I grew up in a suburb of Boston. My grandmother on my mother’s side of the family was a psychiatrist. I remember asking her when I was young, perhaps 10 or so, how you can tell if someone is mentally ill or not since there are no biological tests for mental illness (she had told me prior to that that there are no tests). Her response was that if someone looked at the ground when asked a question and appeared shy, then it meant they were mentally ill. Thinking back on this, it is disappointing that my grandmother was probably a charlatan, like her colleagues in psychiatry.
Her son, my uncle, was diagnosed as schizophrenic, as was her husband, my grandfather. Besides those two cases, nobody else on my mother’s side of the family had any mental illness diagnosis. My psychiatrist grandmother had divorced my grandfather sometime before I was born in 1983. He was a mortician by trade. He died in 2004, though my family was not told about his death, as my mother’s relationship with her brother (my uncle with the schizophrenia diagnosis) had been ruined due to an argument over the estate of my psychiatrist grandmother, who died from lung cancer due to smoking in 1999. She always declared that there was no evidence smoking caused lung cancer, as she sat smoking away on her Camel Unfiltered. Before she died, she appointed my mother as sole executrix over her estate because my grandmother felt that her son with a diagnosis of schizophrenia could not be trusted as an equal in the management of the estate.
Less than a year after my psychiatrist grandmother died, I was talking to someone in school whom I had known a little through the local Unitarian Universalist church I had attended growing up. He was an upperclassman, a junior, when I was a sophomore. I had looked up to him slightly as I was a musician, a guitarist, and so was he. I remember talking to him about psychedelic drugs, saying I was interested in trying them, and that I had read a Carlos Castaneda book recently that got me interested. He told me that I should try sleep deprivation because it was like psychedelic drugs.
Being naive, and not recognizing that I was being taken for a fool by a bully at worst, or had just been given horrible advice at best, I tried it, and stayed up for over a week. When I started acting strange around my parents, they thought that I had bipolar disorder and brought me to the hospital. I was given some Ativan and sent on my way. I woke up 20 hours later and my parents ushered me away to a mental health evaluation, where I was recommended for treatment. I was then sent to Franciscan Children’s Hospital in Boston. I got a feel for what psychiatry really is there, and my life was upended in many ways that I have still never recovered from.
When I got to Franciscan Children’s Hospital, at age 16, I told them I was suffering from significant sleep deprivation. However, they ordered me to stay up for days longer for an EEG that required the patient to be sleep-deprived. Since I got there on a Friday night, I had to wait all weekend. Every time I was about to fall asleep, a nurse would wake me up. I was distraught. It felt like torture. On top of that, the doctor, Dr. Mark Stromberg, did not diagnose me with anything, yet prescribed me Lithium and Risperidone. (Why, I have no idea.) I tried to escape from the hospital by opening part of a hung ceiling, only to have rat poison fall into my eyes. They fortunately had an eyewash handy (like the kind that are in high school science classrooms).
Once outside the hospital, I quickly realized that I could not function on the medications. I couldn’t even get through three pages of a book without falling asleep. Needless to say, I started immediately failing in school due to these medications. I decided after a few weeks that I had to get off the medication, and rapidly withdrew without knowing what I was doing, and experienced an iatrogenic psychosis, the first of many. The second hospitalization, a mere month after the first, was at Pembroke Hospital, an Arbor Hospital on the South Shore of Massachusetts.
When I arrived at Pembroke Hospital, I was asked by the admitting psychiatrist why I was on all these strong medications, which he said were very odd to be taking without a diagnosis. He asked if I had used marijuana recently, which I replied yes to, and his response I can’t get out of my mind even to this day. He said, “It’s unfortunate that you got assigned Dr. Shrand because he really is against marijuana and drug use, and feels strongly about it, but if it was up to me, I would take you off these drugs because people don’t do well on them.”
Sure enough, he was right: as soon as I saw Dr. Shrand, he asked me if I had smoked marijuana. I said yes. I asked him what my diagnosis was and he replied that it would depend on the results of the drug screening test. After that result came back positive for marijuana, he diagnosed me with bipolar disorder, and completely ruined my life. I believe that what happened to me was an example of the War on Drugs being enforced by gatekeepers in psychiatry — what amounts to political abuse of psychiatry. From then on, my parents made me take all the prescribed medications and I went from being a student in all honors classes to failing every last class and repeating a year of high school.
The first outpatient psychiatrist I had was at Harvard Vanguard in Wellesley, Massachusetts: Dr. Miriam Rosenberg. This so-called expert tried to convince me I was gay (I’m straight), and told me I had neurasthenia, a diagnosis from 1869 that is no longer even diagnosed as of 2012. Eventually I left this quack, and ended up at another Harvard Vanguard facility in Braintree, Massachusetts, with Dr. Daniel Teplin. He told me that if I didn’t take the medication, I might have a heart attack, which pretty much shows me that he was also a charlatan.
After failing most of high school, in the year I repeated, he allowed me to take a half dose of the Lithium and to stop taking the Risperidone altogether, which allowed me to regain some functioning and graduate, at least. I then went to community college and ended up transferring to University of Massachusetts Amherst in fall of 2005, where I safely withdrew from the medication and was able to acquire a Bachelor’s degree by winter 2008. I had no episodes of mental illness in college and took a lot of drugs: LSD, mushrooms, marijuana morning noon and night, as well as alcohol, and never had a single problem. Your mind is yours.
While attending university, I took a class called Victorian Monstrosity: 19th Century English Horror Novels. In this class, the professor showed us a screening of Ofra Bikel’s PBS Frontline documentary titled The Search For Satan which documented medical malpractice in psychiatry in the 1980s and early 1990s, specifically focusing on Dissociative Identity Disorder (which was then called Multiple Personality Disorder). This splendid documentary, though banned by the FCC to save face for interrelated government institutions, explains psychiatry’s biggest folly since the lobotomy: the notion that “Satanic Ritual Abuse” and satanic cults are causing an epidemic of mental illness across America.
As the class was taught, the specious origins of the disorder were sensational literature and the media — moral panics, in other words, from the 1970s and early 1980s. For one, Sybil, the supposed first MPD patient from the 70s, admitted years later that she was making it up (this can be verified with online news articles from NPR, etc.). Another example was Lawrence Pazder’s 1980 sensational tell-all Michelle Remembers, which has been discredited.
The point of the class was to explore the archetype in modern horror of the medically questionable Insane Asylum, and the theme of science-gone-awry, which appears in Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, as well as Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and many others (the horror film The Creeping Flesh from the early 1970s also comes to mind). I was surprised and vindicated to realize that I was right all along, that psychiatrists truly were quacks pretending to be accomplishing something scientific when in actuality they were only producing works of abomination.
The professor’s personal belief is that psychiatry is an example of scapegoating, caused by millenarianism and other cultural constructs. The fact is that Dissociative Identity Disorder, to this day, is still diagnosed despite being debunked. We learned in the class, also, that several months after the release of the PBS Frontline documentary, there was an X-Files episode that featured a serial killer with bipolar disorder. The episode is called “Oubliette” and yes, this caused another moral panic that continues today. It is a reason why psychiatrists claimed in the year 2000 that “bipolar is a rare disorder affecting 1 in 1000 people” and yet today they claim that it is a common disorder, affecting 1 in 100 people. The bipolar scare just keeps snowballing. This college professor was very influential on me and has advised me to avoid psychologists, psychiatrists, and any people involved in those fields. I have taken his advice. Why trust any medical diagnosis invented by eugenicists in the 1800s?
