Can Ritalin Cause Schizophrenia in ADHD kids?

Recently, my husband and I agreed to take in a 14 year old boy named Jason from the United States who’d been struggling in school. His dad was “abusive” (per Jason and his mother’s reports) and his mom felt strongly that if he were in a different environment, he’d be able to emotionally calm down and focus. We were going to homeschool him in Mexico where we live. We knew Jason personally, but also before he came to live with us in Mexico, we had a number of Skype meetings with him. His mom withdrew him from public school in December and his passport wasn’t scheduled to arrive until February 6th. So John and I worked with him through January doing online meetings and sending him videos and articles to read in the meantime. Often, he complained that he couldn’t watch the videos because they weren’t available or his Internet was down. His mom said that Jason didn’t finish his chores. He’d vacuum the floor, but then he’d leave the vacuum cleaner sitting in the middle of the room. He’d wash half the dishes and the half that he’d washed were washed halfway. He’d do the laundry, but then throw it down the stairs instead of folding it. Given the problem of abuse in his home, I was undaunted by these reports. They made sense to me. I looked forward to being able to give this kid a quiet environment and some tools and boundaries to help him learn some new things. John and I drove all the way to San Antonio, TX to pick Jason up at the airport. His mother didn’t really seem worried about having Jason fly into Mexico City. She was at her wits’ end and she seemed to just not care anymore about what happened to Jason. Or (I thought), her primary goal was just to get him out of her house to a house that was “safe”. So we offered to pick Jason up at the airport in San Antonio because it was the closest airport he could fly to where everyone still spoke English.

Click here to schedule a health coaching session with us.

This is where the story gets weird. According to Jason’s mom, Jason was on both Ritalin (Metadate) and Prozac (Fluoxetine). She’d decided to let us wean him off the Prozac while he was with us since he could have suicidal ideation during the withdrawal process. When I asked him about his Ritalin and Prozac on the drive home, Jason said that he’d taken both of his pills that morning. By the next day though, Jason told us that he’d stopped taking the drugs two months before. “I just throw them away.” He told me when I asked him how he got away with not taking the drugs. “Okay.” I said. I asked him for some more details about this and assumed that maybe his mom wasn’t as tuned into Jason as she’d claimed to be. Or maybe Jason was lying. I wasn’t sure and I was getting conflicting reports from the two of them. How could his mom not know that Jason was tonguing his meds? Jason clearly wasn't ADHD. He'd sit for hours and read his book Twilight. He'd resist reading books that I'd suggest, but sitting quietly and doing something that required some focus definitely wasn't his problem. I hid his Ritalin and Prozac because if he was lying about NOT taking the drugs (clearly he'd lied about either taking them or not taking them), I didn't want him to have suicidal ideation and then decide to overdose on Ritalin and Prozac. Over the upcoming weeks, Jason showed us his most frustrating behaviors. He actively avoided doing any chores at all. I didn’t pressure him. I thought it would be better to let Jason have a short break from the chores and then create a new paradigm with new rules regarding chores so as to hijack the current abuse-cycle he was used to in his own home. I was working off the idea that Jason's step-dad was a real asshole since this was what his mom had told us. It was during this time that Jason started concocting interesting “projects” that he’d jump into impulsively without asking us first. The first project was a special shelf that Jason wanted to build for our essential oils. His enthusiasm for the project was surprising. He took measurements for the shelf and then built a model of it out of paper. John and I exchanged glances over it. We were proud of Jason and thought, “look at this kid’s spatial reasoning skills and his initiative!” We patted him on the back for coming up with a creative project like this. The next day, we gave Jason a mission to walk down to the centro and back home. This was his task. He had a cell phone (purchased by us since his mother hadn’t thought ahead about Jason's need to be able to communicate) and GPS.  Jason was supposed to update us on his location throughout the day (even though we had software installed on the phone to tell us his whereabouts). He was NOT to get in the car with anyone for any reason (since everyone was a stranger to him as a brand new arrival in Mexico). On his way home, Jason got in the car with a man he recognized from a construction project we’re working on in Mexico. He didn’t send us a message or tell us his whereabouts. When he arrived back at our house, we called his mom and put her on speaker-phone and John and I yelled at Jason. This was dangerous and stupid behavior that could get him killed. Jason cried. He said that he knew it was stupid but that his step-dad had texted him at the moment he got in the truck. It seemed as though Jason understood things at our house (the rules, the expectations, and the idea that we cared about his well-being) better after this incident. We moved his things out of his bedroom to a “common area” in our house and told him he’d have to earn the privilege of a private bedroom by obeying our rules. But the next morning, when I came out of my bedroom, Jason was brewing alcohol in the kitchen with a pineapple and some of our prized stash of natural yeast (which is extremely hard to find in Mexico). His grandpa had brewed alcohol years ago and Jason had told us stories about how he’d brewed some blueberry beer at his home in the states. His mom had tasted it and said it was really good, but his step-dad (the abusive one), had been concerned about having Jason brew alcohol. John and I were both against having alcohol in our home because we’d both grown up with alcoholic family members. But Jason persisted with the idea of alcohol. His little bottle of pineapple beer sat on the counter and John and I were reluctant to throw it away. Jason was moody and persistent about certain things. The alcohol was one of those things.

