Strange double standards

A top health website invited me to subscribe to other blog feeds on their site that share my interests. My interests are really only singular (schizophrenia) but I am willing to stretch myself so I included bipolar as a second interest.

The site then suggested some treatment options that might further interest me in both these categories.

Aside from a long list of nearly identical meds in each category, beginning with Abilify and ending with Zyprexa, the other "help" targeted to these pharmaceutically very similar conditions was interesting, or rather "telling."

In the complementary/alternative medicine category, bipolars apparently benefit from crying, holistic health, marijuana, meditation, music, pets, running and yoga while their identical twin, the schizophrenic, can only take advantage of music and pets!

Under the treatment program category, bipolars may benefit from not only psychotherapy, but cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy and group therapy, while their "twin" only is thought to benefit from mere psychotherapy.

Apparently this website doesn't think that people with schizophrenia will benefit from diet and vitamin support, because they get zilch here, while their bipolar twin is thought to benefit from taking fish oil. Wow, fish oil!

Music and pets while ignoring everything else except drugs? Sounds like this website sees schizophrenia as hopeless and chronic.

Ego death

Strange, perplexing dreams last night. I started off in a swamp with other people, then moved further up the road to a very ordinary house, whose owners were allowing paid guests to view Christian themed tableaus acted out by their children. I didn't stay long enough to watch. I moved on to another interior where the owner ran some sort of volunteer, not-for-profit, talent agency/character search. We watched three groups of aspiring young women from behind the glass walls of the office. Her husband was hovering somewhere in the background, occasionally shouting out his approval of one character or another. I couldn't understand why my old friend from college wasn't considered worthy. The odd thing was, while I was dreaming, I felt that I had dreamed this dream before - the swamp sequence, the religious house, the talent agency.

In another dream later that night, I was driving my car along a frozen canal in a city where I used to live and the weight of the steamroller in front of me caused the ice to crack apart. I had enough warning and was determined to free myself from the seatbelt before my vehicle sank. I was floating above the vehicle at the time, looking down on it which gave me plenty of time to release the damn seatbelt before I landed safely on the embankment and the car sank below the ice. There was a press conference held on the embankment, but no one knew that someone (Me!) had survived the unfolding catastrophe on the canal.

I woke up, and lay there quietly. Then I heard a cat in heat, yeowling piteously like a new born baby crying in the night. I thought of Chris, and his first month of life, when my supply of milk was inadequate yet I was refusing to supplement. I was sure I could get it right and just needed a little more time. This logic was a reflection of the power of the "breast is best" thinking that was so widely promoted. It was almost considered poisoning your baby to think of introducing a Nestle's product into its developing immune system. So, I struggled on and Chris continue to yowl and not gain weight at the required rate. When I finally added bottled milk into his diet, he fell silent, a look of beatific joy on his face.

Walking to work this morning, I reflected on the intense conversation Chris and I had the evening before where he told me that he has no idea who he is. He had also been thinking a lot about the number three that day and noticing how it tied into many coincidences that he encountered. He didn't know what anything meant anymore, if it ever meant anything at all. I thought about my dream. It had three sequences (the swamp, the house and the talent agency). I recalled that I had "auditioned" once for the part of "receptionist" at the aptly named Three Characters Talent Agency and that there were three groups of people auditioning at my dream talent agency.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is holistic recovery from schizophrenia. I sometimes ask myself, even though it's all very interesting, are we getting anywhere? Are we knowing ourselves more or are we deluding ourselves into becoming bystanders in the game of life? I like to think Chris and I are getting somewhere, and that what we are experiencing is true healing, even if it doesn't come swiftly and has a habit of arriving disguised as something else.

