CASE STUDY: HYPERACTIVITY WITH FOOD ALLERGY
A similar case was that of Ralph Hodgson, a twelve-year-old, prone to temper tantrums and hyperactive behavior. He had been having tantrums since the age of one. He had been to a number of psychiatrists for treatment. Since Ralph had an older brother and a younger sister, both of whom were model children, the psychiatrist attributed Ralph’s problem to the fact that he was a middle child, contending that middle children were more prone to such behavior.
Ralph was repeatedly caught lying and stealing. He frequently beat the family dog and succeeded in killing one pet gerbil and mutilating another. He built model planes but only, it seemed, to have the pleasure of smashing them. He also broke several chairs and damaged the furniture.
His I.Q. was above average, and all the standard physical and psychological tests revealed no organic problem. Yet he had great difficulty sleeping and could only sleep at times with the motor of a hair drier running near his bed. (The reason for this quirk was never explained.) If another family member entered his room, he ordered him out. The final straw for his parents was when they returned from a party and found a distraught baby sitter sobbing in the living room. Ralph had pounded a hole in the plaster wall between his bedroom and the living room and was climbing in and out.
Since Ralph’s mother suffered from ecologic illness of her own, I suggested that both she and the boy be hospitalized together. In this way they could help each other and observe one another’s progress. There was a bit of self-interest in this, too, since I knew that it would be extremely difficult to care for a wild twelve-year-old for three weeks in a closed hospital ward. I call this joint treatment of several family members “observed togetherness.”2
The boy’s medical history suggested that he might have food allergies. For instance, he was tremendously fond of orange juice, preferring it over any other beverage. He loved hard candy (which is almost pure corn sugar). His mother, Lorraine, age forty-one, had been subject to rheumatoid arthritis involving the elbows, knees, ankles, hips, and back for the previous eight years. She had also had sinus symptoms, headaches, and chronic fatigue, on and off, for years.
Basically, the patient fasts for five days and then is allowed to test one food after another in a search for definitive reactions. One of the first foods Ralph was tested on was orange juice, because of his addictivelike craving for it. At first he seemed normal, but within about two hours he was flushed in the face, had started to pack his bags, and insulted his mother and the staff. When his father told him, over the phone, that he could not come home, he hung up on him. Ralph struck his mother twice before his father and I arrived on the scene simultaneously. The room was completely disheveled. When I suggested that the oranges were the cause of this reaction, he started screaming and tore his symptom chart to shreds.
A few days later he had a similar but less severe reaction to grapefruit, another member of the citrus family. He also had less troublesome reactions to pork, peanuts, corn, peas, and bananas. Once all of these foods were scrupulously avoided, Ralph’s behavior improved greatly. When I last saw him, he was doing fine and had developed an excellent insight into his problem. His schoolwork and interpersonal relationships were now generally excellent.
An interesting side note concerns Mrs. Hodgson. As she went through the food tests, she discovered that a number of frequently eaten foods—including carrots, rice, pork, halibut, oranges, wheat, corn, peas, and grapefruit—caused acute flare-ups of her arthritic pain. By avoiding these foods and then rotating her diet according to the rules that I shall explain, she reaped equal benefit from her stay in the Ecology Unit.
The case of Ralph Hodgson illustrates the role of food addiction in causing the plus-two reaction of hyperactivity. The fact that he and his mother were both helped at the same time shows that sometimes problems which appear to be entirely “emotional” turn out to be environmental.
When two family members have been at each other’s throats, it is sometimes advantageous to hospitalize them both at the same time. In this way they see that it is not their personalities which are at fault, but that a physical problem lies at the base of their difficulties.
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