Understanding Extreme States: An Interview with Paris Williams

In this interview, a practicing therapist weighs our contemporary understanding of “schizophrenia” and explores alternative models beyond the “medicate your brain disease” approach. I, the interviewer Matt Stevenson, am a psychiatric survivor who first encountered Paris Williams while searching years ago for hopeful alternative conceptualizations of “schizophrenia.” At that time Paris responded kindly to my requests for reassurance that extreme states could be healed. Today I’m following in his footsteps of raising awareness about alternatives; with this interview I’m engaging him in our common goal.

Paris is the author of Rethinking Madness — in my view the most hopeful and encouraging book available about extreme states — and a therapist currently practicing in New Zealand. Before becoming a healer, Paris had to work through his own extreme states of mind based on past trauma, a process which shaped his understanding of and response to mainstream psychiatry’s narratives about “schizophrenia.”

In this interview we will explore often-contentious topics including the non-validity of the biological model, the link between parenting problems and psychosis, and how best to help psychotic people who are fighting both emotional conflicts and a psychiatric system drugging them into silence. Please read on and enjoy.

* * * * *

Matt: Hi Paris. Thank you for speaking with me today. You and I have spoken several times before, on and off the ISPS listserv. You know that I’m a person with lived experience of psychosis, and that I’m trying to help others experiencing psychosis to have a more hopeful view of recovery from so-called “schizophrenia.”

First, can you tell me a little bit about your background and training? Where did you go to school, what sort of therapist are you, what sort of setting do you work in? What led you to get involved in the field?

Paris: Yes. Right now I’m a full time therapist working in New Zealand. About how I got to where I am now: I had a breakdown and/or breakthrough myself in my late 20s (I’m 44 now). I was studying physics and was a professional hang gliding instructor at the time, and I was wanting to answer all the big questions of life through physics. I was getting into mindfulness meditation as a way to deepen my curiosity about my inner world, but had no interest in formal psychology.

Then I had this powerful crisis, coming from a lot of trauma as a child. To give a little insight into how difficult my childhood was, I was diagnosed as having Borderline Personality Disorder at the age of seven (yes, seven, even though you’re only meant to be diagnosed at age 18), and was sent to a foster home that was meant to fix me. That got added to earlier trauma and my early years became a hell of a nightmare. I worked through it, but ended up with a lot of deep pain that I had to resolve.

I got introduced to psychotic experiences very young — my uncle was hospitalized several times for “psychosis,” and my mom has experienced what would generally be considered delusions and hallucinations for nearly all of my life, though thankfully she managed to stay out of the psychiatric system. Her family had deep, deep trauma: her father raped her when she was only seven, then ran off; then her stepfather was physically abusive with her and her siblings; and at age 12, my mother discovered her mother’s dead body after she committed suicide. So the way that I generally make sense of it is that she probably organized her experience in a way that helped her tolerate it, developing beliefs that she is a powerful alien from a much more benevolent world. It was bizarre, but it worked for her to cope and not be totally overwhelmed by her past trauma.

So from a young age I understood how these strange beliefs might be helpful for people. My mom wasn’t hurting anyone and her strange belief system helped her to survive. I saw the potential wisdom aspect of what was called psychosis. Organizing extreme experience in bizarre ways can help one to cope and make the intolerable tolerable.

When I had my breakdown in my late 20s, I just knew it came from all that childhood experience. I actually thought I had dealt with the trauma, but it blew up in my face. But I managed to work through it and stayed out of the system. Just by the skin of my teeth; it was pretty intense. If I had seen a mainstream professional I would have been given a psychotic diagnosis. But I worked through it and came out healthier and stronger on the other side.

After this experience, I started thinking there must be many people who go through these experiences and go to see a professional. And then they’re told these terrible things — you’ve got a brain disease, you’re never going to recover. I felt with my experience I had to do something about it — there’s certainly a lot of healthier ways that people can work out these problems rather than going into the psychiatric system. So that was my impetus toward becoming a psychologist myself.

Matt: Wow, those are some overwhelmingly intense experiences for any young child to go through. I can’t believe you were diagnosed as “borderline” at age seven! What psychiatrist would make that diagnosis for a child of that age? Okay, so after having a breakdown yourself as a young adult, you wanted to help others; that’s similar to my story. How did you move forward with these goals?

