Recovery: Why is it being redefined to mean “doing better but still mentally ill”?
A lot of efforts to transform an often oppressive mental health have focused on “recovery” and making the mental health system more “recovery focused.” Many agencies have integrated the notion of recovery into their practice, and if the use of this word were a measure of progress, we would be well on our way to system transformation! Unfortunately, what seems to be happening is that as the word “recovery” is used more and more, it seems to mean less and less. I know someone for example who is on heavy doses of an antipsychotic as well as other medications, lives in a foster care home, and spends most of his daytime hours in a mental health day treatment program, yet is assured by his case managers that he is “recovered.”
I believe that recovery remains a useful concept, but also that it will only give us leverage to change the system if we give it a clear and powerful definition, and resist efforts to water down that definition.
I would like to propose the following definition: Recovery means having regained a meaningful life, no longer having a mental health disability, and no longer being in need of any sort of mental health treatment. It does not mean that the person for certain will never need mental health treatment again in the future – the person might – but this is also a possibility for people who have never been diagnosed. It also does not mean that achieving a full recovery is the only way to have a meaningful life; instead, it is important to note that a person may find a meaningful life all the way along the journey to full recovery, whether or not that full recovery is ever accomplished.
(Recovery as defined above is a real possibility for people diagnosed with mental disorders. “Schizophrenia” is the diagnosis with the worst outcomes on average, yet when Harding did a long term outcome study of people who had been hospitalized for years with this diagnosis, she found that a third or so met this kind of criteria for recovery. It is unclear how many more might make such recoveries if we geared our mental health system toward helping people accomplish them.)
When we recover from a broken bone, we don’t still need a cast. We can eventually use the body part containing the formerly broken bone and it can eventually become as strong as it was before. When we recover from a cold, we eventually transition from “recovering” to “have recovered” at which point the cold is history. That’s a common sense understanding of the term “recovery.” But somehow when people talk about recovery from a mental condition, this common sense understanding goes out the window. Instead, there may be talk about people being “recovered” even though they still seem to require professional treatment such as medications, or there is talk about how one should expect to “always be in recovery.” What’s going on with that?
A number of things, it turns out. Pressure to define mental health “recovery” as something other than true and full recovery comes from a number of quarters, with a variety of different motivations. In what follows, I will attempt to outline most of these motivations and then show why each one leads to problems.
Historical connections with the physical disability movement
Some people see “mental disability” as similar to physical disability, and so seek to use the word “recovery” in a way similar to that used in the physical disability movement. In the case of physical disability, it is often clearly known that full physical ability cannot be expected to be regained. To inspire hope in such cases, it was found helpful to refocus on fully recovering a meaningful life, which could be done despite the fact that the physical ability was not going to be regained. In such cases, redefining “recovery” to mean regaining a meaningful life made a lot of sense, because that helped people focus on functioning at the peak of their potential, within the limits of whatever physical disability existed.
However, mental health “disabilities” are different from many physical disabilities, in that as far as we know, it is always possible for the person with the mental health disability to regain their full ability to be mentally healthy, while for many physical disabilities, this is not true. In the case of someone with a physical problem where recovery from the problem itself is possible, it clearly would be wrong to define “recovery” as meaning just regaining a meaningful life, while neglecting the possibility of recovering from the physical problem itself. For example, a woman with a physical injury that impairs her ability to walk may be able to regain a meaningful life by using a wheelchair, but if she might actually regain her ability to walk as well if given directed effort and therapy, then we would also want her to know that and to be given support toward the physical recovery. Similarly, the person with a mental health problem from which the person might recover deserves to know of the possibility, so that effort and assistance might be offered toward this accomplishment.
Efforts to focus directly on reducing mental health symptoms are often unhelpful
For a number of reasons, efforts to directly reduce mental health symptoms and so directly eliminate the “disorder” are either unhelpful or actually aggravate a person’s problems. An explanation of why this is so is available at http://recoveryfromschizophrenia.org/2009/08/how-to-recover-by-quitting-your-efforts-to-get-rid-of-symptoms/ In recognition of this fact, many consumers and others have supported efforts to redefine recovery as achieving a meaningful life despite the presence of mental health problems.
However well intentioned this may be however, it creates the impression that full recovery cannot be expected, and that one will always be a person with mental health problems struggling to find a meaningful life in competition with people who do not have mental health problems. Such an impression can create unnecessary hopelessness. A better approach might be to recognize that currently one might be better off accepting the mental health problems and refocusing on achieving a meaningful life, but also recognizing that in doing so one may possibly shrink one’s mental health problems to the point they are no greater than the problems in mental and emotional regulation experienced by all human beings.
Wanting to reduce stigma by allowing more people to feel they have overcome their “mental illness”
When recovery is defined in a common sense sort of way, as true and full recovery, then only those who have really overcome their mental health disorder related disability and need for treatment can define themselves as “recovered.” This means that all those who have not yet accomplished those objectives may be defined as “not yet fully recovered” and so may feel more vulnerable to stigma, or the sense they are “less than,” due to the absence of full recovery. So one approach has been to attempt to remedy this problem by defining recovery very broadly, so that as many people as possible can identify as having “recovered” rather than being “still mentally ill.”
Unfortunately, this approach creates more serious problems than it solves. By redefining ”recovery” as less than full elimination of the mental health problem, it creates the impression that full elimination of the problem is impossible, and so reduces hope and efforts toward real recovery. Further, once mental health workers and others learn that “recovery” means “still having the disorder but just functioning a bit better” then “being recovered” comes to mean “still mentally ill” and stigma continues anyway.
A better approach would be to work on reducing stigma as a whole, for everyone who has been diagnosed with a problem. One way to do this would be to encourage less focus on and less use of labels and more attention to the specific problems, and the specific abilities, of given individuals. With this approach, people can be dealt with respectfully in a way that matches where they are at all the way along the journey to recovery. And the message that a full recovery is possible can again be offered to provide hope to those on that journey.
Concern that a belief in full recovery will lead to the taking of inappropriate risks
When the criteria for full recovery includes “no longer needing treatment” there is then the concern that some people will be encouraged to abandon treatment too soon, while such treatment would actually still be beneficial for them. But if recovery is defined just based on functioning in the world, despite the presence of continued illness or disability, then this temptation is removed. With such a redefinition, it becomes possible that a person still depending on medications or other treatment, yet functioning well in the world, can be defined as fully recovered.
But defining a person as “fully recovered” while that person still needs treatment creates the impression that no further recovery is possible, which reduces hope that the treatment will eventually become unnecessary. If a person still needing a brace or crutch after a physical injury was told he or she was “fully recovered” the natural implication would be to believe that efforts for further recovery, resulting in eventual elimination of the need for the brace, could not be expected to be successful. When the treatment a person is depending on is potentially quite toxic, such as the antipsychotic medications, then defining a person as “fully recovered” who still depends on such medications will naturally result in the impression that further recovery is impossible, which in turn may result in unnecessary damage or even death as the person fails to even attempt further recovery that might eliminate the need for the medication. And just as dependence on a brace or crutch might limit physical performance, there is the danger for example that depending on medications such as the antipsychotics may unnecessarily limit mental and emotional functioning.
A better approach is to address the risk of treatment being abandoned too soon, not by redefining recovery, but simply by addressing this risk directly. It can be pointed out that abandoning a necessary form of treatment too soon might actually increase impairment and slow recovery. At the same time, the need to take some risks by experimenting with gradually withdrawing various treatments, at appropriate times, can be acknowledged to be a natural part of the recovery journey. Consumers can then be encouraged to make thoughtful decisions about when to continue and when to experiment with discontinuing treatments, using collaborative discussions with mental health professionals to think through relevant issues.
“You will always be recovering” – concern about underlying vulnerability
Another risk is that a person may see themselves as “recovered” and yet still have an underlying vulnerability to a recurrence of the disorder, resulting in relapse when the person fails to attend to the vulnerability. One way to defend against this possibility is to convince the person that he or she should forget about becoming “recovered” and accept instead an identity as “always recovering” which includes continued vigilance for the possibility of relapse. This form of thinking is common in the substance abuse field; once people stop using the substance, they are trained to always see themselves as more vulnerable than others to falling back into addiction, and so to see themselves as “always recovering” rather than “recovered.”
It is important to note that there is no clear objective criteria for how to distinguish a person’s precise level of vulnerability to either substance abuse or to mental and emotional problems, so there is no objective way to distinguish a person who might better think of herself as still “recovering” and another person who could safely think of herself as “recovered” and now no more vulnerable than the average person.
In the substance abuse field, the thinking is that it is usually better to be safe than sorry; since the treatment methods themselves tend to be non-toxic, if a person ends up feeling they are “still recovering” unnecessarily, the costs are likely to be minimal, compared to the risk of slipping back into addiction. Also, as long as one is doing well on the objective measure of how well one has escaped the active addiction – years of sobriety – there is comparatively little stigma attached to being defined as in some sense “still recovering.”
