Additions to misconceptions about the history of psychiatry
> Neuroleptics have made it possible to empty psychiatric hospitals
No, it’s retirement homes and antibiotics (among other things) – medico-social developments. Before 1945, the majority of people admitted to psychiatry suffered from organic psychoses, in particular senility, cerebral atherosclerosis and syphilis. Antibiotics almost completely eradicated syphilis, while the elderly were gradually admitted to nursing homes. Another psychosis that has diminished without neuroleptics having anything to do with it is alcoholic psychosis.
> With neuroleptics, the discharge rate was higher than the admission rate
No, it was not until 1970 that the number of discharges exceeded the number of admissions, 15 years after the introduction of neuroleptics. From 1955 to 1970, American psychiatric hospitals were emptied due to a very high mortality rate (about 9% per year), mainly caused by the demographic structure of the hospitals (many old people, few young people)
> Before neuroleptics, psychotics remained locked up all their lives
In 1922, in the USA, for 100 schizophrenics admitted, 57.4 were discharged during the year.
Itâs a bad result, but not as bad as some would have us believe.
The other psychoses had the following discharge rates:
bipolar disorder: 75%
melancholy depression: 64%
paranoia: 61.9%
neurosis: 95%
The study of real statistics will make it possible to replace the mythology of psychiatry with the history of psychiatry.
The only investment that psychiatry and all those who support it deserve is the construction of prisons to put all these people out of state of causing trouble.
I disapprove this article for the following reasons:
The article presents itself as a measured critique of a valid scientific subject, in so doing it totally misses the point.
There is no such thing as a real illness called “depression” and therefore no cure either.
Psychotherapy is not a real therapy, like oxygen therapy for example, but a cultural relationship similar to the Christian confession or to the exorcism of demons. Psychotherapy is surrounded by the same kind of irrational mystic.
By design it is not scientific, but it can be the object of scientific investigation, like ethnology.
–
What this study describes is a ritual similar to shamanism, embellished with a scientistic pretension unique to modern culture. Whoever takes these scientistic claims seriously proves that he has not understood anything about what âdepressionâ, âtreatmentâ and âpsychotherapyâ really are, namely simulation of illness and simulation of medicine: cultural traits. A rational person observe in this experience people who ritualistically indulge in drug addiction, and surround it with a contemporary scientistic and mystical justification: psychiatry.
–
It is reprehensible to present the “results” of this study as promising or scientific.
Drug addiction is an instrument of the bourgeoisie aimed at stupefying and weakening the proletariat, preventing it from looking for the real causes of its misfortune and paralyzing it with rituals of self-mortification.
The mortification presented here produces an artificial psychosis and a state of psychic vulnerability which, even in the long term, “benevolent” people are sure to exploit.
People who voluntarily place themselves in a state of vulnerability will suffer the consequences. The people who encourage people to weaken themselves are foxes and those who trust in them are baby rabbits. Any auto-intoxication, any drug addiction will have its biological and social consequences.
–
In short, this kind of research has to be denounced for what it is: a stupid advertisement for narcotics, the level of scientificity of which does not exceed that of a village sorcerer who justifies the use of hallucinogens to hunt demons (today, our neo-shamans hunt âdepressionâ, to seem more modern), and whose social goal is illusion, attrition and submission.
“about 1% of people get a schizophrenia diagnosis in the general population.” It’s half less.
“Of the 132 core studies, 21 studies reported point prevalence, 34 reported period prevalence, and 24 reported lifetime prevalence. The median prevalence of schizophrenia was 4.6/1,000 for point prevalence, 3.3/1,000 for period prevalence, 4.0 for lifetime prevalence, and 7.2 for lifetime morbid risk. [âŠ] Several important findings emerge from Saha and colleagues’ analysis. For clinicians, the analysis indicates clearly that lifetime prevalence is 4.0/1,000 and not 1%, as reported in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition, and other textbooks.”
Since the diagnosis of schizophrenia is not based on biological but cultural observations, it does not make sense to look for genetic causes that are relatively fixed, to a cultural phenomenon that is changing. This is typically the kind of situation where one can find correlations without causality.
Example: Suppose that for cultural reasons, people with blue eyes inspire less confidence and are more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia. Blue eyes are genetically determined. We will therefore find a correlation between the genetic factors that determine the color of the eyes and schizophrenia. This correlation is not a causality.
Genetics determine many traits in living things, but these traits are then interpreted culturally, often unconsciously. Schizophrenia is typically the interpretation of a cultural phenomenon, without biological observation. The limited correlations of schizophrenia with genetics do not therefore mean anything in particular.
It is not necessary to initiate new research on products which have already been shown in randomized trials to worsen psychosis in the long term (Rappaport, 1978, etc.). Prescribing neuroleptics has been maintained for political non-medical reasons, as it is an excellent tool of repression, superior to the whip and the cangue, to obtain submission.
It is therefore by political means that neuroleptics can be suppressed, on the occasion of a revolution, by the outright prohibition of psychiatry, the seizure of all personal and institutional property of people participating in psychiatry, and their internment during the revolution, as prisoners of civil war.
Rappaport, M. âAre there schizophrenics for whom drugs may be unnecessary or contraindicated?â Int Pharmacopsychiatry 13 (1978): 100-11
I’m not sure if this is the right place to do it, but I would like to publicly suggest you to implement a preprint section on a dedicated MIA-related wiki, and develop the open review.
The preprint and the open review on wiki offers many advantages:
Protect from any accusations of censorship, because even when a paper is not accepted, it is available on the preprint wiki and the reasons for its rejection are available on the talk page.
Discussions about improving the article are public.
The different versions of the article are accessible via the history of changes.
Wiki technology facilitates an open collaboration between authors, reviewers and editors. The greater the openness, the greater the trust.
There is a free, ad-free wiki platform for associations and foundations ourproject.org. They will welcome MIA with open arms.
The length of withdrawal depends on the degree of addiction, and the degree of addiction in turn depends on the length of exposure, among other things.
This is why I think expressing the length of withdrawal as an absolute value doesn’t make a lot of sense, and it would be better to express it as a percentage of the length of exposure.
For example, a person exposed for 6 months to a neuroleptic will probably not need 9 months to wean, while for a person exposed for 10 years, 9 months will probably not be enough, let alone multiple drug abuse.
To say that a person probably needs 10% to 20% of the exposure time to wean may make more sense, although other factors come into play as well.
In addition, one should not overlook personal and relational subjective factors, and even political factors.
States that promote legal drug addiction for social regulation (and all states do) will make withdrawal more difficult.
I think the length of withdrawal should be biologically “reasonable”, but political intervention is needed.
> In the French procedure, the sleep is the treatment.
LOL. It made me laugh to read this. We realize how stupid the procedure is. It’s like an anesthesiologist saying that anesthesia is the treatment, and if 2 hours of general anesthesia isn’t enough, he will try it for 15 days.
However, don’t trust the presentation of Doctissimo. What this article proves is that sleep therapy exists, not how or why it is used. Since the practice is legal in France, it can be used in non-voluntary care, and nothing prevents it from being combined with other treatments, including electroshock.
It is very difficult to know how much and how sleep therapy is used in France, in voluntary care or without consent, alone or in combination with other treatments, because there are no statistics. However, it is likely that the practice is relatively rare in France, because otherwise I would have found other testimonies. In any case, French psychiatrists have a free hand to combine sleep therapy with other treatments, including care without consent, simply because it is legal.
Are you sure it is not practiced in Australia or the United States?
You can find on this forum the messages of a certain Ătienne who testifies that his sister-in-law was hospitalized for a sleep cure in 2011, described as follows:
Sleep: 20 hours a day
for: 15 days
Xanax infusion.
Many French pro-psychiatric websites describe the sleep cure in very favorable terms, specifying that it is practiced in psychiatric hospitals.
In the 90s, a doctor was given a one-year suspended prison sentence after killing his patient with a sleep cure. Nevertheless, the court does not question the practice of the sleep cure in itself, but only the conditions in which it was carried out (drug addict patient, at home, no medical supervision).
In our time, this kind of research is unethical: we have known for a long time that neuroleptics damage the brain, and new “research” on this subject only harms more people, who are treated like animals.
Research has already been done, neuroleptics must be banned now, without exposing more humans in studies whose results are known in advance.
Fanon was a fanatic of insulin comas and electroshocks. But let Fanon speak for himself, since here, the editorial staff have lost any critical thinking to the point of extol one of the criminals we are fighting.
“Second step. During a narco-analysis, we push the shot until deep sleep, we change the patient’s environment, and we transfer her to another district, where she must be submitted, without any new contact with the old psychotherapist, to the Bini cure [electroshocks]. Reaching the confusing stage as quickly as possible, we replace the “nursing home” environment and the individual room, with the very “hospital” “set” for several patients. Practically, if she has some clearings of conscience during these first days, she can only note the vague concept of “disease”, and that very reassuring of “attentive care”.
Third step. Once the confused amnesic stage has been obtained, the patient begins to undergo insulin therapy [insulin comas] the aim of which is to place her, at the beginning of her awakening, in the very primitive situation of the mother-child intercourses: food in the mouth, cleanliness care, first words. […]
[…]
Gradually, the corrections and the awareness of the situation become total. “I’m sorry, I was very sick, the other day, I spoke to you as if you were Miss X., twenty years ago…, when my brother was born… we didn’t need him. Now I don’t have to have the same ideas. It was a conversation I had with her. We spoiled him so bad he was raised badly… I’m confused about it. I was told that I was sick, but I didn’t believe it… It’s a great place here, with you… If one day I relapse – there has heredity with us – I would not hesitate a moment to come back… “
She talks and cares about concrete problems in her community, especially with our only sister-nurse…, sometimes with us…; the behaviour becomes completely normal, and there is no sign of deterioration. She re-enters the community and quickly adapts to it. The hospitalization with us lasted a total of three months. During the five days of annihilation, she had seventeen electroshocks. She underwent forty insulin therapy sessions, forty days of directed institutional therapy.”
I solemnly protest against the pro-psychiatric deviation of Mad in America, which reaches new heights where a supporter of electroshock, insulin comas and patient annihilation can be promoted as “radical” and “progressive” on Mad in America.
I note that I have indeed misinterpreted your words and that you are indeed in favor of the use of psychiatric drugs.
You simply object to the “abuse” of psychotropic substances and the coercive use of these drugs.
Thatâs why we have nothing in common, and I totally reject Marcello Mavigliaâs call to work together.
On the contrary, in my comment, which has been the subject of major cuts in order to be published, I called to exclude from Mad in America those favorable to psychiatric drugs, that is to say, not to allow them to publish here.
[Moderation.]
By way of analysis, I believe there are two irreconcilable categories of readers and editors here on Mad in America.
First we have the “carers”, the intellectuals, the journalists, who studied at the university and who share a common “habitus” between themselves and with the psychiatrists, that is to say, to simplify, the same social class. These are supporters of “critical” psychiatry, they want to reform psychiatry to save it, make it better and develop it according to their views. They do not hesitate to ask for more budgets for psychiatry and to promote illegal drugs, which they are often very fond of.
