I was thrilled to see no mention of psych drugs, and I thought it was an amazing story, and timely for me, as I’ve just started to think about opening a coffee shop. I’ve been daydreaming about the name and the theme for the past three days. Now I’ll have to think about having toast on the menu.
I sent this to both reporters:
“Those of us in the very large and fast-growing community of survivors of psychiatry and psychiatric psychotropic drugs are utterly baffled by an article such as the above-referenced that makes no mention of the well-known link between psychiatric treatment and violence, including suicide and murder-suicide. Most school shooters were taking or had been withdrawn from a psychiatric drug of some type, and the State of Connecticut is refusing to release Newtown shooter Adam Lanza’s toxicology reports (i.e., what psychiatric drugs he had been taking before the shooting).
Personally I have known for 14 years that the SSRI class of antidepressant drugs can and do cause some people to become suicidal and/or violent towards others. Untold numbers of people have died in this manner. This is a fact.
Such adverse reactions, when they occur, typically occur either within the first couple of weeks on the drug, or upon lowering or stopping the dose (i.e., upon or during withdrawal).
As horrific as this sounds, however, this is only one small part of the truth about the full horror of our so-called “mental health” system. “Treatment” means being labeled as defective and drugged. Psychiatry has and is creating millions of chronic, life-long, drug-dependent mental patients.
Yes, that’s right – psychiatry is CREATING mental illness, not curing it.
I can point you to dozens of sources but I will provide here a list of just a few experts, books, and links:
Dr. David Healy
World-reknowned psychopharmacologist and author of several books (Let Them Eat Prozac, The Antidepressant Era, Pharmageddon)
Robert Whitaker
Investigative journalist, winner of the George Polk Award for medical writing and a National Association of Science Writers Award, also finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Whitaker’s “Anatomy of an Epidemic” chronicles the ways in which psychiatry causes rather than cures mental illness. But for the short version of Whitaker’s book, this interview is an excellent summary of the utterly staggering facts and statistics that he has assembled:
Mad in America
Website by and for the growing numbers of people harmed by psychiatry. Of interest might be the fact that the White House refuses to act on a petition seeking an investigation into psychiatric drugs and violence (although the information is already out there – the President simply needs to request his aids to go get it and show it to him!)
Please join the right side of this overwhelmingly important issue, and please use your writing talents to spread the message contained in Robert Whitaker’s book: Psychiatric treatment and the so-called “mental health” system are both causes — not cures — of gun violence (and suicide, and many, many other horrors).
Thank you for your attention.
Hey folks! It’s easy to email the reporters of that NY Times story. Their names in the byline are hyperlinks (Jackie Calmes and Robert Pear). Just click and compose email. Let’s all write to them. I just did. And please share on facebook.
I love the idea of wearing white coats and giving out info outside a pharmacy. That’s great. And it would be fun.
We need to “take back” the definitions of so many words and terms. “Help” of course is one of them, as is “works” – as in “but the drug works for millions of people!” But also the term “forced treatment.”
I was not subjected to forced treatment in exactly the same sense as others were, but I still consider myself to have been forced to take an SSRI against my will. I took it only out of desperation that was caused by years of ineffective — and thus catastrophically harmful — “talk therapy.”
I wish people would understand that when a therapy or a treatment is ineffective, that makes it harmful, not simply neutral in its effects.
There are several reasons for this, not the least of which is the financial cost of every treatment. People usually pay at least some portion of the cost of the “help” and thus are out some amount of their hard-earned money regardless of whether the help is actually helpful. Has anyone ever seen a psychiatrist offer a money-back guarantee? No, I haven’t, either.
In my own experience, the money was a huge factor. The fact that my dad spent tens of thousands of dollars on ridiculously incompetent “treatment” for me was catastrophic for my mental state.
But even if money is not the issue, there is time lost, and the failure itself. The person is seeking help because he or she is desperate and traumatized. An incompetent (sorry, “ineffective”) “treatment” is often traumatic in and of itself.
