I would like your thought on this:
Ivana Fulli MD on December 20, 2012 at 1:17 pm said:
Dear Sir,
I do not know if Adam Lanza was autistic but answering special education needs for the more intellectually able autistic persons taking care of keeping the bullying of the born different by neurotipical kids at school minimal is good prevention:
From Temple Grandin, an autistic very bright woman who got a very nice education in” Animals in translation”:
Teasing hurts. the kids would tease me , so I’d get mad and smack ‘em. That simple. They always started it, they like to see me react. My new school solved that problem The school had a stable and horses for kids to rid, and the teachers took away privileges if I smacked somebody. After i lost privileges enough times I learned just to cry when somebody did something bad to me. I’d cry and that would take away the aggression. I still cry when people are mean to me.///
It is unfortunate that so many very bright autistic persons who haver so much for society do not get a speacil needs education.
The DSM5 makes it impossible to diagnose and get support for the more able of aspies-a Yale child psychiatrist, Pr Volkmar and other teams published on this.
It was for me a cultural experience to see that some MIA political activists -and admirors- agree with the DSM 5 and with the French psychoanalysts who claim that the mother behavior is the cause of autism and that she should suffer in silence-variant from a brtish know it all autism is a thing of the past.
///Should mothers know better than complain? Sure they should, the responsible and respectable grown-up people they want everybody to believe they are. Complaining doesn’t get anybody anywhere but deeper and deeper into the very same misery that’s complained about. /// is -to my view -as a psychiatrist with some and experience and training in the autisms and in forensic of autism although I am not a forensic psychiatrist.
NB: Giving autisitc kids the special education and support they need and educating neurotipical children in not bullying persons born autistic will be good prevention-and an easier task than getting rid of the USA gun culture…
Secondly, and be assured that it will be my last comment to your post: Although some psychiatric drugs – like SSRI can increase violence for other people and suicide risks- some persons with a history of violence are helped by neuroleptics.
NB: I felt privileged to have been invinted as a neurotipical autistfriendly psychiatrists. Some friends of mine were worried for my personal safety immerging myself for three days in an isolated place with very autistic persons but I had no hesitation to go since I knew it would be an autistic friendly place -with for example a special absolutely quiet little dining rrom for the minoirity who couldn’t bear the cutlery and conversation noises in the main restaurant.
I remember some little bit of short temper- for example when the restaurant ‘s rules were changed by surprise by the catering staff- and a few meltdown but I always felt absolutely safe all the time.
If the Western societies do not provide for the specail needs of so many gifted and brave and honest precious autistic people because the DSM5 prohibit it and not many parents can afford it or find the needed professionals, a very small percentage of Asperger’s syndrome persons will make their family home hell and do criminal acts after years of confusion and frustration with modern life intense sensory stimulation and neurotypicals social codes etc..
All the extremisms are dangerous-and no activist has the right to decide what is good for every body-in my view
Dear Paul F,
///It is worth adding that there are legions of licensed mental health clinicians who are very much in line with Ms. Delano’s perspective on mental Health as opposed to mental illness. These therapists are ready, and very much capable of offering corrective experiences for those who are unsure of how to make this sanity-filled journey on their own. ///
You seem ready to make a few dollars on the vaccum left by the disparition of psychiatry offering a “sanity-filled journey. Aren’t you?
Mrs Delano mission on earth has not got space for money makers on her plans for the well-being of humanity.
She will just suppress any need of therapist by some sort of wonderful new era for humanity.
Dear Mr Hoggett,
Life is unfair and not everybody can be autistic and very clever like Temple Grandin:
///That kind of crude behaviourism doesn’t work on me so why should it work for the boy in this story?///
Mrs Long might not have posted a letter to the New York times upon thinking but she posted on her smal blog and it went viral.
Mrs Liza Long would have not panicked after the mass murder, matricide and suicide if she had let her own genius and violent son down.
Your accomplice in bashinbg mjck -who might be a case of Internet Munchaüsen for what I know- boasted on Alice Keys’ blog that she had let her two very young children go to foster care in order to protect her own precious brain from psychiatric drugs. She claim to be sex addicted because she was sexually assaulted and of not having been able to take care even of a kitten who burned on the 11th birthday of her daughter.
This is high moral standard on MIA and that mjck -a suffere or a Internet Munchaüsen creation – use a pseudo to abuse Mrs Liza Long for retiring privilege when it is the best way with autistic difficult children and asking his son to respect his school uniform when most probably the son cannot enter the school without proper uniform.
Shame on you for your lack of empathy with a distressed mother!
Mr Hogget,
You should not believe everything people write to you or tell you.
They make you look so silly sometimes when you dare to write that autism is a thing of the past.
///Someone on my facebook page piped up that he was a violent and angry child who once nearly bit a teachers finger off but he didn’t turn into a mass killer, instead someone organised for all the school bullies to beat him in after school and then he stopped. Hilarious – but not something I could approve of.///
Hilarious really?
– Removed by moderator for personal attack –
– Removed by moderator for personal attack –
– Removed by moderator for personal attack –
Dear Sir,
I do not know if Adam Lanza was autistic but answering special education needs for the more intellectually able autistic persons taking care of keeping the bullying of the born different by neurotipical kids at school minimal is good prevention:
From Temple Grandin, an autistic very bright woman who got a very nice education in” Animals in translation”:
Teasing hurts. the kids would tease me , so I’d get mad and smack ‘em. That simple. They always started it, they like to see me react. My new school solved that problem The school had a stable and horses for kids to rid, and the teachers took away privileges if I smacked somebody. After i lost privileges enough times I learned just to cry when somebody did something bad to me. I’d cry and that would take away the aggression. I still cry when people are mean to me.///
It is unfortunate that so many very bright autistic persons who haver so much for society do not get a speacil needs education.
The DSM5 makes it impossible to diagnose and get support for the more able of aspies-a Yale child psychiatrist, Pr Volkmar and other teams published on this.
It was for me a cultural experience to see that some MIA political activists -and admirors- agree with the DSM 5 and with the French psychoanalysts who claim that the mother behavior is the cause of autism and that she should suffer in silence-variant from a brtish know it all autism is a thing of the past.
///Should mothers know better than complain? Sure they should, the responsible and respectable grown-up people they want everybody to believe they are. Complaining doesn’t get anybody anywhere but deeper and deeper into the very same misery that’s complained about. /// is -to my view -as a psychiatrist with some and experience and training in the autisms and in forensic of autism although I am not a forensic psychiatrist.
NB: Giving autisitc kids the special education and support they need and educating neurotipical children in not bullying persons born autistic will be good prevention-and an easier task than getting rid of the USA gun culture…
Secondly, and be assured that it will be my last comment to your post: Although some psychiatric drugs – like SSRI can increase violence for other people and suicide risks- some persons with a history of violence are helped by neuroleptics.
NB: I felt privileged to have been invinted as a neurotipical autistfriendly psychiatrists. Some friends of mine were worried for my personal safety immerging myself for three days in an isolated place with very autistic persons but I had no hesitation to go since I knew it would be an autistic friendly place -with for example a special absolutely quiet little dining rrom for the minoirity who couldn’t bear the cutlery and conversation noises in the main restaurant.
I remember some little bit of short temper- for example when the restaurant ‘s rules were changed by surprise by the catering staff- and a few meltdown but I always felt absolutely safe all the time.
If the Western societies do not provide for the specail needs of so many gifted and brave and honest precious autistic people because the DSM5 prohibit it and not many parents can afford it or find the needed professionals, a very small percentage of Asperger’s syndrome persons will make their family home hell and do criminal acts after years of confusion and frustration with modern life intense sensory stimulation and neurotypicals social codes etc..
All the extremisms are dangerous-and no activist has the right to decide what is good for every body-in my view
My pleasure Stephen,
I have clients with Asperger’s syndrome.
Please read:
Persons with Asperger’s syndrome- when they do not receive a proper diagnosis and proper help – do not fulfill their potential as very special contributors to society and very loyal and honest and caring people.
To the best of my knowledge, no honest person can pretend that the autisms are due to the lack of love or inadequate parenting as so many political activists like Mrs Delano want to believe and make believe to her admirors.
NB: Everyone is free to have their own beliefs but not their own facts.
If dear chaplain Stephen wants to think the earth is flat with Jesus having rode dinausors on its flat surface, he is very welcome.
Anyone like the French childpsychaitrist claiming that Asperger’s syndrome is due to bad parenting and bad mother is a scinetific fraud;
Some Asper’s syndrome kids need a very intense special needs education and support very fexw families can afford and I can’t see how societycan provide it at the task payer money without a diagnostic by an honest and trained clinican using the best of his abilities since anyone would want his own child to get a lot of special attention and education at school.
People are born autistic -with very good qualities and challenges but Western society nowadays increase the challenge when any teenager has to have a long list of friends on a facebook page to fit in and when often to excel at something intelectual hating sport is not seen as cool…
Dear Mrs Forbes,
I am sorry to disagree with your political agenda and altostrata’s but Asperger’s syndrome persons are born with a lot of good qualities and social challenges and often they are diagnosed at an adult age after having being treated wrongly in psychiatry.They do not need psychiatric drugs when physical exercice, good diet and healthy living can relieve their anxiety!
You are just blinded by simplistic political activism which -to my mind and heart- is not better than the silly monoaminergis theories of mental illnesses!
I wish the know it all, live it all british commentator could benefit from a conference by David Horton a bright and brave young man and Asperger’s syndrome activistof sort who wants to raise awareness of mistakes and help professionals to take better care of asperger’s syndrome young people.
From Pr Mitzi Waltz:///I am writing in response to David Horton’s request for a recommendation as a speaker, as I understand that you are considering asking him to present again at UB.
David provided a one-hour presentation followed by a Q&A session for my undergraduate class at the University of Birmingham last year. He covered aspects of his life at school and in adulthood, including further education and employment, and issues with anxiety. He spoke well, and also answered questions well. His presentation was singled out as a highlight of the module by several students in their evaluation.(..)///
This is taken from an antipsychiatrist-to my mind- but pro psychaitric drugs anonymous psychologist and neuroscientists, “neuroskeptic”:
Since I prefer not to let aspie read the awfull insensitive political stuff in some comments – many aspies are diffciult to raise but they often love their parents and are taking better care of them in their old age that your average neurotipical is when they do not receive a proper diagnosis and proper help – to the best of my knowledge can pretend tha tthe autisms are due to need a special needs education and support only a diagnostic by an honest clinican can provide since anyone would want his own child to get a lot of special attention
http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.fr/2012/11/exercise-and-depression-revisited.html
Anonymous said…
My name is David Horton and I am grateful to Dr Ivana Fulli for being a psychiatrist listening to me in a considerate manner she is also very honest with you. I do not object to receiving help from professionals it is just the typ of help that professionals give that causes me concern.
There are many different treatments for Asperger’s syndrome and I welcome the desire to ameliorate its negative effects. However all treatments for a problem depend on the practitioners knowledge. If Doctors, Psychiatrists and other professionals do not administer these treatments in the correct manner they can case the patient additional problems, instead of helping them to become fulfilled productive members of society they can increase the individuals dysfunctional behaviours.
The text Dr Fulli posted is taken from a collaborative work between her and I : an abstract that has being written from the point of view of someone who has suffered as a result of such treatments and hopes to play a small part in preventing others being similarly damaged.
Exercise helped me a great deal.
7 November 2012 16:17
Ivana Fulli MD said…
David,
Here the text I posted this morning but was just a transient comment. It must have been thought spammage by neuroskeptic ‘s ptotection system – or whatever:
///(…)Once I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome I was told about the problems I would have with the condition. Problems with socialising, problems with work and the other problems that we are all familiar with.
It made me feel powerless, I felt like I had no ability to affect the world or other people around me in any way. The impression of Asperger’s Syndrome that I got was completely negative and that would affect me for the rest of my life.
I was very negatively affected by the advice from the professionals. I never heard anything positive or encouraging from them.
I decided that since there was nothing positive about Asperger’s Syndrome and Asperger’s Syndrome was part of me that I needed to dispense with myself in order to be successful in life.
I decided that all of my feelings and emotions were unnecessary and should be ignored and supressed.(…)
I studied GCSE’s and all of the proceeding subjects as well as outdoor walks (which I hated) and I left with only mediocre GCSE’S.
I then went on to college and enjoyed myself but never achieved a great deal. After that I went to University College Worcester. University College Worcester gave me a chance to live away from home for the first time. I studied A Business and Information technology HND there and passed. When I went on to study a degree I could not cope and decided to drop out.
After dropping out of University I spent several years on my own trying to find a job and failing. (…)
I was not used to living on my own and went a little stir crazy, I once stayed in my flat for three days without leaving.
I decided to correct this by taking a walk every day. (…)
I also mearted to get involved in disability politics. It was good for me and helped me to become more assertive.
In Birmingham I spent a long time working on my physical Fitness.
I also worked on my anxiety levels over the period of about a year and a half.
I could feel great changes being made.
I decided that the time had come to go back to university.
I felt that I had changed enough to be able to cope with the environment. The first grade I got was 86 Per cent considering that in the past I had only go mediocre grades at best this was a great achievement for me. I am now in my second year and hoping for similar success(…)///
7 November 2012 16:58
Of course listening to a person with Asperger’s syndrome is not on your political agenda!
Beware that you can think yourself liberal and broadminded but my point writing that you will made a dreal team with the know it all lived it all British commentator was only that the more right is a governement the less is spend on social help.
To give a hand to a mother in despair by paying with taxpayer money -as they do in UK- a good standards special needs education to autistic people up to precious special needs boarding schools is just what the far right people cannot stand.
They want to pay the least possible tax and want it to be spend for sending drones to kill innocent civilians in distant countries…
Other feel that they are God chosen and any struggling person is not.
Mrs Delano and inconditional admirers:
Internet is a public space and since some poor nerves of a mean political activist censor had seen fit to smear my name with ludicrous accusations on http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/12/many-small-actions-bring-big-results/#comment-18564
I think useful to post e-mails I received from mr whitaker and Cole since apparently those two gentelmen atre not able to make political activists with an agenda behave in a civil way:
///Dear Dr. Fulli,
Your comment should not have been censored. I don’t even know how
this happened, and I was quite unhappy about it.
I can’t even figure out who pulled your comment. We don’t have paid
staff, and so I rely on a small group to try to maintain the site, but comments are not supposed to be censored unless they are attacks on a person (the blogger). Critical comments are fine, of the sort raise here.
I apologize for this. I see that one of your comments was restored, but not the other. I will get to the bottom of this, and get it rectified.
Again, I hope you can accept my apologies.
Bob/
///Dear Dr. Fulli,
I have tried to make it clear that we allow comments, with free
discussion of ideas, unless they are personal attacks. I will have to
read this and see what has erupted . . . I just got back into my office.
Your comment should not have been censored. I don’t even know how
this happened, and I was quite unhappy about it.
I can’t even figure out who pulled your comment. We don’t have paid
staff, and so I rely on a small group to try to maintain the site, but comments are not supposed to be censored unless they are attacks on a person (the blogger). Critical comments are fine, of the sort raise here.
I apologize for this. I see that one of your comments was restored, but not the other. I will get to the bottom of this, and get it rectified.
Again, I hope you can accept my apologies.
Bob/
///Dear Dr. Fulli,
I have tried to make it clear that we allow comments, with free
discussion of ideas, unless they are personal attacks. I will have to
read this and see what has erupted . . . I just got back into my office.
Bob Whitaker//
///From: “Kermit Cole”
Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2012 7:08 PM
Subject: Comments restored
> I have restored your comments.
They should not have been removed, and we apologize for any distress the removal may have caused you.I hope you will understand how difficult it is to maintain a positive environment in the comment section, and it can be almost impossible to draw a clear line about what constitutes a violation of policy. We generally have a very liberal policy, which usually means that bloggers are frustrated with us for not removing posts. Then, when we do, we get a lot of heat from the other side. There is no possible middle ground.
But your comments, upon review, were clearly not a violation and should not have been removed.
and the ludicrous smearing of my name has not disappeared. This is the rerason of that transfer of mails.
if you cannot remove disgraceful intimidation by smearing a name with ludicrous false accusation, think twice before letting your bad nerves take the lead over honesty Mr or MRS censor and political activist not wanting any contradiction!
Dr. Ivana Fulli.
Justin,
I am yet to met an adult with Asperger’s syndrome who has not been suffering at main stream schools and had not been bullied and abused.
One very gentle adult man working as a shop assistant in UK told me that he was expelled from school for throwing a classmate through a window after months and month of bullying but after a small additional comment. Just an exemple and I am bo saying that Adam lanza had been an aspie.
From Temple Grandin, an autistic very bright woman who got a very nice education in” Animals in translation”:
Teasing hurts. the kids would tease me , so I’d get mad and smack ’em. That simple. They always started it, they like to see me react. My new school solved that problem The school had a stable and horses for kids to rid, and the teachers took away privileges if I smacked somebody. After i lost privileges enough times I learned just to cry when somebody did something bad to me. I’d cry and that would take away the aggression. I still cry when people are mean to me.///
It is unfortunate that so many very bright autistic persons who haver so much for society do not get a speacil needs education.
And by the way, the mother was acting right by suppression the ptivilege of videogame to try to make her son understand that his behavior has to change…
The trouble with political agendas is that sometimes one just refuses to see the issues at stake.
Not to mention anonymous Münchausen by internet who always provides some anonymous with lexible personnal stories to make their point, like having had a wonderful mother or a very bad one according to the need of the narrative…
By the way, autistic persons and family do not want to be considered mentally ill but born different with a lot of good autistic qualities as well as social challenges.
///Should mothers know better than complain? Sure they should, the responsible and respectable grown-up people they want everybody to believe they are. Complaining doesn’t get anybody anywhere but deeper and deeper into the very same misery that’s complained about.///
After:
///There was this 13-year-old girl, whose mother had had ever changing relationships with a number of violent men during most of her daughter’s childhood. At several occasions the girl had witnessed her mother getting beaten up. She herself had been sexually assaulted by these men.///Following your line of thinking, a mother should not complained about.///
In 10 years time the abused daughter might get herself in “ever changing relationship with violent men abusing her and raping her own daughter but at that time she will have to suffer in silence her own daughter’s behavior.
I wonder how long it will take for the world at large to recognize your wonderful solution. It will certaintly save a lot of tax payers money.
Variant from dear known it all John Hogget , the autisms do not exist and society do not need to offer booarding school with trained teachers etc…
The two of you would make a dreamteam in any far right governement!
Stephen thinks like you too but presumably for other reasons:
///My sister even tried to kill my mother with the help of her
boyfriend. When my mother got loose from the two of them she beat
the whoops out of both of them. ///
/// As a sibling I supported my mother in her support of my brother
and sister, even though they did horrible things to her in the
process. NO, I DO NOT HAVE ANY COMPASSION FOR THIS WOMAN WHO SEEMS
TO CARE MORE ABOUT HERESELF THAN SHE DOES HER CHILDREN. SHE WANTED
HER FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FAME AND TOOK IT AT THE EXPENSE OF HER
CHILD! ///
I believe that by helping mothers you help the children and that Stephen ‘s mother must have been very fit but that society shoiuld have helped her more when she was rasing 4 or 5 kids as a single poor mother.
Dear Mrs Delano,
Here my comment that has been censored in a way Mr whitaker couldn’t understand yeasterday either- or so he wrote to me.
I will only add that my pro bono clients and my friends in the Autistic community are proud to be different from neurotypical and that you obviously know very little about the autisms.
Adam Lanza might or might not have been an aspie but for sure aspies are born different.
Who are you to decide that the autisms and Asperger’s syndrome do not exist when a vibrant communauty of very decent people is proud to be born autistic ?
I will not discuss further since your idea of discussing is to be congratulatre for being ignorant of the autisms and lacking empathy. On MIA a mjck who boasted on Dr Alice keys ‘s blog recently that she let her two daughter go to foster care and in the USA probably psychiatric medication at a young age -her rights by all means- to preserve her precious own from psychiatric treatment becomes an expert on education and a moral standard!
Ivana Fulli MD on December 18, 2012 at 6:43 am said:
Hi Laura,
Your political agenda -or some personal issues like refusing to acknowledge the pain you inflicted to your parents and siblings if any or whatever – seems to blind you about the issue at stakes:
A courageous and desperate mother asked the USA society to think upon mothers and families of violent children and young people who need help -and not only by increased gun ownership control!
Adam Lanza ‘s father has a new wife and home, his brother had not seen him for years , his mother lived with him alone-if I am to believe the news.
Adam Lanza’s mother is dead- killed by her son.
Do you think she is faking it or that she deserved it?
In the old Romans ‘law a father could kill any offspring by rights.
Do you think- seriously- that giving birth makes it mandatory nowadays to suffer hell in silence and accept any “angry behavior “up to a death sentence for yourself, your other children and other humans beings ?
Do you think that those mothers – and sibling- deserve to live in fear and also in silence because a disturbed behavior is the sign of a sort of a moral superiority quality of suffering or whatever?
Are you thinking that the mothers who are living in terror of their adolescent or young adult child are just lacking empathy and understanding and should know better than complain?
Are you thinking that your political agenda is worth ignoring facts and inflicting an additional pain to a woman and mother in living hell who put her face to her story because she thinks- as I do –that societies should try to do better to support those “angry teenagers” and their family ?
The parents and siblings of violent disturbed children are suffering hell and often-in France and UK – this end up in a divorce with the mother taking care alone of the violent child with the sibling living with the other parent or leaving home very early.
In my experience of pro bono psychiatrist many parents are not as rich as the Lanza family and in addition to the fears, stress and moral suffering for the mother living alone with the very disturbed angry adolescent or young adult, she alos lives in poverty. The father remarries -often enough with a younger woman- and has new children which makes the alimony shrinks to allow for the education of the new family ‘s children.
Often the new babies are a valid excuse for not receiving at all the disturbed child in the father’s new home.
To be fair, I answered last spring an emergency call for information and help from a divorced man who lives alone with a violent son in a Paris’ flat from the day that “angry” teenager almost killed his younger brother. His former wife is said to be happily remarried and she went to live in a nice house in an affluent suburb lives with her new husband and younger son who had been assaulted.
I also know families -I am an adult pro bono psychiatrist- were the father does not abandon the hell of a family to make himself a new peaceful new one or live alone. I remember vividly, for example, a father coming to speak to me with broken eyeglasses in 2010 explaining, with a shy smile, that his almost adult son was in a bad mood that morning and hit him in the face and that contact lensesI also know families -I am an adult pro bono psychiatrist- were the father does not abandon the hell of a family to make himself a new peaceful new one or live alone. I remember vividly, for example, a father coming to speak to me with broken eyeglasses in 2010 explaining, with a shy smile, that his almost adult son was in a bad mood that morning and hit him in the face and that contact lenses were out of the question to prevent recurrent expenses for eyeglasses because a hit in the face could damage his cornea with contact lenses has said the ophthalmologist!
For myself, I live in a country, France, where many a child psychiatrist is still a psychoanalyst putting the blame on the mother’s behavior whom he will advice to do a years long and costly psychoanalysis therapy herself to heal the son-variant putting the blame on both parents behavior.