And then we have the real victims of psychiatry, those who were broken by the machine, those who experienced REAL mournings and REAL mutilations. Those who lost their freedoms, those who saw their loved ones wiped out by treatment that made them weak and helpless – or DEAD. Those who saw the criminality of psychiatrists, through their agreement with the family to camouflage rapes and incest, for the production of false certificates to lock up, for the systematic violation of professional secrecy and private life and all other human rights.
For these, no compromise, no agreement is possible and psychiatry must be exterminated to the root, so that not even a fossil remains for centuries to come.
This is why you will understand that the reformists, with their legal and illegal drugs, their intentions of better “caring” us, their complacency with their colleagues, their pacifism, their moderation and their common work with psychiatrists, all these people are for us like a splinter in the foot.
I hope that my message will not be censored, and that it will not be subject to any cut, having expressed in the clearest way possible the position of a certain number of people who read, comment or publish here.
Maybe someday I will write a blog about the necessary prohibition of psychotropic drugs, except anesthesia and rigorously controlled, reasonable duration weaning (because a weaning which lasts more than 2 years is a fake weaning).
Prohibition is necessary not only for medical reasons, but also for political reasons.
The prohibition of psychotropic drugs and psychiatry in general, whether exercised by a psychiatrist or anyone else, will allow us to separate allies and enemies on this point, and allow us to crush members of the psychiatric industry/institution.
This is why I say that prohibition is necessary on several levels.
Do you know this quote from John Ehrlichman?
âYou want to know what this was really all about?â he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. âThe Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what Iâm saying? We knew we couldnât make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.â
ââDan Baum, Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs, Harper’s Magazine (April 2016)
If one day we take the power, we will use the same kind of methods, but in an open way, to crush psychiatrists (and not Blacks or anti-war activists). The little cannabis users, we don’t care.
We want prohibition, for get hold of the psychiatrists. Prohibition (among other measures) will allow us to bring down an entire sector of the old state repressive apparatus and develop our own repressive apparatus. Only, our repressive apparatus will be directed against a whole other section of the society.
In her articles, Laura Guerra spoke out clearly against drug use (not only against drug âabuseâ): she translated a book by P. Breggin and severely warned her readers against drugs.
On the contrary, according to the biography of Dan Monticelli, Dan Monticelli and Marcello Maviglia have together written a book entitled: âNew Paths to Recovery: Behavioral, Physical and Spiritual Potentials for Cannabisâ.
Since Marcello Maviglia is a psychiatrist, I would like to ask him the question: [moderation]? Or put another way: does he prescribe psychotropic drugs?
Since Marcello Maviglia is asking for feedback on his project, here is mine.
I believe [moderation] and drug promoters should be removed from the “Mad” network.
[moderation]
[Published after autor and moderation’s agreement.]
Early genius is, obviously, non-genetic. See the experience of the PolgĂĄr sisters. Common factors include an early start and hard work. Behind all precocious genius, there is a pedagogue. If early genius were genetic, it would be passed from parent to child, and we would have successive generations of geniuses that would reproduce predictably. But this is not the case.
What about animal experimentation? Indeed, I doubt that the mice raise their twins MZ and DZ differently. The use of laboratory mice would allow to pass them double-blind tests, and to test the mice in very large numbers and at low cost.
Given that the breeding and testing environment is extremely similar and that the mice have no culture but only instinctive behavior, such a well-controlled and double-blind experiment would give us serious clues about plausibility of the genetic hypothesis.
My opinion is that there will be no statistically significant difference in behavior depending on whether the twin pairs are MZ or DZ.
Critical psychiatrists can never help but make a concession to mainstream psychiatry: “Pills may be helpful to modulate extreme distress”, which illustrates that they are from the same corporation and have the same function.
All that distinguishes a critical psychiatrist from a conventional psychiatrist is the feeling of guilt, but a critical psychiatrist will never take it upon himself to take revolutionary action: on the contrary, they always admit, according to their program, that narcotics can be useful “in some cases” and put us to sleep with promises of reform that will never come.
Who can believe a man who works in a mental hospital? He will fill out the same psychiatric records, engage in the same drug trafficking and offer absolution to anyone who seeks in him the root cause of his misfortunes.
After the drug trade, the intimate confession? We know that the Mafia has always been very attached to the Catholic Church. Likewise, psychiatrists are staunch defenders of psychotherapy, which is somehow their excuse and their priesthood for all the crimes they have committed.
Corrupt priests might as well say that the Mafia can redeem itself. Narcotics, kidnappings, blackmail, corruption, extortion and exploitation: all this can be corrected as soon as you surrender your soul to God. But don’t stop the Mafia! Amen.
Suppose 1000 people are going through a psychotic crisis in families refusing psychiatric treatment.
Suppose, 5 years later, 90% have recovered, and 10% have worsened.
In desperation, the families of these 10% finally hospitalize them.
In this case, we observe that 100% of people hospitalized have worsened in the last 5 years. Psychiatrists might observe that, in this group of chronic psychotics, the recovery rate is only 5%. But it is a selection bias: the original sample of this group was 1,000 people, and 90% of this group have recovered and will never go to psychiatry. They are therefore invisible.
Now suppose 100 people are going through a psychotic crisis, but this time, in families following the recommendations of psychiatrists, and immediately hospitalizing their loved one.
Suppose that with medication, 5 years later, 30% of people recover and 70% become chronic psychotics.
Thus, according to psychiatric observations:
30% of psychotics treated immediately recover, 40% become chronic;
5% of psychotics treated 5 years later recover, 95% remain chronic.
But according to the actual data:
90% of psychotics never treated recover, 10% become chronic;
30% of psychotics treated immediately recover, 70% become chronic.
–
Association â causality.
Sometimes a negative association can reveal positive causation.
The psychedelics of indigenous societies have a social function, just like the psychotropics of capitalist society: to prevent society from evolving. Primitive societies are absolutely incredible in their concervatism: they can remain similar to themselves for tens of thousands of years.
The ritual consumption of narcotics to stupefy the people and thus prevent any human progress is thus an instrument of choice to keep society in its current state. No new invention, no discovery is then possible.
It is only in exceptional circumstances (war, famine, migration …) that the tribe is forced to moderate its consumption of narcotics, and possibly to evolve, but it takes an extremely long time.
Thus, the opposition of indigenous “spiritual” society to “materialist” capitalist society is irrelevant, because in both cases the consumption of narcotics has a surprisingly similar social function: to prevent society from evolving. And more precisely in capitalist society: preventing the revolution.
What is true for the monople of alcohol is just as true for the “medical” monopoly of massively consumed psychiatric drugs in contemporary capitalist society.
You and other writers of Mad In America have gained crucial experience in examining research, consisting in tests and analysis criteria.
Isn’t it time to compile all these criteria in a protocol, allowing to carry out a systematic review of research according to predictable and rigorously defined criteria?
We always find the same criteria in your articles and those of other editors:
_ representative vs non-representative population
_ placebo study vs withdrawal study
_ naive population vs non-naive population
_ Confounding factors (including medication)
_ short term vs long term
_ protection of the safety (in particular due to withdrawal)
Etc.
There is not much missing to compile all these criteria in a systematic analysis protocol.
I would like different Mad In America editors to come together to establish such a protocol, which would guide the editors in their analysis of studies.
It makes it possible to assess the quality of studies in a stricter, more in-depth and better defined manner.
Such a protocol could eventually become a recognized standard for evaluating scientific research.
> In June 2018, he pleaded guilty to the theft of $87,000, after which a judge sentenced Neumeister â a classically trained pianist â to play piano for “an hour at least twice weekly for the next three years at group facilities in Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, and Waterbury,” Connecticut, the Associated Press reported at the time.
This is a joke? To punish him, the judge asked him to do a leisure activity ?? !!!
It’s been 312 hours of leisure.
$87,000/312h = $280/h
And meanwhile, there are people who spend years in jail for pickpocketing.
The judges also, they will have to be punished for their class complacency.
“Those who […] were currently abusing substances […] were excluded from the study. […] Participants were assisted in tapering their current antidepressant medication and were allowed benzodiazepines only if needed.”
But antidepressants and benzodiazepines consumption IS substances abuse!
Since when is the consumption of antidepressants or benzodiazepines no longer a drug addiction? Because a psychiatrist said it was good for your health? Because the state says it’s legal?
Addiction to psychiatric drugs is almost always more serious than addiction to illegal drugs, because psychiatric drugs are practically free, while illegal drugs are relatively expensive. Thus there is an economic limit to the consumption of illegal drugs, while for legal drugs, the pockets of social security and insurance are wide open!
The severe consumption of psychiatric drugs, the concomitant withdrawal from antidepressants, and the “at will” consumption of benzodiazepines make the “results” of this pseudo-study completely random.
Besides, we don’t need “scientific” studies to find out if recreational drugs are … recreational. Obviously, certain drugs are “pleasant”, and they temporarily decrease the suffering of some. People are ready to risk prison, and even life, to consume them! Not only do these studies teach us nothing, but in addition their methods are fraudulent, dishonest and criminal: why not give good doses of heroin to depressed people? I am sure that such a study would give “promising” results according to the kind of analysis that Mad in America give us for hallucinogens.
Why this double standard? Why then a rigorous critical analysis for neuroleptics, and a disgusting complacency for hallucinogens? It is however the same kind of pseudo-science at the basis of their promotion!
—
There are reasons to believe that this selective complacency is not innocent. Just as scientists must declare their conflicts of interest, journalists who promote the use of illegal drugs should declare whether they are former users, occasional users or regular users.
For me, it is extremely doubtful that this sudden collapse of the critical mind, when hallucinogens comes to discussion, is pure chance.
When you talk about recreational drugs, honesty requires that you make a declaration of consumption or non-consumption, whether in the past or in the present.
Mad in America is totally ambivalent about drugs. There is no clear editorial line.
On the one hand “Mad in America” will require long-term studies on neuroleptics, antidepressants and anxyolitics, and conclude that they must be condemned. Some authors deny the existence of mental illness, and claim an exclusively social and / or cultural approach.
On the other, it prostrates itself against illegal recreational drugs, based on short-term clinical trials, the scientific value of which is extremely low. There is then no longer any serious scientific requirement, and “mental illness” again becomes like a real disease, which must be treated with medication.
I say that I have had enough of this ambivalence.
I say that the editorial line must be clearer, that Mad in America must abandon its anti-scientific spirit when it comes to illegal and recreational drugs.
But are there effective treatments for chronic pain? Are there randomized studies which prove that a treatment for chronic pain is effective beyond two years?
This is a silent character.
To my knowledge, “chronic pain” means to the doctor:
a) put the patient on opioids,
b) enrich himself in a pornographic way like a heroin dealer until the patient’s death.
If someone has the reference of a randomized study comparing an analgesic to a placebo or the absence of treatment, and doing a follow-up beyond two years, I am interested.
The object of study being chronic pain, studies whose follow-up is less than two years are not relevant.
