Hearing Voices Network Responds to Susan Inman HuffPo Piece

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On Saturday morning, Susan Inman, writing for HuffPost Canada, published “What You’re not Hearing About the Hearing Voices Movement.” Inman criticizes the Hearing Voices Network for “failing to differentiate between the needs of people who actually have psychotic disorders and those who don’t.”  On Sunday the Bay Area Hearing Voices Network published an open letter in response, writing: “Ms. Inman has profoundly mischaracterized hearing voices networks (HVNs) and also demonstrates a troubling lack of understanding of the empirical literature on psychosis, optimal psychosocial intervention and recovery.”

HVN Open Letter →

9 COMMENTS

  1. Typical psychiatry bs: “you’ve recovered? well, you weren’t doing that bad to begin with”. Tell me about confirmation bias.
    If the drug doesn’t work – well we can’t cure everybody (and it’s your fault)
    If the drug “works” – it’s a wonder drug
    If you stop taking the drug and recover – you were OK all along
    They’re really good at producing sequels to Catch 22.

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  2. I thought I read everything until this:

    Susan Inman Author, After Her Brain Broke: Helping My Daughter Recover Her Sanity

    Posted: 08/10/2014 3:13 am EDT

    “Psychotic disorders are frequently accompanied by significant and disabling cognitive losses. These cognitive difficulties can persist even when other symptoms (delusions, hallucinations) are well controlled by anti-psychotic medications. Well-researched cognitive problems include difficulties with short term and working memory, focusing, sequencing (essential for planning), judgment and problem solving. ”

    http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/susan-inman/mental-illness-cognitive-loss_b_5664999.html

    Excuse me but anti psychotics CAUSE the cognitive difficulties. Dopamine antagonists do that.

    Most of these munchkin syndrome by proxy write about my mentally ill kid people are clueless.

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    • The Mommy or Daddy wants to stay in control of their child, (the King+Queen do not want to lose their power) psychiatric drugging of the patient gives the parent this opportunity. Who is the psychiatrist (prescribing the drugs) working for?

      It’s all about following orders. The psych drugs make people stupider, stupider is easier to control but creates a never ending dependency on authority.

      copy and pasted from internet search
      QUIZ: AM I IN A RELATIONSHIP WITH A CONTROL FREAK?

      • Does this person keep claiming to know what’s best for you?
      • Do you typically have to do things his way?
      • Is he so domineering you feel suffocated?
      • Do you feel like you’re held prisoner to this person’s rigid sense of order?
      • Is this relationship no fun because it lacks spontaneity?

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  3. I thought I read everything until this:

    Susan Inman Author, After Her Brain Broke: Helping My Daughter Recover Her Sanity

    Posted: 08/10/2014 3:13 am EDT

    “Psychotic disorders are frequently accompanied by significant and disabling cognitive losses. These cognitive difficulties can persist even when other symptoms (delusions, hallucinations) are well controlled by anti-psychotic medications. Well-researched cognitive problems include difficulties with short term and working memory, focusing, sequencing (essential for planning), judgment and problem solving. ”

    http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/susan-inman/mental-illness-cognitive-loss_b_5664999.html

    Excuse me but anti psychotics CAUSE the cognitive difficulties. Dopamine antagonists do that.

    Message to all current and future “parent advocates” and NAMI types.

    Spend one month taking anti psychotics and get a clue.

    Even a few days should teach you something.

    Until then STFU.

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  4. As Frank said, there is no clear boundary between psychotic and non-psychotic conditions; it is a continuum or spectrum of constantly varying individual experiences.

    Inman’s simplistic thinking about “differentiating the needs of those who actually have psychotic disorders” therefore falls apart right out of the gate.

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  5. I’m glad that so many people defended HVN on the Facebook comments to Ms. Inman’s article. Let’s hope she’s been reading them.

    Bio-only and bio-dominant models of psychiatry insist, to the contradiction of every study and all of the real-world evidence, that Susan Inman’s daughter is “suffering” from a mental “illness” that is caused by a biological dysfunction which is most likely located somewhere inside her brain. Were this “medical” model not being strongly, incessantly, and creatively discredited by a wide variety of reputable laypeople and professionals, we could easily tolerate the conspicuous absence of Ms. Inman’s daughter from the discussion of what psychiatry is doing, could do, and should be doing. Under the “medical” model, her criticisms of psychiatry, her ideas about what she needs from psychiatry, and her appreciation of certain aspects of psychiatry could all be dismissed as untrustworthy. If Susan Inman’s daughter challenged what her family or clinicians said or did, they would tell her that she’s needy, paranoid, dramatic, and self-pitying because her “broken” brain can’t help but look a gift horse in the mouth. Should Ms. Inman’s daughter approve of the way she’s being treated by her family and clinicians, they would attribute this concordance with “sane” people to a deferential posture that Ms. Inman’s daughter assumes out of impotent resignation to the indignity of being forced to “retire” her self-determination because her brain is “broken”. This psychiatric double-bind cannot be tested and theories that cannot be tested hold no scientific value whatsoever. It’s time for Susan Inman to take off the tinfoil hat and quit trying to spin torture into treatment.