Luckily we have not the ” USA guns issues” in Europe but I know families living in hell and I have had to support a mother narrowly escaping strangulation by her daughter.
NB: I cannot believe that “not labeling” violent disturbed teenagers and young person and not prescribing psychiatry drugs is enough because in France young people, unlike adults, are not receiving drugs as much as in the USA- very far from it – and many a psychoanalyst child psychiatrist refuses to put any other label than “it is the mother’s behavior ‘s fault” on a family situation where a son or daughter is making family life hell.
Please consider the consequences for society of what you just wrote with a total lack of empathy for the loving fears of mothers, fathers and siblings society let down!
PS: Those are facts that do not make the DSMs honorable and scientific or the Bad Pharma ‘s criminal marketing techniques acceptable. ///
Hi and so long Alice since your have a moderator who put injust remarks after my real name,
I recommand you to read what suffering parents wrote to that couragous mother on her blog.
I agree with you to the need for taking care of social issues but some single mothers – are left alone in any level of society with violent children they can’t manage alone and it is not good.
Hi and good by, Stephen,
You cannot expect many mother to be as strong and fit and couragous as your mother was. Your mother was a truly exceptionnal woman and by definition it is a rarity.
Ivana.
**** Moderator edit: do not attack poster’s relatives ****
Dear alice,
My comment has been deleted by moderator and I answered with:
“”On MIA, it is OK to attack on a full post a suffering mother who put her face and suffering known to the world asking for the USA society to help families to deal with violent children but not to answer to the attack.
Idem for comments like:
///The mother in the blog (divorced with four children) that Laura writes about, strikes me as someone who has poor parenting skills. (…) she’s dealing with him in a low level assinine way./// ?
To deny the sad reality of single divorced mothers left to deal alone in fear and despair with very difficult behavior of a child with little help from society is OK and encouraged de facto by moderator.
It is always interesting to see politics talk loud in any field… “”
Ivana.
Hi Stephen,
Many parents and sibling live in fear and society has to give a help.
My unbderstanding is that that mother do not want psychaitric care for her son but helps from the society at large.
Do you not think about the siblings ?
Seriously Stephen?
Good special needs sleep in schools are one of the answers and in UK, for example, the society pays the huge costs of precious schools for few pupils and a lot of trained staff.
May be “ex-peers” can organize and run such living in schools but to denied the suffering of the mothers (sometimes father when he dosesn’t divorce the wife and the difficult child-so to speak).
A little compassion for the single mothers of threatening ‘s teenager and adults children is not a small things, Stephen.
Ivana.
Alice,
Of course you are right.
But social politics also have their part to play. As your beautifully eloquent president put it, society and politicians have to give it a try on the guns control front;
Idem for not letting families of disturbed violent teenagers down.
The MIA activists are more than welcome to offer peers (here ex peers) solutions for families of “angry violent children” but to deny the suffering of some family is not acceptable.
Ivana
On MIA, it is OK to attack on a full post a suffering mother who put her face and suffering known to the world asking for the USA society to help families to deal with violent children but not to answer to the attack.
Idem for comments like:
///The mother in the blog (divorced with four children) that Laura writes about, strikes me as someone who has poor parenting skills. (…) she’s dealing with him in a low level assinine way./// ?
To deny the sad reality of single divorced mothers left to deal alone in fear and despair with very difficult behavior of a child with little help from society is OK and encouraged de facto by moderator.
It is always interesting to see politics talk loud in any field…
Dear Alice,
I am looking forward to a conversation in person some day-may be at a meeting for unconventionnal psychiatrists organized at your beach or at a Parisian Museum’s cafeteria with a minimum number of two psychiatrists for the meeting to be hold!
In the mean time, i am always very happy to read your blofs although sometimes I might not feel like hurting other readers by commenting like when I wanted to tell that the French soldiers would like to receive more frequently the label of PTSD they really find not offensive, useful and to the point. Not only the French army medics do not diagnose it as often as the German army doctors, for example, but the “private soldier assurances ” do not recognize it at all arguying that it would be too easy to fake it and claim benefits.
A French soldiers’s association calls the PTSD “The invisible illness”!
I am a great admirer of Dr Pat Bracken’s and of Will Hall and the least reason is not their refusal of any simplistic views and solutions.
It is not nice when money talks but it is not nice either when politics talks too loudly…
Of course, I am against paternalism for any health professionnal and I am all for the sufferers to lead and decide thei way to recovery and be heard but in their diversity.
Ivana
The leaflet is very good indeed and is not such a small thing to give it to a family thinking that a grieving person need psychiatric help- when that person just need the shrink permission to grieve at her pace.
Let’s hope that the RCP do not make it compatible with the DSM5 next May…
Also, it is a way to act against the DSM5 ludicrous take on the loss of a loved one: two weeks to grieve without medication or costly psychotherapy!
Ivana.
PS: We live in very different countries but we made some similar choices like putting family first and not taking for granted that the role of a psychiatrist is to prescribe pills- this written my personal experience is the same as yours : many clients do not need greedy speedy doctors to ask for pills. Even in a free homeopathy clinic in Paris, Dispensaire Hahnemann, I was astonished to witness many clients asking the MD homeopaths -working for free there to promote the use of homeopathy for poor people – to prescribe homeopathy but also a lot of allopathic drugs. Like if they went to consult there for a cheap refill of allopathic drugs!
Dear Alice,
You asked me about what can explain the poor buddhist immigrants suffering less from psychosis.
To the best of my knowledge, nobody has the answer yet. Of course strong family links with respect for the parents and any older person are strong in those immigrant communauties but exploitation runs high also with clandestine factories and very poor but expensive -compared to wages- sleeping spaces etc…
I reckon – just to venture an ideas or two- that parents and elders you trust are a psychologically reassuring force although you might get exploited more easily by an elder person and not choose your future profession yourself and you will give a lot of your money to your parents if they are in need- no free lunch…Also buddhism fatalism helps to get rid of ressentment against other people and the self. Food and genes might play a role too.
Ivana.
Jack,
Just to shame the APA for making so much money and prevent, where we can, the DSM5 to do much harm on people having lost a loved one-or indeed several- one can distribute the free bereavement leaflet of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
I found it to be one of my best clinical tool as a psychiatrist(they offer it not only in English)and since Dr Alice Keys was kind enough not to despise this suggestion on her blog , I feel I might offer it to you and your audience as well:
///Updated May 2011. Due for review: May 2013. Royal College of Psychiatrists. This leaflet may be downloaded, printed out, photocopied and distributed free of charge as long as the Royal College of Psychiatrists is properly credited and no profit is gained from its use. Permission to reproduce it in any other way must be obtained from the Head of Publications. The College does not allow reposting of its leaflets on other sites, but allows them to be linked to directly.///
NB: Let’s hope that the RCP do not feel like adapting their bereavement leaflet to the DSM 5 in May 2013 and beware that the ICD commitees are also electing diseases in a political way and some of those might have the scope to be compatible with the DSM 5.
Anyway, this very useful leaflet is an example of a psychiatrists’ national association who doesn’t put financial profit first- they ask for a voluntary donation when you print it but it is not an obligation. Plus, when you give it to a person in acute mourning, you drastically lessen the risks for that person to become a psychiatrist or a psychologist ‘s client. On that point the RCP seems to do the opposite of the APA…
PS: I am not as keen on every RCP leaflet as I am on that one.
Dear Alice,
Here you are:
///Updated May 2011. Due for review: May 2013. Royal College of Psychiatrists. This leaflet may be downloaded, printed out, photocopied and distributed free of charge as long as the Royal College of Psychiatrists is properly credited and no profit is gained from its use. Permission to reproduce it in any other way must be obtained from the Head of Publications. The College does not allow reposting of its leaflets on other sites, but allows them to be linked to directly.///
NB: I am not as keen on every RCP ‘s leaflets but I couldn’t do easily without their bereavement’s leaflet.
Indeed, it prevented in my pro bono practice several people being pushed into psychiatric medication starting with sleeping pills,costly conselling sessions with a psychologist when nothing was wrong with them. It helps at any distance of the loss, in my experience, but the sooner the better.
The human condition makes that everywhere around you some persons will lost a love one, or several.
Thank you for taking my suggestion kindly.
Ivana.
Alice,
You are such a gifted person and such a good soul that I am sure you will find a way to make a big differences in your communauty with small gestures nicely thought upon.
I might even suggest, as an example, that you set up some local communauty awareness about mourning a loved one -or even loved ones in case of car or boat accident or whatever.
I use myself for my pro bono informal practice with great preventive success the leaflet for mourners and their carers from the Royal College of Psychiatrist. Although they ask for a donation, it is free to print their material as long as you print also the ligne of intelectual property at the end of it.
Those leaflets are printable not only in English- which is useful.They are concise and crystalclear but comprehensive -even the possibility of hallucinations seing the deceased or hearing him-(her)is explained and dedramatized- in my experience it is better than just having a psychaitrist telling you tha tit is nbothing to worry about to the client and their carers ).
I think you can make a big difference only by putting those leaflets in funeral homes or at the office where people do declare the deaths is useful in a country where the national association of psychiatrists will ufficially allow only two week for mourning in the DSM5 .
Just a passing thought of course.
All the best to you and your family.
Ivana.
To read your post and learn that a psychiatrist can manage to run a practice with the time consumming ideal of yours in the USA was a rare and inspirational pleasure.
Without being a buddist, I will add that the pollution from ingesting the most violent of TV series, videogames and pornography is also a stress.
Not to mention the frustration of some ordinary women seing actresses or politicians -like a vice-president candidate in your penultimate presidential election -giving birth and going back in no time to being sexy and very active..
Thanks for that post indeed.
Dr. Fisher,
Beware that in the name of the precautionary principle women are prohibited to give birth at home with a midwife and at least in France,until recently, the same principal made episiotomy the rule for every “natural birth”…
How right can you be on the advantages of independant testing of any medication but where the money to support the cost of those studies come from is only one aspect of the corruption of academics in any field of medicine which let the clients and your average psychiatrist down.
Hi once again Steve,
I meant to write 12 13 12 at 6:20 am that very bright people with a soul do not oversimplify issues – and of course not that they oversimplify issues like politicians of any kind, “physician academic politicians” included.
(Sorry about that but my the MIA “little reply window” is “full of red” when I write in English with my paris baseed computer between typing in French.)
Hi again Steve,
Of course, “Science without conscience is only the ruin of the soul” from Rabelais a XVIe century French physician and writer applies to psychiatric residents and psychiatry researchers and really bright honest people with a soul do oversimplify issues.
I was implicit to my mind that we need to attract very bright people with a soul to become psychiatrists and researchers in psychiatry.
Hi Steve,
///If we’re reduced to arguing about whether the untreated group might not have been as bad as the treated group, we’re already talking about treatment effects that are probably pretty negligible, otherwise, the difference would still be observable.///
Please, do not ignore the fact that the studied groups are precisely that , groups of a very diverse lot of people.
Dr Steingart wrote, I think , something close:
///However, not everyone relapses when they are stopped and some relapse even when they are continued so it is a minority of people who seem to benefit from continuing. We just do not know who they are.///
We really need to attract to psychiatry very bright residents hoping that in the future bright new ideas will lead to a better understanding of whom can benefit from psychiatry drugs.
(Actually, a researcher with a troubling ethical conduct in the past like Pr. Charles Nemeroff might sell himself well to the “grants givers” because he propose futur clinical or labs tools predicting who wwill benefit from antidepressants-seems to me.)
All the best to you Steve for thinking hard and interestingly.
Ivana.
Dr Steingard,
Either you are a better person than I am or you are stronger, possibly both.
I can only congratulate you sincerely on not needing comfort from the “but they do it to (in the other fields of medicine )”.
Still, when a meta-analysis compare psychiatric drugs with drugs used in other fields of medicine, one has to keep those facts in mind before letting that meta-analysis comforting “pills dispensers psychiatrists USA style”-so to speak.
Plus, many of your readers are made believe on other blogs that the world would be better without any psychiatric drugs and psychiatrists…
I find that irresponsible for many reasons;
All the best to you and your good work.
Ivana.
Dr. Elliot,
Thanks for your interesting posts. it is important on MIA that the readers learn about academia whistle blowers, to my mind because it is so easy to claim the entire field of research in psychiatry worthless and deprived of morals.
Does one should conclude that whistleblowers protection has been offered by law in the USA since the end of your civil war and regularly improved but only for those whistle blowers working outside of Academia?
Whistleblowers all over the world, no matter the field of offenses- so to speak, are always taking the risks of whistling with no effect other than suffering themselves inconveniences from a bad name (envious, incompetent) to being fired.
The ostrich attitude is something almost universal-seems to me.
An other way to look at it is Montesquieu ‘s thinking about the certainty of the punishment for any misconduct being more important than the severity of the penalty who applies in crime prevention.In that case, I wonder what do you make about too easy online publishing which can stay forever on the internet and of the fact that one can put oneself out of reach of scientific misconduct regulations by running an independant – non profit organization?
For example:
“Evidence of Photo Manipulation in a Delusional Parasitosis Paper.” Shelomi M.
University of California, Davis, Department of Entomology,
” In 2004, an article in the Journal of the New York Entomological Society claimed that individuals with Delusory Parasitosis actually suffer from collembola infestations. The article has been critiqued for poor methodology and results that contradict all knowledge about collembolans. Less easily accounted for has been a figure in the article purporting to show a collembolan in a skin scraping. The image appears to have been altered using photo manipulation software to an unacceptable degree, and this paper demonstrates that to be the case. The altered figure represents creation of nonexistent data, a form of scientific misconduct. Whether the deception is deliberate or a product of an otherwise well-meaning author ignorant of the limits of acceptable image manipulation is unknown, but the result is peer-reviewed support for an impossible conclusion that complicates patient treatment. In the current era of computers, even regional entomology journals must have detailed standards for what kind of images and image manipulations are acceptable for publication.”
Hi Sandra,
/// I know you are aware of Leucht’s recent metanalysis which reports that these drugs are as effective as many other drugs used in medicine.///
One could argue that the non psychiatric drugs had not been honestly and cleverly tried either and that even ethically conducted in good faith metanalysis ( fair selection of the studies considered good enough to be included in the metanalysis, taking into accounts the probability for negative studies founded by Big Pharma not being published, and fair selection of outcome criteria etc..) are not an easy task after decades of drug marketing interfering with TCS publishing in any field of medicine and academic selection got wrong in medical schools with too much impact given to the number of publications in top journals when good science takes long thinking beforehand and long studies before publishing.
And for a concrete example of non-psychiatric “Bad Pharma” involved in RCT:
///A seemingly small mistake in a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) landed a Danish physician-researcher in hot water last month after a German company threatened to sue him for potential losses that could run in the millions of dollars. The exchange prompted media consternation in Denmark over whether academic freedom was being censored, but the researcher, Anders Perner of Copenhagen University Hospital has corrected the error, which occurred in the publication of a study of a widely used drug to prevent shock, and thereby averted legal action. Still, the episode has shone a light on a therapy that some researchers say may be doing more harm than good, despite its widespread use.(…)./// http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/08/squabble-over-nejm-paper-puts-sp.html
PS: I benefited from a good enough education in pharmacology and neurology in my youth and for 33 years I had shared the life of one of my former professor of medicine, François Lemaire, an Intensive care French academic who had been chief Editor of “Intensive Care” (a European journal) and editor of the review of the Am Thoracic Association. My very bright and not money seeking (estranged now) husband and the good teaching I received in Roma, Paris and Oxford saved me from believing those antipsychiatrists who present our discipline as doomed in opposition to “whiter than white “ non psychiatric medicine-even at the worst times when Bad Pharma and the simplistic monoaminergic theories were the ” only path available” for those aware of the shortcomings of the psychoanalysts.
It is sad but comforting for psychiatrists who care for their clients to know that we are not the devil’s face of medicine some antipsychiatrists want us to appear compared to other doctors-
when it would have been so easy for us to choose another specialty with clients easier to help and deal with (urology being hard to beat for the grateful clients easy as a whole with othopedy, ophtalmology and dermatology coming close in my experience of medical student) and even make more money for the money seeking doctors -at least in France where earnings come from doing any kind of labtest or procedures, not from talking.
Anyway, when has a simplistic dichotomist’s potent political idea be true and safe long term in history in any field?
Thank you for being a model of an intelligent not paternalistic psychiatrist who-in my own views- has also the courage to keep honest and not advertise her own easy path to mental health and happiness following your own method…
Your clients and residents are very lucky indeed to have you !
I wish you a pleasant holidays seasons ans a happy new year 2013 full of satisfactions for yourself, your family and your clients.
Ivana.
Hi Phil,
Actually, one of the oldest trick in spinning data in clinical trials has always been to just ignore the cases of discontinuation of treatment and the cases that didn’t came for follow up since discontinuation often means that the treatment didn’t delivered his promises to do more good than harm.
Hi John,
My brocken English must be at fault there, John, since you didn’t understand that I was answering Richard’s and Duane’s comments.
I hope that my conversing with Duane from Texas, Richard and Stephen gives me more satisfaction than my answers to them grieve you.
Dear Stephen,
I think you should write your own blog on MIA because you are blessed with a talent with words in conveying a unique experience and point of view, many interesting experiences on mental health to share and a gentle very humane modest and rich thinking about it all worth reading and rereading.
Please accept my apologies for having ignored on 12 08 12 at 10:51 that you indeed wrote about unprofessional conduct of nurses:
http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/12/do-diagnoses-injure-people/
(…) when I would just get to sleep this one nurse would come in and shine the light in my face! With that kind of treatment you never get any sleep. One night I told her that if she shined her light in my face or the face of my roommate again I was going to get up and moon her. She ran down to the nurses’ station and wrote in my chart that I threatened to beat the s..t out of her. The charge nurse came to ask me why I was threatening her staff. When I asked what she was talking about she stated what the nurse had written in my chart. My roommate, who was awake at the time and heard exactly what I’d told the nurse originally about mooning her spoke up in my defense and quoted me exactly. The charge nurse told him to stay out of it because it was none of his affair. Of course, psych patients can’t be trusted because we always lie you know. I demanded for three days that her comment be removed because it was a blatant lie. They refused. I said that I wanted what I’d actually said entered into the file below her comment. They refused. So, in my record it stands that I threatened a staff person! You can’t win with these people.(…)///
I am thankful for MIA to exists for many reasons, Stephen, but reading your comments and having a dialogue with you is not the least of it.
All the best to you Stephen.
Ivana
I Stephen,
To look on the bright side, that study will come to the rescue of any psychiatrist not keen on prescribing those neuroleptics to any elderly person – be it because that psychiatrist thinks that cheap haloperidol works better often on the voices and smelling of poison of the elderly and not everybody gets marked neurological adverse effects from it or because that psychiatrist doesn’t want to prescribe any neuroleptics at all to the client if he can help it.
Always nice to discuss things with you Stephen since you are open to dialogue and you do not defend the same fixed views times and times again and you have interesting experience to share. I would recommend everyone to read your full discussion with Alice Keys including your fond memory of the family doctor of your childhood and I am glad you wrote to Alice Keys, among other things of the utmost interest:
///One of the things I’ve decided is that it’s not only the biopsychiatrists, or psychiatrists in general, that have to answer some difficult questions and be held to accountability.///
You often write about the experience of someone working in a USA psychiatric hospital but not as a psychiatrist and some thing is fascinating to me about it:
only psychiatrists seem to behave badly in the hospital where you work!
I think, Stephen , that the USA America really is God chosen country if you are blessed there with only psychiatrists being to blame and nurses and support staff wonderfully dedicated to their task!
To be absolutely frank, Stephen, although it was not my main reason to stop working in the psychiatry hospital care in 1989, some of the French nursing staff and support workers in psychiatry were very problematic to work with for me:
Most nurses had a great sense of duty and were very humane and pleased to work in psychiatryand I learned more from some of them: a good nurse observation had even lead me to my research subject.
That kind of attitude might not exist where you work or in the USA at large but, for example, I met more than once in France with some nurses and support workers who would say “the schizo in room X “ or “ the depression in room Y “instead of a name after the client had been hospitalized for some times with the numerous occasion a nurse or a support worker has to check and write the patients’ names. It was not unusual then and it is still frequent in France nowadays to hear the non doctor staff speak meanly of the family. To tell you a true story, once a social worker refused to do her job when I asked her about finding financial and humane support for a family telling me that first she had her children who where on school holiday and she had to be home a lot and second, since it was the mother’s fault if the son was “a schizo”, money struggling single mother or not, that woman could keep him at her home without help and at her expenses and not the taxpayer ‘s for as long as possible!
To come back to neuroleptic prescroption, some psychiatric nurses and nurses helpers put their safety and comforts first and were making light of the drugs side-effects: It was so easy for nurses wanting a good nap on a chair or to play cards with colleagues at night – to blackmail the psychiatrist on call into overprescribing dangerous drugs for a new client or even into prescribing physical restraint with the argument that the nursing staff or another patient will be physically hurt in the next hours of the night by the emergency patient..A French TV documentary in 2010 has shown me an even worst king of nurse ‘s behavior with a nurse coming into an argument with a young woman asking to go in the garden and smoke with some warm clothes under her psychiatric in-client thin pajamas and a man nurse answering in a very vulgar way that either she had to froze if she wanted to smoke. The young woman protested and got vocal and ended up under physical restraints with a neuroleptic injection in her bottom decided by the woman nurse who came to the rescue and explaining to the man that the client was in a dissociative state and, believe it or not, the reporters and cameras presence where known to the nurses…
Luckily, I can put here a link in English about support staff being involved in incredibly sadistic criminal attitudes against vulnerable people.
// (…)Last week six people were jailed for their role in abusing patients at the private hospital near Bristol after an investigation by BBC’s Panorama.
“What has been exposed by Panorama is utterly intolerable and has to come to an end,” Mr Lamb told the Commons. (…)/// http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20140421
///(…) A BBC Panorama programme last year showed footage of patients being wrestled to the floor to be restrained, the use of water-based punishment and unequal games of strength which the patients could not possibly win.
An undercover reporter managed to get a job as a support worker and filmed colleagues tormenting, bullying and assaulting patients during five weeks at the hospital last year.
He was sent in after the owners, Castlebeck Ltd, and the Care Quality Commission failed to respond to disclosures by a whistleblower.
(…)./// http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/Damning-report-scandal-Winterbourne-View/story-16668258-detail/story.html
Have a nice and resting holiday seasons and a happy new year 2013 Stephen.
Ivana
Dear Alice,
Thanks you so much for your kind words and for asking about the French system;
Unfortunately, to explain it, I would need a “foreigh correspondant blog” on MIA and my English is not up to it- not to mention the fact that I am not MIA politically correct in my defense of psychiatrists…
Anyway, as much as the costs and organization of health care in the USA – compared to France- might explain a huge gap in health between poor and wealthy people in the USA compared to France , in social psychiatry there is much more than poverty at stake- seems to me.
Just think about the fact that some of the poorest people emigrating in GB from the Far-Est seem to suffer less frequently from psychosis than the general GB population when they belong to the Buddhist religion when non Buddhist people emigrating from other places have a much higher rate of psychosis than the general UK population.
