The Answers in the Attic: A Mother-Daughter Story of Overmedication and Recovery

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In 1959, my mother suffered what people commonly referred to as a nervous breakdown after my youngest sister’s birth. Mom spent six months in a local, Catholic psychiatric hospital while Dad and Grandma assumed command of the household. I was seven years old, the second-oldest of five children. Eventually, Mom visited us a few times on Sundays, and then returned home in November, presumably ready to assume her duties as a wife and mother. Sadly, Mom remained gripped by depression for the rest of her life.

Because my memories of that time are wrapped in thick layers of gauze, I’ve had to rely on others to fill in the gaps. My father, grandmother, and Mom’s close friends believed that Mom experienced postpartum depression, starting after my birth, and worsening with each successive child. My older brother shared this memory about a year ago when I asked what he remembered about Mom’s 1959 illness: “I came home from college and found her in the basement, banging her head against the wall, moaning, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’”

My heart ached when I heard that story, but I still puzzled over why Mom never recovered. Until I found Dad’s collection of records in a dusty box stashed in my sister’s attic. Old insurance and medication records, newspaper and magazine articles, and letters to doctors were neatly organized in an unassuming manila folder. As I leafed through the contents, intuition whispered that I’d finally have the missing puzzle pieces I’d searched for all my life.

Some of the most valuable clues were in a letter, typed on onion skin paper, that sat on top of the file. It was dated 1-17-83 and addressed to Dr. L., one of Mom’s many doctors. Dad wrote the following notes:

5th child born Feb.59. Normal birth and she carried baby in good spirits. About mid-April started having problems and had first visit with psychiatrist of May 8, 1959. Between then and June 22nd, ’59, he treated her with Amytal, Ritalin, Nardil, Trilafen, NaBu-4, Dexamyl tabs and spansules, and Tofranil. By the end of May ‘59 she was so bad, that even to my nonprofessional eye, I didn’t see how she could avoid hospitalization… She remained there to late Nov. 59. During this time, she received medicine and numerous EST [electroshock therapy] treatments.

The only drug I recognized in that long list was Ritalin, an amphetamine that had been widely prescribed for depression in the 1950s and ’60s. I quickly set to work looking up the rest, all the while screaming inside, How could anyone give a nursing mother with three small children and a newborn so many drugs in such a short period of time? A quick search on the website drugs.com helped me to understand the other drugs my mother took when she first got depressed. Amytal is a long-acting barbiturate; Nardil is an MAO-inhibitor (a type of antidepressant); Trilafon is an antipsychotic; Nembutal is a barbiturate used as a sedative; Tofranil is a tricyclic antidepressant; and Dexamyl is a combination of an amphetamine and a barbiturate.

It was easy enough for me to find the commonly listed effects of all of those drugs, and I wondered how Mom’s doctor could have prescribed all of them in such a short time. Dad’s records don’t indicate if she took all of them together, but even if she took a few, discontinued them, and started a few others, the chemical load must have overwhelmed her system. What struck me in looking at the effects of all the medications was that many of them could cause anxiety, sleeplessness, and agitation—three things I clearly remember my mother struggling with.

Now my brother’s story made more sense—I think Mom was banging her head on the wall because she couldn’t tolerate what the drugs did to her. Her doctor told a different story in the diagnosis that my father noted: “This psychiatrist [Dr. S.] diagnosed it [Mom’s illness] as severe depression with agitation and not due to childbirth.” The doctor’s assessment rang true in one sense—it seemed pretty clear to me that Mom’s severe depression with agitation was due to the massive amounts of drugs she was taking and was, indeed, not related to childbirth. But somehow, I don’t think that’s what the doctor meant. While I have no doubt that my mother struggled against overwhelming feelings of sadness and fatigue, which led to the initial appointment with Dr. S., I believe Mom’s breakdown was probably chemically-induced due to overprescription of drugs.

