Your daily reinforcement

Do you feel sometimes that you are mostly alone in your belief that your relative does not have a diseased brain? The insightful blogger Alt_mentalities has reminded me once more of Dr. Loren Mosher’s important contribution to viewing schizophrenia as a psycho/spiritual breakdown and healing process rather than a real “disease” as mainstream psychiatry would have us believe.

If you aren’t already familiar with his work, the two must read articles are

Still Crazy After All These Years – Jeanette De Wyze  interview with Dr. Mosher
San Diego Weekly Reader, Vol. 32, No. 2, Jan. 9, 2003

and

Dr. Mosher’s letter of resignation from the American Psychiatric Association – accusing psychiatry and pharma of getting into bed together. The letter was written in 1998, when psychiatry and pharma were still indulging in foreplay by today’s standards!

Some extracts – but the letter is chock full of memorable quotes, so read it in full.

No longer do we seek to understand whole persons in their social contexts — rather we are there to realign our patients’ neurotransmitters. The problem is that it is very difficult to have a relationship with a neurotransmitter — whatever its configuration…….

…….In addition, APA has entered into an unholy alliance with NAMI (I don’t remember the members being asked if they supported such an association) such that the two organizations have adopted similar public belief systems about the nature of madness. While professing itself the “champion of their clients” the APA is supporting non-clients, the parents, in their wishes to be in control, via legally enforced dependency, of their mad/bad offspring: NAMI with tacit APA approval, has set out a pro-neuroleptic drug and easy commitment-institutionalization agenda that violates the civil rights of their offspring.

……..“Biologically based brain diseases” are certainly convenient for families and practitioners alike. It is no-fault insurance against personal responsibility. We are all just helplessly caught up in a swirl of brain pathology for which no one, except DNA, is responsible.

Alt_mentalities has posted a must-read piece on the work of Dr. Loren Mosher (Soteria) and of John Weir Perry.

It’s worth saying, again and again and again, that schizophrenia is a self-healing process. I have posted an extract from Alt_mentalities post below, part of a more in-depth interview with John Weir Perry.

Schizophrenia as a self-healing process:

“Schizophrenia” is a self-healing process – one in which, specifically, the pathological complexes dissolve themselves. The whole schizophrenic turmoil is really a self-organising, healing experience. It’s like a molten state. Everything seems to be made of free energy, an inner free play of imagery through which the alienated psyche spontaneously re-organises itself – in such a way that the conscious ego is brought back into communication with the unconscious again…

It [psychosis] is like the mythological image in a perfect stained-glass window being smashed, and all the bits and pieces being scattered. The effect is very colourful, but it’s very hard to discern how the pieces belong to each other. Any attempt to make sense of it is an exercise in abstraction from the actual experience. The important thing is to find the process running through it all.

“Chronic schizophrenia” – a cultural construct:

[Interviewer:] So are you saying that the reason we have so-called “chronic schizophrenia” in our society, – where a person is medicated, distressed or hospitalized for decades – is really cultural? A society which refuses to understand the healing nature of the phenomenon?

Yes, it seems so. Of course, there are some unusual cases where the individual simply can’t handle the impact of all this unconscious content, or doesn’t know what to do with it, and freaks out. But from my experience at Diabasis, I’ve seen so many people go the other way that I really do feel “chronic schizophrenia” is created by society’s negative response to what is actually a perfectly natural and healthy process.

Reparenting and Jacqui Schiff

Another proponent of the bad parenting school of thought was social worker Jacqui Schiff, who took a number of schizophrenic young people into her household in the early 1970s to “reparent” them, using Transactional Analysis techniques that she had learned from Dr Eric Berne. All My Children, published in 1970, provides a graphic account of the struggles she and her husband went through in the process of reparenting. She is scathing about the failure of parents to send the right messages to their children, which, she claims, results in their subsequent development of schizophrenia. Despite the fact she is acquainted with the parents of her charges in only the most superficial ways, she feels qualified to pass judgment on them, while making the same questionable judgments in her reparenting that parents make in parenting. She is particularly harsh on the mothers.

