On Psychosis

Is psychosis a different malady from neurosis? Is it treatable? Curable? What causes it? Heredity? Epigenetics or just plain bad experience?

I wrote this recently about how we manufacture inhibitory/repressive chemicals such as serotonin.

“What is very important for us to realize was that a mouse fetus does not make her own serotonin until the third trimester. It seems like the mother supplies what is needed until the baby can take over. But when the mother is low on supplies, she cannot fulfill what the developing baby lacks. Therefore, the baby carries around a load of pain. Now if we apply that to humans, there seems to be a time in gestation when pain or noxious stimuli impinge, but we are not yet able to produce our own gating chemicals—ungated pain. This residue will continue and may lead to bouts of anxiety later on in life. It becomes free-floating fear or terror. This is not due to heredity but rather to experience in the womb. This is why we should never neglect womb-life when addressing neurosis.

Part of our in utero life, therefore, takes on hurt at a time when our system can do nothing about it. Nevertheless, it affects all later development. At thirty we may suffer from panic attacks that began its life in the very early months of our mother’s pregnancy. It is pristine and free-floating, ready to spring forth whenever we are vulnerable. No talk therapy can make a dent in it. It leaves us fragile for a lifetime so that any insult in infancy and childhood weakens us all the more.

It seems to me that there may be a genetic component to psychosis but equally if not more important is epigenetics; what happened very early on in gestation. My guess is that the earlier the trauma (mother smoking, drinking, high anxiety state or depression) the more we have the makings for psychosis. For the reasons cited above; the fetus takes on hurt before he can do anything about it. Worse, this alteration in the first months of gestation alters the set-points permanently so that the person is forever low in inhibition or repression. Of course, as an adult he will need the very chemicals he lacked in the womb; inter alia serotonin. And the heavy duty drugs we use on psychotics are enhancers of serotonin. Why? Because early trauma depressed its output and made the body think that was normal. Of course the body doesn’t think in words, but it does in chemicals. And that communication begins with the advent of the secretion of key chemicals while in the womb. It is just an accident that effective pills simply make up for what is missing in the person’s system? What pills do is supply the missing link, help out our physiology and try, therefore, to reestablish normality. So sometimes the mentally ill feels normal again. That is no surprise since we are artificially normalizing the person’s physiology. In Primal Therapy we normalize in the normal way; that is, we reestablish setpoints. That is why after one year of our therapy there are normal levels of serotonin.

What is the hallmark of psychosis? Usually it is hallucinations and delusions. Delusions are a later development than hallucinations. They indicate a more organized cerebral/thinking apparatus. But both manifestations are provoked by upsurging very, very early pain; usually there is no content to this pain other than pure agony.

Can they be treated? We have done so with some success but in-house therapy is needed. Otherwise there is too much stress out there for the mentally ill to adapt. There is evidence that when the psychotic hears voices there is an activation of the brain system where those voices originate. For delusions; there is usually the notion that someone “out there” is out to hurt him. The pain/hurt is already inside, and it is now rationalize as being out there. But the brain is reacting to the hurt. Since the person has no idea where that hurt comes from and how early it occurred, he has no choice but to project it out there: “They are plotting to hurt me.”

There are many ways to go crazy. The body does it with cancer, a cellular out-of-control event. The brain does it with ideas, but it is always the same pain they are dealing with. Psychosis merely means that the normal defense mechanisms do not work. The brain is stretched into wild and unreal ideas because there is no other way to get a handle on the pain. As we add pain killers to the psychotic the delusions lessen. Clearly, they are associated with pain. The great question is where does it come from? I think I know, but we will let research help out here.