Recovery from "schizophrenia" and other "psychotic disorders"

A great deal of research shows that one of the more common effects of child sexual abuse is “auditory hallucinations” or hearing voices and other experiences which tend to get diagnosed as “schizophrenia.  Yet, the US federal government, on an official website, assists mental health workers in telling people diagnosed with schizophrenia that nothing anyone did (and so this would include nothing a child molester did) had anything to do with the person’s later mental health problems.

So first kids get molested, then the mental health system, collaborating with the federal government, comes along and tells them that their “biochemical imbalance” is what caused the problem, and that the sexual abuse had nothing to do with it!  Excuse me if I think that is disgusting…..

The exact language on the SAMHSA National Mental Health Informtion Center website  includes the following:

“What causes schizophrenia?

“Schizophrenia is nobody’s fault. This means that you did not cause the disorder, and neither did your family members or anyone else. Scientists believe that the symptoms of schizophrenia are caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. Chemicals called “neurotransmitters” send messages in the brain. When they are out of balance, they can cause the brain to send messages that contain wrong information.

“Scientists do not know what causes this chemical imbalance, but they believe that whatever causes it happens before birth….”

Is it too much to ask that the federal government, and the mental health system, quit collaborating with child molesters to blame the brains of victims for problems that are actually caused by abuse?

Not everyone who is diagnosed with schizophrenia was molested or otherwise abused in childhood.  There are a variety of ways people end up with the troubles that get this diagnosis, and it probably is true that some are born with increased vulnerability (just as some are born with increased vulnerability to sunburn.)  But it’s an atrocity when people paid to “help” instead provide gross misinformation, and attempt to convince people who often were victims of abuse that this abuse has nothing to do with their current mental and emotional difficulties.

In an article titled “ Effects of Culture on Recovery From Transient Psychosis” the author asks why premodern cultures studied by the World Health Organization had 10 times the rate of acute onset psychosis followed by full recovery as that found in more modern cultures.

The author contends that “Traditional treatment in a premodern society usually consists of a prescribed period of rest; sympathy; heightened social support; alleviation of underlying social stresses; exploration of alternative coping
strategies; and various types of traditional healing rituals, sometimes lasting days or weeks, and frequently resulting in the full recovery of the patient.”  

While “modern medical experts” make fun of “primitive” perspectives about spirits and the use of “witch doctors” to address them, it seems that any truly “evidence based” approach to understanding psychosis would be more interested in figuring out how and why they were so effective.

Contrast the “primitive” approach with the relative isolation and drugging imposed on the newly diagnosed psychotic person in in a modern culture.  The person is identified as “biochemically imbalanced” rather than overcome by stressful life events, no attempts are made to really understand him or her, the experience is identified as an illness with no spiritual consequences, and no coping tools are suggested beyond taking pills as prescribed.

I am reminded of an early drug trial on antipsychotics.  They had 4 groups, three groups were each on a different antipsychotic, while the fourth group was a placebo.  After about 6 weeks, each of the drug groups was doing better than the placebo group. But when they came back and checked on how everybody was doing after a year, they found that the group that had been started on placebo was doing better than any of the three groups started on drugs.  Instead of concluding that there was something wrong with rushing people into drugs however, the experimenters hypothesized that the group initially started on placebo was only doing better because they had been noticed by others to be doing worse because of not being on drugs, and this had elicited sympathy and concern from the people who noticed, and it was the extra care that they received that resulted in them doing better when measured a year later.  Of course, it never occurred to the experimenters that giving a drug to people that made them seem like they didn’t need extra support, resulting in them not getting the support they really needed, so that they would be doing worse later, may not have been a good idea.  (Not to mention that more drugs meant more risk of nasty side effects as well.)  And so the modern era of drugging and lack of empathy was begun. More »

People often become psychotic because they face a problem or set of problems that appears overwhelming to them.  Then what happens is they get tricked into thinking that the “psychosis” is their primary problem, when really the primary problem is their difficulty in facing their original problems in a direct way. 

So for example, people will start seeing their problem as a need to “stop the voices” or to quit seeing images, or quit having violent impulses, or whatever.  (Trying to hard to “get rid of” such mental experiences often just amplifies them, as I’ve written about elsewhere.)  The mental health system tends to jump in and agree that “psychosis” is the real problem, and prescribes drugs to stop it, often failing to notice when the drugs themselves become disabling or ruinous to a person’s health.  All of this ignores the fact that “psychosis” never was the primary problem, but rather, it was the need to face problems in living more directly.

I just read an article about a therapist who was good at just this common sense approach of helping people face their problems directly.  He wasn’t opposed to all use of medication, but thought it was a horrible substitute for real assistance, which he saw as joining with people in helping them face issues that they weren’t ready to deal with alone.  See this article about the work of Dr Elvin Semrad.