I don’t know where Mark Vonnegut stands on vitamins to treat psychosis these days. Maybe he has come full circle back to accepting them as important in his recovery. The last time I checked, the author of The Eden Express was firmly in the camp of schizophrenia as a brain disease. This was odd because in his book, he attributes his rather quick recovery from schizophrenia/bipolar in the early 1970s largely to his taking vitamins.
It is easy enough to link Mark Vonegut’s epic psychotic break to his habitual drug use. He majored in religious studies in college, so that’s a clue that there may have been a certain predisposition in his family background to spiritual ecstasy. Does it really matter what caused his psychosis? I believe that there is a quicker recovery from psychosis brought on by drug use. If you stop taking the drugs you stop adding fuel to the fire.
In one of the later editions to this book the author goes out of his way to say that he regrets giving so much credit to vitamins in his recovery (“and then the vitamins kicked in”).
So what happened? Why this about face? Mark Vonnegut later went on to medical school where my strong hunch is that he no doubt learned that his belief in vitamins couldn’t possibly have been the reason he recovered his sanity. To save face as a newly-minted medical doctor, he renounced the foolish idea of his youth that he got better on vitamins.
I wonder where he is today on this? That was then and this is now. A lot has changed in the world of medicine if you let the quantum light in.
The Eden Express is a wonderful book, because it accurately evokes the mood of the hippie culture of the 1960s early 1970s. It’s not very good on the hope front, if hope is what you’re looking for. To Mark Vonnegut, exactly who gets well is a crap shoot. He wrote the book when he was very young and I don’t think he had a real feel for what his diagnosis meant. Luckily he recovered from his first break quite quickly. He had subsequent breakdowns but continued to practice medicine.