I make a reference in Listening for the Light (pp. 253-4)to the trouble some people have controlling their imaginations and to the way some actors who apply “The Method,” i.e., the submerging of their personalities in a character following the instructions of Konstantin Stanislavski, lose track of their former personality.  This is large enough for a book. What role does the imagination and our ability or inability to control it have in our lives? What I have posted at Quora follows.

It’s not just comedians; people in theatrical performance often have the characteristics that make some aspects of that kind of work easier, such as extraordinary access to memory. We have two brains, the left, rational brain and the right, emotional brain. Normally — under a strong right ear that provides enough high-frequency sound energy to keep the left-brain and its language center dominant over the right-brain and its store of memories — people have to work to embed memories. That work we call “memorization” reinforces pathways of recall from the left-brain to the right-brain and back to the left-brain. However, people with weakness in the right-ear have extraordinarily easy access to their right-brain memories. For that reason, they often are considered geniuses. Some geniuses apply their ability to numbers and become mathematicians or computer whizzes. Some such people can read a script once and remember it word-perfect. Desi Arnaz would read a script once and be able to coach all of the actors in I Love Lucy on their lines from his one-time reading. It’s a handy ability for an actor or director. However, it implies less ability by the left-brain to control the emotions in the right brain. And the emotional instability can be great enough to carry a label of bipolarity, associative identity disorder, or even schizophrenia. Add alcohol and/or drugs to the situation and you have an extremely labile person who also is predisposed to addictions. Such a person is capable of incredibly rapid repartee, which brings to mind Robin Williams and Dana Carvey and Jim Carrey and Paula Poundstone and many others. Along with that instantaneous access to memory and the creative joining of thoughts, images, and ideas comes instantaneous access to emotions, which can useful to an actor but becomes extremely burdensome if you cannot escape from it. Normal people enjoy the blessing of being able to forget, forgive, put pain behind them, and regard the future optimistically. People with hyper-access to their memories have intrusive thoughts that keep them preoccupied with the past. The usual kinds of advice you give to people about handling upsetting memories just don’t work for them. What might work is the technique of Focused Listening that has been used to cure those mental illnesses I listed. Stimulating the right ear strengthens the stapedius muscle that controls the flow of high-frequency sound into the brain. Increasing that flow gives the person the ability to learn more self-control, including over addictions, and the ability to slow down the “chatter” from the right-brain. Then, the person has a choice about how much access she or he wants with the creative side of consciousness.

Is there a way of quitting drugs that is safe, painless, and cures the underlying condition of psychosis for which they were prescribed? That is exactly what Focused Listening has done for Daniel (three times) and for Ian, who were schizophrenic. And for Susan, who was bipolar; and for two unmedicated bipolar women, Marybeth and Nan. Five young men with schizophrenia are using Focused Listening and all of them are showing signs of increasing left-brain dominance; two of them have begun tapering their medication.

People taking psychiatric drugs are told repeatedly to take those medications interminably. However, not all of them do so. Why would you quit taking psychiatric medications prescribed by a doctor? The simple answer is that they are not good for your brain or for the rest of your body and most people who take them are aware that they are being harmed. This study describes how SSRIs cause harm and concludes:[1]

Because serotonin regulates many adaptive processes, antidepressants could have many adverse health effects. For instance, while antidepressants are modestly effective in reducing depressive symptoms, they increase the brain’s susceptibility to future episodes after they have been discontinued. Contrary to a widely held belief in psychiatry, studies that purport to show that antidepressants promote neurogenesis [nerve growth]are flawed because they all use a method that cannot, by itself, distinguish between neurogenesis and neuronal death. In fact, antidepressants cause neuronal damage and mature neurons to revert to an immature state, both of which may explain why antidepressants also cause neurons to undergo apoptosis (programmed death). Antidepressants can also cause developmental problems, they have adverse effects on sexual and romantic life, and they increase the risk of hyponatremia (low sodium in the blood plasma), bleeding, stroke, and death in the elderly. Our review supports the conclusion that antidepressants generally do more harm than good by disrupting a number of adaptive processes regulated by serotonin.