I wish I never again had to read some psychiatrist’s blather about a treatment being “ineffective.” If it is found to be “ineffective” then that means, most likely, that it was HARMFUL.
Perhaps in regular medicine this is not always the case but in the context of attempting to understand and alleviate a person’s emotional distress, I believe it is seldom true that a failed treatment is completely harmless to the person who sought the treatment out of desperation, extreme emotional pain, fear, anxiety, etc.
Thanks Ted and John for your replies. I do think it’s a good idea but I would want to gather input from a variety of people on the precise content of the flyer. Ted I look forward to talking with you directly.
Ted – About 13 years ago, when I first started to really inform myself on the adverse effects of psych drugs and psychiatry, I was a full-time undergrad finally finishing up my bachelor’s degree at an east coast university, and I had the idea to post flyers all over campus warning of the dangers of SSRIs. I spent some time being quite obsessed with the idea, designing the flyers, planning where I’d put them, etc., but ultimately I did not have the courage to do it. I’m now living in Boston and while I don’t have a great deal of free time, perhaps I could start flyering on weekends. Perhaps I could work with a couple of others. I am curious what you think about this idea. (I’ll follow this up with a message via facebook so you will know who I am!)
I love you, Bruce!
Thanks, up-rising. And I agree with your statement that “the drugs and the ideology seem to lead one inevitably in that direction [I.e., social isolation].” You’re made to feel not good enough, too weird to be among people.
Regarding the intuition and common sense, I’ve gained so much new understanding in the past few years, starting with aptitude tests I took in 2008 when I was 36 years old (20 years too late). People vary greatly in their ability for a certain kind of abstract thought/ reasoning/logic that is associated with an ability (and a desire) to write and an ability to understand other people’s motivations (and thus predict their actions). I was the kid who was booksmart but my less-academically inclined friend when I was in elementary school and high school used to look at me perplexed and remark on my apparent total lack of common sense. And in fact I was so lacking in whatever “sense” it is that’s needed to write that I shouldn’t have graduated from high school at all. I simply couldn’t write a paper. I couldn’t complete it. I only graduated through sheer determination and at a huge cost – isolating myself throughout high school because I would spend all my time in my room working on writing assignments.
Based on the aptitude tests which confirmed my growing suspicions I now see myself as an engineer, i.e., someone who should have pursued engineering. My brain seems lop-sided toward the spatial, 3-dimensional and numerical. I feel that if I had put as much effort into engineering as I did into writing papers, I could have designed a space shuttle. But as it was, I burned myself out completely trying to accomplish the impossible – banging my head against the wall and putting all my energy into something I was never going to be able to succeed in. But none of the shrinks, therapists, teachers, or guidance counselors, and not even my uncle who has a PhD in Education from Harvard – none of these people – who knew I was struggling – was able to help me to find the right academic path so that I would lead a life with financial security and a satisfying and challenging career. Over $100,000 was spent in a short span of time on “treatment” that put the nails in my coffin, and the wrong education….
“I’m not mentally ill, never was, never will be.”
It has “only” taken me 25 years to finally understand this with my conscious mind – to say these words. I only came to this point so recently. Which makes me feel like I’m really slow. But I know that I do lack intuition and common sense, actually. That is a significant handicap in my ability to understand and overcome what happens in my life. Also it means I am someone with an especially big need for social interaction. I need to bounce things off other people, to converse, in order to figure things out. But of course I’ve led a solitary isolated, disconnected existence.
Thanks, Anonymous. Really.
Once you have been drugged, you are drugged forever. It is permanent. That first pill or shot changes your life forever. Never mind the actual effects of the drug. You will have to live the rest of your life not knowing how you are permanently changed. THAT is the hell, the torture, the rape. In my experience. Although the actual effects of the drug were pretty bad, too. I developed trichotillomania in my first few months on Prozac and it never remitted. I pulled out my eyelashes and eyebrows leaving my face disfigured. I have had to get tattooing around my eyes which was expensive and unpleasant, and I hate looking like someone with tattoo’ed makeup on.