"Shudder" Island

Saturday evening Ian and I saw Shutter Island, the new Martin Scorsese film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It is a film noir, set in a fictitious asylum for the criminally insane in Boston Harbor, 1954. People may dismiss the film as giving psychiatry and the insane the "Hollywood" treatment, and there is always some truth to that when it comes to Hollywood, but I feel the film goes deeper and makes some interesting observations. The film is about trauma and doesn't shy away from linking trauma to a later diagnosis of insanity.

So, Hollywood is there, but mainstream psychiatry continues to avoid linking trauma to insanity. It is nobody's "fault" they say except your faulty brain chemisty. Pushing the diseased brain model of psychiatry for decades has prevented people en masse from regaining their health and well-being by confronting their deepest pain. If you believe that movies are the vanguard of social change, then be prepared for a sea change in treatments for mental health. It's already evident in the number of books and articles taking the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession to task for mental illness disease-mongering and drug treatments that are not only ineffective, but also ensure life long patients.

I am looking forward to reading Robert Whitaker's latest book, due to be released in April, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. Whitaker is the author of the highly acclaimed Mad in America.

A review of this book by Daniel Dorman, UCLA School of Medicine, posted on Amazon, exposes the growing link between recovery outcomes and long term use of drugs.

Why are so many more people disabled by mental illness than ever before? Why are those so diagnosed dying 10-25 years earlier than others? In Anatomy of an Epidemic investigative reporter Robert Whitaker cuts through flawed science, greed and outright lies to reveal that the drugs hailed as the cure for mental disorders instead worsen them over the long term. But Whitaker’s investigation also offers hope for the future: solid science backs nature’s way of healing our mental ills through time and human relationships.

The Building of the Ego

Chris reports on his sound therapy progress

The past few weeks with sound therapy have been constructive, as we increasingly moved into the world of imagination. As the shaman says, “Sound is linked to memory”, and he's really helped me by letting me release tension, from the present as well as the past. I remember hearing Ray of Light by Madonna at the end of my last session, which really describes his therapy in a nutshell.

What we did this time was the same six-color palette played in sequence, and the shaman gave me a “keyword” associated with each color. They were:

red: opposites
orange: movement
yellow: action
green: distance
blue: sound
violet: form

I didn't know quite what to expect. A very interesting thing happened, which accelerated the time it took to achieve “zen” with the color therapy. Beginning with red (opposites), all the tension left me and I entered into a different space, a space that was not defined by my body but rather was defined by my “rational” mind, the part of me which had preferences and opinions. My mind was liberated, and while I did not enter into free fantasy or “lucid dreaming,” I was questioning things I took for granted, and how I defined most things against my body. At green and blue I was released completely from the present and concentrated on my memories, and I became aware of the life flowing in my limbs and the changes, I could see how my legs had become stronger but less flexible since I started treating the body like a machine.

Completing the session, for the second part the shaman gave two keywords or combinations, red (“opposites”) and each other color, eg. “opposites and distance.” Looking at each combination, you were forced to ask what is an opposite, and this freed me from judgment. I was always looking at how fast something moved, or how loud a sound was. With movement, I defined an upward motion versus a downward motion, but when it came to green (opposites and distance), things looked completely different. How far away is one person when talking to another person? What if you measure from one cell of the body to another, or one atom to another? Then the distance from one person to the next could be greater than “the length of a football field”. How you define your perspective is as important as the objective world you perceive. The issue of personal space: there is a limit somewhere between your body and someone else's, where you can share your feelings without becoming a slave to every little outside stimulus.

When it came to “opposites and form,” red and violet, I pictured myself in a building, and the contrast between my body and the naked structure of an apartment building, and I saw myself fall through the building from the top to below the ground. The shaman told me that often in psychology a building represents the human ego, so I found a connection between the ego (the building) and the body, and the way to transcend the ego (the confines of the building) was to shift my focus away from my body. There the session ended. I didn't especially enjoy being stuck in a building and was happy to keep my new awareness of the connections between my body and the physical world around me.

