Word: allers
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...Soon Aller was visiting cemeteries. "I'd put my hands on the tombstones and make mind contact," he says. He would see his deceased grandmother walking through his parents' home. He was convinced that objects in his apartment were pipe bombs. He was worried that a sniper was outside, somewhere, waiting for him. "He was so convincing that I was frightened," says his father Bob Aller...
Suspecting that Greg was suffering from schizophrenia, Bob and Gloria Aller sought help from an expert at their alma mater, the University of California, Los Angeles. Their fears were confirmed. But they also received some good news: Greg was eligible for a sophisticated UCLA research project that would provide him with the enormously expensive treatment and medication required by schizophrenia. The Allers felt they had found a way out for their troubled son. Instead they found a descent into hell...
...road to science is paved with good intentions. Gregory Aller had volunteered for an experiment designed to study the early years of schizophrenia, the onset of schizophrenic relapse, how to predict relapse, and how to determine who would and who would not be affected by withdrawal of medication. In the short term, that meant Aller would get medicine to make him well. But the long-range realities were harrowing. If he got well, the experiment would follow Greg as medication was withdrawn. If he then became ill, he could fall into the worst stages of psychotic relapse. Last March, Keith...
...March 14, 1988, Aller signed his first consent form at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and became a subject for Phase 1 of Developmental Processes in Schizophrenic Disorders. Twice a month he received a 12.5-mg injection of the antipsychotic drug Prolixin Decanoate. The substance took three months to take effect, but the results were miraculous. "Everything disappeared," Aller says. Gone were the space aliens, his grandmother's ghost, the pipe bombs, the sniper...
Meanwhile the researchers were preparing him for Phase 2, formally titled Double-Blind Drug Crossover and Withdrawal Project. Says Aller: "In group- therapy sessions, they implied that going into crossover meant that you were a strong person. It would be a better thing to do than being on medication. It meant you were doing well...