Paris: Now I practice full time therapy in New Zealand; I’ve been here three years. I moved here after marrying a Kiwi woman. I originally wanted to work quite a bit here with people experiencing extreme states, but I just got spanked badly. What I mean is I got blacklisted from the local hospital while trying to support one of my psychotic clients. And so I’ve actually pulled away from that population right now, because the system here is so oppressive; it’s even worse than what I experienced in the US.

Matt: Thanks for this background. It’s interesting and sad to hear about New Zealand’s situation vis-a-vis psychosis. You’re a talented therapist and someone who I think could do a lot of good work helping psychotic people. Can you share more about the situation in New Zealand, and also about this case that deterred you?

Paris: Here in New Zealand, simply not taking the drugs for a psychotic breakdown is enough for them to make you take them. There is very little genuine informed consent. They have a mental health act that’s a direct violation of the United Nations treaty.

I had a young male client who had a breakdown, whose parents took him into the hospital, so I went to see him there and worked with him in the hospital. First the staff wouldn’t even let me in to see him. Then they finally let me in; then I was too forthcoming with my criticisms of the drugging and the biological treatment approach. We had a meeting with the psychiatrist, his family and the client, and I pushed the psychiatrist to acknowledge that some people recover from psychotic breakdowns. The psychiatrist finally conceded it might be true but then said, right in front of the client, “Some people might recover but he’s not one of them.”

I saw my client a bit longer but then they started ramping up those doses, and then they kicked me out of the hospital. And then I went to my psychologist board and said, “Ethically, we’re supposed to take action when harm is coming to our clients.” But the people on our board said to me, “You have to understand that in New Zealand the psychiatrists run the show and there is no recourse.” Then I went to a lawyer and the lawyer said, “There’s nothing you can do.”

One thing led to another and I decided to withdraw from working with psychotic clients. It appeared to me that because I was willing to openly challenge the psychiatrists’ treatments of my clients, that out of spite, some of them were treating them even more harmfully than they would have otherwise, such as ramping up their dosages to ridiculous levels. So I felt that by continuing to engage with psychotic clients, at this time and place, I would be making things worse for them by causing a backlash from the system which would get them even more heavily drugged. I didn’t want to continue with that.

So right now, I’m still doing the advocacy in terms of supporting a recovery model of psychosis, and providing assessments that people can use with their psychiatrists and other prescribers to encourage tapering down with medications. But that’s pretty much it for the moment.

Matt: Wow, I’m sorry to hear this. This situation of forced drugging is something I’d expect to hear about in Iran or North Korea, not in a supposedly civilized country like New Zealand.

Paris: Yes, it is pretty extreme. The good news is we came here because one of my wife’s family members had a psychotic breakdown and was in the system here on heavy forced medication; and we came here to try to help her. I was really lucky that her psychiatrist had heard of me and was familiar with my work and was unusually open-minded. Her psychiatrist wasn’t happy about it but agreed to take her off her medication. And she really blossomed off drugs and got much better. This psychiatrist now is starting to question her own practice as a psychiatrist, and this family member is doing great, so that’s the positive thing.

Matt: That’s good to hear. Okay Paris, let me move on to some other questions. How much experience overall do you have working with schizophrenic clients? Before you moved to New Zealand, I remember you were practicing for a few years in California. Were you able to work with psychotic people there?

Paris: Well even in New Zealand, I actually have had a bit of experience. I found a doctor who was willing to work with me outside the box a little bit. This doctor helped one person taper off and get his family engaged as support. This young man fully recovered and got off all the meds. And then in the US before I came here I was always dancing on the edge, but I worked with several psychotic people. My experience has been that when you create a very safe space, where the psychotic person knows that they can share whatever’s going on, knows that they won’t get forced treatment they don’t want, that most people are able to work through whatever’s going on and get through it. I’ve had a lot of really good success stories with psychotic people.

I see these experiences on a continuum, so it’s hard to put an exact number on how many psychotic people I’ve worked with. But I’ve had really good results with a number of clients both in the U.S. and New Zealand, in that they’ve come off all the drugs and would be considered fully recovered by any standard. I’ve helped quite a few other people make significant positive gains in many ways, including reducing or coming off the drugs and developing strategies for riding through extreme states without losing control of their behavior or ending up in the hospital. And I have helped a lot of people make significant peace with ongoing distressing anomalous experiences.

