We who do not believe in mental illness as pathological disease continue to have our work cut out for us. In a blog with the tantalizing title Family Dysfunction and Mental Illness, psychiatrist Dr. David Allen believes that there is something called “true bipolar” which does not arise from childhood trauma because it is “genetic.” Dr. Allen also asserts that “psychosis is never a normal variant of anything.”

Note: Since no gene has been discovered for schizophrenia or bipolar we can take any “proof” of a genetic link as hearsay. Epigenetics, on the other hand, is the study of inherited changes in gene appearance that do not change the underlying DNA sequence. These changes can come from the environment, can last for the life of the cell and express themselves over generations. So, if one of your grandparents went on wild spending sprees, had multiple sexual partners and/or was down in the dumps a lot, there is a chance that this behavior is established currency in the generations that followed whether you like it or not. Your genetic coding looks like the culprit, but so far it it not.

Dr. Allen writes: We know that true bipolar disorder is a real brain disease that has a significant genetic component. Earlier studies indicated that if you have a bipolar parent, your odds of developing the disorder are 5 to 10 times higher than the general population. Since the prevalence in the general population is about 1 percent, that means you have a five to ten percent chance of developing the disorder yourself. True bipolar disorder usually manifests itself in the late teens or early 20’s, most frequently with a depressive rather than a manic episode.

Admittedly, we still have not pinpointed the exact nature of the brain pathology in schizophrenia, nor have we found out what causes it. In the past, patients with true bipolar were often misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, so some of the people who “got better” may have been misdiagnosed in the first place.

Dr. Allen believes that family trauma does not contribute to schizophrenia or true bipolar. These are always “special cases.” Dr. Allen is expressing opinion, not hard science, because science isn’t there yet. Patients operating under a doctor’s belief system are probably under the impression that his advice is science. They are doomed from a treatment point of view because their doctor believes that they are intrinsically a separate species. The rest of you might be helped, but, despite the fact that the blog links family problems to mental illness, “schizophrenia and true bipolar” mysteriously are not the results of your birth environment. Psychiatrists who believe that schizophrenia and bipolar are true brain diseases will not give their clients the kind of help they deserve. I’ll let Dr. Allen have the final word here.

After dealing for over 30 years with what I consider to be the extreme case of normal reactions to abnormal situations – borderline personality disorder – and with schizophrenia, I remain convinced that schizophrenia is a true brain disease.. . . Just for other readers, claims of 75-85% recovery rates for schizophrenia from non-traditional medicine are pure snake oil. I hate to see people given false help through outrageous claims. True psychosis is never a normal variant of anything. And I never tell people that they have a chemical imbalance, because that is truly a meaningless phrase.

Goddess Shift: Women Leading for a Change was published in February. People ask me how I managed to snag a chapter in a book in which mainly famous women are featured, women who have made reputations for themselves in fields as diverse as theatre, medicine, politics and writing. To answer that, I have to back up a few years, to when it began to dawn on me that what Chris and I were going through was something extraordinary. I was beginning to emerge from the crippling fear that had engulfed me, which coincided with my seeing that there was light at the end of the tunnel. This was not a sudden conversion experience, by the way. It was simply a recognition that there was some extraordinary help out there for schizophrenia that more people should be tapping into.

The question was, what could I do about this. I could light candles in a church or contribute money to a charity in appreciation, but I felt a bigger gesture was needed. Someone in an on-line group suggested that the best way to get the message out was through a book. That was a great idea, except that my writing skills were pretty rusty. However, I knew the story was compelling, so I started writing it all down. I fell into the new writer’s habit of relying on quotations from other people to begin every chapter, because I didn’t have confidence in my own voice.

One lunch hour while swimming laps, I got the bright idea to send my unwieldy unfinished manuscript to well-known holistic author and editor Stephanie Marohn. It was her book, The Natural Medicine Guide to Schizophrenia, that kick-started my awareness that there is a better way of looking at schizophrenia. She jettisoned all the quotes from other people (I favored rock lyrics)and tamed the document into something more manageable. I wrote some more, then sent it again to her for further editing. The book is almost finished once again, but the journey continues. Had I stopped it where I originally planned, there would be no recognition that relapse may sometimes be a necessary step and of the energetic healing power of music and vibration.

