What about accounting for the people who no longer experience episodes of mania after they discontinue antidepressants and have not experienced mania before they took the antidepressants? Is this only considered anecdotal evidence?
Why does he appear to be totally ignorant of the effect of Cytochrome P450 metabolism on drug response, interactions, and adverse effects?
What is the money trail to this research project?
“Many of us on the spectrum replace social relationships with intense areas of special interest. What, I wonder, will happen when the brain cells just can’t do quantum physics any more? Where will the model train collection acquired over 70 years fit in the constrained space of social housing or care homes? Will those of us who have lived a cocooned existence suddenly be expected to turn into social butterflies in a reminiscence group?
Homogenised solutions for care of older people are unlikely to work well for anyone. For people with autism, they can be damaging and distressing. Rigid routines and the ability to close the door on the world when it gets too much may be crucial to managing anxiety. With autism it is easy to be overwhelmed by sensory input from noise and people standing too close. Having a chirpy care worker turn up at unexpected hours to make small talk and suggest joining bingo at the day centre is unlikely to be of benefit, however well meant.
I hope by the time I need age-related support that health and social care professionals will appreciate the importance of consistency and routine in managing anxiety in autism. I’d like it if they understood why loud noises, unexpected touch and doors left open can be anathema. I’d prefer it if I’m not assumed to have mental health issues or the onset of dementia because my brain processes information differently.
Given the present lack of research, knowledge and training in ageing and autism, I’m not optimistic that any of this will have happened by then.”
Had been hard enough to find mh professionals who were familiar with the sensory disabilities much less heard of it. If psychiatrists aren’t looking for it, they don’t diagnose it.
There are still problems with recognizing and diagnosing female autism. Since medical providers are looking for stereotypical male autistic behaviors, female autism often gets missed. There isn’t much support around for those who can pass for “normal” but still struggle with many autism or asperger’s issues.
I understand why the concept of cognitive dissonance was applied to describe behavior of the psychiatric professional guild and why it was left at that generous assumption, but I feel like putting it more plainly here:
Isn’t pathological lying and believing one’s own lies one of the traits of sociopaths? A lot of the other listed traits of sociopaths seems to fit too.
I think this site might be of interest and of help to people who are dealing with high sensitivities.
Also check out SPD and Psychopathology in Adults (left hand side of page in pink box) for list diagnoses psychiatrists give to people who have high sensitivities and/or Sensory Processing Disorder. Sensory Processing Disorder was a diagnosis which the DSM V panel deliberately left out.
Not so much an issue of trading off one label for another but finding helpful tools, resources to learn from and self manage, and when possible create a shorthand for explaining issues of Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD), selective mutism, Irlen Syndrome, temperature control issues, MCS, food intolerance and other gut problems, confusing social issues and isolation, iatrogenic postrauma stress and post trauma stress. Daniel Wendler’s site on social skills, Rudy Simone’s books and site, as well as blogs which appear on Facebook’s Womens Autism Network are helpful for self understanding and understand that there are people like me around, and to stay core-unpathologized. The verdict is out as to whether the Wilbarger Brushing Protocol helps those who start it as adults.
Another voice here in praise of this post and other posts written by Bruce Levin, Ph.D. Sometimes you need to hear or read someone else say and mean what you have been thinking, especially after experiencing communication suppressing/distorting environments which are presented as the only normal. When I read your posts, I’m feel I am on familiar ideological ground: a great deal of good horse sense, good observations and connecting the dots, and some good ideas on what to do about it.
” If someone asks if you believe them, you can say you know their experience is real because you can see how it affects them, how emotionally hurt they are. You can acknowledge that you were not there and can’t be a witness, but you do witness the reality of their suffering. And you can ask them what they are experiencing now, and tell them that you believe 100% that it is real – because you trust they are not lying and you know that whatever they are experiencing is real. You might not know how to interpret it, but you know it is real.”
This sounds like word dance bullshit to me, but if I know the person has had some of the same alternate reality experiences as I have, I might trust them.
Would there would be also options for energy work since many of us perceive to that degree of sensitivity.
In my region, there is a peer movement, which may have potential, but appears to be be identified with psychiatry. A few times I have gone to NAMI sponsored peer events because that’s is what is around and affordable. I don’t really feel solidarity there and would like to meet and activist activate with type of group which Ted describes. For those of us who are having to make do with “the alternatives” in our region or who are involved in cross disability, this could be very grounding and fortifying energy base for when we have to go back out there as leaders or educators.
I’ve been trying to encourage a friend to do a deck of psychiatric labellee tarot cards for a while now. If you can’t fight the mainstream, you may as well enter it with the message you want to be heard. After all, truth is stranger than fiction, and how hard would it be to invent a scary game based on what actually happens in the system.
The insidious thing about social control is that it programs its targets take on tiers of responsibility and blame: responsibility for self; responsibility/blame for the flaws in the system which are not regarded as flaws but as benevolent provisions; responsibility/blame for the power players who control the system and do not recognize that power is responsibility.
I never meant to imply that reading a sympathetic post is a substitute for experiencing bonds of human compassion and understanding. I have been fortunate to have had bonds with some extraordinary human beings, if not psychiatric survivors, then authentic and nonconformist in their own right. Quite a while back, I experienced more mh trauma in addition to what I had already experienced of trauma and was in a situation where it did not feel safe to really relate to anyone. Someone called me on the phone and because I was in that situation, I had to deflect her request to speak with me. Looking back, I know that she knew something about what I was going through then. She didn’t say “here or the lies…” or “cut the crap.” She ended the phone call by saying what I already knew but didn’t feel safe to act on. She said “I know you want to talk to me.” When I got off the phone with her, I felt I had made a connection with her. Even though, it wasn’t much conversation, it was better than being completely without contact from anyone who understood.