In the mental health field however, the notion that one can at best be expected to be “always recovering” is much more hazardous, and creates a murkiness that allows much of the real hope for recovery to be obscured. For one thing, if the expectation is simply that the person will be “always recovering” then the notion that psychiatric medications may have to be part of that effort at recovery is easy to introduce, and a person’s hope to ever be off dangerous medications may be dimmed. Also, the notion that one is “still recovering” from a mental illness implies that one is to some extent still mentally ill, a notion that can be used to justify lowered expectations for the person so identified.
It is true that if a person who in the past has had a mental health problem ceases to care for his or her mental health, there is a good chance that this person will experience a recurrence of the mental health problem. But a person who has recovered to the point where that he or she does not require treatment, may only need to do the same sorts of things to sustain mental health that other people, never diagnosed, also need to do to sustain their mental health. So rather than insist that people who have previously been diagnosed see themselves as “always recovering,” it is possible instead to notice how healthy mental habits are important to everyone. Early in recovery, developing healthy habits may take extensive conscious effort and support, but eventually such habits may be as strong (or even possibly stronger) than they are for healthy people who never experienced a breakdown. Framing this possibility is important, because it nurtures belief in the realistic possibility that a previously diagnosed person might eventually compete in various arenas where mental health is important, on equal footing with people who never have had a mental health diagnosis.
Concern for profit
When a full recovery is seen as a possible and desirable goal, then a shift to the elimination of the need for mental health treatment in a person’s life is also seen as a desirable goal. But such shifts reduce the chance for profits in the mental health industry, which does best when people become “consumers for life.” Pharmaceutical companies, organized solely around the goal of profits, naturally oppose any message implying that the need for their product might be eliminated.
It is critical though that the mental health system be readjusted to focus on the wellbeing of the people it treats, and that perverse incentives of various kinds be removed. In particular, research and education needs to be taken out of the hands of the pharmaceutical companies, so that the focus goes back to what is good for people instead of profit.
Worry of professionals that they will be seen as incompetent
When crisis occurs and emotional arousal is high in all parties, there is considerable pressure to have the “right” solution. In our society, this is expected to be provided by trained professionals who have many years of college education which is supposed to train them in precisely what to do in such a situation. This puts extreme pressure on mental health professionals who respond to a mental health crisis and to all of the confusion around it. The mental health professional may not be able to understand what is going on in the mind of the person at the center of the crisis, what caused it, or how to really help the person. One way for the professional to handle the pressure on him or her is just to reduce expectations, and a key way of doing that is to define the person at the center of the crisis as having a “biological illness” that results in thinking and behavior that is “not understandable” and from whom the best that can be expected is the modest improvement that is likely from the treatment the professional knows how to provide, psychiatric medications. Full recovery can be defined as impossible, and recovery can be redefined as adjusting to and getting support in “living with the illness.”
All this leaves the professional defined as quite competent, and no longer in crisis due to not knowing what to do. The problem is that the person at the center of the crisis, the diagnosed person, is now likely to be in a state of hopelessness, defined as biologically ill, not understandable, and with no hope of a full recovery.
What would work better? First, it would help if mental health professionals had more competent training, so they were more capable of understanding people in the middle of a crisis, (for example people experiencing “psychosis”), and able to provide assistance other than medications. (Those not motivated or inclined to develop such increased understanding might better be encouraged to seek other occupations.) The hiring of more “peer professionals” would also be helpful, as these are often people with naturally higher levels of understanding due to their own experience.
But even with the best training we might provide, and selection of the most competent and caring individuals we might hire, there would still be much happening in many a mental health crisis that would go beyond the ability of the professional to quickly understand or resolve. What is critical at such a points is for the professional to be able to admit his or her uncertainty about what is going on and about how to resolve it, without pretending to know that there is no way the consumer could be understood, and without pretending to know that recovery is impossible. This means that the professional must lower expectations about him or herself, stepping out of the role of someone who “really knows what is going on” and adopting the lesser role of “someone who has some training that might help some, but only to a point.” Here it is the professional’s willingness to be seen as less competent than others might expect, that creates the space for hope that the diagnosed person may have more possibility for improvement, including hope for full recovery. The fact that the diagnosed person has not recovered at any given point may for example be due to not having yet received the sort of help which might be effective, rather than due to that person’s intrinsic hopelessness.
So what we need are professionals who have hope that their clients can be understood and helped to fully recover, and who are willing to and capable of thinking deeply about how to assist with that. Further, these professionals must be able to accept the moments when they don’t know what to do to make such a recovery happen, without attempting to resolve that uncertainty by redefining full recovery as impossible.
Conclusion:
There are no good reasons to allow mental health recovery to be redefined as in effect “doing a bit better but still mentally ill.” Nor are there good reasons to define it as a goal that can be approached but never reached, as in notions about a person “always recovering.” Instead, we need to insist that real and full mental health recovery be understood to the best of our knowledge to be possible for everyone. Further, we need to insist that all mental health treatment be geared to support progress toward such a recovery, rather than geared to maintain people as lifetime consumers of mental health services.
Notes:
1. Some people resent the notion of mental health “recovery” because they feel that their only problem in the first place was having been labeled as having a problem. Certainly, there are some people who get pulled into the mental health system who would have done fine had they been left alone: in such cases there never was a disability or need for treatment, so what is needed in that situation is more of an “escape” from the mental health system, rather than a recovery from any mental or emotional problem.
2. Strangely, the effort to define people as “recovered” who still need treatment, results in mental health professionals telling clients they have recovered even as they turn around and diagnose the same clients with mental disorders so they can bill insurance companies for the treatments still being provided. Only in “mental health” do people receive treatments for disorders they have already recovered from…….
{ 36 comments… read them below or add one }
If one is “always recovering” from substance abuse, one is expected to live with a certain fear of “slipping” or relapse; and one is expected (for the most part) to be a part of the “recovery community” (i.e., 12-step programs, their rules, their mandates, and their philosophy of always being recovering). Thus, if one is in fact recovering and does NOT participate in the pseudo-mandated and culturally recognized “program,” one may be seen as a heretic, or have one’s recovery questioned.
In a similar vein, naming someone as “recovered” while still taking medications, etc (as you pointed out), is, in fact, the result of someone in a more dominant and powerful position making the judgment that this is the best a person will ever be able to do; and that they must keep taking psychiatric poison drugs, going to day care, etc, to have the limited life that they might be experiencing — and should never expect to do better. It is extraordinarily patriarchal and fascist! But that is in fact the very nature of contemporary culture and the corporatist who control the world.
Your comments on the economics of the situation ring true too. So much profit is generated by the “recovery industry” as well as the “consumers of criminal justice” and, of course, the ever popular permanent war economy that there are very active (and often violent) forces that would prevent us from otherwise transitioning to a different stance, such as the one you suggest that the “recovering formerly mentally ill person” should be drug free and stigma-free to pursue a new and better life filled with high expectation and dignity.
Thanx for your thoughts.
Schizophrenia does not exist. As a consequence people cannot and do not recover from schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a psychiatric label for a pattern of thoughts and behaviors that permeate from a system of beliefs.
To complicate matters further when the original beliefs are skewed further by the mythical belief that someone has schizophrenia, promoted as a brain disease of unknown etiology with no cure, the “problem” grows rather than moving toward being alleviated and the beliefs become more constraining, more resigned, more rigid and hopeless. Neuroleptic drugs aid in consolidating the validity of the diagnosis and its effect on the limited belief system.
Alas what is the individual recovering from then? He or she at best can be recovering from the effects of their limiting beliefs. The solution then is to assist the individual in altering the belief system and helping him or her to discover that what they believe is a matter of choice. How they feel and how they behave is a consequence of the actions they take or do not take, and the results those actions achieve or fail to achieve, inspired by their beliefs. As Harry Stack Sullivan observed it is far easier to act your way into a new way of feeling than to feel your way into a new way of acting.
The problem is the problem is not the problem. Schizophrenia is not the problem. Indeed psychosis is not the problem. The problem, inasmuch as we wish to label it a problem, is the belief system that gave rise, in the presence of environmental stimulus, to a defensive response that resulted in the delusional, hallucinatory, and paranoid thoughts and behaviors in the first place.
We cannot help the individual recover because that person has nothing to recover from. At best we can help the person distinguish their limiting beliefs, how they may have originated, and much more importantly help them understand that these beliefs are myths and that what one believes and how one acts is all within the realm of personal choice. How we act determines whom we are being and how we think and feel.
I am a Certified Peer Support Specialist.
I will be helping people “recover” from the Mental Health Medical Model.
Hi Felice,
Great to hear that you will be doing this important work! People like you, acting and speaking out, is most likely to be the thing that will finally change the system! (That is also the contention of the really important book I’m reading right now, Doctoring the Mind: Is Our Current Treatment of Mental Illness Really Any Good?)
In preparation for a discussion with a friend who is an advocate of NAMI and whose son has been diagnosed as BPD I had a look at the NAMI website.