Dad had also kept some of the original prescription bills related to Mom’s 1959 hospitalization, and between August and October, she took Thorazine, Nembutal, and Tofranil on a regular basis, in addition to receiving an undisclosed number of electroshock therapy treatments. When she came home, the doctor had her on a regimen of Phenobarbital, Miltown (an antianxiety drug), and the tricyclic Tofranil. Dad supplemented that regimen with carefully measured decanters of white wine that I once caught him cutting with water. When he saw me watching, he cautioned, “Don’t ever tell your mother what you saw.” Nowhere in the thirty years of records is there any indication of Mom’s drinking, which all of us tacitly accepted as a significant part of her daily routine.

I also found homemade spreadsheets where Dad listed the dates and medication amounts for Mom’s drugs, often annotated with notes about her responses. The information in those charts prompted me to investigate possible medication effects that may have influenced Mom’s internal state which led her to attempt suicide in 1967. At the time, she was taking a combination of Aventyl (a tricyclic which can cause restlessness, agitation, and anxiety), Dexamyl (amphetamine and barbiturate combination), and Phenobarbital (a barbiturate which is linked to nightmares, nervousness, depression, and anxiety). The effects of all of these medications, combined with Mom’s continued daily drinking, probably led to the intense feelings of despair that drove her to slit her wrists in December. Dad found her in the bathroom that night. I accompanied my parents to the hospital, while my two siblings, ages twelve and thirteen, stayed home and cleaned up the bathroom. None of us ever spoke of that night again.

What about therapy, I wondered, and how did Mom’s psychiatrist treat her after that tragic night? One would think the doctor should have increased Mom’s routine visits to keep a closer watch on her. But according to Dad’s records, that’s not what happened. In fact, Mom’s doctor saw her twice a month, beginning in January of 1960, only about two months after she was released from the hospital, and continuing through June of 1968. However, in the weeks immediately following her suicide attempt in 1967, he did not see her more frequently, a fact which seems to indicate a lack of support and concern. By August of 1968, Dad’s notes indicate that Dr. S. wanted to hospitalize my mother. Dad’s notes and the conversations I can remember ring with the angry charge that “Dr. S. just threw up his hands and gave up on her.”

Because Dad was adamant about keeping Mom out of the hospital, he sought out Dr. M., a well-known psychiatrist who performed electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) treatments in his office. Between August of 1968 and June of 1970, Dr. M. administered thirty-nine ECT treatments to my mother, sometimes giving her as many as five treatments in a month. The one time I remember accompanying my father to help him bring Mom home, I was shocked by her dazed look and unsteady walk. I remember her sleeping through the next day and experiencing memory loss from that time forward. Dad told me that Dr. M. did the procedure without anesthesia, but from some of the reading I’ve done on earlier ECT administration, it seems likely that Dr. M. probably used a short-acting barbiturate to sedate Mom. Otherwise, how could she submit to so many treatments? And how could Dad willingly put her through that pain? I think both of them must have been more desperate for relief than any of us kids could have guessed.

I wish I could say that Mom got better after all of that ECT, but she never attained such a reward for all of her efforts and suffering. In 1973, after suffering from mysterious dental pain for several months and finding no relief, a neurologist helped Mom and Dad to see that she was suffering from depression. Mom was hospitalized for at least a month and endured detox for both barbiturates and alcohol, but she was unable to maintain her sobriety once she came home. I was sickened to learn that Mom’s doctors routinely prescribed Thorazine for her from 1969 to 1983, a practice which would explain why she suffered from tardive dyskinesia and later from severe full-body trembling, possibly akathisia. Mom was hospitalized again for several weeks in 1993, and for the first time, her psychiatrist confronted the family about her alcohol dependence and informed all of us that her MRIs showed evidence of small strokes and blood in the brain. He asked all of us to pledge to refrain from serving alcohol at family gatherings, but we were split on the issue of whether Mom had a problem or not, so she continued to drink along with all of her medications until her death in 2002.

I remember my mother suffering from horrible, visceral anxiety where she would take deep, fast breaths and then wring her hands as if she were Lady Macbeth. Now that I understand more about her medications, I realize how impossible it is to determine if my mother was actually very depressed and anxious or if she was one of the early victims of polypharmacy, trapped in physical and emotional pain due to overmedication and a lack of supportive therapy. It seems clear from the records that Mom’s doctors saw her condition as biochemical and treated her accordingly, tweaking the pills as they went along, and in a sense, resigning themselves to maintaining her “treatment resistant” condition with the only tools they believed in.