Sometimes it’s not possible to even get to the point of dealing with trauma. It’s as if we have internalized the prosecution and have not had a chance yet to internalize an equally strong or better defense. What that person and some others did for me was to be that defense which I was unable to find in myself at the time and make a connection with them being real and being there for me.
meant to say take out and look at survival splits.
You can’t go back and edit on this thing.
I had a chance to read Judi Chamberlin’s Confessions of a Non-Compliant Patient. http://www.narpa.org/Judi/confessions.htm It was a personal acccount of how she had to make a choice upon which her survival and chances of getting out of the system depended. While in the state institution, she made a survival based decision to consciously split herself into two modes of being. One more external and social interacting person lied and faked through the compliance which the system demanded and based their assessment of her mental health status. The other mode of being was authentic and in alignment with her moral beliefs and what she knew to be true. Judi Chamberlin’s life is a testimony to making the journey from survival-lying to her work in civil rights and choice to take on social responsibility.
Not everyone gets to talk directly to someone who can listen and validate the trauma of “treatment,” or be supported to take out whatever survival splits have had to put in place to survive an ordeal, make sure we don’t leave ourselves continually emotional and psychic energy fractured. As we can see from current proposed legislation, the mh industry and the mainstream’s story is that which lacks integrity and is nonhealing and oppressive is all being done for our own good and we have a hell of nerve to want to keep “our rights on.” Supported personal clearing in this type of social and political climate can be hard to come by.
Posts like Ode to Biological Psychiatry, which cut through the the crap, may be the next best thing to being heard and validated by another human being and healing from survival-lying and splitting off –Here are the lies, look at them, calling them lies is not a symptom of your DSM label. It’s safe enough now to talk openly and drop the dissimulation and the crap. Yes, people get sick of lies and might be true to say that people get sick from lies and lying, but in extreme survival situations, we do extreme things to survive. No one likes to have that kind of ordeal trivialized and be forced to keep silent about it indefinitely. People have a right and to choose healing from mh “treatment” inflicted and other trauma and move on to better things.
When the tools for change are good, they can be very good.
I want to shift focus from anti-psychiatry to question what creates effective dialogue? It is certainly not what many have experienced in the mh system where the power imbalance is so skewed that even articulately questioning psychiatric “treatment” translates into “lacking insight” of one’s “deteriorating mental condition.” Nor is it in the political agenda of so called solving problems of violence and mh in the same coercive strategy. We need posts like Ode to Biological Psychiatry to tell it like it is and spell out what the rules in this game have been and why and who the players have been because the real issues of harm passing as “treatment” have been obscured for so long and blamed on labellees. Many of us in the movement are still trying to get grounded from being hit so hard below the belt, and still finding our words after years of having them suppressed, twisted, and/or obscured by the power players. If making things clearer and putting together a collective voice is what you are interpreting as attacks or shutting dialogue, I have to ask — Does psychiatry know or even care to know what creates effective dialogue? So far, biological psychiatry has not provided an acceptable answer to that question. If some of us want to move on, and it’s called anti-psychiatry, so be it. It doesn’t mean that we don’t know where we want to go, collectively or otherwise.
This is about as good as crazy nonsense “explanations ” that I’ve seen ont his topic. Humour often comes from a dark place. Think I met up with Dr. NutJob who has a practice in the same medical building as Dr. Bonkers.
Something told me to speak to a lady who was on drugs because she felt she is bipolar and needs to be taking “medication.” I felt it was important to validate her. I kept it brief and to the point. “Psychiatry is bullshit. You’re not.” I didn’t change her mind on the spot about psychiatry, but I think healing begins with validating that person and echoing that knowing “voice” inside of them which psychiatric “treatment” has hushed up.
Didn’t feel I had a clear cut case against Neurontin because of environmental illness load I was carrying, but neurontin was the biomedical straw which broke the camel’s back. Life changed course after that last iatrogenic trauma.
Some years ago, a friend of mine posted that if you called a a domestic abuse hotline and reported that your spouse was forcing toxic drugs, isolating, humilitating, threatening and/or doing physical harm, listing many of the abuses which are done in the name of “treatment” but substituted “the spouse” for “the psychiatrist,” you’d be advised to go to a shelter. I think comparing domestic violence to psychiatric abuse and endangerment makes some excellent points and might even be useful in educating those who have not been harmed by the system, but I think our best hope is in creating better alternatives than the mh system and not put more energy into trying to fix a broken system to keep it going.
I find that the process of disengaging from the personal and social context of ceremonial degradation to be similar to Kubler Ross stages of death and dying.
I avoid going into a lot of discussion about my personal dramas online. However would like to share with you that I had to make some drastic decisions after being retraumatized again ten years ago and for the first few years barely spoke to anyone and only would email correspond with a couple of friends. What you describe is very familiar to me. I too decided to “steer clear of the whole circus.” If I had learned anything in the mh system, it was to keep ideas, perceptions, connections/understandings which were new to me but not yet something I fully understood, to myself. The mh system is the bull in the china shop to processing experience.
I suffer from heat intolerance which I have dealt with since the last retraumatization by obtaining and using cooling compensations but at the time I was hospitalized was sleep deprived and ill from the heat, environmental illness, and was reacting badly to Neurontin which was prescribed off label at the time. After I was retraumatized, I felt the way I looked and acted when suffering from the heat made me vulnerable to another psychiatric incarceration. I’ve had lived through near a lifetime of bad summers suffering from the heat or indoors too much because of it (another story about a different type of trauma).I was released from the hospital because my labs showed that I was physically ill, but in the days before the lab work came back, the psychiatrist was trying to pin so many crazy diagnoses on me just to keep me there including deciding I was paranoid schizophrenic for reporting domestic abuse. He did so little trying to find out what was going on that he never knew anything about the environmental illness or problems with the heat. Most of the whole world once again became very dangerous, “war zone,” and off limits.