I was amused with the section on schizophrenia. It is not amusing however that the false logic summarized there forms the basis for treatment for individuals diagnosed as having the condition.
NAMI says:
“Schizophrenia is a serious and challenging medical illness…” What classifies it as medical? The term medical versus mental appears to validate a biological origin and justifies a biochemical treatment regime.
“Scientists still do not know the specific causes of schizophrenia, but research has shown that the brains of people with schizophrenia are different from the brains of people without the illness.”
“While there is no cure for schizophrenia, it is a treatable and manageable illness. ”
“Schizophrenia is not caused by bad parenting or personal weakness.”
Hmmmm…If scientists still do not know the specific causes of schizophrenia how can they be certain that it is not caused by bad parenting or personal weakness? How can they declare that there is no cure when people have in fact recovered fully/ been cured?
And, ” Antipsychotics help relieve the positive symptoms of schizophrenia by helping to correct an imbalance in the chemicals that enable brain cells to communicate with each other.” Pure speculation and conjecture I would say.
It’s understandable that any poor soul faced with this level of misinformation can’t help to adopt an apathetic outlook and fall into a predominance of negative symptoms when subjected to their drug induced tranquilized state. What I’ve read there is enough to depress anyone!
Hi Alan,
I think you nailed it about the distortions in the NAMI description, and the likely effect on clients. Not too surprising though, given that most of NAMI’s funding comes from drug companies.
The notion that “schizophrenia” is an entirely biological affair took another blow today, as news came out that many of the brain differences that have a greater than average likelihood of being present in someone diagnosed with schizophrenia, can be affected or even reversed by changing environment. See “Brain Changes in Schizophrenia Respond to Non-Drug Therapy” If just a bit of therapy can have this kind of effect on the brain, that means many other sorts of environmental causes are probably having effects as well.
Ron: I had a look at the article, and although the findings of the study are really nice and encouraging (for someone who clearly favorites therapy to drug “treatment”), there’s something that bugs me.
“Progressive loss of gray matter, frontal hypofunction, and decreased white matter integrity have been consistently observed in patients with schizophrenia,” the article quotes one of the researchers. Now, I’m not a neurologist, my knowledge of the anatomy of the brain, respectively of the scientifically correct terms referring to specific areas, is limited, but I do know that major tranquilizers decrease neurotransmitter activity in the frontal lobes, and I think, this is 101-knowledge for any neurologist/psychopharmacologist. Nevertheless, these guys, who ought to know better, attribute “frontal hypofunction” to “schizophrenia”, not to the drugs probably all of their study participants are taking. The article even says: “The resulting deficits do not respond to antipsychotic drugs,… ” WTF?! How could substances that by definition de crease activity in a specific region of the brain ever be expected to, at the same time, also increase activity in these very same regions?? IMO, there’s something really really wrong here. (And I’m sure, a trained neurologist might be able to find a whole lot of additional inconsistencies.)
I wish, they’d do a study comparing this cognitive enhancement therapy (and somehow its “innovative cognitive exercises and psychoeducation” as well as its “weekly homework assignments” has me cringe… ) to trauma-focussed therapy, or something like Soteria or Open Dialog, preferably with participants who don’t take any drugs in the latter group. I bet, they’d be somewhat surprized… (or not, because I think, many of them know, those bastards).
Hi Marian,
Getting around researchers paid by drug companies is like being around political spin doctors: you have to step back and try to figure out what the facts were before the spin.
To start with, they say that certain losses of brain tissue have been found “consistently” in patients with schizophrenia: I believe the facts on that are that it has consistently been found that ON AVERAGE people diagnosed with schizophrenia have such losses compared with people not so diagnosed, some diagnosed with schizophrenia do not have those differences, some not diagnosed do have them.
As for the charge that maybe the drugs cause the losses, they tend to point out that there is at least a bit of evidence showing some such losses, on average, in people diagnosed before they start drugs. Such changes are likely caused by things like trauma, stress, and avoidance and withdrawal, which then only get worse after a person is started on drugs – with some exceptions, because sometimes people stress less after getting on antipsychotics and may become more active, so for some, the antipsychotics may be both helping and hurting.
Since they can point to some negative brain differences before starting drugs, and then see more negative differneces after the person is on drugs for awhile, and since lots of money comes from drug companies, they naturally conclude that the drugs are simply failing to stop changes caused by “the illness.” They ignore the studies in monkeys, who don’t have “schizophrenia” but show many of the negative differences just as a result of taking the drugs.
Similarly, most reports will say that the antipsychotics fail to improve “negative symptoms” and will ignore data that the drugs induce negative symptoms in many people who never had them before. (Sometimes they may reduce negative symptoms for some people, to make the story more complex.) Other reports will actually claim that atypicals improve negative symptoms more than typicals do – and will simply cite data showing people on typicals having more negative symptoms than those on atypicals, without even considering the possibility that the typicals are simply CAUSING more negative symptoms than do the atypicals.
I share your curiosity about the exact nature of this “cognitive enhancement therapy” and wonder how the study would have worked had they used something else. One possible positive about the cognitive enhancement therapy was the way they paired people up within it – they may have structured it so that a lot of what was going on was really peer support.
Ron: Yes. To everything.
Also I’ve seen critiques of studies that compare typicals to atypicals (side effects etc.) pointing out that more often than not participants are given much higher doses of the typicals, so, objectively, scientifically, the results aren’t really comparable. But, of course, these studies aren’t meant that much to really compare than they are meant to make a case for the atypicals…
I think the relevant point that needs attention arising from the article is that psychotherapy offers the possibility of improving/ promoting recovery from the condition.
The most interesting fact derived from brain imaging observations is that psychotherapy clearly alters brain chemistry and structure. This is the essence of the article.
The scientists have observed that without the benefit of psychotherapy their is a loss in gray matter. The article suggests that these losses occur with or without neuroleptic drugs. It appears logical that introducing chemicals into the body system that target the brain will result in deterioration of particular brain functions. It also appears plausible that absent altering the mental, emotional, and psychosocial aspects of the human employing psychotherapy that deterioration may also occur.
This is very much consistent with observations that responses to stress accelerates or results in other illnesses such as coronary disease, cancer, etc. It seems entirely realistic that stress responses, neurosis and psychosis would accelerate diseases that affect the brain.
I wish however to be clear in the distinction that neurotic or psychotic behaviors are not brain diseases but are human responses to stress and psychological trauma. In all instances unmanaged stress responses are precipitous and not the disease itself.
I have just come upon your website and am glad to hear someone else saying how the socalled “recovery” movement is so misleading. I have in my circle complained about the same thing you write about – how can a person be recovered, which means healed, when that person is still taking drugs? If they were recovered/healed, they wouldnt need the meds.
But I have to rewrite some of the above. With the way the police harass people with mental illness, a person who is recovered still has to cope with the stigma of having been medicated. So someone who might have actually recovered is still subject to being brought to a psychiatric unit or emergency room just because of a history. This has happened to me. So by being brought to a psychiatric unit can still lead to medication. And it might not matter how a person is behaving. I was accused of talking to trees while out for a run. I had leaned against a tree when a car full of elderly people rolled slowly by and I said hello. They called the police and told them I was talking to trees, so the police came and I was taken to a hospital, and forcibly held down – while I was asleep – and given not one, not two, but three injections, I was out for five hours. How can a person recover in this society? The psychiatrists say we need these drugs for life. I want to leave the country over all that has happened to me.
Hi Toodles,
You make a good point that a person can recover from a mental or emotional problem, but still have to deal with other people who don’t recognize the recovery. So I have heard that sometimes finding a way to get that recognition can be as difficult as the recovery itself.
Perhaps you live in the wrong place? Here in the Western US, one can talk to trees and even hug them, without being seen as all that abnormal. (I was at a retreat with a bunch of mental health professionals, including some psychiatrists – well probably the most progressive ones in the US – and we all hugged an ancient ponderosa pine.)
Ron, I think that no matter how “normal” it otherwise is regarded by everyone to, for instance, talk to trees, and hug them, if someone is known to have a history of “mental illness”, virtually everything they do and say may have others panic and conclude “OMG! Symptoms! S/he is going psychotic/manic/suicidal/whatever, again! Let’s call the cops/get him/her to the nearest ER as fast as possible!” And I see people who identify as “mentally ill” do the same to themselves, watching and analysing everything they do, say, feel, and, well, actually trying to find a pathology with it. And they get encouraged to do so by the system (cf. for instance these “mood journals”, or whatever they call it, for people labelled with a “mood disorder”, and being “psycho-educated” to recognize one’s “symptoms” in general), just as the system engages in an outstanding effort to scare the sh*t out of everybody, not just the labelled, with its propaganda that can have you believe any thought, emotion, or reaction could be a “symptom” of one or the other “mental illness”. The effect is about the same as that of first-year med students reading symptom lists: “OMG! Was that stomach pain on Tuesday really just because I had 3 Happy Meals in a row, or am I maybe developing ulcers, or what is worse?!”… The only difference is that you can test objectively for ulcers, or what is worse, but not for “mental illness”. So, you can scare anyone into having a “mental illness”, or believing someone else has. And that’s what they’re doing. And if that someone else already has a label, it almost needs no additional scare tactics to convince everybody else that whatever they say or do is a “symptom”.
