Summary

Top photo via Paul Hanaoka / Unsplash

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.

Niels Bohr

Dr. Clancy McKenzie Identifies Infant/Child Separation Trauma as Setting Stage for Later Onset of Schizophrenia

Dr. Clancy McKenzie, M.D., founder of The ALTERNATIVE American Psychiatric Association, asserts that serious mental diseases such as schizophrenia are not biologically caused, but have to do with delayed post-traumatic stress disorders caused by infant and early childhood separation, with onset occurring years later starting in adolescence. Dr. McKenzie is also opposed to SSRI anti-depressant medications, which he contends increase chance for violence and suicide; and he maintains that anti-psychotic medication shortens longevity by 25 years on average. source

Clancy McKenzie, M.D. Psychiatrist (retired) Chairman, Department of Psychiatry, Capital University, worked with schizophrenics for 40+ years.

“Mental illness” is re-triggered separation panic from infancy. His focus is schizophrenia.

Age of origin of infant separation traumas:

• 0 to 18 months - various schizophrenias
• 19 to 21 months - schizoaffective disorders
• 22 months - peak of bipolar disorder, hypomania
• 21 to 24 months - psychotic depressions
• 25 to 34 months - non-psychotic depressions

Schizophrenia: Its Cause and Mechanism

• Nearly everyone understands Posttraumatic Stress Disorder from war. A car backfires next to a combat veteran and he grabs a gun and hides in the woods for a few days. We can appreciate the terrors of war.

• What we don’t appreciate is that more overwhelming than war trauma to a soldier is separation from mother to a baby. For as long as mammals have populated the earth, separation from mother has meant death.

• We have forgotten our infancies and are not aware of how overwhelming it can be if mother is upset, distracted or away. These can be simple minor separations that practically no one would regard as harmful. A family moves to a new house and the mother busies herself making the new place look like home - or a new baby is born and the mother is in the hospital for a few days.

• Decades later, instead of a loud noise precipitating the flashback, it is a separation from some other “most important person” (husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend or group) which precipitates the initial step back in time, and instead of combat reality and behavior it is infant reality and behavior that we see.

• A full-grown man might sit in the middle of the floor screaming, “Mommy! Mommy!” He is caught in an earlier part of his mind. With schizophrenia, this is somewhere in the first 18 months of life.

It is much more comfortable to be mad and know it, than to be sane and have one’s doubts.

G. B. Burgin

Schizophrenia and the McKenzie Method - Presented at The National Academy of Forensic Examiners

Part 1 (10 mins)

Part 2 (10 mins)

6:46: Treatment depends on understanding the concept of the two minds in one skull. I redefine schizophrenia as a coexistence of the adult and the reawakened infant mind and brain in the same skull.

Part 3 (7 mins)

In the Country of the Blind the one-eyed man is not a king — he is a gibbering idiot.

Colin Cherry (On Human Communication: A Review, a Survey, and a Criticism)

LECTURE - INTEGRATION OF PSYCHOLOGY AND BIOLOGY - PART I (A Psychological Basis for Biological Change)

• We understand when a combat veteran, 20 years after the war, hears a loud noise and suddenly starts behaving as though he were back in the heat of battle. The veteran flashes back at the sound of the loud noise because at the earlier time, loud noises were associated with extreme threats to his survival and the threats caused the experience to be indelibly etched in his mind and brain.

• If a gazelle escapes the attack of a lion, then the next time a lion attacks, the gazelle had better do exactly what it did the first time in order to survive. It goes on automatic pilot. This enables the species to survive more often than not.

• One veteran I evaluated was having lunch in a local pub with a friend and the friend’s wife. Their 12-year-old son entered the pub, the veteran picked him up and was about to give him a kiss on the forehead, when suddenly he flashed back to a 12-year-old in Vietnam who handed him a live grenade. Instantly the veteran threw him over the bar, knocked the friend to the ground and grabbed him by the throat. The friend’s wife began kicking him in the ribs, so he grabbed her by the ankles, threw her over the pool table, splintered a pool stick and charged the friend with the splintered end. The friend ran across the highway - and by that time the veteran began coming back to present reality. His only recollection of the entire incident - after throwing the child over the bar - was of asking a woman, in Vietnamese, to see her pass. His reality perception had changed to that of the earlier time.