I know having some long term friends in the movement, who I could email correspond with and talk to, helped a great deal, but for the most part still live reclusively and practice avoidance and for the most part have gone underground.
If there is any possibility that psychiatry would ever clean up its act, acknowledging and dealing responsibly with iatrogenic traumatization and retraumatization would be a good place to start. The lesson I came away with is when a system is getting and giving rewards for suppressing and controlling people, nobody needs to know what’s really going on other than what is required to keep from getting sued.
I’ve heard the comment “That’s a crazy dream” (DSM confirming) at least twice. What the hell does that mean?
Chaya, Thanks for the good and sensible thoughts. I haven’t been there yet. I think my intrinsic energy does something other than yours does. Your way has not been the way for me to work this stuff out. I am not a public speaker nor comfortable in large anonymous groups and have accepted this about myself. For me it is not the quantity of people who listen but the quality of the connection.
Wow! It’s all so true. What I particularly like about what you’ve written is (1) You’ve made the same observations and have the same understanding that I do, biology and wholistic related, but with better charts and clearer explanations. Sometimes even when among members of the movement, it has not been easy to communicate where I am coming from, so reading your post is a treat (2) You go into a comprehensive discussion of what works and why which also explains why the current pervasive paradigm does not heal or help. It just makes so much darned good sense.
Wow! It’s all so true. What I particularly like about what you’ve written is (1) You’ve made the same observations and have the same understanding that I do, biology and wholistic related, butwith better charts and clearer explanations. Sometimes even when among members of the movement, it has not been easy to communicate where I am coming from, so reading your post is a treat (2) You go into a comprehensive discussion of what works and why which also explains why the current pervasive paradigm does not heal or help. It just makes so much darned good sense.
I think we are very much a part of creating a new culture, and it’s going to happen irregardless of who is listening or paying attention. I’m no historian, but as far as I know we are in unchartered territory in that we don’t have a shared culture to retrieve, no common threads rooted in a long tradition to knit us all up together when we’ve been dispersed, and using the common language is in question when we need to communicate to each other. Nonetheless, I think something new, something better is going to happen anyway.
I just want to take this opportunity to thanks those within the movement who have been doing outreach in the movement (but not excluded to only within the movement) — the teleconferences which educate people about getting off of drugs, teleconferences to repeal mental health law, and whatever ways people are coming up with to get together and not limit gatherings and education to only those who can afford travel and lodging expenses.
Recent attempt had been made here to get some space at a local community project for a drop in center. Attitudes still very much this is and should be domain of the hospitals and mh professionals. Guess it depends on where you are and who you are dealing with and the personalities involved but never lose sight of when and where the movement’s bubble ends and the mainstream begins. With NAMI, always ask — what kind of recovery are they talking about? — Too much of the time, it’s been recovery contingent on a lifetime of medication management. Not something a lot of us are interested in confusing with recovery.
Paris, I’ve never thought of it as busting a corporate propaganda and marketing balloon. Maybe what I think is too simplistic to apply to huge coporations and more myth out of an older America, but I still think there is some element of truth to it. I just figure the guy who can make it better, sell it cheaper, whose goods get a better reputation and are more in demand stands a chance of winning in the marketplace.
Profound good sense during hard times. Empathic intelligence tends to lose its value and becomes harder to find as economic scarcity puts the screws to society — broken people seeking to break others. People get no less than mental illness diagnosed/pathologized for voicing the same ideas which Paris Williams has shared here — the critical understanding.
April is national Autism Awareness Month and the SPD Foundation and STAR Center want the world to know some facts about Autism and Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD).
Did you know?
More than 75% of children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) have significant symptoms of SPD. However, the reverse is not true. Most children with SPD do not have an autistic spectrum disorder. See research on Autism in our website library.
SPD Foundation research suggests that SPD and ASD are distinct disorders just as SPD and ADHD are different disorders.
Sensory features are now included as core diagnostic criteria of autism spectrum disorders in the new DSM coming out May 2013.
Addressing sensory features is foundational to improving the social and communication problems of children with Autism.
————————————————————-
The DSM-5 really got sensory processing disorder wrong despite the the SPD Foundations’s efforts to set them straight.
To Jack Carney, I like the way you think. As I read your strategy, I thought it read like a it could inspire a movie script. Truth is stranger than fiction. Maybe it’ll it be much better than a movie script because it’ll be a documentary as to how it was done.
Does anyone ever consider that the frightening and negative messages of our organized religions and the conflicts between the religions may be making us sick? If not getting to us consciously then subconsciously? Maybe the wars which are fought over religion are also fought in the subliminal realm? This thought has come to me from time to time. No way to prove or disprove. Maybe tally up the delegates from each religion in the psych ward UN. I can’t say I’ve been all that interested in these lengthy discussions on religion. Prefer dreams, stories, myths and reinventing myths. Less prone to arguments. More prone to creative invention.
Pax
Stay grounded and centered when the shift flies,
Rabbit
Study was done at Yale, breaking down use of psych drugs into regional clusters. They found that the use of psych drugs is 40 percent higher in a large section of the South and “Antipsychotics were most commonly used in Gainesville, Fla., where 4.6 percent of local residents took the drugs, compared with a national average of 0.8 percent.” I don’t know if we have any chance of persuading the local mh consortium in Gainesville, FL to sponsor you as a speaker, but we keep hoping and trying. Info on Yale study: http://news.health.com/2013/02/01/psychiatric-drugs-more-often-prescribed-in-the-south/
BTW, I don’t interpret mh labels as infectious disease. It’s the pervasive “broken brain” consciousness, which is so prevalent in the mainstream, which is symbolized as infectious disease.
