Let go, let go, let go

I’ve been busy of late in places other than the blogosphere. Like going to my 50th high school reunion, visiting friends and family in Ontario, taking on the role of chair of the communications committee in my gated community here in Florida.

I’ll start with the reunion, spread out like an Indian wedding over a wonderful three days in rural northern New York State. In a small town small school, everyone knows everyone, the years didn’t matter. We picked up with each other almost where we left off fifty years ago. At the banquet on Saturday night in the Catholic Church Hall I was honored to receive the Alumnae of the Year award for my writing efforts to promote a more holistic approach to the treatment of schizophrenia.

What was not so amazing was the number of people in the room who came up to me later to share how they have been personally touched by schizophrenia. One man told me that my speech evoked a flood of memories of a favorite cousin who disappeared years ago. Another woman approached me to tell me that her daughter is doing graduate work in psychology, focusing on schizophrenia. Someone else wanted to order my book for the local library. Schizophrenia touches many lives.

The community newsletter that I’m putting out once a month has given me a chance to get to know my neighbors more. In theory, it should be easy. I just work off a template and wait for board members and others to send me their news. In reality, there are always small problems that need fixing. It’s vying for time with this blog.

A few weeks ago, Chris and I began attending a metaphysical church where the emphasis is on awakening to the inspiration and guidance of spirit, focusing on healings, mediumship, and embracing the teachings of all Master Teachers.

The church also offers courses based on A Course in Miracles, the words of Jesus transcribed over many months by Helen Schucman, a professor of medical psychology at Columbia University. The book was published in 1975 by The Inner Peace Foundation. It’s essentially an instructional device in how to love (become whole), by letting go of the fear and delusional thoughts to which our ego clings. “It teaches that the way to universal love and peace—or remembering God—is by undoing guilt through forgiving others. The Course thus focuses on the healing of relationships and making them holy.”

only the mind can be sick, only the mind can be healed. Only the mind is in need of healing; we must change our mind about the “reality” of illusions; there is no such thing as “sin” (there are only errors (in thought) that we must correct; Illness of any kind may be defined as the result of the view of the self as weak, vulnerable, evil and endangered, and thus in need of constant defense; while truth is simple, it must stil be taught to those who have already lost their way in endless mazes of complexity. This is the great ill.

And what then is my error in thought in this journey of healing? That I did not put full trust in the healing power of the Universe (God, if you will) to let go of my fear that the result would be inferior to the result that I wanted. My ego knew this was a error that I was hoping I wouldn’t have to correct one day. I carried on nonetheless, endlessly trying new therapies that got closer to God in many respects (music and vibration) without callng on him by Name, in the hope that I almost singlehandedly could lead Chris to taking responsiblity to heal himelf. I was giving an intellectual nod to God that he obviously was important, except I wasn’t treating Him like he was. Where was the mysterious hand of God in all of this?

Recalling Level 5 of Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt’s healing pyramid, where I started off years ago:

Level 5:
The 5th level is the plane of self-healing. I call this level
the “spirit body”. The only relationship that exists here is the
relationship between the individual and god. The fifth level
is this part of God that reaches into us and wants to learn and
experience the physical word through this individual with all
his or her flaws, strengths and idiosyncrasies. A physician,
psychologist, or guru who claims that he can be helpful on
the 5th level is being arrogant, misleading, dangerous and
simply wrong. Anyone who truly has experienced this level
will have an attitude of deep respect and understands that it
cannot be explained using language. People that talk often
about “god”, “angels” and other spiritual experiences are suspicious to me. People too deeply involved in the “New Age”
often have significant unresolved family issues or guilt (that
is either taken on from another family member or “earned”
through one’s own mistakes). The pain and necessary healing work is often avoided by involving oneself in extensive
spiritual practices that never seem to resolve the real issues.
Treatment:
Any exploration of this level is left to the patient.
As practitioners we have no right to intrude on this plane.
An attitude of great respect and humbleness is appropriate. Interfering would be saying: “the part of God that
works through me ( the practitioner) is more important or
healed then the part of God you (the client) represent”.

I’m still around, I’m still interested in helping Chris where I can, it’s just that I can’t do it all, have never wanted to do it all, and I’m more and more interested in finding my own peace by turning this over to Chris and his Father.

Let go and let God.