I have been hospitalized many times since my initial mishap, and believe that this is due to iatrogenic effects. In 2012 I had a bout of chronic insomnia and had to quit my job. My parents, who I was living with at the time, thought I was mentally ill and got an antipsychotic drug from my primary care physician (who is no longer my doctor) without my participation. It was Abilify. I was told by my parents that if I didn’t take it, they would not allow me to live in their house and I would be homeless. I took it and had a bad reaction. I couldn’t speak. It was almost as if I was having a stroke. But I was told I had to take it and took it for a month.
Unfortunately, the medication eventually caused me to hallucinate, seeing things and hearing things that are not there, which has lasted to today. My diagnosis was changed from bipolar to schizophrenia after this, and more recently to schizoaffective. (The word “schizophrenia,” incidentally, was coined by a eugenicist.)
The worst thing about psychiatry, besides it being mainstream eugenics (claims of a genetic cause without a single test to confirm as much), is how it convinces your family to do things that they think are correct, which ultimately gets them to participate in harming you on behalf of the psychiatrist’s demented mad science. An actual medical doctor is not even required when diagnosing mental illness. It can be done by a psychologist with no medical training. The “medications” can be dispensed by a psychiatric nurse practitioner. This process is another indicator of the dubiousness of psychiatric treatment and further evidence that it is mere skulduggery.
Psychiatry has harmed me severely, and ruined my family to a large degree. I fully advocate Anti-psychiatry now, and am appalled at the sordid history of psychiatry that has included eugenics, lobotomy, and satanic panic. Luckily, I am no longer taking psychiatric medication and have recently gotten through to my family, having shown them the PBS Frontline documentary discussed above. I hope to see the end of psychiatry in my lifetime.
(After heart disease and cancer, death from psychiatric medication is the third or fourth leading cause of death at any given time. A recent Swedish study showed that one third of Lithium patients develop kidney failure.)
You poor man. I am appalled at the way you were treated.
I guess the eugenics thing rumbles on all over the world. Christianity used to do paintings of saints with caucasian features and aquiline noses to show what they scandalously considered to be the ideal mimics of Christ. So I tend not to think medicine was the only place to get mixed up in eugenics. People are still Christain today. Many love being so. So the damning history of an ideology need not mean everyone has to cease wanting what it “should have been” and “should be”. But I understand that if a person loathes an ideology because it has been loathesome to them then they will not want it. I have no great desire to see psychiatry preserved or abolished. I have moved on from finding it relevant. But what I do maintain is that my illness of schizophrenia is very real to me. And I do not think people here with experience of DID will like the idea that they are possibly too inept to realise there is no illness or suffering of that nature being experienced by them at all. People know what their illness is.
The ill have a right to be ill.
Any illness may be called by other names in other languages. Does that really matter? It changes nothing about the symptoms to change the name “measles” to “spotty rash”.
I will still be schizophrenic tomorrow and tomorrows tomorrow and tomorrows tomorrows tomorrow, no matter what someone tells me to call it.
But I fully appreciate there has been gross medical negligence in your case, and in the case if millions.
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People have right to psychological identity. Identity is not medical empiricism. Medical empiricism of today is based on marxists hatered of the truth. Medical empiricism must correspond to the overarching idea of the psyche in order to be able to communicate something meaningful about identity at all. Psychiatry have nothing to say about psyche. Nada.
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Hi, thanks for reading. I just want to say in regard to DID, if you look at the original MPD patient Shirley Mason (Sybil) who was featured in the 1970’s Sally Field movie about her, she actually admitted that the personalities were fake. Here’s a link to a good article about that in case you missed it: https://www.wbur.org/npr/141514464/real-sybil-admits-multiple-personalities-were-fake
I think people gravitate towards sensationalism. It definitely sells newspapers and books. That being said, the MPD diagnosis was promoted by a writer in the 70’s, Flora Rheta Schreiber, who knew that Mason’s story was most likely untrue, which was revealed in letters she wrote. To me, it’s upsetting that psychiatry went straight from outlawing lobotomy in 1973 to promoting another pseudoscience in an effort that has lasted to the current present.
As far as Schizophrenia, the diagosis and the word itself was invented by Eugen Bleuler in 1908. He openly advocated for the forced sterilization of patients he deemed unfit, and appears to be a eugenicist.
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Sybil was not by any means the original case of “MPD.” The phenomenon has been reported since ancient times:
“The amazing history of dissociative identity (DID), some say, dates back to Paleolithic cave paintings in the images of shamans. Others suggest that the history of dissociative identity disorder dates back to reports of demonic possession that are now thought to be incidences of dissociative identity disorder. Either way, it’s clear that dissociative identity disorder has a long history and is not a new concept (while the terminology now used may be new).”
https://www.healthyplace.com/abuse/dissociative-identity-disorder/the-amazing-history-of-dissociative-identity-disorder-did
Of course, like any so-called “psychiatric disorder,” there is no objective way to determine if someone “has DID” or “is faking” or to do anything but express opinions. It is a phenomenon that appears to occur rarely, it has been sensationalized and abused as a concept, and I don’t trust psychiatry’s ability to define or evaluate the phenomenon or any other phenomenon in any meaningful way.
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One of the leading researchers of dissociation was Dr. Bennett Braun, who lost his license to practice medicine in the midwest during the late 1990’s for malpractice suits related to MPD. He has now resurfaced in Montana and is facing further suits there:
https://mtstandard.com/news/local/butte-psychiatrist-with-troubled-past-faces-new-suit-alleging-negligence/article_e5ea7374-cf9f-5176-be37-1ad72d8be5bc.html
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According to the book “The Madness of Adam and Eve” by David Horrobin, the amazing emergence of schizophrenia coincided with the birth of civilization. He does go in to depth about paeleolithic cave art which he seems to think is created by rather schizophrenic tendencies, prerequisites to think, and more importantly feel, outside the box, the neanderthally lumpen brain box. Maybe the schizophrenics sketched the portraits of their DID pals. The idea that a name for schizophrenia CAUSES the schizophrenia, or CAUSES the misinformation of schizophrenia seems to be giving too much credence to “words”.
Words are just words. Yes, bullies may use the words they like to use to refer to the latest batch of “them”. But the energy of bullying does not come from the words. Words are like water. Even simple water can be used to torture someone but we do not ban bits of water. To think the issue is in the water is to let the thing that causes bullying get away with destroying someting that in and of itself harms nothing.
The word “woman” interestingly does not mean a lesser form of the word “man”. The word “woman” has as its root nothing to do with the word “man”. It is a medieval word that means something quite different. But everyone who has an eye on real estate could say that since the word “woman” was only invented in the fourteenth century then it means there is no such thing as women before then. Which means women do not exist. Which means they cannot claim their inheritance. Their “freedom of choice”.
