The Three Types of Psychiatric Drugs – A Doctor’s Guide for Consumers

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When people call me up seeking “medication management,” I first say:

“There are three types of psychiatric drugs to choose from:

1. We’ve got placebos1 for all the suckers who bought into the idea of sadness being ‘a serious but treatable illness caused by chemical imbalance that occurs for no reason if you’re genetically vulnerable’. This turned out to be a pure hoax.2 That’s why antidepressants’ initial benefits invariably and disappointingly fade. It’s likely why users usually worsen over time,3 as they try one after another in futile pursuit of a myth.4

2. We’ve got drugs that really do lift you up — at first. But unfortunately they’re all addictive.5 6 Thus, with daily use, not only do you develop a tolerance, but you suffer horrible withdrawals if you try to stop them. Ultimately you need increasingly higher, impairing, and dangerous dosages in order to avoid withdrawals.7

3. And we’ve got sedatives that ensure that you’ll never again have any feelings, thoughts, or complaints, since they can’t selectively numb just your unpleasant sensations — they numb all sensations. They can be used to zombify your kids to make them instantly manageable, so you don’t need to raise them. But then they’ll never mature or reach their potential, and will likely continue using drugs as their only coping tool as adults.“

Usually people either hang up on me before I finish this speech, or let me finish and then politely request the name of another psychiatrist who’s more gung-ho about my field’s miracle pills. Occasionally they take me up on my offer to instead look into whatever is upsetting them (relationship troubles, losses, fears, life pressures, etc.).

Those psychiatrists who do push the medical model profit from it easily and greatly, since health insurers pay for these scams and since people trustingly line up to see them. Clients faithfully stay with them despite faring poorly, since they’re convinced it’s due to their ‘chronic illness’. Many must return religiously, due to becoming drug-addicted and/or needing ongoing medical documentation of permanent disability.

Psychiatrists are seen as hard-working, caring, understanding healers, but they’re really snake-oil salesmen, drug-dealers, and master-sedaters. What they do should be illegal. Someday everyone will realize that not only do psychiatrists not heal anything, they’re a major contributor to the recent rise in suicides and overdoses.

They say little in their brief sessions. But if you take the few things they do say, read between the lies and boil them down to their essence, you’ll be left with this message: “Whatever is upsetting you is not worth listening to — just shut up and take one of these shut-up pills.” (Isn’t that the gist of “Your painful feelings are mere symptoms of depression — a medically treatable illness,” for example?) It’s the essence of psychiatry’s role — the goal of all its treatments. So there’s really just one type of psych drug, not three, and just one type of medication management session, which I’ve summarized below:

“Shut up and take your pills,

And don’t forget to pay your bill.

Take one or take ‘em all, but please move it along,

‘Cause I’ve got an important meeting with a drug rep… Next!”

Show 7 footnotes

  1. Kirsch, I. The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. Basic Books, 2010.
  2. Kapur, S, et al “Why Has it Taken So Long for Biological Psychiatry to Develop Clinical Tests?” Molecular Psych, 2012, 17, 1174-9.
  3. Whitaker, R. Anatomy of An Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. Random House, 2010.
  4. Kaitrin ”How Many Antidepressant Meds Have You Tried?” Depressionforums.org, Aug 15, 2004.
  5. National Institute on Drug Abuse “Well-Known Mechanism Underlying Benzodiazepines’ Addictive Properties” April 19, 2012.
  6. National Institute on Drug Abuse “Prescription Stimulants: Drug Facts” June, 2018.
  7. Weich, S. “Effect of Anxiolytic and Hypnotic Drug Prescription on Mortality Hazards: Retrospective Cohort Study” BMJ 2014; 348: g1996.

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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.

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Lawrence Kelmenson, MD
Lawrence Kelmenson has practiced psychiatry for 32 years, working with children, adults, and families. He graduated medical school from State University of New York, and completed psychiatric residency training at Cornell. He then became staff psychiatrist, and later medical director, of Craig House Hospital in Beacon, New York until 2000, and has since conducted a psychotherapy-based private practice in Cold Spring, New York. 

122 COMMENTS

  1. Hi Lawrence, Your Articles should be published everywhere!

    Mankind has known for hundreds and hundreds of years that any drug taken to make a person feel better will eventually make them feel a lot worse. It’s the Doctors that are telling Lies.

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  2. Thank you for this stark summary of the truth about psychopharmacology in the 21st century. I guess these facts are still a rather difficult pill for most people to swallow (figuratively speaking). Indeed, there should be a chorus of comments on this piece. Instead? Crickets!! That should tell us something.

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  3. Thank you, Lawrence, for concisely and accurately describing the “job” of a psychiatrist. I couldn’t agree more, “What they do should be illegal.” And, actually, a lot of what they do is illegal, given their primary actual societal function is covering up child abuse.

    https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2019/01/23/18820633.php?fbclid=IwAR2-cgZPcEvbz7yFqMuUwneIuaqGleGiOzackY4N2sPeVXolwmEga5iKxdo
    https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/04/heal-for-life/

    “Whatever is upsetting you is not worth listening to — just shut up and take one of these shut-up pills.” “Oh, medical evidence of the abuse of your child was handed over? The best way to help a healing child abuse survivor is to have him psychiatrically drugged.”

    No thanks, the abuse occurred four years ago, and my child is doing much better now.

    “Then I declare your entire life to be a credible fictional story.”

    Are we done? You’re too crazy and criminal for me, child abuse covering up psychiatrist. And, no, I won’t sign a sheet full of clear stickers that say, “I swear this is true” on them. For you to later put on your medical records, that are filled with lies, misinformation, and gossip from the child abusers. I hadn’t realized that psychotherapy is nothing more than gossip masquerading as medicine. That should be illegal.

    By the way, your “antidepressants” and “antipsychotics” can create “psychosis,” via anticholinergic toxidrome. A toxidrome is a medically known way to poison people. All doctors are taught about anticholinergic toxidrome in med school. And intentionally poisoning people is a form of attempted murder, which is also illegal.

    Much or all of what the psychiatrists do, technically, is illegal.

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  4. Here are several ecological studies on the link between psychiatry and suicides:

    Burgess, P., Pirkis, J., Jolley, D., Whiteford, H., & Saxena, S. (2004). Do nations’ mental health policies, programs and legislation influence their suicide rates? An ecological study of 100 countries. Australian and New Zealand journal of psychiatry, 38(11-12), 933-939.

    Abstract
    OBJECTIVE:
    To test the hypothesis that the presence of national mental health policies, programs and legislation would be associated with lower national suicide rates.

    METHOD:
    Suicide rates from 100 countries were regressed on mental health policy, program and legislation indicators.

    RESULTS:
    Contrary to the hypothesized relationship, the study found that after introducing mental health initiatives (with the exception of substance abuse policies), countries’ suicide rates rose.

    CONCLUSION:
    It is of concern that most mental health initiatives are associated with an increase in suicide rates. However, there may be acceptable reasons for the observed findings, for example initiatives may have been introduced in areas of increasing need, or a case-finding effect may be operating. Data limitations must also be considered.

    Shah, A., Bhandarkar, R., & Bhatia, G. (2010). The relationship between general population suicide rates and mental health funding, service provision and national policy: a cross-national study. International journal of social psychiatry, 56(4), 448-453.

    Abstract
    OBJECTIVE:
    The main aims were to examine the relationship between general population suicide rates and the presence of national policies on mental health, funding for mental health, and measures of mental health service provision.

    METHODS:
    Data on general population suicide rates for both genders were obtained from the World Health Organization (WHO) databank available on the WHO website. Data on the presence of national policies on mental health, funding for mental health and measures of mental health service provision were obtained from the Mental Health Atlas 2005, also available on the WHO website.

    FINDINGS:
    The main findings were: (i) there was no relationship between suicide rates in both genders and different measures of mental health policy, except they were increased in countries with mental health legislation; (ii) there was a significant positive correlation between suicide rates in both genders and the percentage of the total health budget spent on mental health; and (iii) suicide rates in both genders were higher in countries with greater provision of mental health services, including the number of psychiatric beds, psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses, and the availability of training in mental health for primary care professionals.

