TRANSCRIPT
What do you think would be the best treatment for it? I’ve no idea. Probably something that they’re not doing right now. I don’t know, but it can’t be, at least as far as it’s portrayed, like the funny farms that people go to. I can’t exactly be the most positive thing for it.
I think people have the wrong idea about what mental illness is. And I think because of that, they’ve decided that it’s hopeless. And because of that, doctors don’t need to work anymore. Nobody needs to do anything. Nobody needs to take it up and look at it and see.
You know what gets me? They will focus all kinds of stuff on the sick. I grant you, yes. Why do people get well? If a person can grow through the psychosis, can understand through the dynamic work what had led to the breakdown and what was contributing to the new cohesion they have, then a pride in personhood and a sense of being a centered self who can then move forward and tackle different challenges.
If a person feels held together with the scotch tape of medication, that person is going to be scared to go out in the rain for fear that the medication is going to wash this, the rain is going to wash the scotch tape off, and they’ll be back in a hospital.
What effect do you think antipsychotic medication has on this, on psychotherapy of people with schizophrenia?
It makes it a little easier to talk to them to begin with because they are under control. They’re not as bizarre. On the other hand, it is like the patient who takes a drink before they go to their therapy hour. They talk freely, but they don’t change. And the reason for that is the medication is effective by diminishing effect. That’s the vernacular being there. Yeah, and they, as you see, they’re not as terrified because they can’t feel.
Do you believe that someone can be, let’s say, have schizophrenia, be on an antipsychotic, and be cured while they’re on an antipsychotic?
No, these symptoms are just suppressed. If their symptoms suppressants, the antipsychotics don’t affect anything of the core.
What do you think she would say to all the medication of everybody nowadays? Everybody who has schizophrenia getting put on medication right away?
Her favorite? This is nonsense. Now, the Big Pharma people will say you have to stay on these meds the rest of your life or you’ll suffer terrible deterioration. But this does not have scientific foundation.
I wrote about science for a long time, and I guess in my personal life, you know, I mean, I’m not a religious fellow. I believe in science. I think it’s a force for good. It’s a force for, you know, about knowing about the world. So I think, I mean, like, I believe in science. I believe in the principles of science. I honor science. I love science.
So that’s one of the things that was so disappointing to see the bad science and to see science dishonored. And all I do is I say, look at your own research. Look at your own, in my own research. It’s not even mine; it’s not the critics. I say, look at your own research. Read it. What does it say?
The attempt to discredit treatment for schizophrenia is really in order to establish a concept that the only treatment for schizophrenia is drugs. And furthermore, I don’t even think that’s the concept that’s to be established. This concept that people want to establish is it’s a brain disease. It’s also just easier to say this is genetic, it’s a chemical imbalance, and let’s just treat it with drugs.
And it reflects our culture in general that we’re moving towards quick fixes and easy ways out. You know, fast food is not just, it’s like a fast food culture. It’s a fast cure culture.
Why are your ideas so unheard and so unpopular in the modern world?
First of all, my ideas are nothing new. I mean, these ideas that I haven’t been around for decades. I think, to be honest, I think the primary reason why they’re not so popular is because nobody’s getting rich off of this way of thinking. You know, the pharmaceutical industry makes billions of dollars, you know, marketing their product. You know, I get my hourly fee, and anybody that does its work, that’s what we get is an hourly fee. There’s no profit margin per se.
Psychiatry has actually engaged in an assault on personal meaning, and part of it is a medical model. The other is greed.
What do you think is the best treatment for schizophrenia?
Do they even have three minute this time as non-medical as possible? Not lobotomies. They used to try like shock therapy and stuff like that. I don’t think that, I hope they’re not still doing that. Pills are kind of overrated. I’m not sure if medication is the best thing about it because people turn into a vegetable.
It seems to me that above all, people, the most disturbed people can’t handle medication intrusions into their lives. It’s like the reverse of what psychiatry says. I mean, sometimes I kid and they say, well, if you want to drug somebody, you know, drug some powerful attorney who’s manipulating his family and brutalizing his wife, and maybe it’ll slow them down, give everybody else a chance. You know, okay, but I don’t really mean that, of course.
But the last person that you want to drug, what to tell that they have a biological disorder, is a 17-year-old girl who doesn’t know she’s the Virgin Mary or if she’s a prostitute or whether she’s good or evil and whether her mother has a tail and her father has horns and was terrified and frightened. That person needs such gentleness and patience and understanding and relationship. That human being really needs to be cared for in everything that word means.
And so what we do instead is to brutalize the most vulnerable people.