BTW, some time ago, I read a blog post by someone, who identifies as “bipolar”, asking how she could know which of her thoughts, emotions, and reactions were herself, and which were the “illness”. Interesting question…
Marian,
Your life experience adds so much insight for the rest of us. Thank you!
Interestingly, what you indicate occurs exactly as you have described it. My son went through a period where he scared himself shitless with every thought, every action, and interaction. He finally appeared to have worked through it. At the same time, while I maintained a confident front I was forever questioning myself and him. Do I need to hit the panic button and if so when? What is he capable of? etc. etc.
He has just come through a period of psychosis without psychiatrists, without meds, and in opposition to every other family member but me telling him to seek psychiatric help. By and large, with a bit of support from me, he has done it on his own.
His views are very much consistent with yours. I think the biggest problem is the context we create with the “mentally ill” patient. It is a label and one that sticks forever. As time passes it is less pervasive however it’s always still there.
Marian, thanks for the great comment. I think you sum up really well some of the hazards in thinking of “mental illness” as a thing that can cause problems, which has been proven to exist within oneself! Since it is kind of mythical, there is no way to convincingly get rid of it, so one can be haunted by it forever.
On the other hand, I think it can be helpful for people to keep an eye out for a tendency to go to the same extremes that caused problems before, as long as one doesn’t get hypervigilant about it. In this case one isn’t watching out for “mental illness” doing something to oneself, but rather just watching to make sure some human phenomena doesn’t go out of control and cause problems as it already did once. I’m thinking right now of Jim Gottstein, who has learned to watch out for times he gets so excited about something like a legal case that he stops sleeping: at this point he knows to stop and do whatever it takes to get some sleep, because otherwise he might let his mental state get way unbalanced & end up in a hospital again. I don’t think Jim thinks of himself as “ill,” just reasonably cautious.
I think it’s a balance, to watch for trouble, to have reasonable self doubt, but to avoid too much watching, too much self doubt. And everyone has to find the balance that works for them. I think it’s a balance that is easier to find if one sees the mental troubles one has had as themselves just a potentially temporary loss of balance that can be regained and that one can eventually become skillful in keeping without a lot of stressing about it. Because too much stressing about it can itself cause a loss of balance.
Ron, I agree. But I think, it’s something everybody ought to do, and I’d call it “learning from one’s experiences”. Unfortunately, if you believe your experiences aren’t really experiences, but symptoms of an illness, you won’t learn much, if anything…
This is a very interesting thread and I am glad to see it is still being read. I agree with Ron’s description of recovery. However too few people fully recover from any kind of mental illness, especially from severe schizophrenia. What causes schizophrenia? How can it be healed? What happens neurologically in someone who recovers fully from schizophrenia? I hope aspects of Daniel’s experiences will shed light on these questions.
My son was diagnosed as schizophrenic when he was 16 and it took me more than a decade to figure out whether or not the diagnosis was legitimate, what the doctors thought that meant, where substance abuse and medications fit into the picture, and what schizophrenia really is and what can heal it. I learned that schizophrenia is a physiological condition but that it doesn’t start in the brain; it starts in the ear, specifically the right ear. The preoccupation of neuroscience and psychiatry with the brain has kept those people from discovering the source of the symptoms they simply suppress with chemicals, most of which affect the ears making their patients sicker in the process.
Daniel was dyslexic. His dyslexia was spectacularly healed at a Tomatis Method Listening Centre in Toronto in 1997 as he listened to electronically filtered high-frequency music. Simultaneously, by the same method, I was healed of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). A few days later, Dan did drugs again (he had been using marijuana and hallucinogens and alcohol) and had a sustained psychotic break. He was hospitalized and massively medicated and diagnosed as “hopelessly schizophrenic.” At first, I assumed the doctors knew what they were doing. That misapprehension took a beating until my confidence in psychiatry evaporated completely. However, Dan’s addictions kept me preoccupied with that aspect of his behaviour, because time and again his psychosis was induced by illicit substances. I did learn that his medications were as great a problem as his counter-culture habits: antipsychotics also induce psychosis.
Daniel kept reaching out for music. Slow and stupid as I am, it took quite a while to figure out why he said several times as he was sliding into another episode of schizophrenia, “I’m dyslexic again.” I thought he meant two different things were happening to him at the same time. He meant that both conditions felt the same to him. And I would eventually be able to show how they are the same — in kind but not in degree.
Finally, during his 2006 episode, he picked up the headphones I used to listen to Mozart violins to keep my CFS from recurring. I saw his psychotic symptoms gradually fade and his brain function return to what we call “normal.” The same kind of high-frequency music that had healed his dyslexia and my CFS had healed his schizophrenia.
But that was not Dan’s baseline for what felt normal. What felt most normal to him was the condition of dyslexia that he had been born with due to his exposure to extremely loud noise in utero. He kept trying to reproduce that dyslexic “normal” with drugs —and many if not most of his subculture friends also had been dyslexic and remained so without ever knowing what normal feels like. Dan succeeded in reverting to his dyslexic condition, but would eventually get out of the range of dyslexia into bipolarity II, then I, and then full-blown schizophrenia. Those conditions are just a few of the syndromes on the spectrum of ear dysfunction. If I had understood any of this, I could have helped him to find our definition of “normal” more satisfying than his, long before.
I had measured aspects of Dan’s behaviour, especially his fluctuating levels of cognition, during his episodes of schizophrenia. He had higher cognizance — less confusion — every two minutes in a cycle that never stopped. No one could explain these fluctuations to me. I learned that Dan could be stabilized on 1/96 of just one of the meds he was given in hospital — and even that may have been too much later on. When he regained normal brain function he also quit all meds.
During his last episode (2008), I decided to try to find out what caused some of his behaviour. I quickly discovered those fluctuations in levels of cognition were his two cerebral hemispheres “trading places.” Every two minutes one, then the other, hemisphere was in control. The left hemisphere is the location of language, rationality, and self-control and I could tell when it was dominant even if its abilities were quite impaired. As Dan had reached out for healing music before, this time he had the headphones on every day for at least an hour. I could see his symptoms changing, and now I knew why and how they changed — because his left hemisphere was getting more and more of the sound energy via his right ear to increase its dominance. That dominance allowed his two hemispheres gradually to integrate more normally. Hemispheric dominance is essential to rational language, normal beliefs (as they are acculturated), and the capacity for learning self-control. Left-dominance also co-ordinates a great many of the body’s systems.
We can teach children how to control the muscles of the eyelid, which also moves involuntarily; it is harder to teach control of the stapedius muscle that similarly protects the inner ear involuntarily. However, that happens according to an inner sense of relaxation and tension in the whole body which also affects the tiniest muscle in the body in the middle ear. That control allows us to “disengage” the hemispheres when falling asleep, for example, which in normal people is the state of consciousness closest to psychosis. Different states of consciousness are different levels of hemispheric integration controlled unconsciously or semi-consciously in the middle ear. However, the schizophrenic, bipolar, etc. individual has lost that volitional control. Fortunately, there is a lot of evidence to suggest the middle ear’s stapedius muscle can in many or perhaps even in most cases be exercised back into fitness.
Talking therapy can sometimes motivate the person with a damaged stapedius muscle to strain to pay attention. Attention is the condition of left-brain dominance and people who learn to listen are learning to attend. Simply trying to pay attention may gradually exercise the stapedius muscle to the point where it can become spontaneously reactive to ambient sound. That is the point at which left-dominance becomes self-perpetuating and defines what most people think of as “normal.” When Daniel was recovering from an episode of psychosis he would approach normal — but not be quite normal — for several weeks. When the stapedius became spontaneously reactive he would very suddenly attain normal cerebral integration. Just as I had very suddenly experienced healing from chronic fatigue syndrome while listening to high-frequency music. It looks and feels as though someone has thrown a switch on in the head when the stapedius muscle starts to move spontaneously.
Some of Daniel’s behaviour during psychosis was like that of the dual brain patient whose hemispheric bridge (corpus callosum) has been surgically severed. It was from that condition of very low hemispheric integration that music revived him. Various aspects of schizophrenic behaviour, including hallucinations, become easily understandably in this neurological paradigm.
Daniel has had no signs of psychosis since he learned the connection between his ears and his disabling schizophrenia and how to take care of his ears. He carefully keeps his use of substances within the range that will not deteriorate into psychosis but that maintains his ease in his social group. He is much more comfortable with fully normal ear/brain function than he was, but not entirely. He is 31, is attending a high school equivalency program, and has a girlfriend who lives in the US. His behaviour generally is gaining in social responsibility. He has always been extremely intelligent and he is beginning to be able to express that intelligence more fully in speaking, writing, and relationships. It is becoming more and more important to him to succeed in the mainline culture and to gain full control over his use of substances that tend to make him temporarily but comfortably “dyslexic.”
