Thursday, March 23, 2023

Comments by ThereAreFourLights

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  • Thank you for this Sera. I knew a few people who knew Malidoma, it’s nice to see him recognized here. The story of Ben Riley was particularly upsetting to me, he sounds very brave to have stood up to such harsh oppression. I hope one day we will find out what became of him.

  • This is a fantastic article thanks ever so much Dr. Levine, it will prove useful to many of us. I have been pointing out the bit about the lack of proof for “mental illnesses” as brain diseases from the neuroimaging standpoint for a long time now. I wonder, has anyone ever documented the timeline of actual discoveries of the physical mechanisms for definitive brain diseases (which are usually the province of neurology)?

  • Thank you immensely for all of your hard work and dedication in exposing the problems in psychiatry. It won’t be the same here without you.

  • Thanks for sharing, you have been through so much. Good on you for sorting out what was really going on. I imagine there must be many others who never do.

    Not sure if you have ever heard this or not but, it’s believed that the famous saying “mad as a hatter” may originate from people being poisoned by mercury. Milliners who were making top hats were exposed to mercury used in the hat making process, and they wound up developing physical and psychological problems. It’s frightening that this history seems to have been completely lost, especially in a time we are awash in chemicals…I have been saying for a long time that some “mental illness” must be due to chemical exposures, too bad no one listens to me.

  • Thank you for writing this. There aren’t even words for how horrendous this is:

    Enter polypharmacy. Over a period of 17 years, I was drugged with over 47 different psych drugs.

    You obviously have great courage to be able to survive what was done to you. I understand why you would detest psychiatry, I do as well. I wound up with probably a hundred “side” effects of pills I was given, many of them serious. I don’t believe the narrative of “but the drugs help some people”, the only legit medical use of these pills is to prevent someone taking them from getting a severe withdrawal syndrome. The pills cure nothing, and the sorry part of all of this is I have found there are tons of way safer alternatives, like a long list of herbs that treat anxiety and sleep issues for instance, so the pills were not even needed to begin with.

    I hope your recovery continues to bring you joy, life is truly beautiful, as long as we can get away from the hell that is (at least some) other people.

  • Gina, regarding your concern about being persecuted again, you could try signing up for the Mindfreedom Shield program. Doing so means if you are locked up you can contact Mindfreedom and they may send out alerts to activists to try to help you get released. It has worked before to get some out of forced treatment, and out of psych wards.

    https://mindfreedom.org/shield/

  • Hello, this is very well written. I appreciate that you tell it like it is and get across that the system is a scam. I am sorry for what you have been through. The pain you must be feeling must be immense. I am a psych survivor too and spend a fair amount of time researching stories of harm. Re the Catholic church, in Canada they committed a massive atrocity in concert with psychiatry. It happened in the forties, it’s called the Duplessi Orphan Scandal. If you look it up, be forewarned, it is extremely upsetting. I am continually shocked about how little coverage this tragedy has received, especially when residential school victims in Canada were found.

    Also where I live they do the “therapeutic” coloring too and also make people build little houses out of popsicle sticks. I had such an urge to ask psychiatrists if this was their way of making sure the “mentally ill” don’t wind up homeless.

  • I remember speaking to him long ago after leaving hospital, I thought he was such a legend. Later he was on TVO and I had a friend who had been forcibly treated watch. They were dumbfounded to hear an anti-psych perspective on TV and agreed with every word he said. What a loss this is to the movement.

    Thank you Irit…and sorry you have lost a friend.

    Keep challenging the collective un-conscience that is psychiatry Don, from the realm of the ancestors.

  • As detaining someone against their will on the basis of actual or perceived disability qualifies as arbitrary detention under international law, as even voluntary patients can find the door locks behind them not allowing them to leave, and as psychiatry has not actually proven that most “mental illnesses” really are brain diseases, the answer is (b), prisoner.

    Final answer.

  • “Nature plays a big role: Windows provide views of greenery, landscapes decorate walls”

    A window on freedom is not freedom. And pictures of nature are not nature.