My guest post at Virgil Stucker and Associates

Mothers, Fathers, and Others

May 15, 2019

Guest post: Rossa Forbes

I’ve been doing all right when it comes to being a supportive mom of an adult son with a schizophrenia diagnosis. I am his life coach, his cheerleader, and his 24/7 shrink. Outside of the home, I try to put a positive face on schizophrenia because I

believe it needs an image make-over and also because I do see a lot of positives in a condition when the world all around me often doesn’t.

I regularly remind myself that in order for someone to gain this label they’ve got to be a pretty thoughtful and generous person to begin with, okay, maybe a tad too thoughtful and a tad too generous to survive in sales, probably too religiously obsessed to even qualify as a preacher, too philosophical and/or poetic to ever work at being a philosopher or a poet, and too generous with their possessions to ever accumulate much in the way of worldly goods. What a wonderful human being my son with all of these traits is.

There’s another aging side of me that increasingly lacked the energy to keep up this degree of cheerful commitment to my son. He’d been living at home READ MORE

The rush to intervene/DO SOMETHING!

My post this week is a random gathering of my observations on the “NAMI Basics” course I’m enrolled in and how my experience with US style medicine as a rush to medicate/operate is confirming what I’ve observed from abroad before moving here.

The NAMI Basics course is a bit of a surprise in that it questions the use of medication more than I would have thought. What is troubling is the emphasis on early intervention in the teen years, which sounds like a good idea, but really means bringing in a swat team of doctors, psychologists, etc. and elevating what could be a one-off situation into something more sinister and chronic. This is one version of the hammer approach to problem solving that I discuss in more detail in this post.

My more pressing concern these past few months has been my own health, not Chris’s. Without getting too specific about the details, I moved to Florida from Europe, proud of the fact that at my age I was on no prescription drugs and taking only baby aspirin to prevent blood clots. I’ve had atrial fibrillation on and off for many years, but I’ve lived with it and never consulted a doctor about it. It hasn’t impeded my life so far. Exercise doesn’t leave me breathless. I’m not saying that A-fib never requires some form of attention, but the devil’s in the details.

In November, I went for my first physical here in Florida and it was like setting off a five alarm fire judging from the response to the taking of my pulse. (This was the first time that my A-fib had been “caught” in real time.) The panicked look on the medical assistant’s face was the first tip-off that A-fib was not okay. (I had always heard that it might be scary, but not life threatening.) The doctor arrived. He pooh poohed the baby aspirin, gave me free samples for an expensive anti-coagulant and set me up for an appointment with a cardiologist. “But,” I protested, “I’ve always had A-fib to some extent or another. I’ve lived with it.”

Fast forward to today. The two heart drugs tried so far have not stopped my A-fib, and I’m no longer feeling quite as perky as before because of the side effects. Furthermore, the medical reaction to my condition had added stress. The cardiologist is sending me to an electrophysiologist and there is talk of surgical intervention (ablation). To gain some reassurance that my concerns about unnecessary intervention are well founded, I’m listening to a Youtube doctor from the UK who takes a much more laid back, non-surgical, non-drug view of atrial fibrillation. I am trying a variety of ways to normalize the heartbeat (heart rate is down already) and plan to discuss my preferred approach with the specialist. I’ll shut up and not question the need for the prescribed anti-coagulant if the specialist will backpedal on the need for the surgery.

I now find myself in the position that people under psychiatric care are in: being encouraged to accept stronger intervention that perhaps can be best managed by holistic means outside of a doctor’s office.

Magnesium, anyone?

The 15 minute med check

After Chris’s psychiatric appointment was cancelled due to the doctor’s no show (see previous post) I marched up to the receptionist and demanded a new appointment –not two months from now, or even a month from now, but NOW!

Chris got an appointment for the following week. I accompanied him to the appointment as the doctor had encouraged him the first and only time he saw him to bring along his mother the next time. I came armed with the results of the neurofeedback brain mapping, hoping to get the doctor to request the insurance company to cover twenty sessions of neurofeedback.

Dr Jesus de N. was an avuncular man in his late fifties with (unsurprisingly) a Spanish accent. His friendly demeanor couldn’t warm up his office however, which had all the charm of an interrogation room. Three wooden chairs facing the desk, no artwork or personal momentos on display. I got the distinct vibe that the doctor didn’t occupy the space for very long and it was probably a shared arrangement. I waited while the doctor asked Chris to update him. Chris wandered all over the map, none of his utterings were connected to any point that I could discern. Now I know how logical Chris can be most of the time, but the doctor wouldn’t have a clue that the rambling person in front of him was fully capable of clarity. My interjecting to try to bring reason and linearity to the update and request a letter to the insurance company just made me look, well, illogical and rambling (schizophrenic). Like mother, like son, the doctor may have been thinking.

