So Long, Pill Mill: A Letter to My Former Patients and Their Families

I am trying to be sympathetic but i just learned that my friends daughter just died. Although technically she died from a head injury–i suspect that undiagnosed/untreated drug induced delirium, akasthisia, or tardive psychosis was at the root of the unbearable agitation she was experiencing that led to her accident. My daughter’s friend was horribly overmedicated for years and ended up being discovered floating face down in a river. My daughter–who never got a shot at a Soteria experience during her first ‘psychosis’ declined cognitively, physically, and emotionally in direct proportion to every year of her exposure to toxic forced psychiatry.

What I am getting at is this: you can open a private practice for the fortunate priveleged few who can afford your services who were never needle-raped, restrained, handcuffed, or institutionalized–those who have no problem establishing trust and who find comfort in the little fountain and the zen music in your lobby but as long as you are a board certified psychiatrist or prescriber and you do not organize politically to take away the power of psychiatrists to abuse vulnerable people with impunity–if you are not actively serving as as a pro bono expert witness for at least one innocent person facing involuntary commitment per week–a service for which there is a huge demand–and you are not educating NAMI parents–the majority of whom have no problem if their adult children spend all day in bed drooling–as long as they dont have to engage in difficult dialogues with their children about past traumas that would tarnish their self image of perfect parent– then you are a part of the problem and your little private practice is swatting at a fly while there is an stampede of innocent victims running towards a cliff

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It’s so nice, Maria, that some of you psychiatric nurses, who are starting to garner insight into the staggering amount of psychiatric malpractice, are starting to speak out, and trying to set up alternatives. Thank you.

I was fortunate to have some mainstream medical nurses finally garner insight into my PCP’s, and her systemic malpractice covering up, misinformed psychiatric “professionals” misdiagnoses … which were finally noticed by her decent nurses in 2005, seen for what they were.

Thus, those decent nurses did hand over my families’ medical records shortly thereafter. And one decent nurse even followed my family to two subsequent PCP’s, to try to protect my children and I.

Medical records, which included the medical evidence of the sexual abuse of my four year old child, not to mention a “bad fix” on a broken bone of mine, at which that PCP’s incompetent husband had been the “attending physician.”

In my subsequent medical research, I was shocked to learn all about, what an ethical pastor of a different religion, confessed to be “the dirty little secret of the two original educated professions.”

It’s truly disgusting that both the psychiatric and psychological industries are largely in the business of covering up child abuse for the paternalistic religions, and easily recognized iatrogenesis for the incompetent doctors.

So absolutely, real change is needed. Thanks, and God bless you in your efforts, of trying to bring about real life change. Especially since I have older nurse friends, who’ve freely confessed they knew nothing about the systemic psychological and psychiatric industries’ systemic scientific fraud based crimes.

And I must agree with Madmom, that we need all decent “mental health” workers, to call for an end to the forced psychiatric treatment of all people.

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I think the author’s desire is noble, but, sadly no psychiatric survivor can be sure. The trauma for many can be so awful, that no one still in the psych industry and even traditional medicine can no longer be trusted. If the author of this article can completely leave the psych industry and find other ways to use her God-given talents and repent of her “sins” then we will really believe she left the “pill mill” as she calls it behind. Thank you.

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Hi Maria,
Thanks for writing this.

I recovered from “Non Existent Schizophrenia” in 1984 as a result of not taking my medication (very carefully).

I stopped taking my Depot Injection medication on my 3rd attempt and switched to oral medication. The depot injection (which I had been taking since 1980) had been causing extrapyramidal disability.

I cut the oral medication down to a tiny dose over a period of 6 years; and the tiny dose eventually went of it’s own accord.

I used this type of Approach to deal with my Neuroleptic Withdrawal “High Anxiety”.

https://youtu.be/YWvIZ9Dcyb8

(Dr David R Hawkins)

It Works!

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What is a six year old doing in your office? To talk to her?
A six year old should never be in an office, she should be going for walks, playing, whatever she likes to do, not what the adult thinks she needs. And “observing” a child while she is playing and spinning stories about that observation is sheer privilege. To completely immerse yourself while with the child until you forget you are the “observationist” is what is healing.
Just like yourself, I’m sure you did not like to be “observed” by other shrinks, as to how you run your business. Because they would deem it abnormal.
Talking to kids about their traumas is not healing. It is easy and monetarily sustainable to bring the child to a building.

