RTE No 20 Interior - Road to Emmaus Journal

Road to Emmaus Vol. V, No. 2 (#17)boxes will only be an extra humiliation. Work therapy must take a person’sabilities and intellect into consideration. Many of my patients are educated,they read quite a lot, write verse and prose, make inventions in differentspheres. Yes, many of them are eccentric, but they aren’t dangerous.One of my patients wrote stories, which his parents then took away fromhim, tearing the papers to pieces. I asked his mother: “What are you leavinghim with? Just the pills? What interest will he have in life? What will helive for? Let him write these stories.” Having something to live for helpspeople with the most acute forms of disease to survive. Also, experienceshows that even the most acutely ill schizophrenic, if he has love for hisneighbor, can make progress. Actually, the more love he has, the better theprognosis. Often, it is not medical care that determines the prognosis in theend, but the patient’s attitude towards others. If he is capable of sympathizingand helping someone else, he will have a better prognosis, even withthe severest form of schizophrenia.There have been many ill people in the history of psychiatry who becamegreat. They did not stay on the level of their ailment but rose above it, andeven became researchers of their own disease. They were able to give a fulland sound account of the manifestation and influence of their pathologyover their personality. An example of this is Kandinsky and his work onpseudo-hallucinations. A sane person cannot understand a pathology thathe has not entered into. He can only study it from the outside, from thematerial that the ill man provides him with. Kandinsky observed himself:how he entered into the different phases of his illness and how he came outof them, and made a great contribution to our understanding.RTE: Fascinating. Can you tell us which mental diseases are inherited ororganic, and which come about environmentally, through upbringing, traumas,and attitudes?MARINA: Mental diseases such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, and maniacdepressivepsychosis are inherited. They can’t be caused by incidents.Neurotic diseases are caused by, or combined from, factors in the person’senvironment, upbringing, or education — these are functional diseases.Also, somatic pathology often causes mental and emotional disorder, orconversely, negative emotions and irrational ideas can cause somaticpathology, that is, become psychosomatic.14 Dr. Marina Busigini,1980’s.