Whether you are “the women” or “the poor” or “the deviant” or “the rebellious” or “the peace lover” or “the insane” or “the eccentric” or “the stupid”, your word for who you like to know yourself as is not “consensus opinion” since it is your own word. That already marks you out as a “fraud” against “consensus opinion”. Who you are, who you wish to be regarded as, gets deemed “fraudulent” to rob you of any autonomy. Experts may be drawn in to deduce that “finding”, experts or activists, since sometimes these are one and the same pushy thing.
Cultural appropriation is often done by arguing over “words”. If you do not have the “words” to describe your acre of land or your acres of personal experience then your land and your personal experiences do not exist. This game was played by the eugenicists that nobody likes but it can be unfortunately and inadvertantly played by supposed “world healers” on the very people who just like their own words for things they feel they know as their truth.
Truly I say…
I am schizophrenic.
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Missing my point. I am not arguing that charlatans don’t use DSM “diagnoses” or generally accepted social concepts to fleece people – they most definitely do, in fact, that’s psychiatry’s stock in trade! I’m saying that phenomena do exist absent the approval or disapproval of a bunch of corrupt old mostly white farts, and the ridiculous behavior of many “modern” “mental health” personnel doesn’t preclude the existence of phenomena they have made such powerful efforts to misunderstand and abuse.
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Good article!
We must eradicate all facets of the Mental Health System.
https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/04/observation-room/#comment-195987
https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/04/observation-room/#comment-196026
Joshua
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Agree with Joshua, above me.
Nice to read some anti-psychiatry. The swedish site is just getting more, and more alternative psychiatry.
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Alternative Psychiatry is just apologetics and a new generation of psychiatrists trying to build careers.
Thanks David,
Joshua
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I’m not so certain that you are correct about the fraud of the “satanic panic” stuff. Since I know of people who’ve worked to help save child abuse victims, some of whom dealt with SRA. And I am aware of SRA victims’ stories.
https://www.coasttocoastam.com/guest/dizdar-russ-61131/
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=SRA victims stories&t=osx&ia=web
And especially since we are now living in a “pedophile empire,” where child sex trafficking and pedophilia are running amok.
https://www.amazon.com/Pedophilia-Empire-Chapter-Introduction-Disorder-ebook/dp/B0773QHGPT
Where over 80% of those defamed with the “mental health” stigmatizations are child abuse survivors. And covering up child abuse has long been the business of the psychological profession.
https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/04/heal-for-life/
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2019/01/23/18820633.php?fbclid=IwAR2-cgZPcEvbz7yFqMuUwneIuaqGleGiOzackY4N2sPeVXolwmEga5iKxdo
Many thanks (sarcasm) to the systemic child abuse and rape covering up criminals of the “mental health professions,” whose “bible” is a systemic child abuse covering up theology.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-child-does-not-have-bipolar-disorder/201402/dsm-5-and-child-neglect-and-abuse-1
And shame on the religions that have “partnered” with the scientific fraud based “mental health professionals,” who claim to know nothing about the common adverse effects of the drugs they force onto innocent others.
https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Epidemic-Bullets-Psychiatric-Astonishing-ebook/dp/B0036S4EGE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxidrome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroleptic-induced_deficit_syndrome
Thank you for telling your story, Tyler.
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Hi, thanks for commenting. 80% of mental patients being victims of childhood sexual abuse sounds way too high. I’m not sure where you got that statistic, but you should double check that. It couldn’t be right. If you check out the documentary I mentioned, PBS Frontline “The Search For Satan” (which is on YouTube by the way) there’s an official FBI statement at the end saying they never found evidence of massive pervasive Satanic cults. The problem is that wasting resources on a witch hunt actually stops authorities from catching actual pedophiles that could have otherwise been caught.
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Perhaps a little exaggerated, but not by much:
https://annals-general-psychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12991-019-0239-1
And we don’t know how the presence of childhood abuse was determined. There are plenty of people who experience childhood abuse and neglect who don’t realize that they have – they view their treatment as “normal” based on their experience. There is also the question of screening. I recall a research study where volunteers went into a children’s psychiatric residential facility and asked questions of the residents. As I recall, about 80% of the residents reported childhood trauma to the volunteers (total strangers to them), and yet less than 25% had this documented in their charts! So either the residents were more comfortable sharing their childhood trauma with total strangers than the staff they see every day, or the staff never bothered to ask, or the staff considered the presence of childhood abuse not to be of sufficient significance to write into the log.
I worked doing involuntary hospitalization evaluations in Vancouver, WA for a while. I spoke to at least a few dozen women diagnosed as “bipolar disorder” during that time. I’d estimate that 90% of them had significant trauma, right on the surface, which was ignored or never considered by their prior care providers. One girl was a MR/DD kid of 17 whose intellectual level was estimated at age 6. She had been raped a couple years before. For a year or so, she was very depressed and withdrawn, which was very different from her previous personality. After a year, she disclosed her rape to her mom. After this point, she became randomly aggressive at times. Her diagnosis? BIPOLAR DISORDER! I gathered all this information in a 20-minute interview with her mom. I actually got them to change her dx to PTSD, but seriously, how OBVIOUS was it that the rape was the event that caused the distress, as there was no distress before, and as she shifted from depressed to angry after disclosure?
It is important to be objective, but that also means being honest about the limitations and massive conflicts of interest that are part and parcel of the field. Underestimation of the impact of environmental impacts is absolutely a basic assumption of the current diagnostic system. It claims to be cause-neutral, but in practice, it is extremely biased toward prioritizing biology FAR over any other potential cause.
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Hi, thanks for the comment. I think you have to be careful when taking in information from people on a locked ward. If they’re kids or adolescents, they could be angry at the thier parents for having them placed in a locked facility, and then make statements against them that could include accusations of different forms of abuse. Children are often coerced into making statements against their parents that conform to ideas thought up by psychiatrists. I forgot to mention another great PBS documentary by Frontline called “Divided Memories” which about this. A lot of times the therapists would pester the kids, showing them an anatomically correct doll, making suggestive statements repeatedly until the kid finally agreed to say that something happened. A historic example of this type of phenomenon would be the McMartin Preschool case which was part of the Satanic Panic. Finally, the idea that 80% of mental health cases are actually PTSD and misdiagnosed doesn’t seem to be correct. This is the first I’ve heard of this.
A central issue in Anti-psychiatry is that a diagnosis can be made by non-doctors, that is psychologists- people with no medical training. No medically trained people are required to make a psychiatric diagnosis. Also, once the diagnosis is obtained, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, a non-doctor, can prescribe the drugs. Again, no doctor or medical school trained individual needed or present for this. Finally, the term “biological psychiatry” is, truthfully, a misnomer and misleading- not a single biological test exists, not a single chemical test or blood test, to determine a psychiatric diagnosis. Claims of genetic defects and chemical imbalances are made without ever testing a patient first before drugging them.
Risperidone was actually developed starting in the 1970’s to stop an LSD trip. When they found something that worked, they realized it was anti-dopaminergic. LSD experiences were seen as psychotomimetic, so they thought they could use it to treat psychosis. However, the LSD experience isn’t considered psychotomimetic anymore. Entheogenic is a more accurate word. Therefore, current treatment models are severely flawed. Ultimately psychology and psychiatry people are just throwing chemicals at people, based off outdated research, hoping for the best.
