My life's Adventure

My recommended therapies

As always check with your own doctor before following medical advice. And I do believe that a multiple problem illness such as schizophrenia has a multiple array of solutions and thus you can see I agree with mainstream medical thinking in this general statement above.

Now for what I would recommend that works for me below but not for everyone I know with schizophrenia. I do have many coworkers, friends, and associates who take no medications for instance and they seem to do fine too. And many do not do well. And I am not really the judge of how well people are doing.

I would recommend vitamins, anti-psychotic medication, peer to peer support, family involvement, goal oriented therapy and above all education therapy. With education therapy this can start as reading pamphlets in a doctors office and become all comfortable levels of studies of psychiatry. Reading schizophrenia.com articles would be a great free place to start and continue this study. I probably don't do this enough. And rather than read advanced medical studies I think in some ways reading consumer oriented literature is better than being some sort of learning snob. Rather to leave some of the more advanced studies to the doctors who know how to filter this vast resource or body of knowledge called psychiatry. I had no idea or time to read about which medications were safe for my partner to take while she was with child but our psychiatrist knew this from research so we let him decide this issue.

I am not the next greatest medication chaser and have even delayed my switching to the modern anti psychotics until I was assessed as being affected with damaging side effects from the older stuff. Then I switched.

But as I said in the last post whatever professional or practical help works for whomever with whatever problem is good. Because, although the doctors and other treatment team members may have knowledge, we should also be able to take some control of our treatment. Thus we need to agree with the treatment on some level for the treatment to be effective. Otherwise we have revolving door syndrome, as we constantly fight the treatment and don't effect the treatment for ourselves and then get sick and treatment is again offered or forced on us. Giving up some ground in treatment and finding a middle ground is helped by learning about the condition, so that one can disgree with some aspects and agree with others. I think this has to do with the first steps in a 12 step program too which is generally known as the acceptance of the illness step(s). After we accept the illness we also have to accept some form of treatment before we can step forward.