Hi Laurna,
That’s an interesting story! I haven’t heard of anyone else having such an experience, but it would be an interesting thing to have someone look into, to see if it would be helpful to others.
Thanks, Ron!
You probably have heard of such healings but didn’t make the connection with schizophrenia. If you realize that most of the categories of behaviour considered aberrant are not actually discrete categories but overlapping phases on a continuous spectrum that includes the range of normal, you will find that tens of thousands of people have been healed of their behavioural syndromes caused by ear dysfunction with high-frequency sound. Mega-millions are using sound to improve their mood (or otherwise alter it) without understanding how that happens. Most of the deliberate healings fall on the sectors of the spectrum that reflect relatively little ear damage (which does not mean the disabilities are minor) such as dyslexia and chronic fatigue and mild depression. Tomatis Method and Berard AIT practitioners have been healing those conditions (and others) for 20 years in North America and since the late 1950s in France. However, a great many people in mental institutions were healed or helped by the music that was considered an essential part of therapy during an earlier historical period; a reference to that comes at the end of the old Olivia de Haviland movie, The Snake Pit. A more recent reference to music helping mental illness is the tragic near-healings of Oliver Sacks, most famously pictured in the film Awakenings but also on display in his book Musicophilia. Sadly, Sacks turned to L-dopa and missed his chance to keep learning about the healing effects of sound he had begun to notice in his patients. Healing mental illness with music is an ancient concept and Daniel is by no means the first person with symptoms of severe “mental” illness to find healing this way.
But as far as I can tell I am the first person to describe the neurology of how such healing takes place. Mental illness is the behaviour caused by audio-processing deficits that can usually be corrected right across that spectrum from the least damaged ears to those severely impaired. Even some congenital ear deficits can be healed with high-frequency sound. Daniel’s ventures into illicit and prescribed drugs suggests hope for those suffering from substance abuse and as psychiatric survivors.
My work builds on and corrects the work of Dr. Alfred Tomatis, who was decorated by the French government for his discovery of the relationship between the ear and the voice (The Tomatis Effect, 1957). Tomatis could heal and/or greatly improve autism (infantile schizophrenia) with filtered music and his followers still do. He was sure other forms of severely aberrant behaviour also were related to ear function, but he borrowed from psychiatric theory and that mistake confounded his science. He thought a degree of volition was involved in mental illness, whereas I have shown that the neurological nature of mental illness is such that volition is impossible. Self-control lies in the language structures of the left brain. When the ear (usually the right, but often the left) cannot support left-brain dominance the left brain loses its control over the right brain and the two hemispheres cannot integrate. Some of Daniel’s behaviour in psychosis was like that of a person whose corpus callosum, the hemispheric bridge, has been surgically severed so that the hemispheres cannot communicate.
The differences in the various designations of aberrant behaviour are the differences in levels of integration or in the security of the dominance in the left hemisphere. For example, sudden losses of left dominance are displayed as epilepsy, bipolar I, bipolar II, rages, panic attacks, Tourette’s, crying jags, daydreaming. You can see the wide range of severity of the losses in that list. Persistent losses of dominance are the “flip-flopping” laterality that Tomatis noticed but shrugged off; he was very focused on the right ear! That alternating from one hemisphere to the other distinguishes dyslexic syndrome, Asperger’s, autism, and the range of schizophrenic behaviour.
All people in the range of normal also experience insecure hemispheric control; the socializing process aims at teaching greater and greater left-dominance through language and through social ideals. But the phases of learning through childhood resemble bipolarity and even psychosis while the right ear is being trained to listen and the left brain is being conditioned, mostly through language, to produce particular behaviours. People with normal ears have the flexibility in the stapedius muscle to learn to control their states of consciousness. People with stapedius impairment lack that fineness of control and have difficulty learning and performing according to social standards, whatever those happen to be. Different cultures expect different levels of performance from the stapedius muscle, too; for example, some are much more permissive of emotional expression and losses of control arising from the right brain. Thus, for example, the Napoleonic Code considered homicide by the spurned spouse justifiable.
Of particular interest is the work of Tomatis’s colleague Dr. Guy Berard with his suicidally depressed patients. Of 235 such patients, all of whom showed a very specific audio-processing deficit at 2 and 8 kHz (in either the right or the left ear) he healed 97.7% of them with electronically filtered music. More than 90% were healed in a single 2-week block of daily 2-hour exposure to high-frequency sound. He noted that less severe depression had a characteristic 1.5 and 8 kHz profile and that mild depression showed deficits at 1 and 8 kHz. He also noted that deficits at 500 Hz in BOTH ears was an indication of aggression. At that point, although he had 8,000 patient profiles to work from, he stopped analyzing them because of his busy ENT practice. So the specific audio-deficits of dyslexia and chronic fatigue and autism and other behaviours remain filed away in AIT and other Tomatis Method practitioners’ files. But he did train over 800 practitioners who continue that healing all over the US and in some locations around the world. There are over 200 Tomatis Method practitioners worldwide, too.
There is no doubt in my mind that all so-called “mental” behaviour is related to audio-processing and that syndromes such as bipolarity and the various intensities of schizophrenia will be measured. Treating deficits with the specific frequencies missing from a person’s audio-processing may be the most efficient route to healing, which is what Tomatis Method and Berard AIT folks do. But Daniel recovered with ordinary CDs of classical violin music which he listened to with ordinary headphones. Until now, most such practitioners have been afraid to take on more severe behavioural syndromes (unless they occur in children under their parents’ care, as in autism) because the medical/psychiatric profession has laid claim to those people and pretends to have expertise.
I have written a 450-page book about Daniel that is fully footnoted. I have skimmed the behavioural and neurological science from the book in a monograph for people too busy to read the book, and I have just completed a study of people in withdrawal from SSRIs and with residual symptoms that shows whatever else those chemicals do to the body they damage the ears. Some people who have read my book (or who have heard about it) and who have tried focused listening report back to me significant changes in mood and self-control, including one woman whose chemotherapy was making her bipolar. Any chemical taken into the body that damages muscle risks harm to the smallest muscle in the body located in the middle ear. One researcher notes that even caffeine has a negative effect on the ear.
I have discovered a legitimate neurological model that is strongly opposed to shock and to antipsychotic and other drugging (but acknowledges the need, possibly, sometimes, for minuscule amounts of medication) but anyone with mental problems who has had anything to do with the mental health establishment is terrified of a medical model of any kind. Understandably so!!!! I am just finishing Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America and find my worst suspicions of Daniel’s abuse in an Ontario hospital confirmed. A post at Bob Fiddaman’s blog tells the story of an Ontario woman whose experiences in a different hospital almost ten years later were eerily similar to Daniel’s. My abhorrence for psychiatry and quite a lot of medicine is profound. However, there is the possibility that a genuinely scientific explanation and treatment for people suffering from severely aberrant behaviour might change medical and psychiatric practice. Who will listen? Doctors and psychiatrists have invested their self-concepts and their fortunes in their supposedly arcane knowledge. And now I tell them all they need in order to actually heal people is some electronic equipment and a few CDs of classical music. Actually, the psychiatrist may be dispensable because anyone who can get sufficient help from a family member or friendly neighbour while listening daily to high-frequency music can recover from a psychotic break.
The anti-psychiatry movement has so fully rejected the prevailing medical models that it is unwilling to pay attention to a new and correct one. The aberrant condition is being touted and embraced; people are being encouraged to defend and remain in physical conditions that are very limiting, not to say dangerous to themselves and others. Justifications for staying psychotic are blossoming, even in academic settings. I cannot see that approach actually helping people with audio-processing deficits in the short or long term.
There are physiological reasons, too, for people who have been or are accustomed to spending half their time in greater levels of right-brained consciousness, which is the effect of non-dominance. The right brain is the emotional brain and the locus of mystic pleasure as well as of the rest of the primal urges. People who can find ways of justifying the amount of time spent on such pleasures usually do so, whether they are monks and nuns retreating into silence or couples falling into bed together or drug-addicted schizophrenics on disability incomes immobilized in a pharmaceutical haze. It is constant, hard work, Daniel reminded me today, trying to find paying work, to study, or to look for a truly satisfying and compatible mate in the real world. It’s tough for those born with normal ears and tougher for someone who has survived Dickensian horrors in the psychiatric hospitals of our day and age. Compromise is so tempting.
I am trying to bridge those worlds.