Aside from the difficulty of supporting people in working through such difficult conditions, I have found that much if not most of my support efforts involve trying to undo the harm caused by the mainstream mental health care system. I’ve found this part of the work to be very discouraging to say the least.

I also see psychosis as extreme responses to trauma for the most part. That’s what I’m working with now; I work a lot with sexual abuse survivors. I’m more and more interested in trauma, developmental trauma as well as acute trauma. I really see these different expressions, e.g. personality disorders or psychosis etc, as sort of extreme responses to existential threat. It might be a literal threat, a bodily threat, or a deeper kind of existential threat to the “self,” such as what is often the case with child abuse, neglect or other developmental trauma — whatever makes the person feel terrified and overwhelmed.

Matt: Yes, I understand this. As I was telling you in another conversation we had, Vamik Volkan and Bert Karon wrote about how experiences of extreme, unremitting terror were at the root of what is called “schizophrenia.” Volkan wrote about how in a successful psychotherapy, one must create the conditions for the person to face their terror and past trauma — to come to terms with it, to dissolve and mature the childlike part of the personality which is trapped in fear, which he called “the infantile psychotic self.” I encourage you to read his book, The Infantile Psychotic Self, which contains several great case studies of full recovery from a long-term schizophrenic state.

Okay, now let me move on to something else. Give me your honest opinion on the idea commonly believed in our “developed” nations that people experiencing delusions, hallucinations, and apathy have a brain disease called schizophrenia. Do you think this is valid? How do you talk to clients and families who have heard of this idea and might be scared of it? If schizophrenia is not a brain disease, how can people think about psychotic experience?

Paris: No, basically I don’t believe that there’s a brain disease causing schizophrenia. It’s not all black or white — certainly there’s cases where physical issues like heavy metal poisoning or other kinds of documented neurological conditions and brain injury can cause severe psychospiritual distress. But most psychotic experience that gets called psychotic disorders in the DSM or ICD isn’t a brain disease.

I see psychotic experiences such as delusions and hallucinations as adaptations, not as diseases. If you locate anomalies in the brain within some people who become psychotic, it may just be evidence of significant trauma in their past lives. Again, I don’t see these brain changes as disease so much as adaptation; as an organism trying to adapt to a very difficult situation. That’s from lots of years of reading the research as well as working with psychotic people clinically.

Also, I’ve seen that psychotic clients can get well and not need the drugs. Did the brain disease suddenly go away and they’re perfectly well? It doesn’t make sense then, the brain disease theory. It doesn’t fit what I’ve seen. Why would the brain disease suddenly go away when they had enough psychological help? And also, the psychiatric research on “still-to-be-discovered brain diseases” is so weak; it’s very unconvincing, not real science.

The problem is, once you get a diagnosis like “schizophrenia” you get put on drugs. You probably don’t have a brain disease when you get diagnosed, but pretty soon you will have a real brain disease if you stay on the drugs long enough — in that your brain gets altered and damaged by the psychiatric drugs, as Whitaker’s book Anatomy of an Epidemic so clearly documents. So there is a disease associated with a schizophrenia diagnosis, it’s just not the disease that’s usually talked about.

I have this vicious cycle I’ve written about in my book Rethinking Madness: people have severe distress, we think we need to prescribe drugs to fix their brain problem, but then the drugs in fact lead to a real problem with their brain. Then they have more problems, then we think they need more drugs, and we don’t realize the drugs might be harming them in the long term… it keeps reinforcing the story that people have chronic life-long brain diseases. But for the vast majority of those people it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy due to the treatment they have been receiving. It’s iatrogenic.

Matt: Yep, I agree with pretty much everything you said. It’s a crime that antipsychotics are used in the amount and length they are in most countries, given the lack of evidence of their long-term benefit and safety. It’s all about profits for the drug companies and about elevating psychiatrists as doctors treating supposedly brain-based illnesses, not about what’s really going on with the psychotic clients or what might be most likely to help.

Okay, talk to me more about the role of drugs. Do you ever refer schizophrenic clients to prescribers? Or do you try to discourage drug use? Do you see any place for these antipsychotic drugs?

Paris: First of all I see drugs as drugs. Illicit drugs and psych drugs are just compounds affecting our neurotransmitters in different ways. They don’t treat a specific disease, unlike insulin for diabetes. What I’ve seen, academically in the research and clinically in my practice, is that at best you get short-term relief at the expense of long-term harm. At the worst, you don’t even get short-term relief, and you get short-term and long-term harm.