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I got the over 80% number from this scientific journal sited article.
https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/04/heal-for-life/
And based upon my experience of the sexual assault of my very young child, medical evidence of which was eventually handed over to me.
As well as the confessions to me of a “dirty little secret of the two original educated professions,” and the confession to me – by ladies of my childhood religion – that “we are partners with the mental health professionals.”
I disagree, “the idea that 80% of mental health cases are actually PTSD and misdiagnosed doesn’t seem to be correct.” The medical evidence seems to contradict your opinion.
But I totally agree, “A central issue in Anti-psychiatry is that a diagnosis can be made by non-doctors, that is psychologists- people with no medical training.” I don’t know why this is even legal.
I also totally agree, “not a single chemical test or blood test, to determine a psychiatric diagnosis [exists]. Claims of genetic defects and chemical imbalances are made without ever testing a patient first before drugging them.”
And I agree, Risperdal causes dopamine problems, and can create a psychotomimetic reaction. I believe it’s medically known as anticholinergic toxidrome poisoning.
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I am kind of appalled by the invalidative attitude you take toward those youth who happen to reside in residential treatment facilities. I have known dozens and dozens of such youth, and have found them no less reliable in general than the staff who report on them. They have no particular motivation to lie to perfect strangers, and I’m quite confident that the collective statistics are indicative of a very real phenomenon. Their comments are also quite consistent with my own experiences that show psychiatrists in particular to overlook or minimize the importance of traumatic phenomena and cast blame upon the patient/client and/or their “disorder” or their brain for otherwise obvious connections between a child’s behavior and events in their lives.
I agree that these kids are often coerced into agreeing with statements their caretakers/doctors are forcing upon them, but that argues 100% in favor of the above observation, as the “mental health” personnel are usually very invested in proving their “diagnoses” are correct and explain everything, and that their “medications” are 100% justified, even if the kid is deteriorating in front of their eyes. The days of therapists coercing their clients into admitting to “abuse” are long gone. They are much more likely to coerce them into the idea that they have “bipolar disorder” and that the fact their father sexually abused them (or continues to do so) isn’t really that important.
And while I am not sure the 80% figure is verifiable (though SomeoneElse provided a link supporting that claim), there is no doubt in my mind that a large majority of those diagnosed with “mental illnesses” have experienced multiple “ACEs,” as the current parlance calls it, which contribute massively or actually are the primary cause of their distress. This is based not only on research, but on decades of personal and professional experience. The percentage of women I interviewed diagnosed with “bipolar disorder” who had enormous histories (and sometimes current experiences) of abuse as a child or young adult is probably at least into the 80s. Even higher for people diagnosed with “Major depression” or “anxiety disorders.” And there is plenty of evidence that the likelihood of childhood abuse (especially sexual) in diagnosed “schizophrenia” cases is many times the population average.
What you seem concerned about was common in the 80s, when everyone’s problems were attributed to bad mothering. Now parents are totally off the hook – it’s all the fault of the brain or the “disorder.” As you say, no one knows what a “disorder” really is, and yet these vague, spurious “disorders” seem to have amazing powers! In the 80s, a kid who never was sexually abused was convinced that s/he was in order to feed the egos of the psychologists/psychiatrists. Nowadays, a kid who WAS sexually abused is “diagnosed” with “ADHD” or “bipolar disorder” and no one bothers to look any further. That’s the current reality, at least in my very broad (25+ years) experience. Things are VERY different today than they were in the days of the McMartin Preschool!
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I was a member of a mental healthday centre and a lot of the members, myself included, had experienced sexual assault and family violence. This is routinely ignored by psychiatric staff. Day centre members had no reason to lie. My experience is backed up by research. While Satanic Ritual Abuse may well have been wildly exaggerated the horrors that my friends and fellow day centre members are not.
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At conclusion of a psyche evaluation, is ANYONE not referred for “treatment”?
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Horrible club to belong in.
“Welcome” inappropriate.
I hope you are able to fully break away and recover.
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I really , really hate psychiatrists guts .
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Dear Steve,
Thank you for replying. May I say that I think you jumped to a conclusion in my comment that is nothing to do with what I was actually meaning or saying?
I do not think I said anything specific about charlatains and their use of diagnosis.
Whilst here I want to say that it is nobodies business if an adult who says they have a word for their own suffering “freely chooses” NOT TO EXPLORE the IdEA of a CURE that SOMEONE who is NOT THEM decides must be the cause.
For someone to impose their idea of a cure on someone else no matter how heartfelt and good intentioned and even “right” this might be, it is an unacceptable disrespect and breach of a person’s private inner boundary and as such could constitute a kind of conversion therapy that is in itself AN ABUSE.
What I mean is it is an abuse to tell someone they MUST look in the abuse direction for a cause of their distress, and disqualify their OWN preferred “free choice” of knowing for THEMSELVES why they feel ill.
I am 100 percent for the erradication of all forms of abuse and this definition of abuse actually INCLUDES the abuse of gaslighting people into “having to” believe their perfectly ordinary and caring parents molested them when this may be UNTRUE.
I feel sure you would agree that NOBODY has the “right” to steamroller over an individuals private inner boundary and go sniffing around for the “evidence” of trauma or “peel away their layers of onion” FOR THEIR OWN GOOD.
What has occurred in society are two things.
1. Actual sexual abuse of children is on the increase.
2. Turning the “confession” of having been abused into a “faith claim” that society is abusive has become a mandatory requirement to “belong” in “some” echelons. But this imoposition of “mandatory” aliegience to “consenus opinion” ABOUT ABUSE also can be what constitutes ABUSE.
As for the word choice of disorder, again I repeat that just like the word “ill” there is a personal use of that word, where an individual freely chooses to use that word, or any word they want to, to describe their OWN FEELINGS, which is something NO ONE should argue with. Your FEELINGS are YOUR FEELINGS and you can use ANY words to describe your feelings that you dam well please…EVEN IF they are apparently “the wrong” words in someone else’s idea. The words “ill” and “disorder” and “stir crazy” and “eccentric” are words ANYONE may freely use to describe THEMSELVES.
What is QUITE SEPARATE is when an outsider or expert or activist TELLS YOU what words you HAVE TO USE to describe YOUR OWN suffering and YOUR OWN FEELINGS.
What you, Steve, perhaps want is for nobody to ever describe their feeling of being “ill” in the same way that other people like experts have foisted on people. You maybe want to undermine the experts words as though those words are cruel. This is vallient and brave and heroic of you. To save the peresecuted is honourable.
But when anyone at all tries to “save” someone who really does not want “saved” it is a bit like stepping into the realm of being a missionary, which is like what pioneering psychiatry was hellbent on doing.
Do you not see that in order to not repeat the same mistakes of the bishopric of early psychiatry we all have to STOP TEACHING EACHOTHER that our OWN way of FEELING SAVED is THE ONLY WAY?
