A True Madness Schizophrenia Documentary Real Patients

all visions of Christ descending from the cross I could see it on the face of the moon I was afraid the people that put poison in me too you know in Britain today one person in a hundred suffers to some degree with feelings like that they suddenly read the people in there suddenly realized that I was Yoga garland sitting in the chair come back from the dead is something you know being able to control people who know what they're saying and everything you know they occupy one-sixth of the hospital beds and take 1/10 of the National Health budget yeah I believe yes and all the clients were created by disease of flour you see it remains one of the unsolved mysteries of modern medicine it's called schizophrenia it can affect anybody regardless of intelligence or background at any age to be schizophrenic is to feel your mind falling apart schizophrenic don't have a dual personality they have bizarre thoughts and strange feelings then they have a persecution complex believe there's someone there not here voices see visions use strange language or refuse to speak it is in short classical madness [Music] [Applause] [Music] it is and what causes is is what the debate in modern psychiatry is about is it a physical illness where the brain is malfunctioning or a genuine and comprehensible human experience resulting from painful emotional relationships mild schizophrenia feelings of unreality of being unloved occasion that touches most of us and only one of us can find themselves here in a mental hospital and if we do what will schizophrenia mean to us and to our doctors I think from the clinicians viewpoint the easiest way to explain it is what one sees in actual patients but this is what boiler described in his now-famous monograph in 1911 the schizophrenia he recognized that there was a number of patients who had number of symptoms in common and that these patients be dominantly had a disorder of their thinking but also feeling and of the way in which they perceived the world I came to hospital just to be buried I come full week I thought we were doing this and I thought people were much different in came bird in the yard and the island but I found them to be something similar and when I first went to hospital I was in Kent house and they shipped me to lime trees and lime trees have shifted me in to Mitchell ward but it seems no not the three managers could get me buried in the normal person once thought is fairly coherent as a steady stream of thought as it were but in the schizophrenic this thought becomes disrupted and the patient experiences thoughts being taken out of his mind or the opposite thoughts being inserted into his mind I'm conditioned and I have to be buried there's no other way for me to early unless I get buried see because I am deliberated as I am and I'm conditioned and were to together I cannot live outside you see he may have illusions that is he sees something and imagines it to be something else or he may have a hallucination that's where he hears something when the fact there is not a an auditory stimulus there now if you're very sensitive about your situation if you feel that other people are criticizing you or thinking badly off you of course you're immediately picking up all sorts of cues from the environment and mistaking people's comments for comments about you now I'll tell you why I was worried I was worried that I was the center of all lies what did you do when you felt like honestly makes you fall over back with our grown-up people babe just like children yes but that is the truth help me God when you put the bucket on your hand did it help yes because then I felt little more self-confidence coming into bit creepy and just because I had a bucket of my own that other people could see if it was giving you some privacy give me some privacy and this is what is the basis of the paranoia these disturbance of one's feeling after all if one's not feeling right if there's a disturbance of one's thinking and if one's not reacting to one's environment a normal way one feels very frightened enough one's frightened one reacts by being hostile by being suspicious you know lab2 you know the way you you see them they're speaking to you you know you be wrong if I speak too long or my a tight tight but what I say differently the other thing which people notice is that the feelings are in Congress that means the feelings don't fit into the situation where I be who would normally be sad the schizophrenic mayor or certain jocularity is a good happy man we are I hope he's long as I keep you down but control nobody gets the better of me control me and we'll ride does it sometimes run away with you well I think I used to love sometimes when I had to do I hate you know it was a different sort of laughter the feelings on the other hand are much more subtle things and not so easy to but the classical situation which is described is that the patient appears to be flat one says technically the effect is flat meaning that one doesn't get any animation from the patient he seems not to be responding to his environment I didn't quite I was all together in one place I felt that I was almost dissolving but I couldn't express this in words toward these feelings but I felt never bad there as if as if I was absolutely stuck and I seem to be this physically I seem to get to Estate's own inability almost to move at a time treated in the 17th century delusions were taken seriously the deluded were Saints or witches agents of God or the devil and delusions were religious later the mad seemed incomprehensible and threatening and rated and chained in the essence and lunatics became more violent in turn enlightened Victorians regarded