    CONCLUSIONS:
    Cross-national ecological studies using national-level aggregate data are not helpful in establishing a causal relationship (and the direction of this relationship) between suicide rates and mental health funding, service provision and national policies. The impact of introducing national policies on mental health, increasing funding for mental health services and increasing mental health service provision on suicide rates requires further examination in longitudinal within-country studies.

    Rajkumar, A. P., Brinda, E. M., Duba, A. S., Thangadurai, P., & Jacob, K. S. (2013). National suicide rates and mental health system indicators: an ecological study of 191 countries. International journal of law and psychiatry, 36(5-6), 339-342.

    Abstract
    PURPOSE:
    The relative contributions of psychiatric morbidity and psychosocial stress to suicide, and the efficacy of mental health systems in reducing population suicide rates, are currently unclear. This study, therefore, aimed to investigate whether national suicide rates are associated with their corresponding mental health system indicators.

    METHODS:
    Relevant data were retrieved from the following sources: the World Health Organization, the United Nations Statistics Division and the Central Intelligence Agency World Fact book. Suicide rates of 191 countries were compared with their mental health system indicators using an ecological study design and multivariate non-parametric robust regression models.

    RESULTS:
    Significant positive correlations between suicide rates and mental health system indicators (p<0.001) were documented. After adjusting for the effects of major macroeconomic indices using multivariate analyses, numbers of psychiatrists (p=0.006) and mental health beds (p<0.001) were significantly positively associated with population suicide rates.

    CONCLUSIONS:
    Countries with better psychiatric services experience higher suicide rates. Although these associations should be interpreted with caution, as the issues are complex, we suggest that population-based public health strategies may have greater impact on national suicide rates than curative mental health services for individuals.

    Sher, L. (2016). are suicide rates related to the Psychiatrist Density? a cross-national study. Frontiers in public health, 3, 280.

    Abstract
    Introduction
    Most suicide victims have a diagnosable psychiatric disorder. Treatment of psychiatric disorders should reduce the number of suicides. Higher psychiatrist-per-­population ratio increases the opportunity for contact between the patient and psychiatrist. It is reasonable to hypothesize that the higher psychiatrist density (PD) is associated with lower suicide rates. The aim of this study is to examine the association between suicide rates and the PD in the European Union countries. These countries are economically and culturally connected and located on the same continent. This is an attempt to study a relatively homogenous sample.

    Methods
    Correlations were computed to examine relationships between age-­standardized suicide rates in women and men, the PD, and the gross national income (GNI) per capita. Partial correlations were used to examine the relation between the PD and age-standardized suicide rates in women and men controlling for the GNI per capita.

    Results
    Higher suicide rates in women correlated with the higher PD. Controlling for the GNI per capita, the PD positively correlated with suicide rates both in women and in men. There was a trend toward a negative correlation between the GNI per capita and suicide rates in men. The PD was positively associated with the GNI per capita.

    Conclusion
    Probably, higher suicide rates directly and/or indirectly affect the decisions made by policy- and lawmakers regarding mental health services and how many psychiatrists need to be trained. The results of this study should be treated with caution because many confounding variables are not taken into account.

    Conversely, here is a ecological study on the link between social support and suicides:

    Šedivy, N. Z., Podlogar, T., Kerr, D. C., & De Leo, D. (2017). Community social support as a protective factor against suicide: A gender-specific ecological study of 75 regions of 23 European countries. Health & place, 48, 40-46.

    Abstract
    By studying differences in suicide rates among different geographical regions one may identify factors connected to suicidal behaviour on a regional level. Many studies have focused on risk factors, whereas less is known about protective factors, such as social support. Using suicide rates and data from the European Social Survey (ESS) we explore the association between regional level social support indicator and suicide rates in 23 European countries in 2012. Linear multiple regression analyses using region as the unit of analysis revealed inverse relationships between mean respondent valuing of social support and suicide rates for both genders, with some indication of a stronger relationship among men. Social support may have a protective effect against suicide on a regional level. Thus, increasing social support could be an effective focus of preventive activities, resulting in lowering suicide rates, with greater expected results among men.

    Note that for the link between psychiatry and suicide, some researchers insist heavily that “correlation does not imply causality”, but for the link between social support and protection against suicide, they more readily admit that it could be causal, even if they use the same kind of analytical method.

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    • Thanks, Sylvain. To synopsize:

      “the study found that after introducing mental health initiatives (with the exception of substance abuse policies), countries’ suicide rates rose.”

      “It is of concern that most mental health initiatives are associated with an increase in suicide rates.”

      “there was a significant positive correlation between suicide rates in both genders and the percentage of the total health budget spent on mental health;”

      “suicide rates in both genders were higher in countries with greater provision of mental health services,”

      “Countries with better psychiatric services experience higher suicide rates.”

      “Higher suicide rates in women correlated with the higher [psychiatrist density]. Controlling for the [gross national income] per capita, the [psychiatrist density] positively correlated with suicide rates both in women and in men.”

      “Someday everyone will realize that not only do psychiatrists not heal anything, they’re a major contributor to the recent rise in suicides and overdoses.”

      All quite compelling reasons to put an end to psychiatry’s “reign of error and terror,” and their modern day psychiatric holocaust of innocents.

      https://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/directors/thomas-insel/blog/2013/transforming-diagnosis.shtml
      http://myeclinik.com/psychiatric-drugs-kill-500k-western-adults-annually/

      Plus, I think these mass murderers should be put jail. The psychiatrists are repeating the worst of history, because all they apparently learned from the Nazi holocaust was to change the word “eugenics” to the word “genetics.” When in reality the appropriate term to describe the etiology of their “serious mental illnesses” is iatrogenic. When will the psychiatric mass murders end?

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      • The impacts are not just those of drugs.
        Nonconsensual interventions are torture.
        Torture, strangely enough, has a way of messing with a persons mental integrity.
        It is not just the torture of forcing the drugs. By manipulation or by physical brutality. It is also forcing the ideology and depriving all ability to explore and form one’s own subjective understanding, with support (which means support not control).
        People who have found meaning in their experience of metaphor have done so under conditions of torture and persecution, including hardcore physical violence, solitary confinement, forced paralysis etc. Brutal administration of drugs and detention all with the impetus of having to “confess” to the ideology of “mental illness”.
        “Do you think you are sick” repeated with only way to end the torture to say “yes I think I am sick”.
        This is applied whether the person is trying to articulate they are not sick but exploring inner world metaphorically, or whether person is describing actual events (in the case of two I know: a breakin, family violence and partner stalking) that the psychiatrist decided did not genuinely happen. It is also used politically – those who protest or point out human rights abuses are given the “symptom” of “antipsychiatry” – it is formally written in notes but later denied that it was intended as a “symptom”.
        Political prisoners are taken.

        In my experience, being forced to adopt the ideology of “sickness” prevented me from exploring and resolving my experience *from my own perspective* it took 20 years before I could do that. Having resolved those experiences, I no longer need to enter metaphorical processing, but am still faced with a world where i have to persue a legal career against the grain because my access to other career paths is temporarily curtailed by the structural discrimination.

        To get back to my old career, I have to overcome the entrenched belief that everyone should be forced under a psychiatric lens and excluded from work unless they agree to submit to it – for ‘risk assessments’ going into remote locations, or for resolving disciplinary action. There are two different tracks for those labelled by ‘psychiatry’ and those not. The tracks are joining, but not in a good way – psychiatry is taking over sensible risk assessment.

        So not I have to become a bloody lawyer, instead of a scientist and I am not happy about that.

        There are amazing lawyers who have risen from positions of horrific torture and discrimination to represent large bodies to the UN. The submissions of these torture survivours, is making headway.

        The major impediment to advancing genuine human rights and recognition of exploitation and abuse is also a major instrument of that exploitation and abuse: the doctrine of “medical necessity”. This does not base itself on anything reasonable, any norms of human rights or good sense. It bases itself on nothing more than what are the agreed common actions in a group of persons who are calling themselves “medical professionals”.

        The need to examine the undue influence afforded to that particular profession is paramount in overcoming the unreasonable and unsubstantiated influence it has been granted. It will not come easily, just as with slavery and advancing the rights of women and recognition of the rights and entitlements due to first nations peoples: this is about power and reputation. Those who have power and reputation, are not going to give it up without a fight.

