Crime & Violence

[Karen]

Commentary on Nutritional Treatment of Mental Disorders
from Willam Walsh, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, Pfeiffer Treatment Center www.hriptc.org

The following information is taken from Dr. William Walsh's discussion on Safe Harbor's "Integrative Psychiatry" email list for professionals. To preserve Dr. Walsh's wealth of information, we have posted his comments here, with the notation of added commentary [with the date] as discussion goes on.

http://www.alternativementalhealth.c...s/walsh.htm#Cr

Crime & Violence

We've spent the past 25 years studying behavior disorders and have accumulated the world's biggest & best chemistry database for behavior. We have about 100 separate chemical assays of blood, urine, and hair for more than 12,000 behavior-disordered persons, including participation in 28 forensics studies of folks like Charles Manson, Richard Speck, Henry Lee Lucas, and James Oliver Huberty. This database clearly shows violent, delinquent persons to have striking biochemical differences, compared to the general population. The late & great Carl Pfeiffer helped me over the last 12 years of his life to development biochemical, non-drug treatments for these chemical imbalances.

The Pfeiffer Treatment Center was named for Carl Pfeiffer, MD, PhD of Princeton, NJ .... for his great contributions to our work. He died 6 months before the Center opened in 1989.

The Pfeiffer Center has completed several outcome studies measuring efficacy of this treatment system. The latest one involves 207 consecutive patients in which we carefully determined the frequency of physical assaults and destruction of property before & after treatment. I've completed a manuscript for this study which will be published in the journal, Physiology and Behavior, hopefully within 4-6 months. The results are quite spectacular

This study indicates excellent efficacy for young persons.... 0-16 yrs of age.... with sharply declining efficacy at older ages. The decline seems to coincide with the onset of drugs & alcohol abuse. I am sorry to say that our experience with adult ex-convicts is not very good & the information you received about 95% success in overcoming recidivism in violent criminals is not true. However, about 90% of compliant YOUNGER violent/delinquent persons respond very nicely to the Pfeiffer therapy.... About 60% of these report complete elimination of assaults and property destruction, with the other 30% reporting excellent partial improvements. Maybe some day we'll be smart enough to help the older offenders too.

We believe that America's best hope for effective crime prevention is early identification of at-risk youths and effective treatment before their lives are ruined. I'm certain that stimulant drugs and/or psychiatric medications are not the answer. (Feb 6, 2003)

Many years ago I did a study examining chemistry differences between male siblings in which one was a violent delinquent and the other a well-behaved child. We balanced age and birth order and accepted only those who lived in the same household and attended the same school.

I clearly remember a family living in the squalor of Chicago's south side black ghetto...... The father was in Stateville Prison for murder.... the mother was a prostitute who sometimes entertained her "guests" at home in the presence of the children. The boys were age 10 and 11 and both had suffered physical and sexual abuse from the customers. I've never seen a worse environment..... I remember being very nervous just driving into the neighborhood.

The 10 yr old was oppositional, defiant, cruel, truant, and was already in a violent gang. However, his 11 yr old brother was quite amazing...... a well-behaved, polite young man who was an excellent student and also class president. For years I wondered how such a miracle could have happened.

We eventually found 24 families that included an "all-American boy" and a "child from hell". The ill-behaved children had clear chemistry abnormalities whereas the well-behaved ones generally exhibited expected trace-metal levels.

This experiment was a watershed experience for me. For the first time I knew that environment wasn't the only causative factor in behavior disorders and ADHD..... that disordered biochemistry (probably genetic) also played a role.

In studying nearly 10,000 behavior-disordered children & adults since that time, I've learned the following:

1. A child born with ideal body/brain chemistry is nearly indestructible, and may thrive in a terrible environment.

2. A child with a MILD chemical predisposition to violence may turn out fine, if the environment is good and there are resources for counseling, etc. The same child might wind up in prison if born into poverty or an otherwise terrible environment.

3. A child born with a SEVERE chemical imbalance will exhibit terrible behavior, even in an ideal environment. You can't just "love away" a severe brain chemical imbalance. My group once visited and tested Charles Manson at San Quentin prison..... his chemistry was so extraordinarily aberrant that I am convinced that if adopted into a different family, Manson would have turned out the same. (July 28, 2003)

In the beginning, we had no way of knowing if the biochemical differences were a causative factor or simply an association. I decided the quickest way to find out would be to correct the aberrant chemistry of the violent children to see if the behaviors changed. 10,000 behavior patients later, I can report that the bad behavior in young children usually disappears completely when the chemistry is balanced. Children under the age of 10 usually correct beautifully without counseling of any kind. However, older children (14+) benefit greatly from counseling, behavior mod, conflict resolution, etc after the chemistry is corrected. I'm not sure if this is because of an ingrained negative self-image, poor social skills, or problems in breaking the bad behavioral habits. All I know is that counseling/therapy seems necessary with teens, even after the chemistry has been normalized. We've also learned that adult criminals generally fail to achieve enduring benefits with our biochemical (non-drug) therapies. Most are back in jail within 5 years. We are on a mission to identify the at-risk children and intervene with effective therapy before their lives are ruined. The window
of opportunity (for severe cases) begins to close in the early teen years. Drug and alcohol abuse may be major factors in this phenomenon.

Most children with a predisposition to bad behavior have chemistry imbalances which are fairly mild, and for this large group..... environment and life experiences rule. For them, early traumae might be the deciding factor. (July 28, 2003)