Mental Health Non-western schizophrenia treatment?

[Fornax55]

I hope this is okay to post here. Its an article I wrote speculating about other cultures treatment of schizophrenia and how I believe it suits my girlfriend (and anyone else I've met with schizophrenia) much more the current western method of forcing them to stomp their illness out with medication. The 'theoretical friend ' quoted is my girlfriend, changed originally for privacy .

Nigel Djalal III
Schizo Treatment
APRIL 5 · CUSTOM
HEY. I need anyone with a sympathetic and psychological mind to read this. A few years ago I had a girlfriend who had mad schizophrenia and she ended up squashing it down witih anti-psychotics. I have lately been thinking about alternatives to this stifling treatment. Forgive the grammar and formatting, was copypasted from when I wrote this in notepad

my theoretical friend has, for years, grown to believe that the entire population of the world is part of a secret community known as the Revolution and that she’s been ostracized because she’s stupid/dumb/etc and because she can’t communicate as secretively as the rest of the Revolutionaries.

Everyone knows that she’s the odd one out. People standing on street corners are laughing at her. Storefront signs are painted to make her feel stupid. She receives messages from them via news tickers, overheard conversations, magazine covers, etc.

She finally reached out to me because I was worried about her and told me about the Revolution - even though she knows I’m (apparently) a part of it.

Because of this outrage and talking publicly, the “Revolution” told her to kill herself via hidden microphones installed in our room. To her, the “Revolution” isn’t just a delusion - it’s as firmly grounded to her as my reality is to me. So, she tried to jump off a fucking building. Lucky I was there to stop her. Now she’s in the psych ward at the hospital.

So what's going to happen? Probably she’ll get medicated and have to spend a couple weeks in the ward forgetting that she ever heard voices in her head at all while the pills stifle her imagination. Good, right? Better than killing herself, I guess -
but whta if.. the doctor revealed herself as part of the "Revolution," and that my friend’s finally found a safe haven where she can speak freely about Revolutionaries? (She has already said she's comfortable spending the rest of her life in the ward for her sins against the Revolution.) What if she was told that everyone else in the ward were fellow Revolutionaries like her who’d experienced similar things?

Now she will be at least a bit more comfortable talking about her issues and why
she's unhappy about being ostracized from the Revolution. The doctor can
sympathize until she's re-accepted into the "Revolution" and then at this point
she'll no longer have a problem but if necessary she'd probably be comfortable
taking meds from you guys now.

I know therapists do, but I don't know if psychiatrists actually work WITH the
schizophrenia or against it.
Other cultures deal with schizophrenia like this - western culture was the first
to come along and decide to supress it and consider it a bad thing. If she
wasn't forced by her society's stigma to consider herself insane, or to know
that everyone else would tell her the Revolution wasn't real - think of how many
positive benefits this could have? :ike, imagine if every conversation she
overheard was telling her that she and her friends and family were beautiful,
instead of that she's dumb? Or if she saw messages in the news that told her to
love her peers and to promote wellbeing and happiness in herself and everyone
around?
That's what i'd go for in a 'treatment,' not just pretending it's not there

other cultures don't try to beat the voices down or remove them. They're just
something that happens - sometimes considered a gift or a voice from God - and
you work WITH them, find out what the person's brain is trying to tell her and
then them. Once 'treatment' is complete, it either fades out and they never have
to deal with it again, or it becomes something positive - not something
subconscious that they have to deal with until the end of their life.

We're just taught to squash it away and pretend its not there
I got more of a response from her today in the five minutes that I started
supporting her theories (delusions seems so harsh now) instead of telling her
that they didn't exist "look you know I'm part of the revolution too, right?"

"well, obviously."
"yeah, so we're all here. you know that, we don't really think you fucked up
that bad. you're okay. trust me - you know you can.

got a way better reaction than 3 days of "look, you know they're not real -
there's no way multinational news companies can send you secret messages, etc.
etc."
My last girlfriend never ever had a positive reaction to me telling her that her
schizophrenic delusions weren't real.