        They will and have attempted to advance on any system that threatens to undermine the power and influence they have achieved – by reputation. Money is a poor point of focus. Reputation is the true power, and reputation has been achieved through corruption – corrupting trust and perception. These are far more powerful things than money.

        Non-consensual psychiatric interventions are formally confirmed torture, despite the obstacles in European courts (mounted on the basis of “medical necessity” doctrine)
        (see paragraphs 31-35, 84 and 89)
        https://www.ohchr.org/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/regularsession/session22/a.hrc.22.53_english.pdf

        Beware that people are trying to use rights as a vehicle to undermine rights. It’s already been seen in draft discussions where “right to life” is attempting to abrogate the rights of women with regards to abortion. The “right to life” argument is also used to advance torture in a psychiatric setting based on a false dichotomy that posits force is
        a) successful in preserving life
        b) necessary to preserve life

        There are obvious ways to blow this sophistry out of the water. But it isn’t going to come if people aren’t empowered to organise and get all that buried information about what the reality of force did to so many of us – and how it drove many of our loved ones to the very death it claimed to be preventing, many of us to the brink of it when we weren’t initially there and made it more difficult to manage for those who were.

        If there are some people who genuinely want to be confined or have control taken away from them, they can be facilitated.

        Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, as clarified in General Comment No 1 – is about recognising diversity. It is not about arranging people into groups based on how they are perceived by others and forcing them under the auspices of someone claiming to be a “authority” on others’ minds.

        Everyone is different, everyone needs to be supported in full respect of their autonomy and diversity, with no undue pressure or influence. No medical gatekeeping. No forced medical ideology – including that of the broader “mental health” philosophy.

        “Mental health” is not ‘reality’ but ideology. There is no limit on different ways to understand life and experience in *all* of its diversity.

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    • Lily Pad:

      Before 2000, I worked at a hospital that was of a type that no longer exists: it was more of a place that people went to in order to get away from the stresses of life that were overwhelming them. There was no emergency room or involuntary commitment, and staff generally was very nurturing and patient. The focus was on going for walks on the extensive/beautiful grounds, participating in creative and physical outlets, and opening up and connecting to others in individual, family, and group psychotherapy. I had regular, long individual therapy sessions with all my “patients”, often while walking the grounds and appreciating nature together. I’m ashamed to admit that I did sometimes (sparingly) prescribe psych drugs. But I always stressed it was short-term for the crisis period, and often tapered people off them by discharge. It was never a focus; the psychotherapy always was.

      Lawrence

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  5. Lawrence,
    I am always amazed to see refined middle aged men with glasses talking in a very educated manner about the merits of the different psychiatric Drugs they prescribe, when in effect these drugs are just tranquillisers or antidepressants that any fool could dole out. These men are not qualified at anything.

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    • Some psychiatric drugs, like antipsychotics, make it so that the person is more prone to abusing alcohol and street drugs. Nicotine use is very high among these people, it’s a stress-relief drug. I read a study recently that nicotine patches are effective treatment for antipsychotic-induced akathisia.

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        • Yes Rachel that craving happened to me and looking back oh yeah my clients with their diet pop from morning until night.
          There must be a connection.
          Also blurry vision, that was the worst because I cut down on my driving and no medical profession ever ever explored how asa mother of a large family how could Icope with the driving and other stuff with the side effect of Parkininsom as well.
          It was a nightmare and the lost years at times are so painful to sit with. Somehow there needs to be a reckoning.
          And Lawerence for his truthfulness, worked in a bubble.

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        • Drug free, that’s they way it has to be. We all need to feel our feelings, and that takes real work.

          Drugs do not “heal”. The idea of healing from distress is complete nonsense. But people post on this forum that things like LSD heal. No, all drugs do is give you an escape, for a while.

          You either deal with the source of the distress, or it just passes, or it clobbers you. But you do not heal from it because there is nothing wrong about the fact that danger and risk stimulate your feelings. Distress is an evolutionarily developed response to that which places us at risk. And anything which attacks our social and civil standing is placing our survival in jeopardy. Poverty in a land of plenty is caused by social marginalization. And as long as we survivors do nothing to punish perpetrators, seize reparations, and to protect the next generation of probable victims, then we don’t have social and civil standing. We live in the shadows which the abusers have left us, seen as ne-er do wells and as a social hygiene menace, because we do not have public honor.

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  6. Your assessment is wrong based on many variables; some of them simple as a placebo effect, others tardive dyskinesia (not mentioned ttbomk) and the general state of being on drugs and how they affect or effect and ultimately affect the human psyche. I could write forever on this but I steadfast on the punisition that people should have a right to choose, so long as they have truly informed consent. And that includes everything, even opioids and psychedelics.

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    • Yes. Sadly there is a dearth of accurate information. I believe 90% of America’s population thinks all “mental illnesses” are caused by chemical imbalances proven to exist in people’s brains. Because NAMI and other educational orgs tell them so.

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    • Our society has the right to place legal restrictions on drugs, including opioids and psychedelics. And when drugs are given out by doctors it is a legal requirement that it be for a valid medical purpose.

      You don’t have to agree with this or like it, but our society does restrict many types of drugs and we do have the right to enforce such restrictions.

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  7. Dr. Kelmenson, Thank you for speaking out against the damage psychiatry is doing. Hopefully more psychiatrists become brave enough to do the same.
    It is so true a psychiatrist says very little during brief appointments and whatever the causation or context of someone’s distress is it simply does not matter.

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  8. Thank you for the truth. Cole, I would just like to say try feeling very smart for finding you way out of psychiatry. This scam is not so simple like someone asked you to send money so they could get back to their home country. I do not feel stupid bc I know I am very book smart. But I feel like the most naive person I know. Being put on psych drugs at age 15 and coming off at 47, I have never viewed the world as evil and messed up as it is. I guess that is the point SHUT UP about all the bad I saw. Would anyone have any comments if that is what these drugs did to me and other teenagers?

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    • Lcostanzo:

      Yes; the point of the medical model is to get people to shut up, placidly conform, and deny being upset about anything. For another example of this, I should have included the classic psychiatrist line: “This isn’t you …It’s your illness talking. Once you’re on the right meds, you’ll be back to your old/real self, and all these symptoms will go away”.

      Lawrence

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      • Lawrence,
        Thank you so much for the reply. I don’t think these blogs are meant for personal support, I am not sure, but all of you on MIA are the only safe support I have during my shocking discovery. Family, old friends and local hospitals have locked me up twice bc I told them they are creating chemical imbalances not curing them. They say I dont make sense. I had to agree I had a chemical imbalance again and take the meds to get out of one. I know better now. I do have a therapist I obtained thru the MIA resource list. He has helped me more in 1 1/2 years than I got over 32 years of others so called “help” or internal and physical torture. Gee, I don’t know Tomato/Tomahto Help/Torture. I do try to maintain a sense of humor. So I keep thanking every single person who has put the truth out. It has reached me and I could not be more GRATEFUL.

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  9. Step right up! We’ve got a pill for whatever dis-eases you. We can thank our lucky stars the vice squad hasn’t caught up with us yet. Snake oil…”You must mean fish oil.”…has gone big time. Step right up! Got a problem with the neighbors? Try some of this, and you will be saying, “What neighbors?” Step right up, or our goons over there, the ones in the whites suits (They must be good guys, huh?), will mug you, and give you a dose by hypodermic needle. Nobody is exempted. If he or she isn’t on anything, we’ve got a drug for him or her, too. Step right up! The elixir of the Gods is just gleaming for another contented customer. Step right up!

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      • Oldhead:

        Until the 1980s, my blog’s explanation of the types of psych drugs wouldn’t have been as needed, since my field used to admit that its drugs were mostly tranquilizers (barbiturates, valium, librium, haldol, thorazine, etc.), though it did play down the addictivenes of the barbs/benzos. Even its placebos (“antidepressants”), which were used rarely until the ’80s, used to have sedative effects, so were usually given at night to put people to sleep.