Click here to buy Cure ADHD Now: The No-Nonsense Guide to Plants, Vitamins, and Minerals That Are Scientifically and Anecdotally Proven to Cure ADHD.

Next, Jason designed a distillery on paper. He became obsessed with the distillery and even though John and I gave him no incentive to continue with it, he persisted. One day we went to a hardware store and we told him that he could buy materials to build some walls to create some privacy in the common area where his bedroom space was located. John and I were there for quite some time getting some other things that we needed while Jason walked through the store with our daughter (age 17). She kept an eye on Jason who had trouble following his list. And he forgot about his bedroom and instead sought out the materials for the distillery even though John and I had been clear with him that we never intended to buy him the materials to create such a thing. Jason also had a habit of seriously hijacking conversations. He’d interrupt with wildly off-topic tidbits that were hard to ignore. And if we didn’t tune into him, he’d get angry with us. Our evening routine involved attempts at conversations about things John and I needed to talk about with ten or more serious interruptions. Jason would get progressively angrier and angrier if we didn’t follow his train of thought. By evening, he was usually in a sour mood. I enrolled him in Spanish lessons for 3 weeks. He’d be going to these classes for 4 hours a day, 5 days of the week. This allowed us to have time to recalibrate during the day. I could tell that Jason wouldn’t be able to learn anything sitting at a table with me or John. Jason was really interested in music (it seemed). He’d brought a guitar with him and John had intended to teach him some things, but what really interested Jason was building a guitar. Actually, no…he wanted to create a guitar-building business. So, as business people ourselves, John and I explained how a guitar-making business would actually work.

Click here to subscribe to the Living Database!

“How many guitars could you make in one year?” John asked Jason. “I could make one per day.” Jason said. “Okay…” John said, “A guitar that only takes one day to make probably won’t be very valuable.” “But all I’d need to do is get a famous person to play it.” Jason told John. “But how would you do that if your guitar wasn’t very valuable and wasn’t well made?” As soon as Jason realized that making guitars wasn’t easy, he didn’t want to do it anymore. It was around this time that we discovered that Jason was stealing things from us. Our things were packed away in his bags. He had one of my socks, a fork, and two pairs of our daughter’s underwear in his bags. The more we tuned into Jason’s things, the more interesting his things became to us. We realized that he had a habit of stashing weird items. At night when we came home, we started asking him to empty his pockets. He would draw attention to things we otherwise would’ve missed. Like a carefully folded piece of aluminum foil. “Where’d that piece of aluminum foil go?” He asked us after he’d made a pile of stuff from his pockets on the kitchen table. “What aluminum foil?” We’d ask. It all looked like trash. But then, there it was…the aluminum foil. “What’s that for?” John asked. “Oh, it has my water purification tablets in it.” He said. The next day, when I found the aluminum foil in his bags, I unfolded it and discovered there was nothing in it which prompted John and I to search his room more carefully. Upon closer inspection we found that Jason had also disassembled a cell phone charger and removed the copper wires. The copper wiring had been coiled and was laying in the middle of the floor in a pile of torn papers, lint, and other trash. This was when John and I remember Jason talking about another one of his obsessions: weapons. He’d talked at length about his goal to build electrified brass knuckles and other electrically inspired weapons that worked like a taser. During my Skype time with Jason before he got to Mexico, he’d told me that he’d watch a YouTube video about how to build a taser using an old camera. His mom told us that Jason had been put in suspension for lighting a fire in his own hands on the bus using hand sanitizer and a lighter. So John and I looked on YouTube for videos that would help explain all the odds and ends in Jason’s possession. The results worried us. Meanwhile, we took back the things that Jason had stolen from us. And he seemed to not notice. His behavior in terms of interruptions, anger, and even smiling and silliness with us remained unchanged.

Click here to buy Hawaii Pharm's Mucuna pruriens tincture.

