From today’s New York Times
A trained Freudian analyst, Dr. Spiegel came to see traditional, open-ended psychoanalysis as too costly and meandering for many patients — and hypnosis as a way to accelerate healing, effecting change in some people even in a single session. As Dr. Spiegel’s reputation grew, performers and politicians in New York and prominent people from around the world made their way to his office in Manhattan.
Chris’s psychiatrists in his day program wouldn’t hear of hypnosis. “It’s not for schizophrenia,” they said, quickly changing the subject whenever it was raised by the parents. They left us with the impression that there was something so strange about schizophrenia that hynosis would only serve to destabilize the individual. I beg to differ. A holistic approach to healing means to employ different approaches in order to ferret out the root cause of the suffering. Hypnosis should be considered when treating schizophrenia. Deep trauma is not easy to get at through conventional therapies.
Hypnosis, fetal memory and past life regression
One intervention that Chris has not tried is hypnosis. It’s not because I don’t believe in it, it’s because the situation hasn’t presented itself, yet. I recently rekindled my interest in hypnosis when I met a woman who is the widow of Dr. Denys Kelsey, a British psychiatrist who discovered early in his career that he had a knack for hypnosis. He was married for many years to Joan Grant, a writer like Taylor Caldwell, whose inspiration for her writing came from her past lives. (Grant claimed she was 25,000 years old!) Grant and Kelsey together wrote Many Lifetimes, a book about reincarnation, and I’ve personally read Now and Then: Reincarnation, Psychiatry and Daily Life by Denys Kelsey, which I highly recommend, as Kelsey writes that he was able to regress some of his patients to the point of conception. Since I literally heard the “ping” of Chris’s conception, and since Chris had confided to me once that he has fetal memory, I wouldn’t mind if he “had a go” at hypnotherapy. This would go over like a lead balloon with my husband, who doesn’t want to bring in any psychiatrist other than the one Chris is seeing. Chris is also understandably tired of seeing a psychiatrist week in and week out. Still . . .
Dr. Stern, Chris’s psychiatrist, doesn’t “do” hypnosis, to my knowledge. She does Family Constellation Therapy and psychotherapy but not hypnosis. For psychiatric patients, wanting to try different therapies beyond what is on offer with their own doctor, isn’t as clear cut as you would think. In the program that Chris attended for two years, the parents often asked about hypnosis and the opinion of the doctors was uniformly against it. The program didn’t “do” hypnotherapy. Neither did it “do” Family Constellation Therapy. What kind of one-on-one therapy it did do is a mystery to me. I suspect that everybody got the same superficial therapy, no matter what their diagnosis. Therapy lite is not for schizophrenia. You’ve really got to get in there.
I have read that people with schizophrenia can’t be hypnotized, meaning that there is something about them that makes it impossible for them to become hypnotized. I have also read that it is dangerous to hypnotize people with schizophrenia. It makes me wonder if there is no distinction made between someone with active psychosis (perhaps harder for them to concentrate) and someone who is more stable. Within the past year or so I have noticed more and more positive articles about hypnosis as a treatment for schizophrenia. The whole area is murky with misinformation and perhaps disinformation. Chris’s program doctors were firmly in the camp of it is dangerous to hypnotize, which causes me to think their opinion is formed because their favored approach is drug therapy.
Psychiatrists seem to be sensitive people. If you are seeing one doctor, you are supposed to apparently only do what that doctor recommends, which is coincidentally whatever he/she is specializes in. If I bring up the idea of trying a new therapy (even a one-off therapy) in addition to Chris’s regular psychiatric appointments, it’s like I’m being hugely disloyal. I don’t think it ought to be this way. As a parent I want to get help for my son anyway I can. I would like to say to psychiatrists “get over it”. Let’s put our egos aside and maybe shave some time off the recovery process by adding some new therapies into the mix.
Hypnosis, done with a responsible therapist, can reveal startling reasons for why we behave the way we do in this life, whether it is overeating, flying into uncontrollable rages, or any number of things. Better still, it can resolve issues that may seem impossible to fix. Young children, in particular, are very close to fetal memories and possible past lives. I am willing to believe just about anything these days, thanks to schizophrenia. Three quarters of the world’s population believes in reincarnation. I am not about to argue against what the majority of people believe in. They all can’t be wrong.
I would be interested to know if anyone reading this post has undergone hypnosis to treat schizophrenia. If so, do you feel it was done well? What results did you notice? Would you recommend this therapy to treat schizophrenia? If you were seeing a psychiatrist at the time, how did you make your case that hypnosis was needed?