Despite all of her sedating and numbing medications, Mom lived a rich and meaningful life. She cared for us, made sure we had regular, nutritious meals and provided a supportive presence when we needed help. Mom hosted her bridge group, participated in a book club, and made weekly trips to talks at the local art museum with one of my aunts. She was also a gifted artist with a degree in costume design from Maryland Institute College of Art, but her talent never matured once all of us were born. Sadly, she never picked up a paint brush in all the years I knew her.

As a child, I made two vows: to help my mother get well and to never be like her. I had internalized a powerful lesson: Physical illness was understood, accepted, and treated kindly, while any signs of emotional weakness were shunned and sometimes mocked, as when my father told me I was too sensitive if I got upset over his teasing. Over the years, I suffered from mysterious pain, similar to my mother’s dental pain. Luckily, each time my body cried out for help, whether it was with pelvic pain, back pain, or intestinal distress, I was able to resolve the issues, sometimes with medication, and eventually with massage and acupuncture. I began to understand the ways my psyche used physical pain to communicate emotional distress. And I remained terrified of being trapped in depression.

I had my first diagnosed depression—postpartum depression—after my daughter’s birth in 1982, but quickly resolved it by briefly using the tricyclic antidepressant Elavil before discontinuing it due to pressure from my husband. Elavil also worked when I had another episode a few years later, and again, I stopped taking it once I felt better. My husband berated me for using antidepressants, and in retrospect, I think he was terrified that I’d be like my mother: our shorthand for “you’ll never get well.”

In 1993, my worst fears were realized with a double-threat: an intractable migraine and an unrelenting depression. My husband and I had a very difficult relationship almost from the outset, but by the mid 90s we seemed to be living on parallel paths, coming together for the children and social occasions, but sharing fewer interests and growing in different directions. When I consulted with my family doctor, I told him, “I know this headache has a psychological cause, and I’m working on things. I’m just not sure what the problem is.” He prescribed two antidepressants—Elavil to help with the headache and Paxil to relieve the depression.

By 1996, three years later, I’d consulted a parade of psychiatrists who’d prescribed grab-bags full of medication. Nothing had worked, for either the headache or the depression. My newest psychiatrist insisted I see a headache specialist, and when I told the nurse practitioner about my theory of physical depression, she immediately prescribed MS-Contin, Migranol nasal spray, DHE-injections, and eventually Oxy-Contin and Methadone.

The headache continued pounding away inside my skull, and I felt so dead inside that suicide seemed like my only option. I begged my doctor for ECT treatments and tried several more combinations of antidepressants and mood regulators before the depression lifted in 1997. But still the migraine raged on.

In the fall of 1999, I had my first car accident, swerving across Route 70 five times before planting my bumper in a guardrail. Miraculously, I didn’t hurt anyone. I told myself it was a one-off and kept driving. In January of 2000, I fell asleep on a busy thoroughfare and slammed my Toyota into the back of a large van. I heard a man pounding on my window as I woke up and found my car filling with smoke and an airbag pinning me tight to my seat. That man turned out to be the van’s owner who disappeared as soon as my father arrived to help. To this day, I think he was an angel sent to save me.

Western medicine had failed me. The deep shame that I felt for taking Methadone combined with the shock of two accidents forced me to confront my life with fresh eyes. I lined up my pill bottles on the counter for a reality check. My psychiatrist insisted I take maintenance meds to prevent recurrence of depression—Wellbutrin, Topamax (a mood regulator), Elavil, and Valium. My headache doctor had me on Methadone, DHE injections, Migranol nasal spray, and a stash of injectable Demerol for the bad days. But I wasn’t high. I was numb.

It was time for radical action, so I called Kayla, an energy healer who’d been recommended by a friend. I told her my story and finished by saying, “I want my life back. Can you help me?”

Her answer: “I can almost guarantee I’ll get rid of the pain, but I cannot guarantee what else might happen. Are you ready?”

Kayla worked with me doing distance energy healing, clearing my chakras and giving me images of what she saw energetically. Because I was already tuned in to the mind-body connection, I surrendered myself to her care. She provided flower essence mixtures that I put in my water, and I was gradually able to cut down on the pain meds. After four months of working with Kayla, my headache had vanished, along with the awful pills that had kept me in such a fog. Only then was I able to leave my abusive marriage—the real source of my pain.