    Even if they were though it’d still be a bad idea…I mean what do they think is going to go on with those pictures when the cleaning crew comes around?

    After all, we all know that nature abhors a vacuum….

  • “I am certainly a critic of the medical model, but it’s better than many of the religious models that preceded it. The AA move to define alcoholism as a disease was an enormous advance over alcoholism as a moral failure or a form of degeneracy.”

    Spoken like someone who never had akathisia before. From what AA users have told me they regularly promote even more dangerous substances like antidepressants to solve alcoholism. I’d far prefer to be told I was a degenerate or drinking was a moral failure than be given a drug that causes akathisia.

    And alcoholism defined as a disease really is yet another machination by pharma to make even more money.

  • We’re not your sacrifice class, to be experimented on and used as guinea pigs, thanks. The fourth phase of clinical trials is called the “post-marketing evaluation phase” whereby they run a mass experiment on the public and sit waiting to reap the adverse reaction reports. oldhead is correct, beware!

    Also noteworthy to add the fact of the matter is that many people hurt by psychiatric drugs are finding that they wind up with sensitivities to medications, and no one has really mapped out what is and isn’t safe for our group to take. The vaccines you can guarantee were not tested on people whom have health issues due to psych treatments. So there is utterly no way for them to predict what will happen to anyone taking them who has past damages from treatment.

  • I understand why people may view disability as reparations but I have never even managed to get it and I know there are others who were denied it too. Where I live and I imagine elsewhere in the world it’s not much to live on, and as cost of living increases and government payouts don’t keep pace it’s only going to get worse. Reparations shouldn’t include having to see social workers and threats of losing the money if you work or for other reasons. It should be structured more like victims of crime money, a lump sum payout. At least that is my opinion. We have the problem too that if someone gets it and they die a few months after getting it that means they only got a tiny amount, which is nothing when a person was a victim of such egregious abuses.

  • “Morris concludes by pushing for a balanced approach to the use of digital technologies in psychiatric settings, one that is aware of the potential benefits and possibilities for such technologies, in addition to being aware of and avoiding misuse and abuse of these technologies.”

    The implication being that the existence of psych wards is perfectly fine, it’s just some few folk mucking about with tech in the wrong ways that is the issue.

    The fact that this guy doesn’t question the existence OF psychiatric facilities to start with is to put it mildly, a huge problem.

  • Absolutely appalling. But, and not to at all minimize what they did to him as it surely is ghastly, it’s an every day occurrence in Canadian “health care” that someone is badly mistreated or gas lighted about their health issues. And this is not limited to “the mentally ill” either this is across the board at this point. I know a number of people whose loved ones died due to health care here, who were left too long to be seen their problems minimized or outright denied. They were not labeled with psych issues. So sadly this sort of mistreatment is no longer surprising to me. I don’t know how many times I’ve been to a hospital over a serious health issue only to be treated like I’ve made it up. One nurse even had to ask me what my issue was as that’s how knowledge she was about the condition I have, then proceeded to treat me like I was exaggerating how bad it was. Apparently she became an expert in the problem in two seconds lol. You really can’t make this stuff up…

    And as if I don’t have better things to do than sit in a crowded waiting room where I could pick up some contagious illness!!!

    Anyway good on this man and his family for pursuing the issue. I hope he understands that he’s far from alone, and there are good people out there who think what they did to him is disgusting!

  • Great article! A subject that badly needs more consideration, so glad to see this here! My new saying lately has been friends don’t tell friends to seek professional help. I’m so so tired of how people can entirely stop being accountable in their relationships by just foisting someone off on a professional. The irony is I know of some therapists where I am who once the person is referred promptly set about destroying their relationship with the person who referred them. Even if the person is not abusive.

    “Advising people to label others as “toxic,” as more and more therapists are “empowering” people to do, is leading people to make very entitled, selfish decisions and do really shitty things to each other in the name of “self-care.” Again, I’m not at all saying that people should put up with abusive behavior. But the label “toxic” is being thrown around without much consideration for the fact that you’re sticking it to a person.”

