A Living Loss - Cannabis Psychosis
(First published in "Out of the Chrysalis" 17/5/2004. Updated for this Blog)
This morning, as I drove back from my son's school through leafy country lanes shining with the inner light of spring,I was so overwhelmed with sadness that I had to pull over and cry. Nature fills me up with a sense of the divine, of dimensions of bright radiant beauty. It calms me and conversely elevates me to a state of near bliss. I drink it in with a hunger for its healing. It has always been so. So why did it reduce me to tears of the deepest darkest sorrow this morning?
I was thinking about my little brother, my brown eyes sparkling, much loved brother, third youngest of our tribe. I was thinking about how he no longer sees the beauty of the morning, no longer connects to the deep sweet reality of nature, no longer vibrates with the sheer joy of being alive. Our brother has been lost to us for 15 years following his descent into the hell of drug induced psychosis. He is now42 and his journey into the darkness began at the age of 15 with the sharing of a joint with a few of his friends. Out of all the millions of people in the world who have safely taken this drug, there are some who have a genetic predisposition to an entirely different biochemical reaction which leads to dependency and in this case, schizophrenia. There is currently no test that predicts this outcome, so that first joint is a game of Russian roulette with our lives.
My brother grew up to be a respected, talented business man,in line for the position of CEO of his company. He married his soul mate and he had two beautiful daughters. He lived in a lovely home and was surrounded by supportive loving family and friends. He had a fine mind, a healthy body, a mischievous sense of humour and a magically attractive personality. He was also addicted to cannabis from the moment he smoked that first joint. As his mind became accustomed to it, he took it in ever increasing quantity. His wife knew; some of his friends knew, but no one else in the family knew. It was not until he was in his thirties that we started to see the first signs of trouble.
His work became erratic and he was demoted. He stayed up late at night and his sleeping patterns became disrupted. He would alternate between almost manic highs and a horrible bitter victim mentality, resenting everyone around him, blaming everyone but himself for the state of his life. One morning, he started to express himself in a way that I had never heard before. Alarm bells rang and the family discussed what was going on. The consenus was that he was stressed because of his work situation, his deteriorating marriage; I thought it was more than this but like the others I was not yet ready to face the reality of mental illness.
Then I received a call from his wife, panicked and frightened. He had been up all night, continuously smoking hash, playing his music so loudly that no one could sleep in their home or in his neighbours. He was watching the television and telling her about the messages he was getting from people on screen. He was to tell the world that he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and that the end of the world had come. She was Eve and he was Adam and they would start the world anew. I told her to take the girls to her mother's house and I would get help.
I called two of my brothers and we went round to his house together. Those hours are burned on my mind forever. In place of my gentle, mischievous little brother, there was a wretched, delusional, wild eyed, mad man. I vividly remember how painful it was as we waited for our family doctor to arrive; how torn I felt signing the certification that would commit him to a psychiatric hospital; the struggle we had persuading him to come with us in the car rather than be taken away in an ambulance. We sat with him. we held him; we listened to his ranting all the way to the bleak psychiatric hospital on the edge of the most god forsaken wind blasted moorland. It seemed like the entry to a kind of hell and that precisely reflected the emotional hell we were also entering. It took six months to stabilise his condition so he could be released but even in the hospital, he continued to access and use cannabis. He was told that he still had the possibility of a full recovery if he stopped but he couldn't overcome his addiction. Within the year, we were going through the same nightmare and this time we lost him forever. He is now diagnosed as a severely paranoid schizophrenic; he has been unable to work since; he cannot concentrate long enough to read or to pursue a hobby; he has lost his wife who stayed by him for many years until she accepted that she needed to create a life for herself and their daughters. He has little or no quality of life. He is often very afraid and he still continues to be addicted to cannabis which he now argues is a sacred herb which enables him to do his healing work.
Medication damps down the full force of his delusions; it stops him accosting strangers in the street telling them that he is their saviour; it stops him visiting sick people or their relatives to distress them with his statements that they have been cured; it stops him from frightening himself and others with the wildness of his behaviour. The price we all pay for this amelioration of his symptoms is a sad, pale, distant shadow of the brother we love. The medication numbs him and dulls down his response to everything; his world becomes a flat, featureless, grey landscape. This lasts only as long as he is on a legally enforceable order which ensures he takes his medication. As soon as this expires, he refuses to take his meds and we see the same hopeless, pain-filled cycle repeat itself. Sometimes he goes to hospital voluntarily and sometimes it is in an ambulance after a difficult process of persuasion; sometimes it is handcuffed in the back of a police car after a nightmarish chase which distresses everyone involved, including the officers for whose kindness and sensitivity I normally have the highest praise.
When he is in hospital, he is difficult and disruptive, agitating other patients and distressing their relatives with his insistence on "healing" them. The hospital has to increase their security when he is in hospital because he is highly intelligent and arranges to have his cannabis smuggled
in which he then shares with other patients, even those who do not normally use it. Unless he is on close observation, he escapes at least once on each hospitalisation, leading to police knocking on my elderly parents' door in the middle of the night. Then we begin a well rehearsed pattern as family and friends search his usual haunts. On one famous occasion, we had to return a stolen car which he used to get away from the hospital. We then endured a court case at which he was declared unfit to plea due to his insanity. Our parents are 83 and 77 respectively; his girls are 18 and 14. What price do they pay?