If the DSM is not the bible, what is it then? How do you use it?

What are medications and where do you use them, how do they work? If psychiatrists use drugs, they must know the mechanisms of drugs, what part of the brain the issue is, and if that drug “addresses” the found issue.

Sorry but you cannot reform psychiatry.
Bottom line is, empathy does not mean that the practice of psychiatry is fixed.

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The author talks of leaving a “pill mill”, but still seems to buy into the notion that most of her patients need pills. We need a new paradigm for psychiatry.

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My value in this article was to get a little peek into how the “healthcare system” of today operates.

Back when I was getting therapy, it was a one-hour session every week. Insurance paid for it. Pills were totally out of the picture, as this was a psychologist, not a psychiatrist. And I got to know the person I was working with, and she got to know me.

What cannot be addressed here, of course, is why the system is so broken. After learning what I have learned (so far) about life, I can say without hesitation that someone wanted to break this system. There are people out there who DO NOT want people to heal. And they have been able to exert sufficient political and financial pressure on the system to break it. I hear that emergency doctors still know how to patch up wounds. But iatrogenic accidents are the 3rd largest cause of death in the United States, by some estimates. And that makes zero sense, unless you factor in this avid (but hidden) desire to break the system on the part of someone who is having a fair amount of success at it.

I just think there are better ways to die. Why go out of this world convinced that you have been betrayed by your doctors? What kind of attitude towards life will that foster? Just because life is hard doesn’t mean that we all have to suffer through it.

This story, to me, is one of a partial escape from the system. Now we need to take it the rest of the way.

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And yet, Maria, you are still utilizing DSM labels and prescribing neurotoxins, aka psychotropics, in your Paperflower Psychiatry practice. ☹️

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Sometimes it’s hard to not lose hope. The American health system is so broken. The MBAs seem to have won. The patient is too often no longer the focus. It’s now the bottom line. I suspect a fair number of practitioners are caught in the middle. Quite likely too much focus on the patient means the loss of a job.

I sent this article to my sister who is an emergency room nurse in southern California. She said she nearly cried when she read it. But as she said, “What can you do?” It was a rhetorical question.

Then she told me that many of the nurses she knows are going back to school to become psychiatric nurse practitioners. What they tell her is chilling: ” I am going to work in [so and so’s] office. A patient will come in and I’ll ask, ‘How are you doing? How’s the medication working?’ Then I’ll write them a script and say, ‘Okay, I’ll see you in 2 months.’ In 5 minutes they’ll be out of my office. I’ll make so much money! I’ll never really have to see patients, just write scripts!”

One can only hope that sooner rather than later the bottom falls out of the whole racket. I think it’s criminal. We must continue to speak up and speak out. If enough of us do so, at some point our collective voices will be heard.

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I keep coming back to this article because I want to comment. It scares me to read the “services” you offer and then you say oh I’m not one to push drugs. I had gone to a chipper young psychiatrist thinking “he’s so nice he knows what he’s doing but he didn’t”. That chipper young psychiatrist almost killed me with the polypharmacy he prescribed dismissing obvious iagtrogenic harm. Your website lists psychiatric “diagnoses” which has no basis but yet you “treat” people for them?

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Maria: Gosh, as I read your piece, I found myself almost melting with heartbreak–for you, for your patients, for the families and friends of so many people who are being consciously and callously destroyed by a system that simply cannot be saved (yet is likely to outlive many if not most of us, whether we like it or not). I found your own heart quite lovely and caring and sad. And I applaud your exit from the mass production line to your own organic farm, so to speak. I wish more psychiatric professionals had a soul like yours. I just want you to know I hear you and I see you and I feel for you, even though you remain in the psychiatric profession. I’m afraid, however, that you have come to a place (Mad in America) where there is, in effect, zero sympathy for psychiatry–hence, for you. It’s inevitable that most of your readers here would indict you for the sins of your profession. No matter that you entered the field with good intentions. No matter that your own lived experience does not preclude medication. No matter that your own training likely did not include a single word about the fearsome horrors of psychiatric medications, that your professional societies and associations systematically lie as much to you as they do to us. No matter that attaining your degrees and licenses and hard-earned wisdom cost you significant sums of money, that changing careers isn’t easy or even possible. You are guilty by your mere being now, I’m sorry to say. At least on this website. Nevertheless, I want to place two hands over my heart and bow to your courage and willingness to resist the system, however you can, however imperfectly, from the inside. I want you to know that, if there must be psychiatric mental health professionals, I would pray that they were all just like you. I don’t judge you, or condemn you, or imagine I can tell you what you ought to do. The mere fact that you are posting this on Mad in America gives me hope. The mere fact that you are as interested in getting people off meds as getting them on gives me hope. May you keep learning and growing and caring and do your best to save a few souls here and there, however you can. I absolve thee by the power invested in me as a father who lost his own daughter to suicide largely because of the grotesque ignorance and insensitivity of a psychiatric nurse practitioner, who had the very same letters after her name. Go in peace.