One night, after his classes, we asked Jason to stay in the garden area downtown and read a book while we went and ran errands. Instead, Jason went around the garden again and again. He told us that he went “90 laps” around the tiny space while we were gone. John and I both noted that each time we walked by, Jason looked a little crazy and we were sure that the restaurant owners around the perimeter of the garden probably thought that Jason was crazy too. Strangely, Jason didn’t seem crazy to me in a lot of ways. He seemed really frustrating to me. And at times dangerous. He stole a needle from me and put it in the window mesh. We started locking our bedroom doors at night. The doors had the kind of locks on them that were easy to pick with just a thin, cylindrical piece of metal (we used a bobby pin that was bent open in the shape of a "L"), but we figured that if he decided to break into our bedrooms that the locked doors would send a strong message at least. We were most concerned about our daughter because she slept upstairs in the same area with Jason and Jason seemed infatuated with her...and he'd stolen her underwear. The next morning, after we started locking our doors, John and I went upstairs to look through Jason's things after he'd left for Spanish classes. Our daughter told us that while she was in the shower, she'd heard Jason come in from the outside patio and jiggle the door to her bedroom. But I felt certain that we wouldn't find anything in Jason's bags since we'd been taking back all the stuff he'd stolen and going through his things each day. Certainly Jason knew that we'd been going through his stuff since his loot was gone. And why bother stealing more if this was the case? John picked through Jason's bags, one item at a time and three layers down, he found a bobby pin which was slightly bent and that looked like it had been forced into something (probably our daughter's door). We hired a guard to watch over him for the next two nights since this seemed to be the time of the day when most Jason's insidious activities took place. He seemed to have a rhythm or a cycle that he followed. In the mornings he was grouchy, angry, and nervous. In the afternoons, he was lucid and seemed normal and happy. By evening, he was angry again or confused, depending on the day's events.

Alcohol Addiction Demystified: The Science of Alcohol Addiction and How to Overcome It At Home - BUY HERE!

Schizophrenia Symptoms

And we called Jason's mom and told her that Jason’s needs were too high for us to be able to manage them here in Mexico. We weren’t equipped to deal with a kid like him. When we told him some of his behaviors she told us that this was, “classic Jason” and not to worry. This was when we suddenly connected some dots: Jason’s mom is Bipolar. And Jason’s history of taking Ritalin places him at risk for developing Bipolar spectrum or Schizophrenia spectrum disorders. It took no time at all for me to find a set of symptoms that fit Jason perfectly:

• Active, but aimless behavior that’s not constructive (working on a distillery when Jason actually needed walls for a bedroom, walking 90 laps around a small garden)

• Bizarre emotional responses like an inappropriate or flat affect (John and I would point out to Jason that he would smile and laugh when Jason was really describing something that made him feel sad or mad...each time we pointed this out, Jason would react to this information as though he'd never noticed his incongruent facial expressions before.)

• False, fixed beliefs (Jason’s beliefs were rigid and unmoving. No matter what John and I said, he wasn’t able to change his beliefs about the appropriateness of a 14 year old making alcohol, for example.)

• Lack of motivation to do work (Jason lost interest in projects like making a guitar for example, once he realized that the project would require work)

• Silly or strange behavior (stealing random objects, Jason would also often try to change the seating arrangements in the living room, and he laughed at almost everything no matter how serious it was; Jason's answers to questions were only tangentially relevant)

• Disorganized speech (In addition to interrupting us, Jason often interrupted himself as he was trying to talk about something else)

• Disorganized behavior (Jason had a distinct smell that led us to believe he didn't clean himself in the shower - I’ll say more about that below; Jason was extremely clumsy to the point that we often reminded him to be careful not to fall in front of a bus)

