Who Are They to Say I Wasn’t Buddha?

You are assuming that they want to help in the manner you are describing. Many can’t even imagine such a means of helping, and think they are “helping” by stopping “bad” emotions. And others are just helping themselves to a bigger payday.

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Religion is like a big house you can live in. Fine with me, if you do not believe in Prophet Muhammad, but, that you find it “extremely wrong” even mentioning some facts about Islam is simply flat out stupid. I am speaking from my own experience, that Islam stabilizes your inner self, to the degree, that you do not need to go through the Christ sickness, where you crucify yourself on the presupposed idea that your suffering is means to change the whole world. In Islam this is exchanged by the maxim of Yihadd, and struggle in the way of Allah. There is still a sacrifice of yourself, but up to a degree where you are allowed to defend yourself. But since you do not want good advice, I leave you here and then.

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I wouldn’t say that faith requires you to believe things that are CONTRARY to facts, just that no facts are required to sustain your belief. I think there are people who have faith to a point, but if consensus reality conflicts with faith, are willing to change their view. There are lots of Christians, for example, who don’t believe that God created the world 5000 years ago by blowing on a bunch of dust, because scientific evidence contradicts that version of reality. But they may still believe in God or Jesus without any need for evidence.

I’d have to agree, though, that the religion of psychiatry goes more along the “religious literalist” line of faith – even contradictory evidence doesn’t shake their faith in the DSM/Broken Brain mythology.

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The very definition of faith is the belief in something that cannot be seen.

Don’t know if that’s actually the definition. “Belief” is an intellectual process. “Faith” to me is beyond belief; it implies an intuitive understanding. William Blake once said something to the effect of truth being something that is understood and not believed, but I may be a little off on that, I’ll try to look it up.

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“Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not to be believ’d” — William Blake

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I just listened to the videos on the website of official site of Scientology, and what they are saying seems to be actually the key? What all people have the right to their own religions and choice? Accepting people from all walks of life? Saying that discovering oneself is a journey and everyone has their own journey? I don’t see anything wrong with it, just the opposite.

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Scientology is bogus. Whether something is “wrong” with that is a matter of perspective.

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I’ve said this before many times – being called a “scientologist” or an “antipsychiatrist” or an “antiscientist” is a tactic of distraction, and should be labeled as such. Such tactics are used by people who don’t have actual data to counter your arguments. I believe the proper reply is to ask why they are distracting from the question at hand. If you defend yourself in any way, you have allowed the topic to be changed to whether or not the label fits you, rather than whether or not psychiatry is a legitimate medical field, which is what we need to be talking about. That’s my humble opinion, and others can disagree if they wish, but decades as an advocate have taught me that the “ad hominem” attack generally means you have your opponent on the ropes, and you should continue your attack rather than let yourself be pulled off topic.

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With all respect Steve this is pretty offensive. I and many others PROUDLY consider ourselves anti-psychiatrists, so many of us that we even have factions, all of whom would be angry at the notion that the term we embrace would be considered an “ad hominem.” The only people who would consider it such are those beholden to psychiatric ideology. The same people who talk about “pill-shamers.”

If you are anti-psychiatry you are an anti-psychiatrist. If you are a Scientologist this is a description, not an insult. How other people react to the obvious is their responsibility.

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Perhaps a poor choice of examples. I apologize for any offense. I had no intent to compare Scientology to antipsychiatry or either to antiscience – these are simply the “accusations” commonly used by pro-psych forces to try and get off the topic of whether there is any truth to psychiatry’s claims.

My point is that any attempt to distract from the discussion should be confronted and labeled as such. I would submit that even if one got into a long discussion of why one is an antipsychiatrist and made a great argument, that person would still be off on a tangent and their antagonist would win a round. My point to that person would be that PSYCHIATRY IS BASED ON LIES AND THE DATA PROVES THAT, and you choosing to try and discredit me by labeling me in any way is simply a tactical distraction from the point at hand, whether it’s true or false, or positive or negative in my own view.

Perhaps the better analogy is if I said I see large corporate contributions are dangerous to our society, and the person said, “You only believe that because you’re a socialist.” I don’t need to “defend myself” against an “accusation” of being a socialist, nor do I have to explain that I am a socialist and explain what it means or why it’s not a bad thing. My reply would be more along the line of, “No, I believe that because it happens to be true” and present my evidence. A more snide response might be, “No, I’m a socialist because what I said is true and it needs to be changed.” Or I might ask them, “So are you saying that buying votes by making “contributions” to politicians in exchange for access and favors is a good thing?” But I’d bring it back to the point, whether the accusation was good, bad or indifferent in my view. It’s a distraction tactic and I think it plays into their hands to fall into that discussion at all.

Does that make it any clearer? Or at least less offensive?

Your candor is appreciated, as always.

—- Steve

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I would also add that whatever you or I or anyone else thinks of the term “antipsychiatry,” it is USED by psychiatric proponents as a means of discrediting someone. I don’t think they care what YOU think about the term, they use it in a way to try and convince other people that you’re irrational. That’s the problem I’m talking about here.

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Perhaps the better analogy is if I said I see large corporate contributions are dangerous to our society, and the person said, “You only believe that because you’re a socialist.”

Actually a socialist in my view would not see “corporate contributions” as overly relevant, at least if you’re talking about elections, as elections are also red herrings.

But what would be wrong nonetheless about holding an opinion due to one’s socialism? So my response to that supposed “accusation” would be along the lines of “Duh…”

the term “antipsychiatry”…is USED by psychiatric proponents as a means of discrediting someone. I don’t think they care what YOU think about the term, they use it in a way to try and convince other people that you’re irrational. That’s the problem.

It’s not a problem at all, unless you’re unsure of something yourself. People talk shit and we expose it as shit, and expose them as either confused or deceptive, which helps enlighten and inspire others and encourage them to resist a little more boldly.

If people are confused about anti-psychiatry there are plenty of people here to clarify. Enough anyway. So bring it on! 🙂

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I still think you are missing the point. It’s not whether antipsychiatry is good or bad or holding opinions “because of one’s socialism” is acceptable or unacceptable. They are changing the topic! Why allow the other person to take control of the communication by making it about antipsychiatry or socialism or Scientology or Catholicism or whatever else? Why not point out that they are trying to distract from the point you just made by bringing up a philosophical discussion of some external explanation of “why” rather than the very obvious factual reasons you have just brought to light? Are the long-term outcomes for ADHD any better or worse based on my philosophical or religious orientation? Are we talking about science or philosophy? I prefer to keep the topic on scientific facts, because when we do that, the forces of psychiatry lose every time. Which is why they want to talk about something else, ANYTHING else besides the actual facts! And I don’t allow them to do that, and point out their deceptive intent into the bargain.

They have also tried to change the topic into admiring me for all of my great advocacy work and how wonderful it is that I’m willing to stand up for foster kids, etc, etc. I do the same thing: “Thanks for your kind words. Now let’s get back to talking about why this kid is having hand tremors. They are listed as side effects for two of the drugs she’s taking – what are you planning to do about this?”

I hope that makes my point clear. It has nothing to do with antipsychiatry or socialism. It has to do with calling out the evasive tactics used to distract from talking about the real subject.

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Steve,
interesting, I also got the impression that the topic gets ‘turned around’ to try to highlight the arguments that the person wasn’t even making in the first place and I feel some ‘subtle’ partonising, trying to discredit the person, but in such words that it doesn’t look like a tactic.

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Sceptics often point out people who claim to have lived previous lives invariably claim to be well-known dead people, such as Anne Frank. There is a clear case to be made for overidentification. And there is clearly little concern for the problems of verification. A deliberate cynical fraud would surely involve claiming to be someone dead that is not well-known, whose life is not well-documented. But seemingly, non-famous people only very rarely reincarnate. Whereas famous dead people reincarnate frequently, sometimes multiple times at different places on the Earth, re-occupying living bodies simultaneously. For instance, Jesus reincarnates several thousand times a year, every year, the world over. Which is troubling, given that Jesus is clearly having problems getting the reincarnation right, which suggests some glitch or bug in the spawning system.