This harsh view of the parents, and in particular the mother, was shared by many psychiatrists at the time, notably Dr. Loren Mosher, Dr. Leo Kanner and Dr. R.D. Laing. Unfortunately, blaming the parents played right into the hands of drug companies. Why do I say this? I say this because drug companies don’t blame the parents. Drug companies claim that schizophrenia is a matter of biochemistry, by implication not by bad parenting.

By labeling schizophrenia a brain disease, not a result of bad parenting, psychiatrists and drug companies have made it easier for parents to say, “Look, it’s not my fault my child has schizophrenia; my child actually has a brain disease.” They have also ensured fat profits for pharmaceutical companies for years to come by this particular logic. What parents, feeling bad enough about the situation, would want to believe that it was their fault, especially if they had raised other well-adjusted children?

At the same time, and this is important, why would parents prefer to believe that their son or daughter has a damaged brain? Why would anyone want to believe that they were somehow “damaged”? That idea is horrible. It is a hopeless view. It is locking the young person into a lifetime of misery and dependency on drugs. There are many websites devoted to showing computer images of the damaged schizophrenic brain. One such website shows pictures of early and late gray matter deficits in schizophrenia. “But”, proclaims the website, “while there is a significant loss of brain gray matter, this is not a reason to lose all hope.” (see link below) Yes, according to the website, these deficits may be reversible and scientists are hard at work on inventing a miracle drug that could potentially reverse these cognitive declines.

I began to appreciate these out-of-favor psychiatrists (and one social worker) after I decided that there was no way I was going to believe that Chris had a damaged brain. The more I read, the more I agreed with them. They were downright interesting. They weren’t trying to toe the politically correct line. They criticized the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatrists for entering into unholy alliances. For all of the emphasis on the pharmaceutical approach, patients weren’t getting much better and of course, there were the side effects. All of this struck a chord with me.

They seemed to be in favor of schizophrenia as giving added value to the world. R. D. Laing believed that schizophrenia was a creative process leading to spiritual and emotional healing and noted that other cultures view schizophrenia as a state of trance, which could even be valued as mystical or shamanic. Isn’t finding “value” in schizophrenia more likely to lead to healing?

I looked into Dr. Leo Kanner’s work again and realized that, as with much of our sound-bite-obsessed culture, even in 1960 his remark about refrigerator mothers was probably blown out of proportion. Dr. Kanner had gone on to say something that shows an understanding that the origins (he was referring to autism) might go further back than the parents have control over. “The children’s aloneness from the beginning of life makes it difficult to attribute the whole picture exclusively to the type of early parental relations with our patients…We must, then assume that these children have come into the world with innate inability to form the usual biologically provided affective contact with people.” He then challenges the mothers to turn against the psychobabble of the contemporary psychiatrists in favor of their (the mothers’) innate common sense: “[R]egain that common sense which is yours, which has been yours before you allowed yourselves to be intimidated by would-be omniscient totalitarians.” Well said, Dr. Kanner!

http://www.schizophrenia.com/disease.htm

It’s likely I am at least part of the problem

I’m going to have to come clean early in my blog. For some time now it has been no longer permissable to blame the parents especially the “mother” for a child’s schizophrenia. But surely it would be remiss of me to attribute my son’s problems entirely to him. I am operating on the assumption that I can help his healing if I find out what it is about me that has affected him. We have heard over and over again that the parents are not to blame. Maybe so, but since schizophrenia emerges in the teenage years, parents are the people who have controlled the environment up until then.

Dr. Loren Mosher was a former chief (1969–1980) of the Center for Studies of Schizophrenia at the National Institute of Mental Health. He blamed schizophrenia on bad parenting, typically by the mother: “There are two aspects of family life that have been consistently highly associated with what’s called schizophrenia. One has been dubbed ‘communication deviance.’ It’s simple. Just means that when you sit with these parents, you can’t figure out what the hell it is they’re talking about. They can’t focus on things. You can’t visualize what they say. They go off on tangents. They are loose in the way that they think.” He stated that the other thing that was clear from studies was that “when families are very hostile to and critical of their offspring, that’s not good for them.”

