Survivor-researcher Vanessa Furtado writes a eulogy for the man who labeled her as schizophrenic when she was a child, sentencing her to a life of forced (mis)treatments, compounded trauma, and marginalization. The doctor passed away as a well-respected, decorated member of the medical and scientific community. She, on the other hand, keeps on fighting to recover from the wounds inflicted on her. Even today as a Ph.D. candidate trained in psychology, that old label keeps on casting doubts on her sanity and abilities in the eye of fellow scholars and the society at large, delegitimizing her critical work as that of a madwoman holding a grudge against psychiatry. Read in Portuguese or an English translation.
© 2024 Mad in America Foundation
This is a good example of what psychiatrists do, beyond the drugs, especially when it comes to diagnoses like schizophrenia and bipolar. It’s mainly psychological. The drugs (which they know nothing about, why would they?), are a tool just meant to reduce your capacity to think for yourself. They lie, the only function they have is to keep you on the drugs. They serve another master.
There is no such thing as mis(treatment) when it comes to psychiatry. As Ms Furtado said, it’s torture.
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” The drugs (which they know nothing about, why would they?)” although many psychologists do lie to their clients, and their families, claiming the psychiatrists “know everything about the meds.”
But what’s truly sad is both psychiatrists and psychologists often claim ignorance of the reality that the ADHD drugs and antidepressants can create the “bipolar” symptoms.
https://www.alternet.org/2010/04/are_prozac_and_other_psychiatric_drugs_causing_the_astonishing_rise_of_mental_illness_in_america/
As well as the fact all medical doctors, including psychiatrists, were taught in med school, that both the antidepressants and antipsychotics can create the positive symptoms of “schizophrenia,” via anticholinergic toxidrome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxidrome
As well as, the negative symptoms of “schizophrenia,” via neuroleptic induced deficit syndrome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroleptic-induced_deficit_syndrome
Most doctors, deny these systemic crimes, but not all doctors deny them. Some doctors do have ethics, and common decency. Like the former head of family medicine at one of the Cleveland Clinics, who has a lot more credibility, than my formers doctors, whose life’s goal was attempting to murder me, to cover up their “bad fix” on my broken bone, the medical evidence of the abuse of my child, and all their psychological defamation of my character.
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The ongoing stigma is real and very intentional, when given a label that gives the go ahead to stigmatise, abuse and control the subject, which would not be possible without said label. Limitations are then put on their life. When my old psychiatrist dies, I will pop open a bottle of champagne, reserved for only the best occasion’s as I don’t even drink the stuff.
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