Thank you Catherine. I can understand why you’d say that and I can appreciate that these are very powerful things that come back time and again even though they appear to have resolved. It isn’t an assumption that these things disappear, it is an observation. The point is that we are disconnecting her present-day actions from the fear-based routines that survived her as a child so she can be robust and unresponsive to further triggers. Yesterday she finished typing up her cv and today is going out job hunting. I’m not sure how successful she will be as she has a gap of more than ten years without work but I’m very happy that she is finding the motivation to do this.
Your diabetic analogy is interesting because her father got type 2 diabetes about ten years ago and managed to cure himself by lifestyle and diet changes. A good place to start understanding something is to put aside the assumptions.
Wholeheartedly agree with you that humans are much more than just a bag of experiences. Much more than any one of us will ever know today. Fine pieces of high quality engineering even.
Yes type 2 diabetes (in many cases) can be cured with dedicated appropriate diet and exercise, Type 2 diabetes is an over-abundance of insulin. My reference I made was for Type 1 diabetes which is an inability for the body to produce any insulin at all, in which case not taking in insulin would result in death.
In reference to what you said to @slw Are you saying that brain chemicals are an ignorant assumption? As in they don’t exist in reality? or someone has made up a fact that not enough serotonin or dopamine or lithium or other such components of the brain are fantasy based ideas?..Just curious and asking for clarification…wanting to make sure I am comprehending what I am reading here. Not trying to “presume” anything. By the way…very glad to hear your loved one is motivated to go out and look for work, my best to her on that endeavor.
No, not at all. The assumption is that they are the cause of anything. Of course we have various chemicals and electrical activity in the brain, that much is a given. Just because we can measure and observe them, that doesn’t mean they are the cause of anything. What causes the chemicals to be in certain places and amounts is the real question, not trying to discover how to control the effects of them being there by trying to control the chemicals. This approach misses a fairly basic premise- the mind controls the body, and the brain and its chemicals are part of the body.
Thank you for the diabetes clarification, I know very little about it.
and in all fairness it doesn’t mean that they are not the cause of anything either…(just playing devil’s advocate here)
I try as best I can to see all sides of any subject and not just readily accept the first notion that comes along…and I am a debater by nature…After reading some of Pete Early’s articles on mental illness I realize you are not alone in your theories about chemical imbalances not being the “go to” culprit for all mental illness. Pete Earley is a prolific Pulitzer prize winning author and mental health reform advocate…I am waiting to read his book “Crazy” about his personal experiences with mental illness (it’s on order) I admire your tenacity to “get to the meat” of the issue but I would encourage you to read as much as you can on Emotional Trauma and the effects on the brain, I found an interesting link on the subject and I also am including the article by Pete Earley that seems to line up with your thought processes to some degree. Stay posted and positive and my best to you. http://www.healingresources.info/emotional_trauma_overview.htm
I totally get why you say that and at one time I would say the same thing…and now I don’t say I know any different I am just saying my mind is a bit more open…This is what I think (for what it’s worth) I think there is a many things that can contribute to all forms of mental illness. As for schizophrenia…I believe in most cases there is a genetic component…but I have read that that gene can remain dormant in some people and some people that carry the gene and never get the full blown symptoms…but maybe their one of their kids will develop it…then I have read that early use of marijuana…during formative years like 13-17 can activate the gene causing symptoms…(my son started to smoke pot at 14 and started showing symptoms not long after…BUT recently I have read several other articles that state that severe trauma can also activate symptoms in a person with the gene for it…I guess my point is everyone is so different and reacts to things so uniquely sometimes…unless an in depth study or analysis is done the root cause of the onset (aside from genetics) is likely to remain a mystery.
Well this thread has kind of gotten derailed from the title a bit now. I do like a good discussion though.
Thanks for the links, they were interesting. The connection between trauma and sz I thought was well established, I have read it in so many places but I guess there are always going to be people who believe otherwise. If you are interested in genetics, there is a very interesting doco called “ghost in your genes” which shows sequences modified by environmental occurrences hundreds of years ago are still that way today, several generations later.
