In this interview, Lloyd Ross of ISEPP and I discuss how to help people experiencing delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, and other problems commonly associated with a diagnosis of “schizophrenia.” We discuss the problems with the biological model of “mental illness” as contrasted with a more psychosocial, contextual model of distress.
As Lloyd says, “What kind of hope do you have if someone tells you you have a brain disease called schizophrenia, and we can only give you this drug that can hold it down but can’t cure it? What kind of hope is that?”
There are better, more hopeful ideas available for supporting people experiencing extreme states, and in this interview we go in search of them.
Matt: Hi Lloyd, thanks for speaking to me today. As a therapist with 40 years’ experience working in intensive psychotherapy with people who would be, and often were, labeled schizophrenic at psychiatric hospitals, your viewpoints may be a real eye-opener for those who only know the popular view of so-called “severe mental illness.”
I am going to ask you questions about your work aimed at an audience of people who are mostly unfamiliar with depth approaches to extreme states, who generally believe that there is a brain disease called schizophrenia requiring lifelong drugging. You’ll note that sometimes I ask the questions using language I don’t believe in myself. You’re free to challenge and reframe anything.
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, and what sort of setting do you work in?
Lloyd: Well, I’ve had a 40-year career as a psychologist in New Jersey. As a young man, I got a Master’s degree in psychology, and then before starting my Ph.D in psychology decided to take a full year off. This was a big mistake because I wound up getting drafted, spent two years with the army in Vietnam, and went through a lot of trauma. But I survived the war, came back and completed my doctorate, and did postdoctoral training.
As a postdoc I was supervised by a number of people, including Margaret Mahler for one year. Next to Freud, Mahler is the most significant person in ego developmental psychology, which is a common form of psychoanalytic theory. She pushed the bar to the next level in terms of understanding our early emotional development.
As an early-career psychologist, I did some work for the Mount Carmel Guild, a public social services agency, where I wound up supervising the first comprehensive community mental health center in the country in Newark, New Jersey. I also spent a few years as a school psychologist working with young kids.
After I got my doctorate and completed supervision I immediately opened up a private practice, and I ran my practice in Ridgewood, New Jersey for 40 years. I did a few other things as well. I consulted for the Newark police department; evaluating police officers who were in disciplinary trouble and addressing whether or not they should stay on the force. I also consulted for a children’s orphanage called St Peter’s Village and did therapy with its kids. But the main thing was my private practice. I was doing 70 hours a week of private practice therapy sessions for close to 40 years. I don’t think I could do it now, but for the first 30 years I wasn’t tired at all doing 70 hours of therapy a week. I did this work six days a week, and sometimes even a little bit on Sundays.
Matt: Wow, 70 hours a week of being emotionally available to people is a lot! I can’t imagine doing that. I’m very impressed.
Now let’s turn to the subject of this interview. How much experience do you have working with clients who may have been diagnosed “schizophrenic” in psychiatric institutions, who are variously delusional, paranoid hallucinating, unable to function? Specifically, how many such people have you worked with in therapy lasting at least one year? And how many times per week do you typically work with them?
Lloyd: Over the last 40 years I saw approximately 150 people who could be considered schizophrenic because they were having delusions and hallucinations, i.e. they had a serious break with reality. Some of these therapies were very brief because they didn’t accept that I don’t use medication, which I always explained in the first session.
Let me explain that point. The fact is that I don’t use medication to treat people diagnosed with schizophrenia. If somebody wants to work with me and they’re on antipsychotic medication, one of the goals is to come off the medication because medication interferes with the work of psychotherapy in terms of working through feelings. It causes people to avoid emotionally important issues and to be unmotivated. You can’t really do psychotherapy with somebody in this condition, because they can’t process the events that happened to them. What we need to do in psychotherapy is go back and process difficult events, to see what factors in our present and past life are causing us trouble and get them under our control.
Now out of these 150 people whom I saw over 40 years, probably about 100 of them accepted my non-medication approach. The large majority of these stayed in treatment for at least one year, and many stayed for between three to five years or more. I’d say it was about evenly split between men and women, so about 50 people of each gender that I did serious work with. Most of the people I consulted with chose to try working without medication, which was often because they or their parents didn’t like what the medications were doing to them.
What was interesting was I saw a number of psychiatrists’ kids who were seriously troubled — it wasn’t always psychosis, also other diagnoses — because I was the only one in the area who didn’t use medication and the psychiatrists didn’t want their kids on medication. This included the children of a psychiatrist who treated kids and used medication for all the kids in his practice, but he didn’t want his own children on anything. So that was interesting.
Matt: Interesting indeed! About working with delusional or paranoid people in psychotherapy, I think a lot of therapists are intimated by or simply ignorant about how to work with people in these overwhelming states because it is not taught. But you clearly have a lot more experience doing psychotherapy with people diagnosed “schizophrenic” than most people. I imagine the Mahler developmental theory of autism and symbiosis was helpful in understanding their problems.
So with the people you worked with, what about the frequency of treatment?
Lloyd: With somebody who was experiencing symptoms that the profession labels schizophrenic, such as having hallucinations, delusions, or being very paranoid, I would usually see them 3-5 times per week over a period of at least two years. Many of these schizophrenic clients were young people undergoing life transitions — these life transitions, like leaving home and going to college, often cause a stress that brings up earlier trauma and can cause a break with reality in a vulnerable person. But I also saw some older clients whose life stresses had precipitated a break.
I worked intensively with them because psychotic conditions are very serious and require intensive help. After an intensive early period of work, I cut down the sessions gradually, over periods of years, letting the client taper down the frequency of our meetings at their own pace. With most psychotic clients we wouldn’t set a formal discontinuation date. Instead we would stay in touch as long as they needed or wanted. With former psychotic clients, I’ve been to their college graduations, weddings, to when their kids get married, to all these events of my clients — and these were people who were delusional and couldn’t function when they started working with me.
There’s one patient I started seeing in 1978 who was labeled delusional and couldn’t function in the beginning, who I’m still working with. He’s now running a very successful business and has two kids, one in high school and one who just graduated college; the kids are doing great and he and his wife are doing great. The reason I’m still seeing him after all this time is he still has some issues around mother and father; his mother was “schizophrenic” (in quotes). His mother did some pretty horrible things to him and he wants to continue talking about it. He functions fine and won’t fall apart without therapy but he still wants to be seen. So I still see him. Every mother’s day I still get a mother’s day card from him. This shows you a little bit of what is going on in the transference between us.
With psychotic clients I often work with them for three, four, five years. Because it takes a long time to work with really serious problems. Keep in mind schizophrenia is not a disease; you don’t get cured, you learn to truly experience your pain in a direct way. You often do a lot of crying, you come to truly understand what happened to you; you have to keep looking at what happened that caused your breakdown, so that symptoms won’t come back.
I’ll give you an example that’s not about psychosis but about trauma that happened to me and my friends. I had a lot of friends who died in Vietnam; it was very traumatizing to me. Every year at least once or twice I go down to the Vietnam Memorial wall in Washington DC, and I stand there and cry remembering my friends who died in the war. This is how I deal with my own trauma. And I know guys who were in Vietnam who don’t do that, and they have all kinds of problems that developed from the repressed trauma. It comes back to haunt them. I have one friend who denied what happened when we were in Vietnam, and his life fell apart, he lost his wife, kids, friends, everything. So facing your pain is crucial, not just after you’ve had a psychotic break but for anyone who’s been through significant trauma.