As far as stories which tell of rumor of infectious disease, I like the movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Have enjoyed what I’ve seen of Dan Fisher’s posts and hope we can get him to speak in this area of of the highest rates of neuroleptic prescribing in the country and the attitudes which go along with it (http://news.health.com/2013/02/01/psychiatric-drugs-more-often-prescribed-in-the-south/). Since Dan is talking dreams, I add one of my own here:
Was walking near entrance of a laboratory where the worst infectious diseases are studied. Hazmat suits hung on a hook outside the laboratory. Assumed laboratory for studying this class of infectious disease was on the top floor. Labs studying less infectious diseases were on lower floors. Felt I was being required to walk through lab on top floor without hazmat suit. Next dream image — was in very cramped room, although sunlit, there was no space to sit down. Felt room was in the same building as the laboratories.
Felt the infectious disease laboratory, which I was required to walk through, represented mainstream and psychiatric propaganda and social pressure to conform to it and make it part of my own belief system. Top floor might have meant orders came from the most empowered and influential people as psychiatric treatment is perhaps the last socially and legally sanctioned hate crime, maintaining its strongest hold before it finally lets go. Walking through the lab without a hazmat suit was a job requirement. Finding myself in the cramped room with no place to sit down and get comfortable perhaps represented isolation and punishment for being at odds with the system, lack of humane alternatives, and ongoing issues with iatrogenic trauma and retraumatization.
Decided decades ago that I did not suffer from “a lack of self esteem” and whatever snap decision DSM diagnosis which the case manager found handy to use in the moment. Perhaps more accurate, I had underdeveloped sense of self entitlement. Democracy of souls brought together by Internet technology reminds me that I am not alone, in particular Michael E. Nagler who teaches Peace Studies from Berkeley online. “Sassing” is an ignorant word used by ignorant people who expect complete compliance in return for being unaccountable for their actions. Heard a lot of the word in the mh system. My diagnoses never helped me get beyond the problems I have with florescent lights and inability to stay well in hot, humid weather or in the high pollen seasons or in rooms which smell like floor polishes. Can never write an essay about making it through to the other side of diagnoses AND finding hope because what I have never been able to overcome leaves me feeling too impaired and too vulnerable and often isolated for months at a time. I keep a low profile, observe (something I have learned I can do astutely well), take notes, occasionally write stories. The kind of creative maladjustment I do and money for what a cup of coffee costs will get me a cup of coffee. Contact with the mh system is reinforcement in fear and hopelessness and reminder that much of what is considered true and benevolent is measured in dollars and cents.
Aside from the experiences with slow torture eugenics, hospitals which don’t heal and other negative social fallout, I think being a labellee has been a boot camp training of filtering out bullshit from what’s true. I’m not sure at this point what this training is going to be good for.
dragonfly, If you google on “Superman, Jewish assimilation,” you’ll come up with some interesting either speculations or information about the creators of the original Superman comics. Just wanted to put a little happier twist on your comment about assimilation. (dragonfly: If you are a “Good Jew”, if you don’t look too Jewish or talk too Jewish, they might give you a job as a capo at the camp!). I know where you are coming from. Was not an attempt to invalidate.
If you have to deal a lot with things,which don’t make sense and are also horrible, you should take a burnout prevention break from time to time and enjoy the fanciful, happier myths of our time.
I’m not sure how you go about creating alliances outside the movement. In just about every social group, there’s someone who feels they have a biological brain disorder and needs their psychiatric medication. They may know about the horrors of the system but cannot be budged on what they believe to be true about themselves and their diagnosis. It creeps me out too much to have much to do with it, and I know most normies in social groups outside the movement would be more likely to support the diagnosis self identified person than they would be willing to understand what I believe. Been there, done that.
dragonfly, remember superman comic books (sorry couldn’t resist that)
Ted, I’ll probably end up on the same database as you for reporting domestic abuse and having physical disability issues which I still have not been able to address.
I think this blocked petition is an indication of just how much influence, ownership? of our gov’t BigPharma has. Have seen it on the media. How much is there to figure out?
Books on philosophy are often too abstract for me to read without a guided tour from which I can at least draft up a flow chart. I usually look around and ask what and where are the tools for change. There’s more to it than that, but I don’t usually post a lot online. I once got into trouble with the system for saying “If I believed that [I and others were no more than their DSM dx and prognosis], I would be in trouble.” That about sums up what I have to say today and have felt and believed for a long time.
I tell friends not to listen too much to the media now. It makes things worse. Makes things better that there are essays like this one posted online. Otherwise, talk is cheap.
Being afraid of the system and knowing how dangerous it is, not knowing who to trust has had a lot to do with losing sense grounding and connection. Will not elaborate further because this is posted on the Internet.
I don’t categorize Icarus and MindFreedom so distinctly into separate compartments — Icarus does the spiritual and MindFreedom does the protests. I believe, as Ghandi did, advocating for human rights is a form of here and now spirituality in action. I see and experience MindFreedom doing a lot to deprogram people from the mh propaganda and how it has defined us, in other words, clear a lot of mental junk out and make room for something new and better. I think suitable companions are important to personal and spiritual growth, and so much better than hearing “You’re the only one who thinks that way, so that proves there must be something wrong with you.” Thanks, Seth and also to Paul Levy for opening up discussion on these topics. I don’t know if those who have opened the doors of perception are destined to change the world and make it more humane and compassionate. I only know that the Messiah (or Messianic Age) will not be until it is time for it to be.
Usually cheap and easy (or easier) explains stupid and harmful, but permanently disabling people, especially young people, on drugs defies common sense and is not cheap and easy as it presents more problems than solutions. Been my experience that psyciatrists don’t talk to patients. They talk at them. You’re dealing with authority for which you risk consequences for questioning. How these people ever learn anything about those they allege to treat a mystery to me. I also don’t think psychiatrists are predisposed to being good observers or original thinkers. They too are going along with the prescribing pack and believing what they are told.
What about accounting for the people who no longer experience episodes of mania after they discontinue antidepressants and have not experienced mania before they took the antidepressants? Is this only considered anecdotal evidence?