• What no one realizes is that more terrifying than war trauma to a soldier is separation from the mother to the infant. For 150 million years of mammalian development, separation from the mother has meant death.

• Thus the human infant is very sensitive and can be terrified or overwhelmed by what it experiences as a threat of separation from its mother. Not just the obvious separations such as the mother dying, but subtle ones such as the family moving to a new house, the birth of a sibling, or an older child getting sick and requiring all the mother’s attention for a period of time. And if there are five older siblings there is five times the chance of this happening. There are literally thousands of events that can cause the infant to experience a separation trauma and feel threatened - by physical OR emotional separation.

• The veteran flashes back to the regions of the brain he was using perhaps at age 18 years, while the person with schizophrenia flashes back to the regions of the brain that were active and developing perhaps at age 18 MONTHS.

• Instead of combat reality and behavior, it is infant reality and behavior that we see. After 30 years, I am able to determine clinically the age the original trauma occurred - based on the behavior, reality and feelings of the patient.

• I recall a full-grown man upside down in a fetal position trying to force his head through a toilet bowl. Re-experiencing birth is highly specific. Another person, carrying on a normal conversation, was experiencing pressure and pain around her face, head, neck and shoulders. I timed her. This was happening every eight minutes. We learned that her mother was given general anesthesia during delivery - and I would bet that she was anesthetized when the contractions were 8 minutes apart.

• When the baby first starts moving its arms about, it has little control and it might hit itself in the face with its fist - or scratch its face with its fingernails. The person with Schizophrenia who has a fear of doing this is re-experiencing a trauma of the first few months of life. Early arm movements are symmetrical - so a person with Schizophrenia who suffered a very early trauma might move the arms in unison. If the person is walking with arms extended for balance, you know the trauma occurred when the person was learning to walk. If they are walking with arms straight down to the sides with no arm movements at all, they are at an age prior to learning to walk.

• Walking starts at about age 12 months, and by age 14 months - when the infant is travelling everywhere - the “whole world,” which to the infant is its mother, watches and follows him everywhere. So when a person re-experiences that age he knows that everyone is watching and following him everywhere he goes. This is the beginning of the age-of-origin of paranoia.

• A lady walked into my office with her mother and announced “I have had Schizophrenia for 12 years” - to which I immediately replied: “No you don’t. You have Schizo-affective Disorder. Schizophrenia has its origin in the first 18 months of life and something happened to you at age 20 months. (she had far too much warmth and affect for a person traumatized prior to 20 months.) I told her the most frequent single cause of her disorder [at that time] was the birth of a sibling - then we learned that she had a brother 20 months younger.

• The earlier the age of origin the more bizarre the reality: Paranoia of 21 months age-of-origin might be “those people over there are talking about me;” of 17 months age-of-origin “they are talking about me on television;” and of 13 to 15 months age-of-origin “aliens have implanted something in my brain and are monitoring and controlling everything I do.”

• Affect begins creeping in after 18 months. Schizo-affective disorders, bipolar hypomanic and Major Depression with psychotic features have an age-of-origin 21 to 24 months, asthma peaks at 24 months age-of-origin. Suicides with age-of-origin prior to 24 months are impulsive and not pre-planned. The baby has less impulse control. After 24 months there is more planning, because there is greater control of impulses since the child has started to learn toilet training - which is learning to control impulses. Non-psychotic Major Depression has its origin at 25 through 34 months.

• Mednick 1994 confirmed the findings, stating, “I was very skeptical about Dr. McKenzie’s findings, but the Finnish database on 6,000 schizophrenic patients revealed a very high level of statistical significance. We confirmed a substantially higher rate of schizophrenia among those with siblings less than two years younger.”

The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.

Salvador Dali

LECTURE - INTEGRATION OF PSYCHOLOGY AND BIOLOGY - PART II (A Review of Origin and Mechanisms, and New Methods for Prevention and Treatment)

• If biological change truly is the result of the disease process and not the cause, then no amount of biological research alone can lead to etiology, nor to prevention, nor correct understanding, nor useful insight psychotherapy.

• Can people become schizophrenic or depressed in relation to certain individuals? A resounding yes! Regardless how much another person might want to help, the nature of the relationship itself can be counterproductive.

• We become a parent when we see a child in trouble; we become a polite, model citizen when a police officer stops us for a traffic ticket; sometimes we take on a holy air when we encounter clergy; we are aggressive adversaries in relation to others on the football field.

