Meditation to amerilorate symptoms of schizophrenia

Was reading another thread that was closed and doing some looking around found the following:

http://www.madinamerica.com/2014/07/mindfulness-helps-people-live-schizophrenia/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/23/meditation-brain-psychiatric-disorders_n_1108238.html
And for those who have a problem with the huffingtonpost as a source, there is a link to the site with the original study.


Finally, this is a link to a study involving loving-kindness meditation and its positive effect with schizophrenia sufferers.
http://www.unc.edu/peplab/publications/Johnson et al 2009.pdf

Personally, i think loving kindness meditation might be more effective initially than mindfullness meditation, since the verbalizing mind is more active in this form of meditation.

 

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IMHO, any meditative practice is better than none and routine meditation over an extended period has been proven to improve not just the emotional state of the practitioner but the health of the brain as well.

 

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Sure. Absolutely. In fact any sort of productive activity is better than- to use a very broad term - nonproductive activity. I mean a task that occupies the mind as well as the body has a very soothing, therapeutic effect on, to use medical terminology: the looney. I've known nutcases (not schizophrenics necessarily) that were changed people by virtue of having a garden or doing needlepoint.
Meditation, I've noticed, does to the mind what combing does to long hair. It sorts it out, neatens, straightens and yes, even beautifies it.

 

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Anything that occupies the mind will help schizophrenia patients (given that it requires reflection/critical thinking). That being said, no schizophrenic should be as narrow-minded as to say that "alternative medicine will do more for me than antipsychotic medication". My cousin was recently diagnosed with schizophrenia, and his medication has never worked for him - I think that meditation is good for those who cannot get relief from medication, and it should be more widespread in the treatment of schizophrenia, but shouldn't take medications place as the best method for treatment.

 

I agree, and further, i dont think anyone with mental illness should take it up without consulting their doctor. Often enough "normal" people get carried away with it and imo anyone who is going to try it should get some instruction, especially at the beginning.

 

I don't think anything you can do will help schizophrenia, except accepting that you have schizophrenia. This is a rather high hurdle for most people affected by it. Medication is the only thing that is known to help, other than kind support from friends.

 

I dunno - if you can come to accept and understand the disorder, and recognize how and when it is affecting you through introspection and self observance, I would think you COULD, in theory, start to control the symptoms of it...

It wouldn't eliminate the issues it causes internally, but rather would give you a mechanism to deal with them.

 

Meditation helps the conscious mind reconnect to the more natural parts of the brain. Because meditation can improve symptoms, this suggest that the conscious mind is contributing to its own condition, via mind over matter. The reconnection to natural is helping to remove a software problem that is creating a hardware problem.

When I was young (pre-teen) and I did not what to go to school, a few times a year, I could induce symptoms of being sick including a slight body temperature rise; induced by stress. Once I was able to stay home, I would get better, in an hour, because I was more relaxed and was happy to just putt around.

If I had not been doing this consciously, with will power, but it was being done unconsciously, through personal or cultural programming or a neurosis, this sickness loop may have appeared spontaneously and more often and may have lingered much longer. I would have been given medicines and other treatments. This may have worked, because this doctor ritual and the reaction of my parents, may have corrected my unconscious, if it wanted this attention.

Spiritual healing deals with diseases stemming from software blockages, cause by the conscious and unconscious mind. Instead of using medicine rituals that address hardware problems, spiritual healing uses more a software approach to help the person reconnect to a natural software backup copy (healthy check point); reboot. The fact that meditation did work suggests a software problem.

When there is miracle healing where hardware solutions, such as surgery and medicine don't work, yet the conditions improves anyway, this is often due to an unconscious brain software emulation for a hardware problem. This is not easy to induce, with very few people in history having such skills. We still need hardware solutions.

But we also need to not undermine the software approach. Hacking into people brains, with rhetoric, spin and advertising, can add virus with unexpected results. The fear might be the dealing with brain software hacking, for personal gain, via an EPA approach. We fine those who create body hardware problems with chemicals. The fear is the spiritual or software polluter will be fined also and not allow to practice their craft.

 

Recently, I've become mucn interested with discovering of schizophrenia, so I've searched for any possible information about it. After reading of a significant amount of articles, I came to conclusion that meditation is not really the best way of treating this disorder. I think that a person with, for example, disorganized shizophrenia just won't be able to focus on meditation due to lack of coordination as described here. Thus, it seems that yet there's no better way of schizophrenia treatment than with the help of medications.

 

You stated medication is not the best treatment and that medication is the best treatment.

 

While you're amerilorating, didn't you conflagrate mecidation and metidation?

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Out of curiosity has there been significant research and treatments testing in linking viruses, herpes, mononucleosis and autoimmune disorders to schizophrenia? If so what treatments have they devised?

I haven't read or kept up extensivly on the above subjects and wonder if someone knowledgeable will answer.

 

It's true.... meditation is not really the best way of treating this disorder

 

I have afamily member who tried to go the meditation route for years with no success. Thankfully he is now on medication, which is working. This stuff is complicated. I highly doubt that meditation alone can have much of an effect. how do you measure the amount or quality of the meditation?

 

Yes, but try telling someone who is in denial about their disease that. I would question the honesty of anyone who has a mental disease when asked about the excessiveness of alternative treatments. No one wants to admit that they need to be medicated.

 

And what parts of the brain are not natural?

Just what isn't natural? This gets to the pop nonsense and fallacious beliefs. There is a popular belief that everything natural is good for us. And if it is natural, it can't be bad. Well, snake venom is natural too, but I wouldn't recommend it as healthy. Poisonous mushrooms are natural too.

How are you going to get a schizophrenic to meditate?

 

It's conceivable that if a schizophrenic is being successfully treated with anti-psychotic medication, that meditation might help that individual cope with the sometimes pretty devastating side-effects of the meds

Meditation teachers themselves don't typically think of meditation as a treatment for the major psychoses. Nevertheless, people with serious psychiatric problems often enroll in meditation groups in hopes of finding some kind of alternative cure. So meditation teachers are often taught to be on the lookout for them and to try to get them whatever help they need.

 

They call it the Thorazine Shuffle for a reason. Yeah, the disease and the medication can be very devastating.