Why does he appear to be totally ignorant of the effect of Cytochrome P450 metabolism on drug response, interactions, and adverse effects?
What is the money trail to this research project?
http://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/social-life-blog/2015/nov/11/autism-aspergers-older-ageing-scared?CMP=share_btn_fb
“Many of us on the spectrum replace social relationships with intense areas of special interest. What, I wonder, will happen when the brain cells just can’t do quantum physics any more? Where will the model train collection acquired over 70 years fit in the constrained space of social housing or care homes? Will those of us who have lived a cocooned existence suddenly be expected to turn into social butterflies in a reminiscence group?
Homogenised solutions for care of older people are unlikely to work well for anyone. For people with autism, they can be damaging and distressing. Rigid routines and the ability to close the door on the world when it gets too much may be crucial to managing anxiety. With autism it is easy to be overwhelmed by sensory input from noise and people standing too close. Having a chirpy care worker turn up at unexpected hours to make small talk and suggest joining bingo at the day centre is unlikely to be of benefit, however well meant.
I hope by the time I need age-related support that health and social care professionals will appreciate the importance of consistency and routine in managing anxiety in autism. I’d like it if they understood why loud noises, unexpected touch and doors left open can be anathema. I’d prefer it if I’m not assumed to have mental health issues or the onset of dementia because my brain processes information differently.
Given the present lack of research, knowledge and training in ageing and autism, I’m not optimistic that any of this will have happened by then.”
Had been hard enough to find mh professionals who were familiar with the sensory disabilities much less heard of it. If psychiatrists aren’t looking for it, they don’t diagnose it.
There are still problems with recognizing and diagnosing female autism. Since medical providers are looking for stereotypical male autistic behaviors, female autism often gets missed. There isn’t much support around for those who can pass for “normal” but still struggle with many autism or asperger’s issues.
I understand why the concept of cognitive dissonance was applied to describe behavior of the psychiatric professional guild and why it was left at that generous assumption, but I feel like putting it more plainly here:
Isn’t pathological lying and believing one’s own lies one of the traits of sociopaths? A lot of the other listed traits of sociopaths seems to fit too.
I think this site might be of interest and of help to people who are dealing with high sensitivities.
http://sharonheller.net/spd-faq.php
Also check out SPD and Psychopathology in Adults (left hand side of page in pink box) for list diagnoses psychiatrists give to people who have high sensitivities and/or Sensory Processing Disorder. Sensory Processing Disorder was a diagnosis which the DSM V panel deliberately left out.
Not so much an issue of trading off one label for another but finding helpful tools, resources to learn from and self manage, and when possible create a shorthand for explaining issues of Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD), selective mutism, Irlen Syndrome, temperature control issues, MCS, food intolerance and other gut problems, confusing social issues and isolation, iatrogenic postrauma stress and post trauma stress. Daniel Wendler’s site on social skills, Rudy Simone’s books and site, as well as blogs which appear on Facebook’s Womens Autism Network are helpful for self understanding and understand that there are people like me around, and to stay core-unpathologized. The verdict is out as to whether the Wilbarger Brushing Protocol helps those who start it as adults.
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/apr/12/autism-aspergers-girls
http://spdfoundation.net/newsletter/2011/10/ask-dr-lucy.html
Another voice here in praise of this post and other posts written by Bruce Levin, Ph.D. Sometimes you need to hear or read someone else say and mean what you have been thinking, especially after experiencing communication suppressing/distorting environments which are presented as the only normal. When I read your posts, I’m feel I am on familiar ideological ground: a great deal of good horse sense, good observations and connecting the dots, and some good ideas on what to do about it.
” If someone asks if you believe them, you can say you know their experience is real because you can see how it affects them, how emotionally hurt they are. You can acknowledge that you were not there and can’t be a witness, but you do witness the reality of their suffering. And you can ask them what they are experiencing now, and tell them that you believe 100% that it is real – because you trust they are not lying and you know that whatever they are experiencing is real. You might not know how to interpret it, but you know it is real.”
This sounds like word dance bullshit to me, but if I know the person has had some of the same alternate reality experiences as I have, I might trust them.
Would there would be also options for energy work since many of us perceive to that degree of sensitivity.
In my region, there is a peer movement, which may have potential, but appears to be be identified with psychiatry. A few times I have gone to NAMI sponsored peer events because that’s is what is around and affordable. I don’t really feel solidarity there and would like to meet and activist activate with type of group which Ted describes. For those of us who are having to make do with “the alternatives” in our region or who are involved in cross disability, this could be very grounding and fortifying energy base for when we have to go back out there as leaders or educators.
I’ve been trying to encourage a friend to do a deck of psychiatric labellee tarot cards for a while now. If you can’t fight the mainstream, you may as well enter it with the message you want to be heard. After all, truth is stranger than fiction, and how hard would it be to invent a scary game based on what actually happens in the system.
The insidious thing about social control is that it programs its targets take on tiers of responsibility and blame: responsibility for self; responsibility/blame for the flaws in the system which are not regarded as flaws but as benevolent provisions; responsibility/blame for the power players who control the system and do not recognize that power is responsibility.
I never meant to imply that reading a sympathetic post is a substitute for experiencing bonds of human compassion and understanding. I have been fortunate to have had bonds with some extraordinary human beings, if not psychiatric survivors, then authentic and nonconformist in their own right. Quite a while back, I experienced more mh trauma in addition to what I had already experienced of trauma and was in a situation where it did not feel safe to really relate to anyone. Someone called me on the phone and because I was in that situation, I had to deflect her request to speak with me. Looking back, I know that she knew something about what I was going through then. She didn’t say “here or the lies…” or “cut the crap.” She ended the phone call by saying what I already knew but didn’t feel safe to act on. She said “I know you want to talk to me.” When I got off the phone with her, I felt I had made a connection with her. Even though, it wasn’t much conversation, it was better than being completely without contact from anyone who understood.