Since May of 2000, I’ve remained free of all pain medications. My infrequent headaches serve as a warning to attend to my life, and I’m able to manage the pain with Tylenol, flower essences and lavender essential oils. I’ve been depression-free since 1997 and psychiatric drug-free since the early 2000s. I smile every time I remember the warning my psychiatrist issued when I told him I’d discontinued my medication: “You have a damaged brain from repeated episodes of depression. If you don’t take meds, you’ll be sicker than you’ve ever been before.” I’m glad I didn’t listen to him.

When I look back over the course of my mother’s and my own treatment for depression, one inescapable fact becomes blindingly clear. No matter how many medications my mother took, she never got well. And I can’t pinpoint any particular drug or treatment that allowed me to finally escape from depression. By today’s standards, both of us would be labeled as treatment resistant, situating the problem within us, as if somehow, we were willfully resisting. What’s been most puzzling to me is why many doctors continue to prescribe medications, often in combination, when it’s clear that they aren’t working. After a while, why doesn’t it occur to them that maybe the treatment itself is the problem? From much of the reading I’ve done regarding the causes of mental distress and the effects of commonly prescribed drug treatments, I see a tremendous gap between what many medical professionals and average people think about depression and anxiety and what vast amounts of research have demonstrated over the last fifty years.

I wish that I could have helped my mother to get well, but I recognize that she and my father were victims of the times they lived in. On the other hand, once I found the tools that helped me to heal at a deep level, my life has been rich and full. I am blessed with a satisfying career, good relationships with my children, and the support of wonderful friends. I’m grateful for the help I’ve found and for the healer who helped me to trust the deep wisdom housed in my body. I imagine Mom’s story and mine joining a great chorus of voices whose song of hope will lift many hearts burdened with doubt. Let’s all keep singing.

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Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

38 COMMENTS

  1. A sorry performance by the medical community. These MDs’ only excuse was that they knew nothing about physical changes at the end of pregnancy- unfortunate, as these states respond well to zinc+B6 with C and B-complex as likely add-ons. The B6 is to expedite the absorption of the zinc, which is to antagonize the elevated serum copper that is promoting the depressed state and the C helps reduce same.

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  2. Thanks for the information, bcharris. I think the right vitamins and minerals can be very helpful, especially when combined with community support in the form of nurses, therapists, or experienced older women. We do know more about postpartum depression, and the human element of support and care is a vital component.

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  3. “What’s been most puzzling to me is why many doctors continue to prescribe medications, often in combination, when it’s clear that they aren’t working.” $$$, and a “white coat conspiracy of silence.” “After a while, why doesn’t it occur to them that maybe the treatment itself is the problem?” “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

    I, too, am a mom who was attacked by “mental health” workers, when my children were quite young. Not because of postpartum depression, but because doctors wanted to cover up easily recognized iatrogenesis. Which was covered up with “complex iatrogenesis” via psychiatric meds, to cover up a “bad fix” on a broken bone of mine.

    As well as, I eventually learned from outside my insurance doctors, and my PCP’s medical records, because “mental health” workers systemically profiteer off of covering up medical evidence of child abuse for the religions. And I had a child, who I learned from medical records eventually handed over, who had been abused, which my childhood religion wanted to cover up.

    https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2019/01/23/18820633.php?fbclid=IwAR2-cgZPcEvbz7yFqMuUwneIuaqGleGiOzackY4N2sPeVXolwmEga5iKxdo

    https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/04/heal-for-life/

    https://books.google.com/books?id=xI01AlxH1uAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

    Thanks for sharing your story, the psychiatric and psychological industries’ historic, and fraud based, crimes against women and children are absolutely staggering, appalling, and disgusting. I’m sorry your family, and mine, was so harmed by their crimes against humanity.

