1997

After his remarkably successful treatment for dyslexia at a Tomatis method psychology clinic, our son had an alarming “psychotic break.” He had been drugged in a local hospital, then transferred to a provincial psychiatric hospital for two months. before being moved back to the general hospital. Weeks before, at my last conference with one of his psychiatrists, I was told that the music therapy (the binaural Tomatis Method) that had healed his dyslexia had caused his mental illness. The elderly psychiatrist I had been trying for weeks to contact for information about his mental condition telephoned me. “I am Dr. R. You can pick your son up today,” she said.
“What is his diagnosis?” I asked.
“Acute schizophrenia,” she answered.
“And what is his prognosis?” I ventured.
“Once a schizophrenic, always a schizophrenic,” she replied, abruptly ending the call.
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” our 16-year-old son was getting from his psychiatrists. A government brochure in the psych ward waiting room stated that schizophrenia improves over time. The same Tomatis Method that cured his dyslexia had ended my eight-year ordeal with chronic fatigue syndrome and restored my health.

I tried to think about the diagnosis during the hour’s drive to the hospital. We had visited him many times. My husband drove the four-hour round trip almost every day to spend a few hours with him in the provincial hospital. We were not sure what about his current state of fear and dazed calm were permanent. I picked up our oddly subdued son, and asked him 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. I had to buy a “remote” membership with the last of the money in my purse. Hurrying, with a large tote stuffed with books, back to the car, I realized my formal research into the state of the art of psychiatric knowledge about schizophrenia had begun.

2006

At first, I simply accepted the diagnosis of the “expert” psychiatrists. The more I researched schizophrenia, the more questions our son’s diagnosis raised. Was his schizophrenia different from his street drug reactions? From his LSD “trip”? From his “shroom” psychosis? He appeared to recover after such episodes. 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? WHAT CAUSES IT? For the most part, he stayed in his room and slept a great deal. I was afraid to talk to him about how he felt. I was afraid to ask him to do anything. Gradually, he told us about incidents on the psych ward that were disturbing, but we did not know if his memory worked well enough that we could believe him. On the other hand, the most serious danger might be the doctors, who seemed to be experimenting with many drugs. We had grave doubts about many things happening to him but nowhere to turn with our questions.

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 his 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. When his 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 — they diagnosed him as schizophrenic. By then, he was heavily medicated with their drugs. The doctors seemed to be most preoccupied with things I could not see: the effects of chemicals on the nerves in his brain.

Tapering Medication

What if street drugs left in their wake some other kind of damage? What if the prescription drugs given to our son also left him with some kind of damage? What distinguishes a “street drug” from a “medication”? As I delved into pharmaceutical descriptions, the phrase “unknown mode of action” for the effect of the drug on the brain usually appeared. Our family doctor tried to wean him off his medications to see if, when drug-free, he would be fine. Not quite. Fairly quickly, his medications were reduced to one. Although he did improve, his addictions to alcohol and to cannabis remained factors in the equation. Reducing his risperidone dose by ¼ mg. produced withdrawal symptoms. So, the doctor 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 — eventually, to a very low dosage of 0.0625 mg (1/16 mg) for stabilizing his behavior. The doctor didn’t believe me. Two years later, when he confirmed the accuracy of my observations in other medical research, he apologized.

For four years, my research focused on his 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. I had taken copious notes during his Tomatis Method treatment and I continued to take notes in my journal. I had always been fascinated by behavior to the point that some of my high school friends wondered if I would become a psychiatrist. I was a student of behavior academically and as a tenet of my religion. I had never expected to be given a box seat to the drama of schizophrenia unfolding 24/7.

From 1997 until 2007, I refused to use the term “schizophrenia” for him. My roles in helping our two substance abuse addicts differed because his brother never experienced sustained psychosis. He had never been dyslexic and was extraordinarily well-coordinated. Both developed loyalties to friends who used drugs that stretched their family ties to the limits and beyond. They saw themselves as members of a “punk” subculture that was anti-social, pro drugs, and addicted to damaging sound in their favored punk rock music genre.

