Psychiatrists have a bad history adopting new technology. Look at what they did with advancements like electricity, brain surgery, and pharmaceuticals. Then again maybe if an AI tells them they are full of crap they might actually believe it.
There is one guaranteed way for doctors to make Medicaid patients profitable. Improve the patients health and get them onto private insurance that pays a profitable rate.
The best analog for the American healthcare system is the Soviet economy. The purpose isn’t to create a quality products but merely to go through the process of checking off the necessary boxes to recieve payment regardless of outcomes.
The 90’s were a very dangerous time for teenagers who had good health insurance that actually paid for mental health.
What’s the difference between an MOIA and a tricyclic?
One’s communist propaganda and the other’s capitalist propaganda.
Thank you. That was difficult but helpful to read. My timeline and experiences were eerily similar.
Your doctors are deceiving you if they are claiming SSRI’S are safe for longterm usage. The reality is they just don’t know because there are not good longterm safety studies and the ones we have show some side effects may be permanent is some patients. We do know the drug companies denied the side effects until the FDA forced a change to the warning labels. Even today the warning labels are deceptive. Claiming sexual side effects are temporary when they can be permanent or claiming the drugs aren’t addictive despite the evidence shows they are still being deceitful.
SSRI’S have a strong anti-inflammatory effect and most drugs that do that will also reduce depression and potentially cause mania (think of the steriod high). I’ve taken Paxil on and of since it came out and understand it’s benefits as well as anyone. I also understand that the potential benefits do not justify exposing patients to dangerous side effects doctors don’t understand.
The drugs can have great benefits but few doctors are properly trained in their safe usage. I encourage you to get the opinion of a mental health professional who’s business model doesn’t depend on the belief SSRI’S are safe.
I are right and I apologize. Schizophrenia is very different from the altered thinking of mood disorders. Many people who are bipolar also have heightened cannaboid sensitivities, perhaps due to the cortisol spike. A more productive discussion would be how of how cannabis use is often misdiagnosed and results in unnecessary exposure to powerful antipsychotic drugs that can cause permanent life altering side effects.
The way doctors treat depression is like endlessly giving someone aspirin to treat a fever without ever looking for the cause.
I believe psychosis is caused by the differences between perceived reality and actual reality.
An example would be when I experienced side effects from Paxil and Zyprexa. The doctors and drug companies denied the side effects creating a disparity between my reality where the drugs had side effects and the doctors reality where the drugs did not have side effects. The gap in those realities is seen as a threat and psychosis is the immune response.
Another example would be when a doctor interprets figurative statements literally and literal statements figuratively. If this situation results in psychic distress then there is a good argument that the doctor is the cause of the distorted realities and thus the cause of the mental illness.
Interesting. My understanding was that ‘devil weed’ originated with Day of the Dead iconography and criminalization was a way to legally discriminate against Mexicans. Much like opium was used against the Chinese, cocaine against blacks, and alcohol against the Irish.
High THC cannabis is a mental health problem but should not overshadow the mental health benefits of CBD and other cannaboids. There is evidence that CBD could be used as a safe way to de-escalate mental health situations. It is safe, easy to administer, and carries minimal liability compared to drugs like ketamine and Haldol.
They actually treated this as a benefit. When teens complained their response that they shouldn’t be having sex anyway. Another benefit was they encourage safe sex because it’s easier for a guy to fake it.
Nothing more reliable than self report data given to large groups of people attempting to measure vague concepts that ultimately don’t matter because the person being screened is just entering random numbers to get back at the screener for wasting their time.
If you want to screen for mental illness try something that might work like modifying the hearing test every kid gets anyway.
B vitamins should be a starting point for all mental health issues before prescriptions are ever considered. I recently came off paxil (again) because of alcohol interactions and a low dose of lithium oratate really seemed to help. There is clinical data showing lithium oratate reduces alcohol consumption. My personal experience is that I’m now able to have a beer and not immediately open another.
The problem is the business model. Nobody even knows what the product is anymore. It certainly isn’t the improvement of health because that has nothing to do with revenue.
The city and suburbs are different sides of the same coin. The city used taxes and the criminal justice system while suburbs outsourced it the private sector and called it healthcare.