I have tried to find a website that collates the reincarnated dead people, attempts to keep a count. It would be interesting to see how many Anne Franks there are currently, as well as an accurate number of Jesuses. John Lennon often reincarnates too. So does Mozart, Beethoven and — less mentioned — Adolf Hitler. I would like to be able to check in somewhere and keep an eye on the numbers. Not sure why I would find that reassuring, but I would.

Language-wise, there is little difference between saying “I am Jesus reborn” compared to say “I am *like* Jesus reborn”. This is why I think that frontal lobe injury is probably a key factor in such phenomena, as the frontal lobes play a part in the regulation of self-image.

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redux wrote “It would be interesting to see how many Anne Franks there are currently, as well as an accurate number of Jesuses.”

The difference is obvious, as Anne Frank is a mortal without magical powers, and Jesus can raise the dead and do other miracles.

I met a guy who believes he is Jesus, but I did not ask him to show me any of his magical powers. Would he have become angry if asked?

A person who believes they are Anne Frank should be less dangerous than someone who believes they are Jesus.

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Psychiatry is an institution which actively promotes that there is no God because it disbelieves and labels people who see god and experience spiritual awakening

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@ Ekaterina

Well, the DSM indicates that religious beliefs must be ruled out of the definition of delusional thinking. In practice, however, psychiatrists, for ideological and economic purposes, will make an idiosyncratic use of the criteria, and are likely to diagnose such beliefs as pathological, all the more because psychs are ignorant of social science and humanities which include sociology, history, and anthropology. Furthermore, beliefs that are too uncommon within a given culture can still meet the criteria. Anyway, such criteria are always left to the therapist’s “clinical judgment”, or personal interpretation.

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Just to jump into this again, it seems to me that ultimately psychiatry — and any “psychotherapy” — does take a religious position when it makes any sort of definitive statement about death, which it generally does by default if at all. But consider the interaction one might go through with a lifelong shrink or therapist who is about to die about what death means, its significance, its reality, the fate of consciousness, etc. — can anyone even pretend that these are scientific or medical issues, and not spiritual/philosophical ones?

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Youre welcome, Ekaterina.

Like anything it depends, depends, depends. Some people would rather be left alone. I can often count myself in that number. It took a while to come to terms with that. I went through a period of thinking I had to recover. That it was possible to recover. And then, in exploring these areas, I discovered that time and time again, the pressures I was putting on myself were pushing me in the opposite direction. I kept getting worse.

And I object to my achievements and adaptations, as humble as they are, being referred to as recovery. It’s not recovery to stay alive or not get arrested or have a bath. It’s not recovery to look in a mirror, or write online. You don’t get to recover from what some describe as severe and enduring mental illness. Or schizphrenia. Or whatever. Frontal lobe damage. Traumatic brain injury. Yes, plasticity, and so on. But for gawd’s sake it’s compensatory. All that evolution wasn;t for nothing and yes if you knock out one section of the noggin, another part of the brain can compensate. But it will never, NEVER!, function as well as that original brainflesh.

I accept that some people want to be in recovery-oriented and so-called compassionate scenarios, and that they go in with high expectations, and come out sometimes as evangelists. This is fine, fine for them, but for people like me, people that do not buy into the New Age stuff, the evangelists for these kinds of things are a bit of a pain in the arse.

The people you allude to, many of them, find comfort in their solitude, find peace in their minimal lives. They do not want to be compelled to be amongst others, in a designated place, herded, shepherded, prescribed an identity, compelled to think that an institution, of no matter what kind, is their natural habitat, and the best place for them, when things are tough. They want to be left alone, for the most part. For all the recovery-bashing zealots to back right off and populate whatever moon takes their fancy.

Some people want to be in hospital wards. They get a lot out of it. They hit it off with staff and the experience is positive for them. Other people want to be in alternative institutions like Soteria, and it works for them, to be indulged by others in a less medical way, although Soteria Houses do not dispense entirely with medication, and of course, they have obligations, and legal requirements, and standards of behaviour and etiquette, institutional rules and modes of being, and are not unknown to ring the police to take over, when they have reached the limits of their limitless compassion.

It depends, depends, depends. Always it depends.

Some people such as myself would much rather, at times, be afforded a personal budget, and a full-time personal assistant, and the green-light to pop off somewhere quiet and solitudinal, near the sea, away from the agony of roads, and the filth of fumes and the sickness of bright lights and the horror of microwave technologies. There is the possibility of this, the carrot has been dangling for many for years, and a few have succeeded in establishing a social contract, a personal budget, and assistance to do with that what they will, psychosocially, for the better of their health and will to live and go on with what is, essentially, a very limited and painful life, by nature of the struggles they contend with.

What I should have been given was a picture-in-picture rectangle in the corner of every single screen that ever got goggled at. I be there, constantly making comments, reacting, correcting grammar and spelling, pointing out logical inconsistences, plot irregularities, and unforgiveable instances of narcissistic character development, and underlining acts and utterances of class betrayal, and bigotry, and self-sodomising pretentiousness, of which there is so much these days, I can hardly come up for air, am deluged by it. For instance I said to a stranger yesterday, do you believe in god, and he goes no, and so I ask, well, have you ever believed in god, and he goes no, and I asks, well, there’s a thing and so have you ever indulged the idea that there might be a god, and he goes no, and so I ask, well, then youll struggle with my question, and I knew he had no interest in my question, but I asked it anyway, as I had a compulsion to finish, and so I asks him, do you think that god would request that someone killed themselves, and finally he awakens from his smartphone, and he goes, I DO NOT want to go there with that kind of thing, I dont want to think about it, and I asks, do you mind but do you self-identify as depressed, and he goes, FUCK YOU YES I AM DEPRESSED, and he looks like he’s going to punch me in the face and I smile at him and I goes, well, according to the bible, god loves you and he won’t ask you to kill yourself and in fact if ever a voice or thought appears in your noggin and suggests you should kill yourself, know this for sure, it isnt god doing it

What I would like to see is less paternalism. Less assumptions being made without actually talking to people and getting a real angle on the true diversity of the mad community, for want of a better collective noun. So much of what is provided or established or proposed stems from the desires and hopes of too small a number of consulted persons, and this, I find, to be a very disagreeble pattern, a perhaps even insulting approach, demeaning, fakey… fakey in the sense of not actually all that concerned with the plight of others, and what they want, and what they think might help them, or even just what they know isn’t helpful to them, but an assumption that because a small handful of celebrity activists push an agenda, that is the totality of the agenda. I find that whole business sordid, and dispiriting.

I accept that madinamerica is doing its bit to give a voice to people, but it’s like, say at a football match, on the terraces, you can only ever hear the voices closest to you, and even then only the ones that are bellowing the loudest,the rest, the vast majority, just merge into an overwhelm of voices indeterminate. the stories can never be exhausted. personally I consider that to be a wonderful thing. and I thank you sincerely for sharing your own. for a while it’ll ring in my ears. Best of luck and health.

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@ Ekaterina

From the outset, the problem with psychiatry is political (power + ideology), not medical (science + care/help/therapy).

I don’t know how familiar you are with the work of Thomas Szasz (The Myth of Mental Illness, The Manufacture of Madness, namely), but if you are going to “help” yourself and others, you need to do political education, promote class-consciousness; that is, be a leftist, and know what it means to be one. By “political”, I don’t mean the mainstream stuff, but the science and philosophy. In a nutshell, the political body of human destiny is about the management of social conflicts, power relationships. Nothing is more important than the power you have in your own life, and the power that others can exert on you.

Now, coercion is the cornerstone of psychiatry. Beyond the myth of mental illness, invalid diagnoses, super-placebo lobotomizing drugs, clinical trials biased to death, etc., it all comes down to behavioral control. The medical infrastructures and the benevolent outlook are really just political devices to make you behave in a sociomorally acceptable way. What we are dealing with is the quintessence of fascism, as centuries of pseudoscientific claims and barbaric treatments will have proven it. Antipsychiatry, on the other hand, given its positive understanding of madness, represents the revolutionary drive. In the final analysis, there is nothing more political of a subject than psychiatry, and nothing as extremely leftist as antipsychiatry.

