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When I first became severely psychotic in 1982, apparently my father realized he was in over his head in trying to deal with me alone, and believed I needed professional help. He first took me to an inpatient psychiatric ward at Kaiser. However, when I was there, despite not threatening anyone or assaulting anyone, I was physically wild, such that the staff at the hospital wouldn't let me into their psych ward and said that I needed a locked ward. They referred me to Gladman in Oakland. At the time, Gladman may have been very different from how it now is. I'm not sure about this, as I haven't kept up on changes in Gladman. 

In Gladman, I was seen as out of hand, and staff decided to strap me down to physical restraints. This is inhumane treatment, but staff believed it was necessary. I'm very mixed on putting people in restraints. For a lot of patients, there are alternatives that do not create nearly as much suffering or as much risk to life. 

I'd been given a big shot of Haldol, with a big needle in the buttocks, and by the next day I was feeling the side effects of that. I was out of restraints, but I couldn't focus my eyes or carry on a conversation. 

That was how my first episode of severe psychosis began, but I was in store for worse. I don't have space or inclination here to share more of that. 

Medicating a person for a psychiatric illness, if we were to make enough advances, could seem like treatment straight out of the Stone Age. Advances in treatment of mental illnesses will necessitate funding. Even the invention of better medications would be welcome. 

NAMI, National Alliance on Mental Illness, is probably a major source of this funding. That organization is composed primarily of parents and other relatives of psychiatric consumers, and it is well organized and well-funded. If I'm not mistaken, NAMI funds research. However, E. Fuller Torrey, a famous psychiatrist and author--who is controversial among consumers and disliked by many of us, in an essay I read, complained that there is not enough funding toward research. 

Torrey claimed there had been no significant advances since the invention of Clozaril, more than twenty years previous. (I don't know enough about Torrey to be aligned with him or against. Most psychiatrists whom I've seen have been a big help, and so have many nonpsychiatric doctors. But there have also been some rotten ones.) 

Many people in favor of alternative medicine might think schizophrenia would respond to exercise and purifying the body. However, the net result is a person in great physical condition, who has severe, ongoing psychosis and resultant brain damage. 

How do you cure mental illness with herbal remedies, with acupuncture, with chiropractic, with mindfulness? You don't. None of this works. For mindfulness or for any of the above to help, you need to begin with a calm, receptive person. If you are severely psychotic, you are not calm or receptive. Once you've reached a state of severe psychosis, you will not respond to reasoning. You will not respond to many things that neurotypical people assume are universal. Herbs will be useless. 

If you are depressed, St. John's Wort sometimes works, and it is also possibly a Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitor, or MAOI, which, coincidentally, some pharmaceutical antidepressants are. I bring this up because MAOIs adversely interact with some foods and with some other medications. 

I'm not going to be bogus and say that no herbal medicines do anything to help with ailments. Marijuana helps many cancer patients with pain and other problems. Yet, try giving pot to a schizophrenic person in treatment--you'll get instant "decompensation" because most of today's marijuana is more potent than it ever was, and it doesn't mix well at all with antipsychotics. In the nineteen eighties, my first outpatient psychiatrist gave me kind words of advice--he advised against smoking pot. Marijuana is a very dangerous substance for someone who leans toward psychosis. 

Alcohol may have a mild antipsychotic effect, but then you're creating an alcohol dependent person who might have slightly milder psychosis. It is not advisable to try alcohol to treat mental illness, under any circumstances. Doing such a thing makes a bad problem into a dire problem. Alcohol doesn't mix with numerous medications that psychiatric consumers are prescribed. 

Naturally occurring substances do affect people, and in some instances might help some mentally ill people a little. But if you want a person to get well, don't expect it to come from alternative medicine. That is an opinion, and anyone who wants to conduct a scientific study refuting that will get my attention. 

By my experience, mindfulness helps with managing a psychotic disorder--when it is used as an adjunct to conventional treatment. Anything you can do to increase your arsenal of useful strategies is going to help. 

Mindfulness allows me to cope with the absurd life circumstances that I have to face, which have partly come about from people's perceptions. When a person is diagnosed with schizophrenia or anything major, the package deal is that life circumstances become crazy, due to government and due to how people behave toward a person with a diagnosis. Mindfulness, in that case, is essential. It can help you do the mental gymnastics needed to deal with having the life of a mentally ill person. 

Additionally, mindfulness helps me not be quite so stuck on delusional thoughts, even while they still arise and can potentially take over if I'm not careful. Mindfulness helps me not hate myself, but instead to accept myself and not identify with having a brain defect. It is not how good your brain is that counts, it is how well you use it. 

Mindfulness can do a lot of good for mentally ill people, but it does not cure a condition. I've tried that path and won't try it again. 

Some have believed their illness is caused by a food allergy. I can't say this has never happened because I don't have access to the facts in those cases. If scientists want to study food toxins affecting the brain and causing mental illness, that would not be a waste of time. 

Psych meds at best do only part of the job of getting a patient to get well. The rest is up to the patient, who has to find all manner of strategies to make life better for oneself. Psychotherapy at best, creates more emotional comfort and more self-affinity for a consumer. It doesn't directly treat symptoms. At its worst, psychotherapy can adversely affect a patient, in ways that are not readily measured. 

If there was a natural cure to schizophrenia, it would be packaged and sold, and the inventor of it would be a billionaire. We know that a different disease, diabetes, can be managed through diet if you don't let it progress too far. 

Some people in mental health believe in taking measures early in a person's life, to prevent full-scale psychosis if it appears to be developing. But then you've got someone who might have bad effects on their life due to being on medication and in counseling at too young an age. If you start with a young person who is having it rough but hanging in there, and then institutionalize them, you could be making a hard life into a hopeless life. I'm not saying this is true all the time, but it could be so some of the time. 

I benefited from going a year without medication following the first episode of the psychiatric condition. I was able to work a demanding physical job and I was able to learn my own variety of meditation. Then I became ill again, and I needed more help. I would not repeat going off medication, because the condition would keep recurring and it would ruin my life if it didn't kill me, or someone else. There is no dogma or belief system that is always correct.