NB: I think psychiatrists and doctors in general have their faults for sure but the clients do not deserve to pay for it by being prescribed dangerous psychiatric drugs by non MDs or to have no other choice than to be put under the care of people believing that their own story applies to anybody or that any interesting causal theory or FRMI study is sound science when it is not, etc…
I wish you a very nice holiday seasons and a happy new year for 2013.
Ivana
Hi Duane,
///adults should be allowed to make their own decisions.///
How right could you be Duane!
And I would add that adults should be allowed to make their own decision for their children but should never be allowed to make decisions for elderly parents able to consent no matter how poor or frail those parents can be.
Taking psychiatric drugs or having ECT are just that to my mind: an option and not one I recommend myself if I see another possibility.
I cannot think that activists denying to anyone in any circonstance the right to ask for psychiatric drugs -or even to agree to ECT in desperate cases are pro freedom.
For example, I heard an autistic advocate doing a PhD and raising children telling that risperidone had been a great help during a discussion at a meeting organized by autistic persons for autistic persons were I felt privileged to have been invited last summer in GB (AUTSCAPE).
Who I am and who are you to tell that intelligent person wrong?
Some elderly people risk to lose living in their own home or in a pleasant retirement home when they are too vocal and energetic about some persecutory ideas they have got from voices in their head. When everything else has failed it might be difficult not to propose a few drops of haloperidol to get the person free of the voices to see if it works and what are the side-effects…
Other elderly people want to drink coffee all day long and after diner, watch TV a lot instead of taking fresh air and exercise during the day and watch TV at night in their beds, eat heavy diner and take psychiatric drugs to sleep when benzodiazepines are very dangerous…
A very vocal ECT opponent and innovative thinker for sure about “labeling” , a psychologist, Pr. David Bentall who wants for GB psychologists the right to prescribe dangerous psychiatric drugs without any medical training wrote in one of his books that nothing could have saved a client of his who hanged himself in the middle of a divorce on the evening his children were celebrating Christmas with his estranged wife- after having trying to hang himself shortly before he succeeded at it.For myself, I think mandatory hospitalization for the time beings until the end of the divorce procedure or ECT should have been proposed to the man after he first tried to hang himself around Christmas which is often a very difficult time for those without a family in good shape.
2) Every society has to draw a line between individual freedom and safety of the population at large (or the children’s safety when parental authority is concerned).
Sadly, in France the former president, Nicolas Sarkosy, pushed strongly for insuring the safety of the population at large against the rights of the mentally ills each and every time a violent crime by a mentally ill person was in the news and many people do not believe in France that the justice system is independent enough from the government…
( I must write on their behalf that the French psychiatrists – as paternalistic as they can be from an Italian point of view, so to speak- are on the whole fighting against that move but they lost with the public opinion.)
It might be different in the USA because you have better journalists and better organized activists but even in a free country of your reality or of your dreams, the line has to be drawn somewhere.
As I have already written to Corinna, I am sure that –law and judges permitting it – many psychiatrists in many countries will be more than happy to leave yourself or Corinna West the responsibility to look after in a caring and healing of any very delusional person who told his psychiatrist how urgent it is for his step father to be dead…
Nice to have had a dialogue with you.
I wish you a nice holiday seasons and a happy new year 2013 Duane.
Ivana
Duane,
///In the case of psychiatric treatment, it seems quite obvious that the field cannot point to *life-saving* treatment, considering the drugs cause more harm than good, increase suicide rates, and injure the brain, body, mind.///
I feel that,on the general population level, psychiatric drugs might do more harm than good but I really don’t know because some people want pills and a quick -fix and may be would use more street drugs to get relief or put themselves into dangerous gourou hands- you do not seem to be one to me but those people do exist.
Actually, what I have been doing since 1989 has been to try and help on a pro bono basis some people escaping escapable psychiatric drugs and psychiatric labels using a gynacologist hormonal prescription sometimes, psychotherapy, support and education about diet and about sleep among other things , homeopathy, exercise you name it.
I found, in particular, ludicrous that the DSM5 will consider acute grief not contradictory with a diagnostic of major depression (and even more that they would suppress Asperger’s syndrome from the American classification).
Also, cheap estrogen (plus progesterone for the women still having their uterus) hormonal therapy should be considered so dangerous when many women -and the more so when they are autistic- get a bipolar diagnosis and more dangerous treatment like neuroleptics.
Still, I always told some people to go and see a colleague psychiatrist prescribing allopathic drugs because my experience is that some people benefit greatly from psychiatric drugs.
I also believe that some premature deaths by suicide can be prevented by ECT as I already wrote on Pr Healy’s blog.
Ignoring that a very severely depressed mother or father can kill herself and her children (“altruistic suicide” is this called in French) is just unpreofessional for somebody working in health care and I am sure you know that.
NB: I am not saying that antidepressant or ECT are the solution her: hormonal treatment or social housing or legal support against an abusing spouse can be the solution.
As I already mentioned on Corinna ‘s blog that a French psychiatrist has been put to trial in Marseilles for not having prescribed neuroleptics in a depot form and not having kept in the hospital a man with a history of violence and of stopping his medication who stopped one more time his neuroleptic treatment and killed his mother’s partner. And that colleague had non only tried to hospitalize the man when he came as an outpatient to consult her but she had taken the difficult ethical step to call the mother telling her son was dangerous to her partner and the police as well in order to have the client safe at a hospital.
As disgusted as I was (and still am) with the paternalism of French psychiatrists in general when I took on pro bono work for people not in need of a psychiatric label and treatment in 1989 and as disgusted I was (and still am) in 1986 with the psychiatrist academics ‘s manner to conduct ” silly monoaminerhgic simplistic or dishonest on bad pharma payroll biological psychiatry researches” -with the only exception of epidemiologists-
I find just not acceptable to pretend that nobody can ever be helped by psychiatric drugs and forced hospitalization and even ECT in desperate cases and that anybody can be helped by peer support or professionals like yourself.
I find recovery a nice aim but a dead person cannot recover. Can she?
To provide availability for peer support and professionnal like yourself is a good and fine thing but you are not going to make it mandatory and send the police to people’s homes because they do not want to use your services or Corinna’s. Or are you?
(Some non-psychiatrists healers can be as paternalistic as your average French psychiatrist -not that you seem to be one to me.)
Hi Duane,
I am the first to be sorry about it but crossing the blood brain barrier is not at all the priviledge of psychiatric drugs.
Often enough, a good psychiatrist will point out to a colleague in other fields of medicine that their drug treatment is giving a client ill mental health that is not the sign of a mental illness- like for examples a client becoming impotent and sad with a treatment aiming at reducing his blood pressure; a client becoming slightly agressive and hyperactive might have received too high a dosage in a needed hormonal therapy and risk a diagnosis of bipolar etc…
Obviously treatment for parkinson’s syndromes and seizures cross the blood brain barrier and can give ill health- GSK has been condamned recently by a French appeal court for having not tell the public about the risk of addctive conduct from Park’s treatment with Roquip (ropinirol HCL)-a man had lost his savings and honesty by suffering a gambling addiction and then had suffer from an additional sexual addiction exibiting himself on the internet and elsewhere and being raped: http://www.lepoint.fr/sante/effets-secondaires-du-requip-la-condamnation-du-laboratoire-gsk-confirmee-28-11-2012-1534717_40.php
It tooks seven years to a coiuragous man to fight that battle almost alone!
I am afraid that psychiatry and psych meds are not so unique.
Plus, the most destructive brain drug is probably alcohol and some people get psychosis from cannabis. This is why – although I prefer exercice and relaxation, some times homeopathy or acupuncture plus therapeutic education of the person and the family about autism- I very much prefer an Asperger’s syndrome adult taking a very low dose of antidepressant than drinking heavily as so many do to treat social anxiety!
Thanks for being open to dialogue.
Ivana
Sandra,
As adult psychiatrist interested in trying to help Asperger’syndrome persons when they ask for it (they suffer often from ill mental health but rarely from mental illness );I like this last example much because it shows how a new non-psychiatric disease can be invented by a committee like those of the DSMs and then be exploited by the drug industry.
You have very good journalists in the USA unlike in France!
PS: Sorry about cluttering uo your blog with too many comments but I am interested in discussing antipsychiatry on MIA because in France the autistic persons (and families) are often the victims of psychoanalysts (psychiatrists and psychologists) but also of money making and /or power seeking people who surf on antipsychiatry with simplistic ideas and false promises.
Some of us had a lively discussion on the supposed superiority of non psychiatry doctors on another blog:
For a narrow portion of those patients — dialysis patients with anemia so severe they needed occasional blood transfusions — the drugs, if used in limited amounts, did offer a critical benefit, one that doctors say amounted to a revolution in treatment. Patients with severe anemia said it could restore their vitality. The new drugs allowed them to avoid the risks of transfusions, which can carry diseases and raise future complications for transplant patients.
The trouble would arise as the drugmakers won FDA approval for vastly expanded uses, pushing it in larger doses, for milder anemia and for patients with a wider array of illnesses. Very quickly, the market included nearly all dialysis patients, not just the roughly 16 percent who required blood transfusions. The size of average doses would more than triple. And over the next five years, the FDA would approve it to treat anemia in patients with cancer and AIDS, as well as those getting hip and knee surgery.
The key to their marketing was the claim that the drugs at higher doses could make patients feel better. By 1994, the drug’s label, approved by the FDA, advertised a range of benefits: “statistically significant improvements for . . . health, sex life, well-being, psychological effect, life satisfaction, and happiness.”
Those claims, withdrawn 13 years later because they did not meet new FDA standards for proof, would be the basis of television and print advertising campaigns, pitched to people with potentially fatal illnesses.
The drugs, according to one, offered “Strength for Life.”///
Ring a bell, anyone on eMIA ?
To me it sounds like SSRI antidepressants’s criminal marketing.
Dear Richard,
What do you think about”How A Bone Disease Grew To Fit The Prescription”?
(…) Osteopenia is a condition that only recently started to be thought of as a problem that required treatment. Until the early 1990s, only a handful of people had even heard the word. And to understand how osteopenia was transformed from a rarely heard word into a problem that millions of women swallow pills to treat, you need to go back to the beginning; (…)
For a long time doctors and researchers were only able to diagnose osteoporosis after a woman experienced a bone fracture. But by the early ’90s technology had evolved, and bone scanners made it possible to determine whether the bones were weak before any fractures occurred.
The question before the experts in Rome then was this: Since after the age of 30 all bones lose density, how much bone loss was normal? And, how much put women at risk and therefore should be considered a disease?
(…)”Ultimately it was just a matter of, ‘Well … it has to be drawn somewhere,’ ” Tosteson says. “And as I recall, it was very hot in the meeting room, and people were in shirt sleeves and, you know, it was time to kind of move on, if you will. And, I can’t quite frankly remember who it was who stood up and drew the picture and said, ‘Well, let’s just do this.’ ”
So there in the hotel room someone literally stood up, drew a line through a graph depicting diminishing bone density and decreed: Every woman on one side of this line has a disease.
Then a new question arose: How do you categorize the women who are just on the other side of that line?
To address this issue, Tosteson says, the experts — more or less off the cuff — decided to use the term osteopenia. Tosteson says they created the category mostly because they thought it might be useful for public health researchers who like clear categories for their studies. They never imagined, she says, that people would come to think of osteopenia as a disease in itself to be treated. The chairman of the meeting, John Kanis, of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Metabolic Bone Diseases, says the same thing.
Nevertheless, 17 years later Banghauser, of Richmond, Va., a woman whose bone density is just a hair away from that of the average healthy 30-year old, is not only medicated for osteopenia but literally spends her days worried about breaking a bone.
“I used to run marathons, and I would fall and trip on broken sidewalks,” she told me. “And you know initially before I had this diagnosis I didn’t think anything of it. But now every time I fall I get up and think, ‘Oh, good, I haven’t broken anything.’ ”
“I’m much more aware of making sure I lift my feet up and I don’t trip on the sidewalks, but you know, if I didn’t know that I had osteopenia, maybe I wouldn’t be so cautious.”
So how did osteopenia change from a category for public health researchers into a condition that millions of women swallow pills to treat?
The answer to that question starts with a man named Jeremy Allen, who lives in a sprawling home in Pennsylvania (…).
To clarify: the lecturer in homeopthy had allopathic treatment against an acute very high blood pressure put into his blood circulation-sorry about my poor English.
Hi Corinna,
With all due respect to your good work and intentions many people outhere struggle to get rid of tobacco or alcohol addictions (many pregnant women who know about the dangers of their addiction for their child in particular) and a treatment has not to be fun but to do more good than harm!
Self-medication with street drugs or alcohol cannot be defended on the ground that they are fun!
Hi again Duane,
Hi Duane,
///These drugs (along with ECT and incarceration) are used by force. Not the case with other health conditions.///
2) What do you make about scandals we had in france about children being underfed and deprived of any vaccination and any medical treatment in some communauties who did not believe in allopathic medicine at all but only in diet and homeopathy- as a qualified Homeopath MD I am sorry about the latter.
To conclude on that argument between us Duane, I will repeat that some of the substitutions for psychiatrists will be just crooks looking for power and/or money and that psychotherapies and unconventional medicine have their dangers too.
And I will tell you two true personal story:
A female of Japanese origins pro bono client of mine aged 88 years old had been recovered at the end of 2008 in an academic hospital at my asking for medical investigations. She fell and broke her hip but had such nice bones for her age that the fracture was not the easy to diagnose elderly person’s type (when one foot is fixed at a strange angle at the end of an inferior member suddenly much shorter than the other one): it took me 4 days as a psychiatrist to make the geriatricians understand that my client had broken her hip! And of course, she was put on a lot of medication to make her quiet…
My second story is that one afternoon some years ago I was at a Parisian medical school taking in knowledge by a well known homeopath MD lecturing there. Suddenly, the man went red in the face and had to stop his lecture in front of MDs and medstudents (In france you have to have an MD to practise homeopathy -on the open that is.)The lecturer asked for some homeopathy remedy and I ask if somebody had there something to measqure his blood pressure. one had it and the blood pressure was so high that I called the cardiology dep and had him admitted for a blood perfusion of allopathic medicine he agrees to. For some reasons, he never thanked me for it and sort of never came close to me at homeopaths meeting where according to him homeopathy can solve every health problems. When I had troubles with the medical board made to me by a psychoanalyst who took advantage of my pro bono onlmy practice, I asked the man to testify that I was a good and energetic doctor for him in an emerbgency and i havce been waiting for years his testimony.
Also, on that second kind of example, I heard with my own ears a British homeopath – non MD to be honest but having MDs following his teaching) telling at a meeting in Spa (Belgium) that if we gave him money he would find in 4 years the homeopathic remedy for AIDS in West Africa. Some MDS were very taken by him.I had heard the man tell a parisian audience that he could sell sand to an arab and snow to an eskimoo…
HGi Duane,
///These drugs (along with ECT and incarceration) are used by force. Not the case with other health conditions.///
1) Are you so sure about that? You may be right in the USA.
Is it legal in the USA to leave a child to die after a car accident making necessary for survival to put foreign red bloodcells in his body because the parents or a good citizen like yourself oppose blood transfusion on religious or safety reasons?
NB: When I was a resident in neurosurgery I remember vividly that I had sometimes to fight with some nurses not to transfuse a very pale person with a very low hematocrite telling them that the client would not be keen on a soccer match soon and will have time to make new red blood cells.
We had dishonest people in France working in blood centers in the past transfusing AIDS virusloaded blood to person having already AIDS virus in their system. It made a big scandal in France with even ministers put to trial. (at that time they thought that it didn’t matter to add viral charge to those already infected and they were wrong)
NB: I believe blood transfusions should be prescribed with the utmost caution and I would welcome any safer replacment.
Until then, I do not think that the scandal we had in France on blood banks and the risks involved with any transfusion should make people die of hemorragia after a car accident.
PS: I knew personaly an honorable Canadian surgeon (not a neursurgeon) who told me that he made contracts with Jehovah Testimony Church belonging clients not to transfuse them during or after an operation taking the risk of letting them die and taking the risks of operating as quickly as possible.
I would not have liked to take on such clients myself if I had ever qualified as a surgeon but I can understand those people.
What I cannot understand is people deciding for others that every psych med is negative in health/ risks benefits for everybody.
What I wouldn’t understand would be a ban on hetero blood transfusion for everybody everywhere- until medical advances making those heteroblood transfusion obsolete that is.
Alice,
In France medical school is almost tution free ( I would say a few hundred dollars a year)and gives right to social benefits.(There is a very selective exam to enter the second year of medical school.)
No hudge students loans to repay for MD in France.
Still, prescribing too many drugs from antibiotics to psychiatric drugs is a main issue for our health system.
The main difference with the USA might be that many MDs are chosing nowadays not to practice medicine
Also in France, women are making nowadays around 70% of the medical schools students’ force so to speak. It is becoming like nursing schools.
Hi Maria,
I am glad that you are all for dialogue and understanding because I have things to get right with you.
1) Corinna wrote to me it was a church. I did not care if it was a church or not. I just find illogical to be against psychiatrists and not against all doctors!
2) I agree that “psych med” can cause great harm.
3)I happen to think that some “psychotherapists” and healers also do great harm to their clients (and family) wellbeing and money savings.
4) We can only hope for the distant future that knowing the causation of every illness doctors will also be able to prescribe an etiologic “non psych med” treatment.
Sadly,for now medicine- not only psychiatry- more often than not has to use, symptomatic treatments.
5)Life would be so simpler if only psychiatrists and other doctors prescribing “psych meds” were evils or only greedy for power or money…
For example: In the catholic church priests and nuns have been known to abuse children in their full time care and not only sexually.
To my view, part of the problem are shallow thinking and greedy for fame or money journalists but also the very shallow and egocentric thinking of researchers believing that science doing should be fun and quickly done like the anonymous neuroskeptic who claim -with vraisemblance to be a young male British anonymous depression sufferer helped by a two antidepressant regiment he does not plan to stop for the years to come- psychologist FRMI researcher:
26 November 2012 18:29
Blogger Neuroskeptic said…
///DS: Good point. My view is, bad science is bad whether it’s from journalists or scientists. I tend to focus on science, though, just because it’s more interesting. Bad media neuroscience is rarely wrong in a new or fun way.///
26 November 2012 19:33
The trouble is -to my mind and I might be wrong- (I tried to comment to him on his blog but that comment was censured and deleted after a little enough time):
In that comment, neuroskeptic doesn’t seem to graps the difference between intersting and fun when real scientists and thinkers are working very hard on very difficult and complicated problems they hope to contribute a little to solve for as long as it takes to produce good sound results.
Those real scientists and thinkers have a very hard time explaining to the lay people the fun of it!
Idem for getting research grant and academic positions.
Hi Will,
Thanks for that interview.
FunctionalRMI studies and the likes are – in the psychology and psychiatric front -hoping to replace the failed and rather simplistic monoaminergic theory of mental illnesses and of human behaviors from chocolate craving to crimes- you name it.
To oppose and ridicule “bastardization by glib” producing “neuresthetics” and “neurolaw” does not require good scientist qualities- in my opinion.
-except when you have got a RMI (without the f ) showing a frontal brain tumor and the likes for neurolaw-
Common sense and honesty will do.
In neuroscientists but also in lawyers, judges, artcritics… and journalists
24 November 2012 17:57
I will listen carefuly and buy the books of your host-
Thanks Will for letting me know about that thinker.
NB: RMI use offer static pictures of brains (and other part of a human or animal body) allowing doctors to diagnose a frontal lobe brain tumor or a subacute temporal hematoma etc…who might express themselves -for a time- only with psychiatric clinical symptoms when functionnal RMI (fRMI) show “a brain in action”-unfortunatly it has been proved to produce a brain in action in a dead salmon client and many people use public money to run very poorly conceived but sexy and quickly done and quickly published studies.
By the way, and this really will be my last comment on this post of yours, the French psychiatrist was not only accused by an expert psychiatrist of not having prescribe depot injection of neuroleptics but she was also accused of letting her client out of the psychiatric ward although she tried to re-hospitalize her client shortly before the crime he committed and had let the police know that she wanted, for public safety reasons, her client to be re-hospitalized immediately but her client had escaped from her office and the client’s mother know that her son was dangerous.
I , sincerely,would not be opposed to the calling of a peer support group in that kind of cases in order to either convince the client to be hospitalized or even to take care of him and garantee that he will not kill his mother’s partner as he announced.
I admire all people in,volving themselves with helping psychotic persons in that time of ours where psychiatry suffer both from the American psychiatrists association ‘s DSM diagnostic mess with their committee electing diseaeses for academics ‘s own personal and criminal bad pharma marketing- not only in psychiatry: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/anemia-drug-made-billions-but-at-what-cost/2012/07/19/gJQAX5yqwW_story_2.html
The first two drugs of the trio, Epogen and Procrit, were approved by the agency in June 1989 for patients with kidney disease. Amgen made both; Procrit was licensed by Johnson & Johnson. Amgen’s Aranesp would be approved in 2001.
For a narrow portion of those patients — dialysis patients with anemia so severe they needed occasional blood transfusions — the drugs, if used in limited amounts, did offer a critical benefit, one that doctors say amounted to a revolution in treatment. Patients with severe anemia said it could restore their vitality. The new drugs allowed them to avoid the risks of transfusions, which can carry diseases and raise future complications for transplant patients.
The trouble would arise as the drugmakers won FDA approval for vastly expanded uses, pushing it in larger doses, for milder anemia and for patients with a wider array of illnesses. Very quickly, the market included nearly all dialysis patients, not just the roughly 16 percent who required blood transfusions. The size of average doses would more than triple. And over the next five years, the FDA would approve it to treat anemia in patients with cancer and AIDS, as well as those getting hip and knee surgery.
The key to their marketing was the claim that the drugs at higher doses could make patients feel better. By 1994, the drug’s label, approved by the FDA, advertised a range of benefits: “statistically significant improvements for . . . health, sex life, well-being, psychological effect, life satisfaction, and happiness.”
Those claims, withdrawn 13 years later because they did not meet new FDA standards for proof, would be the basis of television and print advertising campaigns, pitched to people with potentially fatal illnesses.
The drugs, according to one, offered “Strength for Life.” Reing a bell? To me it sounds like antidepressants’s criminal marketing.
Adult psychiatrist,psychopharmacologist by training with research (in my youth ) and still clinical interest on female hormones and mood disorders; homeopathy training (in France homeopaths must be MD),interest and some training (outside France) in adult autism and in social psychiatry.
Hi Corinna,
The church Maria was quoting is just illogical, to my mind, then: it should not focus against psychiatry for the reasons I explained already.
///As far as first episode psychosis, I would think a peer specialist could do a lot more help and a lot less harm than a doctor///
At the very least, there is more logic in your view!
Anyway, we live in different societies: In France a psychiatrist has been held responsable by a criminal prosecutor and put to trial for not having prescribed neuroleptics in a depot form to a client who repeatidly stopped taking pills who killed his mother’s partner. (The client had been held legally irresponsable and not tried in court for the killing because of his mental state at the momen tof the killing):
///”J’espère que le tribunal aura le courage d’aller au bout de la démarche, en disant qu’un psychiatre défaillant peut être responsable des actes d’un malade mental qu’il avait sous sa garde”, a indiqué Me Chemla///
/// “I hope that the judges will have the courage to keep going with what they started by telling that a psychiatrist who fails can be held responsable of his client’s acts “,said Me Chemla (the lawyer representing the son of the victim.
