do you know of any cases where recovery is possible without meds
John Nash, superstar.
very hard. Meditation (insight/vippasana/Choiceless awareness) is one of the ways. But will take enormous patience and internal strength.
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Darksith manages it
Okay - basically no
we need meds
If you have schizophrenia
the cure is meds
Why do you not want to take meds?
coming off meds nearly killed me - running away, etc very dangerous living (drugs - alcohol - sleeping around - dangerous areas at night - dangerous situations with men, hypothermia, hypogenic polydipsia)
psychosis (unremitting) killed my sister, she walked out in front of a car
I find it’s a choice between jumping out of a second floor window and ending up schizophrenic and disabled - or having a fun married, independent life with meds
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I went through all this. I even watched that documentary. Spent 2 years off meds mainly doing vitamin therapy. The disease didn’t care what I did, I went psychotic and ended up in hospital.
Most people don’t like anti psychotics. But they stop you from becoming psychotic and thinking you can fly and harming yourself or others or worse.
Being off meds isn’t worth the risk. I found out the hard way unfortunately.
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I don’t think anyone has said that he “recovered” completely - he never had a job, etc that one would typically associate with “recovery”. Also - He had his wife who helped take care of him, as he got older his symptoms got better (as they commonly do) - but I’ve never seen anyone who has said he completely recovered. Like many people here - he seemed to do reasonably well though.
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I thought he had a position at Princeton years later. I thought he was returning from some award ceremony the day he died. I could be wrong.
I don’t take meds. I manage but I also feel its like I’m playing with fire because there are days where I feel I’m on the verge of having an episode but then it will pass.
If I ever had another extreme episode like I had a few times in the past then I would be reconsidering.
This is what Wikipedia has to say:
“Due to the stress of dealing with his illness, Nash and de Lardé divorced in 1963. After his final hospital discharge in 1970, Nash lived in de Lardé’s house as a boarder. This stability seemed to help him, and he learned how to consciously discard his paranoid delusions.[47] He stopped taking psychiatric medication and was allowed by Princeton to audit classes. He continued to work on mathematics and eventually he was allowed to teach again. In the 1990s, de Lardé and Nash resumed their relationship, remarrying in 2001.”
…
At Princeton, Nash became known as “The Phantom of Fine Hall”[57] (Princeton’s mathematics center), a shadowy figure who would scribble arcane equations on blackboards in the middle of the night. He is referred to in a novel set at Princeton, The Mind-Body Problem, 1983, by Rebecca Goldstein
Its unclear how much real “work” he did.