Hi Laurna,
I think you may be onto something with your thoughts about problems with right brain dominance, though I think you may be seeing things in excessively black and with terms – for example, you are seeing signs that the “anti-psychiatry movement” is encouraging people to “stay psychotic” when I see more a movement to accept that there are very diverse ways of processing attention that are not troublesome & allow people to live good lives. And I think it is helpful to recall that accessing the right brain in new ways is important in a lot of creative pursuits. So as long as people find ways that work for them that allow them to lead good lives, it seems we should give up any need to “fix” them. Just like the hearing voices movement sees hearing voices as a normal human variation, it’s only when someone doesn’t know how to handle it that some sort of help is needed.
Getting back to the right brain thing, the people in the Human Givens approach have some interesting thoughts on that. One quote:
“Psychotic patients may also talk about hearing voices. In the dream state, which is the province of the right hemisphere of the brain, people are not usually capable of independent thought, the province of the left hemisphere, because the mind is ‘locked’ into the metaphorical script of the dream. But if an individual is trapped in a waking REM state, with waking reality happening around them, there is still likely to be activity in the left hemisphere of the brain.
“We suggest that, because the REM state operates through metaphor, the only way it could make sense of these independent left brain thoughts would be to create the metaphor of hearing voices, or being watched, or spied upon by aliens — which easily becomes paranoia.”
You can read more about their perspective at http://www.hgi.org.uk/archive/psychosis.htm
Hi, Ron,
Please forgive a very long post. I do think that levels of hemispheric integration producing specific syndromes of behaviour will soon be calibrated to audio-processing abilities in a very simple scale, just as Guy Berard already has determined the audio deficits of depression from mild to suicidal and has healed even the most severe of those deficits to an extremely high percentage of success. Meanwhile, I am trying to describe the parameters of other behavioural syndromes without having been able to measure the matching audio-processing deficits. I can describe those syndromes, show how Daniel passed through them on the way to severe schizophrenia and then passed through them in reverse order while he was being healed by exposure to high-frequency sound. I do that in greater detail in my book than I can here. Diagrams help, too, I think. My monograph shows his artwork during that process, which for anyone who has seen children’s artwork as they grow up closely parallels the levels of hemispheric dominance being developed in normal children from the age of 4 to about 14. I can detail aspects of Daniel’s thinking as he approached the condition of normal integration not once but several times as he recovered from extended periods of schizophrenia.
My understanding of hemispheric integration is significantly different from that of human givens, but the link is very interesting and allows me to correct the misunderstandings reflected there. First, psychosis or schizophrenia is not being right-brained or right-brain dominant. It is being non-dominant so that every couple of minutes the right brain holds complete sway in a manner that never happens in normal people while they are awake. The range from normal cerebral integration to schizophrenia is not:
Left-brain dominant to Right-brain dominant
It is:
Left-brain dominant to Non-dominance
Between stable left-dominance and complete non-dominance are those sudden losses of dominance that are recovered from, which are the schizophreniform illnesses. What is not generally realized is that they, too, range in severity from very severe losses, such as epilepsy and bipolar I to much less severe losses such as Tourette’s or even daydreaming.
While schizophrenia approaches the surgical dual-brain state, it is not identical to having a severed corpus callosum. Daniel was not completely devoid of some degree of left-brain dominance even when he was severely schizophrenic. That would be the condition of extreme autism where the child has little socializing because the alternating brain cannot learn effectively. Schizophrenia is the condition where a person’s socialization is being eroded due to alternating “dominance.”. Daniel’s non-dominance in dyslexia did not prevent him from learning at all; it prevented him from learning as easily as normal others. That is what distinguishes his level of learning disability, dyslexia, from more severe ear damage, autism.
People talk about right-brained consciousness as if some people walk around with their right brains dominating their left, rational brains on a continuing basis and that is supposed to be artistic creativity or psychosis. That is incorrect, even in extreme schizophrenia. Normal integration of the hemispheres only takes place under left-brain dominance. A very, very few people reverse hemispheres with the language center in the right brain and the left brain recessive. As I am not sure I know any such people, I assume they function in a mirror image of normal left-brain consciousness. That condition is nothing like schizophrenia or psychosis or dyslexia because one of the hemispheres is consistently dominant; those people in all likelihood are capable of entirely normal behaviour.
The vast majority of people throughout the world, about 88%, are born left-dominant and are already right-lateralized in utero: most babies before they are born most often suck on their right thumbs. Some develop exceptional access to the right brain for activities that draw on the fluid associations of perceptions and memories in the right brain — but without ceasing to be very strongly left-brain dominant. I do not temporarily become psychotic while I am writing or painting and accessing those fluid associations in the right brain we call metaphorizing. Some creative people may happen to be not as strongly left-dominant, but they are still left-dominant unless, like Van Gogh they are losing their rationality.
I think the human givens position on schizophrenia resembling normal sleep is correct, but that is because normal sleep is a very low level of integration NOT because it is entirely right-brained consciousness. However, it is much more right-brained than normal waking, which is pretty much entirely left-dominant. Only when I relax my stapedius muscles and fall into daydreaming or relax them more to go to sleep do I “disengage” my hemispheres and allow them to integrate at a low level. A person becomes “locked” in that condition of low integration—or anyone experiencing sudden losses of left-brain control in a panic attack, bipolar incident, etc. is temporarily locked into it—because the ability to control the stapedius muscle is impaired or almost entirely lacking. When the stapedius is fit and responsive to ambient sound it creates a neurological loop that continuously feeds the upper temporal lobe with the energy from sound that keeps it dominant and capable of returning fairly quickly to dominance from sleep.
In schizophrenia’s “locked” condition of low integration and non-dominance the right brain has far more influence on behaviour than is possible in people with even a fragile left-dominance. During the schizophrenic’s right-brain phase, behaviour is spontaneous and uncontrollable; during the left phase, behaviour will be more controlled and language more rational. But it depends how long the person has been psychotic how much left-brain control s/he will retain because those intervals of right-brain ascendancy have a powerfully destabilizing influence on the left brain. The imaginative right brain convinces the left rational brain of nonsense and the belief structures about reality in the left brain deteriorate. The longer a person is schizophrenic, the more those language structures of reason, realistic belief, and self-control in the left brain erode. I don’t think it is a matter of “if you just leave them alone they will have a good life.” Not treating psychosis guarantees deterioration of the left hemisphere. And the chemical treatments (meds) presently used to treat psychosis tend to harm the ears and make the situation worse. The reason the talking therapies may offset deterioration is because the schizophrenic person is straining to listen and the stapedius is getting some exercise. During the maturation process it is learning to listen, i.e., exercising the stapedius for longer and longer periods of time, that develops the person’s ability to attend, pay attention. Depending on the content of what you are paying attention to you are being socialized into particular beliefs about the nature of the reality you are perceiving with your senses. Those perceptions are organized in the brain by the ear’s hearing in a temporal framework: the ear creates the awareness of time.
Let’s look at those people who have brief psychotic episodes, people with very low left-dominance. Such people also tend to have a vivid memory and volatile emotions: sudden rages, melancholy, manic behaviours, perhaps obsessions and compulsions (OCD) and borderline personality. Those people these days are labelled “bipolar” and the range is broadly distinguished as those with and without hallucinations. At the audio- and visual hallucination end of that sector of the spectrum, which is closest to persistent psychosis, we find people whose behaviour may not be tolerable or sufficiently benign for the person to be left alone with other people. In fact, even at the low end of that sector, the irrationality of a bipolar II person can be extremely hard to live with. I have lived with bipolar people almost all my life, which prepared me for dealing with out-and-out psychosis. Believe me, most people can’t do that and will escape it or alter the condition of the mentally unstable person if possible.
You speak of “hearing voices” as though that experience is never problematical. I would counter that it depends very much on how and what the person hears. I may hear God telling me to buy a certain property and find my steps guided by that inner voice. Another person may hear God telling him to buy an automatic weapon and shoot people. Most analysts do not know how to distinguish those kinds of inner voices; they mistakenly class both the Christian and the schizophrenic as psychotic. But they are distinguished by context—by the person’s overall state of consciousness, i.e., by the dominance or non-dominance of the left brain, which is clearly demonstrated in the rest of the person’s thinking and behaviour. Such distinctions are not arbitrary; an array of behaviours will tell you whether the person is essentially stable and hearing a voice that leads to rational behaviour or experiencing severely unstable brain function and having audio hallucinations that lead to irrational behaviour. In reality, those differences are not as subtle as some people make them out to be.
At the severely non-dominant end of the scale is someone like Daniel during psychosis who has no control over his left and right hemispheres: another biological process is forcing him, first, into the left-brain state of consciousness, then, into the right-brain state of consciousness. He is NOT locked into the right-brained state at all times; he is locked into a state of uncontrollable alternation every two minutes in a four-minute cycle. He has no ability to change that fluctuation. And that situation is a direct result of damage to the middle ear, just as my husband’s tendency to depression and other forms of fragile dominance, and other people’s bipolarity are a direct result of damage to the middle ear. I have seen all of those forms of non-dominance and fragile dominance healed with high-frequency sound.