One of the biggest problems with psychiatry is they consistently treat medication side effects as original pathology. Doctor’s are under the false belief that the only treatment options available to them are medications or psychotherapy and totally unaware that there are other more effective, less invasive, and ultimately less expensive treatments methods available.
How about we start changing the stupid things in society that cause depression?
Switching to standard time all year should be a no brainer when it comes to improving mental health as a society.
When an officer is issued a gun the person they are most likely to kill with that gun is themself.
I’m sure the same can be said about diet, sleep and meditation just to name a few.
Depression is a disease of the immune system, your body responding to a threat, and prescribing antidepressants is like endlessly treating a fever without looking for a cause.
Any drug (NSAIDS, steriods, SSRI’S) or activity (runners high, yoga, meditation) that reduces inflammation will have the side effect of reducing depression and even triggering something similar to mania.
When they look back at the antidepressant era they’re going to realize they were essentially treating a fever without ever looking for the cause. Depression should never have been considered anything but a symptom of of something else.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading that!
I think the worst delusion I’ve ever had was how thought antidepressants were developed when first given them as a teenager. I thought they new every single side effect because they attached radiological tracers to the drug and were able to watch exactly how and were the drug worked. In the process I thought they identified every possible side effect and knew exactly why it occurs. If the side effect wasn’t on the list then it couldn’t possibly be caused by antidepressant and must be my fault and not the drugs fault.
Man was I disappointed when decades later I realized it wasn’t as much rocket science as it was paper airplane folding.
I think the vaccine was a missed opportunity for the FDA to educate healthcare professionals about the role of the immune system in depression. I believe most depressive episodes are triggered by the immune system responding to threats, be it psychological or physical. Many of the most effective therapeutic interventions involve triggering minor immune responses to controlled threats in order prevent more significant illness from uncontrolled threats. This is why maintaining a healthy immune system is more effective at treating and preventing depression than medication that often ends up weakening the immune system.
Isn’t the foundation of science the ‘null hypothesis’ meaning that you start by disproving a theory and only after many failed attempts does a theory become valid. It seems to me there are many studies dating back decades supporting the statement ‘antidepressants do not relieve depression.’
At what point can we no longer consider psychiatry, and even modern medicine as a whole, a hard science?
Kind of like insanity being defined as trying the same thing again and again and expecting different results.
I’d like to see them separate out scans from the medication naive from those with a medication history. Then break it down further based on the number of drugs a person was exposed to, type of drug, and length of exposure. The term ‘treatment resistant’ is used to justify increasingly invasive treatments when in reality they still can’t say that ‘treatment resistant’ isn’t acrually ‘treatment caused’ depression.
Whenever I noticed a sudden lifting of my depression I always had a cigarette in my hand at the time.
SSRI’s need an additional black box warning that says
‘SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION MAY BE PERMANENT.’ Wonder how many people would take the drug if they knew the real risks.
Could they target it to erase the memory of their doctors misdiagnosing me? I had a doctor at SIU ordered a celiac test Inwas unaware of (perfectly justified with consent) without realizing one my dreams is to open a bakery and buy gluten by the pound. There was zero chance of me having celiac other than a false positive. I joked a false positive might result in me being so upset I try to east a bag of gluten powder. She interpreted my joke as a threat of self harm and slandered me by entering it in my chart. After another doctor (3 weeks out of med school) to over I told him her not listening made it FEEL LIKE he was upset with me for getting blood on hand after punching me. He said I was delusional and accusing him of punching me despite never being in the same room. Now because they wouldn’t listen I have panic attacks triggered by anything healthcare related.
I got lucky and avoided the borderline scam because I had a preexisting condition and was uninsurable. Amazing how beneficial going without healthcare can be to your health. I just wish the Paxil was priced more like Zyprexa and less like cigarettes.
‘Jokers to the left of me and clowns to the right’. As a recovering conservative I guess you’re now ‘stuck in the middle with me.’
I guess it just supports my theory that the solution to our problems are in avoiding the extremes.
It’s amazing how they’re still under the illusion the DSM has any validity and can be useful in anything other than billing or prescription justification.
They’re using digital solutions for a quantum problem.
The digital mindset only allows for two inputs be it right-left, zero-one, black-white, or even correct-incorrect and discounts the infinite options between the extremes. Dynamic problems require multifaceted dynamic solutions.
It sounds like psychiatrists are telling their patients ‘2+2=5’.