A man who crawls into the bedroom of a kiddie can convince himself that he is “saving” the kid from the kid’s innocence and to do so he may convince himself it is FOR THEIR OWN GOOD. There is no ASKING the child what their “free choice” is.
It is MY free choice to call my disease schizophrenia. You may say that an abusive psychiatrist “gave me” that descriptive word to call myself. I have to say that NO psychiatrist GAVE me that word. Not until long after I knew it FOR MY OWN SELF. Even a few years. And even after I had been officially diagnosed that word was NEVER mentioned again by any of my psychiatrists since they ALL wanted me to NOT limit myself by calling myself schizophrenic. They wanted me to have a NORMAL life. It is ME who KNOWS that I am incapable of a normal life, even if I want that conventional path. I KNOW my schizophrenia makes it IMPOSSIBLE for me to be NORMAL. Of this I am rather glad. I do not rate NORMAL as anything more than having to do the bidding of “consensus opinion”, which to me seems a form of ABUSE.
Rather I follow my OWN STAR and choose my OWN NORMAL, not a psychiatrist’s notion of normal, not the normal of an activist who has never met me, not society’s idea of normal for me, not religion’s idea of normal for me, not my parent’s idea of normal for me, not politics idea of normal for me, but MY OWN choice of what FEELs NORMAL to ME.
If someone is misdiagnosed then I FULLY encourage them to bin that shoddy imposition and ONLY concur with what FEELS their OWN NORMAL for them. If to them that means they say they were ill from societal inequality or traumatized by abuse then ONLY they can say that and know that.
I am fed up with activism coming over like a new brand of pioneering psychiatry. Telling me what has happened to me to make my suffering real to me. Telling me how to “fix” it so I can join the latest queue of the “myth” of the perpetually “fixed” and “saved” person.
I am already “saved”. By enjoying my liberty to use any words I please to describe my suffering from my disease.
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To be clear, I never meant to suggest that YOU said anything about charlatans’ use of diagnosis. I am merely pointing out that there is a difference between YOU selecting the descriptor(s) or terms that YOU want or relate to, and other people (like the psychiatric hegemony) pushing diagnostic labels on people and NOT giving them the opportunity to choose. Based on what you have said many times, I think we agree wholeheartedly on this point.
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You were unlucky to be born into psychiatry.
Of course then it would be that everyone else is “sick”, except of course the shrink.
Psychiatry reserves the right to call you something, that something, that name is “stigma” itself.
To name someone a name is in itself discrimmination. Period.
The “stigma” word was developed by psychiatry itself because after all, they knew what they were doing.
As the slogan goes. “there is no shame in being MI” lol.
I have heard that used and their desperation is palpable. Please accept this awful name we have for you and then all is well. If you do not accept it, we will add more names.
We got oodles and oodles of names for you.
Psychiatry owns the dictionary.
Any young people reading here, RUN AS FAR AWAY AS YOU CAN FROM THE MENTAL SYSTEM> RUN. Don’t believe me though, find out for yourself some 30 years later. Or sooner. Eventually all thinking people realize the powers that can ruin you, and your family.
It’s like a bacteria left untreated.
Yes there is lots of weirdness in people, but most, unlike psychiatry and it’s medical ilk, are not out to defame, demoralize and destroy simply because they can.
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“There is no shame in being a permanently brain-damaged second class citizen!”
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I feel obliged to comment on your views and beliefs on the issue of the percentage of people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses who were in fact sexually abused as children. I have been in psychotherapy for many years dealing with exactly this issue, having had no memory of this having happened to me and being at the bottom of repeated hospitalised breakdowns and diagnosed bipolar in 1975, until the initial consciousness of it was shocked awake in me as the result of a major car crash at the age of 38. At that point, having been admitted to hospital for the sixth time since age 30, I was privileged to meet the doctor who saved my life. He was in charge of the NHS psychiatric hospital and did not tell me for six months that he was in fact also a Jungian analyst. I had never felt, or been, so helped. I had the benefit of free consultations due to his being in the NHS. He left the NHS after two years however and I went with him and he was my analyst for a total of 19 years, charging me a tiny proportion of his normal fee as I was unable to work due to the long-term effects of trauma and therefore in poverty. I then moved to seeing his colleague as I had moved to another part of the country. That was in 2007 and I am still seeing him weekly.
During all these years I have experienced almost continuous flashbacks and buried memories slowly surfacing of extreme abuse involving violence and hypnosis by my father which continued up to age 26 when I was able to stop him and of this instance I have always had conscious memory but no memory of any of his previous abuse of me and it became my life’s work documenting the flashbacks and memories with writing and drawings. As I became conscious of the abuse I was able with the support of my therapists to come off all medications which, especially during hospital admissions, were in very high doses. I have recently completed an MA in authorial Illustration, having been believed by the initial psychiatrist in 1975 to have no future chances of career or recovery.
I should like to quote some research by my current therapist, with his permission – he wrote this passage for a report supporting my application to the CICA in 2014. He writes:
Research Linking Childhood Sexual Abuse and Severe Mental Illness:
Research into Severe and Enduring Mental Illness demonstrated a remarkably strong correlation between Childhood Abuse (CA), especially Childhood Sexual Abuse (CSA) and a raft of severe mental illnesses. An overview of the research literature in this area shows that CA is causally indicated in, amongst others, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, personality disorders, psychotic disorders including schizophrenia and manic depression, and dissociative disorders. A significant piece of research found that
‘In 13 studies of ‘seriously mentally ill’ women the percentage that had experienced CSA or CPA (child physical abuse) ranged from 45% to 92% (Goodman, Rosenberg, Mueser, & Drake, 1997). A review of 15 studies totalling 817 women inpatients, calculated that 64% reported CPA or CSA (CSA 505, CPA 44%) (Read, 1997). Studies of female inpatients, or predominantly psychotic outpatients, find incest rates of 22%-46% (Beck & van der Kolk, 1987, Cole, 1988, Muenzenmaier, Meyer, Struening, & Ferber, 1993; Rose, Peabody, & Stratigeas, 1991). (Read et al 2003, 76, 2).
This research and study shows that 76% percent of ‘seriously mentally ill’ patients had suffered childhood sexual abuse and states that ‘parental hostility precedes and is predictive of schizophrenia’ (ibid p.3). That,, in a study of bibolar affective disorder, patients who had suffered CSA were twice as likely as other patients to experience some form of hallucination’ (ibid p4) and that when both forms of child abuse was present the combination caused ‘an even worse outcome’ (ibid p 15).
A further research finds that ‘abuse disclosures by psychiatric patients to be reliable and that ‘patients tend to underreport abuse histories rather than overreport them’ (Dill, Chu, Grobb & Eisen, 1991 p 168) and that there is no relationship between childhood sexual abuse and thought disorder.
Research into the effects of childhood sexual abuse on survivors show that severe dissociation and/or the failure in capacity to access conscious memory of extremely traumatic experiences function as psychological mechanisms aimed at preserving the child’s fragile sense of itself and its relational environment (Sinason, 2002)….”
