Conquering Schizophrenia: A Father, His Son, and a Medical Breakthrough

by Peter Wyden

Book Overview

This story of a father guiding his son from despair to hope is a chilling, inspiring journey through the mysterious tunnel of schizophrenia--a world once closed and forbidding, now suddenly radiating... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679446710
• ISBN13: 9780679446712
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 335 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.6" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Not Quite Conquering ....Yet

But still a valuable book that vividly portrays what concerned and responsible families endure when dealing with a psychotic child and trying to make sense of the mental health system that is not really a system. Unfortunately for Peter Wyden, his son became ill at a time when psychiatry was just moving out of the era influenced by Freud with concepts like schizophrenogenic mothers. Today, this crippling disease is becoming properly recognized as a neurobiological problem. Wyden guided his son through something like 50 different psychiatrists, numerous hospitals, clinics, half way houses, hypnosis and electroshock before the development of olanzapine. While this wasn't the first drug developed, it was the one that worked the best for them. Since this book was written in 1997, a number of other drugs in the olanzapine class have been brought to market. While they do help with many of the symptoms, they have not conquered the illness. In fact, there is now considerable controversy about the side effects associated with these newer agents. This class of drugs, called atypical antipyschotics, can cause considerable weight gain, elevated cholesterol levels, and the onset of type II diabetes. As a result, many doctors are going back to prescribing some of the older drugs and/or prescribing lower doses of two or more of them simultaneously. The important point, however, is that with more drug choices that are presently available, there is greater chance that one of them will be effective. The importance of this book is the description of the family role as it should be but is all to often not. Parents need to and should become actively involved in helping their ill children even if that is not appreciated by some psychiatrists. Marvin Ross Author Schizophrenia: Medicine's Mystery - Society's Shame

A veritable encyclopedia of psychiatry and mental health

Before you ransack the library trying to get straight about mental illness, just read Peter Wyden's "Conquering Schizophrenia - a Father, his Son, and a Medical Breakthrough." Wyden, a writer, tells of his son Jeff's 25-years of crippling psychosis, and his story vibrates with passionate critique of the mental health system. His journalist's piercing eye fixes the target, while the other eye darts around, taking us on a back-street tour of psychiatry's history, players, and struggles as Wyden searches for perspective on this arena.What is the target? Is it Jeff himself, who went from warm,extroverted child to introverted, erratic youth, then back to a more normal, properly medicated 46-year old man? Is it mental illness itself? Which illness? Jeff's was diagnosed as "school phobia," "anxiety," "depression," "schizophrenia - paranoid type," then "malignant case of manic-depressive." Perhaps it is psychiatry itself, with its "foibles,follies, and failures," and its oddly noble persistance in the face of overwhelming enigmas?In any case, the target keeps moving. This conveys Wyden's sense of confusion and hair-pulling frustration through the dozens of psychiatrists, neuroleptics that ravaged the body while they calmed the mind, the hospitals, and halfway houses that make up Jeff's existence. He shows us the "split" between modern medicaters who treat the physical, and the traditional Freudians who believe only in the unconscious and psychoanalytic. He describes the bizarre events of pharmacology finds and the equally bizarre trip through FDA approval. He narrates the bitter 20-year feud between Dr Spitzer and proponents of DSM series and the older therapists who call it a "straightjacket."The sound and fury, based on the void of the unknown, rages on. There is an abyss between etiologies, and chaos about categories. Signs of schizophrenia dovetail so slyly into signs of manic-depression (hallucinations, hyperagitation) that even "experts" can't say which is primary. Medications for one cross over for the other. "My learning curve was turning erratic," complained Wyden when Clozaril came on the scene. ". . . Anything might work. Anything might fail. . . There are no true experts."At the book's end, Jeff is converting from Clozapin to the newer Olanzapine (the "breakthrough"), and seems to be emerging from his demi-world into a more responsive, organized person. His real diagnosis is still up for grabs. The real breakthrough is hope, for today and for tomorrow, hope that research and medicine can cut through the profound devastation of a broken brain. Wyden has painted a realistic picture of major mental illness - ambiguous, unpredictable, messy, and bankrupting. Only those who have traveled that tunnel of despair can appreciate the candle of this seemingly promising advance.

Extremely helpful and hopeful. Well written and thorough.

"Conquering Schizophrenia: A Father, His Son, and A Medical Breakthrough", published by Knopf, January 1998, is a father's account of the life of his son Jeff.  Jeff's break came at age twenty-one.  The book chronicles the next twenty-five years along two interwoven paths: the events in the lives of Jeff and his family and the evolution of the mental-health field during this time --its trends, controversies, therapies, medicines, practitioners, advocacy groups, agencies, economics, politics, etc. The father/author, Peter Wyden, has published a dozen books and was formerly a writer for Newsweek. He writes in a concise, organized, journalistic style that is mercifully free of any self aggrandizement that might have been expected (he candidly acknowledges his missteps) and of any excessive sentimentality (the story itself speaks eloquently of the emotions, frustrations, struggles and celebrations that were there throughout).  He levels some very valid criticisms without being strident.  It is carefully crafted with detailed back-of-the-book chapter notes, bibliography and index for the reader who wants to dig deeper.  It is very up to date, mentioning situations as of Fall, 1997. (Of course we Internet devotees want to know how things are going this morning.) I strongly recommend this book highly to anyone whose life has been affected by schizophrenia or by any other serious mental illness. I have been struck over the last four years (our 23-year old son was diagnosed with schizophrenia four years ago) how much I read about one mental illness that relates to the others.  (Incidentally, I have no connection to the publisher or author. I wish I did know the Wydens personally). Jeff was treated by over 50 docs over the 25-year period. He was "treated" in every imaginable theater from the renowned Menninger Clinic, where at the time of Jeff's stay early on, probably did more harm than good, to a run-down half- way house, where he was helped greatly by a dedicated, compassionate social worker. His symptoms when bad were very bad. He once broke a nurse's nose. He was not an easy patient and not an easy son. But those that got to know the real Jeff were very fond of him. And to his father, even after spending 25 years of struggling with Jeff over meds, docs, hygiene, etc., maybe to some extent because of those struggles, Jeff was a hero, a theme often repeated. Family support helped (and I suspect help greatly) throughout. There were some talk/cognitive therapies here and there that helped deal with some of the problems of the underlying illness. Jeff's manic periods were helped by lithium. There were other meds that I cannot recount. A breakthrough came with Clozapine, though negative symptoms, especially lack of motivation, remained and a purposeful day, much less the possibility of a job, were not on Jeff's radar screen and he spent his hours at the half-way house. The "conquering" word in the title refers to the next breakthrough which came wi