I had still more to overcome.  My eldest brother had a nervous breakdown while working on the Dew Line (he was posted on the Arctic Circle watching radar screens for a possible incoming attack from Russia).  I believe his collapse actually began with our childhood nutrition.  While in the Arctic all his foods came from cans.  He also was working long hours in extremely cramped quarters with no leave for months in a row, never going outside because of the cold, or having the benefit of natural daylight.

When he was still in the acute stage of his illness (I was still a teenager myself) I went to the hospital where my bother was being held, and talked the attending psychiatrist into immediately discharging him into my care.  The physician also agreed to refrain from giving him electroshock therapy, a commonly used treatment for mental conditions in Canadian hospitals at that time.  Somehow I knew the treatment they were using was wrong.

I brought my brother home still on heavy doses of thorazine.  The side effects of this drug were so severe he could barely exist:  blurred vision, clenched jaw, trembling hands, and restless feet that could not be kept still.  These are common problems with the older generation of psycho tropic medications, generally controlled to some extent with still other drugs like cogentin (which he was taking too).

My brother steadily reduced his tranquilizers until he was able to think and do a few things.  On his own he started taking a lot of B vitamins and eating whole grains.  I do not know exactly why he did this, but I believe he was following his intuition. (I personally did not know enough to suggest a natural approach at that time.) In any case after three months on vitamins and an improved diet he no long needed any medication, and was delighted to be free of their side effects.  He remained somewhat emotionally fragile for a few more months but he soon returned to work, and has had no mental trouble from that time to this day.  This was the beginning of my interest in mental illness, and my first exposure to the limitations of ‘modern’ psychiatry.

I always preferred self-discipline to being directed by others.  So I took every advantage of having a teacher for a mother and studied at home instead of being bored silly in a classroom.  In Canada of that era you didn’t have to go to high school to enter university, you only had to pass the written government entrance exams.  At age 16, never having spent a single day in high school, I passed the university entrance exams with a grade of 97 percent.  At that point in my life I really wanted to go to medical school and become a doctor, but I didn’t have the financial backing to embark on such a long and costly course of study, so I settled on a four year nursing course at the University of Alberta, with all my expenses paid in exchange for work at the university teaching hospital.