        It was only after the 1980 DSM’s popularity that it began claiming to have different drug classes that supposedly specifically “treated” “anxiety”, “psychosis”, “ADHD”, or “bipolar”. But all these new drugs were really just more sedatives. How could an “antipsychotic” drug, for example, differentiate thoughts based in reality from thoughts based in fantasy, then distinguish socially-conformist from socially-non-conformist fantasies, and then choose to only eliminate the socially-non-conformist fantasies? That would have to be a pretty smart pill.

        And then my field explained/excused the obvious sedation that came from these SHUT-UP pills as “unwanted side effects”. Yet the public was suckered into believing these lies, and duped into taking these tranquilizers and using them on their kids. That’s why this article needed to be written now.

        Lawrence

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        • Lawerence , your explanation of the historical timeline fits my own perspective.
          However, when I was in crisis I could not debate with your peers who relied on psychophamacits who said if Lamictal worked she meaning me was Bipolar. She actually fired me for calling her right then and there and my mother pushed me to call not I because to actually is not playing by the rules but my mother had a disabled husband, and other crisises and hadn’t like myself been exposed to the brave new world of Pharma.

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        • Lawrence,

          The Neuroleptics are “addictive” as well in the sense that (even though they are unpleasant), they are dependency forming.

          I refused “medication” in 1980, but by 1983 when I was given permission to discontinue all “medication”, I honestly couldn’t survive without it.

          I had to come off the Neuroleptic “Medication” very carefully over a long period of time, and I had to learn how to deal with my Reactive High Anxiety (which was not my normal state).

          Valium certainly causes Anxiety, but Neuroleptics also cause High Anxiety.

          But the Good News is that even the High Anxiety (of withdrawing from drugs suitable for “schizophrenia”) responds to Practical Inexpensive Psychotherapy.

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  10. “Psychiatrists are seen as hard-working, caring, understanding healers, but they’re really snake-oil salesmen, drug-dealers, and master-sedaters. What they do should be illegal. Someday everyone will realize that not only do psychiatrists not heal anything, they’re a major contributor to the recent rise in suicides and overdoses.”

    Lawrence, thank you for writing this, and I completely agree. I admire the fact that you are a psychiatrist and are willing to express this bluntly and directly in a public forum. My experience–along with so many of the testimonials I’ve read over the years on MiA and elsewhere–unequivocally supports these statements. This is my story and the truth which I discovered, too, exactly, as I emerged from the dense and disorienting haze of it all, which took years to get clarity on this mess! So many ways in which that particular insitution wraps its tentacles around a person, it’s not just the psych drugs.

    So we were conned by frauds in an abusive profession and as a result, we got the life sucked out of us (along with quite a bit of money–including “lost wages”) under the pretense of “health care,” and it’s been costly in many ways to millions of individuals and families, and society on the whole, like organized crime.

    You’ve been on the inside for a long time and see this without question, it is your field. And many of us know this from having been the ones taken in by such an extreme and sinister, dangerous scam.

    Your voice has credibility, and this is quite clear, damning, and truthful, what you say here. Is there really no legal recourse for this? We are owed, no doubt about that, and the folks to whom you are referring need to be exposed, held accounatable, and disempowered.

    Obviously, from what you say–and of course we all know this, but I’d like to state it yet again and explicitly right here–psychiatry is extremely detrimental to society and a crime against humanity! How is this *civilized* in any way, shape of form? It’s actually destroying civilization. I believe that is 100% accurate and truthful as are the statements which you make, and they go hand in hand.

    I, for one, would like to see civilization preserved, albeit in a radically new paradigm far and away from this sabotaging matrix we’ve got going and in which we are expected to operate in order to “succeed” in life. These are illusions and outright lies, but psychiatry is obviously a loyal cornerstone of them and continues to foster the illusions, the lies, and this matrix, for the gain of a few at the expense of everyone else. Wondering where to go from here, with this information.

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    • Alex, I am thinking of two ways. One some form of repetition and restorative justice. There could be two ways.
      One through the opioid crisis because guess who conned the medical system regarding pain? The same folks who gamed the MH field with false theories of Mental Illness is like diabetes.
      Some of the same Big Pharma folks were double dipping with both types of medications.
      If we could join class action suits somehow. But again they can see it with opioids so many don’t see for MH issues. Partly because some folks feel better. There is no paradigm.
      If one talks to 12 steppers they know some of the SSRI used for pain and they had to be really assertive in saying no this is addictive and I refuse to take it.
      The other is the gun control folks in that shooting survivors are know finding out the lead in the bullets and fragments left in their bodies are causing lead poisoning. Kind of a stretch but still. Many of the groups are more open to looking at systemic and gun industry and advertising issues rather than the proverbial “ crazy” person and then again there is much more to that narrative.
      The other way is to establish trauma centers. Mini Soteria Houses si to speak for all in the community. All of this is all human trauma so why not start the work for an eventual start?
      I hope for a White House Conference on Trauma and Congressional Hearings on Trauma but maybe in the future.
      We have to join together with all the victims of trauma and swallow some stuff stand strong on others things but if we see and after living life as it is now – we all are traumatized and there in might be the answer.

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      • Just saw this, CatNight, I had somehow missed it.

        Based on the above statements, I’m thinking along the lines of fraud and malpractice. To me it fits down the line. The problem is cover up, denial, and lying. It would take tremendous courage for someone from within that industry to break the system. That would need to come from someone–a psychiatrist, namely– who is tired of covering up and ready to challenge their peers legally by supporting the legal cause of those of us harmed specifically by psychiatry and its standard practices, and who recognizes the need for reparations, how that is truly just.

        I know we were harmed by lying Big Pharma, too, but I’m most angry at those who are supposedly trained and dedicated healers and instead turn out to be “snake-oil salesmen and drug-dealers.” That is so betraying to society it’s over the top. I believe it’s most dangerous because the institution sells itself as some sort of standard of being which is absolutely false, fabricated, based on social approval and “fitting in” (making others–the dominant class–comfortable, which is how our power and energy are drained). This is specifically how people become othered, marginalized, disabled, and second-classed, which is treacherous and heartless because it undermines people’s civicl and human rights and causes them to suffer from shame, powerlessness, and poverty, when that does not have to be the case. Makes it toxic, elistist, and exclusionary–aka socially abusive.

        Big Pharma is corporate, diverse, and out for profit. Psychiatrists are supposed to be healers and they are the opposite. It almost destroyed me and my life, all based on what felt like a seriously sadistic psychiatrist who was not in check. I don’t know what was up his butt, but I found myself needing his services to receive other necessary services (or so I thought at the time, programmed as I was), so I got stuck taking a lot of shit from him until I further awoke and finally just walked away in search of real healing. Finally found it, thank God, and nowhere near this so-called “profession.”

        God they can be so awful and abusive, really draining in how they question our reality and self-awareness, in favor of what THEY think or observe or conclude or perceive. What a recipe for disaster, and that’s just what it has been. It’s absurd that this practice of blatant projection and calling it “reality” has been allowed for so long. I just smh about it now, looking back at how much harm this does to people under such false pretenses.

        I saved myself, but as long as this is going on out there, I’m willing to speak my truth in any way at any time where it will make a difference.

        Don’t know if anything else can be done at this point and I’m not really attached to anything in specific. I’m just constantly amazed at how every potential channel and opportunity for some change to occur, it just fizzles. One illusion after another. Like the “dark forces” holding on to the status quo. I still think truth wins out in the end, but the plethora of smokescreens is overwhelming, as I know you know. It’s created a lot of density for the light to penetrate, as we continue to speak our truth of the matter.

        Yep, sure does seem the entire world is functioning from some traumatized place at this point, and certainly in the USA right now. It permeates the collective. I’m sure new things will pop up in response to this. Healing is a huge need right now. The world is changing, and we are transitioning to new paradigms all over the place.

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  11. Just read an article bashing AA as unscientific. The argument is alcoholics are people with the “brain disease” of depression which SCIENCE proves drugs called “antidepressants” can fix.

    Like saying you can cure alcoholism by taking crack. Woo hoo!

    As long as the quacks get paid. 😛

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  12. Got to come up with a slate of actions. I say that we need to make the first priority the restoration of the social, civil, and legal standing of survivors. And this has to be measured in concrete gains, otherwise its just more tune out. We live in a society where social and civil standing is measured in dollars recovered.

    Then we have to protect those next in line to be victimized.