  These behaviors describe a person with disorganized schizophrenia although there are some additional symptoms not listed here. At first, I thought that maybe Jason’s behaviors were a combined results of having been on Ritalin since the 1st grade plus lots of time playing violent video games. But a quick search online revealed that Ritalin can actually cause schizophrenia even in kids who are not predisposed to the disorder. Once I realized that Jason’s symptoms were part of a disorder, several kids came to mind who had the same kind of bizarre behaviors. I’d viewed these kids as “creative”, but the more I thought about it, many of them were almost non-functional. The mother of one of these other kids had told me that her daughter complained of “hearing voices” at times. This girl was only 12 years old at the time. A 22-year old man who’d seemed completely normal to me when I wrote to him via email was a complete mess when I met him in person. I’d wondered if this young man had multiple personalities, his behavior was so erratic in person. He was intelligent in writing, but he lacked motivation and he wasn’t able to learn new things (it seemed) even from personal experience. His behavior was so similar to Jason’s that I was surprised I hadn’t noticed it before. Yet another young woman who was not a prostitute, aged 18, had agreed to be paid for sex by a man 20 years older than her. She’d failed to see that this behavior was technically “prostitution”. Is there a link between Ritalin and schizophrenia? Apparently. These kids had all taken Ritalin to treat “ADHD”.    I spent some time researching Bipolar Disorder and Ritalin as well and found that Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia Disorders are related. Schizoaffective Disorder is where these two mental illnesses categorically overlap. But labels are mostly designed to help the insurance companies decide how much to pay out for a patient's treatment. In reality, in many situations it's difficult to tease apart what's Bipolar and what's Schizophrenia. Psychiatrists even have a hard time telling the difference between these two disorders.   So we hired a guard to watch over Jason at night while we slept during Jason’s final days with us in Mexico and we worked Jason differently during this time. Instead of getting angry or feeling fearful about what he was doing, we started approaching him as though something was glitching out in his brain. Jason seemed okay with this. And it made us feel less crazy to acknowledge that Jason's behavior was perhaps caused by schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. On his final day with us, we took him out to dinner and talked with him honestly about what we’d observed in his behavior and why we’d hired the guard. At no time did Jason seem scared by the guard or frightened by the fact that we’d felt compelled to hire a guard to oversee him. This seemed strange by itself. In fact, Jason slept so well on the nights when the guard was there, that he didn’t even know when the guard left (even though we’d moved Jason’s bed to an area right next to the front door to make it easier for the guard to keep an eye on him).   I never mentioned schizophrenia to Jason because I didn’t want to scare him and I knew that he probably knew very little about schizophrenia except that it’s socially stigmatized. Instead, I told him instead that I suspected that he had Bipolar Disorder like his mom and that he needed to be medicated differently. His mom resisted the possibility that this was the problem and insisted that I give him Ritalin again (I refused). I didn't hear from her from two days before Jason’s plane took off for home until a week later when she finally decided to send some money for the time Jason had spent with us. We had to put him on a plane to fly to Texas, 16 hours from her and Jason’s step-dad’s home. She didn’t have a passport and she and Jason’s step-dad had cut up their credit cards so they weren’t able to come get him from Mexico. Talk about planning ahead…   At the beginning of this whole venture with Jason, John and I thought we were going to be dealing with an abused 14-year old boy who would simply need some guidance, boundaries, and direction. We'd planned to buy him some books and give him lots of educational opportunities. We figured there was a good chance that Jason would stay with us permanently. What we ended up with was a kid who has either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and a mother who refuses to admit that Jason has a mental illness. I suspect that a lot of the “abuse” that’s happening in their home goes both ways because Jason is rigid and not able to reason according to the reality that most people ascribe to. It's possible that Jason's step-dad reaches his limit with Jason and gets abusive because he feels like his step-son's behavior is dangerous and stupid (which it is). But if the parent's don't acknowledge their son's mental illness and start working with it, the prognosis is poor. Jason needs some kind of intervention for his own safety. Unfortunately, his mom and step-dad will probably figure that out eventually, but maybe under some dire circumstances.   I sent an email to my dad telling him how sick I was about Jason and how Jason had gotten a raw deal by having to take Ritalin. And my dad sent me a message back saying that 25 years ago, when he was the president of the school board in the small town where I grew up, he remembers teachers calling parents in to talk with them about putting their kids on Ritalin. The teachers knew that this drug would qualify the school for extra financial assistance and Ritalin made kids easier to control. My dad said that he was angered by this whole situation even 25 years ago and that it still makes him angry, but that the fact that kids end up suffering with problems like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder is even more infuriating.   I add this story to the long list of stories I've heard about how the pharmaceutical companies are destroying people’s health…

 Click here to learn more about the DreamLight.app, a guided meditation and brain-entrainment tool for natural trauma-release.

Schizophrenia Cures

And we called Jason's mom and told her that Jason’s needs were too high for us to be able to manage them here in Mexico. We weren’t equipped to deal with a kid like him. When we told him some of his behaviors she told us that this was, “classic Jason” and not to worry. This was when we suddenly connected some dots: Jason’s mom is bipolar. And Jason’s history of taking Ritalin places him at risk for developing bipolar spectrum or schizophrenia spectrum disorders. It took no time at all for me to find a set of symptoms that fit Jason perfectly:

• Active, but aimless behavior that’s not constructive (working on a distillery when Jason actually needed walls for a bedroom, walking 90 laps around a small garden)

 

• Bizarre emotional responses like an inappropriate or flat affect (John and I would point out to Jason that he would smile and laugh when Jason was really describing something that made him feel sad or mad...each time we pointed this out, Jason would react to this information as though he'd never noticed his incongruent facial expressions before.)

 

• False, fixed beliefs (Jason’s beliefs were rigid and unmoving. No matter what John and I said, he wasn’t able to change his beliefs about the appropriateness of a 14 year old making alcohol, for example.)

 

• Lack of motivation to do work (Jason lost interest in projects like making a guitar for example, once he realized that the project would require work)

 

• Silly or strange behavior (stealing random objects, Jason would also often try to change the seating arrangements in the living room, and he laughed at almost everything no matter how serious it was; Jason's answers to questions were only tangentially relevant.)