Stephanie Marohn is the editor of Goddess Shift. She has assembled an interesting group of woman contributors. Jean Shinoda Bolen, for example, is a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst who writes about feminine archetypes and the search for meaning. She is joined by Madonna, who explains what originally attracted her to study the Kabbalah. There is an interesting chapter by Frances Green, a New York lawyer who was once a nun. J.K. Rowling’s personal story may be too well known, but she contributes a moving insight into the value of failure. A lot of these women are controversial and many of us are prepared not to like them because we think we know them. When we write honestly about ourselves, as this book encourages us to do, we bridge our differences.

All royalties from Goddess Shift go to the following nonprofit organizations dedicated to improving the lives of girls and young women around the world:

The Global Fund for Women
Promotes women’s economic security, health, education, and leadership

Capacitar (Spanish for “To Empower”)
Teaching simple wellness practices in communities affected by violence, poverty and trauma

Tostan
Community-led development

Give consumers the power of choice and we will generally opt for fewer and less costly medical interventions that have unproven efficacy yet known side effects.

From today’s New York Times: In Medicine, the Power of No logically should extend to mental health care.

The better bet for the new reformers — starting with Donald Berwick, the physician who will run Medicare — is to channel American culture, not fight it. We want the best possible care, no matter what. Yet we often do not get it because the current system tends to deliver more care even when it means worse care.

Advocates for less intensive medicine have been too timid about all this. They often come across as bean counters, while the try-anything crowd occupies the moral high ground. The reality, though, is that unnecessary care causes a lot of pain and even death.

As of yesterday, the Large Hadron Collider is up again and running at CERN*, albeit at a more modest pace than originally planned. Quantum physics geeks have something to celebrate – the smashing of the subatomic particles is expected to yield further insights into the origins of the Universe.

CERN’s Director of Research Sergio Bertulocci said “This opens the door to a totally new era of discovery. It is a step into the unknown where we will find things we thought were there and perhaps things we didn’t know existed”.

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*The European Centre for Nuclear Research

You don’t need to spend a lot of money on new and different mental health therapies when there is one intervention that is guaranteed to work. This “secret” is not found in institutional programs nor is it promoted by mainstream mental health organizations, but it does work.

The institutional program that Chris was enrolled in for two years thought that as an institution it could replicate the secret, but it couldn’t. An institution cannot do this. It tried to integrate the young people back into the community by giving them a reason to wake up every day, to interact with people their own age, to not become marginalized and excluded. It encouraged the “patients” to express themselves through art therapy, role playing, music and group therapy. I’m not saying these aren’t worthy goals. It’s just that this focus misses the real problem.

What it failed to grasp is that the constructs surrounding the defense mechanism of the individual are the result of the individual interacting with the familial environment, not the result of a biological disease nor of the schools he went or friends he has known. He is the way he is because of who he is is in relation to us. Exploring the different therapies that I have written about on this blog has made me understand the importance of emotional vibration. Emotional vibration begins in the womb.

So, the secret is very simple. The family (mother, father, close relatives) needs to accept the person as he or she is, not exclude him or her, value the person, empathize, sympathize, understand their own involvement in why this has happened, take steps to change, and give it time.

If I wanted to bowl I’d join a bowling league. If I wanted to golf, I might join a golf club and read Golf magazine. If I wanted to meet more people with my interests while developing and improving my skills I could do any number of things. One thing I am not inclined to do is to join a support group for family members of people who are labelled somewhere on the mental health spectrum.

I thought it was a good idea once. It is what people are supposed to do, isn’t it? You join these support groups and you learn to cope, hopefully you learn greater compassion for your relative, you meet other people in the same boat so you feel you are not alone.

I would not make a good support group member because I want my relative (a.k.a. my “son”) to relinquish his label, not to embrace it. I don’t want to perpetuate his problems, I want to help him get over them and get on with life. I’m willing to admit that I am part of his problems, and I’m working on that, too. My experience with attending what passed for a support group for families opened my eyes to the fact that support groups perpetuate illness, just like bowling groups perpetuate bowling. Except in the second case that’s a positive, and in the first case, it’s a negative. There used to be stigma surrounding mental illness. Stigma does serve one useful function and that is to make some patients and some families damn anxious to get rid of the problem. Acceptance of a condition that you believe is a biological illness doesn’t have this galvanizing effect.