I find the political associations interesting. I became a critic of psychiatry for the same reason I became a political independent. Both psychiatry and my former political party are suffering from a form of cognitive dissonance that allows them to deny reality.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but the akathisia may never go away. It’s concerning that at no point did anyone recommend any kind of nutritional changes to help with the withdrawals. There are many foods and supplements with known mechanisms of action that can ease they symptoms of akathisia. Unfortunately doctors recieve almost no nutritional training and are often completely unaware of effective treatments that don’t require a prescription.
They need to realize that in most cases depression is simply a symptom of another illness. It may be trauma, it may be your body responding to a pathogen, or simply you body telling you to rest. The current model is the equivalent of treating a fever without trying to find out what is causing the fever and the results are no different.
I think the pandemic itself will be a tipping point for mental health. All the people who sought mental health treatment for the first time have now been on the meds long enough realize they don’t work and possibly make things worse. We can see this in the way the general public reacted when given access the facts on the drugs. The mRNA vaccines are setting a new standard for what the public expects in openness in research. Now they want that openness on psych drugs and they are realizing the benefits are not enough to justify the potential harm.
As someone who had great insurance as a teenager in 90’s I can can tell you it is not much better. Inpatient stays were based on how many days your insurance covered instead of any medical need. I think they overtreated the kids with good insurance to offset the insurance with lower payouts.
Don’t get your hopes up, the NYT published the ‘Zyprexa Papers’ and now it’s in a new form and back under patent.
It’s like the doctors are passing around a rubics cube in a circle with each doctor using a different strategy and not being able to figure out why their strategy doesn’t work.
That gets to the fundamental difference between psychiatry and the rest of medicine. They do not use the scientific method and instead rely on subjective self report or observational data. The problem is compounded by other physicians not acknowledging this fundamental flaw.
I’ve heard mixed information about heat and light sensitivity with lithium. Some say it’s the lithium and others say it’s mood disorder marker. I’ve been off lithium for 15 years and heat and bright lights are still miserable.
I wondered the same thing about the FDA. They clearly lowered their standards for drugs treating DSM conditions. They seem to have a history of believing bad research and then not taking corrective action when new side effects are learned. The drug companies all plead guilty to making false claims about these drugs yet never made them correct the harm.
What if the doctor helped you find a diet you enjoy that improved you mood? Or what if the doctor suggested some easy exercises so that nagging injury quit hurting? Of course you don’t want to talk about your mood to a psychiatrists that is only trained to prescibe and not to heal or prevent.
The sad truth is doctors don’t study the alternatives. That requires nutritionists, physical therapists, and other professions that treat the person and not just the symptoms.
How long until they figure out Zyprexa blocks the effects?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3973179/
This is an interesting comparison of the costs of Zyprexa compared to lithium by analyzing insurance claims. Zyprexa was wonderful drug to experience but just like other substances it is difficult to say the benefits outweigh the harms.
Diabetes and Parkinsons are just not worth the benefits.
It’s worth noting many of these areas use traditional medicine focused on lifestyle and restoring the body to balance. If conditions like depression, psychosis, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and Crohns are caused by the immune system being unbalanced then most medical professionals would agree lifestyle changes like should always be used instead of drugs.
Most of these drugs are part of the ‘bipolar cocktail’ that is a prerequisite for the ‘treatment resistant’ form.
These are not civil cases, they are the result of the drug companies pleading guilty to criminal acts.
There’s actually really good research showing chemicals (vitamins, minerals, antioxidants) we consume in our daily diet are safer and more effective than prescription drugs. For example hop tea has been shown to work better than xanax.
My personal revenge fantasy is to make psychiatry obsolete with food that can beat the drugs in clinical trials.
Careful, I asked that as a teenager on a SSRI in 1994 and they put me on Haldol.
This is why I believe it is important to draw attention to parallels in other medical specialties and how they responded when their research was questioned. The American Psychological Association (the other APA) heard the whistle of cognitive dissonance and after reviewing their research blew an air horn on themselves in the form the the replication crisis. Recent developments in Alzheimers research are placing neurology and drug companies (again) where psychiatry was 15 years ago. Do they do what is right and correct the mistake or they do keep digging deeper and ignore the source of cognitive dissonance like psychiatry.