• The person in relation to whom the patient shifts can be the finest in the world - but the reality of the shift in relation to that person remains. Everyone relates to the patient as though the patient were an infant or a toddler. Nearly all persons, in mental hospitals everywhere, are there because of having shifted to infant or toddler mind / brain / reality, which prompts the hospital staff to speak baby talk to them and treat them like infants. Art therapists bring crayons and coloring books to them, movement therapists have them stand in a large circle and pass around a big yellow ball, etc. The mental health team relates to the patient as a parent does to an infant or a toddler - and often, to a naughty one at that. This is very counter-productive. It keeps the patients sick. My patients, during recovery, are taught to recognize this and to not permit it.

• It makes no sense for a combat veteran, with an active posttraumatic stress disorder condition, to work in a stress-laden environment, with heavy equipment making sharp, sudden sounds, or with helicopters flying overhead. This would alter his reality, and would keep him partly in the mind / brain / reality that existed during war. No one would suggest such a work environment for him.

• And so the person with Schizophrenia or Depression also must avoid anything that reactivates the infant or toddler portions of the mind and brain.

• The original traumatic event, as experienced by the infant or toddler, was an unrecognized fear of separation, and the infant or toddler at that time desperately sought the parent, or any other family member, in much the same way a drowning victim struggles to grasp a floating object. Once THAT particular part of the infant mind and brain has been awakened by a traumatic experience, and a first psychotic or Major Depressive Episode has been precipitated, any contact with an original, nuclear family member, keeps the infant portion of the mind and brain active and in high gear, and this - more than any other factor - perpetuates the disorder.

• “Oh no, that’s not so” you might think. I’m sorry, but I truly believe it is. My experience has convinced me, that all a parent or any original, nuclear family member has to do is say hello to someone who’s infant mind previously has been activated, and the infant mind becomes reactivated once more - because of its intense needs for that family member.

  Owen Parachute: If you're interacting with someone who's flashing back (eg. a family member), everything you say and do affects whether they do more flashing back or more flashing forward. When you don't know what's going on, it's like walking across a minefield - you never know what you're going to do to cause an explosion. After you understand what's going on, you get x-ray vision and all the mines become clearly visible and you can confidently proceed around them.

• There are large-scale studies that confirm this finding, and these have been around for a long time. In 1966, G.W. Brown of London was commissioned by the Medical Research Counsel of England to conduct the largest study ever of its kind, to determine what factors in the post mental hospital environment lead to re-hospitalization. One factor alone stood out. This was whether the person went home, or went anywhere else to live after hospitalization. Now if the patient went home, we can be sure that he or she was with the only ones who genuinely were concerned and who cared the most – but if the patient went home to live, that patient was the most certain to be re-hospitalized.

• This is the most cruel of all fates anyone ever could experience - because the parent is the one person who would do anything in the world to help the child - yet the more the parent does, and the harder the parent tries, the more entrenched and permanent the condition becomes. The patient might experience small gains, in an unending battle, and these small gains foster hope, and are taken as signs that what one is doing is helpful - but in my broad experience, the gains are small indeed compared to the gains made through total separation. There is no comparison.

• One lady told me about having Schizophrenia for 15 years - except for 2 years she spent living in another country with distant relatives she had never met. Another person told about developing Schizophrenia - but then having the disorder disappear after venturing off in a sailboat for a year. He exhibited no signs of the disorder. A proprietor of a very successful restaurant told me about having had Schizophrenia for eight years and then suddenly having it disappear - to which I replied “and shortly before it disappeared your parents passed away.” He was amazed. In the early 1970s there were articles in the literature inquiring as to what happens to Schizophrenia after age 50 - because very few were seen in private practice. By age 50, most people do not have parents.

• Once the infant mind and brain are awakened, the patient IS the infant in relation to family, and any contact with original family causes the infant mind and brain to be reawakened - perpetuating the disorder. Separate, and the entire process can disappear! Let the patient and family try it for 30 to 60 days and see what happens. If the disorder starts to disappear, as I believe it will, they might decide to do more. I also am not blaming the parent. It is not the parent’s fault. The parent is not to blame. The parent is the victim, caught in a lifelong struggle, as in quicksand, forever.