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    • PacificDawn,
      I have a small background in the legal field. I myself and many peers I know have had our fundamental right to liberty violated when locked up for not the legal standard. Everyone is always looking for a lawyer with no success. I was referred to Disability Rights and they told me they are only working on physical accessibility issues right now. When I heal from recently coming off these drugs and my son is older, I wonder if I worked on a project to have lawyers avail to survivors. Lawyers that understand. I did attend NARPA. They get it but are all pretty busy. I am so new to this psych fraud maybe this already exists? Do you think something like that would help?

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        • Again, unjust laws support the perpetuation of our entire society. They won’t be changed until the system is defeated. A law which seriously threatened to undermine the basic structure of society would be met with the imposition of martial law.

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      • “Disability Rights and they told me they are only working on physical accessibility issues right now.”

        This caught my attention, thought it was an interesting response from them. What, exactly, does that mean? Sounds like they are discriminating against certain types of “disability,” or they are clueless how to address SOME disability issues, so they ignore them.

        The Disability Rights agency in Northern CA is really awful and when I was dealing with them years ago, they seemed to only perpetuate discrimination rather than to be the example otherwise. I did reflect this back, quite rationally and from my experience of this, but directly and with all certainty while using the exact examples from our dialogue. It was straight math, so very clear and unambiguous, and unfortunately, completely typical. Once one has been through systemic abuse, it gets really easy to spot, in the moment.

        And of course, the attorney with whom I was communicating at the time got angry, defensive, extremely patronizing (in a gaslighting kinda way), and cut off communication. Gee, big surprise.

        There’s really no end to the web of deceit, illusion, and stonewalling that goes on here. I think it’s a house of cards, though, so it will eventually cave in on itself, as long as we keep waking up and speaking up, and moving forward ourselves. That will ripple and others won’t make the same mistake we did in this regard, to trust this intricately corrupt industry. That is my best hope right now.

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        • Alex, once again your comment nails it and totally resonates! As if the harm of psychiatry was not bad enough then you find out all the channels you reach out to for resolution or justice are in bed together and/or riding the same gravy train.

          “There’s really no end to the web of deceit, illusion, and stonewalling that goes on here”.
          Exactly!
          I really appreciate reading your comments Alex. Having such well worded and insightful validation sure helps to neutralize all the crazy-making of psychiatry.

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          • Thanks for saying this, and for all of your validation regarding how you value my commentary, Rosalee. That is extremely helpful and encouraging to me, always. Honestly, many of the brilliant writers on here have been examples to me. I’ve worked hard over the years to refine because it is all so friggin’ complicated! Aligning words with intention is walking the talk.

            I’m honestly so glad my words bring clarity to the situation, that is *exactly* my intent, so thank you for mirroring this. I’m never quite sure, been putting it together for years now. This is healing for me. I’ve unraveled from this by now, but I remain posting here because I know it still continues, and I want to make whatever contribution I can to stopping this crazy ass abuse and vampirism. It’s over the top and it still pisses me off to no end.

            Lately I have been aware of the resonance among many of us now, in this particular regard of how this systemic abuse plays out, and that is MOST encouraging to me. It is so insidious and really hard to pinpoint, but necessary, I think, and we’re getting it to it here, I believe, so hooray for that! I think it’s at the heart of the matter, to be honest, how rights and freedoms become totally and relentlessly compromised, and that’s a blow to a person’s humanity, truly. That’s my perspective, in any event, and what speaks to me most re “chronic mental distress.” It’s really a pisser, to say the least, and I’m HIGHLY intent on, one way or another, getting this crap to fucking stop already! Something’s gotta give at this point.

            “As if the harm of psychiatry was not bad enough then you find out all the channels you reach out to for resolution or justice are in bed together and/or riding the same gravy train.”

            Yes. And also, I think they just perceive humanity through the same filters, as themselves, and “others.” These are the “otherers.” That’s how they justify hoarding all the wealth, by deceiving the world. I think the lies are catching up with all of them, though, don’t you think? We’re awake, and not backing down from the truth, whatever actions we choose to take or not take, as long as we are true to ourselves at this point. Truth is truth, and it’s out there now. I’m encouraged by this.

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        • The problem I see with “Disability Rights” is that by even engaging them, we are allowing that being “diagnosed” with one of these pseudoscientific “disorders” means we are “disabled” in some way. I think the resistance will not be coming from that direction.

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          • Been reading about Maiti Girtanner who wound up disabled after being tortured by a doctor in an interment camp. She never could pursue a career as a musician.
            Those of us who have been “treated” for more than 8 years struggle with real disabilities–inflicted by respected professionals we often trusted. 🙁

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          • Indeed, these are worthless agencies. But when one is stuck inside the system and starts waking up and begins going from agency to agency and advocate to advocate and non-profit to non-profit seeking some kind of reasonable support–and there are so many junctures where this would be most relevant and vital, and to be expected as baseline in a *functional* society– one learns the hard way, that it is nowhere to be found.

            And not only that, but in addition to coming up empty handed as you are going through the various stages of healing and integration, you’ll get a good dose of second-classism (new “ism”) and full blown stigma along the way, simply from asking for help from people who haven’t a clue what they are doing, seriously. Either that, or they’ve found a reason to not like you. Then you’re really cooked, don’t expect justice at all, if that’s the case, which to me is the epitome of abuse of power, to make it personal when there are social justice issues at stake. Neutrality is needed here, and that’s really hard to come by in the system. Talk about feeling powerless! That affects a person’s nervous system, for starters. It’s totally mind/body/spirit detrimental, I think it stands to reason.

            And don’t even THINK about getting an honest answer when you ask a question! Or an answer at all. I had to file a grievance once just to have a dialogue with the CEO of a mh-related agency with which I was once affiliated, who refused to talk to me, and who really had no legal right to stonewall me like that. I rightfully protested, and I got my meeting. Then, I had to take her to legal mediation, because she just could not understand outside her small minded perspective. So much drama, rather to have a simple dialogue. No integrity, no ethics, tons of fear, it is truly mind-boggling to awaken to how deep it goes, but it is what it is and I believe, from what I continue to gather, that it’s gotten way worse over the years.

            When a person is recovering from psych drugs and systemic abuse only to encounter more of it from “advocates,” it is like going from one parent to another complaining about abuse, and all they’ve done is to gang up on you. Include sibs and grandparents on that, too, if you like. Don’t rock the boat, AT ALL COST!

            And why not? Because it breaks the system. That can be scary, because it is unfamiliar and EVERYONE has to own their shit, but it’s necessary because one person cannot continue carrying the burden of all of this lying and protecting abusers in any given “system.” That is THE oppression, and falls on a scapegoat, which is where change needs to happen now, and hopefully, that’s exactly what is changing. We can’t keep functioning like this, it’s the downfall of the system.

            The line which I included in Voices That Heal, which to me sums up the entire attitude here and uttered by a therapist to an older member of a group complaining about crime in his housing situation was “take your meds and don’t make waves.” ‘Nuff said. That would be the title of my book about the system, from my first person perspective, were I ever to write one.

            Going through this crap is wildly surreal, and healing from it is profound. Too many illusions in our society to count. We each have to decide for ourselves what is real and what is fake. Lots of FAKE out there! It’s up to each of us to learn to discern.

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          • Steve,

            I thank you for your writings on MIA. Since the age of 15 (now 49) I have been questioning all of this “help”. It was very easy to question it right from the start when I was 15 and my very initial complaint at the first psych center was that I felt lonely and unloved. The Help for that then was they put me in a straight jacket through me in a seclusion room and drugged me up on thorazine for 4 months while I sat drooling in a chair. Like I said very easy to question that kind of help. Then on from there this drug that drug this drug. So it is such a amazing wonderful help to me to see you write intelligently about all my questioning thoughts. I too thought I dont have a Disability so why would I try to get a service from Disability Services. Thank you so much for helping me clear up this horrific confusion in my life. I have lived your explanations of everything. THANK YOU.

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          • Thanks for your kind words. It baffles me beyond belief that a person who knows they feel lonely and unloved would be secluded in a room and put in a straight jacket and drugged!!!! How could ANYONE think that would help you feel LESS lonely and unloved? Seems like the best way I could think of to make you feel MORE lonely and unloved?

