From time to time, I hear complaints that someone’s brain illness got better with medications and/or ECT, but just came back when they stopped. This almost always happens when a patient never transitioned to maintenance ECT and/or medication therapy.

I dub this, the Tower-of-Babel Syndrome.  We all suffer from it at some point in life, trying to be like God.  Or maybe a lesser god?  During this Tower-of-Babel Syndrome, after we have paid the price, after we have complied with the many hard tasks, after we have built ourselves up into something glorious, we are cured from illness. Right? Once we stop perceiving it, illness that is, we are closer to God, more like Him/Her, perhaps more perfect, when we feel better and do not need medical care. Little gusts of wind are all it takes to fill our wings and off we go, living life free from disease laden earth.

But this is a mistaken expression of freedom.

The number one reason for relapse is…? You remember.  Treatment noncompliance. Is relapse most often due to life stressors? There are so many. No. All those reasons for why we think we feel what we feel and do what we do, all those forces acting on us from the outside in, they are not the reasons we relapse most often.

There is something like a super-bug growing amongst us who engage in treatment on and off. We do it four or five months out of seven. We skip here and there and do not “over-react” if we do. “They don’t control me, after-all.” We apperceive the situation. We think we, by not being consistent with medical treatment, demonstrate our freedom. We are free when we engage in medical treatment or when we do not. We are free because we are human.

The super-bug in brain illness is a progression of disease process heightened and sharpened by treatment noncompliance. A growing resistance to treatment and an acceleration of our falls, how long it takes for us to drop into a relapse and how hard and far we fall.

Let us work together to take away barriers to consistent treatment.  You may laugh when you hear about the Tower of Babel.  You can laugh.  A bonus.

The Tower-of-Babel Syndrome is familiar to those of us who stop any variety of medical treatments on our own, excluding our treatment team members, (such as our physician, Wink! Wink!) in our decision to end treatment.

By stopping medical treatment, many of us have this sense of eliminating the reason we started in the first place.  Take treatment.  Disease continues.  Stop treatment.  We are superior.

When my son was about one year old, he learned that if he turned his head away from you, it was as good as denying your existence.  Turn.  You are gone.  Turn back.  You reappear.  Turn.  And just like that, you have been eliminated.  Even now, remembering it delights me.

Not so cute however, is disease relapse.  Maintenance ECT and/or medication therapy has a protective effect on the brain, prophylactic against further insult. It does not increase the distance between Me and God.  It does not increase a mislabeled dependency on treatment.  Maintenance therapy is part of our life journey.  It is part of our ability to be present with ourselves.  It is friendly.

Questions:  What keeps you in treatment?  Do you feel more diseased when taking maintenance therapy?  How do you manage that?  Please tell us your story.

Self-Care Tip:  Stay in maintenance therapy.