    The massive irony being many therapists refer to psychiatrists who hand out some of the most toxic pills in existence! If they can’t see that what psychiatry does is literally toxic, then it begs the question do they have any real understanding of what that word actually means?

  • Seriously awesome work Dr. Hickey. I have read many of your articles and as someone whom was nearly killed by psychiatry I’m very much for your becoming Dr. Pies’ shadow conscience.

    “‘My psychiatrist said I have a chemical imbalance . . .’ But where is the evidence that this is what patients were actually told?”

    Pretty sure I saw that movie before. Wasn’t it called Gaslight?

  • I haven’t read the full article but wished to mention in case this isn’t being covered it isn’t “just” “antipsychotics” that cause TD. Some anti-emetics (drugs for nausea and vomiting) can, “antidepressants” can and I think benzos might be able to as well. If you are not being forced to take a drug always always dig deeper into what it does and if the “side” effects include involuntary movements assume they may mean TD.

  • I feel for you KateL people were not supportive of me either when I had akathisia and many many other psych drug induced problems. You are not alone here.
    And if people want to get on your back about visiting the site I’d simply stop telling them you visit here. Really you’re an adult it’s none of their business to be deciding for you what you do.

  • I had akathisia for years, I so wish I could go back and take smarties instead!!! And I agree, when starting an SSRI people can get akathisia then too (not termed tardive akathisia mind you).

    I completely agree with Dr. Shipko that there is no adequate way to warn someone about what akathisia is like, as such I think the time has come to demand the drugs be grandfathered off the market.

    Keep them around ONLY for those who need them to taper; can’t get off them; or to reinstate. Anyone who never had them before should be banned from getting them.

  • Thanks sam. I think that one is a fluoroquinolone (sp?) if so I’ve heard they can do serious long term damage. I believe there’s a whole group of people organized against their use much like we have withdrawal forums for various drug classes, I remember seeing a doc a while back about ABs where people had been harmed.

    Good point too re the negative effects too it always bothers me when they call them “side ” effects.

  • They also have nice big houses that could be put on the market…and the housing market is booming where I live…
    Think of all the people they made homeless and all the good it could do if they had to sell their homes and hand back the money they basically stole from us all.

  • But I didn’t like the way they “cleaned the streets” before…Not into their psychiatric dragnets…

    Thinking on this some more if we had a truly just society my hope would be that we wouldn’t have torturers to start with. I know, it’s naive…one can dream I guess.

  • Probably the majority of people now labeled “bipolar” are thus labeled because they suffered dire effects from SSRI use. As such asking to redeem “bipolar’ now means trying to redeem being poisoned.

    And doing that to someone who was poisoned, trying to get them to like identifying as “bipolar” is not a kindness to them. It is misleading and potentially very dangerous, since they may not look more deeply into just WHY they got the label. At an extreme end, suffering serotonin toxicity can be fatal. Mixing two or more SSRIs together can be fatal, particularly in high doses. It is critical that the victims of adverse reactions from SSRIs learn the true nature of what has happened to them or they may never get off the drugs so they can start to heal the neurological damages.

    And of course trying to get anyone to like the label bipolar is not a kindness either seeing as though that can lead to horrendous human rights abuses.

    “People will go willingly into the gas chambers if only they believe them to be showers”. Forget who said it.

  • The only way that psychiatry can be “redeemed” is by being turned over to the UN and courts so they can go to jail and people can collect their reparation money. (Mind you that’s not what typically happens right now when someone manages to do that, but in a just society, torturers would go to jail. )

  • Great comment sam.

    “Which begs the question, What is wrong with psychiatry and what happened to the practitioners in their early years to become part of an abusive cog in an abusive power driven wheel. ”

    Really good point here too, maybe if they used just a fraction of the money used to research “mental illness” we might have a solution to the problem that is psychiatry by now.

  • ““if the drugs are so safe, exactly why would you need a prescription to get them?”

    lol

    Classic example of making crimes medicine is this prescription I have here.”

