I'm not at all convinced that giving an adolescent or college age person a label of "at-risk for schizophrenia" will ultimately manifest the "help" for the person that early detection proponents site as their primary justification for giving someone medication before they can be said to even have an actual mental illness. Those labels will follow you around for life, I know from personal experience. A label of mental illness will change everything for the patient. And where do you draw the line between someone who is merely eccentric, and someone who may be helped by early intervention with antipsychotics? Doctors can't agree on diagnoses for many people with full-blown illnesses. Are we to trust a very ambiguous and clinically gray area? Is it wise to allow doctor's to intervene in our children's late adolescent development, a period of tremendous mental growth and expansion, when kids are finding themselves, exploring their personality, beliefs and habits, "incubating" before careers and families take their attention? -- these same professionals that can't even agree on whether a category as large as schizoaffective disorder is even necessary? Whether someone is prodromal is a very subjective and difficult call to make. What if the doctor makes a mistake? Lives are ruined by a diagnosis such as this -- just one example, a military career would no longer be an option. And finally, where is the study, the proof, that giving a prodromal teen antipsychotics does in fact stymie or ameliorate the continued progression to full-blown schizophrenia?
You can visit my blog, on living with schizophrenia, at www.myschizophrenia.org/blog. Thank you,
Stephanie
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Hi Christina. A very interesting blog. Touching on that early intervention reminded me of the work I have been involved in recently.we're going directly into high schools and educating students about schizophrenia.
We have several videos and play one of them and then spend the rest of the time answering questions. In one of the videos , a psychiatrist suggests that recent research indicates that the illness, if caught in time , can be treated with just one pill a day and in three years is gone .
It would seem to me that more of the resources (from drug companies,etc.) should be focused on this vital issue. As you were saying, you treat cancer before it spreads.
Best wishes, Don F.
Thank you for your work with high school students. I started having hallucinations and delusions at age 10. I dared not tell my parents because I knew it would bring about their disapproval (or so I thought.) I often yearned for a school counselor to take me aside and ask what was going on in my head. She was even my health teacher, and in a whole semester studying health, she never once mentioned mental health or symptoms of mental illness. So I gave up on her. I managed to stay fairly high-functioning although often suicidal. No one knew about that either. I didn't know who to tell. Then when I had a total psychotic break (several times) in my late 30's, I finally went to a psychiatrist and sought counsel and treatment. It took several years of trying a number of medications, but I finally found some that worked for me. I am 49 now and the last 2 years my recovery has been phenomenal, which I never expected. I wish all school-aged children (even the early grades) could meet with a caring school counselor and be asked what their anxieties were, whether there are signs of depression, whether the child has unusual thoughts? I mean it would have to be worded just right and parents may not like it. But I still think it is a vital service that public schools could offer.
Carolyn
Hello Carolyn,
Thank you for your comment.
I, too, had a hard time of it when I was younger, and my mother's response was to label me as "difficult" and ship me off to a psychiatrist when I was twelve. He didn't feel there was anything clinically wrong.
But I do feel if I had her support, things would've been different.
I'm glad you're posting.
Have a good day.
Chris