• The initial separation must be very carefully structured, and it is important that no one experience this as a rejection. It cannot be a “get out of here; you are a miserable failure and we don’t want anything more to do with you” - as happened in the well publicized case of John Hinkley before he shot the president. It has to be “we really care, we’ll do anything in the world to help - and Dr. McKenzie says this might work, so lets give it a try.”

• Contact with original family has such a strong pull on the infant mind, and causes such an intense reactivation of the earlier brain structures, that sometimes all we need to do for a full recovery is bring about a complete, total separation and disassociation from original, nuclear family, and the entire mental process disappears. Schizophrenia is only Schizophrenia in relation to family. Give this a try, under your careful supervision or the supervision of a physician - and with carefully structured support-at-a-distance, in place, and with everyone experiencing the separation as something positive, as a means of helping, and not as a rejection.

• Correct understanding, and complete, total separation and disassociation from original, nuclear family. These two factors alone are highly effective, often without medication, and in my experience these two factors alone can be expected to bring about a full and permanent recovery from Schizophrenia or depression, in a substantial number of individuals suffering from these disorders.

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.

Anatole France

Schizophrenia: What Precipitates the Initial Onset?

• Upon separation from some other “most important person,” the individual shifts to the precise point in time when the infant experienced what it considered to be a threat of separation from its lifeline (mother).

• Just the birth of a sibling in the first 18 months of life can lead to schizophrenia. This does not mean that everyone with a sibling in the first 18 months of life develops the disorder. Only five in a hundred do - but that is five fold. In the overall population only one in a hundred develop schizophrenia.

• This is no one’s fault, because even those who are thought to be experts do not realize this simple mechanism. No one would dream such a simple, innocent event could lead to a serious mental or emotional disorder.

Schizophrenia: How the Cause Was Discovered

• During a child psychoanalytic training class in 1966, Dr. Margaret Mahler said the origin of childhood schizophrenia was in the first 18 months of life. [This warranted close attention because she was regarded as the leading child psychoanalyst of the 20th Century.]

• A family brought in a twenty year old man who was convinced he never would be able to walk again because his feet hurt. That reality was more real to him than the reality that he had just walked into my office.

• At what age would a young child look around the room and observe, most intensely, that everyone else could walk but he could not - and decide that the reason was because his feet hurt? Obviously, this is just about the time the baby takes its first steps, which also is about the time the baby becomes aware that it hurts to put all his weight on one foot.

• I told the family something happened when he was 12 months old. They said nothing happened. I insisted it did, they insisted it didn’t - so finally I said “Something happened, to cause his mother, to be extremely upset when he was just 12 months old!” Oh, then they remembered, his brother died. The mother obviously was devastated for a period of time - and that is all it took to set the stage for the later development of the disorder.

• I told the family that furthermore, in order for him to return to earlier mind / brain / reality, it required a separation from some other most important person, probably a girl friend, and probably just prior to experiencing the strange reality from age twelve months. They revealed his girlfriend left one month earlier.

Literature Review Of Serious Mental Disorders

• The parent often suffers more than the child because of unwarranted feelings of guilt. The attempt to indite the parent was often presented in a way that was cruel and insensitive to the feelings and the needs of the parent, and this effort brought emotional destruction to lives of countless persons who already were in a state of great emotional despair.

• The significant mistake was to identify the unique interaction between the patient and the mother as the cause instead of the result of the disease process. My work clearly makes this distinction: When the patient returns to the infant mind / brain / reality, everyone treats the patient like an infant, and this includes many mental health professionals.

• Even if the parent is exemplary and behaves in the most ideal way, contact can lead to relapse. My sympathy is with family members who often suffer more than the patient.

• Two important psychological factors led to the development of family organizations: 1) strong feelings of guilt (even though unwarranted) as parents were targeted unfairly for the cause of schizophrenia, and 2) powerful psychological defense mechanisms of denial and projection, as family members could not tolerate the pain of feeling guilty. These factors influenced the direction of research for nearly two decades, and a strong desire emerged to find a biological cause or an act of God responsible.

• Ironically, while my theories identify psychological traumata, they vindicate the parent from blame because they identify accidental traumatic experiences that happen to occur at crucial stages of development, and about which no one is aware.

