On Going Crazy

In the psychologic literature they often equate having delusions with schizophrenia or psychosis. But I believe that there are many ways to go crazy not just delusions; in fact, delusions are the mind’s way of going off track. But what about how the body goes crazy? Remember there are levels of brain function, of levels of consciousness and each of those can go crazy in their own way. I submit that cancer may be the insanity of the cells and those cells may be crazy long before we have the capacity to think crazy. We know now that the DNA of cells on the lookout for developing cancer cells, our cellular guardians, are heavily methylated. Methylation usually means trauma earlier on. It is how the cells are tagged for trauma. That is, as the cells encounter adversity they are marked thereafter and they change through a process known as epigenetics. Those cells are now aberrant. And they can go crazy, spilling over their natural boundaries and continuing on a rampage for years; cancer can be considered psychosis of the cells, but as we evolve the message of damage moves higher up and transmutes, perhaps, into what we usually think of as insanity. It is still the cell DNA going crazy. The point of all this is that we should not only consider current damage, (pollution, bad diet, etc., all valid) but also we need to go back to generating sources to ultimate causes.

There is a good evidence now of how external toxins affect the DNA of the fetus and result in serious disease, whether cancer of psychosis. But the mother is also a spillway of toxic chemicals as her disturbed condition can result in overproduction of stress hormones (cortisol) which ultimately affect the baby she is carrying. Again epigenetics is the study of how the environment affects the DNA of the offspring, how it changes genes and their expression. Thus, the genes are the notes but the epigenes play the music. And they can play discordant music that adversely affects the system into developing cancer and/or later psychosis. There are several studies out now that indicate epigenetic dysfunction and the development of psychosis. Imprints take the notes and twist them according to adverse early experience. The early experience I call the imprint and it means that related DNA has been methylated and marked as traumatic. This methylation may be the culprit in all sorts of diseases later on, including Alzheimers disease. If we find a way through reliving to de-methylate key cells and that reverses Alzheimers we are our way to an important therapy.

(See the work of B.P Rutten on Epigenetic Mediation of Environmental Influences; and also F. Perera and Julie Herbstman on Prenatal environmental effects on disease. Also the work of Mill and Petronis on psychotic disorders) .

But now consider this: suppose we could treat all forms of cancer in the same way. Remember that trauma is inscribed in the cell DNA from the time soon after conception. The earlier the trauma and damage the more severe the response. It is why, in my opinion, mental psychosis begins its life in the first months of gestation where a smoking and drinking mother, a mother who is mentally unstable, can imprint great damage to the fetus. It is where the brain cells are being organized, but the damage is there long before we have the capacity for a false thought or delusion—a false belief. On its way upward as we evolve, the cells are already reacting to the damage in their own way. And heavy methylation affects both the cancer control cells and the cell DNA that produce mental illness. It is, in short, the same cause, different targets. Those targets may also be “chosen” due to genetics (inheritance), lifestyle, and many other factors.

The task, it seems to me, would be to try to reverse the damage, go back and undo the trauma. That sounds impossible, but there are chemical ways to reverse methylation, and I am proposing psychological ways—reliving the early trauma, even without words or scenes and return the cells to the original form, given that there is not too much damage already. Just because I call it psychological ways, it is still neurochemical at its base. It is just a more natural process without introducing chemicals into the system; rather, allowing the entire organism to normalize and see if the methylated cells return to normal.

I have written about resonance in my new Life Before Birth. It means that feelings that are related, hopelessness, for example, all levels of our personal evolution, bundle together so that when we set off one feeling in the present, hopeless over getting into college, it can dredge up related earlier feelings and sensations, deep hopelessness, futility and depression. This means that very early trauma--sensations in the first months of gestation before there are feeling structures in place are also part of the resonance. The primordial imprint and methylation becomes elaborated as we mature so that each new higher level of brain organization adds to the generating source; adding first, emotions and feelings, and secondly, thoughts and beliefs. It is still the same neural circuit. And each level is damaged, as well. Hopelessness is experienced in different ways but at the very bottom of it all is damage that has no words and no scenes. It is cellular damage done in the first months of life; it is a damage that has no words, a damage the predates words by millions of years in antiquity.

The good part of this is that as we begin a reliving, starting with a disappointment and despair in the present, the circuit will open up to deeper feelings until finally the reliving incorporates damage long before we had words. We may not be aware of is the added trauma from the past but it is there as part of the feeling, incorporated into the feeling circuit. And it is in this way that we may undo severe very early damage that may have caused cancer, in the first place. It is all part of a gestalt, of an overall imprint that has its antennae higher in the nervous system; related together, perhaps, by chemical similarities and by similar electrical frequencies.

This is not entirely theoretical since we see this taking place every day. As patients begin reliving they dig deeper in their nervous system as the therapy goes on., which allows for deeper more comprehensive access to the deepest imprints in the system, imprints that share a commonality—specific, shared feelings. It may be one reason that we rarely see cancer among our advanced patients. This, of course, needs to be tested. It is not that the patient tries to go deeper; it is that the system opens up all on its own permitting deeper access. If we hurry it by forcing the patient or giving him drugs it can only damage the process. It can produce mental psychosis as things are being brought up prematurely. Evolution needs to take place, and that means that we need to learn from evolution, seeing how our present structure has evolved over many years, but adding on each time new structures. Thus there is a base, a primitive reptile, that becomes a chimp and finally a human, in the same way in our personal evolution that we are humans in the present reliving, descending to our mammalian era and finally down to the basic reptilian epoch. All levels are part of our humanity. The point is that they are all related, still in our systems. Evolution has not discarded them; it has incorporated them. I see our personal evolution, ontogeny, in the same way. Each trauma leaves a trace, a tag, that is related to other similar kinds of trauma later on. There are representations of the original imprint on higher levels; thus, each new level adds its contribution to the memory--the imprint. They all add up to what makes us human both in phylogeny (in human history) and ontogeny (our personal history). It is those markers or tags that identify and inform the specific feelings to each other. Combined, they compound the feeling and its pain; adding to the force that one day will cause serious disease. Cancer, then, is the end result of evolution just as deep early imprints result in mental psychosis later on. They are part of the distortion and dislocation of the function of cells. The imprints change the neural circuits resulting first, in the psychosis of the cell—cancer, and secondly, psychosis of the mind—schizophrenia; deformation and distortion of the neural cells. The system can only take so much before there is a breakdown. We call that cancer and psychosis but it is all part of the same evolutionary process. It is an ineluctable result of our history; how then can we properly understand it without a return to that history? If history and historic imprints are the cause, and if we ignore them, then we can only beat back the symptom and never eliminate the cause. That is why there is an inevitable fall back into cancer and psychosis; the generating source is still alive. That is why we need to wait years to see if the sufferer is “clear,” if she has escaped history.

So to resume, since this is a rather complicated subject; the tag or marker on the primitive gene DNA, the epigenetic imprint is methylated; then as we mature those markers are rerepresented higher up so that first we get cancer and then later we become psychotic all from the very same imprint and distortion of the cell DNA. It is the antennae of the imprint that creates the havoc; the re-representation on higher levels the culprit. Here is one reason we can go crazy in life when there is adversity. It is not just that event, a family member dying, but what those cells contain as information that puts us over the top.