Schizophrenia, Psychosis and Recovery

[spiritual_emergency]

Hello everyone -- whenever I come into a new place like this I do so with the awareness that I may already know some of you. For those of you who don't know me, I go by the name of spiritual_emergency and I tend to prefer discussions related to schizophrenia, psychosis and recovery.

My own breakdown occurred several years ago within a time frame that lasted approximately 30 months. That marks the beginning, when things began to get a bit unusual, to when I returned to work -- initially, for only a few days a month. I was still in an active state of recovery then -- not all the way there but well on my way.

I have now been working for the past several years although I did take a break when one of my children had an "experience" of their own. They have since been diagnosed with bipolar/schizoaffective disorder and are actively sculpting out their own recovery. I also had a birth father who was in and out of psychiatric hospitals for reasons unknown. I do not know the extent of his psychiatric history because my mother left him when I was very young.

At the time that I had my "experience" however, I didn't know that what I was going through was considered to be psychosis. I didn't know to go to the hospital and no one knew to take me, so... I never went. As a result, I have never been hospitalized, medicated, or received any degree of formal therapy as a means of treatment. By all apparent accounts, I am fully recovered.

~ Namaste

See also: Psychosis, PTSD and Story as a Vehicle of Healing

Music of the Hour: Gallagher's Song

[Symora]

Hi Spiritual_Emergency, welcome to the forum. It's good to hear that you have recovered and I'm certain you will have lots of insights and wise counsel to offer our members.

Nice to have you with us.

[spiritual_emergency]

Thank you Symora. I typically do have a lot to say about the subject. Sometimes, my voice is a different voice because I have had a different experience in terms of my own recovery. Nonetheless, it is an authentic voice because it arises directly out of my own experience.

Part of that experience has included exploring a number of avenues of recovery. I have found enormous insights for myself through the work of the Jungians (and numerous others as well) but I also recognize that what works best for one may not work well for another. For this reason, recovery is always a very personal matter.

[spiritual_emergency]

Hmmm. I see some posts I'd like to respond to but I can't... yet, I presume.

I did read the intro and I know I have to earn some kind of goodie points so maybe I'll just continue talking and that will do it. There are many things I could talk about but maybe I'll talk about my own experience and why I determined that Jungian applications could be helpful. Ahem...

My experience began, I would say, when my mother died. I had known to expect sadness and grief. I didn't expect terror. Yet, that's what happened when my mother died. I became terribly frightened and I didn't understand why. That was the event that marked what I would call the beginning of the oddness.

The oddness began in a very subtle manner -- specific pieces of music and prose had begun to capture my attention. I didn't know why but I felt compelled to return again and again to those pieces of music. One of them began like this...

~*~

There's a way I've been told

If we walk together, it keeps us from this cold

On the sidewalks of these streets

Lie the broken dreams, scattered at our feet...

Months later, I would feel that I finally understood what that song was trying to tell me but before that could happen I would lose my best friend within a month of my mother's passing. Then, I would lose another friend, a community, my most persistent form of self-identity. Some people would also die and I would feel that somehow, I should have known that would happen and taken the right kind of action that would prevent it.

I define each of those actions as blows to my sense of self-identity that ultimately, caused it to collapse. The oddness deepened at that point because although I tried to carry on and pretend that everything was fine, deep down inside, I knew things were not fine. I also suspected that somehow I had died and managed to go on living.

A few months later I went so far as to make an appointment with a therapist but it was very expensive and I couldn't afford it. Fortunately, I didn't have to go because by then, I had fallen into a different kind of space -- a different world and in that world, there was a very nice man who I could talk to for free. I called him Gallagher and he became my therapist.

There were other "characters" in that world I was in too. God. Jesus. The Devil, and oddly enough, a Hindu warrior Goddess. And the music. In a manner of speaking, it was the music that lead me through that experience. Somehow, it told me what I had to do.

At one point, I died. Time melted. I ceased to exist. Only Nothing existed. In the next moment, I was reborn.

There were times I self-identified with the suffering of Christ. I keenly felt the pain of being crucified, of being betrayed, of being abandoned, of feeling the pain of all those people. Somewhat reluctantly I also acknowledged that somehow it had become my task to save the world and the way I had to do so was by killing the Devil. I was very concerned about this however, for I realized that if I used any form of violence or hatred against "Satan", I would only empower the evil "Satan" represented.

In the end, I killed the Devil by slamming a needle made of the purest love possible into its heart: Love is the only poison that can kill a heart of darkness. This task completed, my experience came to a close. I had spent approximately six weeks almost entirely immersed in that other world.