 

• Disorganized speech (In addition to interrupting us, Jason often interrupted himself as he was trying to talk about something else)

 

• Disorganized behavior (Jason had a distinct smell that led us to believe he didn't clean himself in the shower; Jason was extremely clumsy to the point that we often reminded him to be careful not to fall in front of a bus)

These behaviors describe a person with disorganized schizophrenia although there are some additional symptoms not listed here. At first, I thought that maybe Jason’s behaviors were a combined result of having been on Ritalin since the 1st grade plus lots of time playing violent video games. But a quick search online revealed that Ritalin can actually cause schizophrenia even in kids who are not predisposed to the disorder. Once I realized that Jason’s symptoms were part of a disorder, several kids came to mind who had the same kind of bizarre behaviors. I’d viewed these kids as “creative”, but the more I thought about it, many of them were almost non-functional. The mother of one of these other kids had told me that her daughter complained of “hearing voices” at times. This girl was only 12 years old at the time. A 22-year old man who’d seemed completely normal to me when I wrote to him via email was a complete mess when I met him in person. I’d wondered if this young man had multiple personalities, his behavior was so erratic in person. He was intelligent in writing, but he lacked motivation and he wasn’t able to learn new things (it seemed) even from personal experience. His behavior was so similar to Jason’s that I was surprised I hadn’t noticed it before. Yet another young woman who was not a prostitute, aged 18, had agreed to be paid for sex by a man 20 years older than her. She’d failed to see that this behavior was technically “prostitution”. Is there a link between Ritalin and schizophrenia? Apparently. These kids had all taken Ritalin from a very young age to treat “ADHD”.  I spent some time researching bipolar disorder and Ritalin as well and found that bipolar disorder and schizophrenia disorders are related. Schizoaffective disorder is where these two mental illnesses categorically overlap. But labels are mostly designed to help the insurance companies decide how much to pay out for a patient's treatment. In reality, in many situations it's difficult to tease apart what's bipolar and what's schizophrenia. Psychiatrists even have a hard time telling the difference between these two disorders. Indeed, none of these children fit the profile for a child with ADHD by the time they entered adolescence.  So we hired a guard to watch over Jason at night while we slept during Jason’s final days with us in Mexico and we worked with Jason differently during this time. Instead of getting angry or feeling fearful about what he was doing, we started approaching him as though something was glitching out in his brain. Jason seemed okay with this. And it made us feel less crazy to acknowledge that Jason's behavior was perhaps caused by schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. On his final day with us, we took him out to dinner and talked with him honestly about what we’d observed in his behavior and why we’d hired the guard. At no time did Jason seem scared by the guard or frightened by the fact that we’d felt compelled to hire a guard to oversee him. This seemed strange by itself. In fact, Jason slept so well on the nights when the guard was there, that he didn’t even know when the guard left (even though we’d moved Jason’s bed to an area right next to the front door to make it easier for the guard to keep an eye on him). I never mentioned schizophrenia to Jason because I didn’t want to scare him and I knew that he probably knew very little about schizophrenia except that it’s socially stigmatized. Instead, I told him instead that I suspected that he had bipolar disorder like his mom and that he needed to be medicated differently. His mom resisted the possibility that this was the problem and insisted that I give him Ritalin again (I refused). I didn't hear from her from two days before Jason’s plane took off for home until a week later when she finally decided to send some money for the time Jason had spent with us. We had to put him on a plane to fly to Texas, 16 hours from her and Jason’s step-dad’s home. She didn’t have a passport and she and Jason’s step-dad had cut up their credit cards very abruptly (apparently) while Jason was gone. As such, they weren’t able to come get him from Mexico. Talk about planning ahead… At the beginning of this whole venture with Jason, John and I thought we were going to be dealing with an abused 14-year old boy with ADHD who would simply need some guidance, boundaries, and direction. We'd planned to buy him some books and give him lots of educational opportunities. We figured there was a good chance that Jason would stay with us permanently. What we ended up with was a kid who has either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and a mother who refuses to admit that Jason has a mental illness. I suspect that a lot of the “abuse” that’s happening in their home goes both ways because Jason is rigid and not able to reason according to the reality that most people ascribe to. It's possible that Jason's step-dad reaches his limit with Jason and gets abusive because he feels like his step-son's behavior is dangerous and stupid (which it is). But if the parents don't acknowledge their son's mental illness and start working with it, the prognosis is poor. Jason needs some kind of intervention for his own safety. Unfortunately, his mom and step-dad will probably figure that out eventually, but maybe under some dire circumstances. I sent an email to my dad telling him how heart-sick I was about Jason and how Jason had gotten a raw deal by having to take Ritalin. And my dad sent me a message back saying that 25 years ago, when he was the president of the school board in the small town where I grew up, he remembers teachers calling parents in to talk with them about putting their kids on Ritalin. The teachers knew that this drug would qualify the school for extra financial assistance and Ritalin made kids easier to control. My dad said that he was angered by this whole situation even 25 years ago and that it still makes him angry, but that the fact that kids end up suffering with problems like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder is even more infuriating. Before I say more, I need to now talk briefly about the unpleasant body-smell and breath smell that Jason had. At the time when Jason was with us, I didn’t know that the smell may have been caused by “fetor hepaticus” (the so-called “breath of the dead”) or by hepatic encephalopathy (where liver congestion, liver infection / colonization, liver abscesses, or possibly liver cysts can cause a build up of ammonia in the body that leads to brain toxicity and mental health issues). So I want to start this discussion about schizophrenia by presenting the idea that the liver can become toxic for a number of reasons and as a result of that toxicity, the body cannot detoxify itself properly to get rid of toxins that hijack the brain and mental faculties. Toxins that can’t be cleared by the liver end up circulating in the blood which means that those toxins end up, at some point, in the brain. When