The next step,for the French prosecutors, will be to put to trial theirs doctors when any alcohol dependent client kills somebody when driving a car after drinking!
I know, I should not comment on MIA because I just do not understand enough of the concrete situation here.
All the best Corinna to you and your project.
I would be the last person to think that it is helpful to contact many a doctor to support coming off medication but, in my opinion, this sad fact is due mainlu to:
1) bad marketing from Big Pharma
2) the silly persistence of the monoamine theory of psychosis and depression Big pharma marketing used with a lot of success (ending of a vicous circle).
Hi Maria,
Psychiatrists are doctors like dermatologists.Aren’t they?
Would you dare to write that dermatologists must disappear because -to take only one example, the first and for a long time only manifestation of a Hodgink’s lymphoma can be a skin rash looking very much like common eczema?
Would you dare to suppress cardiology because the cardiologists have been abused on the statines front by bad pharma marketing?
My view is that psychiatrists should be good doctors first keeping in touch with the progresses of medicine in general and – like other specialists work with family doctors and ask other specialist for advice.
I also think- personal opinion- that all childpsychiatrists should have qualified as pediatrician first. This case is a rarity in France and many French child psychiatrists-even academics are still accusing the mother ‘s behavior of producing autism and psychosis.
When it comes to give a treatment for a terribly annoying treatement resistant skin rash, it would be ludicrous to think that a dermatologist is less able than any other doctor to treat it and for example tapering off the doses of corticotherapies!
NB: You might want to use alternative therapies and it becomes another story -with naughty people out there on the internet as sure as you find honest practitioners of alternative medicines- but if you do not refuse allopathicic drugs, it is ludicrous to refuse the dermatologists expertise.
If a client refuse psychiatric drugs fine but if he doesn’t -or if the law people make him obliged to take it- the ideal situation is a non paternalistic competent psychopharmacologist psychiatrist trained by honest academics.
Please, Maria, do not idealize internal medicine or general practices. Bad Pharma marketing and clients wanting a quick-fix with drugs do exist in every medical discipline and sometimes an internist can make an honest mistake and send to the psychatrist an internal medicine case- so to speak- when a good psychiatrist will send the client back.
Idem for a cardiologt is the same in psychopharmacology: better to find an honest psychopharmacolgy To refuse it is one thing. Fine with me – I have not prezscribe myself any of those medicine nor ECT (but I send some people to colleagues who do from time to time)- since 1989
I know it is different in the USA and the doctor
Would you dare to suppress cardiology because the cardiologists have been abused on the statines front by bad pharma marketing? will you
May be you can use google translation services or whatever or ask a friend. My English is not good enough and really i have not the time to translate it but I wrote the essential facts: a self-appointed healer is answering on a criminal juridiction for having made up to 20 vulnerable people live in a big house and giving her most of their salaries accepting humiliations and sexual acts by promising them to get rid of some demonic possession.
///To continue to discuss *scientology* is to ignore the *real* problem – psychiatry.///
I can’t see any logic here Duane.
It is like to pretend that to discuss Pr Obama or/and Pr Hollande (from France) whatever military putative action against , say… Syria is to ignore the real problem of poverty in the world or the lack of unsalted affordable water sources in the middle East!
This will be my last answer to you because what you wrote shows that you are clever and educated enough but not in a disposition of mind to discuss your beliefs.
I really do not have time to spend in an argument where in front of me somebody do not want to think upon what I argue.
And by the way, Dr Szacz was definitly more on Maria ‘s side than in yours-to my mind.
I am sure that with the people in your care you are more open-minded.
Best regards.
///WARNING: No one should stop taking any psychiatric drug without the advice and assistance of a competent, non-psychiatric, medical doctor!///
On that point, I strongly disagree since a psychiatrist cannot pretend to be a psychiatrist if he doesn’t know how to taper off drugs or stop them to prevent lithium intoxication or in case of neuroleptic malignant syndrome or whatever emergency needing the side-effects of going cold turkey!
In my view, many non psychiatrists will not know how dangerous it is to go cold turkey with SSRI antidepressant. I suppose they will know more about benzodiazepines.
Altostrata will write that psychiatrists do not know how to taper off drugs but not that non-psychiatry doctors are better at it.
My view is:
WARNING: No one should stop taking any psychiatric drug without the advice and assistance of a psychiatrist or a competent in psychopharmacology , non-psychiatric, medical doctor.
As I already answered to your question above in that file I would not trust a French psychiatrist -I would not know to be really competent in internal medicine – in taking care of a first psychotic episode of mine if I were to suffer from one at my middle-age for the first time in my life.
I can add that I would not want a French psychoanalyst doctor to take care of any severe suffering of mine but, on the other hand, I trust only gynecologists more for female hormonal treatments of mental illnesses symptoms (idem with endocrinologists for thyroid hormone level induced mental illnesses )and I trust best psychopharmacologist psychiatrists with psychiatry drugs- Pr David Healy type – for sure.
Not want psychiatry drugs like some religious people do not want blood transfusion is one thing, but if you accept it take it from the most competent one.
My hope is that psychiatrists will register to the medical boards with sub-specialty like, why not tapering off drugs for difficult cases.
“Bad Pharma” as Dr Ben Goldacre call them and academics on their payroll , at least in France, do more harm to non psychiatrist doctors’s practices with their marketing of drugs and the silly monoaminergic theory of mental illnesses than to psychiatrists.
Sorry about my broken English but I really have no time to correct it.
Maria,
Thanks for your comment and work.
To answer your question is easy: if I were myself to suffer a psychotic episode or even a severe depressive state, I would want a good doctor first and not a team of healers who could let me die of hypoglycemia or from a neurosurgical emergency or whatever.
To be honest, being based in France where so many psychiatrists are psychoanalysts not interested in medicine , I would not trust a psychiatrist I would not know for sure to be good in general medicine.
NB: I am middle-aged, do not consume streetdrugs, and never was psychotic so the chances for a medical illness causation would be very high but even for a younger person I would find non medical healer dangerous and would opt for a general hospital emergency room not call healers on the telephone but we are discussing an acute psychotic episode.
Duane,
In case you read French, here one current criminal trial of a criminal sectarian woman leader , an English teacher by profession claiming that she was a healer and a God’s spouse who put to slavery of sort, people who, having had a bad time in life, trusted her for relief giving her 90% of their salary to be humilated etc…Yo can bet that she didn’t like psychiatry at all:
This is the sad French reality and in the USA, it might be enough to know that one healer is an antipsychiatrists to be safe from harm.
Obviously for the USA readers, I wrote Sacks for Szasz. Sorry about that!
NB: I like better, by far, what Dr Szasz wrote than what Dr Sacks wrote about autism but the scientologists are definitely using Dr Szasz for their propaganda.
Hi Corinna,
Thanks for answering me.
If you were not taking holidays and good care of yourself and yourrelationship you would not be a good social mental health entrepreneur!
To my mind an antipsychiatrists claims that the world would be better without never ever any drug prescription for mental symptoms and without not a single psychiatrist being in practice-except themselves when they were trained as psychiatrist that is-
Nothing less and nothing more.
The scientologists are antipsychiatrists, many activistys on MIA are and Dr Laing was one.
Dr Szasz and Dr Breggin obviously are not.
( To my mind, Dr Szasz is antifreudian above anything to my mind and Dr Breggin is for the kind of psychotherapy he invented as the only cure but both were/are treating clients for money in their practice if I have been correctly informed.)
I really think “social” is worth adding to mental health entrepreneur.
It makes it less ambigous.
Added bonus, to my mind, people in need of your services will find it more easily through an internet search.
Duane,
The ostrich posture is rarely smart and beneficial long term.
This written, I agree that in the USA, you might very weel have different scientologists from the ones who had been put to criminal trials in France for abusing people suffering mental stresses including separating them from their money and friends and families-you have different rules here in the USA.
I spend an interesting late afternoon in Verona in 2010 at a scientologist exhibition because a nice person gave me a leaflet for it: in a big square hall you had at least 8 large very screens who showed repeatdly the same moment of a Dr Sacks’s interview.
To deny that the scientologists are-at least in Europe – pretending that Dr Sacks is one of them is just ostrich posture to my mind-and a very dangerous one at that!
Corina,
I understand uou might be busy doing good things -as Pr David Healy who was attacked recently for not answering questions on “his MIA blog which is just a reposting of a foreign blog – and not able to answer comment but I would really like you to answer my yesterday question:
“Where do you place the scientologists and lesser known self-appointed masters of happiness who thrive on their professed hate of mental labeling and psychotropic drugs?”
I would dare to ask it twice because an hagiographic and very long post on two famous antipsychiatrists on another MIA blog fails to acknoledge that Dr S had and is wildly use by the scientologist as their best weapon to attract mental sufferers to their organizatio. ( NB: it was not a place where a psychiatrist could have post comment leading to any discussion worth having in my opinion).
Worth meditating for antispsychiatry activists, in my psychiatrist biased opinion. Here a short extract, a few sentences:
///By the time the DSM-III came along, (…) the paradigm of psychological causation was the one being rejected. To me at the time, it was the baby in the bathwater of all the complaints about the power, the dogmatism, the speculation, and the fiscal drain of psychoanalysis. I agreed with many of those complaints myself, but what about the baby? ///
And I would, in a sincerely kindly meant suggestion that, when you speak publicly outside of MIA and the likes minded, you should find an extra word for “Mental Health Entrepreneurs” in order to not find yourself in the same place as bas Pharma, private psychiatric facilities and the likes.
All the best to you and your entreprise!
Although he is a psychiatrist -one tapering off drug treatment whenever he can according to a former post though – that man is worth reading for any MIA readers – the bright Corina West , the MIA blogger and ” Antipsychiatry mental Health Entrepreneur” ( I added ” antipsychiatry” to her definition of her newest project since to my mind Bad pharma is also describing itself as mental health Entrepreneur), blogging on MIA has been enlighted by him on what the “labeling mind is” according to her last post.
Worth meditating for antispsychiatry activists, in my psychiatrist biased opinion:
///By the time the DSM-III came along, (…) the paradigm of psychological causation was the one being rejected. To me at the time, it was the baby in the bathwater of all the complaints about the power, the dogmatism, the speculation, and the fiscal drain of psychoanalysis. I agreed with many of those complaints myself, but what about the baby? ///
I find, in my own clinical experience, prescribing homeopathy remedies useful when tapering off SSRI antidepressants:
you prescribe them before starting the tapering off and you take care of having an independant psychiatrist doing the allopathic drug prescription to avoid the homeopathy prescriber being too optimistic-
and beware that some homeopaths like some psychotherapists are dangerous and push for stopping at once the antidepressants or whatever treatment.
Once, I even prescribed homeopathy to a women for menopausal troubles for which hormones therapy was not possible (she had had bilateral ovariectomie as part of breast cancer treatment). She was very happy with her antidepressant treatment although she had taken a lot of weight ( I had send her to a colleague to get that treatment a year before for a “post breast cancer treatment severe depression”) but her italian psychiatrist decided on his own to taper off her antidepressant and when I saw her a year later she was drug free and slim again!
Thanks to you and Maria for recognizing that sometimes doctors can help!
Where do you place the scientologists and lesser known self-appointed masters of happiness who thrive on their professed hate of mental labeling and psychotropic drugs?
Surely you know they do exist and target the sufferers your efforts want to help.
Anyway, thanks for your writing. I am really thankful and especially for your letting me know about Bonnie Castro:
///I am the kind of advocate in the room with the client while they talk to their psychiatrist about being over medicated and exploring alternatives to their sleep problems. Rather its tea, hot shower before bed or Ambien, but it’s always the person’s choice not mine or their doctor’s.///
She is my kind of person.
Alto,
“only one or two in the world even attempt to treat it.”
I cannot tell for the USA but for the world at large, i do not think that I have only another fellow psychiatrist trying to help people tapering off from benzos and SSRI!
I did my MD thesis on two personal cases of pseudoneurosurgicaldiseases induced by benzodiazepine I received being oncall as a neurosurgery registrar for only
months at la Salpétrière Hospital in Paris in the early 80s and at that time- in the early 80s as a psychiatry registrar, I used to prescribe a switch to a “long acting” BZ decresing dosage and then Chloral to help in-patients to get rid of benzodiazépines as a sleep prescription and I used a long acting BZ at decreasing posologies plus low doses of imipraminic antidepressants to get rid of benzodiazepines anxiety treatments…
In 2008, I even tried to open an homeopathy and psychotherapy only psychiatrist ‘s private practice in Paris telling the medical Gestapo thant my intention was to work for people not really in need of allopathic drugs to overcome life difficulties. It was not to be for several reasons- one being that the president of the Paris medical board thought that homeopathy was dangerous and my having previously in 2001 having been declared incompetent and dangerous by a very very old psychoanalyst because I had ask a psychiatrist examination of a son of his who sexually assaulted a girl at a high school depriving her of her beautiful long hair because she refused his sexual advances.
Please, Alto, I appreciate youy a lot and have respect for your good work but cannot let it pass when you show – in good faith- an ignorance of the fact that more than 1 or 2 doctors in the entire world are helping tapering off -when the client agree that is…
Thanks again, Will and Alto, for all your good work.
Hi Will,
I am not a paternalistic psychiatrist at all – -at least for a psychiatrist based in France.
This decision of mine -not being a paternalistic psychiatrist- honestly, leave me unable to imagine how one can use the doctors(or whomever in the USA) ‘s prescription priviledge to refuse a prescription to an informed individual.
(Actually, in my own special case, I would write an introductory letter to a colleague or a GP.)
This after one has tried to respect your idea about information and education of the client as when you wrote- in answer to my begging you to maintain a clear and simple first ligne of information using tapering off as a synonym for getting free of drugs:
//Especially with complicated topics like coming off medications, the role of doctors is to provide useful, complete, and honest information to empower patients. Oversimplifying can imply patients are incapable of thinking for themselves.//
If they are capable of thinbking by themselves about “going cold turkey” they should be allowed to judge by themselves about taking Pharma drugs at a time were we-doctors- are still so ignorant. Shouldn’t they?
All the best to you Will and thanks for your comprehensive opus much needed and also the modification of your title.
I was answering to Chris Muirhead with respect for her work but also the belief that not everybody’s son is the same as her sons.
Dr Solange Beaumont is an activist in a French association of mental symptoms ‘sufferers and their families who want more respect, less paternalism and less stigma.
She has every right to be vocal and public about her family experience and I can’t see why Chris Muirhead could use her name and not Solange Beaumont.
( In addition to Beaumont being a very common French surname and many female doctors using their maiden name and having sons using their father’s surname).
“First do not harm” and refusal of paternalism applies also to those who think they benefit from drugs
To put the record straight,I personaly have not prescribed neuroleptics, antidepressants or electrochocs since 1989 but I am happy that some people are offered the choice of different psychiatrists in place of me or in addition to me. Plus,I could afford my “clean hands” with respect to those heavy prescriptions only because my husband paid the rent and I stopped working in hospitals and did pro bono work for restricted populations.
We are in a diagnostic mess and it would be easier if nobody felt helped by neuroleptics or antidepressant pills.
Thanks for your many informative posts and comments.
For myself, I would lose a lot by not reading the many comments on the MIA reposting of Pr DH s’blog since -try as I might- I couldn’t -for the life of me- find the time to open and read individualy the many “MIA blogs” I read regularly enough.
Thanks for your blog and experience – but, sorry about that, I know a French psychiatrist, Dr Solange Beaumont, who, in a Paris meeting on October 2012 had not enough bitter words for the fellow French psychiatrists who accused her of making up any psychosis diagnostic in her son (who was hallucinating and delusional and feeling persecuted) and accused her of stressing him out of his wits -many a French psychiatrist still hold the mother ‘s behavior responsable from psychosis and even autism on Freudian grounds-
Her son ended up sleeping – for real- under Paris’s bridges and in danger for his life. Now the young man takes neuroleptics and works in a bank thinking about finding himself a wife. She had to plead to many colleagues before one consented to admit the young man in a psychiatric ward.
If her son wouldn’t refused it -because he doesn’t want to see psychiatrtists and suffer expertises for the court procedures- she would push for legal action because she thinks psychiatrists ‘ denial of her son hallucinations and delusions and refusal to give him neuroleptics almost killed her son.
Solange worries about long term effects of neuroleptics and, of course, would welcome safer drugs but her son is not on a high dosage regimen and it is -for now- the minimum dosage he can get without getting hallucinations and delusions that his fellowworkers are dangerous to him. The man wants to work and not be a tramp and it is his choice of life.
Pr Healy, you should know better thant to trust what a bad Pharma ‘s PR told you and your speeches have impact worldwide on psychiatrists and GPs at least!
I will put that remarks of yours on your Irish love for any good sounding narrative, if you allow me that lack of respect from an Italian born -sarcastic by nature then..
More seriously, although I was not trained as an epidemiologist researcher and do not possess their mandatory good qualities, I am a strong believer in epidemiological researches being the best instrument for progresses in mental health due to clinical trials limitations -even fair and honest ones to my mind- due to no credible “labeling”, no lab test so far, but also liability for physicians conducting it … you name it.
I also, strongly believe in associationg clients to researches as a way to progress.
I, then, see RxISK.org as having the greates epidemiological research potential and being a client and researchers joint venture.
Duane,
The surest way to get many people convinced that they needed the drugs in the first place is to let them see a friend suffering from the most horrendous withdrawal symptoms going “cold turkey” often cause.
France is a very different country -and this will be my last comment since I do not feel at ease discussing a situation I do not know engough about in practice but in France and in England many people want their pills and a quick fix -not talking therapy,no exercise, and the psychiatrists sometimes have to accept not to be too paternalistic about it.
To my mind, it is a heuristic error to think that it is so different here from medicine or surgery in general: many people want a back surgery even when their GP is agaisnt it -and rightly so- in many casesetc… A French medical student, I know well and trust to be a good person – was hurt recently by the sobering experience she recently had in her cardiology shift: she listened to clients refusing any lifestyle changes the cardiologits proposed and wanting instead pills for moderate high blood pressure levels when losing weight might have been a safer option, etc…and other insisting to get pills they just did not need according to the consultant in charge.
Sorry, wrong blog!
Will,
I printed your last opus on paper in addition to saving it on my computer-a rarity for me since I have not much storage space.
If you will allow me a disgression:
“Exercise more and eat less ” equal obesity fighting message to teenagers and parents of obese children.
This doesn’t mean that “Exercise more and eat less.” is not the behavior in many an anorexia nervosa sufferer teenager.
“Exercise more and eat less” should still be the prevalent message to send around because anorectic persons will not need this message to stop eating enough and exercise a lot.
I believe , to go back to the subject of your post , that it depends on who you want to educate. For the many people ingesting SSRIs, using tapering off as a synonym for getting rid of medication is just safer on health ground. It is another matter when you provide education for health workers.
Thanks for your work. All the best to you.
Reply
Will,
I printed your last opus on paper in addition to saving it on my computer-a rarity for me since I have not much storage space.
If you will allow me a disgression:
“Exercise more and eat less ” equal obesity fighting message to teenagers and parents of obese children.
This doesn’t mean that “Exercise more and eat less.” is not the behavior in many an anorexia nervosa sufferer teenager.
“Exercise more and eat less” should still be the prevalent message to send around because anorectic persons will not need this message to stop eating enough and exercise a lot.
I believe , to go back to the subject of your post , that it depends on who you want to educate. For the many people ingesting SSRIs, using tapering off as a synonym for getting rid of medication is just safer on health ground. It is another matter when you provide education for health workers.
Thanks for your work. All the best to you.
Dear Richard,
Your writing and position are very clear and your demand of course raisonable understandable but it is for the masters of MIA to decide on that demand, evaluating their options by also taking into account other points of view and consideration.
For example, assuming Pr Healy is only one person really engaged in everything he does himself – the man has a lot on his plate and might not possibly answer questions on MIA in addition to his other duties and blogs. He might also have a personal life and family duties to attend to.
To my mind, the question would be: Is not the best sometimes the ennemy of the fair and is-it not better to offer an audience in MIA to a psychiatrist who is fighting a hard fight with the scope of making the side-effects of psychiatric drugs better known wildly?
Anyway, I am not to have a voice in that %IA internal debate. I just wanted you to know that Robert whitaker is a co-founder with Pr Healy and other of http:
//wp.rxisk.org/about/;
I never had the pleasure to see and heard Robert Whitaker but, like you, I admire him a lot. I had the passing thought of going to the South Padre Island meeting nexwt December but Texas is a far and expensive place to visit from Paris.
Best regards and many thanks for answering me in a comprehensive and pleasant way.
All the best to you.
Dear Richard,
In case you do not know it already, Pr healy and Mr Robert Whitaker are working hand in hands in their common web enterprise looking at letting sufferers of side-effects to report them for the world at large -and somer academic or ufficial bodies- to read and learn about it.
On the 9/27/2012, I Dr ivana Fulli, adult psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist by training in my past, asked publicly a polite question about that Pr healy and Mr Whitaker web enterprise -at a meeting on “Medical Error”- to Pr Dominique Maraninchi, director of an official French body(ANSM) in charge of reinforcing the protecting of the persons receiving care in France from doctors against any harm from drugs or indeed any medical or surgical material (like prothesis for example).
I asked Pr Maraninchi -a respectable former oncologist academic- if it would not mzake sense for him to have somebody in his team reading that blog and he answered me that he will stay away from commercial enterprises in a very gentle, matter of factly manner.
of course, I cannot exclude with a 100 % per cent certitude that those two are not just hoping to make a lot of money through selling their books and later selling their “risk website data” to the drug industry, university labs and the likes.
But I will give them both a chance because I think what they do is damned needed.
NB: I do not know Pr Healy, the actual person, and I do not even know a single person who received his care as a psychiatrist.
What i know is that before his good work I had GPs daring to tell me that no SSRI could made a young client of us impotent and that as a psychiatrist, even a pro bono one, I should know better.
DBy the way, do you happen to think that Pr Maraninchi was right about Robert Whitaker?
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Deleted by moderator for personal attack.
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Dear Alice,
I would like your thought on this:
Ivana Fulli MD on December 20, 2012 at 1:17 pm said:
Dear Sir,
I do not know if Adam Lanza was autistic but answering special education needs for the more intellectually able autistic persons taking care of keeping the bullying of the born different by neurotipical kids at school minimal is good prevention:
From Temple Grandin, an autistic very bright woman who got a very nice education in” Animals in translation”:
Teasing hurts. the kids would tease me , so I’d get mad and smack ‘em. That simple. They always started it, they like to see me react. My new school solved that problem The school had a stable and horses for kids to rid, and the teachers took away privileges if I smacked somebody. After i lost privileges enough times I learned just to cry when somebody did something bad to me. I’d cry and that would take away the aggression. I still cry when people are mean to me.///
It is unfortunate that so many very bright autistic persons who haver so much for society do not get a speacil needs education.
The DSM5 makes it impossible to diagnose and get support for the more able of aspies-a Yale child psychiatrist, Pr Volkmar and other teams published on this.