Matt: Okay, thanks Lloyd for the detail on your caseload over all these years. I personally think this frequency of work, multiple times a week, can be crucial if you want to establish a strong enough trusting relationship to get a handle on overwhelming confusion, terror, and fear. It’s sad that relatively little of this work is being done right now.
Now let me ask you about what you would say to a layperson or a beginning therapist who wanted to understand the primary causes of severe states of delusion, paranoia, and hallucination: problems that in the popular discourse get labeled “schizophrenia.” Leading psychiatrists have asserted that there is a lifelong disease called schizophrenia caused by faulty genes or misfiring brain chemistry. But the evidence for that hypothesis — and a hypothesis it is — continues to be missing.
So thinking about a person who is new to this area, where would you recommend they start in learning more?
Lloyd: If I was trying to teach someone how to take a look at the issue of very serious emotional problems, I’d first suggest that they read the book Broken Brains, Wounded Hearts by Ty Colbert, a friend of mine. This was the first book I read after school that had any meaning. What we’re dealing with with a schizophrenia diagnosis and other serious problems is wounded hearts, not broken brains.
I would then take a look at one of two books by Grace Jackson, an American psychiatrist. One of them is Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs, and the second one is Drug-Induced Dementia. In both of these books she describes why psychiatric drugs are absolutely deadly when used over the long term. The second one is extremely detailed and you can read it twenty times and still not get everything. The first one, Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs, is the easier read for a layperson.
Then I would go to Margaret Mahler; her book is The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. She’s easy to read even though her background is German. She describes ego-developmental theory; in fact, she founded it. She videotaped mothers and infants for weeks and months at a time, and her theory came from what she observed. And what she’s saying is that we go through stages of emotional development in relation to other people, and when we suffer any kind of trauma at a particular stage it has ramifications for later on. And sometimes we go through half our lives without ever having a past trauma come back; and then something happens that brings it up and all of a sudden we can’t function.
Most of the people that we see who would be called schizophrenic in a psychiatric hospital setting experienced some kind of trauma at a very young age… if it happens a bit later, it tends to get called Borderline Personality Disorder. But it’s not a disease — it’s bad shit that happens to us.
There are three more books that I think are crucial; one of them is Bert Karon’s Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia: The Treatment of Choice. Everything Bert says I’m spot on with. I think he’s just great. And he’s been working with people who were diagnosed schizophrenic all his life. He’s mainly worked with really severe psychotic patients. He uses the old jargon but he has the same views as me. I would strongly suggest that book.
The other two, one of them is a little difficult; it’s by Hyman Spotnitz, the title is Psychotherapy of Preoedipal Conditions. Spotnitz was an analyst from the New York area. It’s a technical book, but for a therapist it’s a really valuable guide of how to relate to psychotic people preverbally and at their level. If you follow him you’re going to be able to wade right in and be there with a person when they’re having delusions and hallucinations. He talks about those issues really directly.
And the last book is by a guy named Clancy McKenzie; it’s called Delayed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from Infancy. He’s a psychiatrist from Pennsylvania. He’s a bit of a strange guy, but he says it like it is in terms of schizophrenia and borderline states and their causes. He discusses early trauma in detail and how it can cause later suffering that gets labeled as schizophrenic and borderline conditions. Any young person, or young therapist, who wants to take a serious look at issues around helping people with so-called “schizophrenia” should read these books.
Matt: Okay, thanks for these suggestions. From my own reading of these books, I agree these are some great resources with which to start. So what specifically causes the kind of experiences like delusions, hallucinations, and withdrawal or apathy that get labeled schizophrenia?
Lloyd: It’s complicated. It’s usually “bad shit” happening in some form over long time periods. It can be mostly the relationship to parents going wrong in some way. But sometimes it’s not the mother-child relationship; sometimes it’s very subtle things.
Being abused physically or sexually, being homeless, being poor, neglect from parents, having a parent die… all of these things in childhood or early adulthood can be involved in leading someone to have a psychotic breakdown at a later age and getting labeled schizophrenic. It’s never one thing; there are always multiple causes going into it when someone has these severe problems. It may take years to figure out the causes, and you may never figure out all the causes. And you don’t have to — you can still get better and make significant changes.
Matt: This makes me think of John Read’s research; he has dozens of studies which strongly link trauma of all kinds with an increased probability of receiving a schizophrenia or bipolar diagnosis. There’s also the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study which says much the same thing.
Lloyd: Yes, and I have an example from my own life of how early trauma can come back at a later time. As a child myself, when I was very young, I went through a trauma with my grandmother. Because my parents were out working until late, I had to take care of her in the afternoons as a five year old, helping her to the bathroom and to the sink, giving her a drink. I was told “if anything happens to her it’s your fault” — that was a big burden for a little kid. Our house was very dark in the evening time, and I would be scared when I was alone with my grandmother in the dark; scared that something might happen to her and I would be blamed.
Much later on, after the war and after I’d started my career, I found that when I came home at night to my wife, if it was nighttime and the lights were dark, I would go into a rage. I talked about this in my analysis that was going on at the time. It turned out that it came from when I was five years old and I had to sit with my grandmother in the dark and caretake her, and I hated it. Once I got that connection I didn’t go into a rage anymore with my wife. It didn’t go away, I just felt very uncomfortable. From then on my wife made sure the light was on when I came home.
Matt: That is a good example of “transference” of difficult feelings from an earlier setting to a later one. Okay, now let’s go back to the topic of people having a breakdown and getting labeled schizophrenic. This often happens to young people in their late teens or twenties, right? Why would that be?
Lloyd: Yes, a lot of people become “schizophrenic” during adolescence… the majority, that’s when it usually occurs. It’s not like magic, it’s not a coincidence; it’s usually a reawakening of whatever trauma occurred earlier on, which can get triggered by the stresses people often face as young adults — stresses like having to leave home, start college, start a job, start dating and being intimate with the opposite sex, and so on. As an example, imagine if a kid was abused sexually at age four or five, and then as an adolescent they begin to have sexual experiences, but it’s extremely uncomfortable and traumatic because it brings up the past traumatic experience.
What triggers psychosis or so-called “schizophrenia” is usually something, or some combination of things, that is so traumatic that you can’t get your mind to wrap around it; you can’t accept it or process it, it’s terrifying. That’s what hallucinations are: you push an unbearable experience out of your mind, and you see it outside of you. Hallucinations are not meaningless, and they are not evidence of any disease.
As an example, I worked with a woman who was coming off psychiatric drugs but was having hallucinations and hearing voices and couldn’t work. One day she came in and told me she wanted me to see her mother, of whom she was afraid. So we talked a little bit and I said, “Look, how about if you bring your mother in to the next session?” And this lady, the mother, came in and she was the most aggressive woman I ever met. She let me get a quarter of a sentence out before she let out that she wanted her daughter back on psychiatric drugs because it was easier on her.
