TRANSCRIPT
What do they might be the best treatment for schizophrenia? The best treatment for schizophrenia, for schizophrenia, I think would be, I think if people just had three meals a day, had some water, exercised a lot, they’d be normal. They should be looked after but free to live as they were still. And it’s very sad that we don’t have places where people can go and be taken care of like they were, like during the moral hero of psychiatry in the enduring 1700s and 1800s when we had hospitals, especially in England, where you can get the kind of treatment that a person like myself or Lauren Moser would give to somebody who’s really disturbed.
And by the way, there’s a number of ways of doing therapy that helps. None of the psychoanalysis, not just like a little oral treatment, helped patients. The recovery rate, and this was before psychoanalysis, before modern medication. What did they do? They had very simple principles. First of all, you don’t use physical force on the patients. You don’t beat them up, which the staff often did for various reasons. Pannell, what it was, the French Revolution that put him, that gave him a hospital. Everybody said that he’s the father of modern psychiatry, and patients who’d been sick for years got better. But they didn’t tell you how many because it was embarrassing. Most patients got better.
Are there any resentments you have about your treatment from schizophrenia? Yeah, could you share them? Well, remember we had a lot. We had the end of the bug Hauser’s would be people up. We had conscientious objectives. If you’ve never been not silly by a conscientious objector, you haven’t lived. I thought that I would never ever see my family again. I thought I was so dead emotionally and mentally. I thought I would never. And here, here, I’m sure there were a lot of people that would have believed. Do you think in that way? Oh yes, and you know, probably in the environment we have today, I probably would have ended up exactly what I feared back then. I think everybody knows he’s sick. Every schizophrenic knows how sick he is, how far he is from the center of his own being. I think he knows.
What do you think is the best treatment for schizophrenia? I don’t know, but I would imagine therapy would be helpful to begin with, to find out exactly where the core of the problem is. I think just therapy, mostly therapy, trying to speak and figure it out. Their faith in therapy, you teach them that even bizarre, erroneous perceptions are based on something and make good sense. And you start with where they are. You try to get with them, and you try not to humiliate them. You try not to terrify them, and you try to be on their side.
One of the ways to understand some of the kind of craziness of some of the symptoms, whether it’s the voices, the hallucination, visual hallucinations, or some of the bizarre delusions that people have, if you think about how bizarre and off-the-wall some of our dreams, especially our terrifying dreams, can be, imagine having that experience in your waking life. Long before any of us became mental health professionals, we knew that people who are starving see food and that people who were dying of thirst see water. And we didn’t need Freud to tell us that these were wish fulfillment. And then we forget all about that and say nobody knows anything about hallucinations. You say hallucinations are just exactly like dreams. And since the motivation has to be stronger to do it when you’re wide awake, usually even if they don’t give you associations, it’s easier to fall back on symbolism and your knowledge of the patient and your general experience for a good clinical guess.
Dr. Dorman would get, he would go underneath the delusion. He wouldn’t see it as pathological. He would see it as a defense mechanism, as a protective mechanism that I had developed for survival. For survival, what are the universals so that we can learn, though, that you have learned from Catherine’s recovery? The universals are certainly for the therapist, is never underestimate your patient.
So you really like working with a schizophrenic population? I do. I do. I thought I enjoy it. I think yes, it challenges me in ways that working with other patients don’t. It questions all the way to the just the meaning of life. All the therapy is for you to be the most creative, loving, in charge of your life person you can be. It’s not to get old or something. It’s to become something wonderful that you didn’t think you really could be. That was a great love that Dr. Dorman showed, that those staff, those nurses showed, to see you beyond the shell of your psychosis, but to see the person underneath.
Well, it has great value. I used to try various techniques in therapy, and whenever I was open to what my patients were saying, they were saying we just might try this and talk any type of fantasy or free-associate or answer questions or I just need to sit. You’re so good when I just said talking. It is so incredibly dark and lonely on that plane.
I think I said once how cold the wind was blowing above the law of people that you’ve worked seriously with in psychotherapy, people with schizophrenia. What percent would you say have recovered fully and live without medication? No, it’s a good question. The problem is that I doubt if I have seen, oh man, that’s, I was going to say more than 10 or 20 people in intensive therapy long enough. But almost all of them now, for people that I’ve seen for say a small period of time, small period of time being, well, let’s see, at my schizophrenia project, that would be seventy sessions over a 20 month period. I would say three quarters of them you.