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.

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.

The list of therapies

Psychiatrists say that single events can be over-determined. Rather than there being one reason and only one reason for something happening, there can be multiple explanations for a single event. Chris’s current hospitalization is not the result of a single event. The obvious explanation to the well meaning outsider is that he needed his medications.

The less obvious explanations arise from what had been happening in Chris’s life over the months leading up to this crisis. Despite the vitamin support that had worked so well for him before, during and after he stopped his medications, something scary was now happening. He dropped his classes, stopped his voice lessons, rambled frequently off-topic, and tested the patience of his family and friends alike. It had all the hallmarks of a return of his psychosis. Did I mention he was angry? He started to express anger for the first time in his life. He scraped the flesh off his knuckles by driving his fist so hard into the wall.

Chris has yet to offer a definitive explanation as to why this recent crisis has happened. He does say he truly missed his younger brother Taylor, who went away to university about the same time that Chris started to change. My husband and I say that we pushed him too hard to think about returning to university full time. Our expectations likely frightened him. Other people had expectations, too. Chris’s voice teacher encouraged him to fulfill his considerable potential as a vocalist. I believe that Chris is struggling with the implications of what it means to become well.

I remain convinced that this crisis is a necessary passage for Chris. He is on a more solid platform this time around and will continue to grow in health, thanks to the following:

1. Orthomolecular medicine
2. Medication, when necessary, in low doses and for short duration
3. Energy medicine/EFT/Visualizations
4. Assemblage Point shift and shamanic rituals
5. Magnetic therapy
6. Cathartic psychotherapies/e.g. Family Constellation Therapy
7. The Alexander Technique (not a therapy in the standard sense)
8. The Tomatis Method
9. Psychoacoustics and bioharmonic resonance
10. Time and understanding

In the coming days I will discuss these interventions and more.