Mary suffers from schizophrenia – suddenly she doesn’t

Mary sometimes imagines that God has reason to leave her in the hospital, but, she says, “I don’t even want to go there because the reasoning mind makes you feel very nervous and uncertain.” Her daily life becomes so narrow that she stops noticing the weather. “They won’t remind you of changing seasons – spring is coming, summer or winter is coming,” she said. “You’re just spending your days as soon as possible.”

Christine talks to her mother every week and says Mary never expressed her grief at the time. “I wanted to be involved, sorry you were there, are you sad?’ I’m sure she had those emotions, but she couldn’t express them. Christine felt her mother was safer at the Bronx Mental Center than anywhere else, but she wanted Mary to stay there all her life.

A year later, Mary was discharged from the hospital in September 2023. A week later, she collapsed in the bathroom and tried to move. She was taken to a Brooklyn hospital where doctors told her to stop taking antipsychotics because they thought her condition might be a side effect of the drug. Then they discovered that she actually had lymphoma, a sometimes fatal form of cancer. She began seven courses of treatment that combine chemotherapy with rituximab, a drug that targets antibodies that involve human immune responses.

When Christine and Angie visited her in the hospital, Mary answered their questions with one word. Her face had a vacant expression. Christine and Angie thought she was dying. Mary did it, too. She dreams of being a child, playing with her sister and four brothers, and in Kolkata, she grew up. “I told myself, ‘This must be the end of it,'” Mary said.

Angie, 22, recently graduated from Dartmouth, prepares for his mother’s death. She said: “I have multiple meetings and I’m just crying about the basic things I want her to give me, like, ‘I hope she can tell me what’s going on in my head, or ‘I hope she can tell me she’s sorry for what she’s done.’ Transparent

By Christmas, two months after chemotherapy began, Mary moved more freely and she began to have conversations. Christine and Angie noticed that her personalities seemed different: she was calm, outgoing and polite, and she often expressed her gratitude. Angie texts Christine that Mary looks peaceful, as if she “gets some clarity of post-life or death?”

Christine, twenty-nine, has settled in London, moved there to have a master’s degree in psychology, and her mother was able to watch the news and absorb information based on her own opinions. TV has been a source of excitement for years. Mary once said people were using her ideas and repeating her lines.

One day, when Christine visited the hospital, Mary asked to call. “I kind of laughed at her, ‘You want a phone call now?’ said Christine. “I didn’t really do a lot of things, but then I thought, why did she call? This is very unusual. “Mary already had the phone, but it was in storage because she told Christine that it contained spyware.

Angie gave her a flip phone and covered the camera with a piece of tape for safety. “She looks good with it, which is weird,” Angie said.

Mary completed chemotherapy for a month, and Christine and Angie were asked to check her in May at the hospital. “The psychiatrist is like, ‘Why are you calling me here? I don’t understand. She has no symptoms.’ We’re like, ‘Yes, that’s why we call you here.’ “transparent

Christine felt the same inside her mother when she first got sick, and that was something at Mary’s core changed. She tried to let the doctor take the scale of her mother’s recovery. By summer, her cancer had been relieved. One doctor wrote that she had not taken antipsychotics for months, but “her psychiatric symptoms disappeared.” “She has twenty years of psychiatry history. Have you heard of it? Can any of her medications cause this?” Christine told the doctor, and she spoke with a neurologist at the hospital, but he had no answer. Omid Heravi, one of Mary’s oncologists, also didn’t understand what was going on. “Medical is very professional, and we are not involved in other fields,” he said. He only guessed that one cancer drug she was given had collateral benefits. “Medical, all the side effects are pretty good,” he said.

When a person recovers from illness, it is often seen as the end of the story. But becoming sanity can also cause a narrative collapse, which is a confrontation with personal history and is no longer recognizable. Christine encouraged her mother’s friends and siblings to stay alienated for years to connect with them. She wanted to restore her mother’s sense of connection, but, she said, “I hope they can tell me – memories of my childhood – if this is the person she used to be.”

For years, Christine’s friends knew nothing about their mothers except for the details of mental illness. “Suddenly, I was like, ‘Hey, my mom is OK now. Do you want to call her and talk to her?” It was a shocking concept for them. “I mean, there are a lot of people who don’t have to be willing to call without a plan, but my mom is now the kind of person who is very flexible, responsive and fluent in conversation. Christine described her as a “psychological débutante.”