Undoubtedly genetics is involved in sz, but again, who is to say that the genes are the cause of anything. What if the gene sequences were switched on/off via environmental means such as abuse, drug use… etc. We just don’t know this yet.
The reality is that even the best doctors are still amateur technicians when dealing with the level of technology that is the human mind/brain/body. There is more technology in one strand of dna than all the human endeavors to date. It is no surprise at all that there is a long history of disastrous attempts at understanding mi- the technology within us is far greater than our capacity to understand it today.
How am I doing? Well, this thing sure had me beat when I joined up here but I’m feeling very positive about it now after seeing what can be done with a few cobbled together ideas and some perseverance. I’ve spent my engineering career solving complex problems in unconventional ways, now I’m wondering if I can eventually solve this little problem on a bigger scale than just one person. One step at a time though.
Hi - I was wondering where you got this technique from? Its a little like “exposure therapy” - where you gradually expose people to what they have a phobia of, so they become acclimatized to it. This approach would labeled a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy approach by people. I recommend you learn more about CBT for psychosis here:
It is something we developed out of urgent need more than anything. It is based on the principle that the subconscious survival system (fight or flight) operates below our conscious mind, but has the power to override it when our survival appears to be threatened. This is what a properly functioning survival system must do. The survival system appears to store a long history of agreements and these are made and permanently hard-coded at times of duress in an attempt prepare the person for future similar incidents which are counter-survival. We recognise the effects of these agreements as trauma as they cause emotional and seemingly irrational responses. Exposure therapy appears similar but in principle is different in that we are not trying to reduce the emotional response to triggers, we are dismantling the hard-coded agreements so that the emotional responses don’t automatically run each time there is a trigger event.
Subconscious agreements can be anything. So far this week we have worked through “I cannot be controlled”, “I have a long list of things to do” and are presently working on “I can be interfered with”. These are all concepts that were very real to my wife as a child and have been stored in the back of her mind for survival purposes all these years. She would not be here if it wasn’t for her survival system. Each time we release an agreement, she becomes a little more in the present. She had her first job interview yesterday in a decade so very happy with progress now. Excited even that I can have my wife back without all the other stuff going on in the back of her mind.
A cinematic kind-of representation of the process is shown in The Kings Speech. Bear in mind that the reality is a lot less pretty than this but look at the expression change when he realises (subconsciously recorded realisation updated) that “he has a voice”. This is pretty much all we are doing, over and over again but with a lot more unpleasantness associated with the emotional responses which must first be allowed to run their course. It isn’t fun but it is achieving results and that makes it worthwhile.
You seem like a very intelligent guy. I’m assuming you are an engineer by training - something that requires a lot of expertise and a lot of training.
This support site has been around for about 20 years and I’ve never heard of an approach anything like yours. Given your background in sciences - I’m sure you know that a “sample size of 1” isn’t a very valid sample size - and if your wife is getting better it could be from anything - a coincidence, the increased attention you’ve paid your wife since you’ve started helping her, lower stress (a common trigger for psychosis and psychotic episodes) or any of a myriad other things that may be going on in your lives.
I appreciate that you see this as a challenge for you to figure out - and yes, there is still much to learn about the brain (as you’ve mentioned) - but if you were working on the most important engineering project of your life, wouldn’t you want another person to work with who has some good training from a top engineering school to help you??
It just seems that the likelihood of your helping your wife over the long haul would be much greater if you got good professional help.