The idea that medical science really did not know any more than I did about what caused schizophrenia was a long, long dawn.

Attention Deficit Disorder from Dyslexia to Schizophrenia

During our son’s episodes of acute psychosis, I had noticed that his ability to focus during a conversation wavered, just as his dyslexia had caused failures to attend (pay attention) when he was a little boy. One day, I measured that fluctuation of his ability to focus clearly, which shifted into an interval of confusion, during a task of counting from 1 to 100. Two minutes of clarity were followed by two minutes of confusion (2/2) to make a four-minute cycle. Next, came a rapid fluctuation (1/1/1/1), then, the 2/2 cycle returned. This cycling persisted all day, every day. I measured that phenomenon twice again, years apart, during separate schizophrenia episodes, using different tasks (counting, reading, describing photographs), and the results were identical. I knew then that the Freudian ideas his psychiatrists had taught him about his mother having caused his psychosis were false and that some physiological process was driving the changes in his brain. But what?

Between his severe episodes we tried to help him to defeat his addictions. He attended AA meetings for over two years. Sometimes, he seemed to improve a little, but he became acutely psychotic time and time again.

Focused Listening™

One day in November 2005, he put on my headphones. I noticed sudden changes in his facial expression, posture, movement, and behavior — the same types of changes I had seen during his recovery from dyslexia in 1997. I set up a listening station for him. As I put the headphones on him, I recalled that Tomatis thought the right ear is more important, although his Method is binaural. I swiftly improvised an experiment by placing a wad of facial tissues under the left earpiece, forcing only right-ear-stimulation with the high-frequency sound of classical violin music. He applied himself to Focused Listening™ for 1 to 2 hours daily while coloring mandalas. His behavior improved a little. Still, the fluctuating levels of cognition persisted. Then, about six weeks later, after his minuscule medication was withdrawn, his psychosis ended and the cycling stopped. His brain must have normalized because his behavior, speech, and communication became completely normal during that afternoon — as it had become during his Tomatis Method treatment. Despite his involvement in the subculture, his cognition remained normal for the next two years. What had happened?

The Psychiatry Paradox

Psychiatry lacks a unifying, scientific theory of human behavior. Psychiatric theories fail to account for the obvious physical symptoms of schizophrenia, including disorganized speech lacking in “emotional prosody.” The texts I read implied that forms of mental illness were like different kinds of skin diseases: uniquely 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, addictions, and other diagnoses, 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, severe manic depression (bipolar I) and schizophrenia have many similar symptoms. Autism used to be called “infantile schizophrenia,” a name changed for social reasons, not for any discovery of the distinctions between early and later onset of the similar conditions. Autism is acknowledged to manifest levels of severity on a “spectrum.” In fact, most mental illnesses fall on a spectrum with the autism and adult schizophrenia variants subsumed on that spectrum. Bipolar II is a close cousin. Asperger’s is like schizophrenia in some ways, too.

The element missing in psychiatry is sufficient knowledge about the physics of the impact of sound on the nervous system, in other words, of the role of hearing in other anatomical functions. The French otolaryngologist, Guy Bérard, demonstrated the relationship between levels of depression and the audiogram profiles of depressed patients. He explains and shows examples to prove anyone can learn to diagnose depression and the severity of depression from a patient’s audiogram. He healed 97.7% of his 235 suicidally depressed patients. He began to untangle the threads of other mental-behavioral conditions from the audiogram, but he, too, lacked a unifying neurological theory for the behavioral spectrum. He could not cure schizophrenia and warned his readers not to use his Audio Integration Training on that condition. Yet, he and his colleague Alfred Tomatis were closing in on my discovery. If Tomatis had not taken a deep dive into psychiatry, which ended their collaboration, they might have found the neurological paradigm I discovered.