    Yes well there definitely are more than one reason for those scripts…

    When I was first hurt by SSRIs I wondered if perhaps they were invented for some other reason, perhaps by the military to create” the perfect soldier” thinking that the drugs cause people to not feel anything (well unless you have a severe reaction like I did then you will feel overwhelmingly negative emotions like unadulterated terror.)

    I was pretty surprised when I failed to find any evidence to back up my idea. But of course..that’s classified info.

    “And then 2 years later there was another attempt when they tried to refer me back to people they knew had already tried to kill me. ”

    I’m sorry they have terrorized you like this boans. That has to be one of the worst aspects of the system the ability to continue to persecute people.

  • “Repeated failed attempts to prove something scientifically is the definition of DISPROVING that very thing. If these psychaitric “professionals” were truly scientific, they’d realize their experiment was successful – they have successfully proven that none of these “diagnoses” have a physiological cause or even correlation. Convincingly proven. ”

    Great point Steve!

  • As far as I have learned with regards the law today, believing that you are helping someone isn’t seen as a way to excuse criminal activity. Now in practice I would think it’s a case by case basis situation, just a guess but…I’m told it’s supposed to be the case that criminals can’t actually use “but I meant well” as a defense.

    With regards psychiatry particularly, the fact is in my country at least most of the harm they do is listed in their medical books. This is partly why when I was first injured by pills way back when and got online I got so fed up with the propsychiatry people who would try to gas light survivors and insist psychiatry never did anything wrong to anyone. As I’d bothered to reference the actual books the professionals use and in doing that figured out that most of the harm from pills IS documented. At the time the only harm I couldn’t find was protracted withdrawal syndromes (though Dr. Ashton detailed benzo withdrawal fairly well, however I didn’t find her work in these books.) Yet the vast majority of propsychiatry people basically evidenced they couldn’t even so much as google “side” effects of pills, or even figure out basic stuff like, if the drugs are so safe, exactly why would you need a prescription to get them?

    With forced treatment too, it looks violent so it’s very hard to say that no one realized how awful it was. When you have to get the cops involved that really stops looking like health care!

    And ECT they’ve known for a long time causes brain damage even if people are playing that they don’t know that. It should be obvious anyway–seizures are normally a medical emergency, not a positive medical treatment.

    But the most basic problem here is that the doctors particularly can’t not know that the diagnoses don’t correlate to actual diseases. This is one of the most basic points about psychiatry–they all know how those “mental illness” diagnoses get made up they all would know about the voting process done to coin them. So how can they act like they don’t know they are committing fraud? It’s not like they say to people look we are not sure these are diseases–it would be one thing if they did that, at least that is arguably the truth.

    But to pretend like they are when they’ve had decades to ascertain this “fact” and can’t substantiate it with evidence? And then to chase after a percentage of the population using the labels as scarlet letters in some kind of modern day witch hunt? Then too they outright admit there’s “stigma” attached to having the labels so there again is an open admission of the harm they do. They even have the research suggesting that if people believe “mental illness” really is an incurable brain disease issue they are LESS likely to have sympathy for the sufferer.

  • I agree Richard. Psychiatry has backed every major form of oppression you can name. Psychiatry started the holocaust. They helped slavery along with the use of the diagnosis of “drapetomania”. There was an indigenous genocide in the thirties in the US they are responsible for. They were one of the top institutions responsible for persecuting gay people. They have killed so many people and otherwise ruined many who somehow managed to survive. The negative effects they have had on the world cannot be minimized!

  • “Psychiatrists and others might embrace social psychiatry, which was a major movement in mental medicine after WWII and showed how poverty, inequality and social isolation impaired mental health.”

    And in that time period no one was discussing how the effects of war caused mental distress nor how psychiatry participated in starting the holocaust? It’s just some poverty here a little inequality there that causes distress? While the long shadow of the genocide and war lies over everyone?

    Where pray tell was accountability for psychiatry’s role in starting the holocaust????