    But I’m glad you got off the drugs, and recovered from the crimes they are committing, largely against women and children. The paternalist, primarily child abuse covering up, by design, psychiatric system needs to end.

    https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-child-does-not-have-bipolar-disorder/201402/dsm-5-and-child-neglect-and-abuse-1

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    • Hello Someone Else, thanks for your thoughtful comments. I’m sorry for the difficult road you’ve had to travel and hope that life is better for you now. I hope that by sharing my story, the issues of overmedication and iatragenic illnesses become more than ideas discussed in journals. Real people are harmed by drugs and by a model of care that neglects the human aspects of suffering.

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  4. What was done to your mother was CRIMINAL. Something similar was done to my grandmother. Her issues surfaced in the late 50’s and early 60’s and the so-called “treatment” was poly drugging and shock. They destroyed my grandmother with their treatment. When they discharged her they patted her on the back and smiled and told her how much better she was doing than when they first got their slimy hands on her. I was her oldest grandson who she’d spent many hours with in her garden, teaching me about plants and flowers and birds. She didn’t recognize me! She spent most of the rest of her life sitting at the kitchen table staring at the floor and chain smoking. How I hate the “mental health establishment”!!

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    • Hi Stephen, I’m very sorry to hear about what happened to your grandmother. It sounds like she was a special person. I wrote my story and my mother’s to bring attention to the harms that can be done with medication and ECT, and I hope that my memoir will offer resources to people who are seeking another way out of emotional pain.

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      • Yes, my grandmother was an artist, an avid gardener who created new strains of flowers, a Native American Wise Woman who healed with the use of plants and ancient wisdom, and a woman who could call down hummingbirds to sit on the palms of her uplifted hands. The psychiatrists “killed” my grandmother even though she wasn’t dead when they returned her to our care. She was never the same woman after coming home from their wonderful “treatments”.

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  5. Ann , your story and your mother’s was hard to read but glad you wrote it and shared.
    Medicine really ignores the female and I really wonder what really is going on in female bodies. I also wonder about trauma and stress in our bodies and in pregnancy.
    I would suggest you look into your parent’s family histories to see if that played a role in both how your father handled things and how your mother felt about pregnancy.
    There are so many silences in the female world about this area and the medical world has greatly illserved families by their chemical interventions.

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    • Hi Catnight, thanks for you thoughtful comments. Both of my parents are dead and so are their siblings, so I am left with letters and memories. From all that I’ve discovered by looking at my dad’s files, he did the best he could to help my mother. The medical treatments of the time were crude and my mother and many people like her suffered at their hands. Doing the research on the treatments of the time (50s, 60s, 70s) was very painful for me. But my hope is that by shining a light on our stories, more people will seek an alternative path to healing.

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  6. My condolences Ann. “Antidepressants” ruined my own life.

    Anafranil triggered psychotic mania in me back in 1993. Couldn’t sleep for three weeks. Was called “bipolar” for having the audacity to get sick on a psychotropic drug prescribed by a doctor who didn’t care my life was ruined.

    25 years on a “cocktail” including the same class of drug that caused the problems.

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    • Dear Rachel, I’m so sorry to hear what happened to you with medication. Stories like ours need to be shared so that more people can begin to learn to ask serious questions about psych drugs. I also had the experience of doctors not believing me when I talked about drug effects. There are two kinds of people who are easy to dismiss: imprisoned people and people with “mental illness”–which I prefer to call emotional distress. We’ve got to work to change that situation. I hope you are doing better now. Blessings to you and thanks for sharing your story.

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      • It’s like the ending to Alonzo’s Oil. The source of injury was discovered by the detective work of a non medical amateur (me.) And removed.

        But the damage is real. And not all reversible.

        I’m grieving that I’ll never have a family. And all a tragic hoax!

        At least I can appreciate things like music, beautiful scenery, and human interactions again. Not dead inside.

        Sadly I long for companionship more than ever. But am a childless old spinster with no friends in a small rural community. Struggling financially in isolation, I weep almost every evening. Things look pretty bleak.

        A lot of folks have it worse.

        But this thought makes me sadder still.

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    • Thanks, Julie. I’m so grateful to be able to tell my story and to offer hope for life after meds. I appreciate your story as well about your awful experiences with Lithium and look forward to your book. I think it’s vital that people know that choices exist to help with mood swings besides the dangerous drugs so often prescribed.