Sometimes it’s not possible to even get to the point of dealing with trauma. It’s as if we have internalized the prosecution and have not had a chance yet to internalize an equally strong or better defense. What that person and some others did for me was to be that defense which I was unable to find in myself at the time and make a connection with them being real and being there for me.
meant to say take out and look at survival splits.
You can’t go back and edit on this thing.
I had a chance to read Judi Chamberlin’s Confessions of a Non-Compliant Patient. http://www.narpa.org/Judi/confessions.htm It was a personal acccount of how she had to make a choice upon which her survival and chances of getting out of the system depended. While in the state institution, she made a survival based decision to consciously split herself into two modes of being. One more external and social interacting person lied and faked through the compliance which the system demanded and based their assessment of her mental health status. The other mode of being was authentic and in alignment with her moral beliefs and what she knew to be true. Judi Chamberlin’s life is a testimony to making the journey from survival-lying to her work in civil rights and choice to take on social responsibility.
Not everyone gets to talk directly to someone who can listen and validate the trauma of “treatment,” or be supported to take out whatever survival splits have had to put in place to survive an ordeal, make sure we don’t leave ourselves continually emotional and psychic energy fractured. As we can see from current proposed legislation, the mh industry and the mainstream’s story is that which lacks integrity and is nonhealing and oppressive is all being done for our own good and we have a hell of nerve to want to keep “our rights on.” Supported personal clearing in this type of social and political climate can be hard to come by.
Posts like Ode to Biological Psychiatry, which cut through the the crap, may be the next best thing to being heard and validated by another human being and healing from survival-lying and splitting off –Here are the lies, look at them, calling them lies is not a symptom of your DSM label. It’s safe enough now to talk openly and drop the dissimulation and the crap. Yes, people get sick of lies and might be true to say that people get sick from lies and lying, but in extreme survival situations, we do extreme things to survive. No one likes to have that kind of ordeal trivialized and be forced to keep silent about it indefinitely. People have a right and to choose healing from mh “treatment” inflicted and other trauma and move on to better things.
When the tools for change are good, they can be very good.
I want to shift focus from anti-psychiatry to question what creates effective dialogue? It is certainly not what many have experienced in the mh system where the power imbalance is so skewed that even articulately questioning psychiatric “treatment” translates into “lacking insight” of one’s “deteriorating mental condition.” Nor is it in the political agenda of so called solving problems of violence and mh in the same coercive strategy. We need posts like Ode to Biological Psychiatry to tell it like it is and spell out what the rules in this game have been and why and who the players have been because the real issues of harm passing as “treatment” have been obscured for so long and blamed on labellees. Many of us in the movement are still trying to get grounded from being hit so hard below the belt, and still finding our words after years of having them suppressed, twisted, and/or obscured by the power players. If making things clearer and putting together a collective voice is what you are interpreting as attacks or shutting dialogue, I have to ask — Does psychiatry know or even care to know what creates effective dialogue? So far, biological psychiatry has not provided an acceptable answer to that question. If some of us want to move on, and it’s called anti-psychiatry, so be it. It doesn’t mean that we don’t know where we want to go, collectively or otherwise.
This is about as good as crazy nonsense “explanations ” that I’ve seen ont his topic. Humour often comes from a dark place. Think I met up with Dr. NutJob who has a practice in the same medical building as Dr. Bonkers.
Something told me to speak to a lady who was on drugs because she felt she is bipolar and needs to be taking “medication.” I felt it was important to validate her. I kept it brief and to the point. “Psychiatry is bullshit. You’re not.” I didn’t change her mind on the spot about psychiatry, but I think healing begins with validating that person and echoing that knowing “voice” inside of them which psychiatric “treatment” has hushed up.
Didn’t feel I had a clear cut case against Neurontin because of environmental illness load I was carrying, but neurontin was the biomedical straw which broke the camel’s back. Life changed course after that last iatrogenic trauma.
Some years ago, a friend of mine posted that if you called a a domestic abuse hotline and reported that your spouse was forcing toxic drugs, isolating, humilitating, threatening and/or doing physical harm, listing many of the abuses which are done in the name of “treatment” but substituted “the spouse” for “the psychiatrist,” you’d be advised to go to a shelter. I think comparing domestic violence to psychiatric abuse and endangerment makes some excellent points and might even be useful in educating those who have not been harmed by the system, but I think our best hope is in creating better alternatives than the mh system and not put more energy into trying to fix a broken system to keep it going.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highlander_Research_and_Education_Center
I find that the process of disengaging from the personal and social context of ceremonial degradation to be similar to Kubler Ross stages of death and dying.
I avoid going into a lot of discussion about my personal dramas online. However would like to share with you that I had to make some drastic decisions after being retraumatized again ten years ago and for the first few years barely spoke to anyone and only would email correspond with a couple of friends. What you describe is very familiar to me. I too decided to “steer clear of the whole circus.” If I had learned anything in the mh system, it was to keep ideas, perceptions, connections/understandings which were new to me but not yet something I fully understood, to myself. The mh system is the bull in the china shop to processing experience.
I suffer from heat intolerance which I have dealt with since the last retraumatization by obtaining and using cooling compensations but at the time I was hospitalized was sleep deprived and ill from the heat, environmental illness, and was reacting badly to Neurontin which was prescribed off label at the time. After I was retraumatized, I felt the way I looked and acted when suffering from the heat made me vulnerable to another psychiatric incarceration. I’ve had lived through near a lifetime of bad summers suffering from the heat or indoors too much because of it (another story about a different type of trauma).I was released from the hospital because my labs showed that I was physically ill, but in the days before the lab work came back, the psychiatrist was trying to pin so many crazy diagnoses on me just to keep me there including deciding I was paranoid schizophrenic for reporting domestic abuse. He did so little trying to find out what was going on that he never knew anything about the environmental illness or problems with the heat. Most of the whole world once again became very dangerous, “war zone,” and off limits.