  • I agree with oldhead. Radical psychiatry is an oxymoron. This piece honestly seems terribly convenient too. Suddenly psychiatry has gone from mainstream to being radical at a time it seems pretty expedient…

    Is this in the same vein as “we’re all in this together”? As in “don’t march on OUR houses, we’re one with YOU, we were radical the whole time we just had our fingers crossed when we said we were mainstream ” lol

    I am totally failing to see how a group aligned with pharma could ever be construed as radical. You really cannot get any less radical than aligning with corporations. In fact many doctors work for pharma which means essentially there is no meaningful differentiation between psychiatry and pharma. If they are on their payroll they ARE pharma.

    The word radical comes from the latin word radix meaning root. I am not sure how exactly psychiatry proposes it’s going to get at the root causes of society’s issues when psychiatry itself IS one of the root causes. And when they seem grossly incapable of even noticing the problems people really are suffering from…So if they were to address root causes they’d have to take a long hard look in the mirror and then actually change at which point they wouldn’t be practicing psychiatry anymore so…seems to me that there never will be radical psychiatry.

    Well unless we go back to the origin of the word radical..There is a radix which seems relevant to psychiatry….

    Radix pedis diaboli.

    The Devil’s Foot root.

    A botanical invention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle featured in the story “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot”.

    A highly toxic substance known to drive the people who partake of it “mad”, leading to some of them being detained against their will.

    Much like psychiatric drugs…perhaps the story inspired their creation?

  • The real consumer here is psychiatry, it eats people alive.

    “These monetary incentives lead patient groups to censor critiques of high drug prices.”

    Maybe I’m misunderstanding something here but if the goal here is just to critique high drug prices, the groups already were fundamentally flawed. Critiquing the high cost of arsenic pretty well misses the point. Not a surprise then that they can be bought out by pharma.

  • Any medical ethicist who does not vehemently oppose and speak out against psychiatry should be fired. Calling doctors, nurses, social workers etc “heros” who are complicit in having people tortured, in having them arbitrarily detained, in lying to them about the nature of their problems, in offering them incredibly dangerous treatments they don’t actually need, is so beyond unethical it’s embarrassing it even has to be spelled out.

    Psychiatry killed my hero, a famous actor and singer. A friend of mine knew him personally. He was forcibly treated on and off over a ten year period, for grief and overwork. When I learned how he died and what had been done to him I almost collapsed. They took this achingly beautiful, sensitive, compassionate, generous, talented man and made him so sick from pills he couldn’t stand up without help; they gave him akathisia; they lied to him about the nature of his problems which eventually led to a hack journalist outing him for having been locked up, smearing his good name permanently and into perpetuity; they gave him drugs that caused him to gain so much weight in water retention at one point they drained fifty pounds FIFTY POUNDS of water off his body in one day in order to continue filming a show he starred in. And when at one point he demanded his release after being detained against his will he was told, like everyone else in such situations, that the mere fact he wanted to be released was a sign that he was “mentally ill” and reason enough to keep holding him in hospital.

    And to this day you can find fans of his saying things like “at least he was seen by psychiatrists or he might have died sooner”. Even when they kill people still the myth remains that doctors are benevolent.

  • “Unlike corporate platforms like Facebook and Twitter, however, data collected on users is kept to a minimum, and it is never sold to other organizations.”

    Honestly, I feel I’d have to be pretty naive to believe that….

    After all what are people going to do about it if it turns out not to be true? Class actions where everyone gets a dollar I hear are popular lol.

    Really this whole venture of basically spying on people as they try to survive a horrendous health issue in order to do seemingly meaningless research about them…do we need this? It sounds to me like more “user culture” as in “I have a right to take from you without your express consent”, and “you exist to be used”.

    (And don’t tell me people properly consent to this stuff please. Keenly aware of how those privacy agreements work where you click on a third party link that has some relevance to your privacy and then have to read fifteen more pages and then another third party link with fifteen pages on their site, ad nauseum, until your entire life becomes reading dry legalese so that you can at some point figure out that privacy doesn’t exist.)