Testing psychotherapy to cure “mental illness” is as meaningless as testing exorcism to cast out demons.
Exorcism and psychotherapy are cultural activities whose “effectiveness” depends on the social and personal congruence between the parties.
It is not surprising that psychotherapy is more effective in wealthy people, since psychotherapy was born in liberal circles.
The bursting of psychotherapeutic approaches attests to the diversity, complexity, syncretism and cosmopolitism of modern Western culture, unlike other older, more local and more homogeneous cultures.
Psychotherapy is neither medical nor paramedical, it is a purely cultural activity which testifies to the time and the place in which we live.
It is out of the question to reimburse psychotherapies, just as it is out of the question that the State or Social Security finance the Church; all this is only the corporatism of charlatans associated ready to submit to state control in order to enrich themselves.
Schizophrenia is defined by a series of sets of behaviors, not even consistent with each other.
Not being a scientifically defined entity, but rather an extremely vague social category, it doesn’t even make sense to search for genetics under it.
Here are two real cases of people diagnosed with schizophrenia:
Case 1
At the beginning of adolescence, a young girl begins to use recreational drugs massively, in the milieu of rave parties. A little later, she develops a severe psychosis. Her divorced father was himself an addict, addicted to hard drugs.
Psychiatric “diagnostic”: schizophrenia.
“Treatment”: neuroleptics.
The girl continues to use recreational drugs, no measures are taken to change her social environment or to clarify the links between her father’s addiction and her own addiction. On the contrary, her psychiatrist is actively involved in getting her to test various drugs, including a psychostimulant which has triggered an extreme psychotic crisis.
Case 2
At 14, a young girl is sexually touched by her stepfather. The family decides to keep the matter quiet, and recommends to the girl do the same. At 18, the girl begins to tell her story to everyone, and shows a rebellious and independent spirit. She leaves the family home with the intention of no longer living with her stepfather. Her mother calls her back, and, without explicitly forbidding her, makes her understand that she must not leave the family (double-bind). The girl begins to develop a sort of “uncertainty psychosis”, deciding to return home then immediately after leaving. This alternation of decisions becomes faster and faster until the girl becomes completely confused. She was quickly interned by her mother. Since then, she is regularly interned by her parents, as soon as she shows initiative, which triggers a psychosis.
“Diagnosis”: schizophrenia.
“Treatment”: neuroleptics and successive hospitalizations, in order to “subdue” her (to make her accept the illness and the treatment, which she refuses).
Other family and environmental aspects: the sister was raped by the stepfather’s brother at the age of 5. She did not develop psychosis. Of course, there is no genetic link between the father-in-law and the uncle on the one hand, and the two sisters on the other. This young woman is “supported” by those around her, but like a “mental patient”; she is also treated as a “sacred person”, being mentioned that she is truly in contact with the world of the beyond (literally). Thus, her entourage justifies her “schizophrenia” by a contradictory mixture of genetics, mysticism and incest; the sordid reality of sexual touching is most often concealed and minimized in favor of psychiatric and mystical explanations. Her grandmother bluntly told her that incest was a “normal” phenomenon, and that it was important not to talk about it.
–
Two completely different cases, clearly non-genetic and treated in the same way by psychiatry. How can we even seriously consider that these two people could have a “common genetic profile” that would distinguish them and separate them from the rest of humanity? Genetics serve as a cover-up for an absolutely obvious, overwhelming social reality, which psychiatrists have the task of camouflaging for the benefit of family tranquility: the drug addiction of a father, the incest of a stepfather.
This is the real justification for the so-called “research” on the genetics of this absurd entity that is “schizophrenia”.
Currently, scientific research on nutrition is in absolute contradiction with official nutritional recommendations.
We don’t eat enough fat: the PURE study (Dehghan, 2017), bringing together more than 130,000 people over a median of 7.4 years, studying the mortality and morbidity rate according to the intake of macronutrients, finds the lowest mortality rate in the population quintiles consuming the most fats and the least carbohydrates.
Thus, all other things being equal (tobacco, physical activity, education, etc.):
People in the 1st quintile getting a median of 46.4% of their energy from carbohydrates have a death rate of 4.1 per thousand and per year,
People in the 5th quintile getting a median of 77.2% of their energy from carbohydrates have a death rate of 7.2 per thousand and per year,
People in the 1st quintile getting a median of 10.6% of their energy from lipids have a mortality rate of 6.7 per thousand and per year,
People in the 5th quintile getting a median of 35.3% of their energy from lipids have a mortality rate of 4.1 per thousand and per year,
(page 5)
For proteins, the optimal amount was around 16.9% (4th quintile), between 16.4% and 17.4%, although there may be an association between protein consumption and consumption of lipids or carbohydrates (fatty meats, dairy products; vegetables…).
The fact that the mortality rate is lowest in the 1st quintile of carbohydrate consumption and in the 5th quintile of lipids consumption suggests that an even lower consumption of carbohydrates and even higher consumption of lipids decreases mortality even more.
And indeed, the first graph in Figure 1 on page 7 shows an inverse relationship between lipid consumption and the mortality rate. The mortality rate is the lowest… at the end of the graph, when more than 45% of the total energy comes from lipids!
In addition, an increased consumption of saturated fatty acids or monounsaturated fatty acids does not increase the mortality rate, on the contrary. It’s just that a very high consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids lowers the mortality rate even more. In other studies, it is trans fatty acids that have demonstrated their harmfulness (margarines…), not the saturated fatty acids!
On the contrary, beyond 55% of energy in the form of carbohydrates, the mortality rate increases in an accelerated way.
By natural selection, breast milk is probably close to optimal for the newborn.
It gives us an indication of the importance of lipids in human nutrition.
The optimal share of lipids in human food after weaning is certainly greater than or equal to 45%, probably around 54%, as in breast milk.
Proteins are of variable quality in human food after weaning: part of the protein is used for anabolism (cell construction) and the other for catabolism (energy): more protein is therefore needed to ensure anabolic needs, and pay attention to their quality. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why, all other things being equal, people consuming more animal proteins have a lower mortality rate; another reason being that a higher consumption of animal proteins is associated with a higher consumption of lipids (fatty fish, fatty meat…).
In general, the quality of macronutrients is important, and the way they are taken: for example, we know that fibers significantly reduce the harmfulness of fructose (whole fruits…), while pure sucrose, i.e. refined sugar, is very harmful and causes diabetes (Coca-Cola…).
The pharmaco-medical complex intends to expand the extremely lucrative market for recreational drugs, and to seize the market shares currently held by the Mafia.
The “scientific” method by which esketamine has been approved is applicable to any recreational drugs.
It is therefore not only the approval of esketamine that is at stake, but the groundswell aimed at widening the market for recreational drugs: opiates, benzodiazepines, veterinary sedatives, psycho-stimulants, ecstasy, LSD, cannabis, etc.
Hawthorne effect: “is a type of reactivity in which individuals modify an aspect of their behavior in response to their awareness of being observed.”
Social desirability bias: “is a type of response bias that is the tendency of survey respondents to answer questions in a manner that will be viewed favorably by others.”
Classical conditioning: “refers to a learning procedure in which a biologically potent stimulus (e.g. alcool) is paired with a previously neutral stimulus (e.g. aversive social situation).”
At least some parts of the experience was designed to maximize the Hawthorne effect and the social desirability bias by classical conditioning.
“Baseline and post-manipulation (i.e. Day 1 and Day 10) cue reactivity was assessed via âlikingâ and âurge to drinkâ ratings of a set of beer (N = 7), wine (N = 3) orange juice (N = 4) and soft drink (N=2) cue images, as described previously12. The experimenter first opened a bottle of lager (Pilsner Urquell) in front of the participants and poured 150ml into a half-pint glass. This was placed on the table in front of the participants and they were told that they would drink this beer when instructed to by on-screen prompts, but that first they would rate a series of images for pleasantness(liking) and their effects on urge to drink(wanting) the beer in front of them. All ratings were made verbally on a scale of -5 (extremely unpleasant/ greatly reduces urge) to +5 (extremely pleasant/ greatly increases urge) and noted by the experimenter. Images were 400×400 pixels, presented centrally on a computer screen, in a random order, for 10 seconds each. Following completion of the rating, participants were asked to rate their current urge to drink the in vivo beer (anticipatory urgerating) and how much they Conducting the cue reactivity/alcohol reinforcement task on Day 1 and Day 10 both provided a metric of clinically-relevant changes in the hedonic and motivational effects of beer and maximised the expectancy of receiving beer during the Day 3 reactivation procedure, thus generating a prediction error (PE) when the drink was withheld on Day 3.
The alcohol MRM (RET) and Control (No RET) Memory Reactivation Procedures took place on Day 3 and used sub-sets of stimuli from the cue reactivity /alcohol reinforcement task. For MRM retrieval (RETgroups), these were four images of beer and for No RET+KET, these were four images of orange juice. All participants also rated two âsoft drinkâ images of cola and coffee. Participants in MRM retrieval conditions were told they would repeat the image rating and beer consumption task from Day 1. Again, a beer was opened and 150ml poured into a glass placed in front of participants. They then rated four of the beer cue images (designated âbeer retrievalâ images) and the two soft drink images, along with their âurge to drinkâ and anticipated enjoyment of the in vivo beer. The drinking prompt screens then began, but the final prompt read âStop! Do not drinkâ.”
This is pure classical conditionning. Alcohol consumption is associated with an unpleasant social situation, frustration, and public exposure by the “experts”.
Although the experiment has resulted in “favorable” results, it is likely that it has above all (re)demonstrated the effectiveness of classical conditioning and social pressure in reducing alcohol consumption, or at least, the declaration of alcohol consumption.
Other biases can be found in the detailed description of the experiment.
For example, 27/30 of the placebo group and 60/60 of the ketamine group guessed which group they were in. Therefore, this experience is almost open label.
I really appreciate this scientific watch from madinamerica.com.
Unlike other media outlets, madinamerica.com reports on therapies that do not work.
This avoids the crushing and painful bias by which only favorable results are massively disseminated, giving the illusion of scientific progress without end and error.
The reality is that the march of science is riddled with massive, shameful and ridiculous errors; kept artificially alive by interest, authority and blindness.
90% of true scientific work is to get rid of these mistakes, not to create “new” scientific knowledge that is usually defective.
For example, anti-scientific communication operations that seek to promote or protect corporations or businesses, and that have the effect of degrading the health of the population, could be punished by real jail time.
Indeed, this kind of propaganda has the effect of maintaining or increasing the consumption of legal narcotics, and thus of causing harm to society, which can be measured in financial losses, in losses of years of life in good health and losses of human lifes.
These losses should be measured concretely and the people involved should be punished in the same way as other criminals.
“Emphasis on shared decision-making” aims to restore the reputation of psychiatry, and to integrate the institution to trade as a normal service, as are the services of hairstyles or lawyer.
This is total utopia, because the fundamental function of psychiatry is the repression of some form of deviance, while the trafficking of narcotics and psychotherapy are a subordinate function, whatever its economic size.
