prove it, researchers have still come up empty-handed.
Psychiatrist and author Carl Jung would not subscribe to the biochemical imbalance theory were he alive today.

These forces did not originate in our patient out of nowhere. They are most emphatically not the result of poisoned brain cells, but are normal constituents of our unconscious psyche. They appeared in numberless dreams, in the same or a similar form, at a time of life when seemingly nothing was wrong. And they appear in dreams of normal people who never get anywhere near a psychosis. (1939)

Faithful reader Duane has pointed out to me that I seem to be unique in my being parent of an adult child with a schizophrenia diagnosis who has such a postive view of schizophrenia while holding a highly critical view of the medication approach. It’s lonely being me. Don’t get me wrong. There are people like Becky and Stephany, but they belong to a sub-group of mothers fighting the good battle against childhood psychiatric labelling and drugging. Most of the others (we tend to be women) appear to endorse NAMI and the finding the right drug approach.

Where are the others like me who are blogging? Not just mommy bloggers but daddy bloggers, too. One day I would like to join the “in-crowd” of my own choosing. I have a long history of rejection. Even as far back as high school I never made it to the “popularity table” in the cafeteria. When I moved to that school district, the table with the cool kids was full, and I sat with the rejects, as I termed them (not me). I knew it was not cool to be there. One girl wore a hair net. Why a hair net, I had no clue, not that I bothered to ask. I just sat there eating my baked beans and Vienna sausage and fluffy white roll, just a table away from all the fun.

So, if you are willing to step up to the plate and begin your own blog, or you can twist someone else’s holistic arm to start one, I’m all for it. We’ll become the in-crowd, for once. It’s only a matter of time. Check out Blogger or WordPress. You can be up and ranting in about half an hour.

Popularity table

The book can be ordered on Amazon, but the price is a staggering $122 for a used copy! However, there are two good Amazon reviews that I have reprinted here.

Humanity and “Insanity”, December 19, 2002

By Edith Swanek (Anaheim, Ca) – See all my reviewsThis review is from: The Madness of Adam and Eve: How Schizophrenia Shaped Humanity (Hardcover)

To begin with, I purchased my copy from Amazon.co.uk, the British arm, well over a year ago. Even being shipped from England to the U.S., it’s still probably the best way for an American to buy this great book…

You may have heard various movie characters at various times say something along the lines of “We all go a little bit insane sometimes”.

Horrobin shows pretty convincingly that “we ARE all a little bit insane at ALL times”. In essence, the biochemical manifestations of serious mental illness, when LESS chemically severe, manifest themselves as creativity, imagination, audacity, fixation, obsession, compulsion, etc. A given person might in fact be “3% manic-depressive/bipolar”, “2% schizoid”, “4% paranoic”, etc., and not only function well on a daily basis, but actually function as a great thinker, artist, inventor, or world leader.

Take the “quirks” of major leaders in World War II – from Hitler with his sheer terror at his own flatulence, Stalin drawing 1000 red pencil pictures of wolf heads ever day, De Gaulle regarding himself as “the male Joan of Arc”, Patton thinking he had lived dozens of times previously, and Roosevelt allowing both his own and his wife’s mistresses to live on the same floor, to Churchill greating world leaders in the buff. All “a little bit insane”? Not so very different from the rest of us, each with his or her own eccentricities…and all very, very human.

This book is both intellectually and socially important to the exact extent it forces us to look at humanity and its mental condition as a full range, rather than categories and “cut-off points”.

Most highly recommended!

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For ever changes the way you look at the mentally ill, October 31, 2004

By maximusone “maximusone” (Brussels) – See all my reviewsThis review is from: The Madness of Adam and Eve: How Schizophrenia Shaped Humanity (Hardcover)

David Horrobin argues that, as long ago as 3 million years ago, early man – homo erectus – lived close to and off water – rivers and lakes – and his diet contained a fair amount of fish as well as bone marrow from captured animals (who in turn lived off the water). This fish – and animals living off fish or other aquatic organisms – in turn contained so called fatty acids which allowed our human brains over time to become much more creative. Modern human brains consist to a large extent of fat. Hence also, why humans are so much “fatter” then our closest relatives, the chimps. The essential fatty acids in our diets enabled our existing brain cells to better communicate with each other. But a side effect of this evolution was the emergence of schizophrenia.

At some point around 150,000 years ago, someone must have been borne with a genetic mutation which we now call schizophrenia, although his or her behaviour was more what we now would call schizoid, i.e. light schizophrenia. Horrobin argues that throughout human history schizophrenics were often very gifted people, who were creative, held very strong dogmatic beliefs and had an ability to do whatever it took to get to the top. All qualities that made schizophrenics ideal candidates for dictators, priesthood and artists. As such, schizophrenics played a vital role in human evolution. One of the many fascinating facts described in Horrobin’s book is that there is a strong correlation today between highly creative thinkers – say Nobel Prize winners – and schizophrenia. For many highly gifted people, there is a close relative suffering from schizophrenia

Unfortunately, first the agricultural revolution, with its move away from a diet containing abundant fish oil, and our modern diets, full of saturated fats, the wrong fats for our brains, have turned a condition which had possibly more positive than negative effects into one where the patient is often a danger to himself and others (often the mother).

This book has some amazing implications, such as, the world is not black and white, with 99% being normal and 1% completely abnormal, but many of us are a little abnormal (and few may be “completely normal” ?), or, that mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, manic depression or even dyslexia are all related and people affected by them are paying the evolutionary price for the creative brains of other, normal people, to the extent that there is a strong correlation between such illnesses even within families and the existence of highly gifted family members.

