Commit me, too! I’m ready!

Chris’s holistic psychiatrist provided an updated list of supplements before she left on Christmas vacation as a last ditch effort to get Chris through this crisis. She was not in favor of putting Chris back on an antipsychotic, although if push came to shove she reluctantly recommended a mood stabilizer that would also help with the psychotic features. Ian and I welcomed the idea of the mood stabilizer, figuring that a mood stabilizer administered for hopefully a short period would be easier to withdraw from than an antipsychotic. We put Chris on a mood stabilizer, in part to satisfy Chris’s psychotherapist, Dr. Stern, and in part to cover ourselves with Dr. Stern should the situation deteriorate further. Then there was the community pressure (well meaning people) who kept reminding us something was wrong with Chris.

The complexity of administering the supplements and making sure that Chris took them as prescribed nearly drove me over the edge. It was all the worse because this time I was dealing with a psychotic underfoot. I lined up all his supplements for the week ahead and taped them into little paper packets, twenty one packets in all. I labeled them “1” “2” and “3” for swallowing at morning, lunch and dinner. He was now taking sublingual lithium drops and sulfur drops twice a day in addition to the mood stabilizer and the other supplements. I measured out the drops and stood over Chris twice a day to make sure he kept them under his tongue. I poured two liters of water in containers for him every evening and in the morning I mixed the powdered and liquid supplements in the distilled water for him to drink throughout the day. I slathered a detoxifying cream over his liver twice a day, and dabbed a special niacin cream that is supposed to work wonders with psychosis on both temples, wrists and the back of his knees. I supervised his detoxifying epsom salt baths which he did every second day. I watched while he put his detox footpads on every second night before bed.

In short, I was becoming a bloody psychiatric nurse. Actually, I was doing more than a psychiatric nurse would do. A nurse at least gets to go home and isn’t concerned with administering supplements. I entertained fantasies of putting Chris in the mental hospital to relieve me of my round the clock caregiver duties. The only thing that prevented me from doing so is that he would have been immediately put on an antipsychotic as the price of admission.

A slight change in his supplements, the addition of the mood stabilizer and my spending a lot of time talking to him about his feelings and his responsibilities over his actions enabled Chris’s condition to stabilize a bit over the Christmas period. This intense experience convinced me that Soteria and Kingsley Hall and the Jacqui Schiff home based approach worked better than what the critics reported. However, their approach needs a staff. I was simply exhausted and doubted whether I was up to the job.

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