them as wretched and unfortunate but still people to be locked up to protect society his tradition carried on until after the last war and some idea of hospital life then can be gathered from nurses like Erik Raines who works here at full born they had nothing to do but walk around someone was had to be carried out and when they got there they used to stand in one position and they wouldn't move there were tremendous a lot of noisy people they were tormented by their their hallucinations and they would really shout they would really let go for about half an hour and then I'd be dead quiet in every ward you can at least say 10% of the patients were under lock and key they're in individual rooms they were counted out they were counted in they weren't allowed to have any any personal property they were just custodian care while these poor souls that were princes and there were kings they were dukes nothing in the world would ever ever change him that they weren't to see someone discharged in my early days here was a wonderful occasion today hospitals like full Bourne have a liberal Reggie the average stay for first admissions is about four to six weeks this revolutionary change has been affected by therapeutic techniques enlightened attitudes and new drugs these drugs cure 10% and helped 40% of patients concentration was very poor it's very much better now what about your thinking my thinking is still inclined a bit healed a bit over but on my whole it's very much more quiet and concentrated well you don't usually feel the effects unless he's some stranger's home you realize you have a stroke from the drugs themselves well I did quote not when I don't and the injection or filthy miserable you know was all the way but were very loud I'm you know I saw something like you normally miss a lot bigger and if you're not on the tracks or on the injections you sort of take it drag it I am during the time a lot of them haven't really made any difference at all right the one I'm on that presence seems to made the most difference to me a wall I felt better in the last fortnight since I've been having it than I have we're listens I can remember the drugs do have side effects that the empty Awards during the day bear witness to the usefulness of drugs which are basically tranquilizers they react in a much more subtle way than that one of the physiological theories is the idea of arousal but a schizophrenic person is in fact highly aroused now this flat appearance which I described to you is simple a defense mechanism it's a way of cutting off being over aroused from the environment and these drugs the tranquilizers act by putting a zit wear a blanket around the patient so they don't become threatened or overwhelmed by the flood of information and feeling which is coming into them no one's sure how these drugs work if we did know how and where they affected the patient's this would give research scientists a clue as to what causes schizophrenia or at least the types of schizophrenia for which the drugs are effective scientists are able to make informed guesses one of the hunches which is very popular is that the drugs such as the phenothiazines which are nowadays used interact in the brain with aiming systems now many people think of the brain quite correctly as a sort of computer but in one important respect the brain is different from a computer in that the brain uses chemical signals as well as electrical signals in the brain there are biochemical processes which are thought to involve perception and feeling and might therefore be disordered in schizophrenia we now have some idea how these immune systems work although one nerve cell or neuron stimulates the next nerve cell there's always a gap between them near this gap blood vessels supply fresh chemicals an amino acid tyrosine to the nerve where it's converted through two transitional compounds into a chemical called noradrenaline brain activity consists of electrical impulses coming down the neuron which pumps noradrenaline in bursts into the space between the nerve ending and the next neuron in the chain which then interacts at the receptive site on the other neurone to trigger off the electrical firing of the second cell after the burst of noradrenaline has been released it's removed rapidly if it weren't it would keep exciting the second cell indefinitely so it's either pumped back into the nerve terminal that released it or it may get chemically degraded into inactive compounds which are washed away in the bloodstream some of them will eventually be excreted in the urine this is one immune system in the brain there are others good drugs be affecting these systems classic drug for this which was stimulated a great deal of research on these aiming systems and that drug is recipe recipe in fact one of the first drugs ever used in the treatment of schizophrenia and we know now that what it does to a mean neurons is to knock out their ability to store a reserve supply of noradrenaline it interacts in some way with these little storage particles so that if recipe is given Nord Renmin disappears temporarily from the brain this rabbit is drugged with res appear its store of noradrenaline has been reduced in the brain terracing is converted into doper then into dopamine and finally into noradrenaline the rabbits noradrenaline can be boosted by injecting dopa the rabbit temporarily recovers so noradrenaline is involved in behavior and affected by recipe recipe helped schizophrenic s' so could something be going wrong in their immune systems it's tempting to play a hunch here and say yes because mainly because of the similarity in structure between certain hallucinogenic drugs which produce symptoms in men run are similar in character