That brings me to another way in which the human givens folks and I disagree. They think almost all human behaviour falls into a great basin and that some parts of the dough are coming out differently because different ingredients have been unevenly mixed in – cultural and social differences such as war and peace and sibling relationships and parenting and sexual standards in this village or religious attitudes in that ghetto and so on. They think how people are treated makes a significant difference in whether or not they become psychotic or otherwise mentally ill. I am saying on the contrary that people wherever you find them have differing abilities to process sound and that if you have an unresponsive right stapedius muscle you will be schizophrenic whether you are in a war-torn European ghetto or a placid Indonesian village. If your audio-processing deficits are not so severe, you will be bipolar whether you are in England, France, Japan, or the US. In some cultural or social settings you may be under less stress and show fewer symptoms of your bipolarity, but the instability will be there regardless. You can make someone’s experience of schizophrenia better or worse to some extent by nastiness or kindness. But you cannot make someone’s schizophrenia worse or better unless you harm or heal the ears.
I have not only seen many people stuck at various levels of ear function, I have seen Daniel pass through all of those phases. Under various assaults on Daniel’s ears his rationality and self-control eroded until he passed through all those stages from normal, to dyslexic, to depressed and obsessive, to bipolar without hallucinations, to bipolar with hallucinations, to continuously schizophrenic, to more severely schizophrenic, to very severely schizophrenic. Then, under the influence of high-frequency sound, he gradually recovered his left-dominance passing through the same phases in reverse: from severe to moderate to mild schizophrenia; bipolar I; bipolar II; obsessive and depressed, dyslexic; and normal. Clearly, those are gradations of middle ear function affected in the first instance by various assaults on the ear and in the second instance by the healing of the effects of those assaults with high-frequency music (and integrative artwork). I have been witness to Daniel’s slide towards schizophrenia and recovery from it at least 8 times during the plus 10 years of his illness. At all times and in all phases it has been the intention of my husband and me to love and support Daniel. We have not done so perfectly. Other family members have found his behaviour in some phases much more difficult to tolerate. For example, while he was psychotic he said something obscene to a child about its mother. The parents were understandably very upset and the social rift that was created by his irrational and uncontrolled behaviour in that instant has not been mended. Daniel’s pain from realizing what he did while psychotic has not been fully healed, either, although he is rational about it — more so than the offended parties, in my opinion. People who are schizophrenic are not “having a good life.” They are experiencing extreme deprivation from all that normal people mean by having a good life. Dan now has normal brain function. He wants an education, a wife, a family, a decent job. But he has lost more than his severely mentally ill ten years of normal life because his childhood dyslexia also was a condition of deprivation. I will try to remember to ask him when he returns tomorrow how he feels about someone suggesting he can “have a good life” without the education, wife, family, and decent job he desires and that his siblings enjoy.
We have seen in the news recently how psychotic losses of self-control can lead to homicide; I comment on two such incidents on my blog. Far short of homicide, just watching a person have a psychotic break can be a terrifying experience for those present including the person having the break. Allowing people to remain in a condition where they cannot be counted on to behave with self-control according to generally accepted social standards is a serious matter. We are not just talking about dreamy, artistic natures that are locked in a metaphorical dream state that harms no one. We are talking about people who have very low and very undependable rationality and self-control that comes and goes every two minutes. The longer a person remains in that state untreated the greater the erosion of the structures of reason and self-control socialized into the left brain. The human givens’ description of the state of consciousness of schizophrenia/psychosis is extremely misleading – and so are the anti-psychiatry people. In psychosis, if the condition is not for some reason improving it is inevitably becoming worse, because the irrational, fluid, imaginative, dream-like right brain gradually unravels the awareness of reality in the left brain, making it much less rational and uncontrolled. Psychosis, whether temporary or sustained, is not a benign state of consciousness, even if the psychotic person appears to have “adjusted” to the condition. Hardly a day goes by without a report in the media of someone who has lost his or her left-brain dominance and has taken a life, or several lives. It is not true that schizophrenic people just adapt to their circumstances and can have a good life.
Some mildly psychotic people have sufficient left-brain control to sustain themselves in a beneficent social setting with fairly significant audio-processing deficits. You can look at people generally considered to function within the range of normal and find gradations of degrees of self-control that approach such schizophrenics. For example, dyslexia is such mild non-dominance that a certain amount of left-dominance develops until the adult may not be particularly noticeable in the general population as abnormal, although the abnormality of ear function certainly will have affected the person’s behaviour, chances for social and financial success, etc. Some dyslexics succeed spectacularly, of course. But they are the exceptions at one end of that range of ear dysfunction. But, if you see a dyslexic whose ears have been healed, as I have, the changes in self-confidence and self-esteem are astonishing. A new ability to co-ordinate the body physically, socially, and mentally is instantly conferred. That need to feel at one with one’s fellow humans is so strong that having even mild dyslexia creates a sense of alienation. Healing the ears brings the person into the mainstream of human experience. Daniel’s healing from dyslexia was spectacular and provided the foundation for his struggle to survive his abuse in hospital and, eventually, to overcome his schizophrenia and the addictions to hallucinogens that kept inducing that severe non-dominance.
When you see someone recover from schizophrenia, the endowment of normal rationality, beliefs, and self-control and the restored physical co-ordination and the capacity for learning is much more spectacular. It is hard for me to believe that anyone who has witnessed that transformation into normal abilities based on normal audition would want to keep anyone else in an impaired state of consciousness. I think the only reason people take that position is because they have never seen a person with audio-processing deficits healed.
A woman who was bipolar and has gotten off her meds with a focused listening program and felt no withdrawal symptoms and seems also to have lost her bipolar symptoms in the process emailed me last night, beginning, “I can never thank you enough . . .” She is no longer coping with an illness, she is full of energy, purpose, and joyful. And she can sing on pitch because her voice can reproduce the frequencies she can now hear.
I hope this is not off the subject, but I find some of the work that involves meridian-based therapy to be quite fascinating, especially as it pertains to overcoming trauma.
Emotional Freedom Techniques –
http://www.eftuniverse.com/
EMDR – Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing -
http://www.emdr.com/index.htm
NeuroEmotional Technique -
http://www.netmindbody.com/index_ie.html
All of these therapies work on left-brain, right-brain integration (by working with meridians).
Like so much of this stuff, cognitive behavioral therapy may be the answer… For others, all the talk in the world doesn’t help them move on…
I think that for some people these meridian-based therapies work much better than talk therapy, and can be the answer to overcoming a trauma, putting it behind, and moving on.
What works for one, may not work for another… so it goes. But whatever works, works!
Call me crazy (been called worse),
Duane Sherry, M.S.
discoverandrecover.wordpress.com
This is a YouTube site that demonstrates Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) -
http://www.youtube.com/user/magnustapping#p/u
You can find a practitioner, and learn more on the main site -
http://eftuniverse.com
My best,
Duane
Hi Duane,
Thanks for the great references. I’m looking for good EFT references online and found this site http://eft.mercola.com/, i don’t know if they are good source. Any thoughts about this site?
I think Dr. Joseph Mercola offers some good information on EFT… He’s a big proponent.
Duane
Laurna,
Interesting theory.
At an earlier point I postulated that schizophrenia was an autoimmune disease. I had also suggested that the autoimmune response was a result of whole system resonnance. I wrote a paper and even presented it to a number of people (including a psychiatrist). I had been inspired by my son’s recurrent psychotic breaks. I could not prove my theory!
Again, interesting postulation. The challenge is provide the proof for your theory.
Similarly, psychiatrists have plenty of theories, they use them to support their insistence for psychiatric medication, and have no better (or worse) advantage than your theory, or mine.
My friend Jack Rosberg suggests that the etiology is not nearly as significant as having a positive influence on remediating the symptoms/ condition. I suggest if music is the answer for you and Daniel great! Don’t be surprised however if the common element is how you both relate to music and the relationship that has been nurtured as a consequence that has aided in his recovery.
I suggest that beliefs define context and context is decisive (another theory I appreciate that lacks proof). If you, and he, believe that music inspires wellness and that is the context you are living within stay with it. It is an empowering one. Certainly, much more powerful than living within the context of a debilitating brain disease that can only be managed with neuroleptic drugs.
Hi, Ron,
I would appreciate knowing how you feel abut my mega-long posts on your blog. Alan has raised a number of important issues that deserve considered responses. I can take this over to my place if you would prefer.
Laurna
Hi Laurna,
it probably would be better to take this discussion over to your blog, as having so much on one “side” topic might discourage others from posting on the original post.
Hi, Alan,
I expect that you were on the right track with the immune system. I would love to read your paper. Your term “whole system resonance” is particularly arresting. The nervous system carries impulses of energy at about the speed of sound. What happens as sound enters the body literally resonates throughout the nervous system. When sound cannot follow the normal route through the body the entire system shudders with the deficiency. One proof of that total-body effect is that left-handed people live shorter lives by about 7 years than right-lateralized people. Precisely how the neurology of the ear is connected to other body systems, including endocrine, respiratory, cardiovascular, and the extensive abdominal reaches of the vagus nerve is explained by Dr. Tomatis in The Ear and the Voice. While I learned basic neurology from other sources, his explanations of the ear’s impact on physiology expands greatly on basic texts and I corrected my writing after I had read his books and before I published.