My story is nothing like yours and in fact while I of course am as enraged as you are, Anonymous, about the crimes committed by psychiatry, I have to put much of the blame for my drugging on psychology. If the talk “therapists” had had any idea how to help me – any competence whatsoever – I would not have fallen victim to psych drugs. I would not have relented or resigned after several years of refusing to finally taking Prozac. I was not stupid. I knew I was not suffering from a lack of Prozac in my brain. I was never one to take any unnecessary drug. I’d been scared sh*tless in the 5th grade by a movie they showed us in school to deter us from using psychedelic street drugs like PCP and LSD. But years of expensive talk “therapy” including inpatient “treatment” for 7.5 weeks for my “eating disorder” and my “depression” left me so utterly hopeless and despairing and desperately, desperately afraid for my future – I was only 22 years old and had dropped out of an ivy league school – that I relented to taking their “medicine.” It took a while but I was finally broken down. Which wasn’t surprising considering I had no confidence or trust in myself. Which of course is why I’d needed help in the first place….
The biggest lesson I have learned in life is about help. Most of what people call “help” is not help at all. Be very careful with that word.
I love this site and Bob and all of you!! This comment in particular strikes a chord with me. I wish I had the ability that you and so many others here possess to articulate your ideas, arguments, and “things” you know are true. I’ve always struggled with expressing myself through words – which contributed to my falling victim to the “mental health” system in my teen years (am now 41). Thank you, Bob, for helping us. I think any reconciliation with my family members would have to involve their reading your books.
Ha, that’s perfect!
I am such a huge fan of Dr. Levine!
A part of my story/tragedy is the fact that I never found the right educational path and thus am sentenced to a life of under-employment in menial low-paying jobs, despite having worked my *** off in high school and ultimately gotten in, on the second try, to an ivy league school. But all the while I struggled very very badly with writing papers and ultimately dropped out of said ivy league school. I never received a proper “diagnosis” of my academic problem and thus wasted $80K on the wrong education and although I have had many jobs, I have never really worked according to my own definition of work. The jobs were menial, admin nonsense.
Neither my schools or teachers, nor the psychiatrists or psychologists knew anything about the aptitude testing that was available — that I discovered on my own at age 36! But a person will never be happy if s/he is not developing and using his/her aptitudes – which are inborn abilities that stay relatively constant over one’s entire lifetime and have nothing to do with anything “psychiatric”. For some people, their aptitudes are obvious from a young age; for others, they’re not obvious and doesn’t it seem the schools’ main job should be to identify for each child his or her aptitudes?
Psychiatrists and psychologists also fail utterly to take into account the effects on girls and women of pervasive sexism. In my case I got the message loud and clear, very early on, that I was worth less (worthless?) because I was a girl. I remember consciously thinking that being a girl meant I would need to somehow become perfect in every way; only then could I be respected. I consciously thought these things at a very young age but did not have anyone to talk to about my thoughts. My parents, no one, knew that I was having these thoughts. No wonder I was a wreck by the time I was 15.
Bruce – in one of your videos on youtube you make the point that no parent has ever dragged their kid into a shrink’s office because the kid was too compliant. True of course but I’d point out that a kid who tries too hard to be compliant – to conform, to fit in, to be beyond criticism – will surely crack under that effort and end up being labeled “mentally ill” anyway so, there you have it – there is NO WINNING in a world with psychiatry in it.
I wish I could write – like Bruce and some of those guys over at TruthOut – because I don’t know how to engage in this fight. I am isolated, alienated, alone, helpless and hopeless…. What can I do – to help in the fight and to become connected to other people? I am so frustrated.
DB
Love what you wrote, Matthew. I’ve just today seen the Lieberman post and have not even finished reading it. The first 3-4 paragraphs made me ill.
Laura,
You are my hero. Thank you for writing this.
Darian
I was thrilled to see no mention of psych drugs, and I thought it was an amazing story, and timely for me, as I’ve just started to think about opening a coffee shop. I’ve been daydreaming about the name and the theme for the past three days. Now I’ll have to think about having toast on the menu.