Sometimes the records aren’t even the right patient. As a preteen they had me confused with another patient and would argue with me when I resisted being given his treatments. At one point they gave me his EEG and him my ECG. The doctor thought I was going to have a heart attack from the meds and never realized what I meant when I said ‘it wasn’t my heart.’
I don’t think the media is a matter of left or right as much as it is the advertisers threatening to pull their advertisements from legitimate sources of information. Is Tucker Carlson really considered are reliable source? He may be right on this one but people are able to brush it off as another part of the cult.
Actually very FEW drugs are illegal if you simply consider them a chemical that interacts with the body. The supplement industry is largely regulated by consumer fraud laws that prevent companies from making false claims about a drugs benefits. This is why the criminal guilty pleas by the drug companies were for making false claims about the benefits and deceiving customers about side effects.
I strongly agree with you on the problem of family making decisions for loved ones in the mental health system, especially for minors. Even in the best circumstances family is forced to make an unfair decision under pressure from psychiatrists and rarely with accurate information. It is important to recognize the family of the patients are just as much a victim of the fraud as the patients themselves. This same dynamic is occurring in elderly patients suffering from Alzheimers and just like with mental health we are seeing drugs based on fraudulent research that don’t work being given to individuals unable to give consent.
Yes, for many diseases 15% is great, but only if the side effects are benign. With antidepressants far more than 15% experience serious side effects that are often worse than the original disease.
As a child of cure I’m in.
Elon Musk is a missed opportunity for mental health reform. Saying ‘At least I didn’t buy Twitter’ can really put your own mental health into context withbthe bigger problem.
It creates a lot of the same informed consent issues present in using psych drugs in minors. Family is forced into the impossible position of making medical decisions based on questionable research like Study 329. I’m concerned we are recreating that situation except with children making the decision for parents. A single Alzheimers drug caused Medicare to change everyone’s rates. The approval process was sloppy and red flags were ignored. The initial research is based on bad science. Sounds like they didn’t learn and made all the same mistakes.
They’re hoping nobody sees the similarities between psych drugs and Alzheimers drugs not working and why.
What if psychosis was on a spectrum dependent on the severity of the trauma? There is growing evidence showing psychosis may be the immune systems defense against contradictory beliefs as in cognitive dissonance (this is often highly visible in politics and religion). Past trauma causes the immune system to over react to future stresses resulting in damage from stress hormones. One theory is that the stress hormones cause physical damage to the brain related to the damage of prescription psych drugs and the result is psychosis.
I may to totally wrong but my bigger point is that there is value exploring theories bridge that darkness between objective science and the subjective theories that brought us to MIA.
I agree genetics are overrated but if mental illness is a response to environmental stress then from an evolutionary view rapid changes to society would create new stressors and new stress response. An example of this would be variable moods over the course of a year with periods of mania during resource rich times and depressed activity when resources are scarce. This was tremendously helpful for thousands of years in an agrarian society but maladaptive in modern society that requires 8 hr shifts worked 5 days a week for 50 weeks a year instead of simply 2000 hours when needed over the course of a year.
Psychiatrists are like physicists who deny the theory of relativity.
Most mental illness can probably be traced back to the immune systems fight or flight response and the cascade of events triggered. The real illness is the variability in how an individual responds to stress. A malnourished sleep deprived body will react differently than a healthy body. Even a healthy body can be overwhelmed if the stress is either extreme in severity or in cumulative exposure. Ultimately the psychosis is a symptom of damage done to the ‘lizard brain’ from prolonged exposure to the adrenaline, epinephrine, and cortisol etc (precursors to IL’s and cytokines) released during the stressful event. This is consistent with the inflammation theory and explains SSRI’s are better understood as anti-inflammatory agents and not antidepressants.
We’re giving Paxil to dogs and ketamine to humans, which is more inhumane?
What really helped me was viewing my mood disorder through an unemotional lense of evolution. It is stunning how different it is in the context of thousands of years evolving in an agrarian society where times of extreme activity to collect resources intermixed with periods of low activity to preserve resources. It also explains how an evolutionary advantage can to turn into a disadvantage due to stark societal changes like the industrial revolution.
I’m interested in the cost benefit analysis that says this is a good use of scarce resources. On the surface it sounds like a great idea but does it actually help people? My medical provider is currently hiring for this hotline and as someone a BA in psychology and way to much personal experience it is a tempting employment solution to my Medicaid problem.
