With orthomolecular treatment Christine improved but also became more difficult to live with as she got better.  For example, when she came out of catatonic-like immobility, she became extremely promiscuous, and was determined to sleep with my husband.  In fact she kept crawling into bed with him with no clothes on.  Either we had to forcefully remove her or the bed would be handed over to her—­without a resident man.  Christine then decided (logically) that I was an obstacle to her sex life, and once more set out to kill me.  This stage also passed, eventually and Christine got tolerably well.

Christine’s healing process is quite typical and demonstrates why orthomolecular treatment is not popular.  As a psychotic genuinely improves, their aberrated behavior often becomes more aggressive initially and thus, harder to control.  It seems far more convenient for all concerned to suppress psychotic behavior with stupefying drugs.  A drugged person can be controlled when they’re in a sort of perpetual sedation but then, they never get genuinely well, either.

Another early patient, Elizabeth, gave me a particularly valuable lesson, one that changed the direction of my career away from curing insanity and toward regular medicine.  Elizabeth was a catatonic schizophrenic who did not speak or move, except for some waxy posturing.  She had to be fed, dressed and pottied.  Elizabeth was a pretty little brunette who got through a couple of years of college and then spent several years in a state mental hospital.  She had recently run away from a hospital, and had been found wandering aimlessly or standing rigidly, apparently staring fixedly at nothing.  The emergency mental health facility in a small city nearby called me up and asked if I would take her.  I said I would, and drove into town to pick her up.  I found Elizabeth in someone’s back yard staring at a bush.  It took me three hours to persuade her to get in my car, but that effort turned out to be the easiest part of the next months.

Elizabeth would do nothing for herself, including going to the bathroom.  I managed to get some nutrition into her, and change her clothes, but that was about all I could do.  Eventually she wore me down; I drifted off for an hour’s nap instead of watching her all night.  Elizabeth slipped away in the autumn darkness and vanished.  Needless to say, when daylight came I desperately searched the buildings, the yard, gardens, woods, and even the nearby river.  I called in a missing person report and the police looked as well.  We stopped searching after a week because there just wasn’t any place else to look.  Then, into my kitchen, right in front of our round eyes and gaping mouths, walked a smiling, pleasant, talkative young woman who was quite sane.

She said, “Hello I’m Elizabeth!  I’m sorry I was such a hassle last week, and thank you for trying to take care of me so well.  I was too sick to know any better.”  She said she had gone out our back door the week before and crawled under a pile of fallen leaves on the ground in our back yard with a black tarp over them.  We had looked under the tarp at least fifty times during the days past, but never thought to look under the leaves as well.