As Oldhead down there would argue, seek no “alternatives” to psychiatry. There is no alternative to slavery, only abolition. That being said, institutional psychiatry does not exist in a void. It is a reflection of the existing social order. To bring about an “alternate” world in which coercive psychiatry would no longer exist, we have to scrap the political discourse, narrative, ideology that supports it. It involves nothing other than a revolution in mental and social structures.

I have come to realize that the psychiatric survivors movement is the most difficult to put together. Still, we have a whole range of strategies to advance our common agenda of fighting, resisting, surviving, ending psychiatric oppression. You can do it all alone as an anarchist, or work in advocacy groups if you can withstand the collectivist nature of groups. Ultimately, the key point in this brief answer of mine is to not overlook the political, legal, moral nature of the problem at hand.

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There is a lot of criticism of psychiatry but what would be the alternatives? What would be the alternatives for people who ask for help?

Hi, deinquisiteur pretty much said it all here. I just want to pick a little more at this concept of “alternatives.”

The only real alternative to something evil is for it to cease existing — slavery or concentration camps for example. So when you talk of “alternatives” to something you imply that it is basically necessary but there are better or optional ways of doing it. This does not fit the bill with psychiatry, because it has no positive function to begin with, unless you accept the lies and pseudoscience, and the idea that the solution is to “go” somewhere for “professional” answers to problems attributable to and inherent in the very structure of capitalist society. Or the idea that there are individual solutions divorced from that context.

The only legitimate purpose for a “network of survivors” would be to fight to abolish psychiatry (most immediately the forced kind) and support each other along the way — not as “co-counselors” or “peers,” but as comrades in struggle.

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yes, i agree, I am also interested in how ‘madness’ is viewed in line with writings of Foucault, and how it is recycled now into ‘mental health’ discourse, which makes it very very hard to challenge from academic point of view.
Psychosis as an experience is my own interest, but nothing prevents me from pursuing both interests, I guess.

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I have no problem with the word itself. Psychosis is a state of mind.

No, can’t go there. Anything ending with “osis” implies a disease state. This is simply a term to describe an infinite collection of personal idiosyncrasies, expressions of pain, etc. which cannot be adequately articulated, and which do not constitute a legitimate “class” of anything. It is used as a way of feigning an understanding of a vast spectrum of thought and behavior which does not conform to accepted standards. (As evidenced by the inability or unwillingness of anyone to define “psychosis.”) It should not be used. (I’m not fond of “madness” either.)

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@ Oldhead,

We argued about this before. I thought it was done. Well, let’s see if you, Ekaterina (our psychosis expert) or anyone else can help sort this out…

→ Psychosis is a mental state, not a disease. Depression is a mental state, a condition, a symptom, not a disease. Hallucinations are a mental phenomenon, an experience, a neurological condition. Anxiety is a state of mind, a feeling, not necessarily the effect of a brain disease. Mood disorders are just that: disordered moods. On the other hand, major/clinical/characterized depression is construed as a disease. (In “Major depressive disorder,” “major” does not assume any degree of severity; it could be mild, moderate, or severe. However, “major depressive episode” will be interpreted as a psychiatric disease.) “Schizophrenia” is the diagnostic term for chronic psychotic behavior. I would be glad to use the term “schizophrenia” in the sense of the existential/phenomenologist psychs like Eugène Minkowski but, of course, I refrain from using this kind of term in many casual contexts because it is loaded with psychiatric stigma. The above psychological phenomena are neurological conditions, but not only so. Toxic psychosis is a medical condition. Hallucinations are also subject to medical care when they are effectively neurological (caused by trauma or drug abuse, for instance). Those kinds of hallucinations are being branded “pseudo-hallucinations” to distinguish them from true, psychiatric, hallucinations, which bear sociomoral judgments (when people complain about one’s atypical brain functioning). Now, “disease/illness/disorder/condition” are semantic clones that psychiatrists may use interchangeably anytime they see fit. Nonetheless, these terms must have quite distinct meanings. By the way, “mental illness” is a dangerous metaphor only because it is associated with biomedicine. A bipolar season, a moody landscape, an impulsive volcano, an obsessive storm, an antisocial sea, a climate going mad, are beautiful metaphors too, but not dangerous ones, because nobody would think about calling medical doctors to go fix the weather with pills.

“Psychosis” implies a disease state (-osis) and shall be assessed by a medical doctor, a general practitionner, an emergency physician, and not a psychiatrist. In a psychosocial-democracy (in replacement of the biomedical Gestapo), of course there will be holistic doctors in the team. But the psychologist will be in charge of the team and manage every cases of human distress, not the biologically oriented doctor. This plan, inspired by Peter Kinderman’s A Prescription for Psychiatry, might not be the most revolutionary, but it is enough so to cause much disquiet and commotion within the establishment.

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NONE of these terms have any legitimacy and they should never be used. Fuck “teams.” We are not dealing with medicine or science here. The only “prescription for psychiatry” I would adhere to is for it to declare itself illegitimate, go out of business, and offer reparations to its generations of victims. Though obviously it is not about to do that so the burden falls upon us, which is nothing new. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

I like poetry too btw. It’s when metaphors are not recognized as such that the deception starts to creep in.

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“-Osis: abnormal or diseased condition” (Merriam Webster)

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@ Oldhead

If none of “these terms” have legitimacy, that’s a lot of vocabulary to overhaul. To think about the French-speaker that I am, and the Russian lady who just published this article… 😉

Not fond of the word “madness”? Why would you be mad at it? I guess, in English, “madness” has more the sense of anger, lost of temper, violence-prone. In French, “folie” has more the sense of weird, funny, ridiculous, what-the-hell-is-going-on-here, and might be more aptly translated as “craziness”. The French word is extremely customary, hence may bear less pejorative meaning than the English equivalent. Just from the French Canadian public radio, look at how some of the shows are named:

– Plus on est de fous, plus on lit!
(The more of mad we are, the more we read!)
– C’est fou
(It’s crazy)

The same public channel also has a popular variety TV show that involves a jester (fou du roi).

You point out the fact that “psychosis” has no consensual definition. Well, it means an altered state of mind, a disconnection from “reality”. Consensual reality. Buddhism, qua science of mind, comes in handy to get a direct, clear appraisal of the ultimate nature of reality. What is your preferred vocabulary, if you have one?

You find despicable the idea that a psychosocial team would incrementally put the biomedical Gestapo out of business. Well, if those psychologists were trained to be careful about the metaphor of mental illness, to recognize psychiatrists as failed poets and scientists, would you reconsider your position?

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If none of “these terms” have legitimacy, that’s a lot of vocabulary to overhaul.

Tell me about it! 🙂 Though once the fraudulent principles behind them are exposed they should pretty much disappear in one fell swoop.

As for “madness,” it’s fine as poetry but not much else; certainly not an “alternative” term for “mental illness.” Looking for such misses the point, which is to deconstruct the entire context even beyond Szasz — maybe even find that unlikely-sounding Szasz-Marx synthesis and an understanding of psychiatry in the context of alienation and repression. Or something like that.

Yes, “psychosis” falsely implies a disease state, but why should we respect that? You seem to imply that psychiatry can be “put out of business” by competing with it on its own terms, which involves the illusion that human misery can be addressed as a series of individual problems to be addressed individually, rather than a collective malaise to be addressed politically, based on the exponentially accelerating reduction of humanity to our literal worth in dollars and cents.

Tactically, I think psychiatry should be attacked from all angles, but we should be sure that it’s really an attack and not an adjustment.

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@ Oldhead,

[This comment was marked as spam and is reposted here in two parts]

Psychosis, depression, anxiety, hallucination… Let’s take one of these terms.

1. Hallucination (medical, psychological): sensory experience not caused by external source.

2. Hallucination (psychiatric): sensory experiences not caused by external source and not recognized as real.

“If someone hears a voice, for instance, and knows that the voice is not “real”, this is not technically a true hallucination, according to standard accounts in psychopathology texts. This experience, when the person has insight into a hallucination, is sometimes referred to as pseudo-hallucination. Although these terms are somewhat arbitrary, the general concept holds that there is a cognitive component to a hallucination. One experiences something sensory and believes it to be real, when it is not real. This leads to the conclusion that delusions, the psychotic symptom expressed in thought, are necessary for hallucinations and that therefore all psychosis at bottom rests on the presence of delusion.”*

“Hallucination” is a legitimate concept. However, the psychiatric definition adds a moral, belief component. When someone believes their experiences are “real”, or true, or meaningful, then a psychiatrist may pose a philosophical, moral, arbitrary judgment on those experiences. The psychiatrist can declare the person as lacking in insight (anosognosia). Here again, “anosognosia” is a legitimate, medical, neurological concept, altough psychiatry hi-jacked the term for sociomoral purposes, notably by E. Fuller Torrey.