Usually I think it’s best to not use antipsychotic drugs at all for a psychotic breakdown, or if they are used, to keep it short term and then taper off. As an example, I’m working with a psychotic client right now who’s been able to taper off — since moving here I’ve only worked with four people with psychosis, including the one I mentioned earlier who got in trouble with the system. The other three all came off their drugs; they had each been started on antipsychotic drugs, and they later got off and started doing really well.

One man had been in the system on a strong antipsychotic drug for 15 years; I worked with him and his mom. We worked with a really open-minded doctor. We did a really slow taper, and he got much better. Another young man had serious sleeping problems which led him to have psychotic manic-type experiences; it snowballed and he ended up in a pretty extreme place. When I supported him I was at first trying to be alternative, meaning to help him manage his sleep with no drugs at all, but it wasn’t working. Then his doctors wanted him to go on antipsychotics permanently; he’d had two psychotic breaks and was going into his third one when I really began to work with him.

We first tried just basic relaxation and sleep-hygiene methods to help him sleep, which worked okay, but weren’t quite enough given how extreme his condition was. So he tried a benzo for a few nights, then a low-dose antipsychotic for a few more nights, just to help with sleep. Then after 5 or 6 nights using the drugs like this, he was able to stop using them, and has since fully recovered from the episode and came off all the drugs. We continued to do a little work with his past experiences and he’s been back at work full time and doing really well ever since.

Here’s what I think worked well with this last drug use situation: A) Taking the drugs was the client’s full choice; there was no coercion to use them, and B) There wasn’t any suggestion that they were medications curing any brain problem; they were just tranquilizers that helped him sleep.

So in that case I saw drugs as helpful. The problem is they’re very rarely used like that, i.e. as a last resort strategy, with full informed consent, for a short period of time. If used that way they could be helpful for some people. But otherwise, outside of those rare exceptions I think they’re pretty much a negative influence.

Matt: Okay. And why specifically, in your opinion, are these drugs usually a negative influence? Can you give some details?

Paris: A couple reasons why they’re a negative influence: 1) They’re neurotoxins — if the person didn’t have neurological anomalies prior to that, they will afterwards, as the drugs create a neurologically unnatural state (see Grace Jackson’s research). And 2) Psychologically, what the drugs are doing is harmful.

Let me explain. With so much of what we call mental disorders, a person has developed a conflict against their own experience, a tug of war with their own emotions, but with the drugs we’re exacerbating things by making it harder to work with that experience constructively. The drug temporarily reduces intrapsychic conflict by dulling down negative feelings, and they also induce a temporary placebo effect. But if the psychotic person didn’t address the root problems at all — whatever difficult feelings, past trauma, lack of love, etc, that is related to their breakdown — then these issues reemerge and come back even stronger. Psychologically, the drugs have essentially just exacerbated the idea that there’s something wrong with you and you have to keep taking the drug to manage it.

So now the person in this example has even more fear of their problematic emotions and conflicts. And then the drugs also impair the person’s natural ability to navigate through their emotions and meet their needs. They can’t be open to their feelings, which are messengers about what is wrong. It reminds me of the phrase, “Don’t shoot the messenger,” which is what drugs do.

As a therapist, I want to help people make peace with and develop a more open and curious attitude toward their experiences and feelings. And I want to help them get their needs met and develop a more satisfying life. Not always, but generally, I find that psychiatric drugs interfere with meeting those goals. Generally speaking, if a person can not use drugs at all, that’s best.

Matt: Thanks for sharing that. I know it’s not easy to speak out in this way in our drug-happy climate, in a world where most doctors believe delusions and hallucinations represent a brain disease requiring drugs. I experienced what you’re talking about and it was one of the reasons I decided to self-taper myself off antipsychotic drugs; something I did against my psychiatrist’s advice, having to deceive him and exit the psychiatric system. I often wonder how outcomes for psychotic people would be if there were no drugs.

Okay, moving on: What are some sources (books, videos, websites) you would recommend to people who have been diagnosed schizophrenic and want to learn a more hopeful approach to psychosis?