that occurs, the brain and mental faculties can be profoundly affected. I can’t prove that Jason had fetor hepaticus or hepatic encephalopathy. I didn’t know enough about the possible connection between liver disease and ADHD. But John and I did work with one other, much younger child who had a very similar smell and similar ADHD symptoms. I assumed that these boys had hygiene issues and it never occurred to me back then that their mental health problems and inability to focus and follow through on instructions was because they had liver issues. If a doctor diagnoses hepatic encephalopathy or fetor hepaticus, it is considered a serious, most likely terminal issue. But in reality, the liver can become temporarily congested in a very serious way that can be repaired with the right treatments. The liver may develop abscesses or cysts that later resolve themselves without fanfare when the patient is given the proper tools to heal (natural medicines, for example). In any case, liver toxicity is an important consideration in children with extremely disorganized and bizarre ADHD symptoms who also have a very strange, musty-sweet body or breath odor. Not all kids who develop severe symptoms of psychosis do so because there is a liver issue at the root cause, but the liver is an important thing to consider in kids who even have mild ADHD because, first of all, doctors don’t generally note the connection between ADHD and liver disease. The liver is a very regeneratable organ. The liver can heal if the patient works with the right treatments outside of conventional medicine (there are no treatments for healing the liver in conventional medicine). If the liver is host to a low-level infection, as it often is, the liver may become toxic and congested, for example. And the liver is a prime piece of real estate for a low-level infection because antibiotics are broken down by the liver to detoxify them. As a result, antibiotics don’t often treat the liver tissues. Antibiotics treat every other tissue in the body, but not the liver because the liver breaks the antibiotics down. So the liver is often headquarters for the colonization of bacteria and other pathogens following an acute disease. Since the time of this experience, we’ve worked with psilocybin, Ayahuasca, and Iboga or Ibogaine to help people overcome psychosis and bipolar disorder. Psilocybin, Iboga and Ibogaine, and Ayahuasca are entheogens that can help the brain reconfigure itself. I should also note here, for example, that Peganum harmala and other plants that contain harmine alkaloids are often very effective antibiotic agents against pathogens that like to colonize the body. But an ADHD patient with psychosis or confusion has to be able to understand how the sacred medicines could affect them psychologically. And if the underlying problem is liver toxicity, treatments like coffee enemas and the Hulda Clark Cleanse would be essential as a first step before working with the sacred medicines.  When we work with psychosis, we require family members and loved ones to be on-site to be a part of the work. Iboga/Ibogaine is especially useful in situations that involve addiction of any kind (methamphetamines, alcohol, etc.) as well as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). But psilocybin is the friendliest of the sacred medicines and usually a good starting block for those with serious mental health issues. The use of psilocybin, Ayahuasca, and Iboga for the treatment of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder isn't a common path, but it's a possible avenue that some people may want to consider if they wish for their loved one to be able to overcome a major mental illness. It’s a real tragedy that these medicines are used more often as there are many reports of people overcoming ADHD with just one trip with psilocybin, for example and nothing more.  Autism / ASD was once regarded as schizophrenia in children. I mention this to demonstrate the level of overlap in terms of the symptoms of these various disorders. A psychiatrist may diagnose a child with ADHD when, in fact, the child is having symptoms of psychosis. But let’s not get too wrapped up in the diagnostic labels as we talk about these things because diagnostic labels tend to make parents fearful. Also, though diagnostic labels seem to be clarifying, in fact, they can muddle everything quite hopelessly. Fear is the antithesis of intuition and if there’s one thing that’s really valuable in the treatment of psychosis, bipolar disorder, autism, and ADHD it’s parental intuition.  When we work with people with psychosis (children or adults), we always use the sacred indigenous medicines as a way to access and release trauma, including ancestral trauma that is ultimately a root cause of the mental illness. But that being said, treatment always begins with Cinchona officinalis and the supportive herbal treatments that go along with it to get rid of pathogenic infection that’s causing mental health issues. Patients must work with daily IR sauna sessions to produce an artificial fever as well as cold therapy and Wim Hof breathwork as a part of the process of healing. Essentially, treatment begins with Cinchona officinalis and other treatments for hemolytic bacteria and then, once the low-level infection is cured, sacred medicine work and trauma-informed therapies can be used to begin to rewire the brain. For patients with severe mental illness, family members begin by working with the sacred medicines directly themselves. At first, this is done to release individual trauma, but over time, the use of the sacred medicines is done to access resources for healing the patient. Additionally, in the article titled The High pH Therapy for Cancer Tests on Mice and Humans, A. K. Brewer, outlines a study that showed that Cesium salts or Cesium Chloride can be used (with great effectiveness) to cure cancer. At the end of the article, the author also mentions that Cesium salts are very effective at treating heart arrhythmias and bipolar disorder. Note, in particular, that heart arrhythmias are often caused by Streptococcus pyogenes infection. The proper use of high dose vitamin B3 therapy is also an essential body of information for anyone dealing with severe mental health issues. In the book, Niacin: The Real Story, there’s more information about how vitamin B3 (niacin) can cure schizophrenia (and how schizophrenia and other related mood disorders can be considered a deficiency disease brought on by too little vitamin B3 in the diet). The exact protocol and the underlying reasoning behind the treatments that can be used to cure psychosis and other serious mental health issues is beyond the scope of this discussion. Nonetheless, if your child or loved one seems to have symptoms of psychosis or another severe mental health issue, there’s no reason to go into a state of denial. There are ways to overcome severe mental health issues, but only by confronting the issues head-on with treatments other than those prescribed by conventional medicine doctors and psychiatrists. Two Sides In a normal, healthy, happy, and well-adjusted human being in the modern world, there are two hemispheres of the brain, the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. The two sides of the brain have to talk to each other in a productive way or else mental health issues develop. 