Although you recently referred to psychology as being the evil twin of psychiatry, you also consider it benignly as a field of research. I consider the concept of “source monitoring**” like a valuable substitute for “insight”.

__________
* Nassir Ghaemi, The Concepts of Psychiatry, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2007, p. 204-205.
** Richard Bentall, Madness Explained, Penguin Books, 2004 p. 365.

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I would submit that that the judgment involved in determining whether or not something is “not caused by an external source” and/or is “not recognized to be real” means they are ultimately not objective criteria. For purposes of philosophical or lay discussions, I think these are workable definitions, but for any kind of scientific work, they are hopelessly vague and unfalsifiable.

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@ Oldhead

Attacking psychiatry from all sides while making sure that our tactics contribute toward abolition, not reform: that’s what Bonnie Burstow is encouraging in Psychiatry Disrupted: Theorizing Resistance and Crafting the (R)evolution.

Again, if you don’t have a problem with metaphors as long as they are recognized as such (in line with French social scientist Isabelle Kalinowski who translated the works of Weber and revised the notion of “axiological neutrality” by proposing that scientists should not seek and pretend to be absolutely neutral, but rather ought to disclose honestly their personal values), then what is preventing you from supporting the implementation of a psychosocial service outlined in Kinderman’s manifesto, provided that social workers are made aware of the metaphorical, self-contradictory nature of “mental illness”?

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“Hallucination” is a legitimate concept.

However one defines “hallucination” (which philosophically gets into what is considered “real”) it is not a medical issue unless caused by brain damage, at which point it is outside the realm that psychiatry claims as its own.

On “psychology” — you are correct, I’ve said seemingly contradictory things. The suffix “-ology” generally connotes “study of,” and I see nothing that should be exempted from study. The “psychology” I referred to as psychiatry’s evil twin is what is often called “clinical” psycholgy, i.e. psychiatry light. (Has anyone ever heard of “clinical astronomy” or “clinical trigonometry”?)

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@ Oldhead

Hallucination is a medical issue since it can be caused by brain damage – by your own admission.

It is therefore a legitimate concept.

Here I took the time to differentiate in a simple fashion the difference between medical and psychiatric. From there, you keep arguing that hallucination is outside the realm of psychiatry, even though my differentiation intended to do just that.

And that’s three times I’m going to ask you why you won’t support a psychosocial service that can recognize the value-laden aspect of existing psychiatric terms, and would help wearing down psychiatry by transfering power into the hands of people who abide to a radically different understanding of individual distress and social malaise.

This argument is close to a technical knock out, sir.

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Hallucination is a medical issue since it can be caused by brain damage – by your own admission. It is therefore a legitimate concept.

Whether it’s a legitimate concept is irrelevant; if it’s induced by brain damage it is irrelevant to psychiatry, it’s then in the domain of neurology.

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a psychosocial service that can recognize the value-laden aspect of existing psychiatric terms, and would help wearing down psychiatry by transfering power into the hands of people who abide to a radically different understanding of individual distress and social malaise.

You seem to think that people are beholden to psychiatry because of some sort of intellectual debate about ideas. However like all aspects of capitalist culture it is backed up and enforced by corporate guns, and is in fact itself a weapon in service of capitalism. Psychiatry should have no power; “transferring” such power to people with “better ideas” (which you seem to advocate) would not confer legitimacy upon those forces, and would most likely create an additional obstacle to defeat.

Socialist revolution IS the ultimate “social service.” Everything else is at best prelude.

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Psychiatry as a weapon in the service of socialism? Now that’s no less (perhaps we should say ‘equally’) problematic.

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@Oldhead,
socialist revolution and exposing the harm of psychiatry are two totally different things. I grew up under the socialism (one of the best experiences of my life in terms of enjoying my life, while learning values, having fun at school, learning how to socialize, how to think, knowing that everyone should have the right and chance to succeed in life, caring after other people, knowing that whatever happened to you, you would still have a place in the society, be protected, have food on your table, be able to send your child to school and university). But psychiatry was still there, because the society, as whole, doesn’t understand ‘mental distress’ and why it is happening and what to do with it.

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The harm of psychiatry has long been exposed. What needs to be understood is exactly how it functions to oppress people and how this supports the neo-imperialist beast. And how there is no answer but socialism, to start.

Unless you once lived in China or Cuba what you call socialism is probably different than what I’m talking about. Not that it exists in either of those places anymore either, though Cuba is probably a little closer. But psychiatry will be used to prop up any oppressive system, faux-left or right. It was “still there” because class divisions had not really been erased despite the “socialism” tag.

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@ Oldhead

1. Whether it’s a legitimate concept is irrelevant;
2. NONE of these terms have any legitimacy and they should never be used.

So, legitimacy of a given psychiatric concept is irrelevant, but you emphatically specified earlier that none of the mentioned psychiatric concepts have legitimacy and should never be used.

Thanks to you, we are not taught whether or not to grant legitimacy (acceptability, validity, workability) to psychiatric notions and their more strictly medical equivalents in any given context. While readers cannot rely on you for dealing with those dangerous terms and concepts, I know how to make legitimate use of them at a frequency you may not be prepared to handle.

* * *

Following the philosopher Sam Harris, ideas and beliefs that people cultivate have consequences for their personal conduct and political choices. I believe so, notwithstanding the fact that ideas are historically and materialistically conditioned. Now, how am I supposed to give value to your antipsychiatry ideas and your kind of socialist ideology when you say that such things take second place to “corporate guns”? I have my own philosophical system of antipsychiatry, and consider myself to be a socialist, but what’s the point in arguing with someone who is basically propounding that the tenets of the secular Inquisition – really the sociomoral autority in our Western culture – are not of prime importance to challenge? You were the one to say that “the entire narrative […] must be deconstructed, exposed, and eliminated from public discourse”. Well, such narrative includes that of the therapeutic State and that of the bourgeois rule of law. Furthermore, you are the one holding the idea that psychiatry has to be attacked from all sides, albeit not at an institutional/political level. It sounds as if you are overlooking the practical steps toward your so-called socialist revolution. As far as I could go to explain my strategy, I spoke of an incremental, attritional model of abolition, as outlined by Dr. Burstow in Psychiatry Disrupted.

I’m turning off notifications. I shall leave you beating/boxing around the bush, and might contact Robert Whitaker about something I’m not allowed to evoke here.

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Actually Cooper embraced the term. But except for Szasz they were more interested in being “radical intellectuals” than aobolishing psychiatry. Ironically, of the whole batch Szasz was the most anti-psychiatry — ironic because he rejected the term himself. I think this was because of a) his wanting to dissociate from leftsts such as Cooper; and b) his opposition to government controls.

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You embrace the term, too. Thomas Szasz didn’t embrace the term. So, are we to assume that you are a better antipsychiatry activist, or antipsychiatrist, than David G. Cooper?

I dunno. I embrace the term, too. I just wouldn’t assume that I am a better antipsychiatrist than you or David Cooper.

Thomas Szasz wanted to disassociate himself from R. D. Laing and leftist fellow travelers on the continent. Fine and dandy, but he was still a psychiatrist, and as such, by his own accounting, a fraud.

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Sigh. I’ll repeat (or “clarify”):

Yes I embrace the term and Szasz didn’t. My point was that functionally speaking, words aside, Szasz was more clearly anti-psychiatry than Cooper. I see nothing that Cooper did to actually fight psychiatry beyond preemptively appropriating the term. Maybe you can educate me. I remain of the view that Cooper’s “antipsychiatry” was not anti-psychiatry in practice. As for Szasz’s contradictions, I am neither defending nor judging them; he is what he is, or was.

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I’m happy to spark your muse but I don’t see how anything here is a response to what I said, except to confirm that neither Laing nor Cooper were truly anti-psychiatry.