Paris: On my website RethinkingMadness.com I have a resources page. As far as mental health professionals go, I’d really push reading Anatomy of an Epidemic. I just think it’s so important to really understand the whole problem — there’s a really significant problem in the fabric of our society with mental disorders, but we make it so much worse by how we treat it in our society. It’s like, “First let’s stop making it worse, then we can address the real problems”… like problems in parenting, intergenerational trauma, poverty, and so on.

When you look honestly at the broader research, the World Health Organization studies, etc, it’s pretty clear that the Western mental health field is making things worse, generally speaking. Obviously every case is different, but we’re not getting any indicator that we’re making things better with our first-world system of treating severe distress.

One of the things I find very helpful is a mindfulness and somatic therapy approach; and my personal favorite approach to therapy of early trauma is called Hakomi. What I really like about it is it integrates mindfulness, psychodynamic, existential/humanistic and somatic therapies, and puts them all together.

So much of the trauma that shows up in psychosis is actually preverbal experience contained in the body. For the majority of people who develop psychosis, they’ve probably had trauma in the early years of life. How do you actually address it if they can’t remember or talk to you about it? This is why somatic experiential approaches like Hakomi are so helpful. The trauma is still held in the body or unconscious physical being of the organism. And the somatic approach allows you to address it on that level.

Ron Kurtz, Moshe Feldenkrais, Alexander Lowen, Wilhelm Reich, and Peter Levine were developers of this approach. They all asked, “How do we support someone who’s had trauma that either predates or extends beyond their verbal capacity?” Their thesis is that the trauma is still held in their body in some way — in the sensations, in the lens through which they make sense of the world — but they’re not core beliefs you can put into words. They’re core beliefs that go beyond just visual memories and thoughts, but are held even more deeply within the body and the entire organism, showing up in physical sensations, tensions, postures, gestures and impulses, many of which the person is not ordinarily conscious of.

The principal is that you immerse a person into the actual experience — I’ll give an example. When someone’s struggling with overwhelming anxiety, one thing you can do is to direct them into experiencing and identifying where specifically the fear is in their body, and into mapping out and making an image of the sensation. Then you immerse them more deeply into this experience and notice whatever emotions, impulses, thoughts, meaning or any other experiences that naturally emerge. So, like this, you follow an organic process of peeling back the layers of their experience until you arrive at the core material. Then you support the person in transforming the limiting core belief at this very deep level in a whole organism way. Sometimes, repressed or forgotten memories emerge at this point, and you can work with these directly.

If it’s preverbal, that’s where it gets really interesting, and involves more direct physical work with the body. With powerful negative emotions we can get stuck for years and years if we don’t feel and resolve the traumatic feelings. My work is very much from a trauma perspective; it’s very holistic, holding the broad view that one’s entire organism is perpetually striving to survive and thrive.

Matt: It’s interesting to hear about this Hakomi approach. I know about Lowen and Reich, and read their books Bioenergetics and Character Analysis, as well as Levine’s Waking the Tiger.

Okay, let’s move to another controversial question relating to so-called “schizophrenia.” What do you think are the most common causal factors in someone experiencing a psychotic breakdown? The NIMH says the cause of schizophrenia is unknown. Do you agree that we don’t know what causes the experiences that get labeled schizophrenia?

Paris: I have a two-part answer. The first part: So much of what is diagnosed as psychosis shouldn’t be. Essentially, if someone is having a belief or a perception that doesn’t seem to be lined up with consensus reality or with the mainstream accepted standards, then they’re called psychotic. That’s a real problem — where do you draw the line? For example, all the members of one religion may seem really psychotic compared to another religion. You might have another group of people with strange beliefs; i.e. aliens coming from outer space to take over the world at a certain future date. It’s hard to draw the line between what’s crazy and what’s not.

The next question is: Are their strange beliefs causing harm to themselves or others? If not, no problem. If it’s not interfering with their ability to live a decent life, it’s not a problem; it shouldn’t be filed under or called a disorder.

What I’m calling psychosis, meaning psychosis that becomes a real problem, isn’t simply having an anomalous belief or perception. Instead, the person’s basic lens or paradigm or set of cognitive constructs breaks down. During our development, we build up a particular set of constructs to make sense of a world that is stable — but with someone who becomes psychotic, their whole worldview breaks down quite rapidly in different ways. It can become very rigid or totally collapse.

What I think causes this type of breakdown is usually the person being exposed to raw existential terror in some form. In my book Rethinking Madness, I had four different chapters on theories connecting death anxiety to psychosis. When we actually experience our fear in its raw primal form, it can be very destabilizing.