We can think of the left-brain as “dopamine dominant”. In contrast, the right brain is governed more by Thyrotropin Releasing Hormone (TRH). Throughout any given year, there are seasons during which dopamine is more dominant than TRH and vice versa. 

Dopamine is very logical. It is a neurohormone that governs our narrative thought and storylines in our lives that involve a beginning, a middle, and an end. Dopamine helps us connect into a logical, shared consensus reality by helping us follow rules, or decide to break them based on our own personal experience. 

TRH, on the other hand, is very emotion-based. It is a hormone that governs emotion and feelings in the body. We might say that the right-brain represents the body while the left-brain represents our ideals and the institutions that we construct (church, school, government) to maintain certain rules. TRH causes us to dream in color versus dreaming in black and white. As such, while dopamine is very “down-to-earth” we might say that TRH is more oriented toward aspirations and dreams, especially our emotions and how we feel about the facts and the rules.

In a healthy person, the left brain talks to the right brain all the time. The left brain knows the rules, but it checks in with the right brain about how certain rules feel. 

When a child is very young, he or she is very oriented toward the right brain and the body. Very young children under the age of 4 to 5 years are emotional creatures who don’t know the rules that apply in this institution or that institution yet. As children get older, they learn more and more about the rules and a natural dissociation occurs between the right-brain orientation and the left-brain orientation to the world.

Dissociation of consciousness is normal in modern humans. In fact, we require modern children to learn how to dissociate from their emotions early in their lives. Often, dissociation of our logical sense of what’s right or wrong from our felt-sense of emotions about what we feel helps us navigate. We can put our feelings “to the side” in order to fulfill an obligation. Or we can “ignore conscience” in order to do what feels right even though a certain set of rules urge that we do something different.

Modern psychology and psychiatry doesn’t talk a lot about dissociation because psychology and psychiatry are two practices that were created to make money from mental illness. Psychologists and psychiatrists make money by selling the idea that mental illness isn’t curable. Insurance companies cash in on psychology and psychiatry by dictating the need for mental health diagnoses. But in reality, all mental illness derives from this natural tendency of human consciousness to dissociate into “parts”.

Dr. Richard Schwartz is a psychologist and mindfulness practitioner who really expanded on the idea of parts therapy that aims to heal dissociative states of inner conflict. Not all dissociation is negative, but when a person is afflicted with negative self-talk, for example, that signifies that there is an underlying trauma that the body (the right-brain) has experienced and that the body is unable to express this experience in words because the left-brain won’t accept that the trauma occurred (or that the trauma was actually painful emotionally).

Emotions live in the body. We say, “my heart was broken” or “I felt my stomach drop” to describe very specific emotional states. Emotion-based talk is always centered on the body because we feel our emotions with our bodies. Meanwhile though, we think and reason and make rules with our minds. 

If you fall in love with someone who doesn’t love you back, you might try, for example, to make a rule with your left-brain to “not love that person anymore”. You might repeat the rule over and over again to yourself. You might put sticky notes up on your mirrors or create rules about where you can and cannot go in an effort to avoid the love-interest. But if your body loves that person, rules won’t be able to change the fact that the body feels pain and longing in the heart in regard to that person. Dissociation between the left-brain desire to not love the love-interest and the right-brain love for that person can only be resolved through dialogue between the right brain and the left brain. This sounds easy enough, but, in fact, when an inner conflict arises between what the left-brain believes is correct and what the right-brain feels, it can be hard to get the left-brain part of you to speak in a friendly and productive (and non-judgmental way) to the right-brain part of you.