I let the mother speak, then escorted her out to the waiting room. Then I sat down again with the young woman, my patient. I said to her, “I’ve got to tell you, there were at least three times when I felt like strangling your mother and squeezing her until her eyeballs popped.” And then she said, “Oh my god, that voice in my head, I realize it’s my own voice telling me to kill my mother.”
What I did is I inadvertently gave her permission to be angry at her mother. Then her hallucinations went away, and she started to feel and function better in her outside life. This type of thing rarely happens this quickly. But if it can happen, like it did in this case, then it’s clear that with hallucinations or voices related to so-called schizophrenia we’re talking about a defense or an adaptation, not a disease.
As another example, there was a young man who was showing psychotic symptoms, including mild delusions and transient hallucinations which scared him; eventually he wound up functioning well. Near the end of therapy he told me how his mother in his adolescence was attempting to seduce him by coming into the shower with him. We started with his sharing his experience in a very difficult, halting way; from starting with bits and pieces to getting to the point where he shared it completely.
Then we moved on to talking about how crazy his mother was, and then to why she was like that, to what happened to her to make her like that. Eventually he left home; after graduating high school he went to college, we had phone sessions or he’d come home overnight just for a session; and now he’s studying to be a psychologist and functioning well in a doctoral program. He doesn’t have hallucinations or delusions anymore.
Matt: Okay, it’s good to hear these individual examples. Now with delusional or hallucinating people whom you’ve worked with long term, have you had many good outcomes more generally? Do you often see people return to work or school, make careers, develop better relationships with family or friends? Is there much hope for people labeled schizophrenic if they get effective therapy?
Lloyd: One of the things you have to remember is that the problems that get labeled schizophrenia are not a disease. Therefore one doesn’t “get cured” — there is no “it” that goes away.
For example, take one formerly psychotic patient who still keeps in touch with me. He came in and I’ve never met anybody more paranoid and suspicious. We worked and we worked and we got through the paranoid issues. Later on in our therapy, something bad would happen with his school or work, and he’d start to think there was a conspiracy of people plotting against him. But then he’d catch himself and he’d say “Does that sound paranoid?” I’d look at him and say, jokingly, “Paranoid, what, you paranoid?” And we’d both laugh, and he’d be less afraid.
What I’m saying is that a psychotic tendency — a tendency to become suspicious of others for example — often remains, but the more conscious you are of it the better off you are. Let me give another example. Another formerly psychotic guy that I still work with is successfully in business. His mother died just before Christmas, and Christmas was always a horror show for him. Just before Christmas he usually visited his mother’s grave, so from Thanksgiving to Christmas he started feeling crazy. We finally worked that out; what he had to do is visit the grave and talk to his mother, tell her how good things are now, how nice his kids are in spite of her. And he would do that. He didn’t look forward to it, a couple of times he avoided it, but when he did avoid it the psychotic symptoms came back. When he did face the bad experiences with her, things were usually better.
Matt: I like these detailed examples where you see that people given psychiatric labels are actually just people. There’s very little of this detail in psychiatric reports about people labeled with “schizophrenia” — to the point that the person seems to recede into the label, rather than presenting as a real human being.
Okay Lloyd, let me take you back again to the several dozen severely disturbed people you worked with long-term. I want to ask for more detail on how effective you felt intensive psychotherapy was in their cases. How many of them got “well,” i.e., returned to work, functioned, felt much better? I’m hoping to get something positive for young people who need hope for “schizophrenia recovery.” And I want you to tell me the truth of your experience, not sugarcoat anything.
Lloyd: The large majority of them get much better. I’d say 85-90% of the schizophrenic men and women who stayed in therapy at least two years got well to the point of being able to go to school, to work, to function in a meaningful, personally satisfying way, and to be involved in relationships. Probably a majority of these got married and had families. Sometimes their functioning was a bit awkward but they still functioned. For example, a young man who had been psychotic might date or marry the quiet, shy girl rather than the girl who was the life of the party. But they could still have a meaningful intimate relationship and become good parents.
So yes, for most people diagnosed with schizophrenia, if they get effective help they get better. They go out into the world and function, and most often they don’t become severely psychotic again.
In the early part of the work, what happens a lot of times is that as a psychotic person starts to function better, the voices reoccur; but they’re not as disturbing anymore, they’re okay. Later on, if the person more fully works through their issues, these symptoms can completely or mostly go away. Or they still occur but don’t bother the person much at all, because they’re much stronger emotionally.
Matt: Yes, I remember Eleanor Longden and Rai Waddingham of ISPS (the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis) talking about how their voices might reoccur but they weren’t as bothersome when they had become emotionally stronger.
And about the frequent successes; it’s encouraging to hear about that. Hope is so important. I remember when I first read cases by authors like Bryce Boyer, Harold Searles, Vamik Volkan, Murray Jackson, and Ira Steinman, and I was amazed because the stories of schizophrenic people working out their problems and becoming very lucid and clear-thinking were so counter to the medical model picture of hopelessly brain-diseased people who would never get truly well. It was so encouraging and motivating to read these cases.
So Lloyd, speaking about these relatively good outcomes, let me play the devil’s advocate with you — why should a reader believe this? Saying most people diagnosed “schizophrenic” can get well and function is so counter to what one reads in psychiatry journals which say, “schizophrenics have low fertility and rarely marry” or “schizophrenia is a chronic, severe, incurable brain disease” or “people with schizophrenia are likely to need psychiatric care including medication indefinitely.”
Lloyd: This bad outlook can be true if you only give a psychotic person drugs and don’t really try to understand or talk to them. But with the intensive psychotherapy that I did with many people who had been diagnosed schizophrenic in the beginning, after several years of work many of them really were able to work, date, marry, have a family. With some of them, many years down the line not only did I meet their husbands and wives but I met their kids.
What I found interesting is that with my formerly psychotic patients who have kids, their kids are really solid — those kids have got their heads on straight. So as parents these people that had severe breakdowns and recovered from them do a really good job. For one of my patients who was like this at the beginning of our work but got better, his daughter is in advertising, she’s in New York working, and his son just graduated from a really good prep school in Jersey and is in Rutgers doing well in the pharmacy program.
Matt: That’s great. But again Lloyd, when I’m hearing this, I’m imagining what many people might think: “How can this be true, given that so many people, and most psychiatrists, think schizophrenia is incurable and that we shouldn’t expect too much of people with this diagnosis? Are you just telling me what I want to hear?”
Lloyd: I’m a very direct and blunt person. I’m from New Jersey. I tell people the truth, not what they want to hear. So no, I’m telling you my real experience with these people who were “schizophrenic” in the beginning of our work. Most of them did really well.
Matt: Okay, I’ll take you at your word. And I think that when two people do work together, what the therapist believes or expects is possible is important in determining the range of outcomes that are in fact possible. In fact I would say that with extreme states, having an ironclad belief that getting well is possible is even more important.
Let’s talk now about American psychiatrists who believe that schizophrenia is an incurable brain disease. Why do they get such poor results with many clients?
Lloyd: Poor results for an incurable brain disease — yeah, these results make sense for them because you’re not going to get anybody who’s lastingly better using that type of approach. Because delusions and hallucinations are not caused by a brain disease, and the medication doesn’t treat the real problems! The medication usually stops you from facing the real issues.