“Despite the clear benefits of involving young people in their own treatment” This is so obvious that the author is careful not to mention them. Would the benefit be that children can be subjected to drug addiction with their own agreement? Or that it is not necessary to use brutal force against them?
The “decision-making process” is a lie of war propaganda. War propaganda, like the myth of chemical imbalance, is a weapon of war, and makes deaths like any weapon. Proponents of war lies are criminals just like criminals who handle material weapons, like psychiatric narcotics.
“I did not … [know] … they just make decisions for me.”
This child is right. He is not stupid. the propagandists of the “shared decision-making” are liars, who deserve the same fate as other psychiatrists.
I witnessed a psychiatrist who referred her client to a colleague with whom she had previously worked, in another hospital where she had previously worked, with a letter recommending the continuation of the restraint measure because of the voluntary cessation of patient care while in free care. Indeed, even when you are in free care and you stop the care freely, you may be reproached later if you return to care under duress, determining mandatory care potentially unlimited.
This psychiatrist has violated the following laws:
_ prohibition of comperage (article 23 of the CDM, Code of Medical Ethics),
_ violation of the free choice of the patient (article 6 of the CDM),
_ breach of professional secrecy (article 4 of the CDM),
_ refusal of transmission of the medical file (article 46 of the CDM).
and more.
Fortunately, the administration being what it is, they failed to well organize the transfer. They forgot to write the necessary certificates, so the client was legally free without anyone knowing.
When we started the release process, we realized that the client was already free. So we said bye-bye to the hospital, despite the helpless vociferations of the referral psychiatrist, and we had a good laugh in our sleeve.
You claim that you are not against the system, that you want to increase the share of psychiatry in the health budget in Mexico, that is to say decrease the relative share devoted to the true medicine, and increase the psychiatric staff:
“We are not against the system”
“only around 2% of the health budget invested in mental health”
“lack personal means”
“scant mental health budget”
“mental health has […] garnered even less support from the public coffers”
In addition, your group is mainly made up of “academics” and “professionals”, that is to say people working in psychiatric companies or institutions and in the spread of psychiatry. This conflict of interest was not fully declared in the article. This is problematic because many members of the group would directly and personally benefit from the increase in the budget of psychiatry in Mexico.
On the other hand, the collective revealed that some of its members consumed psychiatric narcotics, sometimes in massive proportions. This is also problematic because publicly advocating the consumption of toxic products is one way to promote them (Bernays, 1928; Amos, 2000: “Torches of Freedom”). Think about Camel, who interviewed doctors who smoked cigarettes.
Research shows that the increase in psychiatric budgets across history and countries is correlated with a decrease in the recovery rate (JÀÀskelÀinen, 2012), an increase in the suicide rate (Burgess, 2004), and the increase in the mortality of psychiatric patients relative to the general population (Hayes, 2017). Moreover, the increase in budgets is not associated with an effective enlargement of rights.
This indifference to the facts, this sordid obsession to public money, this complacency towards neurotoxins, reflect the corporatist origin of this so-called “patient movement”, actually under the control of people who have a direct financial or professional interest in the development of the psychiatry.
Bibiography:
Amos, Amanda, and Margaretha Haglund. “From Social Taboo to “Torch of Freedom”: the Marketing of Cigarettes to Women .” Tobacco Control 9.1 (2000). Web. 28 Apr 2010.
Bernays, E. L. (1928) Propaganda. Routledge.
Burgess, P., Pirkis, J., Jolley, D., Whiteford, H., & Saxena, S. (2004). Do nations’ mental health policies, programs and legislation influence their suicide rates? An ecological study of 100 countries. Australian and New Zealand journal of psychiatry, 38(11-12), 933-939.
JÀÀskelĂ€inen, E., Juola, P., Hirvonen, N., McGrath, J. J., Saha, S., Isohanni, M., … & Miettunen, J. (2012). A systematic review and meta-analysis of recovery in schizophrenia. Schizophrenia bulletin, 39(6), 1296-1306.
Hayes, J. F., Marston, L., Walters, K., King, M. B., & Osborn, D. P. (2017). Mortality gap for people with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia: UK-based cohort study 2000â2014. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 211(3), 175-181.
First of all, I would like to congratulate you on your research initiative.
In addition, the absence of relapse, defined as the need for rehospitalization, is an extraordinarily good result. Especially since you have passed the period of beginning of weaning, the most at risk of relapse.
I have some reservations about the pace and the weaning order suggest to your patients.
1) I do not think that a patient who is poorly dependent on psychotropic drugs requires such a long withdrawal. The duration of weaning should be a function of the duration of exposure: the longer and the most intense is the exposure, the longer the weaning time should be.
One-day, high-dose exposure requires weaning? I think not.
An exhibition for a week? maybe two-three days.
A one-year exhibition? three or four months.
An exhibition of more than 5 years? Maybe it will take a weaning of more than one year.
But it also depends on the medication, the motivation of the person and his anxiety. It depends on his surroundings and other social conditions. Typically, you can not compare benzodiazepine dependence, whose withdrawal is torture, and dependence on Haldol, whose withdrawal is often a physical and psychological relief, despite the risk of relapse.
2) The decrease of one drug after another has the advantage of indicating, in case of withdrawal syndrome, which drug is at the cause, since you only decreases one at a time. However, this weaning order has the drawback of considerably lengthening the duration of the overall weaning, and of delaying the start of weaning of the other drugs, which continue to do damage during this time.
In addition, some drugs, in polypharmacy, have antagonistic effects. Therefore, decreasing them at the same time may be easier than decreasing them one by one (when the client is taking a sedative and a stimulant, for example).
Of course, you are anxious to cause relapse of your patients, because the rate of rehospitalization is easily measured, while the decrease in toxicity of drugs by weaning is less obvious. Have you done biological tests to your clients to check the progress of their health? Is there a control group where such tests have been done?
If this is not the case, you are missing an objective measure that could be extremely useful when exposing your results. For is the progressive suppression of drug toxicity, not one of the goals of weaning?
Robert Withaker or other Mad In America authors should expect to be the subject of a denigration campaign at some point in the future, if their audience and speech exceeds certain limits, especially on TV show.
Do not expect loyalty among journalists. On the contrary, they will use scientifically proven means to discredit you:
_ ask unexpected, complex and multiple questions that require thought, research and rigor, but require short and immediate answers,
_ appeal to public opinion, common sense, and popular sentiments,
_ rely on non-existent, questionable or misunderstood scientific research that can not be challenged without rigorous verification,
_ use the editing: select the plans to give an impression of hesitation, stupidity or ignorance of the person interviewed, or mount the plans in a wrong order,
_ use advertisements that contradict the speech,
_ distributing speech in an unfair and biased manner,
Only hypnotics cause 1000 times more deaths than mass shootings.
If the press was objective, it would not even talk about these news items.
An objective press would talk about the real mass murders, that there are hundreds of thousands of people dying every year in the United States, and millions more who are physically, socially and psychologically disabled by means of deliberate chemical poisoning.
And this real mass murder, which makes mass shootings absolutely insignificant by comparison, is not only legal, but also encouraged by the press, which repeats that these psychotropic drugs are good for (mental) health and even save lives.
Teachers are the touts of psychiatry. No wonder psychiatrists say they need to be better indoctrinated.
There is no factual difference between the state and the mafia, only a difference of legitimacy. Both organize their small society through violence, drug trafficking, and even sexual venality (marriage and prostitution).
For both official servants and mafiosi, radical repression is fine.
If we take the trouble to think about it, we will see the problem differently.
Does “mental illness” exist? Can an illness be “mental”? As an antipsychiatrist, I say: “no”.
So what is psychotherapy? What can a psychotherapist and his client do well together?
Psychotherapy is a cultural act. The therapist and his client speak together according to a particular cultural mode, which has a particular cultural meaning.
In this, psychotherapy is not distinguished from cartomancy, Christian confession or shamanism. It occupies the same social place, according to a different cultural mode. Psychotherapy is steeped in a scientific philosophy, but it is rarely scientific, and its effectiveness is not science-based: psychotherapy is effective because it corresponds to the culture of the client and the therapist, and because the therapist and his client are in phase through this special cultural trait.
–
Finally, cultural acts also relate to power, that is, culture imposed by the state. If psychotherapy is reimbursed, it is partly controlled by the state, which is unacceptable. The state uses culture for repressive purposes, and psychotherapy is associated with state university, psychiatric hospitals, and public servants. Psychologists are a corporation that obeys orders.
That’s why, as a psychotherapist, I am against reimbursement, and for liberal psychotherapy; the psychotherapist must stop presenting himself as a doctor, stop presenting his client as ill and his acts as medical. He is not a doctor, his client is not sick and his actions are not medical. All this is cultural, and nothing else.
If you want to make psychotherapy accessible, drastically reduce your fees; psychologists, like siberian shamans and african marabouts, think they have come out of Jupiter’s thigh.
Human research on the toxicity of psychotropic medications is either imprecise (observational studies) or unethical (clinical trials).
What about animal testing? It allows accurate results to be produced in an ethical manner, regarding the chronic use of psychotropic medications.
Report comment
Additions to misconceptions about the history of psychiatry
> Neuroleptics have made it possible to empty psychiatric hospitals
No, it’s retirement homes and antibiotics (among other things) – medico-social developments. Before 1945, the majority of people admitted to psychiatry suffered from organic psychoses, in particular senility, cerebral atherosclerosis and syphilis. Antibiotics almost completely eradicated syphilis, while the elderly were gradually admitted to nursing homes. Another psychosis that has diminished without neuroleptics having anything to do with it is alcoholic psychosis.
> With neuroleptics, the discharge rate was higher than the admission rate
No, it was not until 1970 that the number of discharges exceeded the number of admissions, 15 years after the introduction of neuroleptics. From 1955 to 1970, American psychiatric hospitals were emptied due to a very high mortality rate (about 9% per year), mainly caused by the demographic structure of the hospitals (many old people, few young people)
> Before neuroleptics, psychotics remained locked up all their lives
In 1922, in the USA, for 100 schizophrenics admitted, 57.4 were discharged during the year.
Itâs a bad result, but not as bad as some would have us believe.
The other psychoses had the following discharge rates:
bipolar disorder: 75%
melancholy depression: 64%
paranoia: 61.9%
neurosis: 95%
The study of real statistics will make it possible to replace the mythology of psychiatry with the history of psychiatry.
In french: https://psychiatriedroit.wordpress.com/2017/07/21/idees-fausses-sur-lhistoire-de-la-psychiatrie/
Report comment
The only investment that psychiatry and all those who support it deserve is the construction of prisons to put all these people out of state of causing trouble.
Report comment
Removed for moderation
Report comment
Removed for moderation.
Report comment
I disapprove this article for the following reasons:
The article presents itself as a measured critique of a valid scientific subject, in so doing it totally misses the point.
There is no such thing as a real illness called “depression” and therefore no cure either.
Psychotherapy is not a real therapy, like oxygen therapy for example, but a cultural relationship similar to the Christian confession or to the exorcism of demons. Psychotherapy is surrounded by the same kind of irrational mystic.