So after hearing about other cultures (mostly india actually) and how they treat
schizophrenia like a gift intsead of an ailment i've been really interested in
this method of treatment. Our medicine system doesn't cure schizophrenia - it
just gets you wired to pills that turn you into a zombie. A fucking zombie that
doesn't even get better - then you have to keep paying for your zombie pills.
Just like any of the other money-trap illness mediators that Big Pharma
produces. They sweep your sickness under the rug and makes a profit off it - for
neary every medicine out there save for antibiotics.

so, yeah. I don't think it would hurt her. She tried to kill herself because she
overheard the Revolution telling her in passing conversations that she was
stupid and screwed them over.

so... if she actually got around to being able to directly communicate with us
(since everyone's part of the Revolution, we just keep it secret) and we told
her that we loved and accepted her, instead of having her sift through snippets
of overheard conversations and secret messages in news tickers, then she could
actually get a clear message - and it could be a positive one built on love, not
a dangerous one built on her own fears.


Nigel Djalal III
This puts me in a really tough position because I completely disagree with the standard method of treatment but I don't want to risk anything getting worse... especially by my own choices...
Perhaps I'll just let her stay in the hospital until I'm totally confident that she'll be able to stay clean & sober upon her release and then get her to come home. Then I can work with her in a loving and accommodating environment?

Like, the hospital's safe enough (minus the bullshit about them not letting me talk to the fucking doctors "because they already talked to you once," when I first realized that she was schizophrenic and that schizophrenia, not BPD, was responsible for her attempted suicide) but it's working directly against what she believes is her reality. I don't think it's healthy to treat an issue by forcing the victim to believe the problem's not real. How often do you cure colon cancer by yelling at the victim that they don't actually have any tumours? How often are broken bones healed by you telling them that they're not cracked? How often should voices be healed by told they're not real?

Sure, they're not real to us - but neither is someone else's broken bone. It's visible on an X-Rays which makes it real to us. Schizophrenic activity is visible on brain scans... but that doesn't make it real to us. What if the same neural pathways are activated during someone hearing voices as during regular communication? Does that really make it any less real?

 

[SixBuckets]

Unfortunately, this isn't how psychotic delusions work. It's not a great idea to "play along" with a psychotic person for a lot of reasons.

For one thing, psychotic people often have periods of lucidity and insight where they don't experience symptoms, and it's most common for people to accept or seek help during these periods. If their friends and medical personnel have spent the last however long reinforcing and encouraging their delusions, that's really going to threaten these periods of lucidity. If someone becomes aware that the things they've been freaking out about are illogical or unreal, but everyone in their life has been telling them those things are real and legit, they're going to be really afraid, confused and mistrustful.

Related to the above: delusions are often internally consistent and people experiencing psychosis are often really smart and amazingly quick with their mental connections, but that doesn't mean delusions follow reasonable logic. In a lot of conditions, the delusion follows the emotional response, not the other way around. Someone might feel intense fear and paranoia, and their brain fills in the gaps to justify those feelings by drawing connections between thoughts and features of their environment that aren't really there. Human brains really don't like feeling emotions that they can't explain - it makes us feel out of control, insecure and anxious. The nonsense patterns and weird beliefs (not meaning to sound judgey!) don't make the feelings of fear and paranoia go away - the person is still afraid and paranoid and their brain is still working to find an explanation for that. What I'm getting at is that playing along with someone's delusions might temporarily reassure them, but it's not going to stop their delusional narrative from expanding and developing and possibly getting more dangerous. The absolute worst thing about psychosis, IME, is that it can make you afraid and paranoid of even your most trusted, beloved people. There's no way to get around that. Playing along just entrenches you even more firmly in that fictional world where anyone is a potential villain and removes your ability to act as a reference point for reality.

That said, there are people who hear voices who say they are not mental ill and are actually quite functional. From my reading, the vast majority if not all of these people don't experience delusions or paranoia - just auditory hallucinations. But it might be worth reading their stuff and seeing if there are any tips to encourage a more positive framing in your friend's experiences.

I'm not going to get into the anti-medication stuff - there's a stick thread at the top of the forum where we've hashed that out extensively. But I will emphasise, again, that anti psychotics don't necessarily turn you into 'a zombie'. Many people on this forum have been on anti-psychotics for many years and are happy, functional, healthy individuals with perfectly normal emotional responses. Don't write off Western psychiatry completely - it's not necessarily your enemy.