            I can only surmise that a lot of these people don’t really understand or care how other people feel. The lack of empathy is astounding to me. There is nothing wrong with a person who is feeling lonely and unloved! Maybe what they need is connection and love? Radical thought!

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      • Yes, I know that something like that would be a huge benefit!

        Problem is though, throughout all aspects of our society, those who have the greatest need for a lawyer are always those with the least ability to pay. So where you have public interest law projects, they focus their efforts in the areas where they are most likely to be successful. Nothing wrong with that. But it means that we need to come up with forms of defense which do not depend on having free lawyers immediately available.

        I am inspired here by this group “Satanic Temple” which goes into the states which still allow corporal punishment in the schools. Sometimes the parents have even signed a consent form.

        Satanic Temple encourages children to write letters to school boards, stating their religious objections to corporal punishment.

        Now, in my opinion this is more of a bluff, than something with real legal pull. But nevertheless, it is still well worthwhile. You are teaching children how to protect themselves. And then it is only one small step to go from standing up to school administrators, to standing up to parents.

        And then in instructions, Satanic Temple lists things to do if facing corporal punishment. These include calling police, and calling Satanic Temple.

        Once you teach a child to even attempt to stand up for themselves, then you have made a big difference. Corporal punishment is intended to psychologically humiliate. Once a child knows that others see it as wrong, then it will no longer have the intended effect.

        So while no one is really questioning the propriety of police arresting people for things like Disorderly Conduct, these psychiatric holds are something entirely different. So a card, stating the religious objection to psychiatric drugs, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, it will help. And then the card can direct the reader to a web site and a phone number. The web site will give some very stern warnings. If they call the phone number, it will be even worse.

        Eventually we will want to be ending the careers of many psychiatrists, therapists, and hospital staff.

        But you always want someone else to do the tough talking for you, rather than trying to do it yourself.

        The authorities will always try to turn discontent into a medical problem. And what is the real issue? Its just that someone is not complying with the demands of the Middle-Class Family, the Self-Reliance Ethic.

        So we have to look at how children are scapegoated, and why it is gotten away with. One way is Medical Child Abuse, including Mental Health. Another is disinheritance, the end game of the Family System.

        In most every other industrialized country it is very very hard to disinherit a child.

        In British Columbia you just call Trevor Todd in Vancouver. And their nation’s highest court has upheld this requirement of equal share inheritance, even when no need is demonstrated.
        http://disinherited.com/team/

        In the Civil Law Countries, the disinherited child does not even need a lawyer. And this includes Latin America, and increasingly countries on the Pacific Rim.

        The one hold out is the United States, where everyone can go on and on telling sob stories about their scapegoat child, and about all the tolerance they are showing, and then back it up with disinheritance. Few challenge this because they are silenced lest they could be subjected to the same.

        Everybody, just register here, easier to talk on this because we can post quickly, send PM’s, and exchange email addresses:
        https://openingoftheway.createaforum.com/index.php

        Once there is some consensus, we set up what ever people think is best.

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        • Thank you for your reply. I am a physical therapist, so when I was not sleeping from sedative psych drugs, I work in physical health. There are problems there too. But a Branch of “medicine” that disables our brains. I am just shocked. If someone came into a physical therapy clinic with a sprained ankle and we cut off both their legs, Lawyers would be all over that. Anyway, if I am able to do anything with our fight to obtain lawyers, my thought is to have money to pay them. Honestly, I am so new at this, I have no idea. But thank you for answering my question… I just feel like I am in an episode of the Twilight Zone with this.

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      • Here’s the legal problem: all docs prescribe according to “standard of care.”

        Without violation of that “standard of care” (and we all know what that is – diagnose and drug) the ability to press a lawsuit – class action or otherwise – is a challenge.

        Funny how, when we first presented with distress, it was easy to make us “guilty” (diagnosed with “broken brain”)

        But when the harm is done, it is impossible to prove it.

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        • I am actually working on a law suit mostly on the grounds of lack of informed consent. Even though they all say nothing about the side effects rather these pills will help you, with not a mention of the side effects at all like my last one, that does breach the standard of care. I am lucky to still have 1 1/2 months until the statute of limitations runs out. Most of us including myself could not recover from the damage they did in the short 2 1/2 year statute of limitations on med mal/neg. The only reason I have made it under the time limit this time is literally bc I have been trying to do something about this on my own since 1985. When I discovered MIA and Dr Breggin, that gives me access to expert witnesses. As someone said, the helpful docs like Lawrence were in a Bubble.

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    • Psychiatry is a secondary police force that manages “non-productive, non-conforming and disruptive behaviors” with little legal restraint; it is unusual to obtain legal redress from the abuses of psychiatry. The World Health Organization supports psychiatry by defining “mental health” as a function of productivity- emotional well-being from productivity. The predominance of survivors of psychiatry were seen as “ne’er do wells” in order to qualify for psychiatric abuse.

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  13. Steve wrote, “The problem I see with “Disability Rights” is that by even engaging them, we are allowing that being “diagnosed” with one of these pseudoscientific “disorders” means we are “disabled” in some way.”

    I agree with you, disability rights is treacherous at best.

    [Removed paragraph for moderation]

    I believe that this is due to disability money, that often this is why people go along with it.

    I think we have to go instead to a Universal Basic Income system, no needs test.

    Sami Timimi has said that the explosion in Autism assessments is because of neo-liberalism, a political posture which wants to dismantle the welfare state, and replace it with these disability assessments. It is a resurgence of the eugenics movement.

    Well, what we need instead is UBI + a strong public housing offering.

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    • “I believe that this is due to disability money, that often this is why people go along with it.”

      I believe this is a huge assumption and overgeneralization, while projecting blatant stigma onto people who do identify as disabled because they have a disability which makes having steady employment and income that much more challenging. You never know what is behind a person’s decisions when it comes to their survival, and it’s none of anyone else’s business, anyway.

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      • That they get the money is fine with me. I say we should just have UBI.

        But I still say that there are problems, problems people likely do not really understand, in opting for a disability identity. And then, many are getting shunted into this as minors.

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      • Alex,
        This goes to your previous comment but I did not have a reply button there. Thank you for stating how there is no justice. That is exactly where I am. Awakening to the truth and wanting justice and to stop this for others. I have given up on approaching lawyers. I spent $900 to have an attorney tell me I would have trouble with “Pattern Jury Instruction” which is the Standard of Care. This one is kinda funny, I caught myself trying to explain serotonergic and dopaminergic pathways to a legal assistant. So, I am involved in many peer groups and I share my story with young people and I do believe they question this fraud and begin to understand b4 the 30 years it has taken me. Thank you for adding to my understanding.

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          • I do believe justice will be served, on a grand scale, as long as we continue to speak our truths of the matter in order to bring new and personally/collectively freeing perspectives to light. No room for compromise there, as far as I’m concerned. Truth cannot be censored. It will persist relentelsssly until it is righfully acknowledged and allowed to guide the process.

            Right now, as it is, it is the lies and illusions which are guiding the process, which is why things are so damn messy here! All the “covering your ass” shit that goes on when trying to get to the truth of things, rather than humbly stepping forward and owning what is going on behind the scenes, and therefore, allowing appropriate changes to occur, based on truth over individual ego and the need to control things, and, I imagine at this point, also fear and guilt. That would be novel and truly courageous–heroic, in fact.

            I think systemic abuse happens when there is a need to control, at all cost, and mostly, people–for whatever reason, always justified somehow, in a toxic system. That will never be a just situation, ever.

            But allowing truth to guide (for a change) is the most powerful catalyst to change which I can imagine. I’m a big believer in “the truth shall set you free.” All of us.

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      • I do know a number of people who –

        – like the psychiatrists whose income depends upon performing psychiatry –

        Their diagnosis and drugging is essential to their income. To walk away is a greater challenge than many of them can face, especially after 30-40 years of being on disability payments, diagnosis and drugs. (including the resulting brain damage)

        it’s sad, but true. And more true all the time, as the poor become poorer, and it takes multiple jobs to live inside, eat food, keep warm, have running water, etc.

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  14. “Psychiatrists are seen as hard-working, caring, understanding healers, but they’re really snake-oil salesmen, drug-dealers, and master-sedaters. What they do should be illegal. Someday everyone will realize that not only do psychiatrists not heal anything, they’re a major contributor to the recent rise in suicides and overdoses.”