The doctor brought up the subject of meds and asked Chris where he was with his Abilify. In classic Chris fashion my son intuited that the doctor must want him to go back on the drug. It was hard to tell what Chris was saying but he seemed to be simultaneously telling the doctor that he was no longer on Abilify while teetering on the point of telling the doctor that he would be willing to go back on it! (He hates to disappoint.) I immediately jumped in and laid that one to rest. “Chris is off Abilify, has been off it since September, and he and I agree he’s doing just fine. He has no intention of going back on it.” (Remember, this is the doctor who suggested to Chris at his first appointment that he consider taking Abilify in long term injectable form.)

“So, what’s the purpose of this visit? We only have fifteen minutes,” said the doctor, not unkindly. “If Chris isn’t on meds then there’s no point is my seeing him. Our clinic can provide talk therapy if he wants it.”

If finally dawned on me. This wasn’t a fifty-five minute appointment. It was a fifteen minute med check. Why hadn’t Chris told me this after his first appointment? I wondered. For months I had been under the impression that Chris had spent an hour with the guy.

Our fifteen minutes was up. On our way home, Chris and I high fived each other on the outcome.

Freedom! Freedom! Letting go of psychiatry US style

Today’s vignette is not about the way letting go of psychiatry is supposed to work. Let me explain. Normally when people write about how they ended their relationship with psychiatry, they talk about how they made a conscious decision to just stop going to their appointments, maybe because they felt they no longer needed them or perhaps because they didn’t feel they were serving any useful function.

Chris has seen Jesus de N. (his psychiatrist) ONCE since we moved to Florida in August. Today he attempted a third try only to be told that the doctor had a problem with his car and would be late. Chris was prepared to wait until the doctor got there, but was told that he’d have to make a new appointment because the doctor would not be arriving any time soon. (This was the second time in a row that the doctor has cancelled.)

So, the question is, does Chris actually have a psychiatrist? I think not. He has a psychiatrist on paper, someone whose office he can phone to get a referral, someone who can satisfy our insurance company to continue to cover him, but this person is not someone he actually sees. He is free to do what he wants, unencumbered by psychiatry. This is brilliant! I’m surprised that more people who want to escape psychiatry’s clutches aren’t praising the system here in the United States. (Dr. Stern, Chris’s psychiatrist in Switzerland used to phone him if he missed an appointment or was late. She rescheduled any missed appointments for the same week. Not the case here. Here, it’s like the psychiatrist doesn’t think he needs to see his patients.)

Hallelujah brothers and sisters. Free at last!

Startling news

On Friday, Chris and I met with the director of the brainwave center to go over the results of the testing. To cut to the chase there is clear evidence of a brain trauma. According to the report we received, “Frontal, temporal motor strip and parietal dysregulation are consistent with his symptoms. These areas participate in the executive, default, and salience networks, which have been implicated with schizophrenia. The frontal lobes are involved in executive functioning, abstract thinking, expressive language, sequential planning, mood control and social skills. The temporal lobes are involved in auditory information processing, short-term memory, receptive language on the left and face recognition on the right.”

Evidence of a brain trauma in the left frontal lobe was surprising news to the director as both Chris and I had assured him that he has no history of a trauma.

“Oh, I guess I forgot to mention that when I was about age 30 I used to bang my head on the wall on occasion, and also, I got hit by a car when I was 24 and landed on the side of my head though my arm cushioned the fall.”

I was both dumbfounded by the news and totally embarrassed that we had failed to report any of this in our previous interviews. I did know of the car accident, but this was the first time I learned that he had hit his head in the accident. (His father took him right away to a nearby clinic and he was pronounced okay.) As for deliberately banging his head on a wall, well, how stupid is that?

The point is there is clear evidence of a head trauma as shown by the spectral analysis and topographic mapping. Chris’s alpha, beta, and high beta powers looked very good to the director.

Recommended treatment: Direct neurofeedback x 20 sessions with left frontal and motor strip emphasis.