I know having some long term friends in the movement, who I could email correspond with and talk to, helped a great deal, but for the most part still live reclusively and practice avoidance and for the most part have gone underground.
If there is any possibility that psychiatry would ever clean up its act, acknowledging and dealing responsibly with iatrogenic traumatization and retraumatization would be a good place to start. The lesson I came away with is when a system is getting and giving rewards for suppressing and controlling people, nobody needs to know what’s really going on other than what is required to keep from getting sued.
I’ve heard the comment “That’s a crazy dream” (DSM confirming) at least twice. What the hell does that mean?
Chaya, Thanks for the good and sensible thoughts. I haven’t been there yet. I think my intrinsic energy does something other than yours does. Your way has not been the way for me to work this stuff out. I am not a public speaker nor comfortable in large anonymous groups and have accepted this about myself. For me it is not the quantity of people who listen but the quality of the connection.
Wow! It’s all so true. What I particularly like about what you’ve written is (1) You’ve made the same observations and have the same understanding that I do, biology and wholistic related, but with better charts and clearer explanations. Sometimes even when among members of the movement, it has not been easy to communicate where I am coming from, so reading your post is a treat (2) You go into a comprehensive discussion of what works and why which also explains why the current pervasive paradigm does not heal or help. It just makes so much darned good sense.
Wow! It’s all so true. What I particularly like about what you’ve written is (1) You’ve made the same observations and have the same understanding that I do, biology and wholistic related, butwith better charts and clearer explanations. Sometimes even when among members of the movement, it has not been easy to communicate where I am coming from, so reading your post is a treat (2) You go into a comprehensive discussion of what works and why which also explains why the current pervasive paradigm does not heal or help. It just makes so much darned good sense.
I think we are very much a part of creating a new culture, and it’s going to happen irregardless of who is listening or paying attention. I’m no historian, but as far as I know we are in unchartered territory in that we don’t have a shared culture to retrieve, no common threads rooted in a long tradition to knit us all up together when we’ve been dispersed, and using the common language is in question when we need to communicate to each other. Nonetheless, I think something new, something better is going to happen anyway.
I just want to take this opportunity to thanks those within the movement who have been doing outreach in the movement (but not excluded to only within the movement) — the teleconferences which educate people about getting off of drugs, teleconferences to repeal mental health law, and whatever ways people are coming up with to get together and not limit gatherings and education to only those who can afford travel and lodging expenses.
Recent attempt had been made here to get some space at a local community project for a drop in center. Attitudes still very much this is and should be domain of the hospitals and mh professionals. Guess it depends on where you are and who you are dealing with and the personalities involved but never lose sight of when and where the movement’s bubble ends and the mainstream begins. With NAMI, always ask — what kind of recovery are they talking about? — Too much of the time, it’s been recovery contingent on a lifetime of medication management. Not something a lot of us are interested in confusing with recovery.
Paris, I’ve never thought of it as busting a corporate propaganda and marketing balloon. Maybe what I think is too simplistic to apply to huge coporations and more myth out of an older America, but I still think there is some element of truth to it. I just figure the guy who can make it better, sell it cheaper, whose goods get a better reputation and are more in demand stands a chance of winning in the marketplace.
Profound good sense during hard times. Empathic intelligence tends to lose its value and becomes harder to find as economic scarcity puts the screws to society — broken people seeking to break others. People get no less than mental illness diagnosed/pathologized for voicing the same ideas which Paris Williams has shared here — the critical understanding.
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AUTISM AWARENESS MONTH
April is national Autism Awareness Month and the SPD Foundation and STAR Center want the world to know some facts about Autism and Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD).
Did you know?
More than 75% of children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) have significant symptoms of SPD. However, the reverse is not true. Most children with SPD do not have an autistic spectrum disorder. See research on Autism in our website library.
SPD Foundation research suggests that SPD and ASD are distinct disorders just as SPD and ADHD are different disorders.
Sensory features are now included as core diagnostic criteria of autism spectrum disorders in the new DSM coming out May 2013.
Addressing sensory features is foundational to improving the social and communication problems of children with Autism.
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The DSM-5 really got sensory processing disorder wrong despite the the SPD Foundations’s efforts to set them straight.
To Jack Carney, I like the way you think. As I read your strategy, I thought it read like a it could inspire a movie script. Truth is stranger than fiction. Maybe it’ll it be much better than a movie script because it’ll be a documentary as to how it was done.
Does anyone ever consider that the frightening and negative messages of our organized religions and the conflicts between the religions may be making us sick? If not getting to us consciously then subconsciously? Maybe the wars which are fought over religion are also fought in the subliminal realm? This thought has come to me from time to time. No way to prove or disprove. Maybe tally up the delegates from each religion in the psych ward UN. I can’t say I’ve been all that interested in these lengthy discussions on religion. Prefer dreams, stories, myths and reinventing myths. Less prone to arguments. More prone to creative invention.
Pax
Stay grounded and centered when the shift flies,
Rabbit
Study was done at Yale, breaking down use of psych drugs into regional clusters. They found that the use of psych drugs is 40 percent higher in a large section of the South and “Antipsychotics were most commonly used in Gainesville, Fla., where 4.6 percent of local residents took the drugs, compared with a national average of 0.8 percent.” I don’t know if we have any chance of persuading the local mh consortium in Gainesville, FL to sponsor you as a speaker, but we keep hoping and trying. Info on Yale study: http://news.health.com/2013/02/01/psychiatric-drugs-more-often-prescribed-in-the-south/
BTW, I don’t interpret mh labels as infectious disease. It’s the pervasive “broken brain” consciousness, which is so prevalent in the mainstream, which is symbolized as infectious disease.
