Christmas was hell

By December 2008 Chris was in serious trouble, and I was no longer sleeping at night. We were right back to where it all started when Chris first went off to university six years earlier. His mind was slipping further into psychosis. I watched it all happen once again. How could I have let this happen? How could HE let this happen? Yes, I was glad earlier that he was becoming emotional for the first time ever, but he was also becoming a mess, losing his keys, his identification, forgetting his appointments, and singing, jumping and twirling in the streets.

He was spending inordinate amounts of time in the bathroom. More ominously, he was beginning to leave traces of fecal matter on the walls of the bathroom and on the parquet hall floors, just a hint here and there. He was also urinating in his pants. Ian and I had to re-examine Chris’s need for an antipsychotic, something I especially felt never helped him to begin with and might not even prevent his further slide into psychosis.

His holistic psychiatrist discovered from talking with Chris that he had stopped taking his detox footpads months ago and had been rather careless about some of his other supplements. (Chris was becoming increasingly cryptic when asked straightforward questions, so we are not sure where the truth lay on adherence to his regime.) He was in a state of toxic build-up according to the psychiatrist, that contributed to the expression of anger, mania and depression that Ian and I had witnessed.

From a purely biochemical point of view, my view of Chris as going through a needed stage of emotional release looked rather naive. However, did his emotional state cause his biochemistry to go out of whack, or did his alleged careless use of supplements cause his emotional state? Whatever it was, we wanted it fixed right away. We could concentrate on his needed emotional release after we rebalanced his biochemistry.

Christmas 2008 was hell. Alex and Taylor were both back from university and unhappy at home. They barely gave Chris the time of day, except to be irritated by him. This pained me tremendously, but at the same time it was a reasonable response on their part. People who communicate appropriately with others get included. People who don’t are shunned. Chris was behaving in his own particular psychotic way, crouching on the floor, speaking only the most banal thoughts (but ingeniously cloaked in aggression and sarcasm if you bothered to pay attention), taking long pauses in answer to simple questions, and continuing to urinate in his pants and decorate the bathroom with small flecks of feces. One night I woke up around 4 a.m. to find him in the darkened hallway. He said he was uncertain as to whether he was awake or asleep. I gently led him back to bed.

Dr. Carl Pfeiffer’s 29 medical causes of schizophrenia

When people first fall into the rabbit hole of schizophrenia, the logical question to ask is “what causes schizophrenia?” A psychiatrist’s standard answer to this question is that “nobody knows” what causes it and then, rather inexplicably will hasten to add “but there are good treatments available to manage it”. Technically, the psychiatrist is correct, at least as far as the cause goes, because no medical explanation has yet evolved to apply in a general sense to all of its victims.

As a parent, I want to know what causes my child’s schizophrenia. I’m not interested in schizophrenia in a population.

A lady I am acquainted with was convinced that a particular acne medication may have triggered her sixteen year old daughter’s psychosis. The doctor told her that her daughter’s psychosis was of unknown origin. She was very, very angry because she felt the doctor patronized her by denying possible causality in the case of the acne medication. It is also patronizing of a doctor to believe that he or she knows more than the mother or father as to what makes their child tick.

It is difficult to say what causes psychosis in a particular individual because there may be multiple factors involved, but that is not to say that one shouldn’t look for cause. I am convinced that from knowing cause comes cure. Cure is a word that you are not supposed to use in the context of schizophrenia.

In his book Nutrition and Mental Illness, Dr. Carl Pfeiffer states that there are 29 medical causes of schizophrenia, ranging from pellagra to drug intoxications, to heavy metal toxicity, to wheat-gluten insensitivity, to chronic candidiasis, to a host of other rare and not so rare ailments. That does not necessarily mean that your schizophrenia can be pinned down to one of these 29 medical causes. What I find incredible is that no doctor in Chris’s hospitals bothered to ask me if there was a family history of any of these ailments or called for tests to rule them out.

It is worth noting that Dr. Pfeiffer is referring to 29 “medical” causes of schizophrenia. Half the fun of schizophrenia is figuring out the non-medical, i.e. psychological causes of schizophrenia. Understanding and treating the emotional underpinnings of schizophrenia has been pushed aside over the past few decades in favor of the biochemical model. I am getting ahead of myself here. There will be plenty of time to delve into this fascinating subject in later blogs.