Dr. Mosher’s patronizing view of the parents echoes the view of Dr. Leo Kanner, who wrote the first English language textbook on child psychiatry in 1935. In it, he adopted the term “infantile autism” to describe a set of behavioral characteristics of certain aloof children. “All too often this child is the offspring of highly organized, professional parents, cold and rational—the type that Dr. Kanner describes as “just happening to defrost enough to produce a child.” Such a mother became popularly known as a “refrigerator mother”, a term used for mothers of autistics but also of schizophrenics.

An article in the British Journal of Medical Psychology (1961) claimed: “In the interviews they manifested chaotic forms of communication while sounding superficially sensible. . . The mothers of schizophrenics did not adapt well to external reality, as shown by poor reality testing, marked denial, and projection. Disorders of thought were prominent, giving an impression of ‘diluted schizophrenia’ in these mothers.”

I am willing to entertain the thought that I may have communication deviance while sounding superficially sensible. I have always thought of myself as on track and a cut to the chase type of person. Nobody has ever accused me of not being on track. Come to think of it, my university English professor once said that I write well, but vaguely. Hmm. Since I started paying attention to this flaw, I have stopped using vague terms like “seems to” and “appears to”. I am trying hard to be more definitive, if only to avoid an impression of diluted schizophrenia. There are enough people around me at work who give off this impression.

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1. The Child Is Father, Time (July 25, 1960), http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,826528,00.html
2. http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=paq.031.0431a

Trauma

I have heard people comment from time to time that Chris must have suffered quite a shock over something. “Poor boy,” said a homeopathic consultant, “he must have suffered quite a shock.” This never made any sense to me at the time Chris was first diagnosed. Trauma to me means a car accident, the death of someone close to you, sexual abuse, or witnessing a horrific event.

The shock idea is not new in psychiatric circles. However, it is not currently fashionable in the biochemically determined model of schizophrenia. Dr. Loren Mosher , the first head of the National Institute of Mental Health Center for Studies of Schizophrenia, described psychosis as an understandable coping mechanism, very similar to shell shock, “except that the [shell-shock victim’s] trauma—the overwhelming experience—is very readily identifiable. It’s right there, easy to see. In contrast, the trauma that drives schizophrenics over the edge is not often so readily identifiable, and it is more often cumulative, rather than a single event. But often there’s a lot of things going on, and usually there’s also a trigger event—a romantic rejection, the death of a parent, an excessive involvement with recreational drugs.”

Ryke Geerd Hamer, MD, is famous and infamous in Europe for his Iron Rules of Cancer theory and the astonishing success rate he claims with terminal cancer patients. His approach grew out of a tragic event that occurred in 1978 when Dr. Hamer and his physician wife had clinical practices in Rome. Seventeen-year-old Dirk, the second of their four children, was sleeping on a boat anchored off Corsica when a bullet shot by someone on a nearby yacht lodged in him. He lingered for four months before he died in hospital in his father’s arms in December 1978. Shortly thereafter, Dr. Hamer developed testicular cancer.

Convinced that the shock of what happened to Dirk was reflected in his developing testicular cancer, Dr. Hamer became a cancer researcher. The Iron Rules of Cancer begin with what he calls a DHS, or Dirk Hamer syndrome. Every cancer or cancer-equivalent ailment begins with a severe, highly acute, dramatic, and isolating conflict-occurrence shock that registers simultaneously on three levels: in the psyche, in the brain, and in the organ. The shock registered to the brain can be photographed as concentric circles (or Hamer Herds) using computed tomography (CT). Where the Hamer Herd is located in the brain determines the theme of the conflict. By looking at the location of the Hamer Herd in the brain, it can be determined in which organ the cancer will arise and vice versa. In the case of the schizophrenic brain, according to Dr. Hamer, there are two (and sometimes three) such concentric circles, registering two (or three) shocks.

Schizophrenia was not the main focus of Dr. Hamer’s work, but reading about his theory started me thinking. I began to look at illness differently. Physical symptoms can be manifested by the mind and emotions and registered on the brain. It ties in very nicely with Dr. Masaru Emoto’s work with water molecules.