My concern is when I searched for studies to justify the costs of the 988 number with objective research I ended up here. Mad in America is a great organization but ending up here usually means there is no scientific justification for the policy I am researching.
My theory (and not necessarily a correct theory) is that ‘antidepressants’ mechanism of action is through inflammation changes that alter the permeability of the blood brain barrier. I believe my ‘bipolar’ mood disorder is a presentation of changes in inflammation with low inflammation being associated elevated moods and high inflammation being associated with depressed moods. I also believe depression is like a fever and simply a component of a larger immune response. If you think of the ‘fight or flight’ response as your immune system responding to a threat then the path to a medically based cause and eventual treatments.
Be careful making the mistake that depression has a single cause and generalizing my experience to your own. A virus and a bacteria both cause the immune response of fever but treating the cause of that fever requires two very different treatment protocols.
From a mental health standpoint the real concerns are the unintended consequences. Personally it’s none of my business what another person decides to do with their body. My concern is that legislating morality is itself is often an immoral act. Psychiatry has a checkered history largely because of its attempt to pathologize morality and much of it is rooted in the same religious movement responsible for the current abortion debate. Many of the solutions we need are not possible without legislative action and the mental health community must quit accepting condescending lip service and start demanding evidence based solutions.
This is an interesting subject that I initially wanted dismiss but second glance realized it is a foundational obstacle to receiving medical care for anyone harmed by the system.
I am a difficult anxious patient with PTSD from mood disorder treatments so when a medical professional documents my anxiety with a blood pressure cuff without realizing the hell I’m in it feels like I’m being discriminated against. The real problem is that if they ask about my blood pressure I’m more than happy share my accurate data from when I practice biofeedback.
There are obvious benefits to looking at raising awareness to discriminatory practices like daylight savings time, past failed treatments, and a mental health system more similar to the criminal justice system than medicine. That said it is important not repeat the mistakes of idiot, moron, and imbecile.
I wish they would stop the false marketing of calling SSRI’s antidepressants. If they actually listened to the patients they would realize they are anti-inflammatory drugs.
What about the CR (controlled release) scam. I started on Paxil CR (GSK plc) pretty soon after it came out and within weeks had a depressive episodes. At the time they blamed it on me and not production facility in Puerto Rico the FDA ended up shutting down.
It’s like they’re arguing about if they should throw the baby out with the bathwater without realizing they already killed the baby.
Psychiatric fraud has major implications. Modern vaccine resistance is rooted in mainstream medicine’s failure to respond to autism thus creating a desperate group of patients willing to accept an explanation of their condition with zero scientific basis. This is a great example of the ‘white wall of silence’ where doctors protect themselves at the expense of society.
What do I use to refer to the SSRI and cannabis I use to alleviate PTSD symptoms caused by substances prescribed by a cultist?
Imagining can be misleading in all areas of medicine but psychiatry has very little objective data to work with. Currently describing symptoms to psychiatrist is about as useful as trying to describe the color blue to someone who has been blind since birth. Excessive unnecessary imagining can be harmful but it is minimally invasive and provides information that can be reviewed by more than one individual for interpretation. It probably is not very useful right now but neither are the invasive medications. As we all know profit is a major driver American healthcare and we’re pretty hard to make profitable which is why we’re either ignored or drugged. I feel like a psychiatrist justifying their profession but imagining is highly profitable and has the advantage of being minimally invasive. It may require new techniques and take milli9ns to establish the needed imagining data base but I’m pretty sure my manic brain will look quit different when compared to my depressed brain.
I had to cut off contact to a neurologist relative over this issue. He said informed consent simply is not possible without medical school. I understand his point but at least be honest about what you don’t know. Imaging technology has advanced enough to justify advanced imaging for mental illness.
I think lithium was a missed opportunity to focus more on natural treatments as opposed to patented pharmaceuticals the body has no experience with. My personal experience is that foods high in B vitamins and electrolytes help me manage my mood fluctuations in a way I can adjust as needed unlike pharmaceuticals.
‘Problems in living’ sounds a lot like how ‘failure to adjust’ is used to turn behaviors that are beneficial during millions of years of evolution but suddenly abnormal in an industrialized world. My body tends to respond to the sun and not to a clock that is arbitrarily changed by an hour twice a day.