to the schizophrenic syndrome and naturally occurring a means this is a substance we've been talking about already nor genuine and we've seen its structure already here is for comparison one of the well known hallucinogenic drugs mescaline and if you compare the structures of these two substances you see that they have a certain basic similarity in their makeup on the other hand one could equally plausibly argue that hallucinogenic drugs are more related to another type of a mean that one finds in the brain an indole amine here is a hallucinogenic drug called psilocin which is very similar indeed in structure to a naturally occurring a mean called serotonin in fact if one removes these two groups on the nitrogen here from this hallucinogenic drug one one has the structure of a naturally occurring a mean serotonin and one could imagine quite plausibly when schizophrenia might be related to some abnormal chemical breakdown of the a means in the brain leading to the production of substances like mescaline which would produce the hallucinatory on a bizarre phenomenon that one sees in the disease State if hallucinogens were produced here abnormal waste products might be removed and turn up in the urine in America a compound very like mescaline has been reported in skin Afeni curie doctor ridges liverpool analyzing urine by chromatography where chemicals appear as colored stains on sensitive paper has found a pink spot in schizophrenic Suran but not in normal people our big problem at the moment is to find out the identity of the pink spot which is now allowed to consist of a number of different components does it seem that their substance is similar to mescaline on the one hand and things like adrenaline on the other we think our results are highly suggestive of it being and these sort of compounds and in fact and we're almost certain that these compounds are aiming is this work is controversial some researchers have found nothing others of fan pink spots in normal URI but you're in studies even if indirect clues are the best we have the evidence if tenuous is suggestive brain chemicals crucially involved in thought and feeling looked like some hallucinogens the schizophrenic and hallucinogenic experience seemed to be somewhat similar if schizophrenic s-- were producing hallucinogens in their brain abnormal related chemicals might turn up in their URI it's interesting too but chronic amphetamine addicts often show symptoms indistinguishable from paranoid schizophrenia and amphetamine is chemically related to the hallucinogen mescaline [Music] the brain chemical serotonin which is similar to the hallucinogen psilocin is crucially involved in creaming which can have schizophrenic characteristics there are a number of hypotheses built around these and other suggestive connections if schizophrenia is caused by a biochemical fault that fault might be inherited we know that schizophrenia tends to run in families and the easiest explanation of course is to say well this genetical material this predisposing materials handed on from one generation to another on the other hand we now know that very often what determines how people behave infirm this is not so much the genetic material but the way in which the family conditions its members to behave so it's very difficult to separate out genetical theory on the one hand and environmental failure on the other research has tried to separate inheritance from environment our children driven mad by a schizophrenic environment or do they simply inherit a faulty biochemistry evidence supports both views but all kinds of factors in truth to Blair the issue if in your family there's a trait a characteristic of course everyone's sweating is it going to happen to me and in a schizophrenic family this anxiety will of course play on the person's emotions and on their feelings and and if you like in a kind of way drive them mad occasionally in the womb a single fertilized egg splits and you get twins with an identical inheritance if schizophrenia was simply inherited one twin getting it should mean that the other does it could take ten pairs of identical twins where one is schizophrenic only three of the others appear to succumb this is obviously low for a simple genetic explanation yet twice the rate for non identical twins one doesn't necessarily disbelieve the twin evidence because one wants to talk in terms of environmental conditions it's much less strong than it used to be it's not all black and all white as it was once held to be and I think most people nowadays would say yes there may well be some kind of prudes the predisposing factor but this is not enough it's it's perhaps necessary but not sufficient and and the environmental stresses are and sufficient but what are these environmental factors doctors at full borne visit patients in the bleak and windswept fence where families are isolated and particularly close on one visit with the social worker the psychiatrist is disk encasing the girl Angela remember that they came into the clinic terribly frightened yes crouching behind [Music] auditorally hallucinates it's quite terrifying and we you and I took her into the hospital that evening remember her within about 24 hours she'd settle down and it was quite romantic what dramatic wasn't really a magical change yes okay coming into hospital must have something to do with it but I think it's coming away from the family yes allowing the person to be free to be them soon something strange is going on in the families of schizophrenic one of the first people to investigate this was an American called Bateson he pointed out that people don't only communicate with words but with their face and their bodies and look at these people this one