It was for me a cultural experience to see that some MIA political activists -and admirors- agree with the DSM 5 and with the French psychoanalysts who claim that the mother behavior is the cause of autism and that she should suffer in silence-variant from a brtish know it all autism is a thing of the past.
http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/12/a-challenge-to-i-am-adam-lanzas-mother/
///Should mothers know better than complain? Sure they should, the responsible and respectable grown-up people they want everybody to believe they are. Complaining doesn’t get anybody anywhere but deeper and deeper into the very same misery that’s complained about. /// is -to my view -as a psychiatrist with some and experience and training in the autisms and in forensic of autism although I am not a forensic psychiatrist.
NB: Giving autisitc kids the special education and support they need and educating neurotipical children in not bullying persons born autistic will be good prevention-and an easier task than getting rid of the USA gun culture…
Secondly, and be assured that it will be my last comment to your post: Although some psychiatric drugs – like SSRI can increase violence for other people and suicide risks- some persons with a history of violence are helped by neuroleptics.
see one of my favorite blogger on MIA:
http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/09/dump-carefully-dumping-on-psych-meds-carelessly-might-do-harm/
NB: I felt privileged to have been invinted as a neurotipical autistfriendly psychiatrists. Some friends of mine were worried for my personal safety immerging myself for three days in an isolated place with very autistic persons but I had no hesitation to go since I knew it would be an autistic friendly place -with for example a special absolutely quiet little dining rrom for the minoirity who couldn’t bear the cutlery and conversation noises in the main restaurant.
I remember some little bit of short temper- for example when the restaurant ‘s rules were changed by surprise by the catering staff- and a few meltdown but I always felt absolutely safe all the time.
If the Western societies do not provide for the specail needs of so many gifted and brave and honest precious autistic people because the DSM5 prohibit it and not many parents can afford it or find the needed professionals, a very small percentage of Asperger’s syndrome persons will make their family home hell and do criminal acts after years of confusion and frustration with modern life intense sensory stimulation and neurotypicals social codes etc..
All the extremisms are dangerous-and no activist has the right to decide what is good for every body-in my view
Dear Paul F,
///It is worth adding that there are legions of licensed mental health clinicians who are very much in line with Ms. Delano’s perspective on mental Health as opposed to mental illness. These therapists are ready, and very much capable of offering corrective experiences for those who are unsure of how to make this sanity-filled journey on their own. ///
You seem ready to make a few dollars on the vaccum left by the disparition of psychiatry offering a “sanity-filled journey. Aren’t you?
Mrs Delano mission on earth has not got space for money makers on her plans for the well-being of humanity.
She will just suppress any need of therapist by some sort of wonderful new era for humanity.
Dear Mr Hoggett,
Life is unfair and not everybody can be autistic and very clever like Temple Grandin:
///That kind of crude behaviourism doesn’t work on me so why should it work for the boy in this story?///
Mrs Long might not have posted a letter to the New York times upon thinking but she posted on her smal blog and it went viral.
Mrs Liza Long would have not panicked after the mass murder, matricide and suicide if she had let her own genius and violent son down.
Your accomplice in bashinbg mjck -who might be a case of Internet Munchaüsen for what I know- boasted on Alice Keys’ blog that she had let her two very young children go to foster care in order to protect her own precious brain from psychiatric drugs. She claim to be sex addicted because she was sexually assaulted and of not having been able to take care even of a kitten who burned on the 11th birthday of her daughter.
This is high moral standard on MIA and that mjck -a suffere or a Internet Munchaüsen creation – use a pseudo to abuse Mrs Liza Long for retiring privilege when it is the best way with autistic difficult children and asking his son to respect his school uniform when most probably the son cannot enter the school without proper uniform.
Shame on you for your lack of empathy with a distressed mother!
Mr Hogget,
You should not believe everything people write to you or tell you.
They make you look so silly sometimes when you dare to write that autism is a thing of the past.
///Someone on my facebook page piped up that he was a violent and angry child who once nearly bit a teachers finger off but he didn’t turn into a mass killer, instead someone organised for all the school bullies to beat him in after school and then he stopped. Hilarious – but not something I could approve of.///
Hilarious really?
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– Removed by moderator for personal attack –
– Removed by moderator for personal attack –
Dear Sir,
I do not know if Adam Lanza was autistic but answering special education needs for the more intellectually able autistic persons taking care of keeping the bullying of the born different by neurotipical kids at school minimal is good prevention:
From Temple Grandin, an autistic very bright woman who got a very nice education in” Animals in translation”:
Teasing hurts. the kids would tease me , so I’d get mad and smack ‘em. That simple. They always started it, they like to see me react. My new school solved that problem The school had a stable and horses for kids to rid, and the teachers took away privileges if I smacked somebody. After i lost privileges enough times I learned just to cry when somebody did something bad to me. I’d cry and that would take away the aggression. I still cry when people are mean to me.///
It is unfortunate that so many very bright autistic persons who haver so much for society do not get a speacil needs education.
The DSM5 makes it impossible to diagnose and get support for the more able of aspies-a Yale child psychiatrist, Pr Volkmar and other teams published on this.
It was for me a cultural experience to see that some MIA political activists -and admirors- agree with the DSM 5 and with the French psychoanalysts who claim that the mother behavior is the cause of autism and that she should suffer in silence-variant from a brtish know it all autism is a thing of the past.
http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/12/a-challenge-to-i-am-adam-lanzas-mother/
///Should mothers know better than complain? Sure they should, the responsible and respectable grown-up people they want everybody to believe they are. Complaining doesn’t get anybody anywhere but deeper and deeper into the very same misery that’s complained about. /// is -to my view -as a psychiatrist with some and experience and training in the autisms and in forensic of autism although I am not a forensic psychiatrist.
NB: Giving autisitc kids the special education and support they need and educating neurotipical children in not bullying persons born autistic will be good prevention-and an easier task than getting rid of the USA gun culture…
Secondly, and be assured that it will be my last comment to your post: Although some psychiatric drugs – like SSRI can increase violence for other people and suicide risks- some persons with a history of violence are helped by neuroleptics.
see one of my favorite blogger on MIA:
http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/09/dump-carefully-dumping-on-psych-meds-carelessly-might-do-harm/
NB: I felt privileged to have been invinted as a neurotipical autistfriendly psychiatrists. Some friends of mine were worried for my personal safety immerging myself for three days in an isolated place with very autistic persons but I had no hesitation to go since I knew it would be an autistic friendly place -with for example a special absolutely quiet little dining rrom for the minoirity who couldn’t bear the cutlery and conversation noises in the main restaurant.
I remember some little bit of short temper- for example when the restaurant ‘s rules were changed by surprise by the catering staff- and a few meltdown but I always felt absolutely safe all the time.
If the Western societies do not provide for the specail needs of so many gifted and brave and honest precious autistic people because the DSM5 prohibit it and not many parents can afford it or find the needed professionals, a very small percentage of Asperger’s syndrome persons will make their family home hell and do criminal acts after years of confusion and frustration with modern life intense sensory stimulation and neurotypicals social codes etc..
All the extremisms are dangerous-and no activist has the right to decide what is good for every body-in my view
My pleasure Stephen,
I have clients with Asperger’s syndrome.
Please read:
Persons with Asperger’s syndrome- when they do not receive a proper diagnosis and proper help – do not fulfill their potential as very special contributors to society and very loyal and honest and caring people.
To the best of my knowledge, no honest person can pretend that the autisms are due to the lack of love or inadequate parenting as so many political activists like Mrs Delano want to believe and make believe to her admirors.
NB: Everyone is free to have their own beliefs but not their own facts.
If dear chaplain Stephen wants to think the earth is flat with Jesus having rode dinausors on its flat surface, he is very welcome.
Anyone like the French childpsychaitrist claiming that Asperger’s syndrome is due to bad parenting and bad mother is a scinetific fraud;
Some Asper’s syndrome kids need a very intense special needs education and support very fexw families can afford and I can’t see how societycan provide it at the task payer money without a diagnostic by an honest and trained clinican using the best of his abilities since anyone would want his own child to get a lot of special attention and education at school.
People are born autistic -with very good qualities and challenges but Western society nowadays increase the challenge when any teenager has to have a long list of friends on a facebook page to fit in and when often to excel at something intelectual hating sport is not seen as cool…
Dear Mrs Forbes,
I am sorry to disagree with your political agenda and altostrata’s but Asperger’s syndrome persons are born with a lot of good qualities and social challenges and often they are diagnosed at an adult age after having being treated wrongly in psychiatry.They do not need psychiatric drugs when physical exercice, good diet and healthy living can relieve their anxiety!
You are just blinded by simplistic political activism which -to my mind and heart- is not better than the silly monoaminergis theories of mental illnesses!
I wish the know it all, live it all british commentator could benefit from a conference by David Horton a bright and brave young man and Asperger’s syndrome activistof sort who wants to raise awareness of mistakes and help professionals to take better care of asperger’s syndrome young people.
From Pr Mitzi Waltz:///I am writing in response to David Horton’s request for a recommendation as a speaker, as I understand that you are considering asking him to present again at UB.
David provided a one-hour presentation followed by a Q&A session for my undergraduate class at the University of Birmingham last year. He covered aspects of his life at school and in adulthood, including further education and employment, and issues with anxiety. He spoke well, and also answered questions well. His presentation was singled out as a highlight of the module by several students in their evaluation.(..)///
This is taken from an antipsychiatrist-to my mind- but pro psychaitric drugs anonymous psychologist and neuroscientists, “neuroskeptic”:
Since I prefer not to let aspie read the awfull insensitive political stuff in some comments – many aspies are diffciult to raise but they often love their parents and are taking better care of them in their old age that your average neurotipical is when they do not receive a proper diagnosis and proper help – to the best of my knowledge can pretend tha tthe autisms are due to need a special needs education and support only a diagnostic by an honest clinican can provide since anyone would want his own child to get a lot of special attention
http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.fr/2012/11/exercise-and-depression-revisited.html
Anonymous said…
My name is David Horton and I am grateful to Dr Ivana Fulli for being a psychiatrist listening to me in a considerate manner she is also very honest with you. I do not object to receiving help from professionals it is just the typ of help that professionals give that causes me concern.
There are many different treatments for Asperger’s syndrome and I welcome the desire to ameliorate its negative effects. However all treatments for a problem depend on the practitioners knowledge. If Doctors, Psychiatrists and other professionals do not administer these treatments in the correct manner they can case the patient additional problems, instead of helping them to become fulfilled productive members of society they can increase the individuals dysfunctional behaviours.
The text Dr Fulli posted is taken from a collaborative work between her and I : an abstract that has being written from the point of view of someone who has suffered as a result of such treatments and hopes to play a small part in preventing others being similarly damaged.
Exercise helped me a great deal.
7 November 2012 16:17
Ivana Fulli MD said…
David,
Here the text I posted this morning but was just a transient comment. It must have been thought spammage by neuroskeptic ‘s ptotection system – or whatever:
///(…)Once I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome I was told about the problems I would have with the condition. Problems with socialising, problems with work and the other problems that we are all familiar with.
It made me feel powerless, I felt like I had no ability to affect the world or other people around me in any way. The impression of Asperger’s Syndrome that I got was completely negative and that would affect me for the rest of my life.
I was very negatively affected by the advice from the professionals. I never heard anything positive or encouraging from them.
I decided that since there was nothing positive about Asperger’s Syndrome and Asperger’s Syndrome was part of me that I needed to dispense with myself in order to be successful in life.
I decided that all of my feelings and emotions were unnecessary and should be ignored and supressed.(…)
I studied GCSE’s and all of the proceeding subjects as well as outdoor walks (which I hated) and I left with only mediocre GCSE’S.
I then went on to college and enjoyed myself but never achieved a great deal. After that I went to University College Worcester. University College Worcester gave me a chance to live away from home for the first time. I studied A Business and Information technology HND there and passed. When I went on to study a degree I could not cope and decided to drop out.
After dropping out of University I spent several years on my own trying to find a job and failing. (…)
I was not used to living on my own and went a little stir crazy, I once stayed in my flat for three days without leaving.
I decided to correct this by taking a walk every day. (…)
I also mearted to get involved in disability politics. It was good for me and helped me to become more assertive.
In Birmingham I spent a long time working on my physical Fitness.
I also worked on my anxiety levels over the period of about a year and a half.
I could feel great changes being made.
I decided that the time had come to go back to university.
I felt that I had changed enough to be able to cope with the environment. The first grade I got was 86 Per cent considering that in the past I had only go mediocre grades at best this was a great achievement for me. I am now in my second year and hoping for similar success(…)///
7 November 2012 16:58
Of course listening to a person with Asperger’s syndrome is not on your political agenda!
Beware that you can think yourself liberal and broadminded but my point writing that you will made a dreal team with the know it all lived it all British commentator was only that the more right is a governement the less is spend on social help.
To give a hand to a mother in despair by paying with taxpayer money -as they do in UK- a good standards special needs education to autistic people up to precious special needs boarding schools is just what the far right people cannot stand.
They want to pay the least possible tax and want it to be spend for sending drones to kill innocent civilians in distant countries…
Other feel that they are God chosen and any struggling person is not.
Mrs Delano and inconditional admirers:
Internet is a public space and since some poor nerves of a mean political activist censor had seen fit to smear my name with ludicrous accusations on http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/12/many-small-actions-bring-big-results/#comment-18564
I think useful to post e-mails I received from mr whitaker and Cole since apparently those two gentelmen atre not able to make political activists with an agenda behave in a civil way:
///Dear Dr. Fulli,
Your comment should not have been censored. I don’t even know how
this happened, and I was quite unhappy about it.
I can’t even figure out who pulled your comment. We don’t have paid
staff, and so I rely on a small group to try to maintain the site, but comments are not supposed to be censored unless they are attacks on a person (the blogger). Critical comments are fine, of the sort raise here.
I apologize for this. I see that one of your comments was restored, but not the other. I will get to the bottom of this, and get it rectified.
Again, I hope you can accept my apologies.
Bob/
///Dear Dr. Fulli,
I have tried to make it clear that we allow comments, with free
discussion of ideas, unless they are personal attacks. I will have to
read this and see what has erupted . . . I just got back into my office.
Bob Whitaker//
http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/09/dump-carefully-dumping-on-psych-meds-carelessly-might-do-harm/
///Dear Dr. Fulli,
Your comment should not have been censored. I don’t even know how
this happened, and I was quite unhappy about it.
I can’t even figure out who pulled your comment. We don’t have paid
staff, and so I rely on a small group to try to maintain the site, but comments are not supposed to be censored unless they are attacks on a person (the blogger). Critical comments are fine, of the sort raise here.
I apologize for this. I see that one of your comments was restored, but not the other. I will get to the bottom of this, and get it rectified.
Again, I hope you can accept my apologies.
Bob/
///Dear Dr. Fulli,
I have tried to make it clear that we allow comments, with free
discussion of ideas, unless they are personal attacks. I will have to
read this and see what has erupted . . . I just got back into my office.
Bob Whitaker//
///From: “Kermit Cole”
Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2012 7:08 PM
Subject: Comments restored
> I have restored your comments.
They should not have been removed, and we apologize for any distress the removal may have caused you.I hope you will understand how difficult it is to maintain a positive environment in the comment section, and it can be almost impossible to draw a clear line about what constitutes a violation of policy. We generally have a very liberal policy, which usually means that bloggers are frustrated with us for not removing posts. Then, when we do, we get a lot of heat from the other side. There is no possible middle ground.
But your comments, upon review, were clearly not a violation and should not have been removed.
Again, we’re sorry.
Kermit ///
I had to restore my first comment myself on http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/12/a-challenge-to-i-am-adam-lanzas-mother/
and the ludicrous smearing of my name has not disappeared. This is the rerason of that transfer of mails.
if you cannot remove disgraceful intimidation by smearing a name with ludicrous false accusation, think twice before letting your bad nerves take the lead over honesty Mr or MRS censor and political activist not wanting any contradiction!
Dr. Ivana Fulli.
Justin,
I am yet to met an adult with Asperger’s syndrome who has not been suffering at main stream schools and had not been bullied and abused.
One very gentle adult man working as a shop assistant in UK told me that he was expelled from school for throwing a classmate through a window after months and month of bullying but after a small additional comment. Just an exemple and I am bo saying that Adam lanza had been an aspie.
From Temple Grandin, an autistic very bright woman who got a very nice education in” Animals in translation”:
Teasing hurts. the kids would tease me , so I’d get mad and smack ’em. That simple. They always started it, they like to see me react. My new school solved that problem The school had a stable and horses for kids to rid, and the teachers took away privileges if I smacked somebody. After i lost privileges enough times I learned just to cry when somebody did something bad to me. I’d cry and that would take away the aggression. I still cry when people are mean to me.///
It is unfortunate that so many very bright autistic persons who haver so much for society do not get a speacil needs education.
And by the way, the mother was acting right by suppression the ptivilege of videogame to try to make her son understand that his behavior has to change…
The trouble with political agendas is that sometimes one just refuses to see the issues at stake.
Not to mention anonymous Münchausen by internet who always provides some anonymous with lexible personnal stories to make their point, like having had a wonderful mother or a very bad one according to the need of the narrative…
By the way, autistic persons and family do not want to be considered mentally ill but born different with a lot of good autistic qualities as well as social challenges.
///Should mothers know better than complain? Sure they should, the responsible and respectable grown-up people they want everybody to believe they are. Complaining doesn’t get anybody anywhere but deeper and deeper into the very same misery that’s complained about.///
After:
///There was this 13-year-old girl, whose mother had had ever changing relationships with a number of violent men during most of her daughter’s childhood. At several occasions the girl had witnessed her mother getting beaten up. She herself had been sexually assaulted by these men.///Following your line of thinking, a mother should not complained about.///
In 10 years time the abused daughter might get herself in “ever changing relationship with violent men abusing her and raping her own daughter but at that time she will have to suffer in silence her own daughter’s behavior.
I wonder how long it will take for the world at large to recognize your wonderful solution. It will certaintly save a lot of tax payers money.
Variant from dear known it all John Hogget , the autisms do not exist and society do not need to offer booarding school with trained teachers etc…
The two of you would make a dreamteam in any far right governement!
Stephen thinks like you too but presumably for other reasons:
///My sister even tried to kill my mother with the help of her
boyfriend. When my mother got loose from the two of them she beat
the whoops out of both of them. ///
/// As a sibling I supported my mother in her support of my brother
and sister, even though they did horrible things to her in the
process. NO, I DO NOT HAVE ANY COMPASSION FOR THIS WOMAN WHO SEEMS
TO CARE MORE ABOUT HERESELF THAN SHE DOES HER CHILDREN. SHE WANTED
HER FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FAME AND TOOK IT AT THE EXPENSE OF HER
CHILD! ///
I believe that by helping mothers you help the children and that Stephen ‘s mother must have been very fit but that society shoiuld have helped her more when she was rasing 4 or 5 kids as a single poor mother.
Dear Mrs Delano,
Here my comment that has been censored in a way Mr whitaker couldn’t understand yeasterday either- or so he wrote to me.
I will only add that my pro bono clients and my friends in the Autistic community are proud to be different from neurotypical and that you obviously know very little about the autisms.
Adam Lanza might or might not have been an aspie but for sure aspies are born different.
Who are you to decide that the autisms and Asperger’s syndrome do not exist when a vibrant communauty of very decent people is proud to be born autistic ?
I will not discuss further since your idea of discussing is to be congratulatre for being ignorant of the autisms and lacking empathy. On MIA a mjck who boasted on Dr Alice keys ‘s blog recently that she let her two daughter go to foster care and in the USA probably psychiatric medication at a young age -her rights by all means- to preserve her precious own from psychiatric treatment becomes an expert on education and a moral standard!
Ivana Fulli MD on December 18, 2012 at 6:43 am said:
Hi Laura,
Your political agenda -or some personal issues like refusing to acknowledge the pain you inflicted to your parents and siblings if any or whatever – seems to blind you about the issue at stakes:
A courageous and desperate mother asked the USA society to think upon mothers and families of violent children and young people who need help -and not only by increased gun ownership control!
Adam Lanza ‘s father has a new wife and home, his brother had not seen him for years , his mother lived with him alone-if I am to believe the news.
Adam Lanza’s mother is dead- killed by her son.
Do you think she is faking it or that she deserved it?
In the old Romans ‘law a father could kill any offspring by rights.
Do you think- seriously- that giving birth makes it mandatory nowadays to suffer hell in silence and accept any “angry behavior “up to a death sentence for yourself, your other children and other humans beings ?
Do you think that those mothers – and sibling- deserve to live in fear and also in silence because a disturbed behavior is the sign of a sort of a moral superiority quality of suffering or whatever?
Are you thinking that the mothers who are living in terror of their adolescent or young adult child are just lacking empathy and understanding and should know better than complain?
Are you thinking that your political agenda is worth ignoring facts and inflicting an additional pain to a woman and mother in living hell who put her face to her story because she thinks- as I do –that societies should try to do better to support those “angry teenagers” and their family ?
The parents and siblings of violent disturbed children are suffering hell and often-in France and UK – this end up in a divorce with the mother taking care alone of the violent child with the sibling living with the other parent or leaving home very early.
In my experience of pro bono psychiatrist many parents are not as rich as the Lanza family and in addition to the fears, stress and moral suffering for the mother living alone with the very disturbed angry adolescent or young adult, she alos lives in poverty. The father remarries -often enough with a younger woman- and has new children which makes the alimony shrinks to allow for the education of the new family ‘s children.
Often the new babies are a valid excuse for not receiving at all the disturbed child in the father’s new home.
To be fair, I answered last spring an emergency call for information and help from a divorced man who lives alone with a violent son in a Paris’ flat from the day that “angry” teenager almost killed his younger brother. His former wife is said to be happily remarried and she went to live in a nice house in an affluent suburb lives with her new husband and younger son who had been assaulted.
I also know families -I am an adult pro bono psychiatrist- were the father does not abandon the hell of a family to make himself a new peaceful new one or live alone. I remember vividly, for example, a father coming to speak to me with broken eyeglasses in 2010 explaining, with a shy smile, that his almost adult son was in a bad mood that morning and hit him in the face and that contact lensesI also know families -I am an adult pro bono psychiatrist- were the father does not abandon the hell of a family to make himself a new peaceful new one or live alone. I remember vividly, for example, a father coming to speak to me with broken eyeglasses in 2010 explaining, with a shy smile, that his almost adult son was in a bad mood that morning and hit him in the face and that contact lenses were out of the question to prevent recurrent expenses for eyeglasses because a hit in the face could damage his cornea with contact lenses has said the ophthalmologist!
For myself, I live in a country, France, where many a child psychiatrist is still a psychoanalyst putting the blame on the mother’s behavior whom he will advice to do a years long and costly psychoanalysis therapy herself to heal the son-variant putting the blame on both parents behavior.
Luckily we have not the ” USA guns issues” in Europe but I know families living in hell and I have had to support a mother narrowly escaping strangulation by her daughter.
NB: I cannot believe that “not labeling” violent disturbed teenagers and young person and not prescribing psychiatry drugs is enough because in France young people, unlike adults, are not receiving drugs as much as in the USA- very far from it – and many a psychoanalyst child psychiatrist refuses to put any other label than “it is the mother’s behavior ‘s fault” on a family situation where a son or daughter is making family life hell.
