On Mental Health − Mentale Gezondheid

Het boek – Uittreksel

Request for Research

Over the previous decade, great progress has been made in brain research. With it, the understanding of mental conditions and disorders improved. And yet, when I was confronted with mental conditions in my family, it became apparent that there are still many unknowns. How the brain works and the root causes of mental conditions and disorders remain a mystery. Consequently, there wasn’t much hope for a true cure for these conditions.

Today, however, I can argue that my son, who used to have dyslexia – a learning disability that hinders the development of reading and writing skills – and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), is as good as cured. In the process, I found treatment for my own symptoms, which were different. Actually, the main symptom didn’t appear to have anything to do with a mental issue. And yet, the same therapy led to success in treating my condition.

As we went through two “surprise” therapies – therapies seemingly unrelated to dyslexia or ADHD – I recognized striking similarities with the capacity management of large computers, an area in which I used to be a specialist. I wanted to understand what was going on. “Why are the therapies effective?” I asked the creators of the therapies. Although they had some ideas, they couldn’t give me a satisfactory answer.

I searched the Internet and was amazed that capacity management, storage management, and knowledge management/information management did not appear to be given the importance I felt they deserved. With the exception of computer-based neural networks, it was hard to find anything.

With that, I decided to do something to raise the level of attention given to capacity, storage and information management in brain research. And so the idea for this book was born. At some point, the bits and pieces came together: It’s all about information management, and there must be a surprisingly simple mechanism at work. It became obvious how, at least theoretically, the human brain may store and process information. This led to my development of the information management model.

As this project moved forward, things became increasingly strange. On one hand, I found growing evidence of successful treatment for dyslexia. And yet, by the beginning of 2006, there was still strong opposition by influential scientists and doctors in the country where I live. They said, “There is no scientific proof. This therapy doesn’t work.”  Even classifications such as “rubbish therapy” went around.

Indeed, despite considerable research, it wasn’t possible to confirm some of the successes claimed by earlier surprise therapies. Scientists are also correct in saying that the therapy that led to the results seen with my son isn’t scientifically proven. But this conflicts with our personal experiences and other success stories. Something doesn’t add up.

Clearly, the potential effects of dyslexia and its consequences – for example, the difficulty of getting into higher education if you can’t read – are too far-reaching to accept things as they are. With this, the argument of “no scientific proof” isn’t good enough for those who suffer from this and other conditions. Patients, parents and teachers want convincing answers to questions such as these:

• Why don’t we hear or see information indicating whether the research done to date aligns with the logic of the new surprise therapies?

• What is the scientific reasoning as to why dyslexia patients don’t appear to have dyslexia anymore after following surprise therapies?

• Why is it that the “capacity bottleneck” argument and information management seem to be getting no attention in mental disorder research?

That said, through the information management model I outline in this book, I will present strong reasoning as to why dyslexia disappears following certain surprise therapies. The base argument is surprisingly simple: A capacity bottleneck is removed.

Feel free to judge for yourself. I have tried to write it in such a way that understanding the arguments requires no specialized knowledge.

In an effort to get at least some research started, I contacted scientists and managed to introduce the content of this book to a few of them. Although there was clear interest, it became evident that it would be extremely difficult to find the budget and the right mix of skills required for such research.

Moreover, finding a free slot on scientists’ busy agendas was another non-trivial obstacle. Consequently, I made approaching researchers a lower priority. Instead, I decided to follow the route of least resistance: a public request for research. Let’s see what those who suffer from mental conditions and disorders think about this. Perhaps public opinion can create such a level of interest that research projects will be started in the near future.

In that respect, this entire book is a public request for research along the lines of the surprise therapies and the information management model.

1      Prologue

It all began during the summer of 2004, when I was switching between TV channels. A broadcast of a Belgium station got my attention. A private clinic in the United Kingdom called DDAT claimed amazing results for the treatment of dyslexia. No drugs or any heavy exercise were needed – only some balance exercises. This immediately caught our attention, because our son had been diagnosed with dyslexia a few years earlier.

When our son began to learn reading and writing at school, it appeared to be more difficult for him than for his classmates. He received special attention and, after a while, extra exercises. And yet he kept falling farther and farther behind. After he was tested to assess his learning abilities, there was good news. In some areas, such as logical thinking, he was well advanced and, on average, he matched the average for children of the same age in The Netherlands.

Unfortunately, being advanced in some areas and average in general means something is well below average: His reading and writing abilities were well behind, and he was diagnosed with dyslexia. He later was also diagnosed with ADHD.

With the dyslexia diagnosis, he got special reading and writing exercises – the argument being that only extensive reading and writing exercises in connection with some physical exercises, such as finger training, would help. This, however, didn’t deliver sufficient results. His classmates moved on, while even with the greatest level of attention, our son had greater difficulty keeping pace with the class.

Because the normal school system is tailored to the average pupil, whose mental abilities develop at a faster pace, we decided to enroll him in a school specializing in cases like his. He was fortunate, because the school had a new exercise program for severe cases of dyslexia, and it helped. He made real progress. Unfortunately, it didn’t get him to the level of his age group, and at the age of 13, he still hated reading. Trying to get him to read something or to surf the Internet always resulted in one answer: “No!” It should be obvious that this response had direct implications for all the paperwork he had to do at school and for his further education.

With the experts unable to provide a better treatment, the U.K. therapy had our full attention. But there was more to come. A few days after the TV broadcast, we noticed a small article in our newspaper. Somebody named van Gemert was coming to town to talk about dyslexia. It was within walking distance, so the decision to attend was easy. To our surprise, van Gemert also claimed amazing results. Again, it was a new and simple treatment, and it was drastically different from what the experts had told us before. We filled out the van Gemert assessment form and went for a free initial assessment.

From there we had to decide which treatment option we wanted to follow – the van Gemert or U.K. option. At the time, our understanding of the van Gemert option was that it didn’t take away the root cause, but the U.K. method did. With that, we decided on the U.K. option.

As we filled in the assessment forms for both options, I began to realize there might be some treatment that could be applicable to me. This wasn’t for dyslexia but because of difficulties I was having with my vision. At the time, I was spending many hours behind computer screens, and I suffered from difficulties focusing. Letters and words appeared unclear on the screen. The harder I tried to get the words into focus, the longer it took to write a letter. I had to read the letter over repeatedly, because I didn’t recall what I had written half a page before. In other words, it appeared my concentration and memory weren’t working as efficiently as they were supposed to. And headaches showed up sooner or later. Obviously, those were things I wanted to return to normal.

The focusing problem wasn’t new – I had it for many years. And to make things a bit more challenging, it wasn’t a permanent condition. There were weeks when the focusing problem was there and then weeks, even months, without a problem. What was troublesome was that the periods without the problem became shorter, and the problem was more prevalent in the afternoon than in the morning.

I had told my optician about the problem two years earlier. He prescribed new glasses and suggested that I probably would need reading glasses in a few years. Well, despite the new glasses, the focusing problem remained, and during the two years, I realized something didn’t add up.

Then came van Gemert. His approach to dyslexia focuses around the eyesight, and part of the treatment involves a type of glasses usually not prescribed. I thought he must be the better expert and went for an assessment.

As my son was tested by DDAT in London and I for the van Gemert therapy^® in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, I started to understand the reasoning behind each of the therapies. Surprisingly, the fundamental arguments of DDAT and van Gemert were similar. The real surprise, however, came when I discovered parallels between these therapies and the capacity and storage management of computers – areas in which I used to be a specialist.