He lives alone; he is permanently unemployed; he lives on state benefits and if he did not have his family, he would be another derelict sleeping rough. This is an enormous price to pay for a recreational drug.
The block to my heart connection has been my need to tell this story, to reach into the minds of at least some of the young people who might be thinking that cannabis is harmless. So many of my own generation smoked it and they find it hard to accept that it has the potential to create such devastation. How then do they explain to their children that they are at risk if they follow in their parents' foot steps?
I do not take a judgemental or moralistic stance on this. I believe in freedom of choice with this one rider; it must be fully informed choice. Don't just look at all the people who have been unharmed by this drug; come visit my poor, mad brother and see what your future might hold. I spent two hours with him on Saturday and came away feeling as though I had been drained of my life blood. Yes it is just a small chance that you will be the one to have this predisposition; yes it is statistically low; yes it is unlikely .... but you will never know the outcome unless you take the chance and having taken the chance you have pressed the trigger and there is no turning back from the outcome. My brother pulled that trigger at the age of 15 and we entered a circle of hell with him. It's your choice. Chose with wisdom and love.
Do not smoke cannabis in your early teens. Your brain is still developing and you risk permanent disruption of the dopamine receptors, leading to mental illness.
Do not touch illegal drugs of any kind if you have a familial history of mental illness, particularly schizophrenia, but do not think that no family history safeguards you. We had no prior know incidence of schizophrenia in our family.
Stay clear of drugs. You do not know what effect they will have specifically on you. This is playing Russian Roulette, only the bullet does not just blow your brain away, it destroys the hearts of everyone who loves you.
Please print this and circulate it to your children and to their friends. Reprint it freely wherever it will reach even one person who might be helped by it. As for me, I have entered my heart space and told my story. Now I can breathe again.
Please print this and circulate it to your children and to their friends. Reprint it freely wherever it will reach even one person who might be helped by it. As for me, I have entered my heart space and told my story. Now I can breathe again.
4 comments:
He was to tell the world that he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and that the end of the world had come. She was Eve and he was Adam and they would start the world anew. I told her to take the girls to her mother's house and I would get help.
John Weir Perry, a respected Jungian psychiatrist identified a pattern of behavior in some individuals identified as "schizophrenic" that he refers to as "the psychotic visionary episode". The sequence of behavior you describe your brother going through are classic characteristics.
The disorder is often produced as a result of extreme stress, although other factors can certainly play a role. Perry found that when these first time schizophrenics were allowed to go through the process in a supportive, drug-free environment the visions ran themselves out after about six weeks. "...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." -- John Weir Perry.
I think you make a valid point about drug experimentation but it's possible that you don't take it quite far enough. Consider for example, the words of Loren Mosher -- a psychiatrist who fought to halt the routine drugging of individuals undergoing what may well be a temporary and self-healing restructuring of the psyche...
As for the abnormalities that researchers have found with brain scans, Mosher thinks the antischizophrenic medication accounts for much of this. He says, "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 [anti-psychotic drugs] 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.
I deeply sympathize with the pain your family has gone through, but I also sympathize deeply with your brother who may not even have had the choice to refuse the drugs that may have produced the most long-lasting harm.
Thank you. As a psychologist with a strong Jungian leaning, I do understand what Perry says about the "psychotic visionary episode" and I rejoice in the fact that you and others come through this journey changed but unscathed. I also agree that anti-psychotic drugs may also harm the brain in ways we do not begin to understand.
In this case, drug free therapy was tried for a prolonged period before the administration of the anti-psychotics. The balance between allowing a natural healing process to continue and the extreme distress of the unmedicated patient is very difficult to achieve.
He has had long unmedicated periods which always result in a gradual deterioration to a fearful and agitated state where hospitalisation results.Each time, his psychiatrists have patiently waited to see if his condition will improve without the use of anti-psychotic drugs.However,the delusion of being Christ is fixed and never wavers regardless of medication.
I wish it were otherwise, but the distress he feels is enormous. Imagine what it feels like to absolutely believe that you are re-experiencing crucifixion every day and your fate is to constantly work to heal your wounds and broken body,only to have them come back over and over again.
With medication, that fear and pain is eased. It carries a price as do all medications. What is the alternative, to leave him in that "hell of the mind's own making"? I wish I had an answer.
Namaste
Maria
...Each time, his psychiatrists have patiently waited to see if his condition will improve without the use of anti-psychotic drugs.However,the delusion of being Christ is fixed and never wavers regardless of medication.
In the past few years since I've been studying this process, I've come across a number of individuals who have self-identified with being Christ or a Christ-like figure. Naturally, saying as much tends to freak out the people around you -- they interpret such a statement as a delusion; I attribute it to a lack of ego barriers to that extent that one deeply identifies with whatever symbol, archetype or event one's attention is captivated by. Perry addresses this cultural component in the following excerpt...