Please consider the consequences for society of what you just wrote with a total lack of empathy for the loving fears of mothers, fathers and siblings society let down!
PS: Those are facts that do not make the DSMs honorable and scientific or the Bad Pharma ‘s criminal marketing techniques acceptable. ///
Hi and so long Alice since your have a moderator who put injust remarks after my real name,
I recommand you to read what suffering parents wrote to that couragous mother on her blog.
I agree with you to the need for taking care of social issues but some single mothers – are left alone in any level of society with violent children they can’t manage alone and it is not good.
Hi and good by, Stephen,
You cannot expect many mother to be as strong and fit and couragous as your mother was. Your mother was a truly exceptionnal woman and by definition it is a rarity.
Ivana.
**** Moderator edit: do not attack poster’s relatives ****
Dear alice,
My comment has been deleted by moderator and I answered with:
“”On MIA, it is OK to attack on a full post a suffering mother who put her face and suffering known to the world asking for the USA society to help families to deal with violent children but not to answer to the attack.
Idem for comments like:
///The mother in the blog (divorced with four children) that Laura writes about, strikes me as someone who has poor parenting skills. (…) she’s dealing with him in a low level assinine way./// ?
To deny the sad reality of single divorced mothers left to deal alone in fear and despair with very difficult behavior of a child with little help from society is OK and encouraged de facto by moderator.
It is always interesting to see politics talk loud in any field… “”
Ivana.
Hi Stephen,
Many parents and sibling live in fear and society has to give a help.
My unbderstanding is that that mother do not want psychaitric care for her son but helps from the society at large.
Do you not think about the siblings ?
Seriously Stephen?
Good special needs sleep in schools are one of the answers and in UK, for example, the society pays the huge costs of precious schools for few pupils and a lot of trained staff.
May be “ex-peers” can organize and run such living in schools but to denied the suffering of the mothers (sometimes father when he dosesn’t divorce the wife and the difficult child-so to speak).
A little compassion for the single mothers of threatening ‘s teenager and adults children is not a small things, Stephen.
Ivana.
Alice,
Of course you are right.
But social politics also have their part to play. As your beautifully eloquent president put it, society and politicians have to give it a try on the guns control front;
Idem for not letting families of disturbed violent teenagers down.
I couldn’t help answering this morning an unwised attack on a couragous sufferer of a mother who asked society to do better for suffering violent children and their family:
http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/12/a-challenge-to-i-am-adam-lanzas-mother/#comment-18425
The MIA activists are more than welcome to offer peers (here ex peers) solutions for families of “angry violent children” but to deny the suffering of some family is not acceptable.
Ivana
On MIA, it is OK to attack on a full post a suffering mother who put her face and suffering known to the world asking for the USA society to help families to deal with violent children but not to answer to the attack.
Idem for comments like:
///The mother in the blog (divorced with four children) that Laura writes about, strikes me as someone who has poor parenting skills. (…) she’s dealing with him in a low level assinine way./// ?
To deny the sad reality of single divorced mothers left to deal alone in fear and despair with very difficult behavior of a child with little help from society is OK and encouraged de facto by moderator.
It is always interesting to see politics talk loud in any field…
Dear Alice,
I am looking forward to a conversation in person some day-may be at a meeting for unconventionnal psychiatrists organized at your beach or at a Parisian Museum’s cafeteria with a minimum number of two psychiatrists for the meeting to be hold!
In the mean time, i am always very happy to read your blofs although sometimes I might not feel like hurting other readers by commenting like when I wanted to tell that the French soldiers would like to receive more frequently the label of PTSD they really find not offensive, useful and to the point. Not only the French army medics do not diagnose it as often as the German army doctors, for example, but the “private soldier assurances ” do not recognize it at all arguying that it would be too easy to fake it and claim benefits.
A French soldiers’s association calls the PTSD “The invisible illness”!
I am a great admirer of Dr Pat Bracken’s and of Will Hall and the least reason is not their refusal of any simplistic views and solutions.
It is not nice when money talks but it is not nice either when politics talks too loudly…
Of course, I am against paternalism for any health professionnal and I am all for the sufferers to lead and decide thei way to recovery and be heard but in their diversity.
Ivana
The leaflet is very good indeed and is not such a small thing to give it to a family thinking that a grieving person need psychiatric help- when that person just need the shrink permission to grieve at her pace.
Let’s hope that the RCP do not make it compatible with the DSM5 next May…
Also, it is a way to act against the DSM5 ludicrous take on the loss of a loved one: two weeks to grieve without medication or costly psychotherapy!
Ivana.
PS: We live in very different countries but we made some similar choices like putting family first and not taking for granted that the role of a psychiatrist is to prescribe pills- this written my personal experience is the same as yours : many clients do not need greedy speedy doctors to ask for pills. Even in a free homeopathy clinic in Paris, Dispensaire Hahnemann, I was astonished to witness many clients asking the MD homeopaths -working for free there to promote the use of homeopathy for poor people – to prescribe homeopathy but also a lot of allopathic drugs. Like if they went to consult there for a cheap refill of allopathic drugs!
Dear Alice,
You asked me about what can explain the poor buddhist immigrants suffering less from psychosis.
To the best of my knowledge, nobody has the answer yet. Of course strong family links with respect for the parents and any older person are strong in those immigrant communauties but exploitation runs high also with clandestine factories and very poor but expensive -compared to wages- sleeping spaces etc…
I reckon – just to venture an ideas or two- that parents and elders you trust are a psychologically reassuring force although you might get exploited more easily by an elder person and not choose your future profession yourself and you will give a lot of your money to your parents if they are in need- no free lunch…Also buddhism fatalism helps to get rid of ressentment against other people and the self. Food and genes might play a role too.
Ivana.
Jack,
Just to shame the APA for making so much money and prevent, where we can, the DSM5 to do much harm on people having lost a loved one-or indeed several- one can distribute the free bereavement leaflet of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
I found it to be one of my best clinical tool as a psychiatrist(they offer it not only in English)and since Dr Alice Keys was kind enough not to despise this suggestion on her blog , I feel I might offer it to you and your audience as well:
///Updated May 2011. Due for review: May 2013. Royal College of Psychiatrists. This leaflet may be downloaded, printed out, photocopied and distributed free of charge as long as the Royal College of Psychiatrists is properly credited and no profit is gained from its use. Permission to reproduce it in any other way must be obtained from the Head of Publications. The College does not allow reposting of its leaflets on other sites, but allows them to be linked to directly.///
http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/expertadvice/problems/bereavement/bereavement.aspx
NB: Let’s hope that the RCP do not feel like adapting their bereavement leaflet to the DSM 5 in May 2013 and beware that the ICD commitees are also electing diseases in a political way and some of those might have the scope to be compatible with the DSM 5.
Anyway, this very useful leaflet is an example of a psychiatrists’ national association who doesn’t put financial profit first- they ask for a voluntary donation when you print it but it is not an obligation. Plus, when you give it to a person in acute mourning, you drastically lessen the risks for that person to become a psychiatrist or a psychologist ‘s client. On that point the RCP seems to do the opposite of the APA…
PS: I am not as keen on every RCP leaflet as I am on that one.
Dear Alice,
Here you are:
///Updated May 2011. Due for review: May 2013. Royal College of Psychiatrists. This leaflet may be downloaded, printed out, photocopied and distributed free of charge as long as the Royal College of Psychiatrists is properly credited and no profit is gained from its use. Permission to reproduce it in any other way must be obtained from the Head of Publications. The College does not allow reposting of its leaflets on other sites, but allows them to be linked to directly.///
http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/expertadvice/problems/bereavement/bereavement.aspx
NB: I am not as keen on every RCP ‘s leaflets but I couldn’t do easily without their bereavement’s leaflet.
Indeed, it prevented in my pro bono practice several people being pushed into psychiatric medication starting with sleeping pills,costly conselling sessions with a psychologist when nothing was wrong with them. It helps at any distance of the loss, in my experience, but the sooner the better.
The human condition makes that everywhere around you some persons will lost a love one, or several.
Thank you for taking my suggestion kindly.
Ivana.
Alice,
You are such a gifted person and such a good soul that I am sure you will find a way to make a big differences in your communauty with small gestures nicely thought upon.
I might even suggest, as an example, that you set up some local communauty awareness about mourning a loved one -or even loved ones in case of car or boat accident or whatever.
I use myself for my pro bono informal practice with great preventive success the leaflet for mourners and their carers from the Royal College of Psychiatrist. Although they ask for a donation, it is free to print their material as long as you print also the ligne of intelectual property at the end of it.
Those leaflets are printable not only in English- which is useful.They are concise and crystalclear but comprehensive -even the possibility of hallucinations seing the deceased or hearing him-(her)is explained and dedramatized- in my experience it is better than just having a psychaitrist telling you tha tit is nbothing to worry about to the client and their carers ).
I think you can make a big difference only by putting those leaflets in funeral homes or at the office where people do declare the deaths is useful in a country where the national association of psychiatrists will ufficially allow only two week for mourning in the DSM5 .
Just a passing thought of course.
All the best to you and your family.
Ivana.
To read your post and learn that a psychiatrist can manage to run a practice with the time consumming ideal of yours in the USA was a rare and inspirational pleasure.
Without being a buddist, I will add that the pollution from ingesting the most violent of TV series, videogames and pornography is also a stress.
Not to mention the frustration of some ordinary women seing actresses or politicians -like a vice-president candidate in your penultimate presidential election -giving birth and going back in no time to being sexy and very active..
Thanks for that post indeed.
Dr. Fisher,
Beware that in the name of the precautionary principle women are prohibited to give birth at home with a midwife and at least in France,until recently, the same principal made episiotomy the rule for every “natural birth”…
How right can you be on the advantages of independant testing of any medication but where the money to support the cost of those studies come from is only one aspect of the corruption of academics in any field of medicine which let the clients and your average psychiatrist down.
Hi once again Steve,
I meant to write 12 13 12 at 6:20 am that very bright people with a soul do not oversimplify issues – and of course not that they oversimplify issues like politicians of any kind, “physician academic politicians” included.
(Sorry about that but my the MIA “little reply window” is “full of red” when I write in English with my paris baseed computer between typing in French.)
Hi again Steve,
Of course, “Science without conscience is only the ruin of the soul” from Rabelais a XVIe century French physician and writer applies to psychiatric residents and psychiatry researchers and really bright honest people with a soul do oversimplify issues.
I was implicit to my mind that we need to attract very bright people with a soul to become psychiatrists and researchers in psychiatry.
Hi Steve,
///If we’re reduced to arguing about whether the untreated group might not have been as bad as the treated group, we’re already talking about treatment effects that are probably pretty negligible, otherwise, the difference would still be observable.///
Please, do not ignore the fact that the studied groups are precisely that , groups of a very diverse lot of people.
Dr Steingart wrote, I think , something close:
///However, not everyone relapses when they are stopped and some relapse even when they are continued so it is a minority of people who seem to benefit from continuing. We just do not know who they are.///
We really need to attract to psychiatry very bright residents hoping that in the future bright new ideas will lead to a better understanding of whom can benefit from psychiatry drugs.
(Actually, a researcher with a troubling ethical conduct in the past like Pr. Charles Nemeroff might sell himself well to the “grants givers” because he propose futur clinical or labs tools predicting who wwill benefit from antidepressants-seems to me.)
All the best to you Steve for thinking hard and interestingly.
Ivana.
Dr Steingard,
Either you are a better person than I am or you are stronger, possibly both.
I can only congratulate you sincerely on not needing comfort from the “but they do it to (in the other fields of medicine )”.
Still, when a meta-analysis compare psychiatric drugs with drugs used in other fields of medicine, one has to keep those facts in mind before letting that meta-analysis comforting “pills dispensers psychiatrists USA style”-so to speak.
Plus, many of your readers are made believe on other blogs that the world would be better without any psychiatric drugs and psychiatrists…
I find that irresponsible for many reasons;
All the best to you and your good work.
Ivana.
Dr. Elliot,
Thanks for your interesting posts. it is important on MIA that the readers learn about academia whistle blowers, to my mind because it is so easy to claim the entire field of research in psychiatry worthless and deprived of morals.
Does one should conclude that whistleblowers protection has been offered by law in the USA since the end of your civil war and regularly improved but only for those whistle blowers working outside of Academia?
Whistleblowers all over the world, no matter the field of offenses- so to speak, are always taking the risks of whistling with no effect other than suffering themselves inconveniences from a bad name (envious, incompetent) to being fired.
The ostrich attitude is something almost universal-seems to me.
An other way to look at it is Montesquieu ‘s thinking about the certainty of the punishment for any misconduct being more important than the severity of the penalty who applies in crime prevention.In that case, I wonder what do you make about too easy online publishing which can stay forever on the internet and of the fact that one can put oneself out of reach of scientific misconduct regulations by running an independant – non profit organization?
For example:
“Evidence of Photo Manipulation in a Delusional Parasitosis Paper.” Shelomi M.
University of California, Davis, Department of Entomology,
” In 2004, an article in the Journal of the New York Entomological Society claimed that individuals with Delusory Parasitosis actually suffer from collembola infestations. The article has been critiqued for poor methodology and results that contradict all knowledge about collembolans. Less easily accounted for has been a figure in the article purporting to show a collembolan in a skin scraping. The image appears to have been altered using photo manipulation software to an unacceptable degree, and this paper demonstrates that to be the case. The altered figure represents creation of nonexistent data, a form of scientific misconduct. Whether the deception is deliberate or a product of an otherwise well-meaning author ignorant of the limits of acceptable image manipulation is unknown, but the result is peer-reviewed support for an impossible conclusion that complicates patient treatment. In the current era of computers, even regional entomology journals must have detailed standards for what kind of images and image manipulations are acceptable for publication.”
Hi Sandra,
/// I know you are aware of Leucht’s recent metanalysis which reports that these drugs are as effective as many other drugs used in medicine.///
One could argue that the non psychiatric drugs had not been honestly and cleverly tried either and that even ethically conducted in good faith metanalysis ( fair selection of the studies considered good enough to be included in the metanalysis, taking into accounts the probability for negative studies founded by Big Pharma not being published, and fair selection of outcome criteria etc..) are not an easy task after decades of drug marketing interfering with TCS publishing in any field of medicine and academic selection got wrong in medical schools with too much impact given to the number of publications in top journals when good science takes long thinking beforehand and long studies before publishing.
(///Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124///)
And for a concrete example of non-psychiatric “Bad Pharma” involved in RCT:
///A seemingly small mistake in a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) landed a Danish physician-researcher in hot water last month after a German company threatened to sue him for potential losses that could run in the millions of dollars. The exchange prompted media consternation in Denmark over whether academic freedom was being censored, but the researcher, Anders Perner of Copenhagen University Hospital has corrected the error, which occurred in the publication of a study of a widely used drug to prevent shock, and thereby averted legal action. Still, the episode has shone a light on a therapy that some researchers say may be doing more harm than good, despite its widespread use.(…).///
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/08/squabble-over-nejm-paper-puts-sp.html
PS: I benefited from a good enough education in pharmacology and neurology in my youth and for 33 years I had shared the life of one of my former professor of medicine, François Lemaire, an Intensive care French academic who had been chief Editor of “Intensive Care” (a European journal) and editor of the review of the Am Thoracic Association. My very bright and not money seeking (estranged now) husband and the good teaching I received in Roma, Paris and Oxford saved me from believing those antipsychiatrists who present our discipline as doomed in opposition to “whiter than white “ non psychiatric medicine-even at the worst times when Bad Pharma and the simplistic monoaminergic theories were the ” only path available” for those aware of the shortcomings of the psychoanalysts.
It is sad but comforting for psychiatrists who care for their clients to know that we are not the devil’s face of medicine some antipsychiatrists want us to appear compared to other doctors-
when it would have been so easy for us to choose another specialty with clients easier to help and deal with (urology being hard to beat for the grateful clients easy as a whole with othopedy, ophtalmology and dermatology coming close in my experience of medical student) and even make more money for the money seeking doctors -at least in France where earnings come from doing any kind of labtest or procedures, not from talking.
Anyway, when has a simplistic dichotomist’s potent political idea be true and safe long term in history in any field?
Thank you for being a model of an intelligent not paternalistic psychiatrist who-in my own views- has also the courage to keep honest and not advertise her own easy path to mental health and happiness following your own method…
Your clients and residents are very lucky indeed to have you !
I wish you a pleasant holidays seasons ans a happy new year 2013 full of satisfactions for yourself, your family and your clients.
Ivana.
Hi Phil,
Actually, one of the oldest trick in spinning data in clinical trials has always been to just ignore the cases of discontinuation of treatment and the cases that didn’t came for follow up since discontinuation often means that the treatment didn’t delivered his promises to do more good than harm.
Hi John,
My brocken English must be at fault there, John, since you didn’t understand that I was answering Richard’s and Duane’s comments.
I hope that my conversing with Duane from Texas, Richard and Stephen gives me more satisfaction than my answers to them grieve you.
Dear Stephen,
I think you should write your own blog on MIA because you are blessed with a talent with words in conveying a unique experience and point of view, many interesting experiences on mental health to share and a gentle very humane modest and rich thinking about it all worth reading and rereading.
Please accept my apologies for having ignored on 12 08 12 at 10:51 that you indeed wrote about unprofessional conduct of nurses:
http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/12/do-diagnoses-injure-people/
(…) when I would just get to sleep this one nurse would come in and shine the light in my face! With that kind of treatment you never get any sleep. One night I told her that if she shined her light in my face or the face of my roommate again I was going to get up and moon her. She ran down to the nurses’ station and wrote in my chart that I threatened to beat the s..t out of her. The charge nurse came to ask me why I was threatening her staff. When I asked what she was talking about she stated what the nurse had written in my chart. My roommate, who was awake at the time and heard exactly what I’d told the nurse originally about mooning her spoke up in my defense and quoted me exactly. The charge nurse told him to stay out of it because it was none of his affair. Of course, psych patients can’t be trusted because we always lie you know. I demanded for three days that her comment be removed because it was a blatant lie. They refused. I said that I wanted what I’d actually said entered into the file below her comment. They refused. So, in my record it stands that I threatened a staff person! You can’t win with these people.(…)///
I am thankful for MIA to exists for many reasons, Stephen, but reading your comments and having a dialogue with you is not the least of it.
All the best to you Stephen.
Ivana
I Stephen,
To look on the bright side, that study will come to the rescue of any psychiatrist not keen on prescribing those neuroleptics to any elderly person – be it because that psychiatrist thinks that cheap haloperidol works better often on the voices and smelling of poison of the elderly and not everybody gets marked neurological adverse effects from it or because that psychiatrist doesn’t want to prescribe any neuroleptics at all to the client if he can help it.
Always nice to discuss things with you Stephen since you are open to dialogue and you do not defend the same fixed views times and times again and you have interesting experience to share. I would recommend everyone to read your full discussion with Alice Keys including your fond memory of the family doctor of your childhood and I am glad you wrote to Alice Keys, among other things of the utmost interest:
///One of the things I’ve decided is that it’s not only the biopsychiatrists, or psychiatrists in general, that have to answer some difficult questions and be held to accountability.///
http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/11/but-its-just-the-way-things-are/
You often write about the experience of someone working in a USA psychiatric hospital but not as a psychiatrist and some thing is fascinating to me about it:
only psychiatrists seem to behave badly in the hospital where you work!
I think, Stephen , that the USA America really is God chosen country if you are blessed there with only psychiatrists being to blame and nurses and support staff wonderfully dedicated to their task!
To be absolutely frank, Stephen, although it was not my main reason to stop working in the psychiatry hospital care in 1989, some of the French nursing staff and support workers in psychiatry were very problematic to work with for me:
Most nurses had a great sense of duty and were very humane and pleased to work in psychiatryand I learned more from some of them: a good nurse observation had even lead me to my research subject.
That kind of attitude might not exist where you work or in the USA at large but, for example, I met more than once in France with some nurses and support workers who would say “the schizo in room X “ or “ the depression in room Y “instead of a name after the client had been hospitalized for some times with the numerous occasion a nurse or a support worker has to check and write the patients’ names. It was not unusual then and it is still frequent in France nowadays to hear the non doctor staff speak meanly of the family. To tell you a true story, once a social worker refused to do her job when I asked her about finding financial and humane support for a family telling me that first she had her children who where on school holiday and she had to be home a lot and second, since it was the mother’s fault if the son was “a schizo”, money struggling single mother or not, that woman could keep him at her home without help and at her expenses and not the taxpayer ‘s for as long as possible!
To come back to neuroleptic prescroption, some psychiatric nurses and nurses helpers put their safety and comforts first and were making light of the drugs side-effects: It was so easy for nurses wanting a good nap on a chair or to play cards with colleagues at night – to blackmail the psychiatrist on call into overprescribing dangerous drugs for a new client or even into prescribing physical restraint with the argument that the nursing staff or another patient will be physically hurt in the next hours of the night by the emergency patient..A French TV documentary in 2010 has shown me an even worst king of nurse ‘s behavior with a nurse coming into an argument with a young woman asking to go in the garden and smoke with some warm clothes under her psychiatric in-client thin pajamas and a man nurse answering in a very vulgar way that either she had to froze if she wanted to smoke. The young woman protested and got vocal and ended up under physical restraints with a neuroleptic injection in her bottom decided by the woman nurse who came to the rescue and explaining to the man that the client was in a dissociative state and, believe it or not, the reporters and cameras presence where known to the nurses…
Luckily, I can put here a link in English about support staff being involved in incredibly sadistic criminal attitudes against vulnerable people.
// (…)Last week six people were jailed for their role in abusing patients at the private hospital near Bristol after an investigation by BBC’s Panorama.
“What has been exposed by Panorama is utterly intolerable and has to come to an end,” Mr Lamb told the Commons. (…)///
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20140421
///(…) A BBC Panorama programme last year showed footage of patients being wrestled to the floor to be restrained, the use of water-based punishment and unequal games of strength which the patients could not possibly win.
An undercover reporter managed to get a job as a support worker and filmed colleagues tormenting, bullying and assaulting patients during five weeks at the hospital last year.
He was sent in after the owners, Castlebeck Ltd, and the Care Quality Commission failed to respond to disclosures by a whistleblower.
(…).///
http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/Damning-report-scandal-Winterbourne-View/story-16668258-detail/story.html
Have a nice and resting holiday seasons and a happy new year 2013 Stephen.
Ivana
Dear Alice,
Thanks you so much for your kind words and for asking about the French system;
Unfortunately, to explain it, I would need a “foreigh correspondant blog” on MIA and my English is not up to it- not to mention the fact that I am not MIA politically correct in my defense of psychiatrists…
Anyway, as much as the costs and organization of health care in the USA – compared to France- might explain a huge gap in health between poor and wealthy people in the USA compared to France , in social psychiatry there is much more than poverty at stake- seems to me.
Just think about the fact that some of the poorest people emigrating in GB from the Far-Est seem to suffer less frequently from psychosis than the general GB population when they belong to the Buddhist religion when non Buddhist people emigrating from other places have a much higher rate of psychosis than the general UK population.