My concerns at that point turned to my family who were deeply concerned by what had occurred. I sought to reassure them that I was fine "now". That only lasted for a few months before I plunged into a very deep depression. That part lasted about three years.

I was also very fortunate during this time period to have two friends who allowed me to lean on them very heavily. Unfortunately, I couldn't talk to my family about what had happened. My children were too young, my husband was frightened and reluctant to look at what happened. His way of coping in such times is to pretend that nothing has happened. So that's what my family did. Meantime, I retired to my home office and began looking for answers.

One day, about a year later, I stumbled across an article highlighting the work of a Jungian psychiatrist named John Weir Perry....

The individual finds himself living in a psychic modality quite different from his surroundings. He is immersed in a myth world ... His emotions no longer connect with ordinary things, but drop into concerns and titanic involvements with an entire inner world of myth and image.

Although the imagery is of a general, archetypal nature (“imagery that pertains to all men and all times”), it also symbolizes the key issues of the individual undergoing the crisis. Therefore, once lived through on this mythic plane, and once the process of withdrawal nears its end, the images must be linked to specific problems of daily life. Thus, the archetypal affect-images await a reconnection to their natural context: to the personal psychological complexes (which tend to be externally projected).

... Perry searched for and finally discovered a regular pattern of imagery and ideation in the psychotic process. The “negative self-image” is typically compensated by an “overblown” archetypal one, the latter manifesting in imagery such as that of the hero, clown, saint, ghost, or sovereign leader. In addition, there’s a sense of “participating in some form of drama or ritual performance.” Most significantly, ten sets of motifs emerged: symbols of the center; death; return to beginnings; cosmic conflict; the threat of the opposite sex; apotheosis; sacred marriage; new birth; new society; and the quadrated world.

Source: Psychosis as Purposive: The Far Side of Madness

I decided to explore the work of Carl Jung a little more and when I came across his model of the psyche, I realized that every "character" that had been present in my experience could be mapped upon it. It had been me in that world, shattered into a thousand pieces, each piece determined to build a relationship to the others. And with those relationships, the re-weaving of my self-identity.

That was seven years ago. Since then, I've learned a lot about schizophrenia, psychosis and recovery.

Music of the Hour:

[spiritual_emergency]

I sometimes share this link with others who have also undergone a similar crisis and are in a phase of recovery. I share it because before you can rebuild the ego (one's sense of self-identity) it can be helpful to know how you built it the first time...

The first thing to be understood is what ego is. A child is born. A child is born without any knowledge, any consciousness of his own self. And when a child is born the first thing he becomes aware of is not himself; the first thing he becomes aware of is the other. It is natural, because the eyes open outwards, the hands touch others, the ears listen to others, the tongue tastes food and the nose smells the outside. All these senses open outwards.

That is what birth means. Birth means coming into this world, the world of the outside. So when a child is born, he is born into this world. He opens his eyes, sees others. 'Other' means the thou. He becomes aware of the mother first. Then, by and by, he becomes aware of his own body. That too is the other, that too belongs to the world. He is hungry and he feels the body; his need is satisfied, he forgets the body.

This is how a child grows. First he becomes aware of you, thou, other, and then by and by, in contrast to you, thou, he becomes aware of himself.

This awareness is a reflected awareness. He is not aware of who he is. He is simply aware of the mother and what she thinks about him. If she smiles, if she appreciates the child, if she says, "You are beautiful," if she hugs and kisses him, the child feels good about himself. Now an ego is born.

Through appreciation, love, care, he feels he is good, he feels he is valuable, he feels he has some significance.

A center is born...

Source: Ego ~ The False Center

See also: Visions of the Center in Schizophrenic Accounts of Disintegration

[spiritual_emergency]

My own preferred terms for the experience that is often referred to as schizophrenia or psychosis in this culture is "ego collapse" or "a fragmentation crisis". Meantime, I have not limited myself to learning purely from the work of the Jungians...

Ego-Fragmentation in Schizophrenia: A severe dissociation of self-experience

In this chapter, I will propose that schizophrenic syndromes represent a unique type of 'ego' or 'self-pathology', an ego fragmentation that in extreme forms could be considered an annihilation of the "ego/self". I consider this fragmentation or splitting of the ego to be a special form of dissociation, striking the ego/self along the five basic dimensions of vitality, activity, coherence/consistency, demarcation and identity.