By design it is not scientific, but it can be the object of scientific investigation, like ethnology.
–
What this study describes is a ritual similar to shamanism, embellished with a scientistic pretension unique to modern culture. Whoever takes these scientistic claims seriously proves that he has not understood anything about what âdepressionâ, âtreatmentâ and âpsychotherapyâ really are, namely simulation of illness and simulation of medicine: cultural traits. A rational person observe in this experience people who ritualistically indulge in drug addiction, and surround it with a contemporary scientistic and mystical justification: psychiatry.
–
It is reprehensible to present the “results” of this study as promising or scientific.
Drug addiction is an instrument of the bourgeoisie aimed at stupefying and weakening the proletariat, preventing it from looking for the real causes of its misfortune and paralyzing it with rituals of self-mortification.
The mortification presented here produces an artificial psychosis and a state of psychic vulnerability which, even in the long term, “benevolent” people are sure to exploit.
People who voluntarily place themselves in a state of vulnerability will suffer the consequences. The people who encourage people to weaken themselves are foxes and those who trust in them are baby rabbits. Any auto-intoxication, any drug addiction will have its biological and social consequences.
–
In short, this kind of research has to be denounced for what it is: a stupid advertisement for narcotics, the level of scientificity of which does not exceed that of a village sorcerer who justifies the use of hallucinogens to hunt demons (today, our neo-shamans hunt âdepressionâ, to seem more modern), and whose social goal is illusion, attrition and submission.
Report comment
This is html.
Report comment
“about 1% of people get a schizophrenia diagnosis in the general population.” It’s half less.
“Of the 132 core studies, 21 studies reported point prevalence, 34 reported period prevalence, and 24 reported lifetime prevalence. The median prevalence of schizophrenia was 4.6/1,000 for point prevalence, 3.3/1,000 for period prevalence, 4.0 for lifetime prevalence, and 7.2 for lifetime morbid risk. [âŠ] Several important findings emerge from Saha and colleagues’ analysis. For clinicians, the analysis indicates clearly that lifetime prevalence is 4.0/1,000 and not 1%, as reported in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition, and other textbooks.”
Dinesh Bhugra (2015), The Global Prevalence of Schizophrenia
Since the diagnosis of schizophrenia is not based on biological but cultural observations, it does not make sense to look for genetic causes that are relatively fixed, to a cultural phenomenon that is changing. This is typically the kind of situation where one can find correlations without causality.
Example: Suppose that for cultural reasons, people with blue eyes inspire less confidence and are more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia. Blue eyes are genetically determined. We will therefore find a correlation between the genetic factors that determine the color of the eyes and schizophrenia. This correlation is not a causality.
Trustworthy-Looking Face Meets Brown Eyes
Genetics determine many traits in living things, but these traits are then interpreted culturally, often unconsciously. Schizophrenia is typically the interpretation of a cultural phenomenon, without biological observation. The limited correlations of schizophrenia with genetics do not therefore mean anything in particular.
Report comment
Psychiatry is progressing on corpses.
Report comment
It is not necessary to initiate new research on products which have already been shown in randomized trials to worsen psychosis in the long term (Rappaport, 1978, etc.). Prescribing neuroleptics has been maintained for political non-medical reasons, as it is an excellent tool of repression, superior to the whip and the cangue, to obtain submission.
It is therefore by political means that neuroleptics can be suppressed, on the occasion of a revolution, by the outright prohibition of psychiatry, the seizure of all personal and institutional property of people participating in psychiatry, and their internment during the revolution, as prisoners of civil war.
Rappaport, M. âAre there schizophrenics for whom drugs may be unnecessary or contraindicated?â Int Pharmacopsychiatry 13 (1978): 100-11
Report comment
Hello bob,
I’m not sure if this is the right place to do it, but I would like to publicly suggest you to implement a preprint section on a dedicated MIA-related wiki, and develop the open review.
The preprint and the open review on wiki offers many advantages:
Protect from any accusations of censorship, because even when a paper is not accepted, it is available on the preprint wiki and the reasons for its rejection are available on the talk page.
Discussions about improving the article are public.
The different versions of the article are accessible via the history of changes.
Wiki technology facilitates an open collaboration between authors, reviewers and editors. The greater the openness, the greater the trust.
There is a free, ad-free wiki platform for associations and foundations ourproject.org. They will welcome MIA with open arms.
Report comment
Thank you very much for the article.
Report comment
The length of withdrawal depends on the degree of addiction, and the degree of addiction in turn depends on the length of exposure, among other things.
This is why I think expressing the length of withdrawal as an absolute value doesn’t make a lot of sense, and it would be better to express it as a percentage of the length of exposure.
For example, a person exposed for 6 months to a neuroleptic will probably not need 9 months to wean, while for a person exposed for 10 years, 9 months will probably not be enough, let alone multiple drug abuse.
To say that a person probably needs 10% to 20% of the exposure time to wean may make more sense, although other factors come into play as well.
In addition, one should not overlook personal and relational subjective factors, and even political factors.
States that promote legal drug addiction for social regulation (and all states do) will make withdrawal more difficult.
I think the length of withdrawal should be biologically “reasonable”, but political intervention is needed.
Report comment
> In the French procedure, the sleep is the treatment.
LOL. It made me laugh to read this. We realize how stupid the procedure is. It’s like an anesthesiologist saying that anesthesia is the treatment, and if 2 hours of general anesthesia isn’t enough, he will try it for 15 days.
However, don’t trust the presentation of Doctissimo. What this article proves is that sleep therapy exists, not how or why it is used. Since the practice is legal in France, it can be used in non-voluntary care, and nothing prevents it from being combined with other treatments, including electroshock.
It is very difficult to know how much and how sleep therapy is used in France, in voluntary care or without consent, alone or in combination with other treatments, because there are no statistics. However, it is likely that the practice is relatively rare in France, because otherwise I would have found other testimonies. In any case, French psychiatrists have a free hand to combine sleep therapy with other treatments, including care without consent, simply because it is legal.
Report comment
Sleep therapy is still practiced in France.
Are you sure it is not practiced in Australia or the United States?
You can find on this forum the messages of a certain Ătienne who testifies that his sister-in-law was hospitalized for a sleep cure in 2011, described as follows:
Sleep: 20 hours a day
for: 15 days
Xanax infusion.
Many French pro-psychiatric websites describe the sleep cure in very favorable terms, specifying that it is practiced in psychiatric hospitals.
In the 90s, a doctor was given a one-year suspended prison sentence after killing his patient with a sleep cure. Nevertheless, the court does not question the practice of the sleep cure in itself, but only the conditions in which it was carried out (drug addict patient, at home, no medical supervision).
Report comment
Thank you for the review.
Report comment
In our time, this kind of research is unethical: we have known for a long time that neuroleptics damage the brain, and new “research” on this subject only harms more people, who are treated like animals.
Research has already been done, neuroleptics must be banned now, without exposing more humans in studies whose results are known in advance.
Thanks for the report.
Report comment
There is no link…
Report comment
Fanon was a fanatic of insulin comas and electroshocks. But let Fanon speak for himself, since here, the editorial staff have lost any critical thinking to the point of extol one of the criminals we are fighting.
“Second step. During a narco-analysis, we push the shot until deep sleep, we change the patient’s environment, and we transfer her to another district, where she must be submitted, without any new contact with the old psychotherapist, to the Bini cure [electroshocks]. Reaching the confusing stage as quickly as possible, we replace the “nursing home” environment and the individual room, with the very “hospital” “set” for several patients. Practically, if she has some clearings of conscience during these first days, she can only note the vague concept of “disease”, and that very reassuring of “attentive care”.
Third step. Once the confused amnesic stage has been obtained, the patient begins to undergo insulin therapy [insulin comas] the aim of which is to place her, at the beginning of her awakening, in the very primitive situation of the mother-child intercourses: food in the mouth, cleanliness care, first words. […]
[…]
Gradually, the corrections and the awareness of the situation become total. “I’m sorry, I was very sick, the other day, I spoke to you as if you were Miss X., twenty years ago…, when my brother was born… we didn’t need him. Now I don’t have to have the same ideas. It was a conversation I had with her. We spoiled him so bad he was raised badly… I’m confused about it. I was told that I was sick, but I didn’t believe it… It’s a great place here, with you… If one day I relapse – there has heredity with us – I would not hesitate a moment to come back… “
She talks and cares about concrete problems in her community, especially with our only sister-nurse…, sometimes with us…; the behaviour becomes completely normal, and there is no sign of deterioration. She re-enters the community and quickly adapts to it. The hospitalization with us lasted a total of three months. During the five days of annihilation, she had seventeen electroshocks. She underwent forty insulin therapy sessions, forty days of directed institutional therapy.”
Sur quelques cas traités par la méthode de Bini
I solemnly protest against the pro-psychiatric deviation of Mad in America, which reaches new heights where a supporter of electroshock, insulin comas and patient annihilation can be promoted as “radical” and “progressive” on Mad in America.
sylvain.rousselot.pro (at) gmail.com
Report comment
I note that I have indeed misinterpreted your words and that you are indeed in favor of the use of psychiatric drugs.
You simply object to the “abuse” of psychotropic substances and the coercive use of these drugs.
Thatâs why we have nothing in common, and I totally reject Marcello Mavigliaâs call to work together.
On the contrary, in my comment, which has been the subject of major cuts in order to be published, I called to exclude from Mad in America those favorable to psychiatric drugs, that is to say, not to allow them to publish here.
[Moderation.]
By way of analysis, I believe there are two irreconcilable categories of readers and editors here on Mad in America.
First we have the “carers”, the intellectuals, the journalists, who studied at the university and who share a common “habitus” between themselves and with the psychiatrists, that is to say, to simplify, the same social class. These are supporters of “critical” psychiatry, they want to reform psychiatry to save it, make it better and develop it according to their views. They do not hesitate to ask for more budgets for psychiatry and to promote illegal drugs, which they are often very fond of.
And then we have the real victims of psychiatry, those who were broken by the machine, those who experienced REAL mournings and REAL mutilations. Those who lost their freedoms, those who saw their loved ones wiped out by treatment that made them weak and helpless – or DEAD. Those who saw the criminality of psychiatrists, through their agreement with the family to camouflage rapes and incest, for the production of false certificates to lock up, for the systematic violation of professional secrecy and private life and all other human rights.
For these, no compromise, no agreement is possible and psychiatry must be exterminated to the root, so that not even a fossil remains for centuries to come.
This is why you will understand that the reformists, with their legal and illegal drugs, their intentions of better “caring” us, their complacency with their colleagues, their pacifism, their moderation and their common work with psychiatrists, all these people are for us like a splinter in the foot.
I hope that my message will not be censored, and that it will not be subject to any cut, having expressed in the clearest way possible the position of a certain number of people who read, comment or publish here.
Report comment
Maybe someday I will write a blog about the necessary prohibition of psychotropic drugs, except anesthesia and rigorously controlled, reasonable duration weaning (because a weaning which lasts more than 2 years is a fake weaning).