In order to deal with the things that happened to someone, in the case of someone who is labeled schizophrenic, it usually means they went through horrible, horrible trauma. To get better and to get control over your terror and rage you’ve got to understand what you went through that traumatized you; when you take medication you aren’t able or motivated to deal with those things.
Matt: Okay, how do parents factor into all of this? When a young person gets diagnosed schizophrenic in America today, the family will typically be told that their child has a brain disease and that the parents are in no way responsible for contributing to their breakdown. Can you comment on that?
Lloyd: In this case the family is basically saying, or being told to say, “It’s not our fault, not our responsibility,” and they’re willing to sacrifice the kids at all costs, even if it means a lifetime on drugs and not being able to work or have relationships. That little old lady I wanted to strangle, the mother of my young woman patient, what she was telling me is: “I want to put my daughter back on meds so her problems won’t be upsetting to me anymore.”
In a lot of situations with an adult psychotic child, they’re better off away from the parent, because the parent is capable of destroying any progress they make. This is not all parents, but a significant number of parents. So in these cases, at least in some of them, does the psychotic breakdown partly go back to the parent’s behavior and attitude? Damn right it does, at least for some of them. It may not be intentional, it doesn’t make the parent “evil,” but what happened to the patient as a child is at least partly the parents’ responsibility.
The NAMI people, they’ll tell you, “It’s not our fault that our kid is psychotic, and they need these drugs for the illness.” But they’re often sacrificing their kid’s chance to get really well.
Matt: That is very controversial, but I basically agree with what you are saying. I think it’s important however not to make parents feel blamed. Any parent can do a less than perfect job with their child for a variety of reasons, like being poor, having to take care of the parents’ own parents, not knowing how to parent, fear of intimacy, etc. We know this is a hot-button issue. My position is that facing how one may have contributed to another person’s distress in the past can give you insight and make you more powerful, because it means you can change the relationship going forward.
Okay Lloyd, how do you talk to clients and families who have heard of the idea that schizophrenia is an incurable brain disease and are worried by this pessimistic idea? If schizophrenia is not a brain disease, how can people think about psychotic experience?
Lloyd: One of the first things I do with people diagnosed with schizophrenia and their families is I tell them about some of the research that’s been done in terms of the professional reputation of psychiatrists. A number of studies have been done by physicians about physicians. It turns out there’s a hierarchy about how physicians regard physicians. Psychiatrist fall at the bottom of the list. There’s a reason for that, which is that other physicians tend to see them as not being real physicians. When medication came along, psychiatrists who felt the heat of being considered quacks said, “Now we’re real physicians,” and they just jumped on that; it made them feel better.
Almost all of the research that’s been done — other than by pharmaceutical companies — shows that psychiatric medications, whether they’re antipsychotics, antidepressants, or stimulants, do basically nothing other than have an immediate brain-dampening effect that disappears very quickly, and what you’re left with are the side effects. The side effects are the real effects of the drug, but they’re very painful, dangerous, and toxic.
So the studies show that if you’re diagnosed schizophrenic and you take a drug and continue taking it, you will probably remain delusional and nonfunctional all your life; chances are you’re gonna be on welfare, you’re not gonna work, you’re not gonna do anything. But most of the people who are diagnosed schizophrenic, and if they don’t stay on a drug too long and they get some decent level of social support… most of them eventually get better and move their way into society and function.
So yes, I directly tell clients that schizophrenia is not a brain disease, or more properly: there is no brain disease called schizophrenia. Also, what kind of hope do you have if someone tells you you have a brain disease called schizophrenia and we can only give you this drug that can hold it down, but can’t cure it? What kind of hope is that?
And I tell people these diagnoses haven’t been developed by a real scientific process; they’ve been developed arbitrarily by committees of white-haired white men. They were created for insurance reasons so medication could be sold. They don’t cure anything, many of them are addictive, and a lot have other effects that are worse than the real distress that you have. And the drug companies are very powerful.
If you look at the guy from Princeton, John Nash, the one who recovered from a schizophrenia diagnosis, he said the movie A Beautiful Mind is relatively accurate except for that part where he gave the speech at the end thanking medication for his recovery. They fabricated that part because the drug companies contributed funding to the movie. In reality, he went off medication and that’s when he started to get better. Even when he went off the medication, he was left with tardive dyskinesia which in itself is debilitating. I also have a friend, David Oaks of Mindfreedom; he’s a bright guy but he walks with a limp because of the tardive dyskinesia, and his body is dysmorphic because of the antipsychotics. They can really ruin your body.
Matt: That was a great movie, even if what helped Nash was misrepresented. Moving on: do many of the therapists you know also believe that schizophrenia is not an incurable brain disease, or as you reframed it, that there does not exist an incurable brain disease called schizophrenia? I’ve noticed there seems to be a big gap between how private practice non-medical-model therapists think and practice, and how research psychiatrists and academic psychiatrists think and write.
Lloyd: Unfortunately, quite a few therapists I know do think schizophrenia is a brain disease; they just take the company line, meaning: “Schizophrenia is a disease, worship the DSM, if a patient threatens suicide, get a psychiatric consult right away.” They all freak out about that. Most of these therapists have never had the chance to work with psychotic people intensively on low or no drugs; they don’t know what they’re missing.
In Northern New Jersey I work with a group of therapists including Burton Seitler and Robert Sliclen. One of them, Burton, is starting a journal. It’s called JASPER, the Journal of Psychoanalytic Research. Both Burton and Robert think about schizophrenia as not being an illness and consider psychotic people as being able to get well without medication like I do. A few others in New Jersey think this way too, a couple of social workers.
Matt: It’s a shame that more therapists don’t get the chance to work with psychotic clients off drugs, or really to work intensively in a relational way with psychotic people at all, on or off drugs. Because as long as these people are mainly drugged up, sitting at home, not working, not functioning, and they aren’t being given effective help, it’s easy to maintain the myth that they have a disease and need to keep taking loads of drugs indefinitely.
When you are working with very difficult material in a therapy session, how can you work with and understand delusions and hallucinations — how do you engage with these difficult experiences in a way that helps the client get a handle on them?
Lloyd: Well, the first issue is to recognize and realize that delusions and hallucinations are not totally irrational craziness, let alone evidence of disease. What they are is a way for a person to defend themselves against psychic conflict. Once you recognize that, the issue becomes how to delve into the underlying issues and memories that are creating the need for the symptoms. Hallucinations and delusions and paranoia are basically defenses against horrible things, or against an overwhelming or badly neglectful environment that severely affected a person and that a person’s mind cannot cope with.
It’s like in the army when a young soldier in the trenches would see their friend shot dead, and his fellow soldiers would shake him and say, “It don’t mean nothing!” so that he could keep functioning. What you’re doing in this wartime example is putting somebody into a delusional state, a state of total denial, so they can still function. I treated many Vietnam veterans who were falling apart until they faced what had actually happened. After we worked on the war traumas in therapy, I would get a call later from the wife saying, “My husband is here with me again.”
This example relates to defenses like hallucinations and delusions, which can be necessary for psychic survival. This is what delusions and hallucinations in schizophrenia have to do with: something unbearable.