NB: I think psychiatrists and doctors in general have their faults for sure but the clients do not deserve to pay for it by being prescribed dangerous psychiatric drugs by non MDs or to have no other choice than to be put under the care of people believing that their own story applies to anybody or that any interesting causal theory or FRMI study is sound science when it is not, etc…
I wish you a very nice holiday seasons and a happy new year for 2013.
Ivana
Hi Duane,
///adults should be allowed to make their own decisions.///
How right could you be Duane!
And I would add that adults should be allowed to make their own decision for their children but should never be allowed to make decisions for elderly parents able to consent no matter how poor or frail those parents can be.
Taking psychiatric drugs or having ECT are just that to my mind: an option and not one I recommend myself if I see another possibility.
I cannot think that activists denying to anyone in any circonstance the right to ask for psychiatric drugs -or even to agree to ECT in desperate cases are pro freedom.
For example, I heard an autistic advocate doing a PhD and raising children telling that risperidone had been a great help during a discussion at a meeting organized by autistic persons for autistic persons were I felt privileged to have been invited last summer in GB (AUTSCAPE).
Who I am and who are you to tell that intelligent person wrong?
Some elderly people risk to lose living in their own home or in a pleasant retirement home when they are too vocal and energetic about some persecutory ideas they have got from voices in their head. When everything else has failed it might be difficult not to propose a few drops of haloperidol to get the person free of the voices to see if it works and what are the side-effects…
Other elderly people want to drink coffee all day long and after diner, watch TV a lot instead of taking fresh air and exercise during the day and watch TV at night in their beds, eat heavy diner and take psychiatric drugs to sleep when benzodiazepines are very dangerous…
A very vocal ECT opponent and innovative thinker for sure about “labeling” , a psychologist, Pr. David Bentall who wants for GB psychologists the right to prescribe dangerous psychiatric drugs without any medical training wrote in one of his books that nothing could have saved a client of his who hanged himself in the middle of a divorce on the evening his children were celebrating Christmas with his estranged wife- after having trying to hang himself shortly before he succeeded at it.For myself, I think mandatory hospitalization for the time beings until the end of the divorce procedure or ECT should have been proposed to the man after he first tried to hang himself around Christmas which is often a very difficult time for those without a family in good shape.
2) Every society has to draw a line between individual freedom and safety of the population at large (or the children’s safety when parental authority is concerned).
Sadly, in France the former president, Nicolas Sarkosy, pushed strongly for insuring the safety of the population at large against the rights of the mentally ills each and every time a violent crime by a mentally ill person was in the news and many people do not believe in France that the justice system is independent enough from the government…
( I must write on their behalf that the French psychiatrists – as paternalistic as they can be from an Italian point of view, so to speak- are on the whole fighting against that move but they lost with the public opinion.)
It might be different in the USA because you have better journalists and better organized activists but even in a free country of your reality or of your dreams, the line has to be drawn somewhere.
As I have already written to Corinna, I am sure that –law and judges permitting it – many psychiatrists in many countries will be more than happy to leave yourself or Corinna West the responsibility to look after in a caring and healing of any very delusional person who told his psychiatrist how urgent it is for his step father to be dead…
Nice to have had a dialogue with you.
I wish you a nice holiday seasons and a happy new year 2013 Duane.
Ivana
Duane,
///In the case of psychiatric treatment, it seems quite obvious that the field cannot point to *life-saving* treatment, considering the drugs cause more harm than good, increase suicide rates, and injure the brain, body, mind.///
I feel that,on the general population level, psychiatric drugs might do more harm than good but I really don’t know because some people want pills and a quick -fix and may be would use more street drugs to get relief or put themselves into dangerous gourou hands- you do not seem to be one to me but those people do exist.
Actually, what I have been doing since 1989 has been to try and help on a pro bono basis some people escaping escapable psychiatric drugs and psychiatric labels using a gynacologist hormonal prescription sometimes, psychotherapy, support and education about diet and about sleep among other things , homeopathy, exercise you name it.
I found, in particular, ludicrous that the DSM5 will consider acute grief not contradictory with a diagnostic of major depression (and even more that they would suppress Asperger’s syndrome from the American classification).
Also, cheap estrogen (plus progesterone for the women still having their uterus) hormonal therapy should be considered so dangerous when many women -and the more so when they are autistic- get a bipolar diagnosis and more dangerous treatment like neuroleptics.
Still, I always told some people to go and see a colleague psychiatrist prescribing allopathic drugs because my experience is that some people benefit greatly from psychiatric drugs.
I also believe that some premature deaths by suicide can be prevented by ECT as I already wrote on Pr Healy’s blog.
Ignoring that a very severely depressed mother or father can kill herself and her children (“altruistic suicide” is this called in French) is just unpreofessional for somebody working in health care and I am sure you know that.
NB: I am not saying that antidepressant or ECT are the solution her: hormonal treatment or social housing or legal support against an abusing spouse can be the solution.
As I already mentioned on Corinna ‘s blog that a French psychiatrist has been put to trial in Marseilles for not having prescribed neuroleptics in a depot form and not having kept in the hospital a man with a history of violence and of stopping his medication who stopped one more time his neuroleptic treatment and killed his mother’s partner. And that colleague had non only tried to hospitalize the man when he came as an outpatient to consult her but she had taken the difficult ethical step to call the mother telling her son was dangerous to her partner and the police as well in order to have the client safe at a hospital.
As disgusted as I was (and still am) with the paternalism of French psychiatrists in general when I took on pro bono work for people not in need of a psychiatric label and treatment in 1989 and as disgusted I was (and still am) in 1986 with the psychiatrist academics ‘s manner to conduct ” silly monoaminerhgic simplistic or dishonest on bad pharma payroll biological psychiatry researches” -with the only exception of epidemiologists-
I find just not acceptable to pretend that nobody can ever be helped by psychiatric drugs and forced hospitalization and even ECT in desperate cases and that anybody can be helped by peer support or professionals like yourself.
I find recovery a nice aim but a dead person cannot recover. Can she?
To provide availability for peer support and professionnal like yourself is a good and fine thing but you are not going to make it mandatory and send the police to people’s homes because they do not want to use your services or Corinna’s. Or are you?
(Some non-psychiatrists healers can be as paternalistic as your average French psychiatrist -not that you seem to be one to me.)
Hi Duane,
I am the first to be sorry about it but crossing the blood brain barrier is not at all the priviledge of psychiatric drugs.
Often enough, a good psychiatrist will point out to a colleague in other fields of medicine that their drug treatment is giving a client ill mental health that is not the sign of a mental illness- like for examples a client becoming impotent and sad with a treatment aiming at reducing his blood pressure; a client becoming slightly agressive and hyperactive might have received too high a dosage in a needed hormonal therapy and risk a diagnosis of bipolar etc…
Obviously treatment for parkinson’s syndromes and seizures cross the blood brain barrier and can give ill health- GSK has been condamned recently by a French appeal court for having not tell the public about the risk of addctive conduct from Park’s treatment with Roquip (ropinirol HCL)-a man had lost his savings and honesty by suffering a gambling addiction and then had suffer from an additional sexual addiction exibiting himself on the internet and elsewhere and being raped:
http://www.lepoint.fr/sante/effets-secondaires-du-requip-la-condamnation-du-laboratoire-gsk-confirmee-28-11-2012-1534717_40.php
It tooks seven years to a coiuragous man to fight that battle almost alone!
I am afraid that psychiatry and psych meds are not so unique.
Plus, the most destructive brain drug is probably alcohol and some people get psychosis from cannabis. This is why – although I prefer exercice and relaxation, some times homeopathy or acupuncture plus therapeutic education of the person and the family about autism- I very much prefer an Asperger’s syndrome adult taking a very low dose of antidepressant than drinking heavily as so many do to treat social anxiety!
Thanks for being open to dialogue.
Ivana
Sandra,
As adult psychiatrist interested in trying to help Asperger’syndrome persons when they ask for it (they suffer often from ill mental health but rarely from mental illness );I like this last example much because it shows how a new non-psychiatric disease can be invented by a committee like those of the DSMs and then be exploited by the drug industry.
You have very good journalists in the USA unlike in France!
PS: Sorry about cluttering uo your blog with too many comments but I am interested in discussing antipsychiatry on MIA because in France the autistic persons (and families) are often the victims of psychoanalysts (psychiatrists and psychologists) but also of money making and /or power seeking people who surf on antipsychiatry with simplistic ideas and false promises.
Some of us had a lively discussion on the supposed superiority of non psychiatry doctors on another blog:
http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/11/five-types-of-mental-health-advocates/
Sorry to repost one of my comments but it is so much to the point of spinning in all fields of medicine:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/anemia-drug-made-billions-but-at-what-cost/2012/07/19/gJQAX5yqwW_story_2.html
///The first two drugs of the trio, Epogen and Procrit, were approved by the agency in June 1989 for patients with kidney disease. Amgen made both; Procrit was licensed by Johnson & Johnson. Amgen’s Aranesp would be approved in 2001.
For a narrow portion of those patients — dialysis patients with anemia so severe they needed occasional blood transfusions — the drugs, if used in limited amounts, did offer a critical benefit, one that doctors say amounted to a revolution in treatment. Patients with severe anemia said it could restore their vitality. The new drugs allowed them to avoid the risks of transfusions, which can carry diseases and raise future complications for transplant patients.
The trouble would arise as the drugmakers won FDA approval for vastly expanded uses, pushing it in larger doses, for milder anemia and for patients with a wider array of illnesses. Very quickly, the market included nearly all dialysis patients, not just the roughly 16 percent who required blood transfusions. The size of average doses would more than triple. And over the next five years, the FDA would approve it to treat anemia in patients with cancer and AIDS, as well as those getting hip and knee surgery.
The key to their marketing was the claim that the drugs at higher doses could make patients feel better. By 1994, the drug’s label, approved by the FDA, advertised a range of benefits: “statistically significant improvements for . . . health, sex life, well-being, psychological effect, life satisfaction, and happiness.”
Those claims, withdrawn 13 years later because they did not meet new FDA standards for proof, would be the basis of television and print advertising campaigns, pitched to people with potentially fatal illnesses.
The drugs, according to one, offered “Strength for Life.”///
Ring a bell, anyone on eMIA ?
To me it sounds like SSRI antidepressants’s criminal marketing.
Dear Richard,
What do you think about”How A Bone Disease Grew To Fit The Prescription”?
(…) Osteopenia is a condition that only recently started to be thought of as a problem that required treatment. Until the early 1990s, only a handful of people had even heard the word. And to understand how osteopenia was transformed from a rarely heard word into a problem that millions of women swallow pills to treat, you need to go back to the beginning; (…)
For a long time doctors and researchers were only able to diagnose osteoporosis after a woman experienced a bone fracture. But by the early ’90s technology had evolved, and bone scanners made it possible to determine whether the bones were weak before any fractures occurred.
The question before the experts in Rome then was this: Since after the age of 30 all bones lose density, how much bone loss was normal? And, how much put women at risk and therefore should be considered a disease?
(…)”Ultimately it was just a matter of, ‘Well … it has to be drawn somewhere,’ ” Tosteson says. “And as I recall, it was very hot in the meeting room, and people were in shirt sleeves and, you know, it was time to kind of move on, if you will. And, I can’t quite frankly remember who it was who stood up and drew the picture and said, ‘Well, let’s just do this.’ ”
So there in the hotel room someone literally stood up, drew a line through a graph depicting diminishing bone density and decreed: Every woman on one side of this line has a disease.
Then a new question arose: How do you categorize the women who are just on the other side of that line?
To address this issue, Tosteson says, the experts — more or less off the cuff — decided to use the term osteopenia. Tosteson says they created the category mostly because they thought it might be useful for public health researchers who like clear categories for their studies. They never imagined, she says, that people would come to think of osteopenia as a disease in itself to be treated. The chairman of the meeting, John Kanis, of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Metabolic Bone Diseases, says the same thing.
Nevertheless, 17 years later Banghauser, of Richmond, Va., a woman whose bone density is just a hair away from that of the average healthy 30-year old, is not only medicated for osteopenia but literally spends her days worried about breaking a bone.
“I used to run marathons, and I would fall and trip on broken sidewalks,” she told me. “And you know initially before I had this diagnosis I didn’t think anything of it. But now every time I fall I get up and think, ‘Oh, good, I haven’t broken anything.’ ”
“I’m much more aware of making sure I lift my feet up and I don’t trip on the sidewalks, but you know, if I didn’t know that I had osteopenia, maybe I wouldn’t be so cautious.”
So how did osteopenia change from a category for public health researchers into a condition that millions of women swallow pills to treat?
The answer to that question starts with a man named Jeremy Allen, who lives in a sprawling home in Pennsylvania (…).
http://www.npr.org/2009/12/21/121609815/how-a-bone-disease-grew-to-fit-the-prescription
To clarify: the lecturer in homeopthy had allopathic treatment against an acute very high blood pressure put into his blood circulation-sorry about my poor English.
Hi Corinna,
With all due respect to your good work and intentions many people outhere struggle to get rid of tobacco or alcohol addictions (many pregnant women who know about the dangers of their addiction for their child in particular) and a treatment has not to be fun but to do more good than harm!
Self-medication with street drugs or alcohol cannot be defended on the ground that they are fun!
Hi again Duane,
Hi Duane,
///These drugs (along with ECT and incarceration) are used by force. Not the case with other health conditions.///
2) What do you make about scandals we had in france about children being underfed and deprived of any vaccination and any medical treatment in some communauties who did not believe in allopathic medicine at all but only in diet and homeopathy- as a qualified Homeopath MD I am sorry about the latter.
To conclude on that argument between us Duane, I will repeat that some of the substitutions for psychiatrists will be just crooks looking for power and/or money and that psychotherapies and unconventional medicine have their dangers too.
And I will tell you two true personal story:
A female of Japanese origins pro bono client of mine aged 88 years old had been recovered at the end of 2008 in an academic hospital at my asking for medical investigations. She fell and broke her hip but had such nice bones for her age that the fracture was not the easy to diagnose elderly person’s type (when one foot is fixed at a strange angle at the end of an inferior member suddenly much shorter than the other one): it took me 4 days as a psychiatrist to make the geriatricians understand that my client had broken her hip! And of course, she was put on a lot of medication to make her quiet…
My second story is that one afternoon some years ago I was at a Parisian medical school taking in knowledge by a well known homeopath MD lecturing there. Suddenly, the man went red in the face and had to stop his lecture in front of MDs and medstudents (In france you have to have an MD to practise homeopathy -on the open that is.)The lecturer asked for some homeopathy remedy and I ask if somebody had there something to measqure his blood pressure. one had it and the blood pressure was so high that I called the cardiology dep and had him admitted for a blood perfusion of allopathic medicine he agrees to. For some reasons, he never thanked me for it and sort of never came close to me at homeopaths meeting where according to him homeopathy can solve every health problems. When I had troubles with the medical board made to me by a psychoanalyst who took advantage of my pro bono onlmy practice, I asked the man to testify that I was a good and energetic doctor for him in an emerbgency and i havce been waiting for years his testimony.
Also, on that second kind of example, I heard with my own ears a British homeopath – non MD to be honest but having MDs following his teaching) telling at a meeting in Spa (Belgium) that if we gave him money he would find in 4 years the homeopathic remedy for AIDS in West Africa. Some MDS were very taken by him.I had heard the man tell a parisian audience that he could sell sand to an arab and snow to an eskimoo…
HGi Duane,
///These drugs (along with ECT and incarceration) are used by force. Not the case with other health conditions.///
1) Are you so sure about that? You may be right in the USA.
Is it legal in the USA to leave a child to die after a car accident making necessary for survival to put foreign red bloodcells in his body because the parents or a good citizen like yourself oppose blood transfusion on religious or safety reasons?
NB: When I was a resident in neurosurgery I remember vividly that I had sometimes to fight with some nurses not to transfuse a very pale person with a very low hematocrite telling them that the client would not be keen on a soccer match soon and will have time to make new red blood cells.
We had dishonest people in France working in blood centers in the past transfusing AIDS virusloaded blood to person having already AIDS virus in their system. It made a big scandal in France with even ministers put to trial. (at that time they thought that it didn’t matter to add viral charge to those already infected and they were wrong)
NB: I believe blood transfusions should be prescribed with the utmost caution and I would welcome any safer replacment.
Until then, I do not think that the scandal we had in France on blood banks and the risks involved with any transfusion should make people die of hemorragia after a car accident.
PS: I knew personaly an honorable Canadian surgeon (not a neursurgeon) who told me that he made contracts with Jehovah Testimony Church belonging clients not to transfuse them during or after an operation taking the risk of letting them die and taking the risks of operating as quickly as possible.
I would not have liked to take on such clients myself if I had ever qualified as a surgeon but I can understand those people.
What I cannot understand is people deciding for others that every psych med is negative in health/ risks benefits for everybody.
What I wouldn’t understand would be a ban on hetero blood transfusion for everybody everywhere- until medical advances making those heteroblood transfusion obsolete that is.
Alice,
In France medical school is almost tution free ( I would say a few hundred dollars a year)and gives right to social benefits.(There is a very selective exam to enter the second year of medical school.)
No hudge students loans to repay for MD in France.
Still, prescribing too many drugs from antibiotics to psychiatric drugs is a main issue for our health system.
The main difference with the USA might be that many MDs are chosing nowadays not to practice medicine
Also in France, women are making nowadays around 70% of the medical schools students’ force so to speak. It is becoming like nursing schools.
Hi Maria,
I am glad that you are all for dialogue and understanding because I have things to get right with you.
1) Corinna wrote to me it was a church. I did not care if it was a church or not. I just find illogical to be against psychiatrists and not against all doctors!
2) I agree that “psych med” can cause great harm.
3)I happen to think that some “psychotherapists” and healers also do great harm to their clients (and family) wellbeing and money savings.
4) We can only hope for the distant future that knowing the causation of every illness doctors will also be able to prescribe an etiologic “non psych med” treatment.
Sadly,for now medicine- not only psychiatry- more often than not has to use, symptomatic treatments.
5)Life would be so simpler if only psychiatrists and other doctors prescribing “psych meds” were evils or only greedy for power or money…
For example: In the catholic church priests and nuns have been known to abuse children in their full time care and not only sexually.
To my view, part of the problem are shallow thinking and greedy for fame or money journalists but also the very shallow and egocentric thinking of researchers believing that science doing should be fun and quickly done like the anonymous neuroskeptic who claim -with vraisemblance to be a young male British anonymous depression sufferer helped by a two antidepressant regiment he does not plan to stop for the years to come- psychologist FRMI researcher:
26 November 2012 18:29
Blogger Neuroskeptic said…
///DS: Good point. My view is, bad science is bad whether it’s from journalists or scientists. I tend to focus on science, though, just because it’s more interesting. Bad media neuroscience is rarely wrong in a new or fun way.///
26 November 2012 19:33
The trouble is -to my mind and I might be wrong- (I tried to comment to him on his blog but that comment was censured and deleted after a little enough time):
In that comment, neuroskeptic doesn’t seem to graps the difference between intersting and fun when real scientists and thinkers are working very hard on very difficult and complicated problems they hope to contribute a little to solve for as long as it takes to produce good sound results.
Those real scientists and thinkers have a very hard time explaining to the lay people the fun of it!
Idem for getting research grant and academic positions.
Hi Will,
Thanks for that interview.
FunctionalRMI studies and the likes are – in the psychology and psychiatric front -hoping to replace the failed and rather simplistic monoaminergic theory of mental illnesses and of human behaviors from chocolate craving to crimes- you name it.
As I already comment on neuroskeptic ‘s blog :
http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.fr/2012/11/am-i-attacking-neuroscience.html
Ivana Fulli MD said…
Nitpicker,
To oppose and ridicule “bastardization by glib” producing “neuresthetics” and “neurolaw” does not require good scientist qualities- in my opinion.
-except when you have got a RMI (without the f ) showing a frontal brain tumor and the likes for neurolaw-
Common sense and honesty will do.
In neuroscientists but also in lawyers, judges, artcritics… and journalists
24 November 2012 17:57
I will listen carefuly and buy the books of your host-
Thanks Will for letting me know about that thinker.
NB: RMI use offer static pictures of brains (and other part of a human or animal body) allowing doctors to diagnose a frontal lobe brain tumor or a subacute temporal hematoma etc…who might express themselves -for a time- only with psychiatric clinical symptoms when functionnal RMI (fRMI) show “a brain in action”-unfortunatly it has been proved to produce a brain in action in a dead salmon client and many people use public money to run very poorly conceived but sexy and quickly done and quickly published studies.
By the way, and this really will be my last comment on this post of yours, the French psychiatrist was not only accused by an expert psychiatrist of not having prescribe depot injection of neuroleptics but she was also accused of letting her client out of the psychiatric ward although she tried to re-hospitalize her client shortly before the crime he committed and had let the police know that she wanted, for public safety reasons, her client to be re-hospitalized immediately but her client had escaped from her office and the client’s mother know that her son was dangerous.
I , sincerely,would not be opposed to the calling of a peer support group in that kind of cases in order to either convince the client to be hospitalized or even to take care of him and garantee that he will not kill his mother’s partner as he announced.
I admire all people in,volving themselves with helping psychotic persons in that time of ours where psychiatry suffer both from the American psychiatrists association ‘s DSM diagnostic mess with their committee electing diseaeses for academics ‘s own personal and criminal bad pharma marketing- not only in psychiatry:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/anemia-drug-made-billions-but-at-what-cost/2012/07/19/gJQAX5yqwW_story_2.html
The first two drugs of the trio, Epogen and Procrit, were approved by the agency in June 1989 for patients with kidney disease. Amgen made both; Procrit was licensed by Johnson & Johnson. Amgen’s Aranesp would be approved in 2001.
For a narrow portion of those patients — dialysis patients with anemia so severe they needed occasional blood transfusions — the drugs, if used in limited amounts, did offer a critical benefit, one that doctors say amounted to a revolution in treatment. Patients with severe anemia said it could restore their vitality. The new drugs allowed them to avoid the risks of transfusions, which can carry diseases and raise future complications for transplant patients.
The trouble would arise as the drugmakers won FDA approval for vastly expanded uses, pushing it in larger doses, for milder anemia and for patients with a wider array of illnesses. Very quickly, the market included nearly all dialysis patients, not just the roughly 16 percent who required blood transfusions. The size of average doses would more than triple. And over the next five years, the FDA would approve it to treat anemia in patients with cancer and AIDS, as well as those getting hip and knee surgery.
The key to their marketing was the claim that the drugs at higher doses could make patients feel better. By 1994, the drug’s label, approved by the FDA, advertised a range of benefits: “statistically significant improvements for . . . health, sex life, well-being, psychological effect, life satisfaction, and happiness.”
Those claims, withdrawn 13 years later because they did not meet new FDA standards for proof, would be the basis of television and print advertising campaigns, pitched to people with potentially fatal illnesses.
The drugs, according to one, offered “Strength for Life.” Reing a bell? To me it sounds like antidepressants’s criminal marketing.
Adult psychiatrist,psychopharmacologist by training with research (in my youth ) and still clinical interest on female hormones and mood disorders; homeopathy training (in France homeopaths must be MD),interest and some training (outside France) in adult autism and in social psychiatry.
Hi Corinna,
The church Maria was quoting is just illogical, to my mind, then: it should not focus against psychiatry for the reasons I explained already.
