http://discovermagazine.com/2008/aug/22-can-schizophrenia-be-cured-before-it-starts
Camila Knudsen (not her real name) doesn’t like to recall how her world began changing when she was 14. Background sounds in her suburban neighborhood—lawn mowers, planes, barking dogs—intermingled in a deafening buzz. The cacophony made it hard for her to hear what people were saying or to respond sensibly. “My mind was a blank,” she recalls. “Sometimes I felt like I couldn’t see or hear anything. I’d walk past someone and if they were laughing, I felt like they were laughing at me.” Exhausted, Camila holed up in her room at home and avoided her friends. She wouldn’t shower, and she spent much of her time staring into space.
...a pediatrician referred the Knudsens to William McFarlane, a psychiatrist in Portland, Maine, who had recently launched an experimental treatment program for early-stage mental illness. McFarlane championed a radical view that psychotic illnesses, including schizophrenia, can be prevented by treatment if caught early enough. His program, Portland Identification and Early Referral, or PIER, was a groundbreaking effort to find and treat patients showing early warning signs of psychosis.
...The PIER staff believed that Camille's symptoms, coupled with a history of schizophrenia on both sides of the family, put her at high risk for a full-blown psychotic break with reality. Quick intervention was crucial, McFarlane and his staff stressed, to prevent the onset of major hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia. Should Camila become psychotic even once, the lingering effects on her brain could diminish chances for recovery. One of the most crippling features of schizophrenia is that if delusional thinking is left unchecked, it takes over, robbing patients of the ability to recognize—and seek treatment for—their illness. Losing touch with reality puts schizophrenic patients at high risk of job loss, illness, homelessness, and suicide.
The Knudsens began PIER’s recommended treatment, a novel mix of psychotherapy and medication. Camila stuck with the program for four years and her symptoms subsided, slowly at first, but steadily. “You couldn’t tell she has a mental illness now if you tried,” her father says. “She’s going to be a productive member of society.”...Through PIER’s efforts, McFarlane seems to have kept dozens of patients who once teetered on the edge of psychosis from falling into its grip.
...“Our kids keep getting better and better,” McFarlane says. “Our experience has been that after a couple of years, they don’t need a lot more support.”
Read the full article here: http://discovermagazine.com/2008/aug/22-can-schizophrenia-be-cured-before-it-starts
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