The first time I heard about schizophrenia was when my sister’s husband was diagnosed as being schizo-affective. He heard voices. Back then I was much more superstitious about God and I wondered if it was demon possession. Since then I’ve learned to let go of all that superstitious nonsense of my childhood religion. Let me digress for a moment, and if you are uncomfortable with a bit of talk about Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior, skip on down to the next paragraph. I’m now what is called a “Mid-Acts Dispensationalist” and I won’t go into great detail, but basically we believe that we are to “rightly divide the Word of Truth” which means that the Bible is broke into different dispensations. As a result, we’re living in the age of grace, and the only thing we must do to have our salvation is to believe that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, was buried and rose from the dead. I no longer believe that miracles are being performed, we don’t have to ask forgiveness for every little wrong thing we do. All the work was done at the cross for our salvation and that is what we have today.
So my brother-in-law was diagnosed schizo-affective. He scared me. He was unpredictable (my fear of these people unfortunately manifests as hatred), would scream and yell and he beat my sister. Eventually she left and divorced him, but not until they’d had three children together. Eventually he killed himself, my sister claims it was an accident. Gunshot wound to the main artery in his thigh and he bled to death barricaded inside a friend’s home. He was making my sister’s life so miserable it was a nightmare; I hate to admit being relieved to know I won’t ever have to face him again and he’ll never be able to torture my sister again.
My father was officially diagnosed with schizophrenia. That leads me to my father, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2008. He has had mental issues all his life, and I thank God that he ran away and abandoned me and my mom and two sisters when I was five. He has done things over the years like get up on a roof and shoot at other houses, he slathers his head with olive oil to get rid of the “cradle cap”, he sucks on a pacifier to exercise his mouth, and about two years ago he was arrested for exposing himself to two young girls walking to school. He happened to be drenched in olive oil at the time. About a year ago I got a call that he’d drank antifreeze in a suicide attempt. He came to visit me about four or five years ago and he was very skinny, and looked horrible, skin and bones. His claim to the fantastic body (he really thought he looked exceptionally great) was his diet of corn tortillas and white rice and an occasional chocolate bar.
I was appalled. Especially after he told me a nutritionist told him that white rice is fortified so he was getting all his vitamins that way. He wouldn’t stop bothering me (by email) about my weight, and it was one of the things that compelled me to stop having regular contact with him. My own husband never says a word about my body, my father ran away when I was five and how dare he preach to me about my weight.
I was convinced from the time I heard what he was eating that his troubles were caused from nutrition. I thought maybe pellagra.
For a while I was really scared that I was going to end up with schizophrenia, too. Surely it must be hereditary, and sometimes I feel so stressed out and full of anxiety, it would feel like my brain wasn’t working correctly. I would feel very weighed down. I would cry easily and felt like I was going to crack at any minute. That’s when I started taking Kava-Kava every day for about a month. I was finally able to go off the Kava-Kava, thankfully, mainly because my boss gave me permission to work from home one day a week and that helped a great deal. She has a lifelong friend who had a nervous breakdown and maybe she saw me exhibiting similar signs. I was pretty stressed out at work, even breaking down and crying. After a few weeks she commented to me that I seemed like I was doing a lot better.
If the parents have gut issues, the children are almost certainly going to have gut issues. The mother may pass on the wrong bacteria during childbirth and if the diet is wrong it can lead to gut issues. I have also read that schizophrenia can begin to manifest in the teen years, which of course is when the hormones are beginning to produce, and also the body is beginning to feel the stress of surviving on less than desirable foods.
Our bodies have the wonderful ability to heal themselves. Sometimes, knowing what I know about traditional foods and nutrition, it’s a wonder more people aren’t bedridden since their diets are so horrible. I look around me and I see people taking antibiotics every month or every other month, people with IBS, one was recently diagnosed with lupus, another on high doses of thyroid medication with gut issues. I wish I could bring them all home and feed them nutritiously and help them to heal.
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