    Fortunately for Ms. Inman’s daughter and for Mad people as a whole, EVERY voice matters because bio-only and bio-dominant theories of psychiatry are nothing more than medical urban legends.
    Believing Susan Inman’s accounts of her daughter’s extreme states before her daughter confirms the veracity of these accounts is both morally and intellectually indefensible. Susan Inman is claiming that the Inman family and the psychiatric clinicians they’ve hired to “treat” her daughter’s “serious mental illness” are the people who are primarily responsible for her daughter’s “return to sanity”. Susan Inman’s memoir about her daughter’s “recovery” from “serious mental illness” was published in 2010. If Ms. Inman’s daughter has been “healthy/healthier” for at least the last five years, then she should be in good enough shape by now to verify the claims that her mother has made about how greatly she’s benefited from the social, medical, and legal effects of being “cared for” by her family, the bio-only/bio-dominant psychiatric clinicians, and by their collaborators who work in the civil and criminal law enforcement systems. By what means can Ms. Inman’s daughter truly feel connected to people who are given permission by psychiatry to treat her in whatever way they see fit, thanks to a pseudoscientific ideology of psychiatry that blames “bad brains” for mental “illness” instead of bad people? How has the health of Ms. Inman’s daughter improved by clinicians who purport to “treat” abnormalities of biology that nobody has discovered yet and which might not even exist? Now that Ms. Inman’s daughter has been labeled as “suffering from anosognosia” (i.e. a person’s rejection of their bullshit psychiatric diagnosis), her legal right to protect herself and her property from being controlled by her family, clinicians, etc. has been revoked because a “diagnosis” of “anosognosia” is viewed under the law as proof that you lack the cognitive skills to make your own decisions. By contrast, Ms. Inman’s daughter is also considered to be legally incapable of exercising unilateral power over her own life even if she obeys her family and clinicians without fail. Did Ms. Inman’s daughter really complete some process of emotional adjustment that enabled her to become satisfied with or even inured to the theft of her full citizenship by this grossly manipulative deprivation of her liberty? The fact that Susan Inman’s daughter hasn’t publicly answered any of these questions by now is probably a HUGE sign that she has been and still is dreadfully unhappy and/or sick, despite what her mother has been telling the public. Susan Inman may very well be damaging her daughter and duping the public. Until we hear Susan’s daughter agree with her mother’s recollections and opinions, we need to assume that we’re being scammed by Susan Inman’s showboating of the success that she claims her daughter is enjoying, ostensibly, because she “complies” with her mother’s wishes and with the quacks her mother pays to make those wishes come true.

    Almost everyone who agitates for the “medical” model of psychiatry and for the pro-force mental “health” laws that it rationalizes are sanists who act out their rabid prejudice against Mad people by neglecting and abusing their Mad family members, friends, and patients. I’m sure that Susan Inman is a member of this “immoral majority”, but the part of Susan Inman’s so-called “mental health advocacy” that really gives me the creeps is how she uses her daughter as a mythical testimonial of the advantages that Mad people supposedly stand to gain from the clinician-centered and family-centered goals of the pro-force mental “health” laws and the bio-only, bio-dominant psychiatric systems. If Mad people were listening to this sales pitch for a return to mid-20th century psychiatry directly from Ms. Inman’s daughter, we could and, in my opinion, should seriously listen to whatever she had to say. Solidarity with our Mad sister, if nothing else, would compel us to honor her experience with psychiatry, however different it may be from our own. Unfortunately for us and, most of all, for Ms. Inman’s daughter, the rights-scarce and deficit-focused denomination of psychiatry appears not to be producing positive outcomes for her that can be observed by anyone who isn’t a player on “Team Inman”. From what anyone outside of this “Team” can determine, Susan Inman’s daughter leads a good life in the ink and paper of her mother’s writings and nowhere else. Whether or not Ms. Inman’s daughter leads a good life in real space is a mystery of modern psychiatry! My fear is that Susan Inman is silencing her daughter and keeping her out of sight while she slowly maims or murders her through a torture-for-profit psychiatric system that helps “well” family members wage biological warfare against their Mad family members. This has not been a good year for adult sons and daughters of NAMI-mommies. Zac Pogliano and Natalie Fuller have both bitten the dust this year. Not even Mad in America has written an article about their deaths, both of which were caused by the evils of psychiatry that so enrage and sadden us. I wouldn’t be shocked if Susan Inman’s daughter met an “untimely” death while she was receiving “quality care” from her family and their hired goons. I really think that Susan Inman would rather see her daughter dead or a vegetable than to see her live a Mad life that’s overflowing with purpose and love.

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