Thank you. I have tried on numerous occasions to get the standard level of help from both psychiatrists and psychologists and none were even close to being what I would consider adequately competent, for a variety of reasons. The state hospital psychiatrists are so overworked that they are in battle station mode permanently so tend to snap diagnose and on to the next as there is a massive backlog in the system. They are foreigners who have moved here to fill the vacuum of locally trained doctors who have left for higher pay overseas and may not have the most appropriate approach. It is entirely possible the three psychiatrists that saw my wife came to the wrong conclusion about her having sz and it was just something that would have passed with time anyway. As you say, a sample size of one is irrelevant in the bigger picture, but one has to start somewhere. The psychologists wanted to try touchy-feely things like agreeing to disagree or respecting opinions which aren’t relevant approaches when somebody is delusional and believes ufos are flying over our house sending messages to their brain. One of them got angry at her, then started apologising, then admitted she had a traumatic childhood too. I gave up in disappointment with what the conventional system had to offer. If after 20 years people are still posting the heartbreaking stories I keep reading here then we must consider the possibility that the standard approach is unworkable.
If you know where I might get good professional help I’m very keen to find it. We don’t have health insurance here like USA so paying $400/hour is not an option for me- more on principle than anything.
Interesting thread. I too am an engineer and I applaud any new ideas for trying to find solutions to the issues caused by sz. If nobody considered new ideas we probably wouldn’t even have electricity. I sometimes think so outside the box that I wonder if people with sz are very special indeed, and have a 6th sense. After all, they once used to mock the idea that the world isn’t flat.
I wholeheartedly agree with the ‘sample of 1’ drawback, so have you tried presenting your ideas to the psychiatry community, perhaps something like Psychiatry Research Trust? They may take up your idea and fund a controlled research program.
On the subject of why some people develop sz and whether there’s a gene connection, I read that there is evidence to suggest that genealogy needs to have mental health issues in it for sz to develop in an individual. However, I think maybe that’s a red herring, hasn’t everybody got mental health issues in their family tree somewhere along the way?
My 29 year old daughter has sz and was born 3 months premature. We helped a leading psychiatrist at a top UK hospital with his research into finding a link between premature birth and sz, since more prem babies go on to have mental health problems than is the norm. He was proposing that pure oxygen given to prem babies at birth can interfere with development of the hypothalamus (doparmine central), at a critical time during the latter stages of pregnancy. We never did hear whether he secured a link and was able to change the procedure for care of premature babies.
… good luck with the job hunting. Yes, a 10 year gap will be hard to explain to potential employers. We’ve struggled for years to help our daughter find employment, to no avail. Capitalism is a cruel world, we find that all employers think about is their bottom line, so anybody who presents as a risk to that i.e. with a mental illness, something not quite right, or not able to give 150% to the job, will struggle to even get an interview.
My son was born about 3 months early - they didn’t define him as premie because he had just enough size and the timeframe was borderline.
If they gave him pure oxygen, it couldn’t have been for very long. By the time they handed him to me, he was wide awake & very aware - I had a c-section, so he was all cleaned up & wrapped when they handed him over, so maybe about 10 minutes or less? It was all really fast.
If I remember correctly, babies have a lot of brain and lung development in the last month, so that did worry me a little. But, other than a little jaundice that resolved itself within a week, he seemed fine and grew quickly. He would be a little behind on some benchmarks, but seemed to stall, then progress overnight, and he was very smart about the things he was smart about.
It’s an interesting topic though - with so many unknowns, you’d think they’d be researching everything since this is, in my opinion, the most devatating illness/disorder/condition anyone could ever have.
Not really, it is something that to me is fairly new and as a non-psychologist/psychiatrist I hold no credentials so would not expect any favorable responses. It doesn’t help that my verbal communication skills are average to poor, being a bit aspie. In saying that though, I am beginning to realise that if I want to do anything with this I need to be in the psych community, which means obtaining a qualification. As I only have a BEng I will have several undergrad years to catch up so the reality I face is giving up a well paid industry that I love very much for being a poor student again.
The main issue with what I am proposing is that it is completely incompatible with the conventional base model, and as anyone in the psych industry will be trained in the conventional model, they will very likely reject this in favor of what is more familiar. This is a scenario I am well used to in engineering, however on a much smaller scale and with ideas that can easily be conveyed over the noise of “but you can’t do that”. This one will take a little more effort.