is interested that one quizzical this one bored others in tents or flirtatious Bateson advanced the idea that the child is confused by parents who were saying one thing verbally but showing something else physically and reported that schizophrenic mothers did this for example that mother says come and kiss me darling but indicates visually that she doesn't want him to glamorizing her desire to love but inability to do so the child stops and the mother says what's the matter darling don't you love your mother confronted with a whole complex of this kind of ambivalence the child is literally driven mad other theories of this sort have been advanced but here so the idea the theory would run the family is a very rigid one with perhaps the mother of the family occupying a controlling position and not allowing people to explore with different sets of relationships forcing a person a child into an unnatural if you like relationship which is then intolerable when they remember how when Diane lets came to the clinic she would hardly say a thing and every time she opened her mouth mother or father would say - and don't interrupt as if to imply what she had to say which was not important there was no we're protected by the view from especially as partner with them walk [ __ ] Lyman win and his associates who talk about her if you like an almost abnormally normal family which on that superficially appears to be a very nice family but on inspection is really too nice and that this almost suggests is there's a kind of a quality about the family which is controlling the nastiness if you like this is a rather naive way of putting it but that it appears superficially to be nice but the dunder neat there appears to be a good deal of unobserved and almost unacceptable nastiness now a normal families this doesn't happen normal families are not nice and nasty and the nastiness is allowed to come through and is expressed and is dealt with this kind of work is criticized as grand theory based on small samples where the theorists see only what they're looking for difficult again to distinguish is the family reacting in that way because the person is ill or has the reaction as it were contributed to the person becoming ill and studies of families and in my outpatient work I try to interview quite a lot the parents and young people who have this disorder to try and see how they relate to one another family therapy in other words and one can try to recreate what might be more helpful than family situations helping the schizophrenic patient to come to a better kind of decision about himself and dealing with his problems the parents in this family met and married a full born the mother was schizophrenic [Music] their pregnancy when you're coming after all if you spent a time in a hospital in a sheltered environment it's very difficult to go back out into the outside world perhaps you've had a general illness you know how long it does take to get used to coping with people again well in the alienated world of schizophrenia the sensitivity to other people is very month and so we make use of halfway houses well it's a halfway step into a full citizenship in the community outside one has to get someone comfortable with themselves and this is where one might use individual psychotherapy but then you've got to help an individual to relate to others around him and one will begin to use group therapy well people I mean I was frightened of going to work with a lot of people and seeing them do you think they mixing what were you afraid of last quantities too painful what did you think they might do when he was just probably everything else to feel like man Chris I found that against series first of all you feel fine I'm going to work or I see anyone and then you get that little bit better when you get that little bit better by himself game fighting to people I can't you there how do you feel inside you sir well I feel just a little bit cut off you know from speaking to people in hand you tell us what that feels very being cut well you can't concentrate you know and um I find towing tell people and being kind you know it's a great effort no don't if you ever experience feelings about your thoughts which was strange yes I'm fine with my thinking that my heart won't stop beating like nowhere to go to and I'll don't cry or anything like that you thought your heart might stop in it was baiting a waiter to the dance and then it's just stopped when I came here my people caught me they could only come about once in six months well how do you feel direct about leaving last when going to the job oh I want for you to talk bad I think I'll be able to do it I work at therapy now and of course it steadies nothing direct of course for many schizophrenics the big problem is work when the thought is broken up they can't concentrate and so a lot of our time is spent an industrial setup here well the whole aim is to try to get the person back into a working situation and the pay packet at the end of the week is quite a different incentive so environmental clearly influences the hospitals and the fact that treatment is effective indicates that social factors are crucial recent research has found some evidence that schizophrenic families contain a dominant parent and that communication in normal families is much more chaotic than in schizophrenic families it also been shown that in London male schizophrenic sleeving hospitals are more likely to break down if they return to their families particularly if the family situation was an emotional one insight into schizophrenia might come in unexpected ways sometimes the hallucinations and feelings of schizophrenic seemed dreamlike dr. Chris Evans draws analogies between the need of