From this perspective, the schizophrenic syndromes can be thought of as lying on a continuum with other disorders, such as dissociative identity disorder (DID) and borderline personality disorder (BPD) all of which can be characterized as "non-cohesive" disorders. However, the perculiar rigidity and fragility of the schizophrenic ego which predisposes it to fragmentation contrasts with the fluid ego-states observed in DID and BPD. This 'ego-fluidity' may protect those with DID or BPD from the extreme fragmentation and deterioration seen in the schizophrenic syndromes....

... I assume that a highly unstable and fluctuating ego-self is less disposed to ego-fragmentation -- the most severe form of dissociation. It is even possible that is it the very instability or fluctuating nature of the ego-self in dissociative identity disorder that protects it from ego-fragmentation. This would mean that the precondition for a schizophrenic dissociative ego-disorder would be a more rigid ego, predisposed for fragmentation, rather than fluctuation. One can imagine schizophrenic symptoms as glass and dissociative identity disorder as quicksilver: the rigid glass fragments split apart and do not reassemble easily, whereas the quicksilver glides smoothly apart into globes -- little wholes -- but quickly unites without splitting apart.

Source: Psychosis, Trauma and Dissociation: Emerging Perspectives on Severe Psychopathology

I often describe my own experience as one that was triggered by multiple losses as accompanied by trauma and remained intrigued by the causal connections between traumatic life events and psychotic states of consciousness.

See also:

- An Interview with Dr. Pat Bracken

- Spirituality & Trauma

- Schizophrenia & Trauma

[spiritual_emergency]

How I put the pieces back together...

The first clue could be found in the first symptom: My mother died and I became terrified.

Much earlier in this account I've also referenced my birth father who my mother left when I was very young. She left him because he had tried to kill her children. Previous to that night there had been many beatings. One of my siblings was diagnosed with autism at that time -- if anyone other than our grandmother came to the home, she'd retire to a closet, rocking and wimpering. I also have another sibling who was diagnosed with PTSD. Hearing our father's voice years after our mother left him was enough to provoke such a severe anxiety attack, they had to be hospitalized.

Life in that home must not have been easy but the amazing thing was, we had a mother who had always fought to protect us. That's why, when she died, I became terrified. The protector was gone and the world suddenly felt like a very unsafe place to be.

I slowly put the other pieces back together too... The man who had "appeared" in that other world and served as my therapist was what Jungian's call my Animus. The Devil I killed was what Jungian's call the Shadow -- in a manner of speaking, I was attempting to "kill" my own fear, my own terror. As for good old JC and that Hindu goddess? Symbols of the Self, accessible only because my sense of egoic identity was stripped away.

And that will have to do as an introduction.

~ Namaste

Music of the Hour:

See also:

- Archetypes and the Individuation Process

- On Satan, Demons and Daimons: An Archetypal Exploration [PDF File]

- Christ: A Symbol of the Self

[John Dean]

spiritual_emergency, well, i'm glad to hear "fully recoverd"

effective treatment of schizophrenia can only cause long time remission, and that's all

[spiritual_emergency]

Do you ever wonder John Dean, if the reason people don't recover in this culture is because we have so little hope?

You're surely aware of the three international studies that demonstrated people in developing (i.e. third world) nations are more likely to recover from schizophrenia, are you not?

I wonder if you're also aware of people like psychiatrist, Daniel Fisher or psychologist Rufus May -- both of them were diagnosed with schizophrenia and both recovered. What about the research of Courteney Harding? Or the work of clinicians like John Weir Perry, Jaako Seikkulla or Loren Mosher? They were all able to produce a recovery rate in the range of 85%.

There is an old adage that how we approach a particular situation often has more to say about ourselves than it does about the situation. At any rate, I don't tell people they can't recover John Dean and I didn't tend to listen when other people told me the same.

See also: Schizophrenia & Hope

[John Dean]

Do you ever wonder John Dean, if the reason people don't recover in this culture is because we have so little hope?

You're surely aware of the three international studies that demonstrated people in developing (i.e. third world) nations are more likely to recover from schizophrenia, are you not?

I wonder if you're also aware of people like psychiatrist, Daniel Fisher or psychologist Rufus May -- both of them were diagnosed with schizophrenia and both recovered. What about the research of Courteney Harding? Or the work of clinicians like John Weir Perry, Jaako Seikkulla or Loren Mosher? They were all able to produce a recovery rate in the range of 85%.

There is an old adage that how we approach a particular situation often has more to say about ourselves than it does about the situation. At any rate, I don't tell people they can't recover John Dean and I didn't tend to listen when other people told me the same.