    Also troubling point, because the bar was set super low on what privacy rights you did have on sites like Facebook now some companies could claim to have some kind of “privacy virtue” thing going on whereby all they have to do is be slightly better than Facebook and you know “we care about your privacy”.

  • “Psychiatry has spent the last 100 years asking what’s wrong with people, but might it be more informative to ask what’s happened to them?”

    Psychiatry. That’s what happened to them.

  • “DEFUND “MENTAL HEALTH”!!!

    Might as well introduce the concept here. If people are seriously discussing “defunding”/eliminating the police we need to be consistent and, since the psychiatric system is an institution of law enforcement/social control, demand that psychiatry be defunded as part of this.”

    Great idea oldhead!

    DEFUND MENTAL HEALTH AND GIVE US OUR REPARATION MONEY!

  • “Is “better help” better than the “worser help”?”

    lol sam

    “New and improved worser help..now sixty percent better than it was before” lol

    When people get fired from BetterHelp do they say, “Well, sorry we have to let you go..we need better help” ba ha ha

    And yeah who would have thought…An app that will lead to your info being given to third parties…Never heard of that happening before…

    (But maybe they just farm the data out to WorserHelp? )

  • I followed some of the links in this article and came out to some disturbing findings.

    One of them led to a group in Palestine that purports to help torture survivors. One of the services they provide? Psychiatric services.

    Bit of a contradiction?

    “So you didn’t like the waterboarding you got…Might I recommend you try akathisia instead?”

    Then I looked up IDHA. Anyone else follow that link? Here’s a quote about whom comprises their group:

    “WE ARE…

    mental health workers, clinicians, psychiatrists, current and prior users of mental health services, advocates, artists, and survivors of trauma and adversity, who are interested in exploring the link between personal and societal transformation.”

    They talk about narrative justice. And there are professionals in the group? Seriously?

    And “users of mental health services”. NO. The proper term here would be victims of crime. You can’t be a “user” of fraud. Well unless you have an agenda you wish to further via fraud…

    The site is also littered with references to “mental health”. Do we have to go over again what’s wrong with this concept???

    And seriously IDHA writes an open letter to PBS claiming to support “narrative justice” for those in the system…then individual survivors have to ask permission to sign the letter.

    Great sense of irony there IDHA!

  • Aside from the reality that “mental health” is not making sense as a literal thing, like oldhead says, ie your mind can’t be ill or well anymore than it can be blue, green or rainbow colored save in a metaphorical sense since it is an abstraction, the idea of a right to “mental health” as in always feeling “well” doesn’t make sense to me. It’s like saying one has a right to be happy all of the time..and how is that even possible. I mean fine, great if you can manage it, but..well..anyone who thinks we can be happy all of the time clearly has not met my ex lol.

    Besides which, while we have a number of modern day systemic social problems that we should try to address, we have always had certain problems that no one can totally eradicate. We can’t get rid of grief, injuries, natural disasters etc…So how does it make sense that we have a right to be happy all of the time given these. Never mind that one’s mental state is constantly in flux. There is no end state called happiness that never leaves, there’s no utopia that has any solidity to it, it’s a mirage in the distance no one can ever reach. And psychiatry uses that mirage as an excuse to meddle in people’s lives.

  • But boans South Park says Scientologists are bad. Who are you to disagree then? lol

    Seriously I’m convinced most people’s hatred of Scientologists can be traced to South Park and that time Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah’s couch. When people would tell me they were opposed to Scientology I’d ask them what they knew of it and…they usually haven’t got much to say.

    Someone’s doing their thinking for them…

    And as far as psychiatry is concerned, my feeling is that if they want to call us all Scientologists, then psychiatrists have to be accountable for that. Scientologists don’t control what psychiatrists say.

  • Thanks O.O…I saw your post about your t-shirt about surviving a ward too I almost spit my drink on my laptop reading it lol sounds like you are a fair prankster…My kind of person (wish I’d thought of that shirt idea!)

    But what am I saying…No laughing O.O. and no talking about laughing either… 🙂