"Mental" Illness: The Future of Treatment

Bless you!!!

Excellent, excellent response Liz. I had a whole reply to Irrellus formulated in my head until I came across this post of yours. I can’t possibly say it any better.

Irrellus,

Your friend’s condition seems very similar to that of my sister. I was in elementary school when her symptoms began to develop as such that she became a danger to herself. My family fell apart, she was transferred around to at least half a dozen hospitals and “care” facilities, and I was essentially left in the dark all the while. My dad refused to believe her problem was beyond her control, mom was lost, and a few doctors told them, quite frankly, they couldn’t [or didn’t know how to] treat her. Anyway, to keep things short, my sister was in desperate need of both love and medication. Love saved her life, but medication gave it back to her. I can’t put it any clearer than that. She is the reason I come chime in on these threads suggesting drugs are the devil. Some drugs are over prescribed, some are abused, some probably shouldn’t exist at all – I can agree with all of that. However, for some people a reliance on medication is not a prison sentence. It is just another consequence of living their lives, like eating and sleeping. I don’t know why, but that fact seems much more difficult to accept for people on the outside looking in, than the people who actually experience the difference. The trade-off can be difficult sometimes because certain medications, specifically anti-psychotics, have a very sedating effect that disagrees with some people. I just believe that some drugs, for certain cases, can come as nothing short of a blessing. My sister lives on her own with a husband and kid now, and is probably happier than I am. She still takes her meds, too. My only advice to you, as you seem to have a good head about you already, is to find and stick with a doctor you can dare to trust. There are good and bad doctors, like anything else, but there are some who actually care. If you ask me, a pill is a small price to pay for a drastically improved quality of life. It just doesn’t seem right to regard the drugs as a crutch in every circumstance. Nobody should ever feel guilty or less-than-‘normal’ for wanting to experience life as their loved ones do.

good stuff…the part about finding a doctor that you can trust is so important…and i would extend that to people that you can trust…you have to be very careful about a doctor–they can make you a lot sicker…

Good support, Stat. And thanks for the real, personal example about your sister. Your post is helpful and caring. The problems with my friend do have to with how her family and friends accept what she experiences daily. It seems they are frustrated about the stigma of diagnosis and the inability of doctors to “cure” her. She is on suicide watch.

i am not up-to-date on causes of schizophrenia…
what is the latest thinking…how is research going…

The latest seems to be that the condition is not split personality; it is experiencing hallucinations and delusions and seeing these as reality. It is considered a lifetime condition. Meds keep the condition at bay, but cannot compensate for the ignorance and prejudices of "friends"and family. It’s not always the Docs who are at fault here–the fault being lack of compassion and understanding.

why are they having hallucinations…is it something neurological.

This is all sounding eerily familiar. At first it was bipolar disorder, then it was possible [paranoid] schizophrenia, then possible split personality, then maybe just depression, until finally people start throwing their hands up in frustration. That’s when my sis got transferred to a live-in care facility where they essentially grouped her with peers and counselors that actually understood her condition. They taught her to live and cope as an individual there. I remember visiting and always wondering why her school was so much cooler than mine. Of course, I didn’t find out the real story until years later when I started asking questions. That was the place that really did wonders for her because it was like 24/7 behavioral therapy where the counselors could also monitor her progress on her meds. The emphasis was taken off of the drugs and they were simply treated as a part of a healthy life, like a balanced diet. I am convinced the success there was due largely to her acceptance – people cared and related to her. She wasn’t just a patient who everyone looked at and scratched their heads like they were dealing with a damned alien.

In other words, I couldn’t agree with you more Irrellus. Compassion, understanding, and support were paramount to her healing. The drugs only help with biological ‘abnormalities’, but enabling her to establish healthy relationships with others, and eventually herself, was the real breakthrough. If the care and support begins with friends and family it is more likely to show in her professional treatment because she [your friend, like my sister] will grow accustomed to that level of comfort and understanding.

