Mental illness is not an inherited genetic proposition. Inborn errors of metabolism may predispose but are not causal factors of the condition. Rather, mental illness results from intoxications and aversive lifestyles. Acquired conditions like brain tumors, infectious disease, and generalized metabolic disorders can cause mental illness indirectly and the underlying condition is treated rather than the overt phenotypic reaction. The main causes of schizophrenia are major intoxications that disturb cognitive thinking or elucidate aversive memories that disturb behavior.
The intoxications that cause schizophrenia are atropine intoxication, psychedelic intoxication, and sympathomimetic analog intoxication. These causal elements contain about 90 percent of all acute and chronic cases seen in the clinic and they can be treated.
Atropine and its congeners are non-competitive analogs of acetylcholine. The agent binds to neural receptors and won’t let go. The brain is unable to break down or detoxify these agents. The site of action is primarily the frontal and parietal lobes of the neocortex. This is why the subject exhibits disordered thinking or abhorrent memories. To treat an atropine overdose, the chemical that exerts the most effective competitive effect on neurons is nicotine. Most mental patients must become cigarette smokers as nicotine pushes atropine off the neural receptors and the free base present in cigarette smoke is the most effective way to deliver nicotine. Phenothiazine antipsychotics help by blocking the dopamine receptors in the Archi cerebrum and limbic structures so clinical behavior is not so violent or overt. Newer novel atypical antipsychotics like risperidone that look like atropine molecularly may help displace atropine from neurons but at the cost of impaired mentation and a decrease in intelligence quotient. Probably the best treatment for schizophrenia is non-polar volatile solvents liberally poured on a subject daily. Hexane and ethylene diamine solubilize atropine, carry it to the bloodstream, and then excrete it by the kidneys., The use of non-polar solvent results in brown-colored urine, evidencing the presence of high levels of atropine. People of low socioeconomic status use ethanol, present in alcoholic beverages to excrete atropine as ethanol is slightly polar and acidic which dissolves alkaloids for excretion.
Psychedelic drugs cause schizophrenia. LSD, Mescaline, and psilocybin are indole alkaloids with a structure similar to serotonin and its primary metabolite, Hydroxy indoleacetic acid. Psychedelic drugs pass to the Archi cerebrum or primitive animal brain, cause indole active neurons to fire, and are not broken down by cellular enzymes hence the long duration of action and persistent loitering effect. They eventually diffuse out of the brain by physical osmotic laws of diffusion. Hallucinations are the result of persistent firing in the occipital area of the neocortex area 18 as directed by the globus pallidus and limbic system. Since all parts of the brain are intricately connected, damage to the primitive brain can be evidenced by changes in cognition, disturbances of memory, and sensory abnormalities. The visual disturbance of chronic alcoholism is probably due to Wernicke’s malnutrition rather than ethanol itself.
In our capitalistic society probably the agents of major abuse are sympathomimetic amines, notably methedrine also known as speed. In a sad society where all good jobs are saved for the children of the wealthy, citizens self-medicate with speed to avert the sordid feeling of poverty present in our society. Methedrine abuse leads to high blood pressure and kidney failure, paranoid schizophrenia, and premature heart attack. Because sympathomimetic congeners are competitive agents and broken down by Monoamine oxidase present in the dendritic end of neurons, effects are short-lived, tolerance develops rapidly and habituation ensues with an ultimate nervous breakdown or heart attack. On the street, speed is cheap and the most readily available of the aversive illegal substances of abuse. Because sympathomimetic agents act in the nigrostriatal system of neurons in the archicerebrum, they can be blockaded with dopamine-blocking agents that penetrate the blood-brain barrier like the tricyclic phenothiazines first recognized in Germany in World War 2. The use of phenothiazines is safe and economical and the often heralded side effect of Parkinsonianism is rarely seen except in unusually high doses or disease of chronic duration greater than 20 years. The abandonment of phenothiazines in the treatment of mental illness resulted from the loss of patent rights of the drug companies and the synthesis of the newer atypical antipsychotics that have a patent duration of 30 years with one ten-year extension upon arbitration. Nowadays, like everything, economic factors rule the day.
Depression or more exactly endogenous depression not due to causal agents is a hot topic. People whose life is horrible due to economic factors or poor intimate relationships become depressed. It used to be that depressed people ate a lot of chocolate or drank hot cocoa because chocolate contains phenylethylamine, a nor-epinephrine congener. That is no more. Now Monoamine oxidase inhibitors are the mainstay with the side effects of psychosis and high blood pressure. Additionally, some agents like bupropion are said causally to induce abdominal aneurysms. Depression in reality can be due to an intoxication of a chronic nature with heavy metals most notably those of the uranium or lanthanide series.
The soldiers returning from Iraq with Chronic persistent depressive anomaly merely are soldiers that have been fed by the nationals, the depleted uranium shells that tanks unceasingly hurl at them. Uranium, and most notably thorium cause endogenous depression, and the treatment is chronic chelation therapy in the hands of a trained professional intravenously. All the psychology in the world will not avert a gross systemic intoxication.
Gone are the days of Sheldon’s somatotypes where tall lanky people are schizophrenics, short bald people are manic-depressives, and normal people or euthymics are people with mental illness which is not heritable but causal and elucidated by intoxication. Medicine is now a big business and costs one-third of the national budget. What happened to the days when doctors were welcomed everywhere and health science was a service, not a sale? Vance Packard in all his genius had no direction or advice as to where the nation should head, regarding health care. Will anyone care to ask him, again?