///As far as first episode psychosis, I would think a peer specialist could do a lot more help and a lot less harm than a doctor///
At the very least, there is more logic in your view!
Anyway, we live in different societies: In France a psychiatrist has been held responsable by a criminal prosecutor and put to trial for not having prescribed neuroleptics in a depot form to a client who repeatidly stopped taking pills who killed his mother’s partner. (The client had been held legally irresponsable and not tried in court for the killing because of his mental state at the momen tof the killing):
///”J’espère que le tribunal aura le courage d’aller au bout de la démarche, en disant qu’un psychiatre défaillant peut être responsable des actes d’un malade mental qu’il avait sous sa garde”, a indiqué Me Chemla///
/// “I hope that the judges will have the courage to keep going with what they started by telling that a psychiatrist who fails can be held responsable of his client’s acts “,said Me Chemla (the lawyer representing the son of the victim.
http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/societe/20121113.OBS9108/marseille-une-psychiatre-jugee-pour-homicide-involontaire.html
The next step,for the French prosecutors, will be to put to trial theirs doctors when any alcohol dependent client kills somebody when driving a car after drinking!
I know, I should not comment on MIA because I just do not understand enough of the concrete situation here.
All the best Corinna to you and your project.
I would be the last person to think that it is helpful to contact many a doctor to support coming off medication but, in my opinion, this sad fact is due mainlu to:
1) bad marketing from Big Pharma
2) the silly persistence of the monoamine theory of psychosis and depression Big pharma marketing used with a lot of success (ending of a vicous circle).
Hi Maria,
Psychiatrists are doctors like dermatologists.Aren’t they?
Would you dare to write that dermatologists must disappear because -to take only one example, the first and for a long time only manifestation of a Hodgink’s lymphoma can be a skin rash looking very much like common eczema?
Would you dare to suppress cardiology because the cardiologists have been abused on the statines front by bad pharma marketing?
My view is that psychiatrists should be good doctors first keeping in touch with the progresses of medicine in general and – like other specialists work with family doctors and ask other specialist for advice.
I also think- personal opinion- that all childpsychiatrists should have qualified as pediatrician first. This case is a rarity in France and many French child psychiatrists-even academics are still accusing the mother ‘s behavior of producing autism and psychosis.
When it comes to give a treatment for a terribly annoying treatement resistant skin rash, it would be ludicrous to think that a dermatologist is less able than any other doctor to treat it and for example tapering off the doses of corticotherapies!
NB: You might want to use alternative therapies and it becomes another story -with naughty people out there on the internet as sure as you find honest practitioners of alternative medicines- but if you do not refuse allopathicic drugs, it is ludicrous to refuse the dermatologists expertise.
If a client refuse psychiatric drugs fine but if he doesn’t -or if the law people make him obliged to take it- the ideal situation is a non paternalistic competent psychopharmacologist psychiatrist trained by honest academics.
Please, Maria, do not idealize internal medicine or general practices. Bad Pharma marketing and clients wanting a quick-fix with drugs do exist in every medical discipline and sometimes an internist can make an honest mistake and send to the psychatrist an internal medicine case- so to speak- when a good psychiatrist will send the client back.
Idem for a cardiologt is the same in psychopharmacology: better to find an honest psychopharmacolgy To refuse it is one thing. Fine with me – I have not prezscribe myself any of those medicine nor ECT (but I send some people to colleagues who do from time to time)- since 1989
I know it is different in the USA and the doctor
Would you dare to suppress cardiology because the cardiologists have been abused on the statines front by bad pharma marketing? will you
May be you can use google translation services or whatever or ask a friend. My English is not good enough and really i have not the time to translate it but I wrote the essential facts: a self-appointed healer is answering on a criminal juridiction for having made up to 20 vulnerable people live in a big house and giving her most of their salaries accepting humiliations and sexual acts by promising them to get rid of some demonic possession.
///To continue to discuss *scientology* is to ignore the *real* problem – psychiatry.///
I can’t see any logic here Duane.
It is like to pretend that to discuss Pr Obama or/and Pr Hollande (from France) whatever military putative action against , say… Syria is to ignore the real problem of poverty in the world or the lack of unsalted affordable water sources in the middle East!
This will be my last answer to you because what you wrote shows that you are clever and educated enough but not in a disposition of mind to discuss your beliefs.
I really do not have time to spend in an argument where in front of me somebody do not want to think upon what I argue.
And by the way, Dr Szacz was definitly more on Maria ‘s side than in yours-to my mind.
I am sure that with the people in your care you are more open-minded.
Best regards.
///WARNING: No one should stop taking any psychiatric drug without the advice and assistance of a competent, non-psychiatric, medical doctor!///
On that point, I strongly disagree since a psychiatrist cannot pretend to be a psychiatrist if he doesn’t know how to taper off drugs or stop them to prevent lithium intoxication or in case of neuroleptic malignant syndrome or whatever emergency needing the side-effects of going cold turkey!
In my view, many non psychiatrists will not know how dangerous it is to go cold turkey with SSRI antidepressant. I suppose they will know more about benzodiazepines.
Altostrata will write that psychiatrists do not know how to taper off drugs but not that non-psychiatry doctors are better at it.
My view is:
WARNING: No one should stop taking any psychiatric drug without the advice and assistance of a psychiatrist or a competent in psychopharmacology , non-psychiatric, medical doctor.
As I already answered to your question above in that file I would not trust a French psychiatrist -I would not know to be really competent in internal medicine – in taking care of a first psychotic episode of mine if I were to suffer from one at my middle-age for the first time in my life.
I can add that I would not want a French psychoanalyst doctor to take care of any severe suffering of mine but, on the other hand, I trust only gynecologists more for female hormonal treatments of mental illnesses symptoms (idem with endocrinologists for thyroid hormone level induced mental illnesses )and I trust best psychopharmacologist psychiatrists with psychiatry drugs- Pr David Healy type – for sure.
Not want psychiatry drugs like some religious people do not want blood transfusion is one thing, but if you accept it take it from the most competent one.
My hope is that psychiatrists will register to the medical boards with sub-specialty like, why not tapering off drugs for difficult cases.
“Bad Pharma” as Dr Ben Goldacre call them and academics on their payroll , at least in France, do more harm to non psychiatrist doctors’s practices with their marketing of drugs and the silly monoaminergic theory of mental illnesses than to psychiatrists.
Sorry about my broken English but I really have no time to correct it.
Maria,
Thanks for your comment and work.
To answer your question is easy: if I were myself to suffer a psychotic episode or even a severe depressive state, I would want a good doctor first and not a team of healers who could let me die of hypoglycemia or from a neurosurgical emergency or whatever.
To be honest, being based in France where so many psychiatrists are psychoanalysts not interested in medicine , I would not trust a psychiatrist I would not know for sure to be good in general medicine.
NB: I am middle-aged, do not consume streetdrugs, and never was psychotic so the chances for a medical illness causation would be very high but even for a younger person I would find non medical healer dangerous and would opt for a general hospital emergency room not call healers on the telephone but we are discussing an acute psychotic episode.
Duane,
In case you read French, here one current criminal trial of a criminal sectarian woman leader , an English teacher by profession claiming that she was a healer and a God’s spouse who put to slavery of sort, people who, having had a bad time in life, trusted her for relief giving her 90% of their salary to be humilated etc…Yo can bet that she didn’t like psychiatry at all:
http://www.lepoint.fr/societe/l-epouse-de-dieu-devant-le-tribunal-des-hommes-27-11-2012-1534135_23.php
This is the sad French reality and in the USA, it might be enough to know that one healer is an antipsychiatrists to be safe from harm.
Obviously for the USA readers, I wrote Sacks for Szasz. Sorry about that!
NB: I like better, by far, what Dr Szasz wrote than what Dr Sacks wrote about autism but the scientologists are definitely using Dr Szasz for their propaganda.
Hi Corinna,
Thanks for answering me.
If you were not taking holidays and good care of yourself and yourrelationship you would not be a good social mental health entrepreneur!
To my mind an antipsychiatrists claims that the world would be better without never ever any drug prescription for mental symptoms and without not a single psychiatrist being in practice-except themselves when they were trained as psychiatrist that is-
Nothing less and nothing more.
The scientologists are antipsychiatrists, many activistys on MIA are and Dr Laing was one.
Dr Szasz and Dr Breggin obviously are not.
( To my mind, Dr Szasz is antifreudian above anything to my mind and Dr Breggin is for the kind of psychotherapy he invented as the only cure but both were/are treating clients for money in their practice if I have been correctly informed.)
I really think “social” is worth adding to mental health entrepreneur.
It makes it less ambigous.
Added bonus, to my mind, people in need of your services will find it more easily through an internet search.
Duane,
The ostrich posture is rarely smart and beneficial long term.
This written, I agree that in the USA, you might very weel have different scientologists from the ones who had been put to criminal trials in France for abusing people suffering mental stresses including separating them from their money and friends and families-you have different rules here in the USA.
I spend an interesting late afternoon in Verona in 2010 at a scientologist exhibition because a nice person gave me a leaflet for it: in a big square hall you had at least 8 large very screens who showed repeatdly the same moment of a Dr Sacks’s interview.
To deny that the scientologists are-at least in Europe – pretending that Dr Sacks is one of them is just ostrich posture to my mind-and a very dangerous one at that!
Corina,
I understand uou might be busy doing good things -as Pr David Healy who was attacked recently for not answering questions on “his MIA blog which is just a reposting of a foreign blog – and not able to answer comment but I would really like you to answer my yesterday question:
“Where do you place the scientologists and lesser known self-appointed masters of happiness who thrive on their professed hate of mental labeling and psychotropic drugs?”
I would dare to ask it twice because an hagiographic and very long post on two famous antipsychiatrists on another MIA blog fails to acknoledge that Dr S had and is wildly use by the scientologist as their best weapon to attract mental sufferers to their organizatio. ( NB: it was not a place where a psychiatrist could have post comment leading to any discussion worth having in my opinion).
On the same line -sort of -I would strongly advise your readers to look at the link offered by MIA to another post of “Boring old man”
http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/11/squishy/#comment-17816
Worth meditating for antispsychiatry activists, in my psychiatrist biased opinion. Here a short extract, a few sentences:
///By the time the DSM-III came along, (…) the paradigm of psychological causation was the one being rejected. To me at the time, it was the baby in the bathwater of all the complaints about the power, the dogmatism, the speculation, and the fiscal drain of psychoanalysis. I agreed with many of those complaints myself, but what about the baby? ///
And I would, in a sincerely kindly meant suggestion that, when you speak publicly outside of MIA and the likes minded, you should find an extra word for “Mental Health Entrepreneurs” in order to not find yourself in the same place as bas Pharma, private psychiatric facilities and the likes.
All the best to you and your entreprise!
Although he is a psychiatrist -one tapering off drug treatment whenever he can according to a former post though – that man is worth reading for any MIA readers – the bright Corina West , the MIA blogger and ” Antipsychiatry mental Health Entrepreneur” ( I added ” antipsychiatry” to her definition of her newest project since to my mind Bad pharma is also describing itself as mental health Entrepreneur), blogging on MIA has been enlighted by him on what the “labeling mind is” according to her last post.
Worth meditating for antispsychiatry activists, in my psychiatrist biased opinion:
///By the time the DSM-III came along, (…) the paradigm of psychological causation was the one being rejected. To me at the time, it was the baby in the bathwater of all the complaints about the power, the dogmatism, the speculation, and the fiscal drain of psychoanalysis. I agreed with many of those complaints myself, but what about the baby? ///
I find, in my own clinical experience, prescribing homeopathy remedies useful when tapering off SSRI antidepressants:
you prescribe them before starting the tapering off and you take care of having an independant psychiatrist doing the allopathic drug prescription to avoid the homeopathy prescriber being too optimistic-
and beware that some homeopaths like some psychotherapists are dangerous and push for stopping at once the antidepressants or whatever treatment.
Once, I even prescribed homeopathy to a women for menopausal troubles for which hormones therapy was not possible (she had had bilateral ovariectomie as part of breast cancer treatment). She was very happy with her antidepressant treatment although she had taken a lot of weight ( I had send her to a colleague to get that treatment a year before for a “post breast cancer treatment severe depression”) but her italian psychiatrist decided on his own to taper off her antidepressant and when I saw her a year later she was drug free and slim again!
Thanks to you and Maria for recognizing that sometimes doctors can help!
Where do you place the scientologists and lesser known self-appointed masters of happiness who thrive on their professed hate of mental labeling and psychotropic drugs?
Surely you know they do exist and target the sufferers your efforts want to help.
Anyway, thanks for your writing. I am really thankful and especially for your letting me know about Bonnie Castro:
///I am the kind of advocate in the room with the client while they talk to their psychiatrist about being over medicated and exploring alternatives to their sleep problems. Rather its tea, hot shower before bed or Ambien, but it’s always the person’s choice not mine or their doctor’s.///
She is my kind of person.
Alto,
“only one or two in the world even attempt to treat it.”
I cannot tell for the USA but for the world at large, i do not think that I have only another fellow psychiatrist trying to help people tapering off from benzos and SSRI!
I did my MD thesis on two personal cases of pseudoneurosurgicaldiseases induced by benzodiazepine I received being oncall as a neurosurgery registrar for only
months at la Salpétrière Hospital in Paris in the early 80s and at that time- in the early 80s as a psychiatry registrar, I used to prescribe a switch to a “long acting” BZ decresing dosage and then Chloral to help in-patients to get rid of benzodiazépines as a sleep prescription and I used a long acting BZ at decreasing posologies plus low doses of imipraminic antidepressants to get rid of benzodiazepines anxiety treatments…
In 2008, I even tried to open an homeopathy and psychotherapy only psychiatrist ‘s private practice in Paris telling the medical Gestapo thant my intention was to work for people not really in need of allopathic drugs to overcome life difficulties. It was not to be for several reasons- one being that the president of the Paris medical board thought that homeopathy was dangerous and my having previously in 2001 having been declared incompetent and dangerous by a very very old psychoanalyst because I had ask a psychiatrist examination of a son of his who sexually assaulted a girl at a high school depriving her of her beautiful long hair because she refused his sexual advances.
Please, Alto, I appreciate youy a lot and have respect for your good work but cannot let it pass when you show – in good faith- an ignorance of the fact that more than 1 or 2 doctors in the entire world are helping tapering off -when the client agree that is…
Thanks again, Will and Alto, for all your good work.
Hi Will,
I am not a paternalistic psychiatrist at all – -at least for a psychiatrist based in France.
This decision of mine -not being a paternalistic psychiatrist- honestly, leave me unable to imagine how one can use the doctors(or whomever in the USA) ‘s prescription priviledge to refuse a prescription to an informed individual.
(Actually, in my own special case, I would write an introductory letter to a colleague or a GP.)
This after one has tried to respect your idea about information and education of the client as when you wrote- in answer to my begging you to maintain a clear and simple first ligne of information using tapering off as a synonym for getting free of drugs:
//Especially with complicated topics like coming off medications, the role of doctors is to provide useful, complete, and honest information to empower patients. Oversimplifying can imply patients are incapable of thinking for themselves.//
If they are capable of thinbking by themselves about “going cold turkey” they should be allowed to judge by themselves about taking Pharma drugs at a time were we-doctors- are still so ignorant. Shouldn’t they?
All the best to you Will and thanks for your comprehensive opus much needed and also the modification of your title.
I was answering to Chris Muirhead with respect for her work but also the belief that not everybody’s son is the same as her sons.
Dr Solange Beaumont is an activist in a French association of mental symptoms ‘sufferers and their families who want more respect, less paternalism and less stigma.
She has every right to be vocal and public about her family experience and I can’t see why Chris Muirhead could use her name and not Solange Beaumont.
( In addition to Beaumont being a very common French surname and many female doctors using their maiden name and having sons using their father’s surname).
“First do not harm” and refusal of paternalism applies also to those who think they benefit from drugs
To put the record straight,I personaly have not prescribed neuroleptics, antidepressants or electrochocs since 1989 but I am happy that some people are offered the choice of different psychiatrists in place of me or in addition to me. Plus,I could afford my “clean hands” with respect to those heavy prescriptions only because my husband paid the rent and I stopped working in hospitals and did pro bono work for restricted populations.
We are in a diagnostic mess and it would be easier if nobody felt helped by neuroleptics or antidepressant pills.
http://davidhealy.org/
Thanks for your many informative posts and comments.
For myself, I would lose a lot by not reading the many comments on the MIA reposting of Pr DH s’blog since -try as I might- I couldn’t -for the life of me- find the time to open and read individualy the many “MIA blogs” I read regularly enough.
Thanks for your blog and experience – but, sorry about that, I know a French psychiatrist, Dr Solange Beaumont, who, in a Paris meeting on October 2012 had not enough bitter words for the fellow French psychiatrists who accused her of making up any psychosis diagnostic in her son (who was hallucinating and delusional and feeling persecuted) and accused her of stressing him out of his wits -many a French psychiatrist still hold the mother ‘s behavior responsable from psychosis and even autism on Freudian grounds-
Her son ended up sleeping – for real- under Paris’s bridges and in danger for his life. Now the young man takes neuroleptics and works in a bank thinking about finding himself a wife. She had to plead to many colleagues before one consented to admit the young man in a psychiatric ward.
If her son wouldn’t refused it -because he doesn’t want to see psychiatrtists and suffer expertises for the court procedures- she would push for legal action because she thinks psychiatrists ‘ denial of her son hallucinations and delusions and refusal to give him neuroleptics almost killed her son.
Solange worries about long term effects of neuroleptics and, of course, would welcome safer drugs but her son is not on a high dosage regimen and it is -for now- the minimum dosage he can get without getting hallucinations and delusions that his fellowworkers are dangerous to him. The man wants to work and not be a tramp and it is his choice of life.
Pr Healy, you should know better thant to trust what a bad Pharma ‘s PR told you and your speeches have impact worldwide on psychiatrists and GPs at least!
I will put that remarks of yours on your Irish love for any good sounding narrative, if you allow me that lack of respect from an Italian born -sarcastic by nature then..
More seriously, although I was not trained as an epidemiologist researcher and do not possess their mandatory good qualities, I am a strong believer in epidemiological researches being the best instrument for progresses in mental health due to clinical trials limitations -even fair and honest ones to my mind- due to no credible “labeling”, no lab test so far, but also liability for physicians conducting it … you name it.
I also, strongly believe in associationg clients to researches as a way to progress.
I, then, see RxISK.org as having the greates epidemiological research potential and being a client and researchers joint venture.
Duane,
The surest way to get many people convinced that they needed the drugs in the first place is to let them see a friend suffering from the most horrendous withdrawal symptoms going “cold turkey” often cause.
France is a very different country -and this will be my last comment since I do not feel at ease discussing a situation I do not know engough about in practice but in France and in England many people want their pills and a quick fix -not talking therapy,no exercise, and the psychiatrists sometimes have to accept not to be too paternalistic about it.
To my mind, it is a heuristic error to think that it is so different here from medicine or surgery in general: many people want a back surgery even when their GP is agaisnt it -and rightly so- in many casesetc… A French medical student, I know well and trust to be a good person – was hurt recently by the sobering experience she recently had in her cardiology shift: she listened to clients refusing any lifestyle changes the cardiologits proposed and wanting instead pills for moderate high blood pressure levels when losing weight might have been a safer option, etc…and other insisting to get pills they just did not need according to the consultant in charge.
Sorry, wrong blog!
Will,
I printed your last opus on paper in addition to saving it on my computer-a rarity for me since I have not much storage space.
If you will allow me a disgression:
“Exercise more and eat less ” equal obesity fighting message to teenagers and parents of obese children.
This doesn’t mean that “Exercise more and eat less.” is not the behavior in many an anorexia nervosa sufferer teenager.
“Exercise more and eat less” should still be the prevalent message to send around because anorectic persons will not need this message to stop eating enough and exercise a lot.
I believe , to go back to the subject of your post , that it depends on who you want to educate. For the many people ingesting SSRIs, using tapering off as a synonym for getting rid of medication is just safer on health ground. It is another matter when you provide education for health workers.
Thanks for your work. All the best to you.
Reply
Will,
I printed your last opus on paper in addition to saving it on my computer-a rarity for me since I have not much storage space.
If you will allow me a disgression:
“Exercise more and eat less ” equal obesity fighting message to teenagers and parents of obese children.
This doesn’t mean that “Exercise more and eat less.” is not the behavior in many an anorexia nervosa sufferer teenager.
“Exercise more and eat less” should still be the prevalent message to send around because anorectic persons will not need this message to stop eating enough and exercise a lot.
I believe , to go back to the subject of your post , that it depends on who you want to educate. For the many people ingesting SSRIs, using tapering off as a synonym for getting rid of medication is just safer on health ground. It is another matter when you provide education for health workers.
Thanks for your work. All the best to you.
Dear Richard,
Your writing and position are very clear and your demand of course raisonable understandable but it is for the masters of MIA to decide on that demand, evaluating their options by also taking into account other points of view and consideration.
For example, assuming Pr Healy is only one person really engaged in everything he does himself – the man has a lot on his plate and might not possibly answer questions on MIA in addition to his other duties and blogs. He might also have a personal life and family duties to attend to.
To my mind, the question would be: Is not the best sometimes the ennemy of the fair and is-it not better to offer an audience in MIA to a psychiatrist who is fighting a hard fight with the scope of making the side-effects of psychiatric drugs better known wildly?
Anyway, I am not to have a voice in that %IA internal debate. I just wanted you to know that Robert whitaker is a co-founder with Pr Healy and other of http:
//wp.rxisk.org/about/;
I never had the pleasure to see and heard Robert Whitaker but, like you, I admire him a lot. I had the passing thought of going to the South Padre Island meeting nexwt December but Texas is a far and expensive place to visit from Paris.
Best regards and many thanks for answering me in a comprehensive and pleasant way.
All the best to you.
Dear Richard,
In case you do not know it already, Pr healy and Mr Robert Whitaker are working hand in hands in their common web enterprise looking at letting sufferers of side-effects to report them for the world at large -and somer academic or ufficial bodies- to read and learn about it.
On the 9/27/2012, I Dr ivana Fulli, adult psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist by training in my past, asked publicly a polite question about that Pr healy and Mr Whitaker web enterprise -at a meeting on “Medical Error”- to Pr Dominique Maraninchi, director of an official French body(ANSM) in charge of reinforcing the protecting of the persons receiving care in France from doctors against any harm from drugs or indeed any medical or surgical material (like prothesis for example).
I asked Pr Maraninchi -a respectable former oncologist academic- if it would not mzake sense for him to have somebody in his team reading that blog and he answered me that he will stay away from commercial enterprises in a very gentle, matter of factly manner.
of course, I cannot exclude with a 100 % per cent certitude that those two are not just hoping to make a lot of money through selling their books and later selling their “risk website data” to the drug industry, university labs and the likes.
But I will give them both a chance because I think what they do is damned needed.
NB: I do not know Pr Healy, the actual person, and I do not even know a single person who received his care as a psychiatrist.
What i know is that before his good work I had GPs daring to tell me that no SSRI could made a young client of us impotent and that as a psychiatrist, even a pro bono one, I should know better.
DBy the way, do you happen to think that Pr Maraninchi was right about Robert Whitaker?