One thing most support groups do is tell you that medication is important to your functioning. There has been a whole slew of articles recently that medication prolongues depression and turn something episodic into something chronic. See this one from Beyond Meds. Schizophrenia is no different.

Oh, how I suffered whilst faithfully attending the support group. Everybody in the group was suffering. The mothers were tearful, the fathers were stoic. Everybody was scared. If I felt depressed, how was my son supposed to feel hearing his particular condition discussed so gravely and clinically? What was probably a coming of age crisis for him was turning very rapidly into something chronic and maybe even contagious, judging by the fact the room was full. The support group included several psychiatrists, nurses, social workers, psychologists and art therapists in addition to the stricken family members.

This kind of support group perpetutates suffering and turns the sufferer into a chronic patient. I never learned from the support group that all I had to do was to believe my son was well, to take some personal responsibility for the crisis and time would take care of things. The doctors seemed to be the people taking personal responsibility for the outcomes. All questions were funnelled through them, and of course, they dispensed the medications. It was always about the meds, never about how Chris and I could improve on the mistakes of the past.

I might want to join a support group that took an entirely different approach (buck up, you’re fine, maybe you might want to consider exploring certain kinds of non-drug therapies, talk, really talk with each other) because the outcome would be to leave that episode in your life where it belongs – in the past.

Strange, perplexing dreams last night. I started off in a swamp with other people, then moved further up the road to a very ordinary house, whose owners were allowing paid guests to view Christian themed tableaus acted out by their children. I didn’t stay long enough to watch. I moved on to another interior where the owner ran some sort of volunteer, not-for-profit, talent agency/character search. We watched three groups of aspiring young women from behind the glass walls of the office. The owner’s husband was hovering somewhere in the background, occasionally shouting out his approval of one character or another. I couldn’t understand why my old friend from college wasn’t considered worthy. The odd thing was, while I was dreaming, I felt that I had dreamed this dream before – the swamp sequence, the religious house, the talent agency.

In another dream later that night, I was driving my car along a frozen canal in a city where I used to live and the weight of the steamroller in front of me caused the ice to crack apart. I had enough warning and was determined to free myself from the seatbelt before my vehicle sank. I was floating above the vehicle at the time, looking down on it which gave me plenty of time to release the damn seatbelt before I landed safely on the embankment and the car sank below the ice. There was a press conference held on the embankment, but no one knew that someone (Me!) had survived the unfolding catastrophe on the canal.

I woke up, and lay there quietly. Then I heard a cat in heat, yeowling piteously like a new born baby crying in the night. I thought of Chris, and his first month of life, when my supply of milk was inadequate yet I was refusing to supplement. I was sure I could get it right and just needed a little more time. This logic was a reflection of the power of the “breast is best” thinking that was so widely promoted. It was almost considered poisoning your baby to think of introducing a Nestle’s product into its developing immune system. So, I struggled on and Chris continue to yowl and not gain weight at the required rate. When I finally added bottled milk into his diet, he fell silent, a look of beatific joy on his face.

Walking to work this morning, I reflected on the intense conversation Chris and I had the evening before where he told me that he has no idea who he is. He had also been thinking a lot about the number three that day and noticing how it tied into many coincidences that he encountered. He didn’t know what anything meant anymore, if it ever meant anything at all. I thought about my dream. It had three sequences (the swamp, the house and the talent agency). I recalled that I had “auditioned” once for the part of “receptionist” at the aptly named Three Characters Talent Agency and that there were three groups of people auditioning at my dream talent agency.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is holistic recovery from schizophrenia. I sometimes ask myself, even though it’s all very interesting, are we getting anywhere? Are we knowing ourselves more or are we deluding ourselves into becoming bystanders in the game of life? I like to think Chris and I are getting somewhere, and that what we are experiencing is true healing, even if it doesn’t come swiftly and has a habit of arriving disguised as something else.