Angie, who lives in Queens and works for a company where she analyses data on sexual violence, is skeptical about his mother’s transformation being real. “I think if mom can go away, then she will come back,” Christine said. But Angie has no memories of Mary since she was sick, and for her, she was asked to believe that her mother had become a newcomer. “I tend to choose security during the discovery process,” Angie told me. “My curiosity is not that worthy of emotional risks.” Angie has always believed that to some extent, her mother “chooses her delusions.” She doesn’t want to make a choice again.

Christine searched for medical papers that might explain mother’s recovery and allowed Angie to believe. She read about each drug her mother took and concluded that the key drug might be the immunosuppressant rituximab. “I have a new working theory. In theory, her chemotherapy can cure by chance” she said in Angie.

Christine found some recent case studies that demonstrated psychiatric recovery after receiving drugs that inhibit immune activity. Research in 2017 Field of Psychiatry A woman with schizophrenia for twenty-five years was described. She also suffers from skin diseases, and for this, her medication reduces inflammation and suppresses immune response. Her doctor noticed a pattern: when they treated her skin lesions, the mental illness disappeared. They hypothesized that rashes and psychosis were caused by an autoimmune disease and were cured by the same medications. Another paper Field of Psychiatry Describes a person with “drug-resistant schizophrenia” who has leukemia. After the bone marrow transplant rebuilds his immune system, he suddenly becomes sanely shocked. Eight years later, the author wrote: “The patient is very good and has no residual psychiatric symptoms.”

Christine also found Washington postal Article published in 2023 about a woman named April who fell into a catatonic state at the age of twenty-one and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Columbia psychiatry professor Sander Markx first met at a psychiatric hospital on Long Island while at a medical student on Long Island. Twenty years later, he felt frustrated to find her in the same hospital under the same circumstances. “She has been twenty and twenty years,” he said at a workshop at Will Cornell Medical School. He and his colleagues gave her extensive examinations and found that she has lupus, an autoimmune disease that in rare cases induces inflammation in the brain, leading to symptoms that are indistinguishable from schizophrenia. After receiving immunosuppressive therapy including rituximab, April was essentially “a 25-year coma and was able to tell us everything,” Markx said. “We don’t have scripts. We can’t see patients coming back from this situation.”

April case helps the founder of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) in Colombia to power the founder of the Center for Psychiatry and Mental Health DSM. Christine sent an email to SNF Center co-director Markx and briefly sent an email in her mother’s life. “Her mental symptoms disappeared and have not resurfaced in a few months,” she wrote. “But her current clinician is confused about why this happens.” When Markx did not respond, Christine, who visited New York, decided that she and Angie should go to Columbia to introduce themselves in person. Markx is not in his office—he has just begun taking sick leave—but they slide a handwritten card in a pink envelope under his door and use inter-campus mail to send the card to other directors of the center. Angie said they tried to think of this step, “the part of the documentary where the cameras are all shaking, you feel someone is about to break the hole in the case.”

Emil Kraepelin, who developed the first modern diagnostic system of psychiatry in the 180s, defined the disease as we now know, which is largely fundamentally desperate. The diagnosis allows hospital administrators to separate patients with “periodic insanity” such as depression and bipolar disorder from patients believed to be incurable and belonging to shelter. Crepalin hopes that schizophrenia will eventually reveal itself to be a condition like neurolymph, which later caused most cases of insanity in psychiatric wards. In 1913, scientists proved that bacteria infected these patients’ brains. “The disease produced by syphilis is the subject course,” ClayPelin wrote four years later. “It is logical to assume that we will successfully reveal the causes of many other types of insanity, although we have no clue yet.”

Psychiatry and Neurology were initially a medical discipline, but neurologists gradually became responsible for diseases such as neurolymph and dementia, where pathology can be seen in the brain of corpses, while psychiatrists deal with the disease left behind, their reasons remain a mystery. Schizophrenia affects about 1% of the population, becoming a disease of psychiatry through its identity, partly because it seems to embody crazy mystery and trickyness and raises fundamental questions about what it means to have oneself. “In fact, the history of modern psychiatry is actually synonymous with the history of schizophrenia, a typical form of madness in our time,” wrote psychologist Louis Sass.

However, psychiatrists strive to point out the single function of unified diagnosis. “A great question is, what is it,” Karl Jaspers wrote in 1963,” psychiatrist Ian Brockington warned that his obsession with schizophrenia was curious. “The smaller, more uniform entity is attracted by the gravity of the big idea and eliminated,” he wrote. For decades, scientists have been searching for a biological marker that can confirm whether someone has schizophrenia. Last year, in a paper Schizophrenia ResearchSeventeen international experts concluded that schizophrenia does not have a cause, symptoms or biological mechanism to define. “Precaution wants to know whether the structure of our organization of this information is fundamentally flawed,” the author wrote.