I sent this to both reporters:
“Those of us in the very large and fast-growing community of survivors of psychiatry and psychiatric psychotropic drugs are utterly baffled by an article such as the above-referenced that makes no mention of the well-known link between psychiatric treatment and violence, including suicide and murder-suicide. Most school shooters were taking or had been withdrawn from a psychiatric drug of some type, and the State of Connecticut is refusing to release Newtown shooter Adam Lanza’s toxicology reports (i.e., what psychiatric drugs he had been taking before the shooting).
Personally I have known for 14 years that the SSRI class of antidepressant drugs can and do cause some people to become suicidal and/or violent towards others. Untold numbers of people have died in this manner. This is a fact.
Such adverse reactions, when they occur, typically occur either within the first couple of weeks on the drug, or upon lowering or stopping the dose (i.e., upon or during withdrawal).
As horrific as this sounds, however, this is only one small part of the truth about the full horror of our so-called “mental health” system. “Treatment” means being labeled as defective and drugged. Psychiatry has and is creating millions of chronic, life-long, drug-dependent mental patients.
Yes, that’s right – psychiatry is CREATING mental illness, not curing it.
I can point you to dozens of sources but I will provide here a list of just a few experts, books, and links:
Dr. David Healy
World-reknowned psychopharmacologist and author of several books (Let Them Eat Prozac, The Antidepressant Era, Pharmageddon)
http://www.davidhealy.org
http://www.rxisk.org
Robert Whitaker
Investigative journalist, winner of the George Polk Award for medical writing and a National Association of Science Writers Award, also finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Whitaker’s “Anatomy of an Epidemic” chronicles the ways in which psychiatry causes rather than cures mental illness. But for the short version of Whitaker’s book, this interview is an excellent summary of the utterly staggering facts and statistics that he has assembled:
http://www.naturalnews.com/011353_bad_medicine_psychiatric_drug.html#ixzz2jq0ZjKNA
Mad in America
Website by and for the growing numbers of people harmed by psychiatry. Of interest might be the fact that the White House refuses to act on a petition seeking an investigation into psychiatric drugs and violence (although the information is already out there – the President simply needs to request his aids to go get it and show it to him!)
http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/12/white-house-petition-seeks-investigation-into-school-shootings-and-psychiatric-drugs/
And —
SSRI Stories
http://www.ssristories.com
Please join the right side of this overwhelmingly important issue, and please use your writing talents to spread the message contained in Robert Whitaker’s book: Psychiatric treatment and the so-called “mental health” system are both causes — not cures — of gun violence (and suicide, and many, many other horrors).
Thank you for your attention.
Hey folks! It’s easy to email the reporters of that NY Times story. Their names in the byline are hyperlinks (Jackie Calmes and Robert Pear). Just click and compose email. Let’s all write to them. I just did. And please share on facebook.
I love the idea of wearing white coats and giving out info outside a pharmacy. That’s great. And it would be fun.
We need to “take back” the definitions of so many words and terms. “Help” of course is one of them, as is “works” – as in “but the drug works for millions of people!” But also the term “forced treatment.”
I was not subjected to forced treatment in exactly the same sense as others were, but I still consider myself to have been forced to take an SSRI against my will. I took it only out of desperation that was caused by years of ineffective — and thus catastrophically harmful — “talk therapy.”
I wish people would understand that when a therapy or a treatment is ineffective, that makes it harmful, not simply neutral in its effects.
There are several reasons for this, not the least of which is the financial cost of every treatment. People usually pay at least some portion of the cost of the “help” and thus are out some amount of their hard-earned money regardless of whether the help is actually helpful. Has anyone ever seen a psychiatrist offer a money-back guarantee? No, I haven’t, either.
In my own experience, the money was a huge factor. The fact that my dad spent tens of thousands of dollars on ridiculously incompetent “treatment” for me was catastrophic for my mental state.