      When friends bemoan how some people with manic-depression don’t want to the the drugs–I tell them “With good reason” and then I describe my expires with Depakote—shaking, word-finding difficulties, weight gain, and feeling like my personality was weighted down with a wet army blanket. My doctor wouldn’t listen to me and kept me on Depakote for two years.
      Please send me a message on FB so we can talk off line. All the best!

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  7. Yeeesh! Women were treated like POWs in this family! Psychiatry or not, they had NO chance to live well. Somehow, I suspect that psychiatry was, primarily, a legal means of battering these women, as opposed to a clumsy and brutal tool for disciplining them. For the men in this family, a slow-motion homicide by #FAKESCIENCE had been a handy replacement for a quick and unlawful homicide by assault.

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  8. Thank you for this brilliant rendering of yours and your mother’s struggle with mental illness and the cavalier overprescribing of oftentimes toxic combinations of medications, with little regard of their effect on the quality of life and health of living HUMAN PERSONS. I too was overmedicated for 35+ years for anxiety/depression/PTSD. Every six months I visited my psychiatrist for a weighing in on the positive/negative effects of my medications. When this doctor prescribed yet another regimen of drugs that would cause me to become diabetic, I balked and left her practice. I searched desperately for a new doctor. Fortunately, through a mutual friend, I found a psychiatrist with whom I have been working for the past 18 months. During that period of time I have been weaned from Cymbalta (to avoid the frightening side effects of withdrawal, it took 8 months to complete the weaning process); I discovered a gluten-sensitivity that now has my GI tract operating much more smoothly (90% of serotonin is produced by the gut); and I have been supported in discovering a more “natural” and individualized, customized means of coping with mental illness (quality foods, exercise, meditation, music-making, painting, socializing, etc.). I have developed a protocol that I follow each and every day from the time my eyelids open until I crawl back into bed at night. It is not a strict regimen but simply life-enhancing components that enrich living each and every day. I am not entirely medication-free but those prescribed medications are used PRN, as needed (Ativan, Xanax), with all the necessary precautions not to overuse or abuse them. They are in my toolkit as part of my total self-care package. I am needing them less and less frequently as the insights into my thoughts and behaviors, achieved through talk therapy, have strengthened my inner resolve and ability to live a less darkness-bound and more light-filled existence. Kudos to the state of Maryland for allowing the prescribing of medical cannabis. I use it (and melatonin) as a sleep aid and, considering that lack of sleep is a major contributor to a descent into depression, I am very grateful for access to a drug whose use I can better control than the antidepressants I formerly took for far too many years. Drugs were often prescribed that no doctor could ever fully explain how they operated on my mind, body, and spirit. I have found that the use of cannabis as medication presents a whole new avenue of treatment for the patient/doctor partnership to explore. Thankfully, I now have a doc who is willing to learn together with me as explore the latest research in treating my conditions. Thank you, Ann, for your courage in sharing your story. We are all in this TOGETHER, in partnership with one another and the healthcare community, both traditional and altenative medicine.

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    • Thank you, dutton 999, for your heartfelt story of recovery and hope. It sounds like you’ve head a very challenging journey through depression and anxiety, and I’m so glad that you’ve found a health professional to work with that is offering you holistic choices. Many blessings to you, and thanks so much for your courageous journey.

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  9. Ann, I am sooo sorry for what your mom, you, your siblings and dad went through.

    I have been administered a number of the same medications as well as multiple courses of ECT. Trilafon alone would make a healthy person ill!

    Thank you for joining the chorus!

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  10. HI Lily Pad, thanks for your kind words. I’m very sorry you’ve taken multiple meds and experienced ECT multiple times–I did as well and it was quite terrifying. At the time I thought it was my only way out of depression, Now I think I felt so dead inside due to the multiple meds I was taking—they call is psychic numbing. I kept telling my doctors I couldn’t feel anything–none of them blinked ar told me that such a feeling could be due to the meds. I’m telling my story and my mother’s for all those who are on the same dark road. They deserve to know there’s another way out.