Prohibition is necessary not only for medical reasons, but also for political reasons.
The prohibition of psychotropic drugs and psychiatry in general, whether exercised by a psychiatrist or anyone else, will allow us to separate allies and enemies on this point, and allow us to crush members of the psychiatric industry/institution.
This is why I say that prohibition is necessary on several levels.
Do you know this quote from John Ehrlichman?
âYou want to know what this was really all about?â he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. âThe Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what Iâm saying? We knew we couldnât make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.â
ââDan Baum, Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs, Harper’s Magazine (April 2016)
If one day we take the power, we will use the same kind of methods, but in an open way, to crush psychiatrists (and not Blacks or anti-war activists). The little cannabis users, we don’t care.
We want prohibition, for get hold of the psychiatrists. Prohibition (among other measures) will allow us to bring down an entire sector of the old state repressive apparatus and develop our own repressive apparatus. Only, our repressive apparatus will be directed against a whole other section of the society.
Report comment
[Moderation].
In her articles, Laura Guerra spoke out clearly against drug use (not only against drug âabuseâ): she translated a book by P. Breggin and severely warned her readers against drugs.
On the contrary, according to the biography of Dan Monticelli, Dan Monticelli and Marcello Maviglia have together written a book entitled: âNew Paths to Recovery: Behavioral, Physical and Spiritual Potentials for Cannabisâ.
Since Marcello Maviglia is a psychiatrist, I would like to ask him the question: [moderation]? Or put another way: does he prescribe psychotropic drugs?
Since Marcello Maviglia is asking for feedback on his project, here is mine.
I believe [moderation] and drug promoters should be removed from the “Mad” network.
[moderation]
[Published after autor and moderation’s agreement.]
Report comment
Early genius is, obviously, non-genetic. See the experience of the PolgĂĄr sisters. Common factors include an early start and hard work. Behind all precocious genius, there is a pedagogue. If early genius were genetic, it would be passed from parent to child, and we would have successive generations of geniuses that would reproduce predictably. But this is not the case.
Report comment
What about animal experimentation? Indeed, I doubt that the mice raise their twins MZ and DZ differently. The use of laboratory mice would allow to pass them double-blind tests, and to test the mice in very large numbers and at low cost.
Given that the breeding and testing environment is extremely similar and that the mice have no culture but only instinctive behavior, such a well-controlled and double-blind experiment would give us serious clues about plausibility of the genetic hypothesis.
My opinion is that there will be no statistically significant difference in behavior depending on whether the twin pairs are MZ or DZ.
Report comment
Critical psychiatrists can never help but make a concession to mainstream psychiatry: “Pills may be helpful to modulate extreme distress”, which illustrates that they are from the same corporation and have the same function.
All that distinguishes a critical psychiatrist from a conventional psychiatrist is the feeling of guilt, but a critical psychiatrist will never take it upon himself to take revolutionary action: on the contrary, they always admit, according to their program, that narcotics can be useful “in some cases” and put us to sleep with promises of reform that will never come.
Who can believe a man who works in a mental hospital? He will fill out the same psychiatric records, engage in the same drug trafficking and offer absolution to anyone who seeks in him the root cause of his misfortunes.
After the drug trade, the intimate confession? We know that the Mafia has always been very attached to the Catholic Church. Likewise, psychiatrists are staunch defenders of psychotherapy, which is somehow their excuse and their priesthood for all the crimes they have committed.
Corrupt priests might as well say that the Mafia can redeem itself. Narcotics, kidnappings, blackmail, corruption, extortion and exploitation: all this can be corrected as soon as you surrender your soul to God. But don’t stop the Mafia! Amen.
Report comment
It is a selection bias.
Suppose 1000 people are going through a psychotic crisis in families refusing psychiatric treatment.
Suppose, 5 years later, 90% have recovered, and 10% have worsened.
In desperation, the families of these 10% finally hospitalize them.
In this case, we observe that 100% of people hospitalized have worsened in the last 5 years. Psychiatrists might observe that, in this group of chronic psychotics, the recovery rate is only 5%. But it is a selection bias: the original sample of this group was 1,000 people, and 90% of this group have recovered and will never go to psychiatry. They are therefore invisible.
Now suppose 100 people are going through a psychotic crisis, but this time, in families following the recommendations of psychiatrists, and immediately hospitalizing their loved one.
Suppose that with medication, 5 years later, 30% of people recover and 70% become chronic psychotics.
Thus, according to psychiatric observations:
30% of psychotics treated immediately recover, 40% become chronic;
5% of psychotics treated 5 years later recover, 95% remain chronic.
But according to the actual data:
90% of psychotics never treated recover, 10% become chronic;
30% of psychotics treated immediately recover, 70% become chronic.
–
Association â causality.
Sometimes a negative association can reveal positive causation.
Report comment
Removed for moderation.
Report comment
The psychedelics of indigenous societies have a social function, just like the psychotropics of capitalist society: to prevent society from evolving. Primitive societies are absolutely incredible in their concervatism: they can remain similar to themselves for tens of thousands of years.
The ritual consumption of narcotics to stupefy the people and thus prevent any human progress is thus an instrument of choice to keep society in its current state. No new invention, no discovery is then possible.
It is only in exceptional circumstances (war, famine, migration …) that the tribe is forced to moderate its consumption of narcotics, and possibly to evolve, but it takes an extremely long time.
Thus, the opposition of indigenous “spiritual” society to “materialist” capitalist society is irrelevant, because in both cases the consumption of narcotics has a surprisingly similar social function: to prevent society from evolving. And more precisely in capitalist society: preventing the revolution.
This video explains it absolutely very well, taking for example the monopoly of the production and distribution of alcohol in Tsarist Russia.
What is true for the monople of alcohol is just as true for the “medical” monopoly of massively consumed psychiatric drugs in contemporary capitalist society.
Report comment
PROTOCOLIZE RESEARCH REVIEW
Thank you for your review of this study.
You and other writers of Mad In America have gained crucial experience in examining research, consisting in tests and analysis criteria.
Isn’t it time to compile all these criteria in a protocol, allowing to carry out a systematic review of research according to predictable and rigorously defined criteria?
We always find the same criteria in your articles and those of other editors:
_ representative vs non-representative population
_ placebo study vs withdrawal study
_ naive population vs non-naive population
_ Confounding factors (including medication)
_ short term vs long term
_ protection of the safety (in particular due to withdrawal)
Etc.
There is not much missing to compile all these criteria in a systematic analysis protocol.
I would like different Mad In America editors to come together to establish such a protocol, which would guide the editors in their analysis of studies.
It makes it possible to assess the quality of studies in a stricter, more in-depth and better defined manner.
Such a protocol could eventually become a recognized standard for evaluating scientific research.
Report comment
> In June 2018, he pleaded guilty to the theft of $87,000, after which a judge sentenced Neumeister â a classically trained pianist â to play piano for “an hour at least twice weekly for the next three years at group facilities in Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, and Waterbury,” Connecticut, the Associated Press reported at the time.
This is a joke? To punish him, the judge asked him to do a leisure activity ?? !!!
It’s been 312 hours of leisure.
$87,000/312h = $280/h
And meanwhile, there are people who spend years in jail for pickpocketing.
The judges also, they will have to be punished for their class complacency.
Report comment
“Those who […] were currently abusing substances […] were excluded from the study. […] Participants were assisted in tapering their current antidepressant medication and were allowed benzodiazepines only if needed.”
But antidepressants and benzodiazepines consumption IS substances abuse!
Since when is the consumption of antidepressants or benzodiazepines no longer a drug addiction? Because a psychiatrist said it was good for your health? Because the state says it’s legal?
Addiction to psychiatric drugs is almost always more serious than addiction to illegal drugs, because psychiatric drugs are practically free, while illegal drugs are relatively expensive. Thus there is an economic limit to the consumption of illegal drugs, while for legal drugs, the pockets of social security and insurance are wide open!
The severe consumption of psychiatric drugs, the concomitant withdrawal from antidepressants, and the “at will” consumption of benzodiazepines make the “results” of this pseudo-study completely random.
Besides, we don’t need “scientific” studies to find out if recreational drugs are … recreational. Obviously, certain drugs are “pleasant”, and they temporarily decrease the suffering of some. People are ready to risk prison, and even life, to consume them! Not only do these studies teach us nothing, but in addition their methods are fraudulent, dishonest and criminal: why not give good doses of heroin to depressed people? I am sure that such a study would give “promising” results according to the kind of analysis that Mad in America give us for hallucinogens.
Why this double standard? Why then a rigorous critical analysis for neuroleptics, and a disgusting complacency for hallucinogens? It is however the same kind of pseudo-science at the basis of their promotion!
—
There are reasons to believe that this selective complacency is not innocent. Just as scientists must declare their conflicts of interest, journalists who promote the use of illegal drugs should declare whether they are former users, occasional users or regular users.
For me, it is extremely doubtful that this sudden collapse of the critical mind, when hallucinogens comes to discussion, is pure chance.
When you talk about recreational drugs, honesty requires that you make a declaration of consumption or non-consumption, whether in the past or in the present.
Report comment
Mad in America is totally ambivalent about drugs. There is no clear editorial line.
On the one hand “Mad in America” will require long-term studies on neuroleptics, antidepressants and anxyolitics, and conclude that they must be condemned. Some authors deny the existence of mental illness, and claim an exclusively social and / or cultural approach.
On the other, it prostrates itself against illegal recreational drugs, based on short-term clinical trials, the scientific value of which is extremely low. There is then no longer any serious scientific requirement, and “mental illness” again becomes like a real disease, which must be treated with medication.
I say that I have had enough of this ambivalence.
I say that the editorial line must be clearer, that Mad in America must abandon its anti-scientific spirit when it comes to illegal and recreational drugs.
Report comment
There are effective treatments for acute pain.
But are there effective treatments for chronic pain? Are there randomized studies which prove that a treatment for chronic pain is effective beyond two years?
This is a silent character.
To my knowledge, “chronic pain” means to the doctor:
a) put the patient on opioids,
b) enrich himself in a pornographic way like a heroin dealer until the patient’s death.
If someone has the reference of a randomized study comparing an analgesic to a placebo or the absence of treatment, and doing a follow-up beyond two years, I am interested.
The object of study being chronic pain, studies whose follow-up is less than two years are not relevant.
Report comment
Testing psychotherapy to cure “mental illness” is as meaningless as testing exorcism to cast out demons.
Exorcism and psychotherapy are cultural activities whose “effectiveness” depends on the social and personal congruence between the parties.
It is not surprising that psychotherapy is more effective in wealthy people, since psychotherapy was born in liberal circles.
The bursting of psychotherapeutic approaches attests to the diversity, complexity, syncretism and cosmopolitism of modern Western culture, unlike other older, more local and more homogeneous cultures.
Psychotherapy is neither medical nor paramedical, it is a purely cultural activity which testifies to the time and the place in which we live.
It is out of the question to reimburse psychotherapies, just as it is out of the question that the State or Social Security finance the Church; all this is only the corporatism of charlatans associated ready to submit to state control in order to enrich themselves.