Nine years after our son’s schizophrenia diagnosis, I experimented with my right-eared music therapy that healed him. But I did not understand the mechanism of its effect or of his disease. He had tried other unsuccessful therapies and had complied with my simple experiments, from which I had observed symptoms not mentioned in the psychiatric literature or that defied some textbook symptoms, such as “incapable of learning.” He definitely could learn, although I had to teach him how to read again from the Grade 1 level, after his hospitalization. We stopped the lessons when he could read at the college entrance level. I had some clear, unanswered questions about schizophrenia symptoms.

2008

When his substance addictions triggered his next episode of psychosis, my right-eared music therapy began to heal him again. The healing process with Focused Listening™ was proving to be replicable. I was looking for answers to his specific physiological symptoms: the fluctuating attention cycle, confusion about which hand to use or how to use both hands for a task, a range in the level of intensity of his psychosis. I was about to 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™ heals the illness? Music therapies, including those of Tomatis and Bérard, are widely available, if costly.

I believed my unique therapy was important. I wanted to know how and why it worked. So, I continued my research.

The Tallman Neurological Paradigm™

One day, I learned from the website of a young man who admired his writing that the Indian-American neurologist V.S. Ramachandran had discovered that each half of the brain has different tendencies or “characteristics,” although he was studying amputees’ phantom limb pain, not people with a mental illness. I could see from the chart this admirer made that in people with normal behavior those left-brain and right-brain characteristics somehow were intertwined or shared. I also noticed, from the viewpoint of evolution and survival, that the right-brain characteristics could be “dangerous but also useful” individually and socially and that the left-brain characteristics normally were “highly valued” and essential at both scales. That night, I introspected about how that division of mental characteristics operated in my creation of plastic and visual art forms and of language because, from the time I wrote and received approval for a master’s degree thesis subject, those questions strongly motivated my thinking. In my work editing university textbooks, I paid particular attention to material that had a bearing on my incomplete research.

At that point in his recovery, I had noted the convoluted grammar of our son’s sentence patterns, which were changing in ways that were more comprehensible. Psychiatry has not had the means of healing patients, therefore, has not been able to study the symptoms of recovery. Furthermore, unlike a doctor or other professional who might be observing a patient, I knew his history in great detail. For example, when he referred to his childhood pet rabbit or his sister, I had some idea of what he was trying to say about them in a garbled sentence. The next day, with Ramachandran’s left-brain vs. right-brain categories in mind, I watched Dan doing Focused Listening™ and visualized my right-ear music therapy affecting his brain. From his constant self-talk, I could hear that his grammar was making better sense and that the music therapy was making him “more left-brained,” i.e., more rational. I realized immediately that his left-brain was becoming more able to choose words (from the experiences recorded in the nerves of his right-brain) and place them on a time line (with a better-functioning temporal lobe) and sort into grammatical order (in Wernicke’s area) the thoughts he spoke (with Broca’s area). His rational left-brain was making sense of the feelings in his right-brain associated with the sister who had given him the gift of his childhood pet. The formation of personalities as variations on that paradigm of right-ear-driven left-brain [rational] dominance of [raw, emotional experiences] stored in right-brain memory burst into my awareness. In that moment, I began to shake violently and continued to tremble for an hour. It took me a week to get past the neurological shock of discovery to my lifelong thought patterns of ignorance and questioning.

Still, I wanted to understand the anatomical process in greater detail. My research attention shifted to the anatomy of the ear. Through the writings (in English translation) of Alfred Tomatis, I learned that the right ear controls the pitch of the voice via the left-brain and that other aspects of human neurology and the anatomy it activates, such as the vagus system and the organs under its influence, normally responds from (and to) the dominance of that right ear. As I watched our son’s progression through identifiable “labels” of mental illnesses, I realized that the strength of the right ear’s stapedius muscle determines the state of consciousness the person can maintain, from high alertness to unconsciousness (or even coma). As his right ear became stronger, he came closer to, and finally arrived at, the range of normal behavior, except for his substance addictions.

I had discovered the overarching neurological paradigm that explains not only schizophrenia but all human behavior, normal and aberrant: 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™.