A person with a minor episode of mental illness may spontaneously recover despite the medication if the dosage is low. Others are left in worse health as a result of their medications.[2] Robert Whitaker describes the harm psychiatric drugs can do to people in Mad in America,[3] which became the name for his website[4] that informs people about psychiatric drugs and about a harm reduction program begun in Finland called “Open Dialogue” that tries to support a person in psychosis without resorting to psychiatric drugs. However, that intervention may not cure the conditions that lead to psychosis.

If psychiatric drugs are harmful, why would you be afraid to quit?

1. “Medications heal you of psychosis.”

 Not true. Psychiatric drugs suppress your behavior so that other people will not be afraid of what you might do and so other people are not so stressed and tired taking care of you. It is easier to care for a baby or a small child than to care for an uncontrolled teenager or adult. It is easier to take care of someone chemically subdued than it is to tolerate uncontrolled behavior and the inability to learn that is an aspect of mental illness. Psychiatric drugs make you behave more like a small child.

Here are the conclusions of a 20-year longitudinal study of 139 schizophrenic or schizophreniform (bipolar I) patients, referred to in the study as “SZ.”[5]

Results. At each follow-up assessment over the 20 years, a surprisingly high percentage of SZ treated with antipsychotics longitudinally had psychotic activity. More than 70% of SZ continuously prescribed antipsychotics experienced psychotic activity at four or more of six follow-up assessments over 20 years. Longitudinally, SZ not prescribed antipsychotics showed significantly less psychotic activity than those prescribed antipsychotics (p<0.05).

Conclusions. The 20-year data indicate that, longitudinally, after the first few years, antipsychotic medications do not eliminate or reduce the frequency of psychosis in schizophrenia, or reduce the severity of post-acute psychosis, . . . the condition of the majority of SZ prescribed antipsychotics for multiple years would raise questions as to how many of them are truly in remission.

2. Medications help me learn how to control my behavior.

 Not true. You are not learning to behave; the drugs are forcing you to be quiet. Your right ear is essential to transmitting sound energy that drives the dominance of your left-brain in cerebral integration. If that normal process is interrupted—which is the true definition of mental illness—further harming the ear with a drug makes the condition much worse. Your brain’s integration speeds slow down almost to the point of sleep. Under those conditions learning anything is extremely difficult.

3. My drugs supply a chemical my body needs and cannot produce itself.

 Not true. That lie told by some drug companies has been repeated by some doctors to their patients. No study has ever proven that serotonin or dopamine deficiency is the cause of mental illness.

4. My drugs help me to sleep.

Our ears are the organ that awakens us and puts us to sleep. Our ears control the amount of sound-energy getting to the brain, which is what keeps it awake. A much better idea is to exercise your ears into a healthier condition so they can do their job of making you alert or making you sleep normally. Melatonin, which occurs naturally in the body, can be taken safely by some people to promote sleep, but is not recommended for people with schizophrenia or schizophreniform illness.[6]

5. My drugs protect other people from my dangerous behavior.

 True. Although some psychiatric survivors[7] ignore the dangers of psychosis, medications are a strategy for reducing harm to your family and community. Although schizophrenic and bipolar people sometimes commit major crimes, including murder and suicide, such crimes are rare.[8] They more often commit minor assault, bizarre harm to themselves and others that can lead to accidental death, and minor destruction of property. Without medication, those kinds of harmful behavior can be very frequent so there is an accumulation of harm to the schizophrenic person and mounting costs of many kinds to the family and community. A danger, to the psychotic person, is being shot and killed by the police.[9] Another danger is being forcibly restrained in jail or in a hospital.

6. If I quit my medication, my symptoms will come back.

 True, they probably will unless you have a plan to heal your ears while you are quitting the medications. Focused Listening may prevent that relapse. The Harrow study shows that people who have been on medication for a long time usually remain psychotic, therefore, going off the medication is likely to allow those symptoms to return. Furthermore, the drugs have harmed the ears, so the symptoms may be worse.

Focused Listening strengthens the ear, which has made tapering and withdrawal safer for the people who have tried it. Following your achievement of normal left-brain dominance you should continue to use Focused Listening, but on a less intense schedule, to maintain your ear health.