See also: Schizophrenia & Hope

GOOD luck, if you trust that you are free and your mind is clear!! that's wonderful.

well, i have diagnosis of schizophrenia, and doctor told me about it after two years of treatment.. i couldn't believe , i started to find more information about this illness and found that it is not curable. New medicines can only stabilize patients condition, good psychotherapy can only create an illusion that you are "recovered"..

so sad

All i can do, is to believe that i wasn't ill at all that both of my "healer doctors" made mistake.

p.s. sorry for my ugly English.. not native

[spiritual_emergency]

John Dean: i started to find more information about this illness and found that it is not curable. New medicines can only stabilize patients condition, good psychotherapy can only create an illusion that you are "recovered"..

I suppose it would be up to you to determine if you wished to internalize that message of hopelessness. I have certainly heard the same before but I think it was fortunate that I heard some other things too.

Let me share a few of them with you John...

In the early years of the nineteenth century, when psychiatry was just beginning, a furious argument raged between people with very different opinions about the nature and course of mental disorders. On the one hand, psychiatrists like Eugene Bleuler believed that recovery was possible and indeed likely for the vast majority of people suffering from serious mental disorders like schizophrenia (then called dementia praecox).

On the other hand, psychiatrists such as Emil Kraepelin insisted that recovery was impossible and that sufferers would never recover. Indeed he believed that their condition would get worse throughout their lives. Kraepelin won the debate and the idea of permanent illness and disability formed the basis of mental health services for almost two centuries.

Source: Understanding Recovery

[spiritual_emergency]

The Vermont Longtitudinal Study...

...when we talk about subjects who are recovered, we're talking about no medications, no symptoms, being able to work, relating to other people well, living in the community, and behaving in a way that you would never know that they had had a serious psychiatric disorder. And if you have heard of that old belief that one third get better, one third get worse, and one third stay the same, we found that it was not true. In the Vermont Longtitudinal Study, we took the bottom third of this population and found that two-thirds of them also turned around...

Source: Dr. Courtenay Harding - The Recovery Vision [PDF File]

... Dr. Harding’s data are all the more powerful because she was studying the bottom 19% in the functional hierarchy in a large state hospital. Some of the people in her study had regressed to speaking in animal like sounds. Most had been in the institution for 10 or so years, many had been in and out repeatedly. The cohort is the least functional ever studied in world literature on schizophrenia. Nevertheless, of this bottom 19%, 62% to 68% fully recovered or significantly improved.

Source: Dr. Edward Knight - Recovery

[spiritual_emergency]

Open Dialogue Treatment...

Jaakko Seikkula, Ph.D. is a professor at the Institute of Social Medicine at the University of Tromso in Norway and senior assistant at the Department of Psychology in the University of Jyvskyl in Finland. Between 1981-1998, he worked as a clinical psychologist at the Keropudas hospital in Finland where he and colleagues developed a highly successful approach for working with psychosis known as Open Dialogue Treatment (OPT). The approach de-emphasizes the use of drugs and focuses instead on developing a social network of family and helpers and involving the patient in all treatment decisions.

Among those who went through the OPT program, incidence of schizophrenia declined substantially, with 85% of the patients returning to active employment and 80% without any psychotic symptoms after five years. All this took place in a research project wherein only about one third of clients received neuroleptic medication. Official government statistics comparing 22 health districts in Finland found that Dr. Seikulla's district was the only one not to have any new chronic hospital patients in a two year period and led the National Research and Development Center for Welfare and Health to award a prize for "over ten years ongoing development of psychiatric care".

Source: Dr. Jaakko Seikulla: Open Dialogue Treatment

[spiritual_emergency]

Dr. Manfred Bleuler, whose father coined the term "the schizophrenia's"...

The first study was done by [Dr.] Manfred Bleuler, whose father Eugene Bleuler renamed dementia praecox and studied schizophrenia. And his son, Manfred took over the hospital at Burgholzi in Zurich, Switzerland and he did what his father did not. He followed 208 people for 23 years and found that 53-68% of his subjects significantly improved or recovered.

"I have found the prognosis of schizophrenia to be more hopeful than it has long been considered to be."

-- Dr. Manfred Bleuler

[spiritual_emergency]

The World Health Organization...