I was wondered if Einstein’s definition of insanity was commentary on psychiatry.
There is great benefit for a well educated consumer. It is also morally dishonest to disregard that information on MIA could be dangerous in the wrong context.
A well educated patient, being necessary to the maintenance of a working mental health system, should not have their access to information infringed.
Almost every drug used to treat bipolar disorder was involved in some form of criminal settlement and lithium is the only drug that I don’t feel defrauded me. It was easy to understand why it would work. Learning how all those elements around it helped my mental health benefited my health more than any other treatment. Unlike prescription drugs they can be altered on a seasonal basis more in line with our seasonal changes. Lithium seems like a great candidate for microdosing studies.
When I was a teenager and in group therapy I always wondered why people had to include their diagnosis and medications in their introduction. Almost like they’re trying to get you to believe something that doesn’t have any scientific basis. A primary care doctor focused on improving your overall health is a far better mental health professional than any psychiatrist not willing to acknowledge the problems in their own profession.
There’s any number of Planters products that could beat most psychiatric drugs. In the US they have a heart logo because they showed a strong relationship to heart health. Pretty sure the science is a lot better for a brain logo.
When I was 16 (1994) I tried to blow the whistle about how the SSRI made me feel weird. The doctors response was Haldol on which I subsequently overdosed. This was two years after a different SSRI lead to a tricyclic overdose. I was always confused about how easily they believed me about those not being suicide attempts. In hindsight I wonder if they new something I didn’t.
Psychiatrists have a bad history adopting new technology. Look at what they did with advancements like electricity, brain surgery, and pharmaceuticals. Then again maybe if an AI tells them they are full of crap they might actually believe it.
There is one guaranteed way for doctors to make Medicaid patients profitable. Improve the patients health and get them onto private insurance that pays a profitable rate.
The best analog for the American healthcare system is the Soviet economy. The purpose isn’t to create a quality products but merely to go through the process of checking off the necessary boxes to recieve payment regardless of outcomes.
The 90’s were a very dangerous time for teenagers who had good health insurance that actually paid for mental health.
What’s the difference between an MOIA and a tricyclic?
One’s communist propaganda and the other’s capitalist propaganda.
Thank you. That was difficult but helpful to read. My timeline and experiences were eerily similar.
Wonder if this caused parkinson.
https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2009/January/09-civ-038.html#:~:text=American%20pharmaceutical%20giant%20Eli%20Lilly,Department%20of%20Justice%20announced%20today.
Your doctors are deceiving you if they are claiming SSRI’S are safe for longterm usage. The reality is they just don’t know because there are not good longterm safety studies and the ones we have show some side effects may be permanent is some patients. We do know the drug companies denied the side effects until the FDA forced a change to the warning labels. Even today the warning labels are deceptive. Claiming sexual side effects are temporary when they can be permanent or claiming the drugs aren’t addictive despite the evidence shows they are still being deceitful.
SSRI’S have a strong anti-inflammatory effect and most drugs that do that will also reduce depression and potentially cause mania (think of the steriod high). I’ve taken Paxil on and of since it came out and understand it’s benefits as well as anyone. I also understand that the potential benefits do not justify exposing patients to dangerous side effects doctors don’t understand.
The drugs can have great benefits but few doctors are properly trained in their safe usage. I encourage you to get the opinion of a mental health professional who’s business model doesn’t depend on the belief SSRI’S are safe.
I are right and I apologize. Schizophrenia is very different from the altered thinking of mood disorders. Many people who are bipolar also have heightened cannaboid sensitivities, perhaps due to the cortisol spike. A more productive discussion would be how of how cannabis use is often misdiagnosed and results in unnecessary exposure to powerful antipsychotic drugs that can cause permanent life altering side effects.
The way doctors treat depression is like endlessly giving someone aspirin to treat a fever without ever looking for the cause.
I believe psychosis is caused by the differences between perceived reality and actual reality.
An example would be when I experienced side effects from Paxil and Zyprexa. The doctors and drug companies denied the side effects creating a disparity between my reality where the drugs had side effects and the doctors reality where the drugs did not have side effects. The gap in those realities is seen as a threat and psychosis is the immune response.
Another example would be when a doctor interprets figurative statements literally and literal statements figuratively. If this situation results in psychic distress then there is a good argument that the doctor is the cause of the distorted realities and thus the cause of the mental illness.