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R. D. Laing rejected antipsychiatry. Psychiatry (psychoanalysis) was his bread basket. He wasn’t into the antipsychiatry thing at all . David Cooper, if he didn’t coin the term, revived it.

You are saying that David Cooper’s brand of antipsychiatry is false, and OldHead’s brand of antipsychiatry is true. You are also saying that the Thomas Szasz brand of psychiatry is closer to your brand of antipsychiatry than David Cooper’s brand of antipsychiatry. I’m just not sure that follows.

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You are saying that David Cooper’s brand of antipsychiatry is false, and OldHead’s brand of antipsychiatry is true.

Nope. I’m saying that when Cooper used the term “antipsychiatry” he was not talking about abolishing psychiatry but pushing his own brand of psychiatry. So when I use the term I’m not discussing the same subject, it’s not even a matter of disagreeing about something.

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I don’t see any point in arguing where David Cooper WAS coming from. I just think our movement might have been a lot more accommodating to psychiatry without him and people like him. Part of the reason behind these arguments stems from the animosity Thomas Szasz had towards R. D. Laing. Couple that with his antipathy for left-wing socialism, and you’ve got Antipsychiatry: Quackery Squared in a nutshell. I just see the likes of Jeffrey Lieberman, Ronald Pies, E. Fuller Torrey, Allen Frances and the larger portion of the APA establishment as being much more problematic than that of a renegade like Ronald Laing ever was. Alright, so now Szasz, with the publication of that book, has increased the ammunition for the opponents of the critics of psychiatry. Fine, fire away.

I see only one way of abolishing psychiatry and that’s by outlawing it. Were psychiatry like the institution of slavery, it would be much simplified. Slavery is wrong, do away with it. The problem here is that some people freely seek psychiatry, and don’t have it imposed upon them from the outside. As long as that is the case, I can’t see abolishing it. I would abolish forced mental health treatment, forced psychiatry. I would do so by outlawing it. (If mental health law were repealed, it would be outlawed.) To my way of thinking, forced psychiatry deprives people of liberty, and I wouldn’t want to deprive people of liberty. It is enough to abolish forced treatment, and with it, psychiatric oppression. I can’t see the virtue of any drive to abolish the profession borne of the revenge motive, that is, what occurs when some people who have been deprived of their liberty wish therefore to deprive others of their liberty. I just don’t get the idea that you would know when to stop once you had started down the path of depriving people of their rights. Once we start in that direction of forcing people, I imagine it could come back around to having force applied to you again.

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A related question here: do psychiatrists have the right to represent themselves as experts and to make recommendations of destructive “treatments” just so they can make money? Truth in advertising has been a concept since at least the 1800s. I’m not sure I think it’s depriving psychiatry of its “liberty” if we require honesty in all representations about their supposed “knowledge” about people and the apparent effects of the drugs they are peddling. Where do you stand on that point?

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Psychiatric expertise as seers (i.e. people in the know about whether this person or that will do harm to themselves or others or not in the future) is no better than that of the ordinary citizen. This is the problem with bringing psychiatrists into the courtroom. It is the courts that are colluding with psychiatry in granting the profession this privileged status. It is, frankly, not about rights, the acquired rights of psychiatrists negating the unacknowledged rights of their victims. It is about power saying, in a sense, tread lightly lest you stir up a hurricane (initiate proceedings that lead inevitably to tragedy.)

The problem, you see, does not begin and end with psychiatry, and getting rid of psychiatry won’t get rid of the problem. Why? You’ve got the courts, you’ve got the families, you’ve got related professions in the mental health camp, you’ve got hired goons and grunts, and all of these people, and psychiatry, are working together, and closely together at that, to keep other people down and out. Blame everything on psychiatry, and if you ever did succeed in getting rid of it, something else just as creepily oppressive is going to rush in to fill the recently vacated power vacuum.

It should be obvious to anyone who looks deeply into the matter that something more sinister than the provision of adequate medical care for physically “sick” people is taking place here in the mental health realm. It is folly (unwise) to use state legislatures and the legal structure to try and outlaw folly, but that is what has happened. What do we get out of this vain effort to put folly permanently to rest by banishing it from existence on the street, in the shop, in the hallway, and in the office? Basically…the mental health system. Wisdom is not something that can be forced on people. Wisdom has more to do with knowing when not to intervene than it does with interfering with the natural course of spontaneous events.

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@Frank,
well, you just summarized the biggest problem, and indeed, it has all moved into ‘mental health’ domain, with extremely disturbing marketing campaign happening in parallel (it is ok to be ill, it is just a physical illness). Therefore, any anti-psychiatry initiatives look like you are talking against ‘health’ in general, like you are attacking all health professionals at the same time. This is definitely happening in the UK. The psychiatry has become a system within a system.

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The chief difference between my position and that of OldHead is that I’m not so much antipsychiatry as I am anti-mental-health-system. Psychiatry in itself is not the problem, psychiatry is only a problem because psychiatrists have been granted so much power over other people’s lives. Get rid of that power, and psychiatrists are just like everybody else.

The mental health movement is behind much of the expansion of the mental health system today. It is not really a mental health movement at all, instead it’s a mental health treatment movement. It is, basically, a medicalization movement, and medicalization involves calling matters that are not medical medical, and offering medical “treatment” to people who are not “sick” in the slightest, although, some of them might be said to be errant or lost. The system itself just represents another cul de sac, and thus, insult added to injury.

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@Frank, yes, moving it all into ‘mental health’ has made the real enemy invisible

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I’d say that the mental health system is the real enemy, and what friends and allies we’ve got are outside of, and beyond, the constraints and confines of that system.

Less mental health treatment means more mental health. The real problem is that mental health treatment endangers physical health, and if you want to stay physically healthy, which in turn facilitates what we call “mental health”, you will get away from the entire mental health treatment paradigm.

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The problem here is that some people freely seek psychiatry, and don’t have it imposed upon them from the outside.

This is where education comes in. Perhaps such people should be forced to sign a waiver indicating they understand they are engaging in a discredited and potentially lethal endeavor (like the warnings on cigarettes)? Anyway, abolition does not necessitate force of law, but it would be a start.

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@oldhead, no one seeks freely psychiatry

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You realize we don’t have an antiastrology movement, instead we have something called astronomy. In other words, one should take a little time, and not rashly jump into the matter, when it comes to choosing a witch doctor.

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I’m not so much antipsychiatry as I am anti-mental-health-system

OK at least you’re getting more specific; but exactly where or how do you make this distinction? (Being as the “mental health” system is essentially the extension of psychiatry into a gulag, and there is no element of it not controlled by psychiatrists and/or psychiatric ideology.)

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The “mental health” system is based at this point on the spurious claims of the DSM 5 to be able to identify “disorders” of the “mind” which can be “treated” by some medical modality, in which I include any form of reimbursable “therapy” of any sort. Until the DSM is completely deconstructed and the truth about the non-medical nature of most “mental illnesses” defined therein widely publicized, and the entire edifice removed from any semblance of “medical treatment,” we’re still screwed. So being anti-mental-health-system definitely involves a large degree of being antipsychiatry, as psychiatry is the progenitor and main profiteer from the DSM and its multifarious cultural offspring.

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Government bureaucrats, business people on a short fuse, family members, law enforcement, the drug industry, psychologists, social workers, nurses, ward staff of all sorts, grunts and groans, psychiatry could do very little without all those subordinates in some, but not all cases, who work and collude with it. I mentioned the court system previously, if it weren’t for the import politicians and judges have granted psychiatrists they wouldn’t have nearly the power that they have today. There is an entire psy-complex that extends well beyond the profession of psychiatry itself which you ignore at your own peril.

As for ideology, if you mean bio-psychiatry, not all psychiatrists subscribe to it, and it is something that could be subject to change given undeniable evidence and public pressure. I don’t hold this view of yours that all psychiatry is the same, especially not when that dissimilarity means putting some innocent people in harms way, or defending them from such.

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@oldhead, no one seeks freely psychiatry

I know that — please explain it to Frank.

There are exceptions, depending on what you mean by “freely” — is it really a “free” choice if the entire social milieu is permeated with psychiatric propaganda?

