Remnant: I have read claims that folic acid is good for treating schizophrenia, have to use at least a 5 mg dose, and niacin is also good. These two things should be tried before any medication.
Not long ago I put a post together on the presumed causes of schizophrenia and it was a bit of a laugh really, because if you start looking for causes, you're going to find that damned near everything under the sun can be linked to schizophrenia -- in fact, the current theory being proposed by E. Fuller Torrey (author of "Surviving Schizophrenia") is that "cat poop" is the culprit. Anyway, one of the causes listed is niacin deficiency and apparently, there has been some success with this form of treatment. Personally I'm very much in favor with starting with the least invasive forms of treatment and working one's way up as necessary.
I'm also more than a little concerned about the links that are implied between some studies and chronicity, i.e.
Quote:
"The Germans, who invented neuropathology, looked at the brains of thousands of schizophrenics before there were any neuroleptics. And they were never able to find anything. They never reported increased ventricular volume, which at postmortem you can measure quite easily. And they also never reported any specific cellular pathology, and they studied many, many, many brains." He adds that "there are a whole lot of people who don't have schizophrenia and also have enlarged ventricles. And there are people who have other psychiatric conditions who have enlarged ventricles, and there are a number of known causes of enlarged ventricles that are not schizophrenia. So, yes, there is a statistical difference, but it is not specific."
"On the other hand," Mosher continues, "there are studies that have shown that people treated with neuroleptics have changes in brain structure that are at least associated with drug treatment, dosage, and duration -- and have been shown to increase over time as drugs are given." He cites one "horrific study" of children between the ages of 10 and 15 in which the researchers measured the volumes of the kids' cortexes. "The cortex is what you think with, the part on the outside," Mosher explains. Over time, "They watched the cortical volume of these young people decline, while the cortical volume of the nonschizophrenic controls was expanding because they were adolescents and still growing." The researcher concluded that their schizophrenia had caused the decrease in the subjects. "And yet every single one was taking neuroleptic drugs," Mosher says.
-- Dr. Loren Mosher
See also: Still Crazy After All These YearsQuote:
He said, "I absolutely believed the common wisdom that these antipsychotic drugs actually had improved things and that they had totally revolutionized how we treated schizophrenia. People used to be locked away forever, and now maybe things weren't great, but they were a lot better. It was a story of progress."
That story of progress was fraudulent, as Whitaker soon found out when he gained new insight from his research into torturous psychiatric practices such as electroshock, lobotomy, insulin coma, and neuroleptic drugs. Psychiatrists told the public that these techniques "cured" psychosis or balanced the chemistry of the brain.
But, in reality, the common thread in all these different treatments was the attempt to suppress "mental illness" by deliberately damaging the higher functions of the brain. The stunning truth is that, behind closed doors, the psychiatric establishment itself labeled these treatments as "brain-damaging therapeutics."
The first generation of antipsychotic drugs created a drug-induced brain pathology by blocking the neurotransmitter dopamine and essentially shutting down many higher brain functions. In fact, when antipsychotics such as Thorazine and Haldol were first introduced, psychiatrists themselves said that these neuroleptic drugs were virtually indistinguishable from a "chemical lobotomy."
...
Antipsychotic drugs may cause diabetes, but the FDA still allows their sale. Here's just one real powerful study on this: Researchers with the University of Pittsburgh in the 1990s took people newly diagnosed with schizophrenia, and they started taking MRI pictures of the brains of these people. So we get a picture of their brains at the moment of diagnosis, and then we prepare pictures over the next 18 months to see how those brains change. Now during this 18 months, they are being prescribed antipsychotic medications, and what did the researchers report? They reported that, over this 18-month period, the drugs caused an enlargement of the basal ganglia, an area of the brain that uses dopamine. In other words, it creates a visible change in morphology, a change in the size of an area of the brain, and that's abnormal. That's number one. So we have an antipsychotic drug causing an abnormality in the brain.
Now here's the kicker. They found that as that enlargement occurred, it was associated with a worsening of the psychotic symptoms, a worsening of negative symptoms. So here you actually have, with modern technology, a very powerful study. By imaging the brain, we see how an outside agent comes in, disrupts normal chemistry, causes an abnormal enlargement of the basal ganglia, and that enlargement causes a worsening of the very symptoms it's supposed to treat. Now that's actually, in essence, a story of a disease process -- an outside agent causes abnormality, causes symptoms...
-- Robert Whitaker
See also: Mad in AmericaThose World Health Studies do concern me -- why do we have so many more people recovering in cultures and settings that don't use drugs? I remain of the opinion that although drugs are helpful to a number of individuals the goal should be short-term dependance. We know that with long-term dependance, neurological or physiological dysfunction is bound to erupt, perhaps in the form of tardive dykinethesia, diabetes, tumor or stroke.
What's most disturbing to me is that these drugs are being used almost routinely with children and young people, i.e., this recent case in which
a child was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 2 and 1/2. That little girl died just a few weeks ago at the age of four due to an overdose. According to news reports her parents deliberately gave her too many drugs -- I don't know if that's true or not but I do wonder where the medical and pharmaceutical corporations hold any responsibility. How many other children are out there, being doped up on drugs to control their behavior. Those are mean streets when "the terrible twos" can be interpreted as a neurological disorder requiring treatment with drugs that can kill.
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28 Feb 2007, 8:43 am