7. I can’t get along without my psychiatrist.

Do you have a dependency that would end if you could be cured? You may wonder why you trust your psychiatrist if the prescribed drugs are harming you, will never cure you, and may have been offered to you under claims that are not true. Psychiatrists have been given great legal and social power. Some of the ways they try to help people are by using drugs, hospitalization, electrical and chemical shock treatments, and talk therapy to alter dangerous behavior patterns.[10] However, those methods rarely if ever cure schizophrenia or schizophreniform disease; they control it largely to the long-term detriment of the patient.[11]

Ask your psychiatrist, “What is the cause of schizophrenia or any other mental illness?” The only truthful answer is “We don’t know.” A few people do know, including a couple of doctors and psychiatrists.[12] But most psychiatrists do not know yet and have not tried very hard to find out. They expect neurologists to come up with that answer.[13] Meanwhile, they usually recognize the symptoms so they can label and categorize mental illnesses (using the DSM-5). They are allowed by law, more or less, to prescribe dangerous chemicals and other means to subdue behavior, emotions, and thought processes. As one psychiatrist told me, psychiatrists are looking for non-drug answers to mental illness because an increasing number of lawsuits have been brought successfully against doctors as well as against pharmaceutical companies for the harm done by psychiatric drugs.[14]

You can ask your psychiatrist about a non-drug therapy that might replace chemical controls and you can refer your doctor to this website and my publications.

     8. What about withdrawal symptoms?

Some people decide to quit taking their psychiatric drugs because they don’t like feeling tired or gaining weight or other side effects. Whether they stop suddenly or taper slowly, they often still feel miserable. I have written a study of SSRI withdrawal symptoms that concludes most (not all) psychiatric drug withdrawal symptoms are ear-related. Especially important is the link between vestibular malfunction and suicidal depression.[15] Strengthening the ear with Focused Listening during medication withdrawal decreases withdrawal symptoms and may make them disappear entirely.

Our son Daniel had already tapered his medication (risperidone) to a very low dosage before he started Focused Listening. We learned that he could not completely recover from his symptoms of psychosis until he stopped taking any medication. Since his last healing (2016) he has used Focused Listening fairly often to maintain his right-ear strength.

[1] Paul W. Andrews, Ananda Amstadter, Michael C. Neale, “Primum Non Nocere: An Evolutionary Analysis of Whether Antidepressants Do More Harm than Good.” https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00117/full

[2] You can meet dozens of such individuals at “Surviving Antidepressants” at https://www.survivingantidepressants.org/

[3] Robert Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (New York: Crown Publishers, 2010).

[4] https://www.madinamerica.com .

[5] M. Harrow, T. H. Jobe, and R. N. Faull, Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois College of Medicine, Chicago, IL, USA, “Does treatment of schizophrenia with antipsychotic medications eliminate or reduce psychosis? A 20-year multi-follow-up study,” (Psychological Medicine, Page 1 of 10. © Cambridge University Press 2014 doi:10.1017/S0033291714000610). http://www.mentalhealthexcellence.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/HarrowJobePsychMedMarch2014.pdf

[6] https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-940/melatonin

[7] For example, Will Hall in the Icarus Projects’ “Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs Harm Reduction Guide,” p. 11, that insists in its “Universal Declaration of Mental Rights and Freedoms” that psychotic individuals have “a right” to their aberrant states of consciousness. http://www.willhall.net/files/ComingOffPsychDrugsHarmReductGuide2Edonline.pdf

[8] But no less horrific when they do occur, for example, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/greyhound-killer-believed-man-he-beheaded-was-an-alien-1.1131575; https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/02/26/board-oks-plan-for-man-who-beheaded-bus-passenger-to-eventually-live-on-his-own_n_9321924.html .

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_Canada

[10] “But aren’t there any psychiatrists that do therapy?”

“There are a few,” I said, “but not many. They’re hard to find these days.” Daniel Carlat, Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry—A Doctor’s Revelations about a Profession in Crisis (New York: Free Press), 4

[11] I discuss the issue of talking therapy in the book review of No Language but a Cry under the Reviews tab.