Another common example of how difficult life experiences get turned into “symptoms of an illness” is when women have postpartum depression. It’s not a disease. What happens is, you have a baby and all of a sudden your life totally changes. For the next year you have this appendage that sucks up all the energy you have; it doesn’t even let you sleep. Everything centers around that baby. And after a short time many people have thoughts, “Why did I have this damned kid? I’d like to get rid of it.” Some people are taught “You cannot have bad thoughts like that,” so they push them away, perceive themselves as bad, feel guilty and overwhelmed, and in extreme cases wind up making a suicide attempt. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The person who can accept these disturbing thoughts is able to handle those feelings.
So to restate this whole discussion, a hallucination is often build out of unacceptable thoughts or feelings that have to be projected outside of you. It’s a defense and nothing more than a defense. It’s perfectly logical; nothing bizarre about it.
In therapy a lot of people grind away at these hallucinations and delusions with me and they soften and stop being a central part of their lives. Like I said before, it’s not guaranteed to never come back, but it’s not there in a big way anymore.
Matt: I agree with this concept of hallucinations and delusions as defenses or adaptations to overwhelming experiences. I’ve always thought the disease theory of schizophrenia was extremely vulnerable because it couldn’t explain why many hallucinations appeared to have meaning or context in a particular environment or culture. If it’s only a meaningless brain disease, why do hallucinations often tend to focus on particular fears based on the person’s relationships and past experiences? Why wouldn’t hallucinations simply be random sounds or colors, rather than words and images related to the person’s environment?
I wanted to ask you more about the role of the family with psychotic young people. You’ve already noted families could often be difficult and hold the young person back. Can you say anything else, like what hurt or helped in terms of how families got involved in treatment?
Lloyd: Families were usually suspicious — they sometimes had a right to be, because in many cases they had contributed to the child’s distress. When the family did contribute to the kid’s breakdown, it didn’t just happen. Some of it was totally inadvertent; they didn’t start out wanting to hurt their kid, but their own problems created problems in their children.
Way down deep, these parents knew that. That’s a big reason why NAMI exists. They’re mostly a bunch of parents who want kids on drugs; you dope them up and they never take a look at anything underneath. They say, “It’s the fault of the kids’ brain chemicals, it’s nothing wrong with the parents.” But that idea’s a myth.
Only a few parents came in and said, “Look, I know we’re involved in some way in contributing to our kid’s problems, so you gotta see us too so that our kid can get better.” They wound up in therapy alongside their kid and it was a pleasure.
These few healthy parents were looking for their young adult child to go into the next phase of development, which is oppositional defiance and being more separate and independent from the family. When I see a young person going through that phase I think that it’s fantastic. I help them to be successful in that endeavor in every way I can, because that’s a movement toward health. This process of opposing the other and developing your own identity can be worked through at any age — it’s about emotional development and not chronological age. I have grandchildren and whenever I’m involved with them I make trouble; I set them off against their parents, so they can develop their identity.
Matt: I like that idea of encouraging a person to be oppositional and defiant! So Lloyd, if as we’ve been discussing there’s little evidence that extreme psychotic experiences are caused primarily by genes or brain chemistry, and much evidence that being diagnosed with schizophrenia relates to adverse life experiences, why do psychiatrists keep believing what they do?
Lloyd: Psychiatrists do this for several reasons. One reason, and I’m being sympathetic here, is that they’re really not trained to do anything else; they don’t know what else to do. When you go to any school of psychiatry in this country, you get trained to medicate, and that requires saying that problems are medical conditions. There is no course whatsoever in psychotherapy or human development; they don’t teach it anymore, so these psychiatrists don’t have a clue. They see themselves as white coat doctors, treating a disease not a person. Some of them may have a little more sense and try to talk to their patients and be benevolent, but they’re not trained in it. In the old days they studied Carl Rogers, Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Margaret Mahler. Now they don’t do any of that.
The other reasons have to do with them making a lot of money pushing drugs. There’s a psychiatrist in Ridgewood, New Jersey, who just as I was opening my practice was consulting at one of the clinics near where I worked, and he had started seeing kids there. This psychiatrist said, “Would you teach me how to work with kids in psychotherapy?” So I supervised him for two years, and he was getting really good at it. He eventually left and went into practice privately.
I found out later he stopped doing psychotherapy and was only prescribing drugs. I ran into him at a restaurant one day and asked him why he stopped doing therapy with patients. He said, “As a psychiatrist doing psychotherapy I can charge about $200 for a one hour session… if I medicate, I can see four people for 15 minutes each in the same amount of time, for $800 per hour. And if I shock people, I can charge $1500 a pop and it only takes 15 minutes. Do the math, do the math.” And he walked away while I just stood there. That’s the name of the game for most psychiatrists and most pediatricians.
I once argued with a pediatrician; I said, “Why are you giving these kids drugs for ADHD? You know that’s bullshit.” And he agreed with me! But he said,“About two thirds of the patients are being pushed by the school to get drugs to get their behavior under control. If I don’t drug the kids, I’ll lose two thirds of my practice because they’ll go to another pediatrician who will drug them”.
It’s sad, but that’s what it’s about when it comes to psychiatrists and schizophrenia. They’re in business. When you’re in business doing something and you don’t know how to do anything else, you don’t have an alternative. Those are the nice guys. The not-so-nice guys, even if they do have an alternative, they prefer to profit.
Matt: Yes, the ability to earn so much more money by prescribing drugs in short time periods (relative to actually getting to know people in depth and working through their issues) is a huge problem. Like you said, ignorance is a huge part of it, and the drug companies have contributed a huge amount to that by making psychiatrist training into a mostly biological endeavor, as well as by creating the illusion that there is a brain disease called schizophrenia that has to be drugged indefinitely.
Anyway, thanks a lot for your time Lloyd. I think your direct, passionate thoughts will be very interesting to readers. Even if people don’t agree with everything you say, they have to respect that you’ve spent 40 years trying to help seriously troubled people by talking to them, and have been successful in many cases.
Thanks Matt and Lloyd,
This is fantastic. “Schizophrenia” is not such a big problem with the right kind of help. In 1983 a Psychologist in Ireland quoted me a 100 percent success rate for “schizophrenia” through the talking treatments.
It’s interesting what researcher Dr Robin Murray (on MIA ) said recently about the problems with “Dopamine Supersensitivity”. In real terms the Present Day Drug treatments are causing the longterm chronic illnesses that are costing the country a fortune.
The only way I could deal with my high anxiety was to sit with my feelings until they softened. My (trainee) therapist described anxiety as similar to anger; that once the feelings eventually levelled off – the problem wouldn’t seem as serious.
Thanks for commenting, Fiachra. What exactly were you referring to with what Robin Murray say about dopamine sensitivity? I remember this as the general idea that severely distressed people would get used to being on a certain dose of antipsychotic drugs, but then once withdrawn their brain chemistry would react badly to the sudden change in levels of dopamine and be unable to function “normally” again. Not sure if that is correct. I read about this in Whitaker’s books.
Meanwhile, yes I agree that a diagnosis of “schizophrenia” (which could mean a wide range of things) is not such a big problem necessarily. Although it depends… extreme states of mind vary along a continuum and some instances can be quite severe and long-lasting. But it all depends on how bad the precipitating conditions have been, and as you said on what quality and quantity resources are available to help… I remember Ira Steinman saying, at the Boston ISPS conference, that “It’s not THAT hard.” (referring to understanding and helping delusional people). What I think he meant to say was that the strong pessimism commonly seen in our society about being able to meaningfully talk to and understand people who seem out of touch with reality is not warranted.
