RICKIE, don't lose that number
by - Written: Oct 22 '02 (Updated Oct 23 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Good firsthand account of mental illness
Cons: May be offensive to those who do not advocate alternative treatments
The Bottom Line: RICKIE provides an excellent view of one way of treating mental illness.
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| Kidnykid's Full Review: Rickie |
RICKIE tells the story of Frederica Flach, or Rickie for short, who has a history of schizophrenia. Her own history of mental illness is interspersed with remarks made by her father, Frederick Flach, a physician himself, who tells what the perspective of a family member is like.
We follow Rickie's journey through the often-flawed mental health system, and her own reactions to her illness. We also learn how influenced she was, at a vulnerable time in anyone's life, by other mentally-ill people. In many ways, Rickie was actually taught how to behave dysfunctionally by being around so much dysfunctional behavior. Therefore, when she got out, she needed to learn just what constituted functional or healthy behavior patterns, so that she didn't continue to carry the sick or dysfunctional patterns of her untreated fellow and sister patients into real life with her.
Much of that sort of teaching is done in psychiatric rehabilitation. When she was so sick, there was no such thing as psychiatric rehabilitation, and therefore, few centers existed for the rehabilitation of long-term psychiatric patients once they were released from the hospital. The irony is that nowhere is rehabilitation more necessary than with psychiatric patients; especially with the most serious mental illnesses, bipolar disorder (which wreaks havoc with finances if one goes on a spending spree while manic) and schizophrenia (which causes any number of behavior problems which cannot be resolved by the use of medication alone), rehabilitation is a necessity. Rickie Flach was fortunate in finding just such a rehab center, one that was willing to teach her functional behavior patterns, right down to the most basic ones, such as remembering how to smile.
That is actually one of the strengths of the book. Rickie and her father both show us just how easy it is to get good rehabilitative care - if one is determined to do the work of rehabilitation. Rickie and her father both were determined to get Rickie out of the mental health system for good, so they were willing to do the work of rehabilitation. (It also helped that Dr. Flach himself had a number of contacts in the profession, but not by much, simply because the concept of rehabilitation was too new to the field to have made much of an impact on psychiatry.)
The major weakness of RICKIE is that if one is a believer in medical-model treatment for mental illness, one will almost be offended by some of the strategies Rickie uses to recover from schizophrenia. Rickie's rehabilitation team believes strongly in orthomolecular methods of treatment, in which the mentally-ill person is prescribed an individualized treatment regimen primarily consisting of vitamins and minerals. Some of the tests Rickie must undergo to determine her individual vitamin regimen sound a little unorthodox, to put it mildly, despite the fact that other aspects of her rehabilitation are actually quite helpful in keeping her out of the hospital and behaving appropriately. Although the orthomolecular regimen, when combined with rehabilitation in what has now become the traditional sense, worked with Ricki (to the point where she relapsed once she went off the regimen, only to get back on track when she went on it again), it, like standard medical-model treatment, will not work for everyone. The multivitamin, multimineral approach to mental health has not yet been tested adequately, and because most psychiatrists are wedded to the medical-model stuff, I doubt that it ever will be. Therefore, it is wise to advise the reader of this review not to try what Rickie tried at home, without professional advice to fall back on.
Because RICKIE is no longer in print, I would recommend trying to get a hold of it in a public library, or used over the Internet. (Links for that purpose are provided automatically by Epinions.com at the end of this review.) If one is interested in another view of mental illness and the rehabilitation of the mentally ill, I would recommend reading RICKIE for that reason.
Recommended:
Yes
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