Surviving Schizophrenia

By Mendlovitz, Gershon

Surviving Schizophrenia By E. Fuller Torrey, MD Harper Collins, Fourth Edition, 2001 The main precept of E. Fuller Torrey in “Surviving Schizophrenia” is to deal with schizophrenia as a physical disease, or biological disease, if you will, to which medication is the cure. He defines the disease according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and reinforces the idea that delusions and auditory hallucinations are its main characteristics. These delusions and hallucinations are best dealt with by medication of the second generation, like haloperidol, or the third generation, like olanzapine. He does make allowance for the use of cognitive therapy, among other non-medical therapies, as a good talking therapy to help the client realize that the delusions and hallucinations are not real…. He strongly advises against any form of insight therapy like Freudian analyses as a cure. It is “analogous to pouring boiling oil into wounds because they ignore the chronic schizophrenic’s particular vulnerability to over- stimulating relationships, intense negative affects, and pressures for rapid change,” as he quotes from a review (Comprehensive Psychiatry 1986; 27: 313-326, R.E. Drake, L.I. Sederer) entitled “The Adverse Effects of Intensive Treatment of Chronic Schizophrenia.”

E. Fuller Torrey illustrates his book with marvelous and poignant vignettes from mental patients’ personal experiences of the disease to Charlotte Bronte’s depiction of the “fiend-like nature” of Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre. However, there is one seriously lacking point that this book does not make – the development of schizophrenia from poor socialization as a child in dysfunctional families.

From my personal experience, obsessive-compulsive behavior induced by my environment played a major role in my illness and it was learned from my dysfunctional family and surroundings. Torrey will give this reality no credence. Through careful selfobservation, medication and a form of cognitive therapy, I was able to rectify these symptoms and return to health. The inner process of the development of mental illness is almost completely ignored in this book.

While it is true that deterioration of the brain occurs “by damage to the specific parts of the brain, especially portions of the frontal lobe, cingulated, and areas in the right cerebral hemisphere” by this insidious disease, who is not to say that the unhealthy brain patterns of thought are not also responsible for the brain’s deterioration. Treatment of these physical abnormalities with medication is, of course, warranted, but attribution of this illness alone to the brain’s deterioration is uncalled for.

He also denigrates books like I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Hannah Green and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but fails to give insight as well suited, as these books, into the illness. His vignettes of mental patients are sometimes insightful as when he describes schizophrenic behavior as “internally logical and rational.” In his account of a woman who broke two pairs of glasses worn by her nurses, a logical reason is given: “Glasses symbolized false or literary vision, a barrier between the individual and the direct apprehension of life.” So she “grabbed and broke two pairs of glasses worn by nurses.”

Essentially this book is a good overview and guide to the current scientific knowledge of the physical nature of the disease schizophrenia. It provides statistics, services and much information on the anti-psychiatry groups like Scientology that are doing harm to the advance of the mental health field. It also provides a glimpse into the inner world of the disease, which I find most compelling.

Gershon Mendlovitz

E-mail: smendlovitz@hotmail.com

Copyright Gefen Publishing House Ltd. 2007

(c) 2007 Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.