Some people are off to see the doctor to be treated for any disease, except for mine. Unfortunately, many people believe my brain disease is a special case.
My brain disease is not the only medical condition that has been seen as a “special case” in the recent history of medicine. In the past, many did not want to touch the heart.
In 1944, Dr. Alfred Blalock and his assistant Vivien Thomas set out to perform the first ever heart surgery on a “blue baby,” Eileen Saxon, who was dying from a heart defect. Doctors at that time believed that the human heart was “Nolitangere”– a Latin word meaning “not to be touched.” At one point before the surgery, a colleague asks Dr. Blalock “Isn’t a doctor’s first tenet to ‘do no harm?’”
With my parents at age 16, 1997. I never dreamed I would become mentally ill.
The movie Something the Lord Made chronicles the journey of Dr. Blalock and Vivien Thomas to performing the first ever heart surgery, and their success, which changed the field of medicine.
There was also other opposition to operating on the human heart, prior to the first, groundbreaking surgery. In Something the Lord Made, Eileen’s parents discuss whether they should allow Dr. Blalock to perform heart surgery on their daughter. Eileen’s mother asks, “Why can’t God’s plan be to let this doctor operate, to save Eileen’s life?” Dr. Blalock is warned that the surgery will “intervene with God’s will” and “violate the purity of an innocent heart.”
Today, it is almost impossible to find anyone who believes operating on the human heart is contradictory to God’s plan. Dr. Blalock challenged what he called the “ancient doctrinal myth,” and won.
But when it comes to psychiatric medicine, there are still many people who believe we should not interfere with the brain. I have been told that I need to discontinue my medication in order to “fully trust in God.”
I hope the stigma against psychiatric medications will also disappear. When we hear our friends or family encouraging the mentally ill to discontinue their medications because the medications are for people who are “weak” or for people who “do not have enough faith” it is important that we speak up, and fight the ignorance and the stigma. I believe that, someday, antipsychotic medications will be considered as legitimate as other available treatments, like antibiotics, physical therapy, and heart surgery.
For more on schizophrenia as a brain disease, see https://www.schizophrenia.com/disease.htm.
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