the brain to dream and the necessity of clearing no programs in computers you have with computers at regular intervals to perform certain operations on them which involve removing care in old programs from them and also updating and revising existing programs in sleep we come offline to use a computer term and the brain works the brain is cut off from the outside world and this process of running the old programs through and updating them so on goes on this is what I think dreaming is now I suspect that dream deprivation produces the effect of of sort of clogging the system up and producing a backlog of old programs which have got to be cleared and in due course these will come to the fore while the person is awake and then you'd get the kind of hallucinations that you get with sleep deprivation now I think that one might expect if Dreaming was very important that you could get malfunction of dreaming and there would be a particular type of illness where this very important process wasn't operating properly now I think it's quite possible that some of the schizophrenic conditions are caused by a malfunction of this dynamic dreaming process and one of the symptoms would be an inability to distinguish between the interior material in the exterior material one would experience one's dreams if you like while one was awake and not be able to tell how real or how unreal they were dreaming LSD schizophrenia perception fragmented and sensibility acute [Music] this is the stuff of art the unusual connection with strange perception and the fragmentation of experience is what modern arts about [Music] [Music] these cats were painted by Lewis Wayne as he became progressively schizophrenic [Music] and many great artists from Van Gogh - Tchaikovsky were deeply disturbed if schizophrenia is a thought disorder great art is the reordering of conventional thought the difference could be fine it's an old idea that madness is akin to genius some families madness and genius coexist perhaps then we should consider schizophrenia as a genuine human experience that like art it's meaningful David Cooper a radical psychiatrist thinks so I think it's fiendish sheer creation in fact if you think of all the meaning artists and poets that we most will hear these days after Joe had never heard of even William Blake Coleridge I think these are people find a found a very discreet way building out their madness in fact I think schizophrenic tend to be victimized because they're not skilled enough in social tactics and strategy to do this in a way it doesn't get them put away locked out this view is a radical departure madness is not what happens to a person but what happens between people our behavior depends not only on what we want but what other people expect if schizophrenic sliven disturbed families they have to fit into false and rigid relationships the sensitive find this difficult he has to live up to the role the family have assigned him and suppress his own idea of himself he can't contact those near him without being forced to himself schizophrenia is not Jekyll and Hyde but false self and real self the mask is the false self which the family need but behind is the real self stunted and cut off as he acts out his full self his family are happy for that's how they want him he's being something that he isn't imprisoned in a closed family world his position is untenable going mad in this situation is saying what he really thinks and feels he asserts his yourself and says his family are trying to kill him for example meaning in a poetic sense they're not allowing him to be real he's now refusing to play according to the families ruled in a game that's been destroying him once the rules have been challenged the family can either examine the game that's disguising their own problems or call him mad threatened with a reappraisal of their own way of life it's easier to choose the latter to stay up all night as when is a day I used to feel very active talk a lot and I meant a world focus okay mom said you might have to go for the car ride under set and to drag me into the car to come and I felt very only made knitted towards my parents but I thought they were taking the wrong decision taking responsibility for me to them yes I don't think my brother-in-law was gonna forgive me how I used to behave when I before I first came in here right even to put you in a hospital may feel a little bit different now that you're in a hospital and situation changes then Cooper argues that the symptoms of madness are the first sign of health his true self speaks at last he says what he feels but because the real self is emaciated in fragile he does so in goshen bizarre ways to suppress madness by drugs is to suppress the true self which needs to be developed the real feelings of a crippled personality are now coming through in the delusions I think we have to find the truth of delusion so-called the delusions are simply socially defined in a very arbitrary very false way I think it's meta funny the truth the delusion of the falsity of it I'm not trying to cure people off it well what about somebody who says they wanted to bear it I think there's probably attended to have in that case to achieve a state of death and then rebirth I think is essential to one's understanding of what a psychotic breakdown means it's always it him to achieve the proper day and proper rebirth this integration reintegration I haven't had a chance because I'm married young and I had a family of children and I had two rare them you see and I've had no chance at all I think that most people go through it so course gets a pretty great arm go through the whole experience and Landers then come out of it you know matter of few months if they're not