The latest news on the tragic death of Rob Reimer and his wife (not neccessarily accurate- so many untruths!) is that their son was previously diagnosed with schizophrenia and had been prescribed a newer medication.

That news hit home pretty hard for me! In August 1993 my kind, gentle son’s long journey with the baffling symptoms of schizophrenia hit rock bottom, as a direct result of his having been put on a wrong medication.

My family’s heart wrenching story is in my book “The Ghosts Behind Him”  Caitlin Press 1999.

As I mourned the death of Rob Reiner who’d been one of my favourite entertainers, I wondered if the symptoms of schizophrenia could have been a provocation behind the grisly story that was all over TV and the Internet.

The all-too-familiar painful memories returned that had haunted me for so long in the past.

Violence does happen. Not very often, but violence has been in the news a few times over the years, since my son’s horrific psychotic episode back in 1993.

There is sometimes no link whatever to the victim – unless you count proximity: whether he or she be a friend; a loved one or stranger. Anyone could become  a victim if a  chemically unbalanced mind reacts in a frenzied or fearful state to a drama inadvertantly concocted within his own diseased brain. But thank goodness that seldom happens.

I wondered what prescribed medication Nick Reimer was on….

My son had been put on the anti-psychotic Risperidone which I learned later- much later – was a medication that can cause “agitation.” One mother noticed that the side effect had been listed on her son’s prescription label. Her son had also been adversely affected by Risperidone.

But the medication does work well for many psychiatric  patients.

Despite what some fundamentalists continue to believe, spirituality has nothing whatever to do with the disease. But because they hear voices that appear to come from outside their own thought processes, patients may think that they are being “possessed”

In actuality the voices are similar to an echoing of their own thoughts- the little ideas, memories and inspirations that we all have almost  every moment of the day. Our conscious minds are continously active, except when we sleep. People with schizophrenia have an overload of dopamine in their brain which may possibly stimulate the processing.

At one point I did wonder if my son was “possessed” by evil and/or helpful spirits. That notion almost sucked me into what he himself believed. It was a very unhealthy interpretation of a biological dysfunction in his brain.

Perhaps if more people understood the state of mind of those suffering from extreme psychosis , more money would be focused on a cure for this devastating disease which strikes at least one in every hundred young people in all parts of the world.