[12] For example, Norman Doidge discusses cures of dyslexic syndrome, autism, and suicidal depression using the Tomatis Method of binaural music therapy in The Brain’s Way of Healing: Remarkable Recoveries and Discoveries from the Fontiers of Neuroplasticity(New York: Viking, The Penguin Group, 2015), Ch.8.

[13] Ibid., Ch. 1.

[14] https://breggin.com/legal-page/

[15] Laurna Tallman, Ear Function in SSRI Withdrawal Syndrome: A Comparison of Symptoms with Other Ear-Related Syndromes (Marmora, Ont.: Northern Light Books, 2012), 20–22.

You may hear people say, “but you haven’t run double-blind experiments,” as a criticism of the claims of a researcher. I noticed this when a California doctor criticized the off-label use of Etanercept by Dr. Edward Tobinick of Boca Raton, Florida, which can clear the inflammation in the brain of stroke patients. While Tobinick’s off-label treatment carries serious risks, there is no doubt that his greatly improved stroke patients, recorded on “before” and “after” videos, are success stories. It is not possible for stroke patients to “take a placebo” because that would imply an injection of some other substance into the spine and brain, which would be foolhardy at best and quite likely lethal. It is not possible to “have a placebo effect” from the injection because that would entail the paralyzed and cognitively impaired patient performing in some ways that were utterly impossible for the patient prior to the Etanercept injection. The symptoms of stroke are not unique to individuals; they are specific to the part of the brain that has been damaged by a blood clot or by a haemorrhage. We already know from the medical histories of millions of stroke patients that without this particular treatment or some other extraordinary experimental treatment that their symptoms remain the same or deteriorate. Those untreated stroke victims are the “control” group. There is nothing about the knowledge or demeanor of the technicians or doctors involved that could possibly draw the same kinds of responses from the patients—an experimenter effect—as the drug does soon after it is injected into the spinal cord and flows into the brain (http://www.nrimed.com/uncategorized/60-minutes-australia-reverse-stroke-23-min-version/).

Double-blind studies of Focused Listening are run every time the method is tried on a new condition.

Testing Focused Listening against the Tomatis Method has effectively been done when you compare Daniel’s recovery from schizophrenia with Tomatis‘s and Berard’s failures with schizophrenia and their uneven success with autism (infantile schizophrenia). Furthermore, my method comes with a comprehensive neurological explanation, a hitherto unknown understanding of cerebral integration, and better information about longitudinal treatment. Bérard’s AIT practitioners have discovered that autism patients require much longer treatment times and Norman Doidge’s account of an autism healing with the Tomatis Method included longitudinal, follow-up, at-home treatment,[1] both of which are confirmations of my findings with Daniel that the usual two-week protocol of Tomatis and Bérard are inadequate for schizophrenia. My neurological paradigm allows for an explanation of why binaural treatments are less likely to be helpful in conditions of cerebral non-dominance. “Testing” Focused Listening is not the same as testing a drug against a placebo or one drug against another drug. As in the Tobinick experiments, we already know that the outcome of non-treatment of any kind is the persistence of symptoms. The Harrow study[2] is an excellent demonstration that conventional treatment of schizophrenia with antipsychotic medication leads to the persistence of symptoms. Dyslexic syndrome, bipolar disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome/fibromyalgia, and schizophrenia are chronic. Why? Because the cause and cure for those conditions was not known and still is not widely known. So, if you have a treatment that cures the syndrome—or all of those syndromes—you don’t need a double-blind study because the control group is “everyone who has ever lived with that chronic condition until now.” There also is no need for a control group when the research of other scientists can stand for the control group.

When I focused music only on Daniel’s right ear, it was a double-blind experiment because neither I nor Daniel had any idea whether or not it would cure his schizophrenia. He had been schizophrenic for 10 years. I vaguely recalled that Alfred Tomatis thought the right ear was more important than the left ear. I had not read any of Tomatis’s writing. I had read Paul Madaule’s book[3] that reported on his personal healing from dyslexic syndrome by Tomatis with a binaural method. The Tomatis Method Daniel and I had experienced was binaural and used electronically filtered the music, which we were led to believe was essential to healing, which proved not to be the case as we learned later. Daniel had shown a positive response to wearing my ordinary headphones binaurally and listening to ordinary CDs of a Mozart violin concerto for a few minutes in mid-November. I used those headphones binaurally. Yet, a couple of days later, I acted on my intuition when I improvised my innovative, right-ear technique on Daniel. We persisted for four weeks without seeing much change. On a day in mid-January, he “awakened” mentally during the afternoon. His brain function remained normal for the next two years.