My SSRI paper contrasts the medical (chemical and surgical) approach of Dr. Jay Goldstein, an acknowledged expert in chronic fatigue syndrome, with the correction of that syndrome via the same neural pathways but with the far more beneficent use of high-frequency sound. The immune system is strongly affected by the health of the ear. My CFS was partly an immune dysfunction and was healed by about 7 1/2 hours of music stimulation. My SSRI study notes immune system dysfunction caused by antidepressants. That appalling array of side effects of psychoactive drugs corresponds to sectors of the spectrum of ear-related mental and physical conditions that have already been shown to be susceptible to healing with sound; some of them definitely fall in the category of immune responses. The Appendix to the SSRI study lists about 2,000 symptoms reported by 107 people in withdrawal from SSRIs or dealing with residual symptoms from 6 months to 10 years after discontinuation. They are the same symptoms recognized by Goldstein in his CFS patients, and in classic descriptions of dyslexia, depression, suicidal depression, bipolarity, and schizophrenia. The immune system definitely is part of the picture of so-called “mental” illness.
Etiology
Etiology matters only if you are intellectually driven and if you want to understanding the healing. At first, I didn’t. I just wanted to find an answer for Daniel’s dyslexic syndrome. I understood neither Daniel’s healing from dyslexia nor my healing from CFS. Other healings of family members would come much later. Actually, the Tomatis Method people didn’t fully understand what they were able to facilitate, either. I sensed that what was happening to Daniel was on the cutting edge of knowledge about behaviour. But the Tomatis practitioners could not provide explanations I found adequate. Dan became psychotic a few days after his dyslexia healing and all hell broke loose. It took me years of observation and research and many, many blind alleys to figure out the ear-brain relationship and what happens when you stimulate a damaged stapedius muscle with the music of violins (whether or not you filter it).
I am not using comforting but impossibly vague words about “enhancing wellness.” I am talking about extremely hard-nosed science: the possibility of precisely measuring audio-processing that departs from normal– in the same sense one measures blood pressure , the acuity of vision, and blood sugar — and possibly (certainly not coercively) instilling fully normal brain function through ear stimulation in someone who has the classic symptoms of schizophrenia. Or bipolarity. Or depression, including suicidal depression. Or OCD. Or substance abuse. Or chronic fatigue syndrome. Or SSRI withdrawal syndrome. In fact, I am offering new and scientific definitions of those inadequately understood patterns of behaviour. I am showing that they are phases on a continuous spectrum of middle and inner ear function that supports or fails to support the dominance of the left hemisphere of the brain. I have opened the door to accurate calibration of those conditions as audio-processing deficits that can be healed, just as Bérard pegged the degrees of depression from the “2-8” down to the “1-8” profile and healed his depressed patients including most of those who were suicidal. I have shown that one of the most severe forms of ear malfunction (caused by various different kinds of assaults on the ear)—schizophrenia—can be healed with high-frequency music. Put together with your theory about the immune system, I think a great many other diseases and disabilities will become understood in terms, partly at least, of ear function. But for now I am sticking to what I have seen and know from my research.
High-Frequency Sound and Musicality
The effects of the physics of music on the neurology of ear-related behaviours has little to do with how people react to the musicality of music. In fact, the Tomatis Method removes all of the musical quality from the music and exposes the listener to a rather irritating buzzing sound. Similarly, the high-frequency racket of a smoke alarm can activate the stapedius muscle and heal CFS (I do not recommend that treatment, but I have experienced it inadvertently.) This is learning within the belief system of science, not emotional reaction to the beauty of music or the mind-over-matter effect of a belief in the plasticity of the brain or some mystic view of mental changes. It applies to persons of every belief system in very much the way prescription lenses for the eyes apply to persons of every belief system. Actually, my paradigm casts such a rational light on the nature of all belief systems that it forced me to revise some of my religious views. The paradigm has been very extensively tested on the milder forms of ear dysfunction and on autism, which resembles adult schizophrenia.
I have added some points about forms of proof to my blog.
I really would like to hear more about your theory of the immune system in mental illness.
Laurna
Good Stuff.
Now I don’t have to write it, I’ll just link – thanks.
..
But the word is so corrupted in common use and the propaganda of Pharma will predominate because of their wealth.
It’s probably better to dump this neologism (started in the ’80′s about three years after I was cured).
Best to find another word.
Dear sir,
I am suffering since 8 years from a mental illness. MY psychiatrist told me that it is schizophrenia, and I’ve been taking meds (Abilify) for a year long now. I have passed through many difficult times, horrible and painful days and nights; to such extend that I even tried to suicide twice!
I am now at a point of time where I can’t continue anymore like this, and I want and must recover from this illness. I have hallucinations; I see horrible things in my mind, and I feel horrible things in my body. I can’t eat nor drink in peace; in fact I can’t even rest in peace. The only peace I have is while sleeping.
If you have any advice for me, a plan to stop this illness which I suffer from for 8 years now; please do let me know.
May God bless you, and keep you safe.
Peace!
Hi Azir,
Sorry to hear about all your difficulties. But I’m happy to see you are getting more informed and learning different perspectives by reading: that’s one way of getting ideas that might be helpful.
If you haven’t tried it already, I would suggest meeting with a counselor or therapist. I would especially suggest one who knows how to help you focus on dealling with exactly the kinds of mental events that cause you trouble. If you can, find one who understands that when we try to get rid of disturbing things in our mind, we sometimes make them stronger, while when we can just accept the unpleasant thought or image or whatever, we often can shift our focus to how to pursue our values and get on with our lives.
Wishing you well on your journey.
Laurna your explanantions are extremely one sided and come from experience with only one person and system as a schizophrenic I would say the human givens research is very accurate and REAL not drug induced schizophrenia IS the result of creativity running amuck in the brain. try googling schizophrenia creativity,-novel associations and a lot of other stuff are missing from YOUR theory, my symptoms have reduced greatly without any medication or treatment in the past couple of years. and research actually says the LEFT inner/middle ear might be related to schizophrenia
Like a few others who replied, I have problems with the idea of recovery from something that is notional and contested. Your definition works only if a person subjectively experiences their pain, distress, revelation etc. in a framework of mental illness and seeking mental health treatment. I believe that there is a more inclusive way of looking at these experiences without a mental health/ mental illness framework, and that is in terms of healing and transformation rather than recovery. Another way of stating my objection is that “recovery” defined in mental health terms leaves power in the hands of mental health professionals to validate or refuse to validate a person’s sense of well-being. It reifies (and medicalizes) the concept of “mental health disability” as residing within the person, contrary to the social model of disability, and assumes a “need” for treatment rather than accepting that there are different ways a person can heal and transform their life. You are trying to get away from the co-optation of recovery by the institutionalized system that wants to keep people tied to services but you maintain a dichotomous way of thinking about mental illness vs. mental health that is not in line with the experience of many of us who have been locked up in psychiatry and had our subjective distress medicalized/diagnosed as falling on the wrong side of the line. The biggest revelation to me in that situation was that the line was false. I refuse to submit myself to a standard that seeks approval implicitly from those who create this false line.
Hi Tina,
I think you raise some important issues, but you are also interpreting my views as more narrow than they are intended – I will try to explain what I mean.
It is certainly true that some people would do fine if simply left alone by the mental health system, or if they were not misinformed or abused by it, and so I certainly don’t intend to suggest that the mental health system itself should be seen as having a right to establish by itself what is or is not recovery! In those cases, simply breaking away from the system and establishing one’s own definition of what is going on may be all that is needed for “recovery” (and in this case, one is recovering from the system, and not from “illness” or whatever!)
But there are also many people whose experience is that of being disabled by a problem that then seemed to require mental health treatment in order to function in any way close to adequate. It is for those people that I think it is important to keep in mind the possibility of recovery from the mental health problem and disability, even to a point where there is no disability and no need for assistance from the mental health system in any form.
I appreciate that it can be unclear what disability should be seen as “in the person” and what is social, or in they system around the person. For example, a person in a wheelchair may be disabled from getting around town not so much by the wheelchair as by the absence of curb ramps, which is a social problem. Or the person who hears voices may be disabled more by the reactions of people who freak out about the fact of that experience, rather than by the experience itself. All of us are very complex, with a mix of abilities and disabilities, when one looks at it in detail, and sometimes it is exactly being disabled in one area that helps us find or develop other abilities. But it is also often true that when people are paralyzed or horribly disabled by a problem, they can often be helped in a way that helps them overcome that problem to the point where it is no longer disabling in any important sense, and we shouldn’t ignore that possibility, anymore than we should ignore the possibility of helping someone learn to walk again and not need a wheelchair if that possibility exists.
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