Daniel Walks Out of the Woods, October 2008What Is Schizophrenia?
At first, I simply accepted the diagnosis of the “expert” psychiatrists. The more I researched schizophrenia, the more questions Daniel’s diagnosis raised. Was his schizophrenia different from his street drug reactions? From his LSD “trip”? From his “shroom” psychosis? If the symptoms are the same, why are they? What does that mean about other conditions that include psychosis, such as bipolar I or epilepsy? How are two syndromes “different” if their symptoms are similar? Do they differ only in degree of severity? If so, why?
Schizophrenia is a “diagnosis of exclusion”—tests rule out other known illness. Some schizophrenia symptoms are behavioral. Anyone can observe them, as one psychiatrist told me to watch for changes in Daniel’s eating, drinking, and sleeping habits; tendency to isolate; mood swings; delusions; or hallucinations. Schizophrenia also includes changes in speech and language, which is my academic specialty. When you drug a person, you lose the opportunity to study the symptoms. Daniel’s symptoms remained past the “wash-out point,” the time interval after which the doctors thought his street drugs would no longer remain in his body. By then, he was heavily medicated.
What if street drugs left in their wake some other kind of damage? What if the prescription drugs given to Daniel also left him with some kind of damage? What distinguishes a “street drug” from a “medication”? For four years, my research focused on Daniel’s brain and what drugs (including SSRIs) did to it. I learned about drug effects, withdrawal symptoms, and support strategies. I learned to read his behavior for what might be happening to serotonin and dopamine levels in his brain. His doctor tried to wean him off his medications to see if Daniel, drug-free, would be fine. From 1997-2007, I refused to use the term “schizophrenia” for Daniel. My role was helping our two drug and alcohol addicts, although his brother’s symptoms differed from Daniel’s.
Reducing Daniel’s risperidone dose by ¼ mg. produced withdrawal symptoms. So, I reinstated his dosage. Then, I discovered his withdrawal symptoms would fade after a week or two and I could reduce again, tapering down at 3- to 6-week intervals to a very low dosage for stabilizing his behavior. The doctor didn’t believe me. Two years later, when my observations were confirmed in medical research, he apologized.
The idea that medical science really did not know any more than I did about what caused schizophrenia was a long, long dawn.
Daniel had been in a provincial psychiatric hospital and then had been moved back to the admitting general hospital. At last, the elderly psychiatrist I had been trying for weeks to contact for information about Daniel’s mental condition telephoned me. “I am Dr. R. You can pick Daniel up today,” she said.
“What is Daniel’s diagnosis?” I asked.
“Acute schizophrenia,” she answered.
“And what is his prognosis?” I ventured.
“Once a schizophrenic, always a schizophrenic,” she replied and hung up the phone.
It occurred to me that no doctor in her right mind would break that kind of news to a parent that way. But I already had reasons for distrusting the kind of “help” Daniel was getting from his psychiatrists.
I made the hour’s drive to the hospital, picked up our oddly subdued son, and asked him as we started home if he would be able to wait in the car for a few minutes while I stopped at the library. In terror as to what sort of things might go wrong if I left him unattended, I ran into the building, found the small section on health, and gathered psychiatric texts, stories by or about schizophrenics, and books about dyslexia. My formal education on the state of the art of psychiatric knowledge about schizophrenia had begun.
Psychiatric theories fail to account for the symptoms of schizophrenia, including disorganized speech. The texts I read implied that differing forms of mental illness were like different kinds of skin diseases: different, but all happening in the same place—the brain. The more I learned about neurologists’ and psychiatrists’ probing of the brain for the cause of schizophrenia, the more I fell into the trap of thinking the brain becomes sick in a dozen different ways to produce various mental illnesses. Occasionally, I would encounter a doctor who mentioned similarities between one mental illness and another. In fact, manic depression and schizophrenia have many similar symptoms. Autism used to be called “infantile schizophrenia.” Asperger’s is like schizophrenia in some ways, too. But no one had a theory of how or why these conditions were related.
During several of Daniel’s episodes of schizophrenia, I had noticed his ability to focus on conversation wavered and returned. I measured that fluctuation. The intervals were two minutes of clarity followed by two minutes of confusion to make a four-minute cycle. The cycle persisted all day, every day. I measured that cycle twice again, years apart, during separate schizophrenia episodes, using different tasks, and the results were identical. I knew that some physiological process was driving the changes in his brain. But what? Between his severe episodes we struggled to help him to defeat his addictions. Sometimes he seemed to improve a little, but he became acutely psychotic time and time again. One victory was titrating his medication to the lowest possible dosage for tolerable behavior: 0.0625 mg. of risperidone, a minuscule amount.
Then, Daniel reached out for music in November 2005. His healing had begun. He applied himself to Focused Listening daily while coloring mandalas. His behavior improved a little. Still, the fluctuating levels of cognition persisted. Then, one afternoon, his psychosis ended and the cycling stopped. His brain must have become healthy because his behavior, speech, and communication became completely normal during those few hours and remained normal for the next two years. What had happened?
My research would resume in earnest when his addictions triggered his next episode of schizophrenia in January 2008. This time, I would learn exactly what Daniel meant when he said, referring to his schizophrenia, “I’m dyslexic again.” Does it matter what anyone calls it, if Focused Listening to high-frequency music heals the illness?
It mattered to me. I wanted to know. So, I did the research.
The strength of a tiny muscle in the right middle ear is essential to normal behavior because it determines the volume and accuracy of sound transmission into the left-brain. The spectrum of human behavior, including so-called “mental” illnesses, is generated in the ear. The right ear controls the dominance of the left-brain in cerebral integration. Losses of dominance, whether brief and intermittent or prolonged and continuous, account for the most common forms of “mental” illnesses. The ear muscle that is too weak to maintain left-brain dominance can be strengthened by exposure to high-frequency sound. I had discovered the overarching paradigm that explains behavior: right-ear-driven left-brain dominance in the integrative activities of the cerebral hemispheres. And I had created a novel way of strengthening left-brain dominance: Focused Listening.