Thanks, Stat.
My friend seems to have been dumped here in these apartments with no one to monitor her meds, eating, sleeping, exercizing, etc. I go on walks with her and listen, but the situation is getting beyond my understanding. I need support group help as much as she does. But I don’t give up hoping that I can provide her with a caring companionship that may make her life easier to bear.
Turtle,
It’s a combo of apparently fixed neuron routes, genetics and environment. More than I can understand, but, hopefully, not more than I can compassionately address. I suffer from major depression. Maybe the two of us can find comfort in being with each other that benefits us both. No one should have to face these things alone.

Irrellus,

Just curious, who did the ‘dumping’? Family? If so, my heart really goes out to both of you. Her for essentially being abandoned to care for herself, and you for your compassion. You are an admirable individual in my book, man. Not because you’ve made friends with this person, but because you’ve made a personal investment. you are the type of ‘anomaly’ in society that nihilists have no witty retort for. Your actions obviously mean something, and, even without any innate purpose, you seem to have purposed yourself. I respected you before, but now in an entirely new light.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I wouldn’t mind being more like you.

My last piece of advice is just to agree with something that has already been said: There is support out there that can help her, and even you. I think an introduction to a group of peers that not only recognize, but understand and relate, to her condition can do wonders for someone [perhaps like your friend] who has been ostracized due to circumstances beyond her control. That was the main point of my last post about my sister being transferred to a sort of care community [in case the point got lost in all the extra details] where she began to thrive again.

As do I. And I have since elementary school, back when I didn’t even understand enough to really be “depressed” about. But I was, and still struggle daily. Maybe it’s genetics considering how my sister’s situation evolved, but who’s to say. You must admit, though: Seeing someone in a far more compromising situation kind of lends a new perspective to your own ailments, no?

I’m a full grown man and not embarrassed to say I wish I could give you both a hug.

I’m no saint, my friend, and often am not someone to serve as an example for others. Floundering is what I do best. My life includes many “dirty deeds done dirt cheap”, paranoia, judgmentalism, etc., etc. Intersubjective communication sometimes sets me straight in daily attempts to get outside the locked-box of self-closed mind wherein disturbances ruminate and fester. I’ve been advised that the local chapter of NAMI may be my and my friend’s only resource for identifying with others who suffer in the ways we do.
If I’m not getting too personal, how do you handle your depression? Most times I just have to wait mine out and hope I didn’t do anything stupid or unloving in the interim. Humor helps. Music helps. Hugs do the best help. Thank you. And ditto.
My friend’s family seems not to know what to do with her, which has more to do with ignorance than lack of caring.

Of my friend–I have to be totally honest with her, which prompts thorough examination of my motives. When I hugged her she thanked me for touching her. That humbled me. Such gratitude, IMHO, is unwarranted. She should be touched by anyone who claims to love her or even care for her. I thank her back for touching me. I’m afraid that in her reliance on her negative self-image she will come to resent me for tresspassing in her familiar mindset. Change in a sense of reality is often emotionally painful, even if the change is for the better.
I think we can agree here that current therapy suffers from lack of empathy and compassion, that the more skilled therapists have little time for such concerns or consider them obstacles to objectivity and that the general public is still remarkably ignorant of, or biased toward, mental illnesses. In this situation I think we can agree that group therapy, with its sharing of experience, may offer what is missing from one-on-one talk with doctors and drug stabilizers.

Ier, you should always be totally honest despite your listeners–but that’s beside the point.

Being empathetic can have unforeseen/unexpected consequences, which is why I asked you to be very careful in how you treat this very fragile personality.

If her reality contains no one, in her mind, who loves or cares for her other than you, she could become fixated on you as her sole lifeline to reality. If you, somehow, ‘disappoint’ her, it may not be because of her ‘negative self image,’–it could be because of her unrealistic expectations of you.