Thank you. She had one interview last week for electronics sales at a shopping mall telco store which has several others applying for the position. She is very good at customer relations and sales but it will be hard getting over the big gap in her cv for sure. Hopefully she can find something to get a reference and move up from there.
Just wanted to post a bit of an update as this is becoming very exciting to me now. After nearly a month of intense work every day we have almost resolved “I can’t be interfered with”. That one has held her in suspended animation for the better part of a decade, only allowing her to do things of her choosing and only when nobody else that appears threatening is around. When combined with a variety of other rules that were created during her childhood it has meant the sum total of things she has achieved in the last ten odd years equals very little that is recognizable outside of herself because she cannot build upon the past or stay focused on one path.
She is now exercising several times a week, is applying for work regularly and has had no signs of delusion for over two months. One thing I don’t quite understand is that her lifelong fear of water has vanished. She is quite happy to spend three hours at the local pool whereas previously she’d rarely go more than ankle deep in water without looking terrified. She has just gone there now, on the bicycle no less which she has not ridden since 2002.
Despite daily threats to, she hasn’t called the police for two weeks now. Previously I have gotten to meet most of the day-shift staff at the nearby police station. While they don’t comment exactly on what I am trying to achieve, they understand and appreciate that I’m trying to do something with a bad situation and that the threat I pose to her is imagined rather than real. The mental health people get a report from the police every visit and they have so far called once to make an appointment to see if she/we need a counselor. That took three weeks, the lady she saw decided we need one and they would make an appointment in another three weeks. They haven’t called back or confirmed an appointment. This is about the level of competence I expect from them now.
The shouting fits continue, one per day starting mid morning but they are getting progressively shorter and less intense, every day either a continuation of the previous topic or a new one as they come up. “What are you doing today?” is enough to start 45 minutes of non-stop shouting because it contravenes the “I cannot be watched/monitored” rule which we haven’t yet resolved. I have about 300GB of video now of these and on several occasions have captured the realisation point where a connection is made between the past and the present. These little moments are the points where whatever particular topic we are grinding on gets resolved.
As far as doing anything with this, I have applied to the university and they offer a graduate diploma in science which is a course specifically for anyone with a undergrad degree from a different faculty to transition into postgrad study in psychology. I start this early next year. If what we are seeing can be replicated then we can do some very exciting things, far more than just understanding and resolving sz. If it cannot then I’ll quite happily accept that I have gone mad.
I can’t say I completely understand this method you’re trying with her but if it’s enabling her to cope with normal life then stick with it.
It could be that the method is acting as a distraction for her, which is a recognised coping mechanism. But if it works for her then stick with it.
We find that distraction is a great tool. It’s not just listening to music or playing a computer game. We help our daughter to do bigger projects, like a course at college, make a dress, get published, or create and sell a piece of art. When she’s interested in something, she’s on it 100%, it gives her a feeling of self worth and achievement, all good positive stuff.
I hope your ‘her’ continues to be well, I assume it’s your wife or partner? No doubt you’ll keep tracking her interest in your technique, to make sure she doesn’t get bored with it and look for something new to distract her.
Wife of 16 years. She had a horridly abusive childhood and carries all these defense and survival strategies inside her. We are just dismantling them one by one so that she can exist in the present time as an adult without having to be constantly dragged back into the past when she gets triggered by things that are unresolved.
This is definitely not a distraction to her, nor a coping strategy. She hates me viciously when my actions represent her parents, just as she hated her parents for what they did to her. After about 45 minutes of shouting and swearing at me like a champion, when she gets to the point of realisation she turns back into my loving wife within a minute as if nothing has happened. Her sz seemed to blossom out of this unresolved stuff last year and now that we have found a way to resolve it, the sz behaviors have disappeared. I don’t know for sure if permanently but it certainly looks like it at this early stage.