No one else had ever cured schizophrenia with music, even with a binaural method, but I did not yet realize that Focused Listening was uniquely suited to curing certain mental conditions. Later, as I kept on doing research about symptoms I had noticed about Daniel that were not mentioned in psychiatric texts or other literature, I was able to draw certain conclusions about how the brain works because my Focused Listening was a unique experiment that limited treatment to his right ear.

Was Focused Listening’s effect replicable?

It worked again for Daniel in 2008, after his relapse into psychosis after taking LSD at the end of 2007. Eight years later, when he relapsed early in 2016, he recovered again by using Focused Listening, without medication, between February and late July.

Was Focused Listening’s effect replicable for others?

I helped at least 30 people locally and online with a range of mental problems that responded to Focused Listening, including one young man with psychosis from a head injury. All of those were “double-blind studies” because each person was breaking new ground with this innovative music therapy. I invited at least three times that many people to try Focused Listening, but some people prefer to remain mentally ill if they can get away with it, especially if they have addictions. Sadly, among those who refused to use Focused Listening, at least three schizophrenics died: one from his medications, one from an overdose of street drugs, and one from a bizarre experiment. Some healings lasted well. Some healings were interrupted or reversed sooner or later by substance abuse but worked well apart from those other influences. Some healings were for conditions I would not have anticipated, for example, surviving chemotherapy without developing bipolar disorder or stopping stage fright. When several parents of mentally ill children decided to try Focused Listening, I saw people without a mental illness gaining in energy, self-control, thinking ability, self-confidence, right-lateralization, and communication ability. All of these healings confirmed the neurological paradigm of right-ear driven left-brain dominance in cerebral integration.

Was Focused Listening’s effect replicable for other schizophrenics?

I thought it would be, but my only other psychotic client had suffered a head injury, which is not the typical etiology for schizophrenia.

Since January this year (2018), six schizophrenics have begun using Focused Listening and, despite medications, all are showing signs of increasing left-brain dominance. Three have begun medication withdrawal. The young man reducing only one drug is very close to achieving normal integration. Another six families are considering Focused Listening for psychosis.

[1] Norman Doidge, The Brain’s Way of Healing: Remarkable Recoveries and Discoveries from the Fontiers of Neuroplasticity(New York: Viking, The Penguin Group, 2015), 319–28.

[2] M. Harrow, T. H. Jobe and R. N. Faull, Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois College of Medicine, Chicago, IL, USA, “Does treatment of schizophrenia with antipsychotic medications eliminate or reduce psychosis? A 20-year multi-follow-up study,” (Psychological Medicine, Page 1 of 10. © Cambridge University Press 2014 doi:10.1017/S0033291714000610).

[3] Paul Madaule, When Listening Comes Alive (Norval, Ont.: Moulin Publishing, 1993).

You will notice that comments sections attached to particular titles no longer exist. Laurna’s Desk is my blogspot to share my views and ideas and where questions and comments are welcome. You can also contact me directly at admin[at]northernlightbooks.ca if you have questions and views you want to discuss privately.

If you are a writer in this field, feel free to contact me about writing a review of any of my publications. All readers comments are appreciated as I strive to improve what I write, speak, and publish.

New applications of Focused Listening, beyond the mental health issues I first addressed, are in motion, as you will see from the Index and from new pages added to the site. If you try Focused Listening or binaural listening for a particular purpose, we would love to learn about it. On the page What Have You Learned about Focused Listening? my readers have an opportunity to share their views and experiences of Focused Listening. A community of people who are using Focused Listening is learning about the benefits of that music therapy. Your contributions are valued! When that community becomes large enough, I will open special project pages for those pioneers to share their stories.