Palliative half-measures

My oldest "child" may be twenty-six years old and given a different label, but I share the same apprehensions as outlined by the New York Times article "Concocting a Cure for Kids with Issues."

My middle "child" Alex (age 23) has been seeing a dermatologist to get to the bottom of his fairly mild eczema. $1600 later and several doctors visits and lab tests later, he is no more aware of what the underlying problem is than when he started. I have suggested that he look into gem therapy, which I think has real healing possibilities and if that doesn't work, you move on to something else in your personally designed program for wellness.

The New York Times article says . . .
These parents often don’t trust the mental-health professionals who usually treat children with “issues,” as we euphemistically tend to refer to problems like learning disabilities, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism or other developmental difficulties. They find offensive the prospect of having a child “labeled” when his or her development doesn’t correspond to what seem like random, overly restrictive norms. They find the notion of putting children on psychotropic medication frightening and unacceptable. They want to find concrete causes for their children’s diffuse, often difficult-to-understand problems and, ideally, to find cures. They want their children to achieve, and they’re dissatisfied with what they feel are the palliative half-measures offered by pediatricians, psychiatrists, psychologists and learning specialists.

I like the use of the term "palliative half-measures." It summarizes my frustrations over the years with conventional approaches.

Hothouse flowers

A mesmerizing story about Japan's Chrysanthemum Throne hothouse appears today in the New York Times. As uniquely Japanese as the tale appears, what lies beneath is universal. Crown Princess Masako, who suffers from depression and is not often seen in public, now appears to have a daughter who may be showing early signs of nervousness.

Then there is the Washington Post story about Patrick Kennedy not seeking re-election for a ninth term. I give him credit for weathering the storm of the public eye for sixteen years despite having familial tendencies toward drink and manic-depression.

Kennedy says he intends to work for mental health and addiction issues from his home base of Portsmouth, Rhode Island. "As exciting and as meaningful as work is and as my career is, ultimately something clicked inside of me that there was something that was missing," Kennedy says. "I want a fuller life."

I wish him the best of luck. I can guarantee him a fuller life if he, for personal and professional reasons, decides to investigate the healing world of holistic mental health. He can also develop a reading list of the great inner life authors - Hermann Hesse, Kierkegaard, Neitsche, to name just a few. The Big Bang and energy medicine should be on the reading list, too. We are put here on earth to do more than simply cope with our problems. We can transform them.

"We grew up in a family where there was very little tolerance for self-exploration," says a cousin, Christopher Kennedy Lawford. "I think now he has this freedom . . . to do some real exploration of who he is and what he wants to do in his lifetime. That's a valiant exploration, and a needed one.

"Gandhi," he adds, "said the man who conquers himself is greater than the man who conquers 10,000 armies."

Orgone energy

Actor Orson Bean's book, Me and the Orgone, about his experiences with orgone therapy under Dr. Elsworth Baker, is an interesting look at little known orgone therapy. My one disappointment with the book is that his therapy didn't involve the use of the orgone accumulator box that was so popular with beat generation writers and poets. According to J.D. Salinger's daughter, he used to sit for days at a stretch in the accumulator and drink his own urine. (Daughter obviously had "issues" with dear old Dad.)

Orgone therapy involves circulating the natural flow of energy around the body by pushing and pounding and pinching various places in the body to loosen the bodily armour (defense mechanisms) that build up due to life's traumas and layer like scar tissue. The body adapts, but is locked.

The trauma that Orson's Bean confided to in the book was how badly he felt when his parents got rid of his dog when he was about ten and that he never cried when his mother died. It was also obvious that he felt unfulfilled sexually and that was largely the reason behind his entering into orgone therapy. Three and a half years of orgone therapy once a week accomplished more than what ten years of psychoanalysis did for him. He felt released.

Orgone therapy involves the manipulation of what has come to be called putative (non-measurable) energy or chi. It can be consider a category of energy medicine and is cathartic in nature.

See also Psychiatric home remedies.