Rickie

Recounts a thirteen-year-old's descent into schizophrenia and her subsequent recovery through nutritional therapy and visual perception training

After 10 years of his daughter's institutionalization for schizophrenia, New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center psychiatrist Flach ( Resilence ) decided she should be treated with experimental, physiologically-based nutritional (vitamin) therapy and visual perception training, which proved successful. Now a licensed practical nurse and mother of three, Hartman has not seen a psychiatrist since 1978. The poignant story of the pain of patient and parents during repeated episodes of improvement and regression on conventional therapy is told in alternate segments by the father and daughter. Singularly devoid of self-pity and bitterness, Flach pere makes palpable the anguish of being torn between parental and professional concerns during his daughter's illness.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In this compelling account, Flach, a psychiatrist at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center and author of The Secret Strength of Depression (Bantam, 1986. rev. ed.), tells of his own teenaged daughter's ten-year battle with schizophrenia, including her stays in various institutions and treatment with electroshock therapy, an assortment of psychotropic agents, and various psychotherapeutic approaches. Rickie was finally cured through a combination of visual perception training and experimental nutritional therapy and is now a mentally healthy licensed practical nurse, wife, and mother of three. It all reads like a good mystery novel: even when her condition seems to be getting more and more hopeless, we know from Rickie's own recollections, which are interspersed with her father's narrative, that she survived and overcame. For public libraries.
- Marcia G. Fuchs, Guilford Free Lib., Ct.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.