But even if money is not the issue, there is time lost, and the failure itself. The person is seeking help because he or she is desperate and traumatized. An incompetent (sorry, “ineffective”) “treatment” is often traumatic in and of itself.
I wish I never again had to read some psychiatrist’s blather about a treatment being “ineffective.” If it is found to be “ineffective” then that means, most likely, that it was HARMFUL.
Perhaps in regular medicine this is not always the case but in the context of attempting to understand and alleviate a person’s emotional distress, I believe it is seldom true that a failed treatment is completely harmless to the person who sought the treatment out of desperation, extreme emotional pain, fear, anxiety, etc.
Thanks Ted and John for your replies. I do think it’s a good idea but I would want to gather input from a variety of people on the precise content of the flyer. Ted I look forward to talking with you directly.
Ted – About 13 years ago, when I first started to really inform myself on the adverse effects of psych drugs and psychiatry, I was a full-time undergrad finally finishing up my bachelor’s degree at an east coast university, and I had the idea to post flyers all over campus warning of the dangers of SSRIs. I spent some time being quite obsessed with the idea, designing the flyers, planning where I’d put them, etc., but ultimately I did not have the courage to do it. I’m now living in Boston and while I don’t have a great deal of free time, perhaps I could start flyering on weekends. Perhaps I could work with a couple of others. I am curious what you think about this idea. (I’ll follow this up with a message via facebook so you will know who I am!)
I love you, Bruce!
Thanks, up-rising. And I agree with your statement that “the drugs and the ideology seem to lead one inevitably in that direction [I.e., social isolation].” You’re made to feel not good enough, too weird to be among people.
Regarding the intuition and common sense, I’ve gained so much new understanding in the past few years, starting with aptitude tests I took in 2008 when I was 36 years old (20 years too late). People vary greatly in their ability for a certain kind of abstract thought/ reasoning/logic that is associated with an ability (and a desire) to write and an ability to understand other people’s motivations (and thus predict their actions). I was the kid who was booksmart but my less-academically inclined friend when I was in elementary school and high school used to look at me perplexed and remark on my apparent total lack of common sense. And in fact I was so lacking in whatever “sense” it is that’s needed to write that I shouldn’t have graduated from high school at all. I simply couldn’t write a paper. I couldn’t complete it. I only graduated through sheer determination and at a huge cost – isolating myself throughout high school because I would spend all my time in my room working on writing assignments.
Based on the aptitude tests which confirmed my growing suspicions I now see myself as an engineer, i.e., someone who should have pursued engineering. My brain seems lop-sided toward the spatial, 3-dimensional and numerical. I feel that if I had put as much effort into engineering as I did into writing papers, I could have designed a space shuttle. But as it was, I burned myself out completely trying to accomplish the impossible – banging my head against the wall and putting all my energy into something I was never going to be able to succeed in. But none of the shrinks, therapists, teachers, or guidance counselors, and not even my uncle who has a PhD in Education from Harvard – none of these people – who knew I was struggling – was able to help me to find the right academic path so that I would lead a life with financial security and a satisfying and challenging career. Over $100,000 was spent in a short span of time on “treatment” that put the nails in my coffin, and the wrong education….
“I’m not mentally ill, never was, never will be.”
It has “only” taken me 25 years to finally understand this with my conscious mind – to say these words. I only came to this point so recently. Which makes me feel like I’m really slow. But I know that I do lack intuition and common sense, actually. That is a significant handicap in my ability to understand and overcome what happens in my life. Also it means I am someone with an especially big need for social interaction. I need to bounce things off other people, to converse, in order to figure things out. But of course I’ve led a solitary isolated, disconnected existence.
Thanks, Anonymous. Really.
Once you have been drugged, you are drugged forever. It is permanent. That first pill or shot changes your life forever. Never mind the actual effects of the drug. You will have to live the rest of your life not knowing how you are permanently changed. THAT is the hell, the torture, the rape. In my experience. Although the actual effects of the drug were pretty bad, too. I developed trichotillomania in my first few months on Prozac and it never remitted. I pulled out my eyelashes and eyebrows leaving my face disfigured. I have had to get tattooing around my eyes which was expensive and unpleasant, and I hate looking like someone with tattoo’ed makeup on.