Interesting. My understanding was that ‘devil weed’ originated with Day of the Dead iconography and criminalization was a way to legally discriminate against Mexicans. Much like opium was used against the Chinese, cocaine against blacks, and alcohol against the Irish.
High THC cannabis is a mental health problem but should not overshadow the mental health benefits of CBD and other cannaboids. There is evidence that CBD could be used as a safe way to de-escalate mental health situations. It is safe, easy to administer, and carries minimal liability compared to drugs like ketamine and Haldol.
They actually treated this as a benefit. When teens complained their response that they shouldn’t be having sex anyway. Another benefit was they encourage safe sex because it’s easier for a guy to fake it.
Nothing more reliable than self report data given to large groups of people attempting to measure vague concepts that ultimately don’t matter because the person being screened is just entering random numbers to get back at the screener for wasting their time.
If you want to screen for mental illness try something that might work like modifying the hearing test every kid gets anyway.
B vitamins should be a starting point for all mental health issues before prescriptions are ever considered. I recently came off paxil (again) because of alcohol interactions and a low dose of lithium oratate really seemed to help. There is clinical data showing lithium oratate reduces alcohol consumption. My personal experience is that I’m now able to have a beer and not immediately open another.
The problem is the business model. Nobody even knows what the product is anymore. It certainly isn’t the improvement of health because that has nothing to do with revenue.
The city and suburbs are different sides of the same coin. The city used taxes and the criminal justice system while suburbs outsourced it the private sector and called it healthcare.
One of the biggest problems with psychiatry is they consistently treat medication side effects as original pathology. Doctor’s are under the false belief that the only treatment options available to them are medications or psychotherapy and totally unaware that there are other more effective, less invasive, and ultimately less expensive treatments methods available.
How about we start changing the stupid things in society that cause depression?
Switching to standard time all year should be a no brainer when it comes to improving mental health as a society.
When an officer is issued a gun the person they are most likely to kill with that gun is themself.
I’m sure the same can be said about diet, sleep and meditation just to name a few.
Depression is a disease of the immune system, your body responding to a threat, and prescribing antidepressants is like endlessly treating a fever without looking for a cause.
Any drug (NSAIDS, steriods, SSRI’S) or activity (runners high, yoga, meditation) that reduces inflammation will have the side effect of reducing depression and even triggering something similar to mania.
When they look back at the antidepressant era they’re going to realize they were essentially treating a fever without ever looking for the cause. Depression should never have been considered anything but a symptom of of something else.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading that!
I think the worst delusion I’ve ever had was how thought antidepressants were developed when first given them as a teenager. I thought they new every single side effect because they attached radiological tracers to the drug and were able to watch exactly how and were the drug worked. In the process I thought they identified every possible side effect and knew exactly why it occurs. If the side effect wasn’t on the list then it couldn’t possibly be caused by antidepressant and must be my fault and not the drugs fault.
Man was I disappointed when decades later I realized it wasn’t as much rocket science as it was paper airplane folding.
I think the vaccine was a missed opportunity for the FDA to educate healthcare professionals about the role of the immune system in depression. I believe most depressive episodes are triggered by the immune system responding to threats, be it psychological or physical. Many of the most effective therapeutic interventions involve triggering minor immune responses to controlled threats in order prevent more significant illness from uncontrolled threats. This is why maintaining a healthy immune system is more effective at treating and preventing depression than medication that often ends up weakening the immune system.
Isn’t the foundation of science the ‘null hypothesis’ meaning that you start by disproving a theory and only after many failed attempts does a theory become valid. It seems to me there are many studies dating back decades supporting the statement ‘antidepressants do not relieve depression.’
At what point can we no longer consider psychiatry, and even modern medicine as a whole, a hard science?
Kind of like insanity being defined as trying the same thing again and again and expecting different results.
I’d like to see them separate out scans from the medication naive from those with a medication history. Then break it down further based on the number of drugs a person was exposed to, type of drug, and length of exposure. The term ‘treatment resistant’ is used to justify increasingly invasive treatments when in reality they still can’t say that ‘treatment resistant’ isn’t acrually ‘treatment caused’ depression.
Whenever I noticed a sudden lifting of my depression I always had a cigarette in my hand at the time.