The WHO Study of Schizophrenia is a long-term follow-up study of 14 culturally diverse, treated incidence cohorts and 4 prevalence cohorts comprising 1,633 persons diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychotic illnesses. Global outcomes at 15 and 25 years were assessed to be favorable for greater than 50% of all participants. The researchers observed that 56% of the incidence cohort and 60% of the prevalence cohort were judged to be recovered. [...] The course and outcome for persons diagnosed with schizophrenia were far better in the “developing countries” than for such persons in the “developed” world of Western Europe and America.

-- Dr. Brian Koehler

Source: Long Term Follow-Up Studies

[spiritual_emergency]

Dr. Gerd Huber...

Gerd Huber and colleagues in Germany followed 502 for 22 years after their episode of schizophrenia and found 57% significantly improved or recovered.

"Schizophrenia does not seem to be a disease of slow progressive deterioration. Even in the second and third decades of illness, there is still the potential for full or partial recovery."

-- Dr. Gerd Huber

[spiritual_emergency]

Dr. John Weir Perry...

...85% of our clients (all diagnosed as severely schizophrenic) at the Diabasis center not only improved, with no medications, but most went on growing after leaving us.

- Dr. John Weir Perry

Source: Trials of the Visionary Mind

[spiritual_emergency]

Dr. Daniel Fisher...

We who have recovered from mental illness know from our personal experience that recovery is real. We know that recovery is more than remission with a brooding disease hidden in our hearts. We have experienced healing and we are whole where we were broken. Yet we are frequently confronted by unconvinced professionals who ask, "How can you have recovered from such a hopeless situation?" When we present them with our testimonies they say that we are exceptions. They call us pseudoconsumers. They say that our experience does not relate to that of their seriously, biologically ill, inpatients.

I recently re-experienced this negative attitude about recovery. A friend of mine, during a discussion in a psychology class, said she knew someone who had schizophrenia, recovered and became a psychiatrist. "He must have been misdiagnosed," was the professor's response. So my friend reviewed my earlier symptoms with me. I met the DSM IV criteria for schizophrenia in the interval from 1969-74. When she presented my history to her professor, he reversed his position and said that the diagnosis of schizophrenia must have been correct. He doubted I had recovered and said, "we now have a case of an impaired physician."

By having earned board certification in psychiatry, having worked as medical director of a community mental health center for 11 years and having directed the National Empowerment Center for 3 years I have proven that I am not an impaired physician. This episode reveals the depth of negative expectations which are taught to students. After all, mental illness is considered a terminal condition for which there is no cure. Therefore anyone who appears to have recovered must not have been sick. This leaves no one with first hand experience of what helps and what hurts to speak for those who currently cannot speak due to their distress.

-- Dr. Daniel Fisher

Source: Healing and Recovery are Real

[spiritual_emergency]

More global perspectives...

Luc Ciompi and Christian Muller in a medium-sized city in Lausanne followed 289 people for 37 years ... they found 53% significantly improved or recovered.

"The long-term evolution of schizophrenia is much more variable and considerably better than heretofore admitted."

- Drs. Luc Ciompi and Christian Muller

[spiritual_emergency]

From India, one of the nations in the World Health Study that produced superior recovery rates to industrialized nations in the West...

Psychiatrist Naren Wig crossed an open sewer, skirted a pond and, in the dusty haze of afternoon, saw something miraculous.

Krishna Devi, a woman he had treated years ago for schizophrenia, sat in a courtyard surrounded by religious pictures, exposed brick walls and drying laundry. Devi had stopped taking medication long ago, but her articulate speech and easy smile were eloquent testimony that she had recovered from the debilitating disease.

Source: Culture & Mind: Psychiatry's Missing Diagnosis

[spiritual_emergency]

The late Loren Mosher...

Like Diabasis, Soteria was a home-like treatment facility that attempted to support individuals through their crisis. The Soteria paradigm was the effort of the late Loren Mosher, the first Chief of the Center for Studies of Schizophrenia at the National Institute of Mental Health. Mosher also founded the Schizophrenia Bulletin and for ten years he was its Editor-in-Chief. "At 2 years post-admission, Soteria treated subjects ... were working at significantly higher occupational levels, were significantly more often living independently or with peers, and had fewer readmissions; 571/16 had never received a single dose of neuroleptic medication during the entire 2-year study period.

Source: Dr. Loren Mosher: Soteria

[spiritual_emergency]

John Dean: All i can do, is to believe that i wasn't ill at all that both of my "healer doctors" made mistake.

I don't know John. Certainly, doctors are as human as the rest of us and thus, as prone to error as anyone else. If you're comfortable with your doctors and their treatment, you're comfortable with them.