Down with the Rasputins!
Report comment
Schizophrenia is defined by a series of sets of behaviors, not even consistent with each other.
Not being a scientifically defined entity, but rather an extremely vague social category, it doesn’t even make sense to search for genetics under it.
Here are two real cases of people diagnosed with schizophrenia:
Case 1
At the beginning of adolescence, a young girl begins to use recreational drugs massively, in the milieu of rave parties. A little later, she develops a severe psychosis. Her divorced father was himself an addict, addicted to hard drugs.
Psychiatric “diagnostic”: schizophrenia.
“Treatment”: neuroleptics.
The girl continues to use recreational drugs, no measures are taken to change her social environment or to clarify the links between her father’s addiction and her own addiction. On the contrary, her psychiatrist is actively involved in getting her to test various drugs, including a psychostimulant which has triggered an extreme psychotic crisis.
Case 2
At 14, a young girl is sexually touched by her stepfather. The family decides to keep the matter quiet, and recommends to the girl do the same. At 18, the girl begins to tell her story to everyone, and shows a rebellious and independent spirit. She leaves the family home with the intention of no longer living with her stepfather. Her mother calls her back, and, without explicitly forbidding her, makes her understand that she must not leave the family (double-bind). The girl begins to develop a sort of “uncertainty psychosis”, deciding to return home then immediately after leaving. This alternation of decisions becomes faster and faster until the girl becomes completely confused. She was quickly interned by her mother. Since then, she is regularly interned by her parents, as soon as she shows initiative, which triggers a psychosis.
“Diagnosis”: schizophrenia.
“Treatment”: neuroleptics and successive hospitalizations, in order to “subdue” her (to make her accept the illness and the treatment, which she refuses).
Other family and environmental aspects: the sister was raped by the stepfather’s brother at the age of 5. She did not develop psychosis. Of course, there is no genetic link between the father-in-law and the uncle on the one hand, and the two sisters on the other. This young woman is “supported” by those around her, but like a “mental patient”; she is also treated as a “sacred person”, being mentioned that she is truly in contact with the world of the beyond (literally). Thus, her entourage justifies her “schizophrenia” by a contradictory mixture of genetics, mysticism and incest; the sordid reality of sexual touching is most often concealed and minimized in favor of psychiatric and mystical explanations. Her grandmother bluntly told her that incest was a “normal” phenomenon, and that it was important not to talk about it.
–
Two completely different cases, clearly non-genetic and treated in the same way by psychiatry. How can we even seriously consider that these two people could have a “common genetic profile” that would distinguish them and separate them from the rest of humanity? Genetics serve as a cover-up for an absolutely obvious, overwhelming social reality, which psychiatrists have the task of camouflaging for the benefit of family tranquility: the drug addiction of a father, the incest of a stepfather.
This is the real justification for the so-called “research” on the genetics of this absurd entity that is “schizophrenia”.
Report comment
Currently, scientific research on nutrition is in absolute contradiction with official nutritional recommendations.
We don’t eat enough fat: the PURE study (Dehghan, 2017), bringing together more than 130,000 people over a median of 7.4 years, studying the mortality and morbidity rate according to the intake of macronutrients, finds the lowest mortality rate in the population quintiles consuming the most fats and the least carbohydrates.
Thus, all other things being equal (tobacco, physical activity, education, etc.):
People in the 1st quintile getting a median of 46.4% of their energy from carbohydrates have a death rate of 4.1 per thousand and per year,
People in the 5th quintile getting a median of 77.2% of their energy from carbohydrates have a death rate of 7.2 per thousand and per year,
People in the 1st quintile getting a median of 10.6% of their energy from lipids have a mortality rate of 6.7 per thousand and per year,
People in the 5th quintile getting a median of 35.3% of their energy from lipids have a mortality rate of 4.1 per thousand and per year,
(page 5)
For proteins, the optimal amount was around 16.9% (4th quintile), between 16.4% and 17.4%, although there may be an association between protein consumption and consumption of lipids or carbohydrates (fatty meats, dairy products; vegetables…).
The fact that the mortality rate is lowest in the 1st quintile of carbohydrate consumption and in the 5th quintile of lipids consumption suggests that an even lower consumption of carbohydrates and even higher consumption of lipids decreases mortality even more.
And indeed, the first graph in Figure 1 on page 7 shows an inverse relationship between lipid consumption and the mortality rate. The mortality rate is the lowest… at the end of the graph, when more than 45% of the total energy comes from lipids!
In addition, an increased consumption of saturated fatty acids or monounsaturated fatty acids does not increase the mortality rate, on the contrary. It’s just that a very high consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids lowers the mortality rate even more. In other studies, it is trans fatty acids that have demonstrated their harmfulness (margarines…), not the saturated fatty acids!
On the contrary, beyond 55% of energy in the form of carbohydrates, the mortality rate increases in an accelerated way.
100ml of breast milk contains:
4.2g, 37.8cal (54%) fat
1.1g, 04.4cal (06%) protein
7.0g, 28.0cal (40%) carbohydrates
By natural selection, breast milk is probably close to optimal for the newborn.
It gives us an indication of the importance of lipids in human nutrition.
The optimal share of lipids in human food after weaning is certainly greater than or equal to 45%, probably around 54%, as in breast milk.
Proteins are of variable quality in human food after weaning: part of the protein is used for anabolism (cell construction) and the other for catabolism (energy): more protein is therefore needed to ensure anabolic needs, and pay attention to their quality. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why, all other things being equal, people consuming more animal proteins have a lower mortality rate; another reason being that a higher consumption of animal proteins is associated with a higher consumption of lipids (fatty fish, fatty meat…).
In general, the quality of macronutrients is important, and the way they are taken: for example, we know that fibers significantly reduce the harmfulness of fructose (whole fruits…), while pure sucrose, i.e. refined sugar, is very harmful and causes diabetes (Coca-Cola…).
Dehghan, M., Mente, A., Zhang, X., Swaminathan, S., Li, W., Mohan, V., …Mapanga, R. (2017). Associations of fats and carbohydrate intake with cardiovascular disease and mortality in 18 countries from five continents (PURE): a prospective cohort study. Lancet, 390(10107), 2050â2062. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(17)32252-3
Report comment
Spears should consider applying for Russian citizenship.
Gerard Depardieu did it well… and he got it.
Of course, she would lose all her fortune, but freedom is priceless… And then she could rebuild a small capital by working in Russia.
She should visit Russia when the Cold War heats up.
Ah, Russia, country of freedom, LOL.
Report comment
The comparison with cocaine is wise.
The pharmaco-medical complex intends to expand the extremely lucrative market for recreational drugs, and to seize the market shares currently held by the Mafia.
The “scientific” method by which esketamine has been approved is applicable to any recreational drugs.
It is therefore not only the approval of esketamine that is at stake, but the groundswell aimed at widening the market for recreational drugs: opiates, benzodiazepines, veterinary sedatives, psycho-stimulants, ecstasy, LSD, cannabis, etc.
Report comment
We can find other biases in this study.
Hawthorne effect: “is a type of reactivity in which individuals modify an aspect of their behavior in response to their awareness of being observed.”
Social desirability bias: “is a type of response bias that is the tendency of survey respondents to answer questions in a manner that will be viewed favorably by others.”
Classical conditioning: “refers to a learning procedure in which a biologically potent stimulus (e.g. alcool) is paired with a previously neutral stimulus (e.g. aversive social situation).”
At least some parts of the experience was designed to maximize the Hawthorne effect and the social desirability bias by classical conditioning.
“Baseline and post-manipulation (i.e. Day 1 and Day 10) cue reactivity was assessed via âlikingâ and âurge to drinkâ ratings of a set of beer (N = 7), wine (N = 3) orange juice (N = 4) and soft drink (N=2) cue images, as described previously12. The experimenter first opened a bottle of lager (Pilsner Urquell) in front of the participants and poured 150ml into a half-pint glass. This was placed on the table in front of the participants and they were told that they would drink this beer when instructed to by on-screen prompts, but that first they would rate a series of images for pleasantness(liking) and their effects on urge to drink(wanting) the beer in front of them. All ratings were made verbally on a scale of -5 (extremely unpleasant/ greatly reduces urge) to +5 (extremely pleasant/ greatly increases urge) and noted by the experimenter. Images were 400×400 pixels, presented centrally on a computer screen, in a random order, for 10 seconds each. Following completion of the rating, participants were asked to rate their current urge to drink the in vivo beer (anticipatory urgerating) and how much they Conducting the cue reactivity/alcohol reinforcement task on Day 1 and Day 10 both provided a metric of clinically-relevant changes in the hedonic and motivational effects of beer and maximised the expectancy of receiving beer during the Day 3 reactivation procedure, thus generating a prediction error (PE) when the drink was withheld on Day 3.
The alcohol MRM (RET) and Control (No RET) Memory Reactivation Procedures took place on Day 3 and used sub-sets of stimuli from the cue reactivity /alcohol reinforcement task. For MRM retrieval (RETgroups), these were four images of beer and for No RET+KET, these were four images of orange juice. All participants also rated two âsoft drinkâ images of cola and coffee. Participants in MRM retrieval conditions were told they would repeat the image rating and beer consumption task from Day 1. Again, a beer was opened and 150ml poured into a glass placed in front of participants. They then rated four of the beer cue images (designated âbeer retrievalâ images) and the two soft drink images, along with their âurge to drinkâ and anticipated enjoyment of the in vivo beer. The drinking prompt screens then began, but the final prompt read âStop! Do not drinkâ.”
This is pure classical conditionning. Alcohol consumption is associated with an unpleasant social situation, frustration, and public exposure by the “experts”.
Although the experiment has resulted in “favorable” results, it is likely that it has above all (re)demonstrated the effectiveness of classical conditioning and social pressure in reducing alcohol consumption, or at least, the declaration of alcohol consumption.
Other biases can be found in the detailed description of the experiment.
For example, 27/30 of the placebo group and 60/60 of the ketamine group guessed which group they were in. Therefore, this experience is almost open label.
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION
Report comment
The link do not go to the right URL. The right URL is:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/11/mental-health-issues-cause-record-numbers-of-gen-x-z-to-leave-jobs.html
Report comment
I really appreciate this scientific watch from madinamerica.com.
Unlike other media outlets, madinamerica.com reports on therapies that do not work.
This avoids the crushing and painful bias by which only favorable results are massively disseminated, giving the illusion of scientific progress without end and error.
The reality is that the march of science is riddled with massive, shameful and ridiculous errors; kept artificially alive by interest, authority and blindness.
90% of true scientific work is to get rid of these mistakes, not to create “new” scientific knowledge that is usually defective.
Report comment
What is the difference between a 1939 German psychiatrist and a 2019 Canadian psychiatrist?
80 years apart.
Report comment
It seems that the authors really believe that the GMH movement could have a beneficial effect if properly reoriented.
Report comment
For example, anti-scientific communication operations that seek to promote or protect corporations or businesses, and that have the effect of degrading the health of the population, could be punished by real jail time.
