Med Head Analysis

Cory Friedman’s life was a living hell. In the novel Med Head by James Patterson, Craig Friedman is a boy who suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette’s syndrome from the young age of five. He also experienced bouts of depression and was prescribed to over sixty medications throughout his teenage years. When Cory was five, he had the urge to switch his neck back and forth and it just stuck with him. Before this day, he remembers being a ‘normal’ kid. People are not born with mental illnesses; they develop them throughout their life experiences and the people they interact with.

When Craig was around the age of thirteen, the doctors noticed not only his Tourette’s, but he was showing signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD is a ‘mental disorder characterized by intrusive thoughts that produce anxiety, or by a combination of such thoughts’. He also showed signs of anxiety, depression, and alcoholism and was prescribed medicines for anti-psychotics, anti depressants, anti seizure, blood pressure, mood enhancer, and mood depressors. When a baby is born, it is impossible to tell if they have a mental disorder, however, if scientists come up with the technology finding a way to do so, there would be a low chance of them having mental disorders. Even mental disorders that are passed throughout the family would not show up very well. Yes, people that have bipolar in their family have more of a chance to have bipolar; however, this does not mean that they defiantly have bipolar. All it really depends on is their interactions with people and what they are exposed to throughout their lives.

Before Craig was five years old, he showed no signs of mental illness. Majority of mental illnesses cannot be determined for sure until the patient eighteen years old. This is also proof that with age and more real life experiences, the person will show more of the symptoms. Throughout Craig’s high school career, he showed worse symptoms of Tourrette’s and unbelievable anxiety. People use Craig throughout his life but in high school, his schoolmates brought this to a new level. They performed cruel tricks and used his Tourette’s to their advantage. His depression was brought out more and more, especially when his own assistant who was his ‘best friend’ turned him into the school for smoking behind the school’s gym even when he knew about his addiction. Other schoolmates would mimic his tics and make the squawking noises Craig makes when he gets nervous. As a result, Craig himself gets more anxious and squawks himself, and the teacher, not taking full account of his condition, would easily get annoyed and punish Craig.

Craig decides to go to a wilderness camp for troubled teens. All of his depression led to his alcoholism which led to him almost burning down his own house and having his parents and older sister killed. This was the peak moment that made him decide on his own to go to one of the hardest wilderness camps in the United States. He lived in the wilderness for three months and it was the ‘best he had ever felt’. In this life experience, Craig battled with his own depression and addictions. His tics also got better, obviously not cured. This shows that through better life experiences, mental illnesses can be cured to some extent. If a person surrounds themselves with another who is a bad influence, they themselves with start partaking in activities that they are not proud of. The same goes for mental illnesses. If somebody surrounds themselves with a depressed person, they will start to feel down themselves. When Craig went to the wilderness camp, he surrounded himself with others who were going through the same situation as him. They all had to work together and get through the hard times. There was no time to focus on yourself or your problems. There was no selfishness, no teasing, and no judging which was exactly was Craig needed.

Life experiences cause mental illnesses more than family trees do. There was no family history of Tourrettes’, OCD, anxiety, depression, or alcoholism. Obviously, more situations caused more anxiety than others. For instance, if Craig was never teased in school as much, he probably would not have suffered as much anxiety or depression. More anxiety causes more tics and more compulsions, triggering more drinking.

Also, when one grows older there are mental disorders that occur more during with more matured ages. For instance, there is dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. However, the elderly suffers less from high anxiety. The older the person, the more memory loss they are going to suffer. With military veterans, they suffer more and various mental illnesses because they have gone through extremely stressful and life threatening times. Majority of mental diseases are stress related.

Overall, there are a lot of factors that could cause all different kinds of mental diseases. Some causes for mental illnesses include early development, drugs, a loss of a family member, disease or injury, life experiences, and society and culture. No infant can truly go through the pain and suffering of any of these causes. Therefore, no infant can be diagnosed of a mental disease unless they had gone through a traumatic time or period, which they would most likely forget because they are at such a young age. ‘Higher rates of mood, psychotic, and substance abuse disorders have been found following traumatic brain injury’.

Even with autism, which can be detected more or less when a woman is pregnant with a child, is told to be “caused by genetic and environmental factors, not just genetic”. This was said by Dr. Lisa Jo Rudy of the Science Institute of New Hampshire. The same information is found out with Tourette’s. Some children are performing small tics, more like twitching, but when they grow older and have to face others in high stress their tics become more intense and more embarrassing all the more. Whenever Craig got into a high stress environment such as school, or a mental hospital, his tics got so bad to the point he was handicapped and had to use a wheelchair. He opted against using the wheelchair in his house because there was no need because his tics were not nearly as bad.

The quick fix for Craig and his Tourette’s was alcohol. Alcohol made him so numb to the point of where he ‘could not even feel the need for his tics anymore’. Craig’s stress level was always low when he drank. Alcoholism caused his Tourette’s and his struggles overall. When in the wilderness, he not only had to suffer through withdrawal from alcohol, but also from Clozapine. Clozapine is an antipsychotic that is used to treat schizophrenia, usually. The withdrawal from this medicine causes many people put on it causes depression. Also, the weight gain from this medicine would cause depression. Before Craig went to the wilderness camp, his alcoholism and Tourette’s had gotten really bad, causing more and more depression. He passed out with a lit cigarette in his hand, and was woken up to the smells of smoke and fire. Knowing how severe he had gotten at that point, he knew he had to do something about it. He knew to surround himself with positive influences and positive experience. This experience ended up helping Craig for the rest of his life. A negative experience can ruin a person’s life, but what people do not really focus on is that a positive experience can help somebody for a lifetime. It is a person’s choice of what they do to help themselves.