First time I saw a shrink I actually demanded my mother take me — I thought he would scold her for bringing me up in an emotionally/sexually repressed environment. The joke was sure on me! 🙂

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I’m not so much antipsychiatry as I am anti-mental-health-system

Try this again — I maybe should have said that this is like saying you aren’t so much anti-Rome as your are anti-Roman Empire.

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Propaganda doesn’t make a person a prisoner. I’m saying that there are people who go to the shrink’s office, or get into treatment programs, not because they were involuntarily, or even plea bargain “voluntarily”, committed to a facility. Sometimes they get into things just to see what’s going on. You’ve mentioned John Lennon before. John Lennon and Yoko Ono did the primal therapy thing with Arthur Janov. Good thing, bad thing, I can’t say, but the album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, his first post-Beatles solo venture, came out of it.

I can’t say I had it as good as you did. I was driven by family members to the hospital, and admitted. Only after I got out did I see the shrink in another capacity, and I can’t say that was entirely pleasant either. After a few trips to and from the loony bin, I was in outpatient treatment, and I regularly, quarterly or yearly or something like that, did the 20 questions thing with a shrink. “Do you hear voices?” “You know that kind of thing that got you into trouble. You’re not going to do it again, are you?” And so on.

I don’t see that psychiatry and the mental health system equate. Get rid of psychiatry, and you will still have the mental health system. Get rid of the mental health system, and you may still have psychiatrists, but the worst of what they do will be over. This solution to social problems that they’ve got going, grabbing, what is it? 20 % + of the population. Well, it isn’t really working. In some instances you’ve got people making a living on “bad outcomes”. Who needs that!?

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I mentioned my first time, which indirectly led to the second time, which was less voluntary — that was the full nine yards with screaming sirens, ambulances, jail cells, court commitment and Mellaril. The admitting shrink asked me if I heard voices too — “I hear yours” I said, and I was on my way; the rest is history.

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You have nothing to apologize for; please continue posting more often. Your anger is evolved and right on.

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I am not a “friendly guard”, plain and simple.

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Again, I would consider you the exception. Hope you realize this with all my posts.

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well, revolution is at the level of social order, where the psychiatry is just one institution of many.
As to Scientology, not trying to ‘drag’ into discussion (someone mentioned them in comments, and I became curious), and they seem to do in fact real work, and ignoring it is a negation of those who actually fight with the assumptions of psychiatry.

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We do not ignore it, but we know about it and reject it. (Though some give it too much power by getting hysterical about it.)

Psychiatry is one institution of many, but one of the most virulent; it is a key institution of repression, whereby people are coached to blame their reaction to an inhuman system as the problem, rather than the system itself.

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this was the question I was asking you, in terms of which group you are talking when you say ‘we’.

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I think that there are different groups and different survivors. Groups probably do include academics but also health-professionals, activists, journalists, etc. As to survivors, i think one needs to be very careful and make them welcome on this site, instead of trying to partonize them. Many people have been smashed for years by psychiatry, are addicted to medication which they are prescribed, are surviving within the official paradigm of ‘mental health’, and until there is an organised group which can receive the survivors in real life to help them, one has to be careful as how to address them and try to make them feel as if they aren’t in any group. Taking a clear academic stance, or becoming an activist is a different thing.

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an example of a survivor where I am (the UK), a girl diagnosed with schizophrenia, years on medication. She is anti-psychiatry, she can’t stand it. She stops her medication, because she knows how harmful it is, and she can’t work on it or lead any active life while on anti-psychotics. Anti-psychotic medication, however, alters something in the brain, making it addictive to it, to an extent that when one tries to stop it, it leads to medication-withdrawal psychosis. She ends up in the hospital, she is sectioned under mental health act, she knows it is wrong, but there is no other place to go, there is nothing available as an alternative. So, in the hospital, she is put back on medication, there is no choice, unless you want to stay in the hospital forever. And her journey starts all over again. But she is anti-psychiatry, she is a survivor, like many others. There are thousands of such people, and they don’t know what to do, where to turn, how to get out of the carousel unless there is a clear, real-life alternative.

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I think that is very well said. We don’t need an “alternative to psychiatry,” we need some alternative to being involved in the “mental health system” altogether, where folks can get the help and support they need without having their lives controlled or invalidated by so-called “professionals” who have the power to destroy their lives with impunity.

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We are all familiar with the horror stories, as they are our own. But trying to solve unsolvable problems generated by capitalism without dealing with capitalism, or by treating it as an abstraction, is just another dead end, and trying to solve them at an individual level is not activism, but social work, and futile as well.

Abolishing psychiatry is like abolishing the death penalty, torture, slavery, etc. We don’t need “alternatives” to any of these sorts of things, and addressing the personal pain of their individual victims can not be used as a guilt trip or excuse to avoid the main goal, which is to end the source of that victimization. But an effective guilt trip it is, and continues to psychically neutralize many of us who should be identifying not as “peers” but as freedom fighters and comrades.

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I can’t see abolishing psychiatry without abolishing forced treatment. Psychiatry sees itself as a medical specialty, a branch of “medical science”, even if it actually is a police science, or pseudo-police science, pretending to be a medical science. Abolish psychiatry without abolishing force, and you’ve only changed management, or, you know, bosses. This represents a problem when the “alternatives” “peer” “recovery” dizability whatchmacallit so-called movement is way too compromised to fight for human rights and against force any more. They are, to speak bluntly, working with the enemy. If we are to be freedom fighters, then we need to be working for freedom, and not waste our time chasing another version of ‘pie in the sky’.

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Wow, so Scientology is dropping the CCHR front? Wonder what that signifies.

No argument that Scientology does some great documentaries, but there’s no information they have that we can’t put out on our own.

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well, if you watch the documentary you will realize that they aren’t just doing documentaries but do very active work in helping people in real life to survive the psychiatry. Doing documentaries exposing a truth is also a massive humanitarian work.

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OK for all her other valuable insights, someone with more info than I needs to fill Ekterina in about Scientology; she’s really drinking the Kool-Aid here. But it’s starting to come across like this is my personal grudge or something.

So where are the folks who usually chime in with these “Scientology” discussions?

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OK, oldhead, I’ll bite:

Scientology does indeed produce some good documentaries.

It is for the purpose of getting you into one of their programs like the Purif (Purification Rundown) where they try to sweat the drugs out of you like toxins. Or the Narcanon cover group. CCHR used to be a cover group – which is why folks here expressed surprise that this doco was in the name of Scientology instead of CCHR.

There are some valuable concepts in Scientology, but you will be a lot poorer to learn them. It is a scam designed to make L. Ron Hubbard a God and very very rich, copying techniques borrowed from various (including occult) sources. It can cost $100k to a $million $ to go through all their programs “up the bridge,” and however “clear” or free you may believe yourself to be, there is always another level to pay for.

The reason it is a religion is so that Hubbard would owe no tax (though the IRS was beginning to wonder…). He started it out as Dianetics, but realised that if it was a “psychological process” it would be taxable – so he made it a religion.

When one is caught in the cult, his/her free labour goes to the organisation. Your time, your money, your family are no longer your own. You are separated from “non-believers” (one of the definitions of a cult) and encourage to only affiliate with believers. There is Thought Crime in Scientology. You will be minding your words (and looking them up in the dictionary) with great care and precision, lest you be considered an SP (or Suppressive Person).

I encourage you to read Jenna Miscavage’s autobiography. There are other excellent books, such as “Going Clear” – which was also made into a film (much against Scientology’s protests).

It is a tyranny of its own, with survivors much like the psych movement.

If I were given a choice to be trapped in Psychiatry, or trapped in Scientology, it would be a rough choice. I think I would prefer the cult, because of the community support available there (which you would lose as soon as the wool falls off your eyes and you had to leave, but at least you would know what that support would be like).