Thanks Matt,
Yes, something like you describe. I think this syndrome has routinely been brushed under the carpet.
Even if a person is only transitorily distressed to begin with they can develop Severe anxiety on halting neuroleptics.
Robert Whitaker uses the term “High Anxiety” to describe the condition. When I stopped the drugs – I developed “mental health” problems I never had before.
I’m sure people get it at different levels. It could be the receptors becoming denser, or something else – but the syndrome definitely exists.
But even today Consumers are often diagnosed as relapsing when they come off neuroleptics and become overwhelmed.
I believe with that people can recover very quickly from “hopeless states” and remain well. The time spans Lloyd quotes are very positive.
(And Psychiatrists themselves can often commit suicide).
Matt,
.”….In real terms the Present Day Drug treatments are causing the longterm chronic illnesses that are costing the country a fortune…” : – It was ME that said this.
Hi Fiachra, thank you, I do not have personal experience of this phenomenon but don’t doubt it is possible from reading the experiences of others who were withdrawn abruptly from drugs and then experienced sudden recurrence of their distress. Disturbingly, leading American psychiatrists during the 1980s and 1990s actually proved that such experiences are possible, via conducting unethical experiments in which they suddenly withdrew patients from their drugs cold turkey.
Hi Matt,
I was on depot injections for years.
In 1986, after well over 10 years on various psych drugs, I stopped the “Triavil 4/25’s” that I was taking 3x/day. (Triavil is Trilafon & Elavil, 4mg.’s, & 25mg.’s, respectively.) I never said anything to the psychiatrist I was working with, and she never said anything, either, about tapering, vs. stopping “cold turkey”. What happened next was the start to the past 30 years of psych drug HELL. After a couple of weeks, I was more psychotic that I’ve been, before or since. I knew then that I was very, VERY sick, but didn’t understand what was really happening to me. I’d rather not discuss it, because words fail me. I can say it was “hell”, that I felt like, -and thought,- that I was literally dying. Yes, I was *BLAMED* by bogus DSM diagnosis, and the belief that I was “mental”. Funny enough, but it took me several more years to get off the DRUGS. What I couldn’t see then, but do know now, is that the worst of my so-called “symptoms” were in fact CAUSED BY the psych drugs! In the ~20 years I’ve been “shrink-proof”, most of my so-called “symptoms” have gone away. I wouldn’t go back to the pseudoscience drug racket and means of social control known as “psychiatry” for anything. The drugs create a sometimes-fatal toxic withdrawal event. Thanks~B./
Thanks so much for this Matt. And thanks Lloyd for bringing up Margret Mahler’s work with whom Selma Fraiberg followed. There were issues with this approach but lots of important good things if a person who was in trauma and crisis could get a person like Lloyd. Not many around the country especially these days and in our recent past.
It made me want to cry reading this because if I had the option this is a person I would have gone straight way for help. I was never able to reference Mahler, or Fraiberg Or Real, or some many other folks because they people who were on the insurance boards or who saw me were unaware and uninformed and I was in too much of crisis to be able to think about what there knowledge base was.
I was being evaluated by folks who had never read or s studied what I studied and never had the intelligence, medical and professional ethics, and curiosity to ask or see me as an intelligent professional and parent with loads of life and yes maybe even goodness to share. I was seen as other and as a dangerous other. This is what I s till need to cry for. The drugs and trauma took the ability for me to cry away. I have times where I think I should be crying But am unable to start. Because of the lack – anger is easier to draw upon. Bad all the way around.
The idea that Lloyd articulated so well of the opposition an anger and rage being legitimate emotions and steps up the ladder of life development is so true and so very very very MISSING in our society and in the psych world. Greed and little minds and extremely tiny hearts rule. And how can they all sleep at night?
Matt, I think you need to do some research on Aeuspcalian sp ? Authority. That is the contract that lay folks consent to when having a medical issue or crisis. We give power over to professionals who are suppose to help. The contract in psych world has always been corrupt ( looking at its history) and there have been bubbles of times and only in certain lucky places where the contract was not broken and it worked.
There will always be sickness and there will always (if we survive in our world of ours as it is today) people who have been traumatized in primary ,secondary, or tertiary ways.
How can we put in place a working contract for dealing with this in a healthy way?
How. can we create a new paradigm of healing for all?
Lolyd’s way created way problems too – see and read Se Miller’s “Family Pictures” for what went wrong with that approach in the past.
There will always be mistakes made, errors created even with all the best intent in the world. The proverb ” the path to hell is paved with good intentions” is around for a good reason.
How can we all redo and put in place the idea that nothing is perfect, anger will there for good and sometimes not good reasons, but the idea that
trauma doesn’t have to be a fuel for misery, it can be a tool for strength.
We cannot be afraid of each other. How to teach empathy to folks who are committing abuse of the A sp
contract and how to get them to apologize for what they have wrought?
We need a framework and we need a think tank.
Hi CatNight, thanks for checking in. I don’t know this Aeuspcalian authority concept and would be interested to read more if you have references.
I agree, it can be easy for things to go wrong when attempting to help a severely distressed person… for example, if the therapist is inexperienced, or if they have serious doubt about whether successful therapy is possible, or if they are poorly trained… or, if the family of the client is unsupportive or abusive, or if there is not enough money to do therapy long enough or frequently enough for what an individual wants or needs. Any one of these things alone could negatively influence or derail a psychotherapy relationship. On the other hand, many good treatments do happen, and few of them are reported or ever known due to confidentiality. What we hear about in terms of good (and perhaps bad) treatment must be the tip of a huge iceberg. Although, good and bad experiences in therapy are also relative, and therapies can (and I would argue almost always do) contain both aspects.
When you say “giving power” to a professional, I would refer to this as being dependent upon someone who is in a more powerful, quasi-parental role. I think this can be helpful or harmful. In a positive sense, being dependent on a person who is genuinely committed to your best interest, and is loving, can be very helpful. This is what happens in normal childhood development – the young child depends on the parent emotionally for support. In a successful therapy of severe distress / psychosis, this process is crucial (it’s called a “therapeutic symbiosis” in the Mahlerian, or Searlesian terminology). On the other hand, if such dependence goes on too long it can be harmful. Or if the client becomes trusting but then the therapist makes serious mistakes and betrays that trust, that can be very harmful.
These possibilities for better or worse do not say anything inevitably or essentially negative about psychotherapy, in my view. Psychotherapies are a variety of human relationship. And human relationships have innumerable variations and no two are alike.
Good read, but until you resolve the contradiction you insist on maintaining by putting “schizophrenia” in quotes yet referring to “psychosis” as though it’s a real disease your writing will continue to send people mixed messages.
Hi Oldhead,
I do not think psychosis is a disease. It’s just a vague label for severe distress which can have any number of disparate causes. I only use it reluctantly… because I want outsiders, who do not know other ways of thinking about problems in feeling / functioning, to find such a piece in the first place. The terms I use in my own mind are things like “serious distress”, “soul emergency”, “pre-symbiotic ways of relating”, “regressed mental states”, “being in terror” and so on. More relational, experiential and soul-focused.