An ADHD drug like Ritalin or amphetamines that cause a big release of dopamine at times when the body is not experiencing something that would provoke a natural dopamine release can lead to inner conflict and an inability for the right brain to communicate with the left brain and for the left-brain to be gentle and attentive to the right-brain. A child that grows up without the ability to do inner self-talk and self-care that allows for the resolution of inner conflicts can develop symptoms of mental illness when the challenge of puberty is on the horizon.

One of the reasons why we recommend that parents and children both work with the sacred indigenous medicines like psilocybin, Ayahuasca or Iboga in order to overcome ADHD is because these medicines promote a healthy dialogue between the right brain and the left brain so as to resolve inner conflicts as an individual. Parents are the purveyors of rules. As such, parents are often the inadvertent instigators of trauma for children. The family is a system that operates according to rules that are set by parents. The parents themselves are instigators of trauma as a result of their own traumatic upbringing if their own trauma has not been resolved using trauma-informed therapies such as sacred medicine work. When parents work to resolve their own underlying trauma using, for example, psilocybin microdosing, among other things, the system becomes much moe flexible. The paralysis of ADHD as a dynamic that everyone is trying to avoid triggering is released so that the system can move again and heal. 

In children with ADHD, trauma always plays an underlying role in negative behaviors. Drugs that release dopamine inhibit the resolution of trauma. On the other hand, medicines that regrow the dopamine receptors (like Mucuna pruriens) prime the brain and body for communication. This is a positive thing, but regrowing those dopamine neurons can also be like bringing the left hemisphere of the brain and the right hemisphere of the brain into a small room together to sit at a table after years of not speaking to each other at all. Sometimes, a reunion like this can be heart-warming, but it could also be explosive. This is why we recommend that parents work with sacred indigenous medicines like psilocybin themselves in order to be able to deal effectively and creatively with challenges that occur as the ADHD child’s trauma is primed for release. Kids can, in turn, do trauma-informed therapy like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing / EMDR, craniosacral therapy, or DreamLight.app to get the right-brain and the left-brain to communicate positively with each other so as to resolve trauma.

Treatments for Psychosis and Mental Illness: Summary

If your child has taken a drug for ADHD, you can heal whatever damage has been done by working with the Mucuna pruriens protocol, the Cinchona officinalis protocol, and by seeking out trauma-informed therapies or sacred medicines to overcome underlying trauma. Additionally, there are other known treatments for psychosis that have been used by doctors prior to the AMA takeover of psychology and psychiatry. These include:

• Malaria therapy / pyrotherapy - Doctors in the past would inject patients with malaria or typhoid (or Viscum album) to provoke fever in order to cure psychosis. This type of therapy had a cure rate of about 50%. This treatment works in patients who have a pathogenic colonization (a low-level infection) that’s causing the mental illness.

• Cold therapy - Cold packs were administered to patient’s bodies to reduce symptoms of psychosis. 

• High dose niacin therapy -  This therapy involves the administration of high doses of niacin to repair nicotinic receptors in the body.

• Sacred indigenous medicines and trauma-informed therapy - Psychosis and severe mental illness if often caused by underlying trauma that’s unresolved combined with low-level infection or drug administration that makes it impossible for the underlying trauma to resolve.

Now that we’ve shared this story about Jason and some experiences that we’ve had with children who were medicated for ADHD who later to go on later to develop psychosis or other types of mental illness, it’s important to wrap back around now to the ideas that we’ve presented earlier in this book regarding Sydenham’s chorea, PANS / PANDAS, ADHD, and OCD. Streptococcus pyogenes and other hemolytic pathogens can cause mental illness and physical movement disorders such as hyperactivity. Indeed, Streptococcus pyogenes can do “molecular mimicry” of dopamine receptors, causing the body’s immune system to appear to be attacking its own brain.  Again, the protocol for overcoming severe mental illness is beyond the scope of this book, but we want to make sure that we inform our readers of the fact that severe mental illness can develop as a result of taking ADHD drugs. But severe mental illnesses can be overcome with effort and if you have access to the information that you need about effective treatments. To overcome a major mental illness, trauma-informed therapy and treatment for low-level infection of hemolytic pathogens in addition to the Mucuna pruriens protocol is vital. These treatments require consistent effort and it takes some faith to keep going at times, yet for the most part, our experience has been that symptoms resolve very suddenly and they never return. Once trauma is released, it is gone permanently.

The Renegade Parent's Guide to Children's Health and Healing: Encyclopedia of Herbal Remedies