Welcome to the worlds of Steven Michael Harris (Author, Theorist, Educator and Performer).
Imagine that a group of people with a new disorder has been identified by the medical establishment. The disorder has symptoms of tremor, psychosis, extreme mood-swings, inappropriate sexual behavior, memory loss... In a science fiction world of our imagination the medical forces are able to swing into action and study this group of people with a whirlwind of activity. In the 24-hours after identifying this disorder countless medications were tested and a medication with high-effectiveness in relieving the symptoms of the new disorder was located. At the right dosage most of the symptoms go away and these patients are able to function quite well although there are some side-effects. The medication has a therapeutic range much like many of the other medications that can be prescribed for a variety of problems. This means that if you take too little of the medication you can get worse and if you take too much of the medication you can get worse. In that same 24-hour period a pharmaceutical company is able to license the new drug and doctors begin to prescribe the new medication for these people that are identified with the new disorder and the patients are able to function much better with the medication. Like many who receive medication for various problems, this group will need to continue paying the drug store for this medication if they want to avoid the terrible symptoms - perhaps for the rest of their lives. One of the drawbacks of taking this medication is that if you stop taking it, the symptoms will return and they will be worse than before the medication treatment began. But this sort of thing is common with psycho-pharmaceutical drugs.
If the group of people with the disorder in this scenario were suffering from heroin withdrawal, and the doctors were somehow unaware of this, then the one drug that would work the best in relieving their symptoms would be heroin. The heroin would make them better and they would be paying the drug companies for their prescription of heroin (in a therapeutic dose).
Meanwhile, in this science fiction world, the doctors would be using their success with heroin to create their scientific understanding of the brain. Seeing that heroin makes this group of symptoms improve, they might decide that the neurotransmitters that were increased by heroin were in short supply in these patients and that the neurotransmitters that were decreased by the heroin were being overproduced by the body. They might even decide that these neurotransmitters were regulators of the functions effected by this new disorder.
Some enterprising doctor who was involved with this work might write up a paper and get his/her name attached to this disorder and then have a significant future career as a speaker at medical conferences.
Of course, we know that heroin is not what helped these people. Heroin is what made them have the symptoms in the first place. But the people in this fictional world did not know that. They used the success of the treatment with this drug as the basis of their science and medical understanding.
Every symptom of disorder that is written about in the DSM-IV can also be created by legal and illegal drug and alcohol use.
If you drink or do drugs enough you will experience a lack of focus, short and long-term memory loss, stuttering, aphasia, tremor, mood-swings, lack of social awareness, sexual dysfunction, change in appetite, mental retardation, mania, sleep disorder, disorganized speech, loose associations, grandiosity, paranoia, hallucinations, delusions, coma...
The person kicking a major drug or alcohol habit will go through a period of withdrawal where these symptoms get worse for some time in the absence of taking the substance that has been stressing the body.
The period of withdrawal is necessary as the path towards health. Every symptom is worse but the person is actually getting better.
Some people go through this detox period and manage to stay away from their drug of choice for good. Of these people, some appear to have a full recovery of their abilities and manage to reach a good state of health. Some people get clean but appear to have permanent neurological damage that was a result of their drug use.
What if it can be shown that those with permanent damage are symptomatic partly because they did not have enough withdrawal? That something got in the way of their being able to go through a proper withdrawal from their substance disorder?
Then what they would need to get better is some sort of treatment to give them more withdrawal.
The body operating under the conditions of drug use begins to learn to operate under such conditions. The longer the exposure to the drugs, the more that learning is embedded in the system.
The body that has the drugs removed then needs to learn to operate without the conditions of the drug environment. (Which is a new drug environment.) A drug withdrawal is worse if the exposure to the toxic environment has been continuing for a long time.
Short-term drug use is remembered in the nervous system as short-term memory and is not as permanent. Withdrawal from short-term drug use is not so severe.
Long-term drug use is remembered in the system in the mechanisms of short-term memory and long-term memory and the withdrawal is more severe.
The one thing that is consistent among all of the mental disorders mentioned in the DSM-IV is the mechanism of memory. It is the mechanism of memory - long-term and short-term memory - that causes every disorder to progress with ever-increasing severity as the disorder learns these behaviors. Any neurological symptom that continues to get worse is being practiced by the nervous system. The mechanisms of memory (which exist in every nerve cell of the body to some degree) are learning the disorder and practice makes perfect.
The treatment that will cure these disorders will reverse this pattern and will need to somehow make it possible to unlearn a bad pattern of functioning. Such a treatment will seem to be very stressful for some time as the body goes through a period of withdrawal (a period of unlearning the disorder much like the period of unlearning a drug addiction).
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Copyright © 1997-2008
steven michael harris
Lexington, virginia, usa