Do what you can for yourself, first, and realize that isn’t being selfish. I’ve often told my daughter that she has to ‘take care’ of herself, first, before she can take on caring for another individual and the family that may ensue.

I think that if you find a support group of like people who’ve experienced PS in their lives, you’ll be better able to take care of yourself and your friend.

I realize this is taking things to an extreme, but it happens,

Liz,
By noting being totally honest I was simply trying to suggest that honesty is dependent on one’s sense of reality.
Thanks for the good advice. I constantly keep that in mind.
My hopes for this thread are that those who are family and friends of a person diagnosed as mentally ill will give objective accounts of that experience and that those, like myself, who are nowadays called “consumers” can give subjective accounts without fear of bias. IMHO, the thread could be a virtual group therapy arena in which objective and subjective accounts may find common ground. The future of therapy may depend on that kind of approach to its current limitations.

Okay, I’ve been thought of as ‘mentally ill’ several times in my life, starting in grade school when I went through voluntary mutism; going on into high school when my lungs started collapsing spontaneously; into young adulthood, when I was ‘theruped grouply,’ because I felt my younger brother’s pain; on to adulthood, when I went through episodes of agoraphobia and couldn’t leave the house.

I begged my husband to let me get myself help–but he was afraid of the ‘curse of mental illness.’ He was also afraid because his first wife, he thought, was also garbanzo beans and he didn’t want to think that he might somehow be responsible for my mental state. He wasn’t, of course.

Anyway, I’ve gone through all sorts of therapy ‘types,’ and I’ve learned a lot along the way. I’ve learned I’m intelligent and I’ve learned that I have a higher than average EQ–empathy quotient. I feel the pain people feel–or what I imagine people feel–the existential pain of being alive.

However, I have no experience with PS or Manic/Depressive disorder–or any of the ‘higher level’ mental disorders. My high EQ resulted in my clinical depression for which I take drugs. I still feel the pain (I imagine?) humans and animals feel, but I’m better able to deal with it.

Whatever. Without having experienced the ‘higher level’ disorders, if I can give you comfort in any way, I will. I admire and respect you–but I must also say, “Please, be very careful.”

Bless you, Liz! Your experiences fall under the category of misdiagnosis or misjudgment, IMHO. How you dealt with that is very important here. It relates to how we all deal with these diagnoses, whether they are seen by therapists as severe psychoses or just personality defects.

I read Martin Buber’s “I and Thou” when I was a young man. Reading about Buber now, I find he became interested in psychotherapy.
His challenge to therapists was based on his “I-it”/“I-thou” distinction. He noted that therapists most often listen to their patients through the bias of the therapists’ training and beliefs about what constitutes “normal” human behavior. Buber finds this as listening to oneself, not to an other. This makes the patient an it, a case study, not a suffering human being. He believed that only “I-thou” communication, which is devoid of preconceived ideas, can allow a therapist to actually hear what a patient is saying and may be the perspective from which any new or innovative therapies can become possible.

You also said:

To answer your last quote first, yes, there was a lot of misdiagnosis and misjudgment. How I dealt with it is another matter. I have no idea what the diagnosis was when I was 8-9 yrs. old–I do know how I reacted to the Chief of Thoracic Surgery at one hospital when he said the pain I felt after my second surgery at another hospital was ‘psychosomatic,’ because I ‘,wasn’t ready to give up my ‘semi-invalid’ state.’ That was a bunch of bs, as far as I was concerned, since I’d taken over the lead in a musical comedy about a month after my first surgery at yet another hospital. What ‘semi-invalid state?’ I was also smarter than the psychiatrist to whom I was sent–and he knew it.

In other words, I was able to answer the docs empirically. Not everyone is able to do that, because not everyone is misdiagnosed.

Martin Buber is correct when he says that most therapists listen to patients through a filter of their own biases. We all do, that’s human nature. I read posts here and filter them through my own ability to understand the subjective language used. I’m often not successful. People need to categorize and label–to fit things into the narrow boundaries of their own minds as those minds have been taught. Otherwise, they might never be able to even start to ‘understand.’