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  11. Hi Ann, Thank you for sharing the difficult road you and mom travelled with psychiatry and the harmful drugs pushed on both of you. Your dad was so diligent and involved in trying to help your mom, going so far as to keep a spread sheet, wow that is true love!
    A psychiatrist I saw during cancer treatment published a report mocking me for various serious side effects the psych drugs had on me and described me as ‘non-compliant’, and as you put it well, that I was “willfully resisting” her drugs. Yes, I resisted the drugs because my body was totally rejecting them, but that didn’t matter to the psychiatrist at all.

    It is great to hear you have your life back and have been free of psych drugs and pain meds since 2000. Congratulations on that! I wish there could have been a happy ending to your mom’s story but telling her story along with yours is very impactful in helping others avoid the same treacherous path.

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    • Thank you, Rosalee, for your kind words. I am stunned that a psychiatrist would mock you for side effects and describe you as noncompliant. From all the reading and research I’ve done, I believe that they fully embrace their paradigm of chemical imbalance and therefore, chemical cure. They lose sight of the person across from them that has a real life with real pain and distress. I honestly don’t know what doctors don’t believe their patients–I think they are truly acculturated to believe that if someone objects to the meds, it’s because they are “crazy” and not in their right minds. For all of those reasons, when I discontinued my meds, I worked with my therapist to taper and never mentioned it to the doctor until I was off the meds. Believe in yourself and all the best to you!

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  12. A story of courage and love. Honestly what I see here, is they never broke the family bond, or your mom’s tenacity. Possibly to the ‘medical’ or other people, your mom appeared in need of fixing. I think despite her difficulties she had a pretty good handle on life. She had a bunch of kids, and did her best. It is ALL that anyone ever does. I also had difficulties ‘post partum’…..I don’t like to see it as a psychiatric problem, a woman’s problem, a religious one, or a trauma one. Each mother has their own unique physiology, mind set, subconscious stuff, psycho-social stuff etc. Each one needs unique support. And after my stint, I can say that I just did not know how to be pregnant, or how to be a mom. It helps a lot to be close to other women, sisters, aunts. To have a loving support system. I know now that I did not know then, that people need a psycho-social system. And for this lack and response of, there are pills. Pills are much easier than having system in place within a home. I remember that one doctor’s first line of treatment was fluoxetine. He sent me to a shrink where I sat in front of a shrink in training who asked me why my hands were so dry. I knew he figured I excessively washed my hands when in fact I had an awful problem with dry skin. If it had not been so stupid, it would have been funny. I turned tables on him and gave him a nervous rash that covered his neck. I knew that no matter what I said about my ‘dry hands’ would result in his opinion overriding mine. I left his office and never went back…..What strikes me as weird is, how often does the husband get questioned about his role? Or the rest of the family? Often women struggle within a relationship or within their roles, yet on an unconscious level. Many women feel that everything should come natural to them. In fact often they are not aware that the life they are in is not right or good for them based on their unique personality and too often these women are labeled as ‘the problem’, when it is really much more than that. It is rarely one thing and to find solutions is difficult. But we put an absolute stop to progression of the person by labeling, even in the case of “post partum”. Labels cause it to become medical and so does the treatment follow. For me, I instinctively knew there was something wrong, but I absolutely knew that I could never find the answers in any psychiatric system. It’s an awful thing to drug people, an awful thing to drug mothers. I have no use for the label ‘post partum whatever’, because it is a process, not a disease.

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    • Dear Sam, Thank you for sharing your story with me and for your kind words about my mother, I think she did remarkably well, especially now that i know all she was struggling with. My mother was kind, creative, and courageous, and I so appreciate everything she did for all of us. Yes, I agree, women need a good support system, but that’s not how things were set up bak then—-even now for a lot of people. I agree with you about your dry skin story—OMG, psych docs ar esophaguses hubristic—–and usually don’t really have a clue about human beings.

      Thanks again for sharing with me. All the best, Ann

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  13. Hi again Ann.

    My friend’s pain started with horrible tooth pain and here is an article that might have been, quite possibly, what your mom had. Some call it “suicide pain”, because people do commit suicide from it.
    I think back then they might not have been aware of it and chalked it up to ‘nerves’.
    My friend had gamma knife surgery which took it away for a bit, but they can only do one repeat. Then they put her on high doses of a heavy duty painkiller that is used for this condition.
    https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/trigeminal-neuralgia/symptoms-causes/syc-20353344

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