My story is nothing like yours and in fact while I of course am as enraged as you are, Anonymous, about the crimes committed by psychiatry, I have to put much of the blame for my drugging on psychology. If the talk “therapists” had had any idea how to help me – any competence whatsoever – I would not have fallen victim to psych drugs. I would not have relented or resigned after several years of refusing to finally taking Prozac. I was not stupid. I knew I was not suffering from a lack of Prozac in my brain. I was never one to take any unnecessary drug. I’d been scared sh*tless in the 5th grade by a movie they showed us in school to deter us from using psychedelic street drugs like PCP and LSD. But years of expensive talk “therapy” including inpatient “treatment” for 7.5 weeks for my “eating disorder” and my “depression” left me so utterly hopeless and despairing and desperately, desperately afraid for my future – I was only 22 years old and had dropped out of an ivy league school – that I relented to taking their “medicine.” It took a while but I was finally broken down. Which wasn’t surprising considering I had no confidence or trust in myself. Which of course is why I’d needed help in the first place….
The biggest lesson I have learned in life is about help. Most of what people call “help” is not help at all. Be very careful with that word.
I love this site and Bob and all of you!! This comment in particular strikes a chord with me. I wish I had the ability that you and so many others here possess to articulate your ideas, arguments, and “things” you know are true. I’ve always struggled with expressing myself through words – which contributed to my falling victim to the “mental health” system in my teen years (am now 41). Thank you, Bob, for helping us. I think any reconciliation with my family members would have to involve their reading your books.
Ha, that’s perfect!
I am such a huge fan of Dr. Levine!
A part of my story/tragedy is the fact that I never found the right educational path and thus am sentenced to a life of under-employment in menial low-paying jobs, despite having worked my *** off in high school and ultimately gotten in, on the second try, to an ivy league school. But all the while I struggled very very badly with writing papers and ultimately dropped out of said ivy league school. I never received a proper “diagnosis” of my academic problem and thus wasted $80K on the wrong education and although I have had many jobs, I have never really worked according to my own definition of work. The jobs were menial, admin nonsense.
Neither my schools or teachers, nor the psychiatrists or psychologists knew anything about the aptitude testing that was available — that I discovered on my own at age 36! But a person will never be happy if s/he is not developing and using his/her aptitudes – which are inborn abilities that stay relatively constant over one’s entire lifetime and have nothing to do with anything “psychiatric”. For some people, their aptitudes are obvious from a young age; for others, they’re not obvious and doesn’t it seem the schools’ main job should be to identify for each child his or her aptitudes?
Psychiatrists and psychologists also fail utterly to take into account the effects on girls and women of pervasive sexism. In my case I got the message loud and clear, very early on, that I was worth less (worthless?) because I was a girl. I remember consciously thinking that being a girl meant I would need to somehow become perfect in every way; only then could I be respected. I consciously thought these things at a very young age but did not have anyone to talk to about my thoughts. My parents, no one, knew that I was having these thoughts. No wonder I was a wreck by the time I was 15.
Bruce – in one of your videos on youtube you make the point that no parent has ever dragged their kid into a shrink’s office because the kid was too compliant. True of course but I’d point out that a kid who tries too hard to be compliant – to conform, to fit in, to be beyond criticism – will surely crack under that effort and end up being labeled “mentally ill” anyway so, there you have it – there is NO WINNING in a world with psychiatry in it.
I wish I could write – like Bruce and some of those guys over at TruthOut – because I don’t know how to engage in this fight. I am isolated, alienated, alone, helpless and hopeless…. What can I do – to help in the fight and to become connected to other people? I am so frustrated.
DB
Love what you wrote, Matthew. I’ve just today seen the Lieberman post and have not even finished reading it. The first 3-4 paragraphs made me ill.
Laura,
You are my hero. Thank you for writing this.
Darian