As far as stories which tell of rumor of infectious disease, I like the movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Have enjoyed what I’ve seen of Dan Fisher’s posts and hope we can get him to speak in this area of of the highest rates of neuroleptic prescribing in the country and the attitudes which go along with it (http://news.health.com/2013/02/01/psychiatric-drugs-more-often-prescribed-in-the-south/). Since Dan is talking dreams, I add one of my own here:
Was walking near entrance of a laboratory where the worst infectious diseases are studied. Hazmat suits hung on a hook outside the laboratory. Assumed laboratory for studying this class of infectious disease was on the top floor. Labs studying less infectious diseases were on lower floors. Felt I was being required to walk through lab on top floor without hazmat suit. Next dream image — was in very cramped room, although sunlit, there was no space to sit down. Felt room was in the same building as the laboratories.
Felt the infectious disease laboratory, which I was required to walk through, represented mainstream and psychiatric propaganda and social pressure to conform to it and make it part of my own belief system. Top floor might have meant orders came from the most empowered and influential people as psychiatric treatment is perhaps the last socially and legally sanctioned hate crime, maintaining its strongest hold before it finally lets go. Walking through the lab without a hazmat suit was a job requirement. Finding myself in the cramped room with no place to sit down and get comfortable perhaps represented isolation and punishment for being at odds with the system, lack of humane alternatives, and ongoing issues with iatrogenic trauma and retraumatization.
Decided decades ago that I did not suffer from “a lack of self esteem” and whatever snap decision DSM diagnosis which the case manager found handy to use in the moment. Perhaps more accurate, I had underdeveloped sense of self entitlement. Democracy of souls brought together by Internet technology reminds me that I am not alone, in particular Michael E. Nagler who teaches Peace Studies from Berkeley online. “Sassing” is an ignorant word used by ignorant people who expect complete compliance in return for being unaccountable for their actions. Heard a lot of the word in the mh system. My diagnoses never helped me get beyond the problems I have with florescent lights and inability to stay well in hot, humid weather or in the high pollen seasons or in rooms which smell like floor polishes. Can never write an essay about making it through to the other side of diagnoses AND finding hope because what I have never been able to overcome leaves me feeling too impaired and too vulnerable and often isolated for months at a time. I keep a low profile, observe (something I have learned I can do astutely well), take notes, occasionally write stories. The kind of creative maladjustment I do and money for what a cup of coffee costs will get me a cup of coffee. Contact with the mh system is reinforcement in fear and hopelessness and reminder that much of what is considered true and benevolent is measured in dollars and cents.
Aside from the experiences with slow torture eugenics, hospitals which don’t heal and other negative social fallout, I think being a labellee has been a boot camp training of filtering out bullshit from what’s true. I’m not sure at this point what this training is going to be good for.
dragonfly, If you google on “Superman, Jewish assimilation,” you’ll come up with some interesting either speculations or information about the creators of the original Superman comics. Just wanted to put a little happier twist on your comment about assimilation. (dragonfly: If you are a “Good Jew”, if you don’t look too Jewish or talk too Jewish, they might give you a job as a capo at the camp!). I know where you are coming from. Was not an attempt to invalidate.
If you have to deal a lot with things,which don’t make sense and are also horrible, you should take a burnout prevention break from time to time and enjoy the fanciful, happier myths of our time.
I’m not sure how you go about creating alliances outside the movement. In just about every social group, there’s someone who feels they have a biological brain disorder and needs their psychiatric medication. They may know about the horrors of the system but cannot be budged on what they believe to be true about themselves and their diagnosis. It creeps me out too much to have much to do with it, and I know most normies in social groups outside the movement would be more likely to support the diagnosis self identified person than they would be willing to understand what I believe. Been there, done that.
dragonfly, remember superman comic books (sorry couldn’t resist that)
Ted, I’ll probably end up on the same database as you for reporting domestic abuse and having physical disability issues which I still have not been able to address.
I think this blocked petition is an indication of just how much influence, ownership? of our gov’t BigPharma has. Have seen it on the media. How much is there to figure out?
Books on philosophy are often too abstract for me to read without a guided tour from which I can at least draft up a flow chart. I usually look around and ask what and where are the tools for change. There’s more to it than that, but I don’t usually post a lot online. I once got into trouble with the system for saying “If I believed that [I and others were no more than their DSM dx and prognosis], I would be in trouble.” That about sums up what I have to say today and have felt and believed for a long time.
I tell friends not to listen too much to the media now. It makes things worse. Makes things better that there are essays like this one posted online. Otherwise, talk is cheap.
Being afraid of the system and knowing how dangerous it is, not knowing who to trust has had a lot to do with losing sense grounding and connection. Will not elaborate further because this is posted on the Internet.
I don’t categorize Icarus and MindFreedom so distinctly into separate compartments — Icarus does the spiritual and MindFreedom does the protests. I believe, as Ghandi did, advocating for human rights is a form of here and now spirituality in action. I see and experience MindFreedom doing a lot to deprogram people from the mh propaganda and how it has defined us, in other words, clear a lot of mental junk out and make room for something new and better. I think suitable companions are important to personal and spiritual growth, and so much better than hearing “You’re the only one who thinks that way, so that proves there must be something wrong with you.” Thanks, Seth and also to Paul Levy for opening up discussion on these topics. I don’t know if those who have opened the doors of perception are destined to change the world and make it more humane and compassionate. I only know that the Messiah (or Messianic Age) will not be until it is time for it to be.
Usually cheap and easy (or easier) explains stupid and harmful, but permanently disabling people, especially young people, on drugs defies common sense and is not cheap and easy as it presents more problems than solutions. Been my experience that psyciatrists don’t talk to patients. They talk at them. You’re dealing with authority for which you risk consequences for questioning. How these people ever learn anything about those they allege to treat a mystery to me. I also don’t think psychiatrists are predisposed to being good observers or original thinkers. They too are going along with the prescribing pack and believing what they are told.