When it comes to Lloyd and his uses of these words, I obviously did not tell him what to say. I believe that when Lloyd was trained in the 60s/70s, that “schizophrenia” was commonly used in training psychologists how to think about and communicate about severe distress. That is probably still the case, so Lloyd is simply using the words that he was originally taught by his teachers to think about delusions and hallucinations. But, you can see in how he speaks about it that Lloyd doesn’t really believe in any underlying illness in a person who is diagnosed as being supposedly schizophrenic.
I am glad you enjoyed reading some of Lloyd’s thoughts. I like how Lloyd is very direct in what he says. Since he was always someone with a private practice, he doesn’t have a boss or company controlling him and so can be forthright with his opinions.
As a mother, I have looked up, down and sideways to find out the cause of my son’s so-called schizophrenia, and I’ve come to reject the trauma theory that is so popular with just about everybody these days. Sure, some people have very clear trauma events that one could point to as a cause of “schizophrenia” but, of course, these events cannot be proved causal. All human beings have suffered trauma –simply being born is a trauma. What I have found, and I’m only talking about a sample of one, is that there is also a personality factor: The good, compliant child, the one who doesn’t rock the boat, the once who feels guilty for the sins of others, the pale child who borders on the angelic, the one who takes things at face value. Homeopathy calls them the “phosphorus” personality. (Look it up. It’s fascinating.) This child is overdue for a breakdown when he or she discovers (around the age of leaving home) how difficult life really is when you finally have to confront it. They should have rebelled as children, thrown tantrums, done something. I, personally was delighted when my son began to show a long overdue rebellion. It should have come in childhood and it never did. I was waiting for it, and figured that something would eventually happen to him that would kickstart an overdue rebellion. I just never thought it would be “schizophrenia.”
So, here is the one part of this interview that I thought really contributed something unique to understanding why someone may go psychotic. Trauma is the simple and popular explanation, but not necessarily what is at the heart of the problem. Maybe these parents, like myself, have been waiting years for the child to individuate.
“These few healthy parents were looking for their young adult child to go into the next phase of development, which is oppositional defiance and being more separate and independent from the family. When I see a young person going through that phase I think that it’s fantastic.”
By the way, I think this was an excellent interview in so many ways. I totally agree that years of therapy will bring someone to the point of ‘normalcy.’ I’ve seen it work with my own son.
Hi Rossa,
I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule. I know my own recovery was through basic psychotherapy – this helped me with my withdrawal syndrome and any underlying anxiety (if I had this philosophy on board to begin with, I wouldn’t have chosen to visit a psychiatrist).
Hi Rossa,
Thank you for commenting.
In hearing from various parents and family members I have been forced to reconsider what I thought before about trauma and psychosis… I once thought some form of trauma was the cause of severe distress in almost all cases. Now I see that it’s more complicated. It’s by no means primarily the parent that causes what gets labeled as “schizophrenia”, of course (although in some cases, abusive parents are a large negative influence, unfortunately, although they should not be blamed since the parents themselves are often subject to secondary adverse psychosocial factors).
But more than this, in some cases we simply do not know why someone becomes delusional, withdrawn, paranoid, or hallucinates. It may be partly due to some fragility in their personality which makes them susceptible to stress – although I would say that this is never the ultimate cause… it’s always some interaction between the environment and the organism that leads to the expression of severe distress. However we always divine what that interaction is or how it works. It is hard to follow the causal chain from proximate causes to ultimate causes. Perhaps biology, the way the mind and the brain it depends on interact with the environment, and the way a distressed person conceptualizes the world, are simply too complex to untangle precisely in some circumstances.
Happily, I think what you say is quite true – healing human relationships can help even if we do not understand the ultimate or even proximate causes in toto of serious distress. Luckily, human beings are primed to respond well – although it may take some time – to things like safe environments, having enough money, genuine interest on the part of another, a non-intrusive other who listens and waits, being in nature, exercise, and so on. So even with a severely distressed person where causes of distress are not apparent, there are many ways to help.
I am glad to hear your son is doing better.
Oldhead is hitting the nail right on the head here, “putting “schizophrenia” in quotes yet referring to “psychosis” as though it’s a real disease”.
Lloyd Ross, I do appreciate some of the work you have done with Daniel Macker. But beyond that I still have to take exception.
People will feel extreme things and go into extreme states when their ability to live is seriously threatened. And this is happening when they are socially marginalized. Social marginalization. as caused by the middle-class family and its built in child abuses, and by the mental health system and our economic system, are the causes of the bogus concept known as “mental illness”. There is no moral or medical problem.
And so you will never find a remedy within the mental health system, not Psychiatry, not Psychotherapy, and not anything which turns the blame back on the victim. Not in Recovery, not in Life Coaching, not in Healing, and not in Evangelical Religion. Every bit of it is just abusing survivors, because they are the only ones who don’t protect themselves.
The reason our society wants to put people into the Mental Health System and into Recovery Programs, is because our need for basic labor is much less, but our need to scapegoats is as high as ever. So what this amounts to is the resurgence of the bogus science of eugenics.
So every time one of us tries to assure people that the mentally ill can be rendered non-violent, we are aiding the in the propagation of the bogus science. Everyone knows that if you keep jabbing at an animal with a stick for long enough, then something is going to happen. But most of those considered mentally ill have been jabbed at for years and years, and they just become more and more passive. We must never contribute to this, we must never become Uncle Tom’s.
The most important areas to push are:
1. Total non-compliance, total defiance of all aspects of the mental health, psychotherapy, recovery system.
2. Political actions, not asking for pity, but going on the offensive against abusive parents and all facets of the mental health system.
3. Using every opportunity available, and every means available, to protect the children of today from the kinds of exploitation and abuse which the middle class family is built on. That we still fail to do this, only adds to the bogus eugenics argument.
4. An organized campaign to get these matters settled in the civil and probate courts, not in the psychotherapist’s office or the recovery group meeting.
Extreme states are a normal part of life, something sought after by religious mystics, not something which indicates a medical or moral problem.
People resist seeing what must be obvious to them, simply because they don’t want to face their own pain. That pain is not just in the specific abuses endured. The larger part of it is in how still today, our society vindicates the perpetrators and puts the blame entirely on the victim.
Psychotherapy is a denial system, and it serves the needs of the therapists and the abusers, and no one else. The only way we can change this bleak picture is for we the survivors to organize and take confrontational public actions.
As I am writing this to you, I am engaging with local politicos who are actively working to further turn economic and child abuse problems, into mental health problems. So we must act, and act in public and in collectivity.
Nomadic
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http://freedomtoexpress.freeforums.org/index.php
Excellent, meaty interview. A pleasure to read whether or not I agree with everything (what he said about post-partum issues is dangerously simplified). Also really happy to see Rossa Forbes commenting because I was also chewing on the ‘family’ stuff. Very much agree that ‘trauma’ is everywhere in life from birth (or before birth if you believe epigenetics and/or Buddhism) and some individuals are just more susceptible to the storm that is life than others. But great, none the less, to read the words of a truly thinking therapist who was able to separate himself from the herd from the beginning and give back lives that would otherwise have been stolen by conventional systems. Wow.