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One can not justify what they do to others by doing the same thing to oneself; if it creates harm, whether intentional or not. There has not been a psychiatric drug invented that does not cause harm. Why? Because, they are meant to make changes in the brain; the one organ we know least about and or meant to know least about…And, when you realize that this is because the brain is the organ that basically houses who each of us individually is; you will know that each one of us is too close to our brains to ever understand them. Aah, the mystery…Perhaps, some things are better left a mystery and that saves lives. Thank you.

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Ms Ingalla says she’s taking lexapro. Reports variously associate or conclude lexapro use is associated with dementia, tardive syndromes, traumatic brain injuries, weight gain, sexual dysfunction and on it goes.

However, as one Mad in America essayist misconstrued, the incovenient truth is that some people claim high voltage impacts on the brain (for example) do feel just right. The issue is far more complicated than an essay could ever hope to impress, or confuse readers with.

Ms Ingalla is motivated and intelligent and is running what appears to be a successful business.

I see no indication or concern about poverty anywhere. Poverty greatly upsets anyones mental health. Much worse is the orchestrated denial that it exists along with its deliberate creation. Instead we hear a constant refrain about social justice when people are homeless and can’t pay the rent much less their mortgages.

A thoughtful or caring mental health worker presumably understands these dynamics in the economy and it would be in the domain of their care. Realize (for example) that hedge fund managers and venture capitalists or defense contractors in Arizona aren’t apart from the poverty and desperation in the country but are direct causes of so-called mental health casualties.

Instead Ms Ingalla has appointed her web page with diagnosis, care for sexual preferences, immigrants and refugees. Very popular and nothing objectionable. We’re all against racism, sexism, violence, and for human rights. We see the lies of omission too.

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Maria,

Very interesting on many levels, thank you.

I want to say that I generally think it’s not an ideal form to make a grandiose ‘You’ or ‘population’ of citizens as patients-clients, especially given the fluctuation and diversity. I understand it’s part of professional identity, and I feel your goodwill and struggle. The message certainly seems great to me in many ways, the attention on these issues being important.

Part of the difficulty is not just in the ‘politics of professionalism’, but professionalism, the service-business itself, and ‘service-provider’. I admit I’m still trying to reckon with this. In a sense, there needs to be more politics FOR or ABOUT professionalism.

I personally reject the word ‘patient’ except in rare circumstances or usually for the convenience of providers/staff in a service-business, insurance, etc. I find many people understand why, like my psychologist who has moved from the habit of ‘patient’ to ‘client’ or the county mental health services director who moved from ‘consumer’ to ‘client’, each based off my comments. Then there’s the insurance customer service, receptionist, or billing manager who asks ‘what is the patient’s name’ (I’m pretty sure I already said ‘I’ wanted ‘my’ medical records, so it is my name, not ‘the’; or ‘are you the patient’: I say, ‘yes, I am the client’, haha, but underneath I know that the client-ification and systems-language should really be transcended whenever possible, too. Not always, but whenever possible. In this way, one may relinquish some ‘power’, but another may gain it. This is what you have been doing in many ways, and I like that.

I spoke with a Bradford agent yesterday. We didn’t know if a person I was calling about had entered their ‘system’, and she almost said ‘what is the patient’s name?’, but she hesitated. I said, ‘oh my friend? The person’s name is…..’. Apparently it didn’t even matter unless I gave her my friend’s birthdate anyways.

I have found both positives and negatives in Dr. Humphrey’s Osmond’s book on Models of Madness, Models of Medicine about the physician’s or doctor’s Aesculapian authority and designation of the sick-role (and patient-role). Ivan Illich in Medical Nemesis has important supplementary and counter arguments to Osmond’s preferences and purposes (which have spread far beyond the classic physician). All terribly complicated.

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