I think our development is like a skyscraper and the first foundation is getting the experience that the world is safe enough and I belong here and I’m accepted here. As long as we get that, we establish a greater and greater distinction between ourselves and others (more differentiated object relations). Then these needs connected to being autonomous on one hand and having intimate relationships on the other hand develop as we get a more complex sense of ourselves. So if someone has a good first few years of their life in terms of having security and love from caretakers, if they get that deep in the fiber of their being, then if some terrible trauma happens later in life they’re less likely to develop psychosis due to having a stronger foundation (they might develop PTSD or mood problems instead).

Having a psychotic break is like having the carpet underneath one’s feet getting totally ripped out — and people who’ve had a difficult early first few years of life are most vulnerable to that. With someone who’s had a lot of early trauma, the normal stresses of life as a young or middle-aged adult might be enough to break them down.

If I look at my own life, the first one to two years were actually really secure; but then all hell broke loose for me. When I had my breakdown in my late 20s, I had enough resilience at the very bottom that I had the strength to work through it alone. But other people might need more support to work through it.

It’s complicated, but if we were to generalize, it’s the undermining of our sense of self at the deepest layers that can lead to psychosis, and early trauma can make us much more vulnerable.

Matt: You give long answers, Paris! But a lot of good food for thought. Okay, I have one more very controversial question: Through neglect and/or abuse, can parents contribute to their children developing problems that get diagnosed as “schizophrenia”? If so, do you think it can be advantageous to acknowledge this in a way that doesn’t blame parents?

You know what I think about this. I hate it when certain NAMI parents and many of our American research institutions state, “We now know that bad parenting does not cause schizophrenia.” That’s not only incredibly simplistic, it almost borders on lying when we look at how strongly correlated trauma of all kinds is with psychosis. Not all trauma is from parents, but a lot of early trauma is. Okay, let’s hear your view on this.

Paris: Yes, the research is pretty clear, especially from the Adverse Childhood Experiences studies, that there are really high correlations (which look more like causal links) between the severity of adverse childhood experiences and the likelihood of developing psychosis.

The one study in my recent paper about Psychosis and the Family — about the number of adverse childhood experiences correlating with chances of having a psychotic break — concludes that when you have five different kinds of adverse childhood experiences (like sexual abuse, physical abuse, bullying, verbal abuse, etc) you’re 193 times more likely to have a psychotic breakdown than someone who had 0 or 1. When you compare the strength of these trauma factors in affecting psychosis risk to the tiny genetic correlations that have been discovered so far (which were ironically on the front page of the New York Times), suggesting that having certain genes might raise your risk from 1 to 1.2 percent, it’s pretty clear how important trauma is.

Where do these adverse experiences come from? Most of them come from our family and early environment including parents. Not all of them — some can come from war, poverty, other factors. Intergenerational trauma is important. How do we name the elephant in the room? Yes, problematic parenting leads to significant problems later in life. We don’t want to just come out and say that, but it’s so, so clear it’s true.

Also, we don’t want to get locked up in blaming the parent. Often the parents were abused themselves, or are in poverty, in a difficult situation where they’re doing the best they can, and it’s impossible for them to do a good job given the situation they’re in. It’s painful to see how you try to talk about parents and psychosis and you get labeled a mother blamer. Things are much more complicated.

Matt: Yes, I agree. Identifying a parent as a possible causal agent in triggering a psychotic breakdown isn’t the same as saying that parent is a bad person. My own father beat me for years and my mother didn’t protect me and didn’t know how to talk to me about my fear of my father. They didn’t do these things because they were evil people; they had been neglected and abused by their own parents. I have no hesitation in saying that my parents contributed to my having severe emotional problems, including psychotic experience. They did.

I think things are much better if we face and acknowledge the harm that poor parenting can do; because then we have a chance to change it for the better, especially for parents to change their relationship with their child for the better. Taking the approach of some NAMI groups, “Bad parenting does not cause schizophrenia,” is both meaningless but at the same time a stonewall that precludes a careful examination of what is really going on in the relationship between parents and a child who becomes psychotic.

Okay, we’ve been talking a long time and both need to go. Thank you very much for your time, Paris. I’m sure that what you shared here will be very helpful to people looking for a humanistic, psychological, hopeful approach to psychosis and “schizophrenia.” I’ll talk to you soon.