Liz Sydney
Hi Liz, thanks. When I reviewed the text of Lloyd’s talk I sensed some of it would be controversial. But I’m glad some people like it despite the somewhat blunt parts. In knowing him a bit personally, I like how Lloyd is reallyhonest and will always tell you what he thinks in a very straightforward way. He says that’s how people from New Jersey are in general. I don’t know whether that is true or not 🙂
I would imagine that people who work with or stay with Lloyd tend to be those who are more willing to talk about traumas and discuss troubling feelings around their experience in the world. So it’s possible that Lloyd’s views could partly reflect the type of work he does best, and the people that tend to gravitate toward and stay with him as clients. That would only be natural – all of us have preconceived ideas / schemas / internal object relations based on our unique experiences… these affect how how we represent the external world, and inevitably affect our worldviews by causing us to attract some things and repel or be unaware of other things.
I’d pay more attention to this trauma stuff, had I not accidentally treated myself for schizophrenia syndrome. I was collecting wild hallucinogenic mushrooms and had studied the old megavitamin therapy in case I spaced myself out by accident, which I did. I took B3 for a number of weeks while experiencing irritating hallucinations of several kinds, and then continued to take it afterward, when they were gone, because it suppressed hay fever symptoms. A couple of weeks in the fall, after I stopped B3, I reverted to a spacy, depressed state that I felt was my real personality. I started on the B3 again and ceased being spacy and depressed (although some of the bloggers might say I’m not there), although it took some time to discover I had serious temperamental reactions to caffeine, which I no longer use.
Hi bcharris, How much B3 were/are you taking and talking about? (I read and listen to a lot of Integrative/Functional medicine people and there’s very interesting stuff in nutrition and behaviour.)
Liz Sydney
Hi Liz. I use 9g/day (3gx3/day), similar C (also partially for viruses). The basic level Hoffer used to use was 3g/day, but I let myself get chronic- probably because I didn’t give up the caffeine and because I suffered a head injury about 10 years ago. My friend from support groups meetings, Henry the Paranoid, used about 15-20g/day, but he was chronic and may have had cerebral allergies as well.
Hi BCharris, thanks for commenting. I think Lloyd is actually open to the idea that other causes of severe distress exist and that in some cases they could be directly physical or caused by adverse substances one ingests, as you felt yours to be. Severe distress can be caused in a variety of ways… among the ways that come to mind that are known to be heavily associated with the “symptoms of schizophrenia” (i.e. delusions, hallucinations, voice-hearing, paranoia, withdrawal) are…
– prolonged torture
– prolonged isolation
– taking various illegal drugs
– heavy use of cannabis
– unbearably painful surgical procedures
– other hallucinogenic substances like you describe
– various adverse social experiences like sexual abuse, extreme neglect, physical abuse, bullying, severe poverty and hunger
–
I think Lloyd is just focused on trauma because that is primarily what he worked with. It doesn’t he excludes other possible etiologies. Also, I would have to support Lloyd and say that the research seems to suggest that traumas of various kinds are some of the most common experiences raising the risk of getting one of these diagnoses… this does not mean, however ,that traumas are present in every case or are causal in a given case.
An interesting thing about traumas is that normal disintegration patterns of metabolizing adrenalin, a potentially dangerous stimulant, can result in it becoming adrenochrome (first) and then adrenolutin (second). Both of these chemicals are long-acting hallucinogens (in Hoffer and Osmond’s (now rare) book, The Hallucinogens, is an account of a subject’s 100 hour adrenolutin trip, while driving from Saskatoon to Ann Arbor, MI in the pre-interstate days).
Now cannabis is supposed to be a “cause” of stress (rather than a way of processing it)? And what does the legality or illegality of a substance have to do with its effects, good or otherwise?
Great interview, thank you Matt and Lloyd, so pleased to see that there are therapists who don’t buy into the hope crushing, scientifically “invalid,” DSM “lifelong incurable genetic mental illness” theology. I wish there were more, and I wish my hypocritical, pathological lying, Holy Spirit blaspheming, 9/11/2001 and it’s subsequent never ending war loving, child abuse covering up, DSM deluded, self professed “holistic Christian” therapist had actually been a person with Christian ethics and a brain in her head. But no, and apparently lots of therapists and psychiatrists have less than zero ethics and like to profiteer off of covering up child molestation by psychiatrically defaming and drugging child abuse victims given, “the prevalence of childhood trauma exposure within borderline personality disorder patients has been evidenced to be as high as 92% (Yen et al., 2002). Within individuals diagnosed with psychotic or affective disorders, it reaches 82% (Larsson et al., 2012).”
I absolutely agree, the neuroleptic drugs interfere “with the work of psychotherapy in terms of working through feelings. It causes people to avoid emotionally important issues.” Once the medical evidence of the abuse of my child was finally handed over by some decent and disgusted nurses, it was actually a relief, because I could understand the emotionally important issue with which my family had to deal, and which my psychologist and psychiatrist were denying. Can you imagine, once I told my psychiatrist that the medical evidence of the abuse of my child had been handed over, he wanted to drug up my child and tried to convince my husband I needed to be put back on all the antipsychotics! How ungodly unethical and criminal can a psychiatrist get? I had not realized in 2001 that my religion had filled itself with pedophiles and was run by psychopathic child sodomy apologists and profiteers, but now even ELCA insiders are writing books about the improprieties of these war mongering, child sodomy covering up psychopaths:
https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Culture-Wars-Reclaiming-Prayer/dp/1598868330
Although I don’t agree the neuroleptics always cause a person “to be unmotivated.” To the contrary, when psychiatrists give a person antipsychotics to profiteer off of covering up child abuse, rather than because the person has a brain disease, the neuroleptics do make the person tired, but they can also make a person “psychotic” and “hyperactive” when awake, via anticholinergic toxidrome poisoning. Here’s what drugs.com has to say about neuroleptic induced anticholinergic intoxication syndrome, “symptoms may include memory loss, disorientation, incoherence, hallucinations, psychosis, delirium, hyperactivity, twitching or jerking movements, stereotypy, and seizures.”
These symptoms are basically identical to the positive symptoms of “schizophrenia,” the only difference being the person becomes “hyperactive” rather than “inactive.” But, since anticholinergic toxidrome is not a billable DSM disorder, it’s almost always misdiagnosed and mistreated by the stupid, DSM deluded, child molestation profiteering, criminal psychiatrists.
I very much hope the psychological and psychiatric industries will consider the ethical importance to all who live within our society of ending their decades, or more, old “dirty little secret of the two original educated professions” promise to cover up the pedophilia crimes of the clergy, especially since it now appears we have a pedophilia problem within our self proclaimed political “elite” too, which is probably why our government is currently advocating belief in the BS that is today’s DSM psychiatric industry.
Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, and Life Coaching are all bad because it is all predicated on the client abandoning attempts at redress. The only way one regains a biography is by vanquishing foes. I would never be stupid enough to let someone do that to me, turn it all back on me and make me come to live by denial instead of engaging with enemies and prevailing. And you shouldn’t let anyone mess with you like that either, expecting to live in the very small social space which his left, instead of reclaiming your biography and your place in our world.
Nomadic