I know that I would be dead long ago without having done this extensive psychoanalytic work. I have been re-diagnosed by an NHS Consultant psychiatrist who is rare in that he is an expert in dissociation (contrary to your statement that dissociation has been “debunked”) as having been misdiagnosed “manic depressive/bipolar” in 1975 – which led me down years of wrong treatment with drugs and ECT. My diagnoses should have been, and is, CPTSD and I daily experience dissociative states which I am now able to monitor myself through and am looking forward to doing a PhD exploring DID and the healing power of art and truthful self-expression.
Regarding your comments about the “Satanic Panic” do remember that the many people involved in these activities are despicably cunning and clever and of course will infiltrate and destabilise information. I have worked in womens’ sexual abuse healing groups going back 30 years, where there have been survivors of SRA.
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Hi, thank you for commenting on my article. First off, I’m glad that you got your case straightened out, as you seem to have experienced a misdiagnosis also. My thoughts on the subject of bipolar is that it’s iatrogenic in most cases. In your case you had past trauma that was misdiagnosed. However, in my case this is not what has happened. For psychiatrists to say that 80% of bipolar is past childhood trauma, is to me, evidently an outgrowth of the Satanic Panic and Stranger Danger moral panics of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, and do not reflect an actuality. If you look at the FBI report on Satanic Ritual Abuse in 1995, when the Frontline documentary came out I discussed, the report, as shown in the film, shows that there was no evidence of Satanic cults found by the FBI in any form as espoused by psychiatrists for the prior 15 years. If there was any evidence since then, you can be sure that it would have been front page news and everyone would know about it. To insinuate that there were actors high up in the government hiding information is basically what the conspiracy theory based Q Anon movement is about. Some of those conspiracy theorists attacked Congress on January 6th, 2021 thinking that ‘all Democrats are in a satanic cult’ or thinking similar lines of thought when they tried to overthrow the government for Trump. I really seriously think that you should take a look at the issue again a rethink your position, and I apologize for bring politics into this.
Second, for you to insinuate that I was probably raped and don’t remember it, and that most people with a mental health diagnosis of Bipolar, Schizophrenic, Schizoaffective, etc. are actually misdiagnosed and have had childhood sexual abuse is, quite frankly rude. I know that did not happen in my case. I have a very supportive loving family, thank you very much. Just because it happened to you, doesn’t mean that it happened to everybody with the diagnosis. I think that psychiatrists are probably promoting that narrative at the moment though, as a marketing ploy, it would seem, judging by various comments I’ve read attached to this article.
The bipolar diagnosis is by far more likely, in my opinion, something that was given to a lot of teenagers and younger children whose parents advocated for the diagnosis to their children’s psychiatrist, thinking (falsely) that it was a genetic disorder in their familiy where there had already been past family members with the diagnosis. (Nobody is tested for a gene prior to diagnosis.) If you look deeply at psychiatry and psychology diagnosis protocol, IT is abuse in my opinion. That being said, if I were raped tomorrow and felt traumatized by it, I would NOT go to a psychiatrist or psychologist having already experienced the demented and distopian nature of mental hospitals. You need to give people that choice, or it’s coercion. The only trauma I have is from being in mental hospitals themselves and from being forcibly drugged against my will. Period.
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I am so sorry you interpreted my post as “insinuating” – to use your word – that you were raped. That was neither my intention nor my belief, at any level. I would not ever believe, and never have, believed such a thing about another person. I have re-read what I wrote and do not see any suggestion in it that I believed you were raped. I was responding to your comment in your reply to ‘Someone else’, where you state ‘80% of mental patients being victims of childhood sexual abuse sounds way too high. I’m not sure where you got that statistic, but you should double check that’. You repeat this in your reply to Steve McCrea with ‘…the idea that 80% of mental health cases are actually PTSD and misdiagnosed doesn’t seem to be correct. This is the first I’ve heard of this’.
I suggest that if you double check what I have written you will see that I was quoting research written by my therapist. This is quoting various studies and is not a suggestion to any reader that this has to apply to them personally. When expressing an opinion I feel it is crucial to have reliable information to base that opinion on, as opposed to stating vaguely what something seems to be or not to be, and at least two of the people quoted in this research are names of people I deeply respect, having studied a lot of their work myself at some depth and recognised, from my own lived experience, the veracity and utter importance of their work. These two people are John Read and Bessel Van Der Kolk. The latter you may recognise as the author of “The Body Knows the Score”. This book became central to my MA thesis and is one of the most profoundly helpful and healing books I have ever read. I know many people worldwide feel the same, as shown for instance by the thousands of 5 star reviews on Amazon as well as numerous conversations I have had with people feeling the same.
Following your comments I looked up the link kindly provided in her comment by ‘Someone Else’ – http://www.madinamerica.com/2016/04/heal-for-life/ and read the article by Liz Mullinar and Matthew Britts, “Victim Blaming: Childhood Trauma, Mental Illness and Diagnostic Distractions?” I am grateful to ‘Someone Else’ for sharing this link because it is a brilliant article which says it all in a nutshell. I was amazed to see there are no less than 92 comments under it. If you read it you will, I think, find that there are many things said which are in agreement with many of the things you have also said, especially about forced medication and the psychiatric labels, over which I also feel entirely in agreement with you. The first short comment also hits the nail on the head so much that I quote it here – by Markps2 –
“Why are past experiences not talked of? The we-have-a-medicine/magic pill industry is worth billions of dollars a year is why.
Those who separate themselves from the mentally ill also need the idea-excuse of a DNA error or brain chemical imbalance to keep themselves apart from the ill, keep the illusion that medicine is being performed, not a person’s soul is in conflict or damaged.’
Regarding the subject of Satanic Ritual Abuse, I do not know anything about Q-anon as I have not felt the need to research it, although I watched the horrific riots on the Whitehouse over the Trump election. What has happened to me from very early childhood was not only actual sexual abuse by my father and uncles but not being believed by my mother, who protected my father and would not hear a word against him. This is about about extreme denial and cover-up, which is like a force field in the world and which has been a major cause of my own life-long ill-health as I was silenced by both family, Church and culture even though my siblings later revealed their own abuse by our father. However they did not want this spoken about as they did not want their own children to know. I was therefore silenced all my life and am only just feeling ready to speak out about it. During this time I have read a number of books which I would recommend to anyone who wants to learn about SAR and mind-control. These are: ‘The Enslaved Queen’ and ‘White Witch in a Black Robe’ by Wendy Hoffman, ‘Shattered but not Unbroken’ edited by Valerie Sinason and Amelia van der Merwe, and ‘Trance Formation of America’ by Cathy O’Brien and Mark Philips. They are not easy reads. But when you have yourself gone through similar experience even when it is still buried in your own unconscious, you know when something is real and true. These authors are very, very brave and courageous and has been written amongst the reviews, humanity owes them a debt.
In relation to conspiracy theories, two years ago I came across a site called the “Grey Faction” which states its headquarters as a ‘Satanic Temple’ and on which I found a list of so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’ compiled by them. This list included both the therapist who helped Wendy Hoffman, Alison Miller – and Bessel Van Der Kolk! It is when I see the discrediting of someone of whom I am in no doubt as to their authenticity as truthful and first rate healers in the field – as ‘ conspiracy theorists’ that I can see through the lie of any such claim.