    Excellent. This is one of Lawrence’s best articles thus far.

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      • I thank God for the psychic healers and medical intuit with whom I worked so that I could successfully withdraw and heal from two decades of psych drugs. Being open to new perspectives is how anyone can heal, grow, and move forward in life, past the double-binding matrix of illusions and projected judgments. There are charlatans out there like in any professional vocation, and as always one has to use their intution and discernment where trust is concerned when it comes to healing services.

        But energy healing (all based on subtle energies, and which includes the ancient art of Chinese medicine) doesn’t even begin to compare with the insitution of psychiatry in terms of limiting beliefs, marginalization, and systemic harm and abuse. Chakra, energy, and psychic healing are all based on principles of SELF-healing, so it supports and fosters personal agency, empowerment, and independence.

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        • I was using “psychic” in the pejorative sense. Like the con artists who advertise on daytime TV.

          Psychiatrists claim the ability to read minds (can tell what the thoughts of patients are) and predict the future (will he commit a violent crime or not.)

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          • Ah, the “fortune tellers.” I just want to distinguish these from psychic healers. That’s all present time energy shifting, which is authentic healing.

            Psychiatrists, of course, tend to not have a psychic connection with their clients, while believing they know a client better than the client knows themself. That’s the problem.

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          • Great point, Steve. The heart and spirit are not perceived, and that is way problematic because these are generally what need healing when we are in distress. And they will heal in time, if they are seen and validated, rather than only further tortured by neglect, abuse, and betrayal.

            Of course, toxic drugs don’t nourish the heart or spirit, although I guess these are used in lieu of loving kindness and helpful validating insights. Not working too well, is it?

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          • Psychiatry believes that they are “working with a body” that is not affected by personal experience. Psychiatry denies our humanity when it relegates lived experience to “triggers of an underlying genetic time bomb.”

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  15. At least our government is not licensing Fortune Tellers, Psychics, Channelers, and Faith Healers. So the degree of harm which they can do is limited.

    Got to stop our government from licensing Psychiatrists and Psychotherapists. And got to stop our government from supporting the Recovery and Salvation Industries.

    We need to come up with a slate of actions, and at least some kind of a position statement.

    Everyone, lets talk here, post, send PM’s etc.

    https://openingoftheway.createaforum.com/index.php

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  16. Helpstillneeded,

    Thank you very much for the welcoming to The Twilight Zone. Thirty – two years ago my original complaint to the psych center included i felt lonely. After 32 years of “mental health treatment” , I am now lonely in the Twilight Zone. Good news is now with skills I am learning through psychology not psychiatry, I am going to have a beautiful future. Your welcome and support is greatly appreciated. It makes me feel less lonely.

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  17. Proposed Objectives:

    1. No more government licensing of Psychiatists or Psychotherapists.
    2. No more government support for Recovery or Salvation Programs.
    3. Mandatory Court Supervision anytime a minor child is being taken to any kind of behavioral therapy.
    4. No more Psychiatric holds.
    5. Psychiatric medications outlawed, along with lobotomy, electro shock, insulin shock, or psychiatric committal.
    6. As it is in other industrialized countries, equal share inheritance for offspring, no more disinheritance.
    7. Offspring can sue for punitive damages when there is evidence of the tortious causation of harm.
    8. Universal Basic Income, Universal Medicare, Free College, Robust Public Housing Program.
    9. All children always have access to drop in and overnight group home, like Foster Care, but also like Israeli Kibbutz.
    10. Free pre-school and day care for all children, not compulsory, following French model.

    Interim actions intended to promote the above:

    1. Putting as many Psychiatrists and Psychotherapists as possible out of business.
    2. Suing as many parents as possible for child abuse, and to overturn disinheritance.
    3. Suing psychiatric drug makers and the institutions which dispense these drugs.
    4. Street protests and filling court rooms.
    5. Clear position papers and public education program.
    6. Offer people chance to sign non-disinheritance contract, and sibling equal share contracts.

    Join here so we can plan and then act:
    https://openingoftheway.createaforum.com/index.php

    I suggest that in the later Foucault lectures talking about BioPower and BioPolitics, and in Alain Badiou’s 1982 “The Subject”, we can find excellent theory and terminology.

    Part of the idea is that where as states used to keep people in line via the threat of execution, today people are kept in line by withholding permission to die.

    That is really bleak, but look at people who are fodder for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Recovery, and Salvation, isn’t it obvious that they are just waiting to be given permission to die?

    https://openingoftheway.createaforum.com/news-politics-and-general/proposed-objectives-responding-to-biopower-biopolitics/

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      • The only way to protect children from their parents is via the government. Child protection is one of the most important changes of the later 20th Century. Unfortunately it still seems that with Psychotherapy and these Autism-Asperger’s doctors, those in private practice use a business model which is centered on exonerating the parents. So we have to go the next step, mandatory reporting anytime a child is sent to such therapy.

        Inheritance is already subject to court authority. And whenever someone dies intestate, it has to go thru the Probate Court. I’m just calling for it to be handled as it is in most other industrialized countries.

        People can already sue for civil damages, its just that there are laws which make it hard for a child to sue their parents. So these can be changed.

        UBI, Universal Medicare, Public Housing, Free College, these are just further developments in the move to Social Democracy, they are both the fruits of and necessitated by advancing industrial technology. The US had been on track with Western Europe up through the mid 60’s. Then Richard Nixon unveiled his Southern Strategy, and broke up the New Deal Coalition and steered us in a reactionary and idiotic direction. Most familial child abuse, physical, emotional, medical, and even sexual, is justified by invoking the Self-Reliance Ethic. That ethic has always been nonsensical.

        Everything else on the list is a prohibition on what the government can do, no more licensing of Psychiatrists, Psychotherapists, or support for Recovery or Salvation programs, or Psychiatric Holds.

        Following the precedent set with Jefferson’s Preamble, by Constituted Popular Sovereignty, the government belongs to us, and we can make it do or not do whatever we want.

        I’m not naïve here, I know that the fight will be long hard and dangerous.

        Eugene Delacroix 1830
        https://classconnection.s3.amazonaws.com/571/flashcards/419571/jpg/liberty_leading_the_people1312067692248.jpg

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        • You think the government will stop psychiatry and save kids from abusive parents who use psychiatry to drug them?

          Ever heard of Justine Pellegier? Other parents here could tell of the fights they had getting their kids out of institutions with shocks and drugs.

          Psychiatry IS the state.

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  18. Boston Children’s Hospital protected Justina Pelletier from the illness which it seemed that her parents were inducing in her. Were it not for that protection, Justina could now be dead.

    Most worth reading:

    https://www.amazon.com/Medical-Child-Abuse-Munchausen-Syndrome/dp/1581101368

    Now if her parents cared about her, they would have admitted right off that they don’t know if it is they who are making her sick. There was evidence to say that they were making her sick. But the only way to tell is the “separation test”. And this may well have saved Justina’s life. So the parents were completely wrong from the very start.

    And of course her parents were livid, because they hold right wing views. And that children are property is a central tenant of the right.

    Now yes, BCH did do one thing wrong, they gave Justina psychiatric neuro toxins. They should not have done that, those drugs should not exist. That doctor has resigned. The statements used to justify it have been retracted.

    As far as the gov’t stopping psychiatry, I am only saying that we should force our government to stop allowing the drugs, electro shock, insulin shock, and lobotomy, as well as stopping psychiatric holds. I am also saying that the gov’t must stop issuing licenses for Psychiatrists and Psychotherapists. This can be had, if we force it.

    As far as child protection, this will often necessitate forcefully separating children from their parents by involuntary means. Any time this is done, it is always under the authority of the court.

    We should also make it so that anytime a child is taken to any kind of behavioral therapy, it has to be submitted to the court. Someone has to represent the child. The doctor is a paid servant of the parents, and this is how the middle class family defines itself.

    Old book now, but still very good:

    https://www.amazon.com/Somebody-Elses-Children-Struggle-Americas/dp/0517599414/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=somebody+else%27s+children+hubner&qid=1561242420&s=books&sr=1-1

    We used to call it Munchausen’s Syndrome By Proxy, then Facetious Disorder, now Medical Child Abuse.

