Hi, Jessica,
Your mom had (has) a weakness in the tiny muscle in her right middle ear. She may have a similar problem in her left ear, but it’s the right ear that primarily feeds the left half of the brain, the seat of rationality. If the sound stream through the right ear is distorted and/or diminished by a weak stapedius muscle, the left-brain is unable to dominate the right half of the brain in their integrative processes. Most of the forms of mental illness you know something about are caused by some level of sound deprivation to the left-brain, which causes some level of decreased speed of cerebral integration. Those forms of deprivation likely would show up on an audiogram as oddities at particular frequencies of sound. The left ear’s deficits cause depression, i.e., when the left ear distorts sound headed for the right-brain, the range of depressions occur from mild and moderate to suicidal. The French otolaryngologist who isolated the specific frequency deficits in depression is the late Guy Bérard. He cured about 96 per cent of the suicidal patients he treated with his version of the Tomatis Method of ear stimulation using high-frequency music.
As a mother of a dyslexic child who became schizophrenic, I can sympathize with the pain you experienced growing up. Daniel’s dyslexia was hard on the family, but his schizophrenia blew the family apart. There were other stresses in the family, but the utter ignorance of the medical profession regarding the foundations of behavior exacerbates the problems in families coping with mental illness. Often, the ear problems are genetic. More of our kids inherited their father’s tendency to depression. I think I harmed Daniel’s ears in utero by using a power saw to build a large wall unit of bookcases during my pregnancy. As Daniel encountered the ignorance of the school system regarding his dyslexia, he gradually fell into despair and turned to drugs and alcohol. By then his ears were so damaged that, while he responded fantastically well to the Tomatis Method, when that treatment stopped after 10 days he crashed: he became schizophrenic. It took me 10 years to figure out that more music could heal even schizophrenia. After his addictions made him schizophrenic again, I healed him again. By then, I had noticed some things about schizophrenia that no one seemed to have written about. In seeking an explanation for those observations I studied neurology (on my own), did a lot of reading in psychology and psychiatry and related fields, read Tomatis’s book on the neurology of the ear pertinent to singing, and happened across V.S. Ramachandran’s description of the differing propensities of the cerebral hemispheres. I realized Daniel’s alternating states of consciousness (two minutes of better attention, two minutes of confusion, which contaminated your mom’s ability to communicate with you), were caused by the left-brain trading influence with the right brain every two minutes, for two minutes. When Daniel became upset he cycled faster, then the four-minute cycle would return, until he slept. All of us in some sense experience schizophrenia as we are falling asleep and dream, because we lose our left-brain dominance. A great many physiological changes cascade from that relaxation of the stapedius muscles that induce sleep.
All states of consciousness are controlled by the ears, which are incredibly sensitive to changes in the air supply through the mouth and nose (e.g., marijuana smoke, tobacco smoke), to substances in the blood (e.g., alcohol, anesthetics, drugs), to hormonal changes, to loud sound, to low-frequency sound, to sudden immersion in cold water, to infections, to blows to the head, and to obnoxious sounds we don’t want to hear. The good news is that most of those sources of trauma can be healed with high-frequency sound (yes, could be Mozart), gently amplified through headphones, and applied for a couple of hours a day until the muscle recovers. That treatment time can range from a couple of weeks for dyslexia to several months for autism and schizophrenia.
If you want to learn more about music therapy and mental illness, feel free to email me.