I am so glad to read that you have a supportive loving family and I wish you all the very best.
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The Satanic Panic moral panic of the 80’s and 90’s was an outgrowth of the Stranger Danger moral panic of the 1970’s. If you look into that, “Stranger Danger” was started by non other than Jimmy Saville who himself was a prolific pedophile in England. He wrote a book for kids called “Stranger Danger” warning them of strangers while he was molesting droves of children. He distracted the authorities with his stranger danger movement and got away with horrific crimes. He openly molested mental patients in Broadmoor Psychiatric Institution, in England, where he was a porter.
The same could be said for the Satanic Panic and so-called “Satanic Ritual Abuse,” which has been debunked and discredited over and over again. It distracts the authorities with a witch hunt and strains public resources that could otherwise go towards investigating actual pedophiles. My point in the article is that psychiatry continues to promote a thoroughly debunked moral panic/witch hunt and that this clearly shows that you can’t trust psychiatry. That’s all. My point of view is that psychiatry is pseudoscience. “Dissociation” is a pseudoscientific idea, and hypnosis sessions are not permissable as evidence in US courts. (Discomfort from having taken antipsychotics is a likely culprit.)
I don’t buy the notion that there are upper echlons of the government run by a Satanic cult started by the CIA. To me that is a truly laughable conspiracy theory. Cathy O’Brien does not seem too credible if you ask me. Just from doing 2 minutes of research I found that Cathy O’Brien claims to have been raped by Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, and Hillary Clinton. That many politicians just does not seem likely.
I explained in the article, also, that the uptick in Bipolar diagoses is likely also caused by a moral panic from an episode of the X-Files from 1995. Is it a coincidence that MPD gets debunked that year, then pharma-research and psychiatry seize upon a new revenue source- bipolar, after having noted that there was an X-Files episode that could be used to trigger sales of Risperidone? I think not. I’m sure you are familiar with the concept of Occam’s Razor. This is something that is believed by people in academia, that I learned from someone with a doctoral degree.
As far as the 80% figure being thrown about here, when you cite studies conducted by Psychologists or Psychiatrists you are just citing pseudocientific sources. I think 80% percent of Bipolar cases are just psychiatrists negligently mishandling confused families with nothing wrong with them, who have minor problems. The other 20% may be misdiagnosed PTSD. In some cases, as in yours, that seems to be the case. But there is something fishy about the claim that a full 80% of mental patients are misdiagnosed and are actually PTSD childhood sexual abuse victims. It just doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t fit Occam’s razor.
As far as Gray Faction, I know little about “The Satanic Temple” other than that it has a base in Salem, Massachusetts. From what I understand, in the 1980’s, Lawrence Pazder, the Canadian psychiatrist who wrote the debunked book “Michelle Remembers,” initially blamed The Church of Satan started by Anton LeVey, who you may or may not have heard of. LeVey threatend Pazder with a defamation lawsuit, then Pazder backed off. So perhaps since people target Satanists with unfounded claims, the Satanists feel the need to debunk certain psychologists and psychiatrists who have them in their sights? Do you believe that Dungeons and Dragons causes children to worship Satan then commit suicide? Do you believe that Judas Priest inserts backwards Satanic messages into their music to make teenagers worship Satan and kill themselves? These kinds of claims are complete crap. You really should look into Q Anon because belief in these types of conspiracy theories is leading people to commit violent acts and to become extremists.
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The real trouble is with the idea of HEALING.
Healing ought to be about helping you in YOUR choice of knowing what feels ill FOR YOU.
Helping YOU does not mean coersively imposing external UNWANTED theories and conjecture and “logic” about the myth of the perpetually “fixed” person.
HEALING YOU means loving you…..IN YOUR OWN CHOICE of how you want that love to be. For some who feel ill they WANT that healing to be from an abuse counsellor specialist. For others they do not want that. They want traditional psychiatry. And for yet more others they want that healing to be political justice and compensation. Whatever heals YOU ought not to be publically shamed since to leave a person unhealed IS more shameful. But you CANNOT TELL another unique human being WHAT their OWN HEALING “SHOULD” BE. Which means you therefore have to ALLOW them to HEAL THEMSELVES in their OWN PREFERRED WAY or what you are doing IS NOT HEALING…
it is BULLYING and PUSHING YOUR AGENDA and it is probably happening because you have a desperate need to be “right” “right” “right”.
This might be because widespread “logic” impacting your life with a million ghastly unnecessary preachy LESSONS has made you feel “wrong” “wrong” “wrong”.
When you find a way to mend the wound of your thinking you are “logically” all “wrong” happens is that THIS then becomes a separate but nonetheless as profound sense of healing. By this manner A LOGICAL THEORY that “logically” explains why you ever were coerced into accepting that you were “wrong” “wrong” “wrong” comes to your rescue.
But then what occurs is that THE THEORY becomes a bit like a metaphorical new pill that you want to hand out to anyone who YOU THINK has bought into something YOU once felt had you down as “wrong” “wrong” “wrong”.
But your THEORY that rescued YOU, like a quasi pill, is ONLY A THEORY. IT is only A RATIONAL explanation of your “feelings”. The THEORY itself is NOT “FEELINGS”. Since “logic” is not the same thing as emotions.
When you are telling yourself you are “wrong” because some “logical” overlord in your vicinity gives you that “rational” explanation for your misery and insists you believe that “logic”, you long to prove that overlord mistaken. You long to prove that you are “right”. But this overlord giving you the sense that you are “wrong” is an injury to your intelligence. A snub. A “reason” for the overlord’s rejection of the feelings you feel. That injury is NOT the same hurt as the initial feelings of outcry or upset from being bullied.
See it as two pains. The first pain is what happened or how ill you feel. The second pain is how people receive your own understanding of why you feel ill. If people give you THEIR THEORETICAL “logic” as to why you are stupid or careless or feeble or easily conned and that is why you are suffering, this slap in the face becomes a second type of excruciating pain. It is one that makes you determined to DISPROVE that their cruel “logical” THEORY is really what is “wrong”.
To do that you may develop an over determination to heal your own absorbtion of ever feeling “wrong” by overly wanting to prove and prove and prove YOUR THEORY “right” “right” “right”.
In coffee parlours and municipal parks you proudly strut around looking for ANYONE who looks a bit sad and to that stranger you foist your own rescuing “right” THEORY as to why they feel “wrong”…even if they DO NOT NEED your THEORY.
You can convince yourself that the stranger DOES NOT KNOW how much they need rescued by YOUR LOGICAL THEORY. If the stranger just want’s to nibble their cheese bagel you pin them as dangerously AVOIDING being HEALED by what “logic” healed your injured intellect. So you pull a chair closer and proceed to gaslight their OWN SENSE of themselves as being “right for themselves” or happy in their own glib understanding of why they feel a feeling of sadness that day.
If you can “fix” them too then you can believe yourself doubly “right” ir even “righteous” by being a superb rescuer. A world healer of ALL the upset people you read about in comments sections. Being a world healer would certainly “fix” your ever having been told you were “wrong” by a preachy overlord. But in this vital step…
YOU BECOME AN OVERLORD.