Spiritual Considerations Regarding Current Science of Mental Health Investigation

• Pharmaceutical companies search for true cause as long as it relates to something they can sell. The National Institute of Mental Health searches for true cause as long as it is biological, because much of the 1.3 billion dollars they receive from Congress each year is to search for biological cause. And NAMI, the National Alliance for Mental Illness, searches for true cause as long as God did it, because if it is not an act of God, this could cause people to feel worse. (My heart really goes out to family members, because they suffer enormously as a result of self blame.)

• The irony is that if family groups, such as NAMI, only understood the actual cause, it would vindicate them of guilt because not even the so-called experts in the field are aware of the simple PTSD origin and mechanism, and nor do they appreciate why seemingly innocent little separations are experienced by the baby as overwhelming threats to survival.

Twelve Precise Parallels Between DPTSD From Adult Life and DPSTD From Infancy

• The original symptom-defining trauma for both is an overwhelming event. To the adult combat veteran it might be terrifying experiences of carnage and death. To the infant it is anything the infant might experience as a threat of separation from the mother. These sometimes subtle traumas are not recognized as being upsetting to a baby, and might include taking a brief vacation and leaving the baby for a few days with someone who is totally trustworthy, caring and reliable. The problem is, the baby doesn’t know that, and the baby might be terrified of abandonment and death. Other infant separation traumas include moving to a new house and the mother busying herself making the new place look like home, or a tragedy happening to an older child, taking away the mother’s attention, or the father doing something foolish that upsets the mother and emotionally produces a separation trauma to the baby.

• The initial symptom-precipitating trauma, years or decades later, matches or resembles the original symptom-defining trauma in some way.

• The symptom-precipitating trauma triggers a survival mechanism, which applies to all species, at all ages, and in general enhances survival more often than not. Otherwise it would not be built in as an adaptive measure for survival.

• Schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder and the other psychotic and non-psychotic depressions actually meet all DSM criteria for delayed Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.

Schizophrenia And Mental Illness - Separation From Nuclear Family Critical To Success

• The therapist must become an anchor in adult reality, a person with whom the patient can relate at such a firm adult to adult level that contact with the therapist immediately brings the patient back to the adult reality.

• The identification and cross referencing of realities is a very important aspect of treating schizophrenia, and especially the paranoid. One approach is to say, “I absolutely believe, 100%, that what you are telling me is exactly what you experience to be so.”

• It may be possible to move on to, “The way we experience things varies somewhat from time to time and from person to person. If ten people witness the same event, they experience it ten different ways. If one person experiences something at ten different ages, he experiences it ten different ways. If you are asleep and dreaming and a bear is chasing you, it is real until you wake up. If you are hypnotized and told you are a rooster, that is real until you are no longer under hypnotic suggestion. Likewise, when persons shift to earlier ages, they may be experiencing what is real to them at an earlier time.”

• “What you experienced to be real yesterday is not what you experience to be real today”. (This interpretation is vitally important as the patient’s delusional system begins to change with the advent of hospitalization, separation from family and the administration of neuroleptic medication). “Perhaps what you experience tomorrow will be different from what you experience to be real today.”

• One recovering schizophrenic woman complained that when she returned from shopping she would put the groceries on the floor instead of in the refrigerator. She did this even though she knew the food would spoil. She, therefore, wondered why she did it. It was easy to point out that the baby plays on the floor, puts everything on the floor and never puts anything away.

• Each symptom that is a replay of the reality / behavior of the infant can be interpreted. When the patient lists countless reasons why he cannot move away from his parents’ home, this is the infant mind speaking. The adult will find just as many ways to make the separation possible.

• What is real to the person depends on the reality the person is experiencing at the time. Only with special attention to cross referencing various realities can the patient begin to recognize “I’ve been here before.” One of the best times to do the cross referencing is when the patient is coming out of the delusional system and the realities are changing on a daily basis. This is also a good time to identify how the particular reality or behavior relates to that of an earlier age during infancy.

• One schizophrenic high school student whose mother just left home, partially returned to age 18 months when she left him at that time. His means of getting her to pick him up during infancy was to have a smelly diaper. His later symptoms were the same. He did not become overtly delusional, but his affect was flat and the stench from unclean underwear was so strong that no one could sit next to him.

• Each symptom such as this needs correct interpretation until the patient has good understanding and comprehension of his illness. With schizophrenia of very early origin, interpretation can be more difficult since rigidity, concrete thinking and inflexibility are greater at earlier ages. More of the interpretations have to be made when the person is not in the acute state. To achieve positive results with the more disturbed, the total separation from family is absolutely essential otherwise there will not be sufficient return to the adult brain to allow for insight and recovery.

