Resources for Extraordinary Healing: Schizophrenia, Bipolar and Other Serious Mental Illnesses. Emma PhD Bragdon PhD
to their religious preferences; like Spiritists, the practitioners are ecumenical and welcoming. As in the best of medicine, the practitioners are knowledgeable about the needs of the physical body and may prefer to use natural supplements. We survey options: residential care, private practitioners, clinics, collaborative arrangements between private practitioners, and the use of mediums and medical intuitives. Linda Haltinner’s reflections on Brazil and her USA clinic, Sojourns, illustrates integrative care that gives weight to the spiritual nature of healing.
We pay particular attention to the efforts that are being made in the USA to establish sanctuaries, or safe “healing” homes, for those in crisis. These function more like homes than hospitals in that people live together in extended family, taking on responsibilities for household management and engaging in caring relationships. These have a more egalitarian structure, unlike the more authoritarian structures of most hospitals. This enables participants, when they are ready, to responsibly take on the full power of who they are. Peer support is included as a vital aspect of healing, as well as supporting those choosing to withdraw from some or all of their psychiatric medications.
“Last Words,” the final chapter, gives a summary of the book’s message.
Appendix A gives guidelines for those who are looking for and those who may want to set up a safe home for those in crisis. It covers what to look for, and encourage, in the paraprofessionals who assist those in crisis. These guidelines were taken from a 1992 booklet prepared by Loren R. Mosher, MD, and associates to explore alternative approaches for helping those diagnosed as schizophrenic. Soteria, the original facility and the focus of this report, lasted twelve years (1971-1983).
Appendices B-E offer readers resources for supportive organizations, covering the themes that are described in a more narrative form in the first thirteen chapters of the book. Appendix B provides contact information including websites of supportive organizations. Appendix C profiles Models for Peer Support in Massachusetts with contact information. Appendix D provides ways to find safe homes/therapeutic communities in the USA and Europe. Appendix E lists resources for safely getting off psychiatric drugs and treating children without psychiatric drugs. Appendix F offers more perspective on what orthomolecular psychiatry has to offer.
Final Note
When the tsunami is over, the ocean waves are back to normal height, and people are assessing their situation and what needs to be done, we would diminish them by calling them “sick” for having survived the experience. Nature unleashed herself, and these people were there—managing the changes as best they could. Period.
In a similar vein, we need not stigmatize a person for having an emotional or spiritual tsunami in his or her own life, either. Instead, we can offer each one a safe house, food, water, warmth, some tools to build a new life, and sustaining friendship for stability over time, just as we would for someone who had literally been overpowered by a tidal wave and was lost at sea for some time. To do this, we must often step out of our own culturally-biased comfort zone--become bigger than our ego identity and become a large, benevolent force that empowers and shares with compassion, as equals.
Since the late 1960s, we have come to understand whales as basically benevolent beings—not the fear-inspiring Moby Dicks that symbolized the menacing forces we projected on Mother Nature. Whales maintain communications with each other by sending subtle vibrations (sound waves) over long distances. They do not attack unless provoked or threatened. Like us, they are mammals, and social creatures who are loyal to their young, taking care of them consistently until they are ready to go solo. Unlike us, they are adapted to life in the water. They know how to be safe in the midst of ocean storms and approaching tsunamis by staying under the most turbulent waves. Thus they are a good model for those of us learning how to weather the turbulence that our emotional lives can bring to us. Like whales, it behooves us to learn to recognize the vibrations of change in the sea’s waters so we can keep ourselves out of harm’s way, and stay in close contact with our loved ones in that ocean of consciousness referred to as “the Field.”
At our most elemental, we are not a chemical reaction, but an energetic charge. Human beings and all living beings are a coalescence of energy in a field of energy connected to every other thing in the world. This pulsating energy field is the central engine of our being and our consciousness, the alpha and the omega of our existence. There is no “me” and “not-me” duality to our bodies in relation to the universe, but one underlying energy field. This field is responsible for our mind’s highest functions, the information source guiding the growth of our bodies.
---Lynne McTaggart, The Field, p. xiv
Art by Daniel B. Holeman www.AwakenVisions.com
Section 1: Who Needs It?
Chapter One: What’s the Problem?
Bi-Polar kills tens of thousand of people, mostly young people, every year. Statistically, one out of every five people diagnosed with the disease eventually commits suicide. But, I wasn’t convinced, to say the least, that gulping down a handful of pills every day would make me sane.
--Sascha A. Dubrui, in “The Bipolar World”
The following two stories involve families that are well-to-do. They have the means to go to the best clinics, hospitals and private practitioners available in the world. Most people do not have these privileges due to lack of financial means,; therefore, there is little is available to them for assistance except what is offered for free by governments’ welfare systems: psychiatric medication only.
1. Caught in the System: Low Functioning
(Names in this story are fictitious in order to protect the privacy of the people involved, but the story is an exact retelling of real circumstances.)
Sylvia is the youngest of 7 children, and although the family was not well to do in the early years of her life, Sylvia’s demands were always considered first. She generally got what she wanted as a child. When Sylvia was 18, she was diagnosed as schizophrenic and later as bipolar. She is now 56 years old. For thirty years, she has been taking a phenothiazine called fluphenazine”, or Prolixin. This is used to reduce psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia, as well as to reduce the acute manic phases of bipolar disorder.
Sylvia is under the care of her sister, Ann, a highly successful, wealthy businesswoman, aged 58, who worked closely with the mentally ill for two years before going into business. Ann chose to place Sylvia in a low-income apartment building close to Ann’s home, where Sylvia can walk to her psychiatrist and group therapy, as well as the bank and market. However, Sylvia is not able to follow the simple rules of the house, and her habits of being half-dressed in public places, and being abrasive and belligerent to others in the building may lead to her being evicted soon.
Sylvia says she stopped drinking alcohol 15 years ago, but Ann believes she continues to drink vodka regularly, and it’s her mixing alcohol with psychiatric medications that causes the hallucinations. “She knows how to take herself right to the edge, and she does it every day,” Anne told me, exasperated with how consistently Sylvia seems to take pleasure in disempowering herself, not taking any responsibility for herself, and manipulating others to care for her without regard to how that caring impacts their lives.
Thinking that it might be the drugs that kept Sylvia in this state, Anne asked the doctor, “What would happen if you weaned her off the drugs?” The doctor ushered her into a room to view a patient with severe tics and tremors to illustrate what Sylvia would be left with as the effects of taking the drug for 30 years and then stopping. Ann was horrified.
According to Ann, the conventional treatments of our mental health-care system only mask the symptoms of schizophrenia. Everyone with psychotic symptoms is given the same treatment, and the mental healthcare system seems incapable of treating each person as