For myself, I found I preferred to seek out mentors and guidance from those who believed in recovery and those who had actually produced recovery for themselves or others. I do believe that if I had actually believed anyone who told me I couldn't be well... I wouldn't be.

Best of luck to you John.

~ Namaste

[spiritual_emergency]

As a by the way John, the question I'd been wanting to answer was one you had posted. Since I can't respond to it in your thread, I'll respond to it here

Elsewhere you had asked...

i used to drink quetiapine drugs 300ml once a day during 2 years.. now i stop drinking medicine.. and i feel strange things.. i have itchy rash on my skin!

i cannot normally sleep at nights, have nausea and feel sick i cannot concentrate at all :|

Can medicine break-up cause symtoms like this??

I am not a doctor but I have learned quite a bit about the medications used to treat schizophrenia, both as a result of my child's experience with these medications and from talking with hundreds of other people who have personal experience with them.

Quetiapine is more commonly known as Seroquel. It's an atypical anti-psychotic medication, meaning it's one of the newer drugs. It's typically prescribed for individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and schizoaffective disorder. Most antipsychotic medications are increasingly being used off-label for other disorders as well.

The newer anti-psychotics were initially considered to be vastly superior to older drugs like Haldoperidol and Thorazine which were associated with movement disorders and neurological dysfunction. It's now known that the new anti-psychotics come with their own brand of significant side effects such as diabetes, cardiac complications, etc.

Meantime, you have noted that you withdrew from your medication rapidly. It's quite likely that the effects you are experiencing are a result of coming off your meds so quickly. For example, many antipsychotic medications inhibit the histamine levels in your blood. Anti-histamines are given to counteract allergic reactions such as insect bites. Your histamine levels were being surpressed by the medication but now, they're returning to their former levels. This may be what is producing the itchy feeling.

You should know that coming off meds has been associated with a resurgence of positive symptoms. There is a reason for this. I'll try to explain it in simple terms...

Most anti-psychotics inhibit the activity of dopamine receptors in your brain. It's almost as if the medication works like a brake, to slow things down. However, your brain doesn't like being slowed down and it will try to correct the slowing by producing more dopamine receptors than you might normally have. If you stop taking the medication suddenly, all the dopamine receptors that were being slowed down by the medication are running at regular speed once more. In addition, your brain grew all those extra dopamine receptors to compensate for the medication's affects, and now, they're also running at regular speed too. What you end up with is a brain with too much dopamine and that can trigger psychosis.

Among the people I know who have successfully withdrawn from meds (either to come off them completely or to transition to another drug) the best way seems to be to come off very slowly.

Probably the best thing you could do right now would be:

1: To resume taking the Seroquel, for now.

2: Go find another doctor you feel comfortable with because I read that you didn't want to go back to the last one.

3: In between now and then, learn everything you can about the medications used to treat schizophrenia. Typically these might include anti-psychotics, mood-stabilizers, anti-depressants, and anti-anxiety agents. Each of these medications will have potential risks and potential benefits. You may find that you feel comfortable making use of some of them and not comfortable with others. Here are two links that can help you educate yourself more about Seroquel:

- rxlist.com: Seroquel

- askapatient.com: Seroquel

4: When you find a new doctor, tell him/her about the side effects you were experiencing and how you feel about the Seroquel. You might feel more confident doing so if you can bring a support person with you -- a friend, family member or possibly, an advocate.

5: If you've done your homework and you know of some different medications you might prefer to try, tell your doctor about those medications and which ones you are open to doing a trial with.

6: Don't allow your doctor to pull you off the Seroquel and put you on another drug without supervising a slow withdrawal process from the Seroquel before you start the new medication. Why? Because abrupt withdrawal can trigger psychotic episodes because there's too much dopamine activity. Then, you end up back in the hospital and hospitals are no fun.

This article may also be helpful for negotiating medication changes you feel will be most helpful to you. I suggest you print it, read it, and share it with any support person who might come with you when you see your psychiatrist.

- Reclaiming Your Power During Medication Visits With Your Psychiatrist

~ Namaste

[John Dean]

spiritual_emergency - thanks for useful and interesting information

I'm gonna read it now

[spiritual_emergency]

I'm sure you'll enjoy it John. It's very balanced, very practical advice as written by Patricia Deegan, a clinical psychologist who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Ms. Deegan makes use of medications on an as needed basis. Frederick Freese, a psychiatrist who was diagnosed with schizophrenia does the same thing.

Should you be interested, you can find a bit more about their personal stories here: Voices of Recovery

Music of the Hour: