Product Description
The severely and persistently mentally ill (SPMI) have been ignored, ridiculed, stigmatized, locked away in prisons, forgotten in hospitals, or left to wander the streets of our small and large cities. LUCY is a mother's story of her daughter's long struggle with a relentless brain disease-schizophrenia-that has no cure and gives no quarter. It's past time to recognize that Lucy and thousands like her need ASYLUM-places of care, protection, and refuge-in a world that's passed them by."Lucy, the Anguish of Schizophrenia was revised in 2005.That book was used for four semesters in a mental health nursing lab course at the College of Nursing at Florida State University in Tallahassee.It is currently being used for the third year as part of the curriculum in psychiatric nursing at Chattanooga State Technical Community College in Chattanooga, TN and as recommended reading for graduate family therapy courses at the University of Maryland School of Nursing in Baltimore, MD."Megan Trotter, Herald-Citizen staff, Oct. 8,2009 ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

An eye opener
I was required to read this book before the second year of nursing started, which is when we began to learn about psychiatric nursing. This did not seem like a home work assignment to me because it was so interesting to read. This mother wrote so honestly and openly about her experiences, feelings, and depression felt while watching her daughter slowly disappear behind this mental illness, schizophrenia. This gave a really honest and real insight into schizophrenia without having to depend on textbook definitions and "examples". If you really want to understand this mental illness, read this book, and also read the epilogue which goes into detail about the treatment that Lucy endured over the years.

An Intimate Look at the Devastation of Schizophrenia
This book was hard for me to put down. Told from the prospective of her mother, this is the true story about Lucy, a woman who has suffered with schizophrenia since the age of 17. It spans from the time of Lucy's birth through forty plus years to the present; chronicling the early signs, the first breakdown, the numerous hospitalizations and psychiatrists that try to help, and the pain and anguish it inflicts on her family. It offers a glimpse into the everyday challenges of living with someone with a mental illness, and the author shares with us the daily angst and distress she and her husband face knowing their daughter will never live a normal, productive, and independent life. This story helped me understand what schizophrenia looks like up close and personal, something that is hard to get from textbooks and the scientific liturature. It also points out how our healthcare system has failed to meet the needs of people with this illness. This is a short read; the author successfully mixes together "here and now" dialogue in day to day life with Lucy, and at the same time panning out regularly to skim over a few years at a time, smoothly taking us through the years in a direct no-nonsense kind of storytelling. I highly recommend this book.

Overall Excellent
I admire Sarah Holloway's courage to write this book and put her story out in the open. She is a strong woman, and I have learned a great deal from her story.
This book really helps put a name and a face to schizophrenia. it is one thing to learn about schizophrenia out of a nursing textbook, but quite another to see the progression of the illness and its effects on the family as well as the patient. This book does an excellent job of painting a picture of the illness.

-Review by a nursing student at Chattanooga State Technical Community College

A Special Message
My overall opinion of this book is filled with gratitude to a mother who can write of deep heart feelings about her beloved daughter.For anyone who does not have this family problem, it sheds much light on the illness. I appreciated that point since I never clearly understood the unpredictability of this mental illness.But I also appreciate the precious moments when Sarah Holloway shares her broken heart. This story is about a family that loves as well as a clinical study of schizophrenia. We see a story of hope in the midst of dispair and love that never dies.

Dr. Torrey
Lucy: The Anguish of SchizophreniaIs a poignant reminder of the cruelty of this disease and why we need better treatments.Sarah Holloway writes clearly and honestly about her daughter, telling a story that is all too common but that is important to keep telling until we can find a better ending.Strongly recommended.

E. Fuller Torrey, M.D.
Associate Director for Laboratory Research
The Stanley Medical Research Institute ... Read more

Product Description
In clear, simple language, the doctors cut through the confusion, misconception, and myths that have surrounded schizophrenia, obscuring its reality and compounding its tragedies The book is complete with information about a revolutionary new treatment using vitamin B-3. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Early pioneers in managing brain architecture!
Now seen as "dated" by pharmacological specialists, Hoffer and Osmund, in company with their peer and friend, Linus Pauling, were early leaders in the field of using cheap, available methods to intervene in haywire biology, effectively.Because "there's no money in it" this important research has been downplayed by researchers intent upon developing patent-able products for the industy.Too bad for us!Too bad for those without health insurance to cover hospitalization and expensive (and extensive) drug therapy!A good place to start, in finding where we've been lead into a trap of dependency upon medical professionals and today's bewildering array of chemical formulations.

Response to szwebmaster
I feel I should offer a rebuttal to szwebmaster The report referenced by szwebmaster is the 1973 APA psychological report, a report full of errors, misleading statements and poor arguments. Hoffer has claimed that Niacin & vitamin C works best on acute schizophrenics, the 1973 report used niacin alone on chronic schizophrenics. It sounds like a minor issue, but the biology of schizophrenia and its treatment varies for the two. Hoffer wrote a well thought out retort to the 1973 report entitled `Megavitamin Therapy in reply to The American Psychiatric Association Task Force Report on Megavitamin and Orthomolecular Therapy in Psychiatry.' In it he details all of the misleading statements of the APA report, and I urge everyone here to actually read the 1973 report and its rebuttal. In fact, after reading this retort JR Wittenborn, one of the six authors of the APA report conducted a test of niacin using Hoffer's parameters (acute schizophrenics) and found positive results (A Search for Responders to Niacin Supplementation). Naturally none of the skepticsreference that study. Hoffer claims his theories have helped over 100,000 patients with niacin. Should we discourage all of them to throw their treatments in the trash? PS the methodological flaws referenced by the APA report are mainly a lack of double blinds, which is not only false (hoffer conducted double blinds) but which Hoffer had trouble with due to the Niacin flush.

There was a drug for schizophrenia first discovered over 50 years ago, but because it was a medication unrelated to mental illness nobody wanted to use it. Doctors laughed at other doctors who prescribed it and many in the medical community wrote off how effective it was. However for the doctors willing to shrug off the criticism of the skeptics and who tried it noticed massive improvements. This drug was just an antihistamine, how could it treat schizophrenia? That drug was called thorazine (thorazine was originally an antihistamine), and it started the revolution that led to antipsychotic medications which has helped millions of people. Where would we be if we had just written off thorazine because it was `just an antihistamine'? Why is this better than writing off niacin for being `just a vitamin'?Would we be better off today as a community of medical patients if we had let the skeptics win on that battle? Would we have geodon, abilify or risperdal today if we hadn't fought back against the medical dogmatists fifty years ago?

All I know is my feelings of unreality, my magical thinking and my paranoia are not present now that I am on niacin therapy. No error laden, misleading study written 34 years ago is going to make me feel like I'm not better or take away the fact that I can function better. Schizophrenia is a horrible disease, and it is too important for us to stop looking for every treatment we can find. Instead of believing me or szwebmaster actually ask a schizophrenic on niacin therapy what their experience is/was.

Read Also His Other Books
Dr. Hoffer is a brilliant and extensively published author in both journals and books. His writing is very clear and he doesn't hide complexities. This book is no exception. My only complaint is that his writing does not divide topics very well for easy digestion. His mind is full of facts, and he types what he thinks.

The primary orthomolecular approach to schizophrenia is niacin or niacinamide (vitamin B3) in > 2 g/d doeses. In double-blind trials, 3 grams of niacin daily resulted in a doubling in recovery rate and a 50% reduction in hospitalization. Later double-blind trials did not reproduce the positive results, but Hoffer contends these trials were poorly designed. Subsequent research has been too meager to quote.

There are several complexities to niacin therapy. It must be at least 3,000 mg per day in divided doses. It must not be "time release" forms made by pharmaceutical companies that are dangerous and the root cause of the irrational fears of niacin. There are several forms of niacin. Make sure you follow Dr. Hoffer's guidelines. It's most effective if the patient's schizophrenia is a fairly recent development. Ignoring these issues is probably why some studies are negative.

Please keep in mind there are websites dedicated to trashing megavitamin therapy. They modify other's writings from 1998, change the wording a little, and pretend it's their own recent writing. They then copy and paste the same negative plagerism under several of Hoffer's books. On their web site they reference journal articles "disproving" megavitamin therapy but when you take a closer look, they are often not related to the issue at hand.

Doesn't it seem strange they have to go back all the way to 1973 to find a legitimate and relevant negative reference? That's over 30 years ago. Dr. Hoffer has done a lot of research since then. At 88 he's still mentally active, publishing, and treating patients. His research in the 1950's that showed niacin improves schizoprenia was the first double-blind study in psychiatry. Dr. Hoffer has been trying to make psychiatry a science for a long time, but the influence of money has been a much tougher opponent than ignorance and Frued.

Here's a 2003 interview of Dr. Hoffer:
http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2003/jan2003_report_hoffer_01.html

Clinically Proven Treatment: Hoffer is Right
The United States Patent Office delayed issuing a patent on the Wright brothers' airplane for five years because it broke accepted scientific principles. This is actually true. And so is this: Vitamin B-3, niacin, is scientifically proven to be effective against psychosis, and yet the medical profession has delayed endorsing it.Not for five years, but for fifty.

In 1952, Abram Hoffer, PhD, MD, had just completed his psychiatry residency. What's more, he had proven, with the very first double-blind, placebo-controlled studies in the history of psychiatry, that vitamin B-3 could cure schizophrenia.You would think that psychiatrists everywhere would have beaten down a path to Saskatchewan to replicate the findings of this young Director of Psychiatric Research and his colleague, Humphrey Osmond, MD.

You'd think so.

In modern psychiatry, niacin and schizophrenia are both terms that have been closeted away out of sight. And patients, tranquilized into submission or Prozac-ed into La-La Land, are often idly at home or wandering the streets, where either way it is highly doubtful that they will get much in the way of a daily vitamin intake.Those in institutions fare little better nutritionally.For everyone "knows" that vitamins do not cure "real" diseases. (http://www.doctoryourself.com/hoffer_paradigm.html)

But Dr Hoffer dissents.For half a century Dr Hoffer has dissented.His central point has been this: Illness, including mental illness, is not caused by drug deficiency.But much illness, especially mental illness, may be seen to be caused by a vitamin deficiency.This makes sense, and has stood up to clinical trial again and again.If you do not believe this, this book will provide you with the references to prove it.And remember that it was Dr. Hoffer who started off those clinical studies in the first place.In 1952.

Dr. Hoffer explains the mechanics of how niacin works against schizophrenia. There is a chemical found in quantity in the bodies of schizophrenic persons. It is an indole called adrenochrome.Adrenochrome (which is oxidized adrenalin) has an almost LSD-like effect on the body.That might well explain their behavior.Niacin serves to reduce the body's production of this toxic material. (http://www.doctoryourself.com/hoffer_psychosis.html)

That Dr. Hoffer can compress a lifetime of research experience into one readable and surprisingly short book is a tribute to how clearly he teaches both layman and physician the essentials of niacin treatment.I have taught nutritional biochemistry to high school, undergraduate, and chiropractic students.To most, it is not an especially gripping subject.But when even a basic working knowledge of niacin chemistry can profoundly change psychotic patients for the better, it becomes very interesting very quickly.

Dr. Hoffer has treated thousands and thousands of such patients for nearly half a century.At 87, he still is actively practicing orthomolecular (megavitamin) psychiatry.He has seen medical fads come and go.What he sees now is what he's always seen: that very sick people get well on vitamin B-3.

(Additional books by Dr. Hoffer are posted at http://www.doctoryourself.com/biblio_hoffer.html)

Vitamins Don't Cure Schizophrenia - Disproven Book
If vitamins cured schizophrenia do you honestly think that we'd have 50 million people suffering from this horrible disease in the world today??If something is too good to be true - it probably is - and this is true for this theory too.

This book covers an approach which Dr. Abram Hoffer and others developed in the 1950s, but which by the 1970s was proven to be fruitless. The work of Dr. Hoffer and others is discussed in detail in the American Psychiatric Association Task Force Report, July 1973, which points out methodological flaws in the early work and reviews later studies which failed to show any benefit for such treatments.

In recent years, new medicines, with improved side-effect profiles and techniques to overcome problems with social and occupational functioning, have been well proven advances for the treatment of schizophrenia. Early intervention programs should prevent some of the serious dysfunction of the disease.

Serious illnesses like schizophrenia require proven treatments. Vitamin treatments as "alternative" therapy for schizophrenia should not be recommended. ... Read more

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Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

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A Simon & Schuster eBook ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Now 10 years old andout of date.
Publisher: Free Press; (May 6, 1994)
I bought this back years ago and it was one of the best of the time when it was written.It is a little dry...written scholar to scholar, not for consumers or even families in my opinion.

But its now totally out out date with regards to new antipsychotics as it only mentiones Clozaril and Risperdal.Missing Seroquel, Zyprexa, Geodon, Abilify and plenty more now being tested!

Look at recommendations for another...this is past its prime.

Excellent resource for patients, families, and students
This text is provides the reader with an excellent layman's description of the illness and the potential and methods of treatment.An ideal text for patients or families, this may also serve as a comprehensive introduction for students.

comprehensive and illuminating
I have started reading a few books on the subject, and this one complements the others.Positives/novelties include various experiences with the illness, told in form ofstories, on different possibilities andcourses of the illness for different people, and the human suffering, andcomprehensive information on various aspects of the illness, and where toget help, etc.It provided answers to some of my specific questions suchas the danger of violence from an ill person and how drugs may contributeto the illness, which I haven't found in other books. ... Read more

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Best of the Best
Every part of this book shares valuable information inreal life easy to use with an easy to apply format.This book is a must for anyone to read who is trying to understand why, and knows howhelpless you feel. When itseems that no amount of money can fix things, start reading this book andyou will find the sound principales along with alot of LOVE can providemiricles for YOU TOO!It will take you step by step toward the BEST OF THEBEST, quality of life, possible for you and your family. It has for mine.Share It with someone you love. God Bless

extremely helpful strategies for coping with Schizophrenia
Extremely helpful strategies for coping with Schizophrenia in the family.As a Social Work student in Jerusalem doing an internship with a population suffering from Schizophrenia, I found this book provided excellentstrategies for the families who must cope with acute or cronic attacks ofSchizophrenia within their families.It also provides concise, up to dateinformation and research on causes and treatments of Schizophrenia. I wasalso impressed with the organization and clarity of the presentationproviding a wealth of information and coping strategies in a simple andeasy to understand way. I highly recommend this book for the therapist andlayman alike. ... Read more

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Schizophrenia: A Scientific Delusion?, first published in 1990, made a very significant contribution to the debates on the concepts of schizophrenia and mental illness. These concepts remain both influential and controversial and this new updated second edition provides an incisive critical analysis of the debates over the last decade. As well as providing updated versions of the historical and scientific arguments against the concept of schizophrenia which formed the basis of the first edition, Boyle covers significant new material relevant to today's debates, including: The development of DSM-IV's version of 'schizophrenia' Analysis of social, psychological and linguistic processes which construct 'schizophrenia' as a reasonable version of reality A detailed critical evaluation of recent alternatives to the concept of schizophrenia Schizophrenia: A Scientific Delusion? demonstrates that the need for analysis and debate on these issues is as great as ever and that we need to question how we think about and manage what we call "madness". ... Read more

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uncovering the understanding
this is an excellent text on the lost glory of understanding the concepts in psychiatry.currently, the teachings in psychiatry have jumped so far and fast that the flavour of human understanding is missing. an essential text for every psychiatrist AFTER the training in the basic current conventional understanding of schizophrenia. ... Read more

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Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA. Reviews the genetic, environmental, and neurodevelopmental origins of schizophrenia and offers strategies for early intervention in, and prevention of, this disorder. Discusses clinical features, with an emphasis on a specific syndrome of liability, and discusses how schizophrenia might be treated in the future. DNLM: Schizophrenia--genetics. ... Read more

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This text examines the role of psychotherapy in the treatment of schizophrenia. It describes psychiatric workers' approaches and methods and includes research and pracitcal clinical material on dealing with schizophrenics. ... Read more

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The association between disturbances in water balance and schizophrenia has long been recognized and heavily researched. Water Balance in Schizophrenia represents the first attempt to provide clinicians with a consolidated guide to polydipsia-hyponatremia, associated with schizophrenia. Here, some of the foremost experts in the field address a variety of issues pertinent to both researchers and clinicians. The first portion of the book focuses on the history of polydipsia-hyponatremia and related conditions. Subsequent chapters are devoted to recent research developments that range from the cellular physiology of thirst and water homeostasis to the behavioral determinants of polydipsia. Additional chapters address recent findings and their implications for understanding schizophrenia. The final portion of the book confronts the problem of clinical management, stressing both behavioral and pharmacological techniques. All clinicians who treat schizophrenic patients will find Water Balance in Schizophrenia an indispensable reference. Whenever possible, the editors provide details regarding methodology and explicit management guidelines.They even include a detailed description of an inpatient polydipsia unit, as well as a comprehensive review of drug treatment. ... Read more

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In Phenomenology and Lacan on Schizophrenia, Alphonse De Waelhens provides a clear summary of Lacan's theory of schizophrenia, as Lacan derived it from his commentary of Freud's study of the Memoirs of Schreber. De Waelhens also shows how Lacan's understanding of the schizophrenic as having a defective relation to language can also explain four other characteristics of schizophrenic behavior: the fragmented body image; lack of realistic evaluation of the world; so-called bisexuality; and confusion of birth and death. Third, De Waelhens gives a Hegelian interpretation of the pre-Oedipal experience of the child. He makes use of Freud's study on his grand-child using a bobbin and later the words fort-da (away-here), to demonstrate that a transitional object allows the child to take distance from its attachment to the mother so that it can start to separate itself from the mother. Taking distance is, according to De Waelhens, introducing the Hegelian negative, which is the birth of the subject. Fourth, De Waelhens gives a dialectic reading of the history of German and French psychiatry. He shows the epistemological contradictions in the work of some of the great nineteenth century psychiatrists relying too exclusively on a biological model of schizophrenia.

In his contribution to this volume, Wilfried Ver Eecke draws several lessons from evaluating the literature on schizophrenia. He argues that epistemologically neither a biological nor a psychological method of reasoning can capture all the factors that can play a role in the creation of schizophrenia. He relies heavily, but not exclusively, on the Finnish studies of Tienari , Myrhman, and Wahlberg and their colleagues to provide statistical evidence that non-biological factors also play an important role in causing schizophrenia. He relies heavily, but again not exclusively, on the study by Karon and VandenBos to demonstrate statistically the efficiency of psychodynamically inspired therapy of schizophrenics.

Ver Eecke also addresses an apparent inconsistency in De Waelhens' presentation of Lacan's theory of schizophrenia. Where De Waelhens seemed to argue at one time that the mother figure was the crucial figure to explain schizophrenia (leading to a defective relation to the body) and at another time that it was the role of the father which was crucial (leading to a defective relation to language and the symbolic), there Ver Eecke argues that the defective function of each influences the function of the other. He then draws a conclusion for the therapy of schizophrenics: to be helpful a therapist will have to address both deficiencies. The problem for treating schizophrenics is that correcting an unconscious deficiency to the body-a deficiency in the imaginary-requires a totally different kind of intervention than an attempt to correct a symbolic deficiency-a deficiency in the paternal function. A correction of the imaginary requires a kind of maternal mirroring; a correction of the symbolic requires making a distinction or a prohibition stick. One further difficulty arises. Psychotherapy uses language in its treatment. However, language in schizophrenics is deficient. We can therefore expect that language will be inefficient. This is so unless the therapist uses language, first, to make a repair at the imaginary level and only thereafter makes an attempt to make a correction in the symbolic. In analyzing successful therapeutic techniques reported by several therapists Ver Eecke discovers that all of them first try to repair the imaginary before they attempt to make corrections to the symbolic. ... Read more

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Schizophrenia is being increasingly viewed as a neurological disorder. The Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia addresses the key questions in modern schizophrenia research. How do abnormalities of the brain produce the characteristic signs and symptoms of this most severe and mysterious mental malady? Where are these abnormalities? How do they develop? How can we detect them? What clinical and cognitive effects do they have?
This new book is the first of its kind to tackle these questions in a systematic way from a number of allied perspectives: from phenomenology to physiology, animal behaviour to metacognition and from PET scans to paper and pencil tests. A number of authors from the United Kingdom and the United States have made contributions; all are acknowledged experts in the field. The chapters each contain a concise review of the particular topic, empirical data and also a theoretical overview.
The Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia will be required reading for all serious students of schizophrenia from both medical and psychology backgrounds. ... Read more

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Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. Text on schizophrenia emphasizing a medical model approach, for psychiatrists. Covers the biological approach to assessment, diagnosis, and treatment. ... Read more

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This fully revised second edition of Schizophrenia: The Positive Perspective uses biographical sketches and essays to discuss schizophrenia and related conditions, providing advice on methods of coping, routes to growth, recovery and well-being, and how schizophrenia can be viewed in a positive light. It also explores the insights of R.D. Laing and discusses how they can be applied to contemporary ideas and research.

In this expanded edition Peter Chadwick, a previous sufferer, builds on his earlier edition and introduces new topics including:

• Cannabis smoking and schizophrenia.
• Psychoanalytic approaches to psychosis and their extension into the spiritual domain.
• Using cognitive behaviour therapy in the treatment of profound existential distress.
• How experiences on the edge of madness can be relevant to understanding reality.

Schizophrenia: The Positive Perspective encourages hope, confidence and increased self-esteem in schizophrenia sufferers and raises new questions about how schizophrenia should be evaluated. It is important reading for anyone working with schizophrenic people including psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and other mental health professionals.

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Highly Commended in the Psychiatry category at the 2010 BMA Medical Books Awards!

Psychotherapeutic Approaches to Schizophrenic Psychoses brings together professionals from around the world to provide an extensive overview of the treatment of schizophrenia and psychosis.

Divided into three parts – past, present and future – the book begins by examining the history of the treatment of schizophrenia and psychosis, with reference to Freud, Jung, Harry Stack Sullivan and Adolf Meyer, amongst others.

Part two then takes a geographical look at treatment and its evolution in different parts of the world including the UK, USA, Northern Europe and Eastern Asia.

Finally, part three covers the range of interventions, from pharmacological treatments to psychoanalytic psychotherapy to CBT, with the aim of helping to shape the future integration of treatment.

With contributions from leading figures in the field, this book will provide a varied examination of treatment, and spark much-needed debate about its future. As such it will be essential reading for all mental health professionals, in particular those involved in psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy.

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With advances in medical technology and with many large scale, longitudinal studies now underway, social and biological science have built a convincing case that the varieties of madness subsumed by the label schizophrenia are created, fueled, and sustained by genetic, biochemical and environmental factors. However, with the ever more detailed models of the neurobiological and social systems out of which schizophrenia is born, it is possible to overlook how suffering persons actually experience their symptoms and navigate their way through life.

This book is unique in focusing on the experiences of those who have schizophrenia, and who must make sense of and live with this condition. It explores how schizophrenia disrupts person's experiences of themselves as beings in the world and how that disruption poses enduring barriers to recovery - barriers not reducible to issues of social justice or biology. After presenting a model of how disturbances in self-experience are related to but not identical with symptoms and dysfunction, it looks at the implications for the development of therapies that might provide greater opportunities for recovery.

The book provides a highly readable and humane examination of this common condition. ... Read more

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Older adults with schizophrenia have been a largely neglected population, and only since 1990 has any systematic effort been made to study them. The author describes epidemiology and life course as well as various treatments. ... Read more

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In this award-winning book, Interpretation of Schizophrenia, Silvano Arieti presents the history of the medical research on schizophrenia, the summary of the ideas of the major scholars who devoted their careers to the illness and finally the conclusions drawn by the author himself. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A forgotten Copernicus
A forgotten Copernicus

To understand Silvano Arieti's Interpretation of Schizophrenia we must first get straight the facts about psychiatry. Although this review is not the place to do it, those who are familiar with how some psychiatrists and neurologists dismiss bio-psychiatry know what I am talking about. Suffice it to say that there exists a whole journal, Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry that debunks biological psychiatry: a profession that has hoodwinked the whole society.

Those who give credibility to everything that, under the banner of science, the status quo sells us (e.g., biological psychiatry), will consider it foolish that I take seriously an author who published a work about schizophrenia in 1955. Long before Colin Ross published Schizophrenia in this century, Arieti had already advanced a trauma model that would later resonate in Ross' psychiatric work.

Virtually forgotten, Arieti's treatise is an authentic mine of theoretical and clinical information to understand psychosis. Most striking about the massive body of literature from Arieti's colleagues that pointed at the family as responsible for the schizophrenias in their patients is that the theory was never refuted. It was conveniently forgotten, swept under the rug of political correctness in the mental health professions. It is very common to read in the textbooks of contemporary psychiatry and psychology that the theory of the schizophrenogenic parents was discarded because it was erroneous with the most absolute absence of bibliographic references to support such claim. I cannot forget an article written in the present century in which an investigator complains that, despite an extensive search, he did not find any coherent and clear explanation of why the schizophrenogenic theory has been abandoned.

As always, everything has to do with the fact that to question the parental deities is terrifying for most people, especially for those who are forbidden from using their own emotions: academics, including the mental health professionals.

Arieti distinguishes between a "paleologic" form of thinking (what Julian Jaynes called "bicameral mind") and the thinking that comes from "Aristotelian logic" that rules Western man. Since the first edition of his book Arieti points out that the paleologic thinking, which modern man only experiences in dreams, was omnipresent in prehistoric cultures. In order to avoid a runaway anxiety that drives the victim into panic, the patient diagnosed as schizophrenic abandons the Aristotelian norms of intuitive logic and lapses into the sort of thinking of our most primitive ancestors.

Like John Modrow, Arieti acknowledges the value of the work of Harry Sullivan about the panic the child experiences as a result of an all-out emotional assault from both parents. The paleologic regression can be adapted years after the abuse occurred, even when the child has become economically independent (cf. Modrow's How to Become a Schizophrenic). The withdrawal from reality, or psychotic breakdown, is the last and most desperate attempt of the unconscious to maintain the ego in a state of internal cohesion. A dramatic regressive metamorphosis arises when, one after another, the defenses that the victim had been using do not work anymore. To a greater or lesser degree all human beings function with a dose of neurosis, but in the psychotic outbreak, when neurotic defenses collapse, the subject falls into even more archaic forms of defense: mechanisms which had been overcome millennia ago, a regression to what Jaynes calls the bicameral mind.

Arieti's book contains chapters about his clinical experiences with patients. In the case of two brothers, Arieti describes how one of them suffered a pre-psychotic panic as a result of the abuse at home and observes that, once in a florid state of psychosis, "The paleologician confuses the physical world with the psychological one. Instead of finding a physical explanation for an event, he looks for a personal motivation or an intention as the cause of an event." Just as the primitive man, in a definitive breakdown of the Aristotelian superstructure, for the disturbed individual the world turns itself animist; each external event having a profound meaning. There are no coincidences for those who inhabit the world of magical thinking. Both the primitive animist and the modern schizophrenic live in distinct dimensions compared to the rational man. The conceptualization of external happenings as impersonal physical forces requires a much more advanced level of cognition than seeing them as personal agents. Arieti wrote:

"If the Greeks are afflicted by epidemics, it is because Phoebus wants to punish Agamemnon. Paranoiacs and paranoids interpret almost everything as manifesting a psychological intention or meaning. In many cases practically everything that occurs is interpreted as willed by the persecutors of the patient."

Arieti also writes about the time before the Homo sapiens acquired the faculty to choose an action through what we call today free will, and he adds:

"Philogenetically, anticipation of the distant future appeared when early man no longer limited his activity to cannibalism and hunting, which were related to immediate present necessities, but became interested in hoarding and, later, in agriculture in order to provide for future needs."

The reference to cannibalism makes me think that, though unlike Jaynes Arieti maintained that schizophrenia is due to the parents' behavior, unlike Lloyd deMause Arieti did not conceive that such cannibal practices, like the ones described in the Preface, could have injured the inner self of the surviving children in prehistoric times. Nevertheless, Arieti disagrees with the theoretical psychiatrists who see no similarities between schizophrenic and non-schizophrenic. He believes that such points of view "are fundamentally wrong", and, speaking of non-Western cultures and even of the times of Cro-Magnon man, he writes:

"Often the culture itself imposes paleologic conceptions and habits on the individual, even though the individual is capable of high forms of thinking. The more abundant is the paleologic thinking in a culture, the more difficult it is for the culture to get rid of it."

Arieti also rises the question of why civilization originated only ten thousand years ago. Like Jaynes, he believes that the incredibly long gestation of civilization had to do with the persistence of paleologic thought, and he adds that presently the paleologic defense mechanisms underlie the human psyche and can return in extreme conditions.

Arieti elaborated his theory twenty years before Jaynes or deMause started to write their books, and he was within an inch of discovering what deMause would discover: precisely that schizophrenogenic forms of childrearing through the Bone Age and the Stone Age had impeded the psychic integration of our ancestors. Getting ahead in time to Ross, Arieti wrote: "A characteristic unique in the human race -- prolonged childhood with consequent extended dependency on adults -- is the basis of the psychodynamics of schizophrenia."

Arieti defines schizophrenia as an extremely regressive reaction before an equally extreme state of anxiety, a dynamic that originates in infancy and that accelerates in adolescence, or later, due to abuses at home. "In every case of schizophrenia studies serious family disturbances were found". He adds that to produce schizophrenia a drama is needed which is sufficiently injuring to the inner self; a drama that, if we ignore it, we become deaf "to a profound message that the patient may try to convey". And writing about one of his patients, and getting again ahead in time to Ross, he tells us that this patient "protected the images of his parents but at the expense of having an unbearable self-image".

Interpretation of Schizophrenia contains the keys to understanding issues that at first sight seem incomprehensible, and even bizarre, for those of us who live in the world of Aristotelian logic: the probable meaning of the symbols of the oneiric world in which the psychotic individual lives; his apparently incoherent salad of words, the linguistic whys of his inner logic and the many regressive stages of the disorder. In Arieti's treatise there is an enormous richness of ideas and theoretical schemas that I cannot summarize here, as well as clinical analyses of his patients, to understand the gradations of madness. Even though, as I said, in the middle 1970s his book won the National Book Award, in a more valiant world his work would have been influential.

But society freaked out before the findings of Arieti because, to understand psychoses, it would have been necessary to point the index finger at the parents. And as an Alice Miller reader would say, the most potent taboo of our species prevents us from knowing the truth about our childhoods. ... Read more