A Phone Chat With Dr. Clancy McKenzie, World Expert On Schizophrenia And The Mind, About Casey Anthony, John Nash And Drugs - Raven Poe, Natural Mind Retrievers, 2011

ERIN: … I read the recent email you sent out about Casey Anthony that explains her actions using something called the 2-trauma mechanism. What is that and how did you come up with it?

DR. MCKENZIE: Sure. A long time ago, back in 1966, I was in a child psychoanalytical training class being taught by Margaret Mahler. She said that the origin of childhood schizophrenia is in the first 18 months of life. … These are all infant separation trials, and there’s more studies than these, but the important thing is we know the data and have it.

ERIN: Okay, and just to clarify, when you talk about infant separation, you’re referring to separation of an infant from its mother, and that can be as simple as a sibling being born, thereby diverting attention from said infant?

DR. MCKENZIE: That’s one of the separation traumas. Anything that upsets the mother or takes her attention away. Could be a hospital stay, even. For example, paranoid schizophrenia has its age of origin between 12 and 21 months, when the baby starts to walk. The whole world…, the baby’s mother, watches and follows the infant everywhere it goes.

ERIN: So when is the paranoid schizophrenia planted? When the mother doesn’t watch the baby for some reason?

DR. MCKENZIE: No, no, no. If there happens to be a separation trauma (separation of mother and infant for any reason) during that time interval, and what psychosis results, really depends on the age the trauma occurs. At 20 months, it might be those people over there are talking about me…back it up to 17 months, and it’s there talking about me on television and radio. At 13-16 months, the reality of the baby is different: it’s aliens have implanted something in my brain and they’re monitoring and controlling everyting I do because at that age, infants experience, most intensely, everything as being monitored and controlled.

ERIN: Okay, to better help me understand this and before getting to Casey’s case, you mentioned you had several encounters with John Nash, the famous, brilliant schizophrenic the film Beautiful Mind is based on. He said aliens were sending him messages and things were being planted inside his head. So did some sort of separation trauma happen to John Nash when he was an infant?

DR. MCKENZIE: Yes, well, I told him something happened to him between 15 and 16 months, and that would be when his trauma was. When he was 15 months, the stock market was 400. When he was 16 months old, in October 1929, the stock market was 200. Women who were focused and devoted to their babies suddenly shifted their focus to survival. Would there be food for the family? Would they lose their home?

ERIN: So was John Nash a patient of yours?

DR. MCKENZIE: We just spent some time together. The last time we got together, I told him when his symptoms would have disappeared. You see, once a person shifts to the infant mind, from then on, contact with the original, nuclear family will always be in a parent to infant relationship, because the infant is hanging on for dear life. So if the person separates from the parent, the whole process disappears. It’s very simple to overcome these serious disorders. It’s just making a complete and total separation from the original, nuclear family and the whole process can disappear.

ERIN: So you’re saying if John Nash never talked to his mother again, he’d be cured?

DR. MCKENZIE: I told him his problem would disappear after his last parent died. He told me his father died in the 50s and his mother died in 1969. The last hospitalization and the last medication was in 1970. The reason for the additional year of symptoms is that he moved in with his sister, part of his nuclear, biological family, and that would keep the whole process going. It took a while before his brain started working better again, though.

ERIN: I see. So what was his second life trauma that caused him to resort to his infant mind?

DR. MCKENZIE: I didn’t even get into that with him, but it would have been a significant, relationship breakup. You see, every time an initial psychosis occurs, it’s when the most important person in someone’s life separates from him or her. It can be separation or rejection. And the reason the original separation during infancy is so traumatic is because for as long as mammals have populated the earth, separation from mother has meant death. It’s more overwhelming for a baby to experience that than war trauma to a soldier. Then it just takes a subsequent separation from another very important person in their life to reactivate the process.

ERIN: Can you describe that process? The first psychotic episode, that is?