Indeed, this kind of propaganda has the effect of maintaining or increasing the consumption of legal narcotics, and thus of causing harm to society, which can be measured in financial losses, in losses of years of life in good health and losses of human lifes.
These losses should be measured concretely and the people involved should be punished in the same way as other criminals.
Report comment
“Emphasis on shared decision-making” aims to restore the reputation of psychiatry, and to integrate the institution to trade as a normal service, as are the services of hairstyles or lawyer.
This is total utopia, because the fundamental function of psychiatry is the repression of some form of deviance, while the trafficking of narcotics and psychotherapy are a subordinate function, whatever its economic size.
“Despite the clear benefits of involving young people in their own treatment” This is so obvious that the author is careful not to mention them. Would the benefit be that children can be subjected to drug addiction with their own agreement? Or that it is not necessary to use brutal force against them?
The “decision-making process” is a lie of war propaganda. War propaganda, like the myth of chemical imbalance, is a weapon of war, and makes deaths like any weapon. Proponents of war lies are criminals just like criminals who handle material weapons, like psychiatric narcotics.
“I did not … [know] … they just make decisions for me.”
This child is right. He is not stupid. the propagandists of the “shared decision-making” are liars, who deserve the same fate as other psychiatrists.
Down with the liars!
Report comment
Thank you Peter. Your scientific watch is very useful.
Report comment
Convictions are very rare.
I witnessed a psychiatrist who referred her client to a colleague with whom she had previously worked, in another hospital where she had previously worked, with a letter recommending the continuation of the restraint measure because of the voluntary cessation of patient care while in free care. Indeed, even when you are in free care and you stop the care freely, you may be reproached later if you return to care under duress, determining mandatory care potentially unlimited.
This psychiatrist has violated the following laws:
_ prohibition of comperage (article 23 of the CDM, Code of Medical Ethics),
_ violation of the free choice of the patient (article 6 of the CDM),
_ breach of professional secrecy (article 4 of the CDM),
_ refusal of transmission of the medical file (article 46 of the CDM).
and more.
Fortunately, the administration being what it is, they failed to well organize the transfer. They forgot to write the necessary certificates, so the client was legally free without anyone knowing.
When we started the release process, we realized that the client was already free. So we said bye-bye to the hospital, despite the helpless vociferations of the referral psychiatrist, and we had a good laugh in our sleeve.
Report comment
In France, “compĂ©rage” is strictly forbidden by the law.
The “compĂ©rage” (from “compadre”, “partner”) consists, for a legal or physical person, to send his client to another legal or physical person, under a customers exchange agreement or other benefits, to limit competition, limit the choice of the client, and keep the customers captive of an oligopolistic network of companies or liberal professions.
When your psychologist sends you specifically and compulsorily to Chicago Lakeshore Hospital, which has an agreement with the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine, she commits an act of compĂ©rage, which is a form of corruption.
Report comment
You claim that you are not against the system, that you want to increase the share of psychiatry in the health budget in Mexico, that is to say decrease the relative share devoted to the true medicine, and increase the psychiatric staff:
“We are not against the system”
“only around 2% of the health budget invested in mental health”
“lack personal means”
“scant mental health budget”
“mental health has […] garnered even less support from the public coffers”
In addition, your group is mainly made up of “academics” and “professionals”, that is to say people working in psychiatric companies or institutions and in the spread of psychiatry. This conflict of interest was not fully declared in the article. This is problematic because many members of the group would directly and personally benefit from the increase in the budget of psychiatry in Mexico.
On the other hand, the collective revealed that some of its members consumed psychiatric narcotics, sometimes in massive proportions. This is also problematic because publicly advocating the consumption of toxic products is one way to promote them (Bernays, 1928; Amos, 2000: “Torches of Freedom”). Think about Camel, who interviewed doctors who smoked cigarettes.
Research shows that the increase in psychiatric budgets across history and countries is correlated with a decrease in the recovery rate (JÀÀskelÀinen, 2012), an increase in the suicide rate (Burgess, 2004), and the increase in the mortality of psychiatric patients relative to the general population (Hayes, 2017). Moreover, the increase in budgets is not associated with an effective enlargement of rights.
This indifference to the facts, this sordid obsession to public money, this complacency towards neurotoxins, reflect the corporatist origin of this so-called “patient movement”, actually under the control of people who have a direct financial or professional interest in the development of the psychiatry.
Bibiography:
Amos, Amanda, and Margaretha Haglund. “From Social Taboo to “Torch of Freedom”: the Marketing of Cigarettes to Women .” Tobacco Control 9.1 (2000). Web. 28 Apr 2010.
Bernays, E. L. (1928) Propaganda. Routledge.
Burgess, P., Pirkis, J., Jolley, D., Whiteford, H., & Saxena, S. (2004). Do nations’ mental health policies, programs and legislation influence their suicide rates? An ecological study of 100 countries. Australian and New Zealand journal of psychiatry, 38(11-12), 933-939.
JÀÀskelĂ€inen, E., Juola, P., Hirvonen, N., McGrath, J. J., Saha, S., Isohanni, M., … & Miettunen, J. (2012). A systematic review and meta-analysis of recovery in schizophrenia. Schizophrenia bulletin, 39(6), 1296-1306.
Hayes, J. F., Marston, L., Walters, K., King, M. B., & Osborn, D. P. (2017). Mortality gap for people with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia: UK-based cohort study 2000â2014. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 211(3), 175-181.
Report comment
First of all, I would like to congratulate you on your research initiative.
In addition, the absence of relapse, defined as the need for rehospitalization, is an extraordinarily good result. Especially since you have passed the period of beginning of weaning, the most at risk of relapse.
I have some reservations about the pace and the weaning order suggest to your patients.
1) I do not think that a patient who is poorly dependent on psychotropic drugs requires such a long withdrawal. The duration of weaning should be a function of the duration of exposure: the longer and the most intense is the exposure, the longer the weaning time should be.
One-day, high-dose exposure requires weaning? I think not.
An exhibition for a week? maybe two-three days.
A one-year exhibition? three or four months.
An exhibition of more than 5 years? Maybe it will take a weaning of more than one year.
But it also depends on the medication, the motivation of the person and his anxiety. It depends on his surroundings and other social conditions. Typically, you can not compare benzodiazepine dependence, whose withdrawal is torture, and dependence on Haldol, whose withdrawal is often a physical and psychological relief, despite the risk of relapse.
2) The decrease of one drug after another has the advantage of indicating, in case of withdrawal syndrome, which drug is at the cause, since you only decreases one at a time. However, this weaning order has the drawback of considerably lengthening the duration of the overall weaning, and of delaying the start of weaning of the other drugs, which continue to do damage during this time.
In addition, some drugs, in polypharmacy, have antagonistic effects. Therefore, decreasing them at the same time may be easier than decreasing them one by one (when the client is taking a sedative and a stimulant, for example).
Of course, you are anxious to cause relapse of your patients, because the rate of rehospitalization is easily measured, while the decrease in toxicity of drugs by weaning is less obvious. Have you done biological tests to your clients to check the progress of their health? Is there a control group where such tests have been done?
If this is not the case, you are missing an objective measure that could be extremely useful when exposing your results. For is the progressive suppression of drug toxicity, not one of the goals of weaning?
Regards,
Sylvain Rousselot.
Report comment
This is the normal runing of the “free” press: The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine
Robert Withaker or other Mad In America authors should expect to be the subject of a denigration campaign at some point in the future, if their audience and speech exceeds certain limits, especially on TV show.
Do not expect loyalty among journalists. On the contrary, they will use scientifically proven means to discredit you:
_ ask unexpected, complex and multiple questions that require thought, research and rigor, but require short and immediate answers,
_ appeal to public opinion, common sense, and popular sentiments,
_ rely on non-existent, questionable or misunderstood scientific research that can not be challenged without rigorous verification,
_ use the editing: select the plans to give an impression of hesitation, stupidity or ignorance of the person interviewed, or mount the plans in a wrong order,
_ use advertisements that contradict the speech,
_ distributing speech in an unfair and biased manner,
Etc., etc.
Report comment
“Mass shootings” are a “social subject” whose media coverage largely exceeds the objective importance.
Mass shootings in 2018:
373 deaths (gunviolencearchive.org)
Opioid overdoses in 2018:
68,557 deaths (US drug overdose deaths fell slightly in 2018)
Excess mortality due to hypnotics in 2010:
320,000 to 507,000 deaths (Hypnoticsâ association with mortality or cancer: a matched cohort study)
Only hypnotics cause 1000 times more deaths than mass shootings.
If the press was objective, it would not even talk about these news items.
An objective press would talk about the real mass murders, that there are hundreds of thousands of people dying every year in the United States, and millions more who are physically, socially and psychologically disabled by means of deliberate chemical poisoning.
And this real mass murder, which makes mass shootings absolutely insignificant by comparison, is not only legal, but also encouraged by the press, which repeats that these psychotropic drugs are good for (mental) health and even save lives.
Report comment
Here is a lucid article.
Report comment
Teachers are the touts of psychiatry. No wonder psychiatrists say they need to be better indoctrinated.
There is no factual difference between the state and the mafia, only a difference of legitimacy. Both organize their small society through violence, drug trafficking, and even sexual venality (marriage and prostitution).
For both official servants and mafiosi, radical repression is fine.
Report comment
Enrico Gnaulati, let me ask you a question:
Is psychotherapy a medical act or a cultural act?
If we take the trouble to think about it, we will see the problem differently.
Does “mental illness” exist? Can an illness be “mental”? As an antipsychiatrist, I say: “no”.
So what is psychotherapy? What can a psychotherapist and his client do well together?
Psychotherapy is a cultural act. The therapist and his client speak together according to a particular cultural mode, which has a particular cultural meaning.
In this, psychotherapy is not distinguished from cartomancy, Christian confession or shamanism. It occupies the same social place, according to a different cultural mode. Psychotherapy is steeped in a scientific philosophy, but it is rarely scientific, and its effectiveness is not science-based: psychotherapy is effective because it corresponds to the culture of the client and the therapist, and because the therapist and his client are in phase through this special cultural trait.
–
Finally, cultural acts also relate to power, that is, culture imposed by the state. If psychotherapy is reimbursed, it is partly controlled by the state, which is unacceptable. The state uses culture for repressive purposes, and psychotherapy is associated with state university, psychiatric hospitals, and public servants. Psychologists are a corporation that obeys orders.
That’s why, as a psychotherapist, I am against reimbursement, and for liberal psychotherapy; the psychotherapist must stop presenting himself as a doctor, stop presenting his client as ill and his acts as medical. He is not a doctor, his client is not sick and his actions are not medical. All this is cultural, and nothing else.
If you want to make psychotherapy accessible, drastically reduce your fees; psychologists, like siberian shamans and african marabouts, think they have come out of Jupiter’s thigh.
Low and adapted to client fees = more clients.
Report comment
Thank you for this article.
Report comment
Thank you very much. Peter Simons, your watch work is very useful.
Report comment