You become a BIG PHARMA of a THEORY of how YOU became upset once a long time ago. You become despotic in telling everyone how they can put themselves “right”.
As though you are now the inquisitor PREACHING at people how they can “get right with God”. Get “right” with an abusive priest’s twisted “logic” of what God stands for. As if “logic” is THE HEALING that compassion and acceptance is.
What happens is the wounded cry and people then act like overlords telling the wounded not to be so messily “feeling” and “illogical”, even though feelings can ONLY be illogical, since they are not thoughts. The overlords tell the crier to hush up and they do so by pointing out how “illogical” the crier is being. The overlords then offer to give education to the “wrong” crier in order to make them all “right” and “logical” again.
For years the crier has a deep unease about calling their OWN feeling “wrong” all the time. This erupts in a breakdown. To which yet more and more “logical” priests of “reason” step forward and say the breakdown is “illogical” and “wrong”. New THEORIES are pressed into the fingers of the crier and if they take up those new THEORIES they may think it a rescue. They may think so if the THEORY declares them “right” instead of “wrong”.
FEELINGS are NEITHER “right” or “wrong”. FEELINGS just ARE. YOU either understand them emotionally or you don’t. You either ACCEPT your own feelings or you don’t. But feelings are not “wrong”. There are no “wrong” feelings. There can only be “wrong” outward behaviour. Behaviour is NOT feelings. To behave in an outward way needs the trigger of a thought. A decision. A “logical” planning executive decision. It need not even be your own decision if you are a puppet on a string.
If you BUY that your crying feeling is “wrong” because it is not a feeling that can be explained by “extreme rationalism” then all you need to do is chuck out the “logic”. Do not apply it to your feelings. Feelings are just feelings. You do not have to explain them. You do not have to explain why you want “love”, yet “logic” would have you give a reasearch paper on “why”.
If you BUY that you need to be armed with an intellectual THEORY as to why you feel sad then you will become a THEORY BULLY to someone else. You will produce reams of statistics and percentages and university studies and scans and countering whistleblower articles and activist graphs and political shenanigans and almost anything that you can squeeze LOGICAL EXPERT FINDINGS from. To Do Battle with OTHER LOGICAL FINDINGS.
But NONE of this being “right” “right” “right”…
is LOVE.
Being “right” may restore your injured prestige and that alone may seem all the healing you ever need, a kind of justice, or revenge.
But what you really may find greater healing from is realizing you do not need a theory to defensively counter riposte at other overlord’s theories. You never needed to “logically” explain your tears AT ALL. If someone in your vicinity demanded a “logical” explanation before they would find you deserving of love or even respect then that is NOT someone to be feeling ill around.
There has been the psychiatric THEORY for why you feel the way you do. Perhaps what you have really is a disease that is causing hallucinations and knowing this much may help you feel not “wrong” since you truly cannot help being ill. Some people who receive that rationale may LIKE that THEORY and so it consoles them enough to help them survive. Who are you to dare them they are “wrong”?
Whatever heals YOU is only for YOU to choose. Whatever heals another human being who is quite separate from YOU is ONLY for that other unique individual to choose as THEIR OWN choice of healing.
Some other people loathe traditional psychiatry and much prefer the trauma and abuse THEORY as to why they feel as upset as they do. That also is a choice of enhanced understanding. An understanding of them not being “wrong” for feeling as they do. Like the disease model the trauma and abuse model ALSO declares that you are NOT “wrong” for feeling anguish. BOTH of these THEORIES for why you are crying are coming from neat “logical” analysis and “consensus opinion” over what you have “got going on in you”. Either “free choice” of theory might have a big grain of truth in it FOR YOU as an INDIVIDUAL, if you resonate with either one as YOUR prefered healing way of regarding yourself.
All “logical” theories are fine so long as they do not become overt BULLYING.
If your feelings want to choose the disease model because it brings you comfort for whatever reason then LET NO ONE TELL YOU that YOUR FEELING is “WRONG” or that what feels like a healing view to YOU is illogical and “WRONG”.
Even if your theory has weird logic that says you are ill because your cat is an Amazonian leopard who communicates with a Shaman, THAT is what feels most comforting and healing TO YOU in that moment. And provided it is harmless as a weird “logical” belief then allow it.
Psychiatry is comparable to a weird “logical” belief at times, one that many derive solace from.
Neither logic
nor reason
nor rationalism
nor theories
are ever bad.
They are lovely free choices. Many love being theoretical all day. It is a game.
But what IS BAD is BULLYING. And since bullying often wears the soft soled sneakers of “logical explanation” and being “a rescuer” or “righteous healer”, it is good to be aware that IF YOU do not like a THEORY that is being shoved at you as if it is THE ONLY WAY you are feeling feelings of suffering….then politely tell that pushy so and so to shove their theory up their metaphorical gangway.
What happens when enough people gather in a mob and say that THEIR LOGICAL THEORY is the ONLY way, either the disease model or the trauma model, is that they CAUSE ILLNESS by telling you that IF you do not AGREE to be rescued and fixed in THEIR MANNER then you are not only shamefully “WRONG” but you are somehow to BLAME for the world not being rescued and fixed. That is when “LOGICAL THEORY” ceases being a healthy choice or game or helpful understanding and instead becomes a BULLYING pontificating, righteous, persecutor of the free and the individual people of feeling.
Such bullying imposition to save the world with a consensus opinion righteous THEORY can inveigle a way into the leadership in psychiatry.
BUT it can ALSO inveigle a way into antipsychiatry if antipsychiatry grows a pet theory that everyone has to pay lip service to.
What I see occurring is the calling of ALL psychiatrists and their patients “wrong” for not espousing the new rhetoric and new LOGIC.
Whilst I feel that indeed psychiatry has made rather a lot of patients who should never have had their ordinary feelings called “wrong”, and that bullying has to end, I do feel that severe mental conditions cause illness to the people who know they feel that ill, and that these need more than some stranger calling those illnesses fabribations that are “wrong”.
In short nobody should ever ever ever call ANYONE “wrong” i their OWN understanding of why they are crying.
But “LOGIC” fetishizes telling everyone that they do not know themselves at all. And “LOGIC” is pumped up by telling everyone that their failure to “know themselves properly” and be puppets on strings marks them as LAZy.
This is inadvertantly, the hissing cat that psychotherapy let out the bag.
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I am so sorry that happened to you Tyler. You are a sane, beautiful, wonderful, unique, special human being deserving of all that is good and rewarding in life. I hope with all my heart that you find the happiness you were denied in your early years. I hope your family realizes the truth, too, and follows in your footsteps to be a crusader for justice from this awful medical system.
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Apologies for errors in my post – I meant to recommend this link for the MIA podcast “Fighting for the Meaning of Madness” http://www.madinamerica.com/2019/05/an-interview-with-dr-john-read/ as opposed to the link I wrote – although that one I also recommend – both of these back up my own experiences of mainstream psychiatry which thankfully I have not been involved with for the last 30 years.
2. Title of book should be “Shattered but Unbroken” – not “not unbroken” as written.
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LOVE the term “mainstream eugenics” –
Perfectly describes psychiatry.
Thank you for telling your compelling story. I’m glad you could get off the psych drugs –
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