    This last term is the best, as it does not assume motive.

    So if medical personnel do something wrong, it is Medical Mal Practice.

    If it is the parents deliberately causing the problems, it is Medical Child Abuse.

    But what about when you have many specialties of doctors who encourage children to be pathologized?

    I mean mental health, psychotherapy, autism-asperger’s-adhd, and lots more.

    Need to have someone who represents the child, and this means that they have to have authority over the parents. The only entity which can have authority over the parents is a court.

    So we have to make it this way. Our government is what set things up the way they are, and it is we who can force our government to correct the problems.

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  19. The Internet is saturated with Right Wing sites. And nothing limits what these sites can say. And of course their central tenant is that the family is always good and that children are property.

    So they have been putting out a completely distorted story about Justina Pelletier for years now.

    BCH and MA child protection on the other hand cannot open their files or disclose Justina’s medical records. They BCH’s director has said that they welcome the lawsuit because then finally they can say what they did and why they did it.

    This mitochondrial illness is extremely rare. Though the Pelletier’s say a relative had it, this still sounds iffy and unconfirmed.

    What is very common Is medical child abuse, and especially when the parents have access to private practice doctors.

    I have not heard any allegation that they were feeding bad stuff to Justina or tampering with tests, but the medical records have not been opened yet.

    What seems probable was just that Justina was entering puberty, so she would no longer be the figure skating princess that her stage mom wanted her to be. So they wanted to somehow suppress her development. Mitochondrial illness interferes with how the body turns food into energy.

    A specialists at Tufts made the diagnosis. But at BCH they said that the diagnosis was completely invalid. For starters, you cannot diagnose mitochondrial illness without a muscle biopsy. This specialist says that he does not need that. This was one of the first thing which set off doctors at BCH.

    So from that point on, everything BCH did was approved by, ordered by, Judge Jamie Johnston. And this judge bent over backwards to make sure he was making the correct decisions. He appointed a special master, someone who did not report to BCH or to Department of Children and Families, DCF.

    The Pelletier’s made this worse by threatening DCF officers and accusing MA of “abduction”. Their concern for their daughter seemed most secondary compared to their insistence on defending her status as property.

    MA was displeased because the Pelletiers lived in Connecticut, and Connecticut DCF had and open file on them. But they had not done enough. Performing parentectomies costs money. Judge Johnston tried to get Justina transferred to a convalescent home in Connecticut. But Lou Pelletier threatened to sue any convalescent home which accepted her. Does he really have any concern for his daughter?

    And the daughter is not going to challenge her parents, there is the elite suburban high school, and then college, and then money for cars and washers and driers, and for babies, and then inheritance.

    So finally the court finally did terminate all parental rights of the Pelletiers, and transfer Justina to MA Foster Care.

    And normally for the good of the child, that kind of a decision is irreversible.

    But I guess someone finally talked some sense into them and I know they got a great deal of counseling, and they finally chilled out, and they did get the decision reversed. But as far as I can see, Justina getting notably worse after each parental visit, and the parents only able to engage in threats and bullying, MA and BCH did do what was right, and it may have saved Justina’s life.

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  20. The state depends on Capitalism and the middle-class family in order to keep people in line. So it also depends on Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Recovery, and Salvation Religion,.

    Hardly and original insight, as Fredrick Engels was saying similar things over 100 years ago.

    Child protection is something very different and completely radical. Right now Pediatricians have gotten ahead, forming their own Child Protection subspecialty. RI and MA are already leaders, as is Dr. Alice Newton.

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    • As for peoples comments on disability rights. It’s just the typical ignorance and self importance. Disability is not “medical model” of disability. People do not understand the social model of disability and the medical industry is right into making sure that they don’t.

      Psychosocial disability could be broadly defined as any combination of social and emotional circumstance that an individual finds debilitating, temporarily or long term.

      CRPD General Comment Number One explicitly makes it clear that medical gatekeeping, substituted decision making, locking support or access to “best interests” models and all force is out. The UN has repeatedly told Australia and other states that they have to *stop* forcing people to be “diagnosed” to get access to support particularly for psychosocial disability.

      Steve and all those others should sit down and start reading UN documentation and stop mouthing off in ignorance and prejudice from their own entrenched medical view of disability.

      There are advances happening, in institutions that actually give a crap, increasingly people can get adjustments based on Statutory Declarations in recognition that we *do not* need another person to tell us when our work was disrupted. We only need to provide assurance we can be held to to make sure we are telling the truth. CRPD General Comment No 1 explicitly states (why did it even need to?) that no person can know the mind of another. There is no reason why the opinion of a registered health practitioner should be seen as any more trustworthy than the opinion of a person themselves. A statutory declaration means that the person is swearing by their own circumstances and how they have affected them. The person themselves will be liable if they made it up to extort the system. The involvement of a physician is completely ridiculous. How could they possibly know another’s mind?

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  21. Love this article. Breath of fresh air.
    But there are a few socio-political background issues worth pointing out.

    Individuals seeking ‘miracle cures’ and documentation for permanent disability are not operating in a vacuum.
    We live in a world where ‘mental health’ ideology is blasted through every medium – from formal education to the media to everyday conversation. It is a saturation of ideology that rivals that criticised about the propaganda of Chinese officials, or the fictional universes of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” or “Brave New World”.

    From the appendix of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”:
    “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least insofar as thought is dependent on words.”

    Many people have no longer any ability to conceptualise life outside the ideology of “mental health” – the language of “Psychspeak” has been invading the population along very similar lines, making it literally impossible for many to have thoughts diverging from the principles of “mental health”.

    This has made its way in to law, policy, practice and culture in such a way that nobody is able to get access to any ongoing support of any kind *without proving permanent disability*. It has made its way into workplace law, the court system, and virtually every mind. To the point where even the owner of this blog does not seem to be able to describe life without referring to and furthering the broader ideology of “mental health”.

    How many people seeking documentation for permanent disability had no other choice? Were faced with having to “prove” permanent disability or get no space to heal, and no access to social supports? (In Australia, funding for almost all social support was ripped from the community – the only way to access it is to get assessed as permanently disabled under a medical model and get access to the National Disability Insurance Scheme.)

    I have had many arguments with the National Information Service of the Australian Human Rights Commission, in trying to point out that by being forced into a medicalised model and not allowed to attend work unless I agree to do a “risk assessment” with a psychiatrist is discriminatory. They don’t think it is. Psychiatry has gained ownership of anyone attempting to ask not to be treated differently and less favourably on the basis of a *perceived* “mental impairment”. Speaking with trained information officers on discrimination law which is supposed to *prevent* different and less favourable treatment on the basis of a perceived (or actual) impairment in thinking or emotion and trying to point out it has nothing to do with the medical profession – since nobody knows the mind or capabilities of another, least of all a *physician* is like negotiating a minefield of doublethink. They can not see clearly.

    The old adage of “don’t judge what we can do by what you think we can’t” which was the slogan for discrimination reform – reform to *provide equal opportunity* – the opportunity to ask for a few minor, reasonable adjustments and then prove what you can do – has been replaced by an absurd notion that a physician is capable of determining another’s capabilities. This is nonsense even physically – how could a physician have predicted what Stephen Hawking was able to achieve? Or the blind or one legged persons who climbed everest? How could even another physicist or mountain climber have predicted these things? They could not – non-discrimination is supposed to overcome prejudice.

    But thanks to the huge political and economic profits afforded by the medical industry moving from being a profession of tradespeople offering a particular approach to solving various problems, that persons can take or leave, to being seen as priests of all knowledge – seeking influence, successfully establishing themselves as “authorities”, they have entrenched themselves in a social position that is advancing prejudice – with them as the priests at the helm of this new religion.

    Without taking in the wider social context, it is easy to blame individuals seeking these things in terms of support. That is not fair. The exploitation lies with the guilds that advanced these ideologies and eroded the ability to think outside of them – and with the wider community that has colluded with this and allowed it to get to this point. Even some of those who speak out in opposition are often not aware of human rights or, when questioned, do not believe in equality – it is alarming how many people when questioned will say that they believe some people simply don’t deserve to be “equal”.

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