If the woman you know told her family that she did something because she saw an angel while walking through the park, and the angel told her to do it, and if she repeats that to psychiatrists–and supplements it with other such events as a way of ‘proving’ what she experiences, wouldn’t such auditory and visual ‘hallucinations’ lead a psychiatrist to a diagnosis of PS?

I’m not saying there’s no possibility what are called ‘hallucinations’ do or don’t happen–they could have. Your friend believes in their reality, if she really does. If she doesn’t, then she’s been misdiagnosed because she’s misrepresented herself.

PS, Please stop ‘blessing’ me–it’s unwarranted and rather embarrassing.

No more blessings, Liz. Maybe an occasional applause. You were able to outthink your docs! =D> Mine didn’t know what to do with me. I could be rational with the best of them.
About my friend–My dreams are surreal; her waking hours are surreal. There must be some connection here between dream states and awake states. That might be worth exploring.
My wife, now deceased, was diagnosed as bipolar. She might as well have heard she was condemned to a living hell. One comfort she had was on learning that Patty Duke shared the same diagnosis. IMHO, my wife’s psychiatrist overmedicated her to the point where she could no longer function. Something’s definitely wrong with that drug approach.
I understand your comments about Buber; but wouldn’t you rather be listened to as a person than as an it? Despite our needs to classify and categorize in order to understand we need to feel we are listened to from who we are. Maybe virtual conversation (computer) doesn’t do justice to that need.

As I’ve said, I don’t know what the original diagnosis was–my mother was the only one privy to that–and my father, but at second hand. It’s only been because of further learning and introspection that I was able to arrive at my conclusions.

What, exactly, do you mean by ‘surreal?’ Do you mean Dali ‘surreal’ or Leonora Carrington ‘surreal?’ Do you dream in symbols and does she experience life in dream symbols? No matter what, you’re going beyond my layman’s knowledge of PS and/or Bipolar Disorder.

/

Believe it or not, there are a lot of fine actors, both male and female, who are bipolar–Patty Duke is one and, off the top of my head, Marietta Hartley is another. Google it.

It sounds to me as if both you and your wife felt being diagnosed with a mental ‘condition,’ was synonymous with 'being “crazy.” It isn’t, of course, but that’s what most people felt–and what a lot of people continue to feel. For all I know, that’s what my Mother felt about me, only she couldn’t admit it, of course.

Do you know what caused your clinical depression? For me, it was a combination of a high EQ and circumstances that continued to escalate until I ‘broke.’ Simple as that.

There’s certainly something wrong–everything wrong–with over-medication. IMM, that’s the fault of the doctor rather than the treatment, however. He should have started with a low dosage and ramped it up to a point where your wife could function as normally as possible–then stopped. But you shouldn’t dwell on your wife’s condition and treatment because your friend’s condition is entirely different from either you or your wife’s.

I’d always like to be thought of as a person rather than as a thing. But aren’t we all, sometime or another, thought of as ‘things?’ Doesn’t it depend on the level of abstraction we use in our ‘labeling?’ For example, (and this is hypothetical, I don’t mean YOU, specifically,) you’ve labeled your psychiatrist–and your wife’s–according to gender, then supposed knowledge (subjective, on your part, and based on your ‘expectations’ of what a psychiatrist should be.) You then go further–expecting all psychiatrists to be what you expect them to be–empathetic and caring toward everyone they try to counsel and attempt to help. In your, specific, experience this includes a minimal use of drugs–your wife was over-medicated–you may think your friend is also being over-medicated. I really don’t know. She may be.

But stand back about five steps and honestly look at what your thoughts are, how you arrived at them, and what you feel as a result of them.

I really can’t go on–I’ve gone way beyond my concrete knowledge. I don’t want myself or this web-site accused of contributing to the delinquency of a major–or a colonel–or a staff sergeant…