Hello to everyone,
I am the mother of a young man who has had schizophrenia for 10 years since he was 16 years old. When he first became ill I took him to a doctor who gave him a lot of supplements such as niacin; it didn’t help but he kept taking them anyway while he was also on medications (most of the time abilify). A couple years later we moved into a new house and after a few months I found out that he had stopped taking his abilify and was doing just fine. He thought that he had just gotten over the schizophrenia (he didn’t really believe that he had it at that time) and after a few months he stopped taking the other vitamins and he got sick again and had daily voices even on medication for the next 6 years. (without medicaion he became delutional in addition to the voices)
Now I have figured out that the reason he got well when we moved into this house is because at the time the water neutralizer was using magnesium oxide and that was the missing factor in his supplement protocol. So now he is back on the supplements, with added magnesium, and has been off his meds for 5 weeks and as long as he takes the supplements 3 times a day he doesn’t have any symptoms, but he keeps slacking off on the vitamins and then he gets a little bit of voices and he ramps up on the vitamins again to make them go away. Also he keep drinking energy drinks which increases his dopamine, but he can still do well as long as he takes the vitamins faithfully.
I have developed my own theory of what might be the usual cause of schizophrenia (a broken mechanism for slowing the production of dopamine when dopamine levels are high along with blockages in the pathway that breaks down dopamine) and I have put our experiences and my thoughts into a bog, but I don’t know if it is allowed to post the name of my blog on this site. Is it OK to do that? It is completely non-commercial and it just is a log of our experiences with schizophrenia and depression and my thoughts about the causes and best natural treatments.
Here is a list of the supplements that we have found to be essential for my son.
niacin 6-9 grams a day total
magnesium 1200 mg a day total
folinic acid (or methylfolate) about 5 mg a day
P5P (or regular B6) about 100 mg a day of P5P
B12 5000 mcg a day
a few grams of vitamin C per day.
A good multivitamin
The niacin, Vitamin C and magnesium are divided into 3 doses and given 3 times a day with meals. If there are loose stools then less magnesium is needed. The amount of magnesium depends on how much niacin is needed. Because of the large amount of niacin he has to use regular niacin and not niacinamide, but I think that hexanicotinate would work, too. Niacinamide starts causing nausea at about 5-6 grams a day.
My son took these high doses of niacin for about 4 years earlier on, and never had any problems on his liver function tests, which he always had to have due to his antipsychotic medications. I looked online, but I couldn’t find any instances of someone having permanent liver problems from taking regular niacin, only slow release niacin. There have been some studies done where they have concluded that niacin might cause liver damage, but if you examine the studies, they just say that because some people get elevated liver enzymes, not because their livers stopped working. There have been a few cases of people getting jaundiced from high levels of niacin, but it went away after stopping the niacin.
For us this small risk is well worth it because my son has never been able to have a really normal life or hold down a job with the medication. Now he has 10 years of bad habits and lack of social development to overcome but at least now he has the opportunity to overcome it.