DR. MCKENZIE: The first, psychotic episode will happen when a person’s most important relationship breaks up. It’s like a combat veteran: A vetaran might have PTSD from war, but it might be anytime afterward, say a car backfires next to him, that causes him to grab a gun and hide in the woods. This 2-trauma system is a lot like that. So when the second trauma ( the first being separation from mother) happens, it will cause a person to shift to infancy. When a person shifts to infancy, they are using biogenetically, earlier-developed brain structures, and these are the ones that produce more dopamine than the other neurotransmitters. There’s a shift away from the adult brain structure, and like when any part of the body becomes less active, you get disuse atrophy. The biological change is largerly the result of the disease process: which is the shift to using earlier, developmental, brain structures.

ERIN: So a lot of anti-psychotic medication targets the dopamine system. You mention complete separation from the original, nuclear family to help cure psychosis, but do you ever use the traditionally-prescribed medication?

DR. MCKENZIE: Oh my God, those medications are all fraudulent. Fish oil works better, and it doesn’t have side effects.

ERIN: Fish oil? For its omega-three fatty acids?

DR. MCKENZIE: I started using it in 1998 when I read the Sheffield Studies. What those studies showed was that fish oil can make delusional symptoms disappear.

ERIN: So are you deadset against antipsychotics?

DR. MCKENZIE: Antipsychotics, in monkey brains, have been show to shrink the brain by 8%, in the first year alone. They operate by doing chemical lobotomies, but they don’t let people know that. The drug companies know that, but they don’t let people know that, because if they said, “Come and get your Chemical lobotomy,” no one would go for it.

ERIN: It doesn’t seem like a whole lot of altruistic decisions are going on in medicine.

DR. MCKENZIE: No, there are not. It’s financially-driven. And there are people who are writing about this. Grace Jackson just wrote Drug Induced Dementia: A Perfect Crime. She has 80 pages of references and it’s just a phenomenal book. Bob Whitaker, who just wrote Anatomy of an Epidemic, shows very clearly what these drug companies do and how they created an epidemic of mental illness. We have six times as much mental illness because of these damn drugs. The antidepressants - through studies not reported and retrieved under the Freedom of Information act, showed that there was no effectiveness at all.

ERIN: Yes. There is a lot of evidence for corruption. So, now, if it’s okay, I want to ask you about Casey Anthony, she wasn’t a schizophrenic, right?

DR. MCKENZIE: I would put her more in the schizoaffective range. The age of onset for that is 19-21 months.

ERIN: And by schizoaffective, you’re just referring to a mixed diagnosis of psychosis and some sort of mood disorder

DR. MCKENZIE: Yes. And different disorders peak at different months. For example, bipolar hypomania peaks at 22 months. A very precise peak. And the rest of the psychotic deressions go up to 24 months and the nonpsychotic depressions age of orgin is between 24 and 34 months.

ERIN: So if Casey Anthony was schizoaffective, some sort of separation trauma would had to have occurred when she was between 19 and 21 months?

DR. MCKENZIE: Yes. And usually if I meet the person, I can get it right down to the month. I’ve been doing this for 45 years.

ERIN: Okay, and you mentioned, in the email you sent, that the reason you applied this 2-trauma mechanism to Casey Anthony was based on the lies she told in the aftermath of her daughter going missing?

DR. MCKENZIE: The lies were just so transparent. When I first heard the story, I could just picture it: A little girl, sitting on the floor, candy wrappers all around her with chocolate on her face, saying she didn’t eat the candy. You know? I mean that was the level of her lies. The lies were obviously from that age.

ERIN: So when she was telling those lies she was doing so with an infantile mindset?

DR. MCKENZIE: She was doing it with a partial return of mind, body, brain, reality, feeling, behavior, chemistry, physiology and level of affective expression.

ERIN: So, in her case, if she did kill her baby, would she have done it in this state of partial return?

DR. MCKENZIE: She definitely was functioning partially in an earlier time, because when they were questioning her, her excuses and replies were so incredibly without reason. No one would try to make up such a story. Only a child would make up stories like that.

ERIN: How can you tell she wasn’t a socipath?

DR. MCKENZIE: Oh, no, no. She really, really cared. The tape across the mouth with the little heart there. I mean, there was love there. She really loved the baby. The fact that the fiance broke up with her after the baby was born took her back to a much earlier, infantile time.

I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I’ve been knocking from the inside.

Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

Book: Delayed Posttraumatic Stress Disorders from Infancy: The Two Trauma Mechanism

1996 amazon

Book Forum: Delayed Posttraumatic Stress Disorders From Infancy: The Two Trauma Mechanism by Clancy D. McKenzie, M.D., and Lance S. Wright

ROBERT CANCRO, M.D. New York, N.Y.