Messiahs are found all over the world, you know! Almost any culture that's going through a profound upheaval of rapid turbulent change, produces seers and visionaries who glimpse the new myth-form and express its guidelines - the basic ideas and paradigms that give the people a new sense of direction. This is particularly true, of course, at the tribal level - in almost every part of the world. The shamanic visions are particularly close to what we see in "psychosis," with all the ideation of death and rebirth, and symbols of world destruction and regeneration. [Source]
Typically, what's being expressed in these situations is a deep empathy and compassion for one's fellow man. It remains a matter of curiosity to me as to why -- when most religious/spiritual paths emphasize that we are all children of "God" (however you may define "God" to be) -- that this identification with being a child of something larger than oneself, and this outpouring of concern for one's fellow man would be considered a crime or a state of consciousness that should be penalized through forced hospitalization or halted via neuroleptic drugs and their potential for permanent brain damage.
Having been through a schizophrenic break myself, I suspect much of the distress on behalf of any observers is that they are interpreting the statement "I am Christ/Christ-like" as a literal statement as opposed to a metaphorical one. In this respect I see the role of the observer as playing every bit as vital a role as the "dysfunction" of the individual caught in the headlights of this empathic crisis.
I wish it were otherwise, but the distress he feels is enormous. Imagine what it feels like to absolutely believe that you are re-experiencing crucifixion every day and your fate is to constantly work to heal your wounds and broken body,only to have them come back over and over again.
Clearly Maria, you empathize with your brother's pain -- empathy being a trait that is generally held to be a positive one in our culture. Yet, when the "schizophrenic" empathizes with the pain of Christ, or the World, or Mankind, this same empathy is cast as irrational and negative.
Fear, pain and suffering are an indisputable facet of our shared reality. In every single moment of every single day in this world, untold suffering unfolds: people are dying of starvation; men and women are being beaten, tortured, raped; children and soldiers are losing their limbs, their minds, and their souls in fields of war. If more of us were capable of the deep empathy of the "schizophrenic" we might more willingly accept that these are human beings who feel pain and hope and joy and despair, just as we do. We would be rendered utterly incapable of bringing that kind of pain to another human being. [See also: Tonglen]
With medication, that fear and pain is eased. It carries a price as do all medications. What is the alternative, to leave him in that "hell of the mind's own making"?
If I may offer a quote from Jungian, Maureen Roberts...
working with sufferers of schizophrenia from a shamanic angle can be helpful, since the shaman has in all likelihood experienced similar experiences to those of the schizophrenic. Mainstream reductionist psychiatrists, on the other hand, by and large presume that if an experience (such as chronic depression) is unpleasant, it must be stopped or band-aided, but because an experience is painful or difficult, it doesn't necessarily follow that's it's not valuable, or therapeutically worthwhile as a 'wound which heals'. [Source]
I wish I had an answer.
I doubt that the answers can easily be found and it does wrench the heart, the guts, and the mind; but certainly, as long as one group of people possess the power to determine that another group of people are irrational, or dysfunctional, or neurologically flawed, or less than, we will have the full range of "the schizophrenias".
At any rate, I'm certain it's a difficult issue all the way around. I thank you for your time and your willingness to bare your soul in this manner. I have no doubt that it's been a long, painful, and difficult process for your family.
Kind Regards.
I came across this Maria, and thought it was very much in keeping with not only the theme of your blog, but also the nature of this specific discussion...
From Caterpillar to Butterfly
Our experience confirms what the elders and wise ones of all times have said -- that we live in a constant state of change. Modern science tells us the world consists of patterns of unceasing transformation of energy and matter. We observe these changes in ourselves and in those we know and care for: changes of physical growth, the learning of muscular skills, emotional development, acquisition of knowledge, conformance to the changing expectations of our culture, becoming ill, becoming healed. We grow up. . . we grow old. . . but we always grow. Our lives appear to unfold in multiple inter-weavings of cycles of change at many levels, punctuated by discontinuous transitions. We see certain of these basic transitions -- marriage and divorce, illness and accidents, births and deaths -- as "life-changing" events.
In addition to such changes, which are natural and ordinary, in the sense that they are an accepted part of life, there exists in human experience another kind of transformation, a radical restructuring of the entire psyche that has been variously referred to as mystical experience, ecstasy, cosmic consciousness, oceanic feeling, oneness, transcendence, union with God, nirvana, satori, liberation, peak experience, and other names. Such experiences may occur in some people without their recognizing much of what is really happening and just how extraordinary this process is. [Source]
... Archetypes are essentially quasi autonomous functions which give rise to specific motifs, as common in all mythology as in any individual's life. They are often discussed in terms of personifications which appear in dreams, but they can also be seen in themes of stories, mythological or lived. They are very potent as patterns of action. Another reason I prefer to consider them functionally is that they perform discrete functions as will be seen below. They are more than just different flavours of the same thing.
Another advantage of starting with a rather broader definition to avoid a common confusion of archetype with personified image. While the Self may give rise to an image of Jesus Christ for example, it is also the archetype behind the most abstract of mandalas. I also wished to start this way because it's especially difficult in the case of the Anima/Animus who seem to be especially prone to personification, given the emphasis on gender. [Source]
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