But it is dangerous, too. Take care, do not engage with any of their “free personality tests” or “information evenings.” It will seem so innocent at first. Like psychiatry…

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ah, i am not biting into anything, Oldhead!
Scientology- i know nothing about it, indeed, but they seem to attack the core of the matter: DSM and the diagnosis system.
There is no real coordinated system elsewhere, it is all non- coordinated ‘talk’ at this moment. And people in real life have nowhere to go, apart from the system of ‘mental health’. Psychiatry and mental health are the same thing, they just rebranded themselves and penetrated all spheres of life. Attacking psychiatry therefore, looks like attacking all doctors, which try to help and heal people. There is misunderstanding of the mind, and therefore, it is delegated into the field of ‘illness’, and the ‘attack’ should be at the level of ‘DSM and diagnoses’, while doing research on the mind and theorising that ‘cases of distress’ are a natural reaction to major events in life, stress, and current capitalistic system which makes some people poorer and unable to enjoy what should be enjoyed by each individual.

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Which makes a wonderful marketing opportunity for Scientology. (though oddly, their numbers are down, while psychiatry’s are way way up)

Jung used to say that Satan was Jesus’ brother – that you couldn’t have one without the other.

I would say the same is true of Scientology and Psychiatry. Different approaches to control.

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“Mental health” is the problem (and there are no “mental health patients”). You don’t “reform” something that is inherently destructive, you scrap it.

Anyway, you’re just not going to get most of what I’m saying, so don’t worry about it. Maybe in a few months or years some epiphanies might start to present themselves. Be well.

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oldhead,
on the question of your alternatives, your answer was ‘socialism’.
This is not an answer to a society based on institutions, whether socialism or capitalism, you should research ‘functionalism’ and how current governments base organisational structure on it, and where psychiatry plays a role as an institution regulating social control, presenting itself under ‘medical establishment’. Health is a different domain all together, as well as medicine. What you propose is not socialism, but chaos and denial of all terminology, which is a denial of the current discourse and language, and not helpful if you want to make a real change, so that people actually listen when they are familiar with a language they can recognize, otherwise, there is a risk of ‘blah-blah-blah’ without leading to any concrete results, such as radical change for the better, liberation of mad (crazy, different, bipolar, schizophrenic, patients, survivors, psychotic, visionaries, prophets – they all prefer their own terms, and you need to be aware of it) people, and recognition of difference in humanity.
To make it easier: socialism is an ideology, psychiatry is an institution based on discourse (which became an ideology) within a system of other institutions, and where ‘mental health’ is currently a discourse, and while it is in the stage of discourse one can still make changes before it becomes an ideology based on control, coercion and further suppression of agency.

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No, you don’t get it and probably shouldn’t try, whatever road you are on, if you are sincere, will eventually lead you to a place where we can at least speak the same language; right now it’s apples & oranges.

I did not say the “alternative” to psychiatry is socialism, only that socialism is one step along the way to liberation. My point all along has been that the idea of “alternatives” is irrelevant to a discussion about fighting psychiatry. The main point of the above post is that fighting psychiatry and providing a network or program of “support” for troubled individuals are two separate tasks practically speaking and, whatever their relative value, should not be treated as the same.

As for your last paragraph, even if your faith in “mental health” were realistic, it’s way too late for “change.” I see nothing to support any of your assertions here regarding “discourse.” At any rate, psychiatry has always been an ideology supporting whatever status quo is in effect.

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P.S. Abolishing “disorders” could be done with a stroke of the pen. Or by delegitimizing psychiatry as a branch of medicine, which is a project you might consider.

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There is no “it.” So back to that, we’ve come full circle.

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Thank you so much for the links! Yes I am actively learning how to come off AP in a safe way, I was without them for years but my approach was avoiding psychosis and only recently I learned that psychosis is a positive experience for me and part of who I am, therefore I need to learn how to have the state of altered consciousness without loosing it totally and still enjoy my life. So I am looking at how it can be done! If they developed a medication which just provided deep profound sleep and relaxed you, I would try it

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OK, so ignore everyone who is trying to explain to you about the pitfalls of embracing “psychosis.” If it were up to me using such terms without quotes on MIA would be moderated as hate speech. And if “it” is so “positive” why are you looking for drugs or chemicals to “treat” “it” with?

“AP” stands for anti-psychiatry btw.

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I’m sorry Ekaterina, but I watched your video – and it did not present you well. You sounded like crazy person saying “Psychosis is good, psychosis is fun!”

There are many many people who do not find the intrusions of alternate views as pleasant (even without the drug psychosis). There are many people who suffer under the pain of trauma and their intrusive realities are punishing, torturous. The trauma is so intense, and the Voices and HyperReality is so pressing that it is literally punishing.

Use clarity and describe – what you are calling “psychosis?”

“Today the faeries told me not to take the train, and a man jumped onto the tracks.” “When I was Buddha, I knew that humanity had hope and purpose.” These are connections, communications with deeper realities – but they are NOT PSYCHOSIS. (regardless of what doctors have told you)

I’m all for reclaiming words like fag and witch, even Mad – but when the power of the corporate, government, and society at large are behind a word like “psychosis” then the tide is too great to turn. You are punishing yourself with use of words like this. And – it will be harder to reach the audience you want to reach – while you are saying “Psychosis is pleasurable” I know hundreds of people who are saying “I cannot, the pressure in my head is too painful.”

I got labelled “bipolar” in the 90’s. When I was “manic” it was dramatic and energising – but it was not creative, it was horrible. It was indeed “spiritual emergence” but it took me 20 years to process the information that came through. But it was painful, not pleasurable. Saying “psychosis is great” diminishes my own experience, which was that “psychosis is intense, it is valuable – but it is also hard work.”

You will heal better when you let go of the “psychosis” word and all of the baggage attached to it.

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Hi,
thank you for the comments,
I have to rethink, since more people agree that ‘psychosis’ is too embedded as a very negative experience.
My particular aim is to help to understand what exactly happens in that state, such as ‘voices’ and ‘hallucinations’ (visions), and that they are real, not a sign of disease. That in fact even in its most frightening manifestation (psychosis), if the person is believed for what he says or hears, instead of ‘debunking’ it as total nonsense, then the person can work on what is happening in that parallel reality, and be helped better in the recovery journey.
But i have to think indeed how to communicate what I want to say in a better way.

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Hey Ekaterina – you might enjoy listening and reading at http://www.shadesofawakening.com where they discuss awakening, emergency, emergence, crisis – and have a number of different terms to discuss these things.

You are awakening from the psychiatric experience, and you have recognised that these events are not an illness. This is a HUGE step!

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Hi JanCarol,
thank you for the links, i will also look at your website.
Yes, i am at that stage when i finally realised that it isn’t an illness, and that all my visions were real. Yes, i did have the chance of having ‘beautiful’, ‘amazing’ ‘psychoses, and am reclaiming my own personal power that it was beautiful and that magic is real.
But I need to be careful in terms of how I address all this, since ‘psychosis’ can be a very traumatic experience. It is an experience, it isn’t an illness.

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Ekaterina – I am eager, excited to see where you go from here.

An awakening is always beautiful to behold (even the challenging ones!).

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Yes this is what I am doing

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Ekaterina.

Well, that is what you are attempting to do. But from my perspective, the result of using the medicalized language is ALWAYS to reinforce the concepts that such terms stem from: that people who experience altered states of consciousness are having a symptom of an illness.

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Like the Pride movement reclaimed ‘fag’ and ‘queer’?

Glad you said that. These words that are supposedly being “reclaimed” — when were they ever used in the first place before they were “stolen”? “Mad Pride” indeed.

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that’s fine! Yes, i will continue using the term for what i want to do, i don’t see any other way if i want to reach people who experienced the phenomenon and know what I am talking about. This is how it is called, and adopting a different terminology which isn’t recognized will be talking into the void. Here, on this site, we know of different terminology which is still building up. Those in the hospitals with diagnoses are familiar with a different, very embedded in the daily life term. I want to address these people, by explaining that when they are told they experienced ‘psychosis’, it isn’t an illness, that nothing is wrong with them, and that it can be healed, transformed and even enjoyed. And I will change the term in due time. I might be wrong as how I decided to talk about it, by using ‘their’ terminology, but for now I trust my intuition. First of all, I am interested to help those who are stuck in the system and think that something is wrong with them after they had what they call ‘psychosis’ by explaining what it is really ‘psychosis’. A healing process from trauma, which can also be magical.

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Give up Lavender, I already tried my best. Your insights are needed elsewhere. 🙂

For the record, “psychosis” is rooted in psyche (mind/soul) and -osis (disease or abnormality).