interfered with by these means I think it's a bet of taking away the psychiatric interference allow people to live through the experience their normal human content that's why I think mental hospital should be called does ordinary houses in the community with people go through the experience be accompanied by other people who understand enough want to frighten they could come through with the other end in maybe three or four months enacting if that happens in London today here in an old church hall Cooper and his associates help their patients live through their madness Mary Barnes once a chronic schizophrenic talks about her experience here well here it seemed that I was understood but they understood what was happening and they allowed me to go according to my own desires but they helped me to understand it and to grow through it why didn't the sort of deny it and to push it away and when I came here I had had the idea myself that I wanted to go back to before I was born again then when I actually got here I was so frightened I forgot that but they helped me to remember it and then to be what I felt which was physically baby which is what a psychosis is really about you know to be structure one's whole existence and into a restructured gaining a new better way to be renewed by the experience I think what I really have to do is to revalue what socially understood is madness in these terms renew well in the beginning I wanted to be naked just used to put a black counterpane around me and I was able to do this my room and to wait to the bed as I wanted and it relieved me often in my feeling to learn wet bed and also it relieved me when I wanted to put my shits over me so I was able to do this and sometimes I go to sleep like it was a relief and then I would be bought and I would be fed and marries I was very much to stock them and so I was fed to the bottle I start the bottle and I got to gradually in her name still in bed and I seem to almost be in a state of hibernation it's one time like if I was an animal going to sleep in the winter I think is a matter simply accompanying the person on the basis of one's experience of one's own madness and it's also available to our mighty although one refuses at all time denies it it's a matter of the right accompaniment to the person witnessing them and being with them through the experience and doing that for weeks or months whatever is necessary enjoying it in fact I've sort of undergone an operation mental as it were in the sense that you speak of a physical operation something that is a radical change and I don't go according to the old sort of record or pattern that and got into which was one of deception because I didn't I'd very early in my life what I really felt and I'd always had to pretend because of this thing that I'd made him myself in response to what I'd been up against when I was first born and Joe seemed to unearth the real me and though I felt very fragile at times about the house I couldn't move if I felt other people were coming near me much money old Joe with people I found who didn't really understand and I would keep quite still then I felt I didn't want them to come in on me and I didn't feel able to speak much with them but Joe used to explain while I was speaking through my painting and gradually I came more to have words not to feel that I was going away on my words because the process here was all the time and living process this suffering seemed in the sense to be positive because who seemed to be suffering in a growing way [Music] many psychiatrists and scientists are skeptical about these ideas on the grounds that they have not been subjected to scientific scrutiny to handle madness like this takes time faith and compassion and those who do are healers in the old-fashioned sense schizophrenia here is a mystical journey and a religious experience madness in revolving around hallucinogens dreaming the mystical experience and the creative process takes us into the world of fantasy dreams mysticism the marvelous mystery of our own minds as yet there are no satisfactory answers but the questions are enough what can we learn from the schizophrenic experience [Music] is the schizophrenic sangwich the result of a diseased mind or the way we trip his understanding schizophrenia the business of scientists or philosophers and priests the hypothesis would be that what's happening in schizophrenia is something abnormal in the breakdown of a mean substances in the brain are you to air this voice in my head saying they're bad enough without a noun and crucify and things like here is a family which can't allow conflict the child finds this almost so the theory would run unbearable and therefore withdraws retreats becomes autistic this is in some sense his name schizophrenic because I felt fine I thought everybody else was wrong and I was right and so I resisted involved in the I do treat Minh I think the main thing the schizophrenic suffers from is alienation well the trouble was of us nobody to talk to me so I filled all the down the wall alone and nobody wanted to have anything to do with Sonny who's so silly I'm terrified of love of living our progressively older fantasies and dreams in fact of having our dreams but above all we tell that laughs I think the lobby's Watkins friend [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Recap Radio

Views: 312,781

Rating: 4.8038411 out of 5

Keywords: Schizophrenia, schizophrenic, Mental illness, abnormal psychology, psychology, psychiatry, insanity, paranoia, paranoid schizophrenia, catatonic schizophrenia, mental hospital, psychiatric hospital, psych ward

Id: s0NdkYs-5AU

Length: 46min 5sec (2765 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 22 2019