A ramble about stuff to do with my life and the treatment of psychiatric illness

This is sort of what my grandparents taught me. My maternal grandparents were both teachers in the town I was born in the north of sri lanka.

I think they used the metaphor of a knife. A blade needs to be sharpened. Any person can become more intelligent through doing things which train the brain.

I suppose its obvious in a way. I think the big word for it might be neuroplasticity. Not sure. It's the ability of the systems of the brain - to me this means the software - to overcome differences or changes in the hardware. Not sure.

I saw a tv program about the first guy to recover from a stroke. This was in the mid 20th century. The standard treatment was to give up. But one guy's carer wouldn't. He forced his dad back to health. Daily training forced the software in his brain to adapt to the changes in the hardware. This guys dad recovered a high level of function. If I remember right he eventually died of a heart attack climbing up a mountain. When they autopsied him they found he'd lost over 90% of the organic connections between his body and brain. Perhaps more.

For victims of a stroke this one carer's dedication in the spite of medical nihilism meant treatment changed.

I think the lives of children with schizophrenia could be better by making them more intelligent. This is a shit idea. It does nothing to solve the root of the problem. It means that it a shit world where their difference is a disability then making schizophrenics advantaged in later life (because intelligence helps) could work.

When I was much younger I was thrown into a children's home. This was a result of the deterioration of my behaviour to the point where my family could no longer handle me. I was 15 and this was shortly before my gcse exams. There had been an ongoing deterioration of my behaviour.

If I remember right I saw a psychiatrist at some point. I didn't get a diagnosis and I didn't end up in a psychiatric ward even though this is when I first started cutting myself and I had a clear history of errant behaviour and mood problems. Fuck knows how I wasn't labelled or incarcerated.

Instead I ended up in a home. Thankfully I wasn't homeless. Thankfully I never went through the trauma of psychiatry either.

Within a few months I returned to living with my parents then was sent to a local boarding school for two years. I come from a privileged background where education is prized. My parents sacrficed a lot to pay the high fees.

When I finished school i'd secured a place at a top 5 university but took a gap year. I worked as an assistant systems engineer at a small company working on a european space agency project. The pay was rubbish but I was 18 years old and programming for a european space agency project. There were other aspects to the gap year. I did accelerated courses in business and other things.

In those 3 years my life changed drastically from what outcomes I might have had had I been hospitalised and my life choices governed by psychiatric labels.

Those 3 formative years are reason enough for me to keep tearing the medical profession a new arsehole at any given opportunity.

My idea for sticking schizophrenic kids - or potentially schizophrenic kids - in really good schools, on really good gap year programs and then sending them to really good universities is a dumb idea. It would work but I think too many parents would want this for their children. Though this alternative would be the best on any idea of mental health outcomes and potentially save lives it is probably poor health economics and is hard to sell to the public who are the ultimate powerholders, or should be at least.

But perhaps there's an alternative within this dumb idea. What I'm doing is trying to explore non drug treatments for psychosis and schizophrenia. Bipolar and all the rest too actually. It's just that I know the most about schizophrenia because...well, that's another story.

I don't really know what neuroplasticity is but I know what my grandparents taught me about intelligence or whatever else is valued by modern society and employment structures. If the objective is to heal the disability rather than fix a fucked up society then psychiatric mental healthcare and national clinical guidelines need to understand that to fix the disability bit people can be trained.

This could be an alternative to creating drug addictions in children which cause real illnesses and harm, which is what current best practice seems to be about.

At the very least those few years of my life could be considered similar to the Soteria paradigm in a way. Sort of. Mosher and his crew have been working on an alternative for ages. John bola"s review in 2009 or 2010 highlights other international programs which offer alternatives to the current cosh and incarceration of children.

The uk doesn't. Not that I've come across since I discovered there is progress in psychiatry. Just not in the uk.