To “Rossa,”

I’m an accounts manager for Schizophrenic.com and PsyWeb.com (part of the Opteama/Deep Dive Media network). We are a growing online network for mental health information and resources.

Our team has invested a lot of effort to ensure our visitors receive the highest quality of information and we intend to continue that service.

We believe a link to your site would be beneficial to our visitors. Conversely, we believe your visitors stand to benefit from a link to our network. Therefore, we would like to add a link to your website, http://holisticschizophrenia.blogspot.com, on www.PsyWeb.com in exchange for a link to www.Schizophrenic.com on your website.

We have other mental health websites on general disorders, conditions, and addictions that may interest you as well. Together we can boost awareness to our online programs with better a link exchange.

Please let me know your thoughts or any questions you may have.

Thank You,

Opteama Health
269 S. Beverly Dr.
Beverly Hills, CA 90212
________________________
Dear Opteama,

Thank you very much for contacting me about linking our sites. I am not inclined to do so for the reasons which I will list below. I hope you take this in the spirit it is intended, which is to educate and inform, not to denigrate.

1. My philosophy of schizophrenia is not mainstream. It is deliberately anti-mainstream. The reason is quite simple. By reading about and paying attention to what former schizophrenia patients had to say, and to people who never wanted to buy into the medical model of illness, I realized that the best chance people have of “cure” for this supposed “disease” is to distance themselves from the medical mainstream.

2. In tandem with this point about distancing from the medical model, one has to be an uncompliant patient, to be the type of patient who does not consider themselves a patient. This isn’t just me or former patients who think this. I have heard doctors say this from time to time. Their patients who were no longer “schizophrenic” were the ones who weren’t good patients to begin with. This only stands to reason. More and more scientific evidence is emerging about the long term effects of being medication compliant when it comes to neuroleptics, e.g. people die on average twenty-five years early. A quick check of your website showed me that the advice given out is to follow the doctor’s orders and take your medication.

3. I do commend your website for being dedicated to schizophrenia. However, there are many people who object to the use of the word “schizophrenic.” The reasons vary, but one objection raised is that the adjective is deliberately used by the medical community to equate schizophrenia with diabetes and being “diabetic.” The medical community has promoted the myth started by pharma that people diagnosed with schizophrenia need their medications just like a diabetic needs insulin. This is absolutely untrue. The falsehood was revealed in an interview with a pharmaceutical executive in Robert Whitaker’s 2010 bestseller, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.

4. I do have a link to another medical community on my website that I plan to eventually take down. I was asked to link to their site very early on in my blog and I did so, figuring there was nothing to lose. However, I have been unable to find my own blog on their site, and the only way I can do so is to go to my account and trace it back from there. This explains why I get no traffic to my site from their site. Nobody can find it! However, I will post your e-mail and link and my response as a one-off on my blog today.

In short, thank you for contacting me with your offer. If your site changes in future to allow easy access to a more proactive, positive and innovative view of schizophrenia, offering real alternatives to the mainstream, feel free to contact me again.

Yours sincerely,

Rossa Forbes

I remind myself from time to time that the reason I started this blog was to put a positive spin on schizophrenia as a means of helping others.

When I first got into the SZ business, I used to read other people’s personal stories to see where my son was in comparison. I came away discouraged. For example, someone recommended  early on that I read Mark Vonnegut’s book, The Eden Express. Now, that’s a wonderful book, I think Vonnegut Junior is a better writer than Vonnegut Senior, but not a writer I would recommend to someone who is looking for encouragement in overcoming their mental health crisis. Better to read it as a spot on evocation of the hippie era. Mark Vonnegut recovered quickly enough to write a book and then went on to medical school at Harvard after taking a lot of preparatory courses. (He was a religion major as an undergraduate. No surprise there.) Vonnegut remarks in his book that a person going through a mental health crisis is in no shape to take on challenging work for at least a year. Well, I looked at Chris with hope in my eyes after a year and he was in no shape to take on any kind of work. Naturally, I became discouraged. I began to think that Chris was not going to make it. This thinking doesn’t move anyone forward.

Three years went by. Finally, Chris had a small but significant breakthrough after our Family Constellation therapy, and he decided he wanted to take a month long summer physics course at a university in another country. He made all the arrangements himself and returned home after the course was finished having spectacularly failed the course. He had a good time socially, so Ian and I hung on to that bit of progress.

More time passed. Chris’s ventures into academic courses were sporadic and underwhelming. He suffered another relapse and was back in the hospital for three months. Another two years went by.

At some point, I stopped looking at what others were saying about their own progress and paid more attention to the progress that was in fact happening in our own particular case. I stopped being panicky about Chris failing to meet his milestones (as if he was a toddler) and concentrated more on the big picture. I took up yoga and meditation to quiet my mind and to stop the incessant negative thinking. I gained some distance and objectivity.

Negative thinking and fear is terribly destructive for all concerned. Comparing, what-iffing, and self-recriminating actually prevents healing. Helping your relative where you can and leaving him alone to find his footing works wonders.

I don’t think Chris would be where he is today if I had put my faith in traditional medicine or science to sort him out. Science hasn’t a clue about schizophrenia,  but it pretends it does. This is scary. We are fortunate in that Chris’s psychiatrist, Dr. Stern, reserves her fifty minute hour to actually talk with him. I consider her a psychiatrist in the old fashioned sense. She’s not a pseudo-scientist. But, the idea is not to have a long term relationship with any psychiatrist . The only way to avoid that fate, I figure, is to not put your eggs all in one basket. Psychiatry doesn’t cure schizophrenia. I look upon it more as a useful pressure valve.

The patient cure themselves.

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.

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.

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.