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Ekaterina, what about the word “hallucinations?” “Visions” would be better, but to meet your need for a word that those in the medicalized system recognize, a “hallucination” is an event, not an “illness” or “disorder.” I think the issue with “psychosis” is that it invalidates the very premise you are setting – namely, that the event is not an indication of “illness” but is a step in a process that could be embraced rather than denied and pushed away. Am I reading that correctly?

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Steve,
yes, I try to argue that the whole process is not a disease but a reaction to something very traumatic in one’s life, and that it is actually a strong ‘healing’ process of the person, and that telling the person that his ‘visions’, ‘thoughts’ and ‘voices’ are not real, stops the healing process and turns it into something shameful, bad and into illness.

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So why not use the terms “visions,” “thoughts,” and “voices?” I have found that being as specific as possible about describing the actual experiences of the person in layperson language is the best antidote to the psychiatric song and dance routine.

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Yes, I agree! That’s what the person experiences in altered state of consciousness! Having visions which can be accompanied by hearing voices, and they are real, they aren’t ‘hallucinations’. My particular aim (on my blog) is to deconstruct first their medical language. They ‘shame’ these experiences by calling them a ‘disease’ by attaching a specific label such as ‘psychosis’ or ‘schizophrenia’

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They ‘shame’ these experiences by calling them a ‘disease’ by attaching a specific label such as ‘psychosis’ or ‘schizophrenia’

Yes, which is exactly what I, Lavender, Jan Carol and others have been trying to help you understand — that you reinforce that shaming by using the terms yourself. Steve might be on to something here with his encouragement to be specific — although one can only be specific about his/her own experiences, and should not generalize or categorize them.

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Oldhead,
one can generalize, because all these experiences (as different as they are), are called ‘an illness’ by ‘professionals’ who don’t understand them. Therefore, my usage of the terms ‘psychosis’ was motivated by deconctructing the assumption that it is a ‘desease’. It isn’t an illness, and it isn’t disease. The opposite is true, it is a healing journey.

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Yes Steve I’m being facetious . Please do remove it if it is causing offense.

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Not at all. Just making sure that we’re all on the same page. I’ve accidentally offended folks with my facetious sense of humor on many occasions. It’s always a hazard of using indirect humor.

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It’s ok Steve. Seems like I’m being accused not only of having positions on subjects, but being sure of them as well. That can certainly be off-putting and get under people’s skins.

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Ekaterina – No, you don’t look like an idiot! Far from it – this is the best thing I’ve seen and heard for ages! Please believe me. I am going to spend some time reading your blog, and I will be in touch. Thank you so much!

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I agree with Auntie – “idiot” is not a word I would use.

And perhaps my first description of your video wasn’t very accurate, either.

One of the things which I learned in undiagnosing myself was how to appear calm, rational, even when I was excitable or agitated. It is vital to “present well” around professionals (I still have to use doctors, and they ***still*** want to address my mood, even though it’s none of their business). Unfortunately, the people who are diagnosed look through similar lenses as the professionals – because they’ve been taught and conditioned that way.

When I looked at your video, I could see the diagnostics flying, as you were so enthusiastic, and your repeated use of the word “psychosis” caused problems for me. My “psychosis” was not pleasurable at all – so my reflection of your video was that it was “off the wall” or not very credible – TO ME. As Auntie pointed out – it has appeal.

Please do not think “idiot” about yourself. Ever.

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JanCarol,
no, i know you didn’t call me ‘an idiot’ lol, but i do appear quite ‘off’ in the video:) I will make more!
Yes, one has to be very very careful as how to present oneself and talk with others, while undiagnosing oneself and navigating the system. Totally agree! I wrote a post about it today(in terms of navigating the system, but how to ‘appear’ then to the public, yes, very important, i will address it in my next post. ‘How to play normal’ to the rest of the world, something like that. My post of today is, if any interest, on: https://porcupineswisdom.blogspot.com/2018/11/second-step-in-your-journey-towards.html

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I thought the same thing: there is no “it.”

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@Oldhead: “Your mistake is in believing there is a “thing” to define, not the words you use. I must be doing something wrong if so few people get this by now.”

You’ll have to help us out Oldhead…. what don’t we “get”? What are we actually talking about?

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Maybe Lavender can take over for a while, I’m completely frustrated, as I’ve been trying to drive this essential point home for years. What we are actually talking about is decontextualized experience and behavior, as I believe Bonnie B would put it. There is no “it” to mislabel, rather people’s projected beliefs that they are all experiencing a consistently definable “thing.” All experience is unique.

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Which “conclusions”? — you mean R.R.? Sorry, but ad hominems and accusations are a sign of weakness in your argumentation (though I urge Steve not to moderate this). If your logic were sound it could not be “sabotaged.”

Anyway, wrong, I have been “diagnosed” as “psychotic” more than once.

However you clearly intend to stubbornly cling to your narrative no matter what, so I have little or nothing more to say. Maybe we can check back with each other in a few years and see how things have evolved. And I’ll let you have the last post.

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LavederSage,
I am female, and I talk directly to people, not discussing them as ‘they’

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I was speaking to oldhead, remarking to him about his interaction with you, and he knew to whom I was referring when I said, “I don’t think she’s gonna get it.”
Just because you are the author of the blog post does not mean that every comment must be directed to you; we talk to each other here, too, not just to the authors.

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LavenderSage,
1. yes, of course, people, have a right to talk to each other. I am extremely glad that my article provoked so many discussions and possibility to exchange opinions.
2. My exchange with Oldhead is interesting, but I don’t allow myself to be partonised, when I see it clearly. Including from you.
3. To come back to ‘I don’t think she’s gonna get it’, yes, I would like to know myself as what exactly I can’t get. I am a researcher and an academic, and am always interested to learn, exchange opinions and understand the logic behind each argument, including when it seems I don’t understand something. I also admit when I am wrong if I see absence of logic in my own opinion.
4. To make clearer my point: psychiatry in all its manifestations is ‘witchcraft’, since it isn’t based in science or medicine. Mental distress is real, mental illness is a myth. Psychiatrists make people ill. Medication is different from concoctions created by the psychiatrists. Biology and medicine are real sciences. Diagnoses damage people and are based in fiction of an evil mind. So, yes, i am curious what I don’t get.

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JanCarol,
I agree with everything you say.
‘Witchcraft’ as ‘bad witchcraft’, probably not a right word, maybe to call it ‘mass hypnosis’ is a right word. I apologise if the word’ witchcraft’ caused offense and I need to re-frame it, you are right.
I don’t recommend anti-psychotics! Anti-psychotics are created by the psychiatry! I recommend a ‘potion’ and only for those who struggle to claim their voices and visions in peace!
I do consider myself a witch too, but good witch, white witch.
I am developing the blog so it is in the stage of ‘unveiling’ and is for now, addressed to those, who sit at home under a huge amount of ‘anti-psychotics’ and struggle to exit the system.
I un-diagnosed myself long time ago (on the matter of ‘diagnoses’ and the absence of logic in it, will be in my next post) and embraced my ‘madness’ too. My choice for my ‘potion’, created by myself, is to be ‘grounded’ in my daily life, where I am a single mum, have to work, look after my son, and still enjoy my ‘madness’, etc.
I obviously plan to stop my ‘potion’ at some point, when I have firm stability and when I can’t risk to get back in the system for the sake of my son. I have to be grounded, well-thought, and lucid. But with my ‘potion’ I also enjoy meeting with angels, talking with fairies, etc, etc.
Something very bad happened to me last year, when under massive stress (provoked by terrible car accident), I felt i was in ‘psychosis’ and went to the hospital in search of a safe place, and where I was detained under Mental Health Act, and where the ‘doctor’ was experimenting with three types of drugs for two months on me (while seroquel had worked just fine for me, previously), and where I was ‘recovered’ a week upon my arrival to the hospital, but they wouldn’t release me, with shouting nurses, terrible noise and constant partonising. During two months of the ‘nightmare’ my mum had to look after my son who wanted his mum and needed me. It was such a nightmare that it opened my eyes finally at the evil of the psychiatry. Before, I was living outside the psychiatry.

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