Nature versus Nurture.

A debate is currently over a study whether schizophrenia is or is not indeed a total and exhaustive result of gene mutation.

Two comments below ... are the ones I found most interesting to this article:

Danielle C March 29th, 2008 10:38:
Hello,My mother is schizophrenic, my brother was as well.My brother died last year, at age 53. He had had the disorder since childhood.I am interested in biology and medicine and have studied both. I am also a student of shamanism. I have studied with a traditional healer in the Peruvian jungle.Yes, there is probably a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia. There is also a spiritual dimension that is ignored by the medical profession.My brother was “inhabited” by a very evil being who was not my brother. It became very obvious during the ceremonies I participated in on his behalf.I was able to be by my brother’s bedside before he died, and that being was very aware of me and the ceremonies. It was very scary.There was no way for my brother to be aware of my work on his behalf, and yet the being new.I was able to help my brother go in peace.I know this seems strange. Schizophrenia is strange.I believe that we will not address the fundamental root of the disease as long as we do not address the spiritual nature of man. I hope that we can bring science and spirituality together in order to really help people in this terrible predicament.Danielle

Roger March 30th, 2008 14:26:
I have a severe case of schizophrenia (and have known people (mostly) with (much lesser) cases and find many of the posts here rediculous. First of all, medications ofter work very well most of the time. I am on 200 mg of Geodon and 6 mg of Ivega, both newer anti-psycotics. Before I started taking them, I had been homeless and without even one penny for many years and eating almost solely from dumpsters and sleeping on the ground even in the snow with a tent of piece of plastic in the winter in Pennsylvania. I was rediculously delusional. Just before I was finally helped by being arrested (yet again) and locked in a mental hospital (yet again) and given one of the new medicines in June, 1999, I was seeing people that weren’t there (and they looked perfectly real, not like in a dream) and rediculously delusional. For example, in a period of hours I went from thinking that I had to go on a suicide mission to kill the Serbian leader in Serbia (a missile would target us both) or my baby (no longer a baby in real life) relative would have to go and I would be tortured if caught, to thinking that I was already in Serbia all my life and should have realized it from all the evidence around me like the names of towns where I grew up (really, Indian names) and that the police arresting me were going to torture me and that my father was the head of a secret CIA type organization that was running the country (and very evil) and that my mother was a captured Soviet agent. Then, when they had me strapped to a cart, that the doctors and nurses were really martians and were about to stop torturing me with super effective alien torture technologies and were going to be able to keep me alive for hundres of years for more torture with advanced martian technology so I could be tortured longer. That was the most suffering I’ve ever been through for that long. You can’t imagine the terror. A non-paranoid person would be not even scared if it was actually happening to him comparted to how terrified I was. Then I thought Hitler was going to take over my body and that I had been fooled into thinking he lost World War Two all my life just so that I could be made an example of. I had other delusions then over a period of hours. For instance, I thought all patients in the Hostpital were really spies, as I thought all people in Wilkes-Barre were when I got there. Anyway, eventually I decided to sign some papers so that I could be drugged for some reason and I did and was drugged and the delusions almost went away in days. Anti-psychotic drugs can be very effective is the point. I think it was Prolixin, then.
I still have bouts of fear of the government sometimes and very great hatred for the government and its operatives to this day (based on actual experiences with them, not delusions). I also believe that I have come up with a number of super ideas, for instance, a design for a vastly better processor chip than anything in existance to day, like the Pentiums used today that it makes obsolete. You can judge for yourself wether my design is vastly better than Intel’s by checking out my website that describes it at http://howcomputers.com . You should think I might be right about some things because I graduated with high honors (3.7) from Penn State with a physics degree from Penn State in 1981, where I had a physics scholarchip, and went on to work on a PhD in physics a the University of Texas, Austin with a research assistantship for one semester, then got a secret clearance and worked for Northrop on a secret program for 3 year and at Texas Instruments for 3 months and was crazy the whole time and getting crazier all the time, but hid it.
Anyway, anti-psychotic drugs can be super effective. I have experienced it and seen it. I have also seen people get crazy by stopping taking anti-psychotics. A terror of my life now is that somehow, through poverty, I would not be able to get anti-pyschotic drugs. It would be a horror I can’t imagine.
Luckily, psychiatrists have seen it all many times and believe none of the nonsense in many of these comments. It must be boring to them because it’s the same stuff with person after person. Spiritualism, oh brother.