1998 The American Journal of Psychiatry

The theory, in a somewhat simplified version, is that separation, real or imagined, represents an extraordinarily severe trauma to an infant. This trauma, if severe enough, alters the child’s biological and psychological development and predisposes that child to a risk of flashbacks to the earlier developmental period of the initial trauma. Posttraumatic stress disorder is offered as a model for the mechanisms involved in all serious mental disorders. The flashback is particularly damaging when these initial traumatic events occur early in development because it involves a reversal to the infantile brain development available at that time. With persistence of the presence of the infantile brain mechanisms there is a disuse atrophy of the adult brain areas. The flashback is produced by a second severe trauma, which is both intense and similar to the initial trauma and produces a physiological and psychological return to the period of the initial trauma.

According to the theory, schizophrenia involves a trauma during the first 18 months of life, schizoaffective disorder during the next 6 months of life, and depressive disorders during the period between 24 and 34 months of life.

Readers may differ sharply in their interpretation, but it would be best not to ignore the finding.

Delayed Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Model for Schizophrenia and Depression

(The Unification Theory of Mental Illness) Clancy D. McKenzie, M.D., B.C.E.T.S Philadelphia Psychiatric Consultation Service 1998 The American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress

The Unification Theory of Mental Illness, according to O. Spurgeon English, who first suggested the name, is a marriage of psychological and biological approaches, spanning the neuroses and the psychoses, from infancy to old age.

Book: “Babies Need Mothers”: How Mothers Can Prevent Mental Illness in their Children

2009 amazon By Clancy D. McKenzie, M.D.

• To illustrate a difference in symptom expression, let us compare the above eight-to-nine-month separation case to the Unabomber who sent letter bombs to persons across the country. He was hospitalized when he was nine months old, and his mother was allowed to see him, but only through a glass partition.

• Rage is proportionate to helplessness, and no one is as helpless as a baby when the mother is not there. The Unabomber was physically very ill, could see his mother, but could not be comforted by her. Even she attributes his later violence to that separation. Since the mother is the whole world to the infant, the rage is directed outward to the whole world. Forty years later, when a lady friend left him, he returned to the earlier separation and no longer could function well enough to teach math at Harvard. Instead, he holed up in the woods and sent bombs indiscriminately to others. While the infant mind directed rage outward to the whole world, the adult mind attempted to justify the murderous actions by finding specific reasons to kill certain individuals he did not know.

• Adolf Hitler had a horrible infancy. His mother had lost her first three children to diphtheria, all within a two-month period just prior to becoming pregnant with Adolf, and she was in a terrible abusive relationship. Saddam Hussein also experienced early separation traumas. His father left his mother six months prior to Saddam’s birth, and then shortly thereafter, his thirteen-year-old brother died of cancer. This left his mother severely depressed; and Saddam, as an infant, was sent to the family of his maternal uncle until he was three.

Misc

• My finding is that the mind focuses on the point in time where there is the most extreme threat to survival. If that moment is a life-threat in the present, the patient automatically might shift from infant reality (psychosis) to adult mind / brain / reality, and thereby come out of an acute psychosis.

• In France during the war the asylum doors were opened and patients told: “The Germans are coming and they are going to kill you.” Many of the regressed schizophrenic patients reportedly shifted immediately to the adult mind / brain / reality and responded appropriately.

• When Gary Heidnik, who chained six women in the basement of a small row house because he wanted babies, was captured and taken to prison, he immediately returned from his bizarre infant reality to adult mind / brain / reality because other inmates tried to kill him.

• One recovered patient with schizophrenia described his means of preventing movement back into “dreamland” reality: He would mount a fast horse and race through the woods, hanging on for dear life. That brought him out of the infant mind / brain / reality and right into that of the adult.

Clancy McKenzie in the congressional record

Personal Note

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

Carl Gustav Jung

“Extreme States Of Mind” - Other Resources

• The Fallacy of the 50% Concordance Rate for Schizophrenia in Identical Twins by Jonathan Leo - A Review of The Gene Illusion: Genetic Research in Psychiatry and Psychology Under the Microscope by Jay Joseph

• Thomas Szasz: Does mental illness exist? (22 mins)

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