SSRI’s need an additional black box warning that says
‘SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION MAY BE PERMANENT.’ Wonder how many people would take the drug if they knew the real risks.
Could they target it to erase the memory of their doctors misdiagnosing me? I had a doctor at SIU ordered a celiac test Inwas unaware of (perfectly justified with consent) without realizing one my dreams is to open a bakery and buy gluten by the pound. There was zero chance of me having celiac other than a false positive. I joked a false positive might result in me being so upset I try to east a bag of gluten powder. She interpreted my joke as a threat of self harm and slandered me by entering it in my chart. After another doctor (3 weeks out of med school) to over I told him her not listening made it FEEL LIKE he was upset with me for getting blood on hand after punching me. He said I was delusional and accusing him of punching me despite never being in the same room. Now because they wouldn’t listen I have panic attacks triggered by anything healthcare related.
I got lucky and avoided the borderline scam because I had a preexisting condition and was uninsurable. Amazing how beneficial going without healthcare can be to your health. I just wish the Paxil was priced more like Zyprexa and less like cigarettes.
‘Jokers to the left of me and clowns to the right’. As a recovering conservative I guess you’re now ‘stuck in the middle with me.’
I guess it just supports my theory that the solution to our problems are in avoiding the extremes.
It’s amazing how they’re still under the illusion the DSM has any validity and can be useful in anything other than billing or prescription justification.
They’re using digital solutions for a quantum problem.
The digital mindset only allows for two inputs be it right-left, zero-one, black-white, or even correct-incorrect and discounts the infinite options between the extremes. Dynamic problems require multifaceted dynamic solutions.
It sounds like psychiatrists are telling their patients ‘2+2=5’.
I find the political associations interesting. I became a critic of psychiatry for the same reason I became a political independent. Both psychiatry and my former political party are suffering from a form of cognitive dissonance that allows them to deny reality.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but the akathisia may never go away. It’s concerning that at no point did anyone recommend any kind of nutritional changes to help with the withdrawals. There are many foods and supplements with known mechanisms of action that can ease they symptoms of akathisia. Unfortunately doctors recieve almost no nutritional training and are often completely unaware of effective treatments that don’t require a prescription.
They need to realize that in most cases depression is simply a symptom of another illness. It may be trauma, it may be your body responding to a pathogen, or simply you body telling you to rest. The current model is the equivalent of treating a fever without trying to find out what is causing the fever and the results are no different.
I think the pandemic itself will be a tipping point for mental health. All the people who sought mental health treatment for the first time have now been on the meds long enough realize they don’t work and possibly make things worse. We can see this in the way the general public reacted when given access the facts on the drugs. The mRNA vaccines are setting a new standard for what the public expects in openness in research. Now they want that openness on psych drugs and they are realizing the benefits are not enough to justify the potential harm.
As someone who had great insurance as a teenager in 90’s I can can tell you it is not much better. Inpatient stays were based on how many days your insurance covered instead of any medical need. I think they overtreated the kids with good insurance to offset the insurance with lower payouts.
Don’t get your hopes up, the NYT published the ‘Zyprexa Papers’ and now it’s in a new form and back under patent.
It’s like the doctors are passing around a rubics cube in a circle with each doctor using a different strategy and not being able to figure out why their strategy doesn’t work.
That gets to the fundamental difference between psychiatry and the rest of medicine. They do not use the scientific method and instead rely on subjective self report or observational data. The problem is compounded by other physicians not acknowledging this fundamental flaw.
I’ve heard mixed information about heat and light sensitivity with lithium. Some say it’s the lithium and others say it’s mood disorder marker. I’ve been off lithium for 15 years and heat and bright lights are still miserable.
I wondered the same thing about the FDA. They clearly lowered their standards for drugs treating DSM conditions. They seem to have a history of believing bad research and then not taking corrective action when new side effects are learned. The drug companies all plead guilty to making false claims about these drugs yet never made them correct the harm.
What if the doctor helped you find a diet you enjoy that improved you mood? Or what if the doctor suggested some easy exercises so that nagging injury quit hurting? Of course you don’t want to talk about your mood to a psychiatrists that is only trained to prescibe and not to heal or prevent.
The sad truth is doctors don’t study the alternatives. That requires nutritionists, physical therapists, and other professions that treat the person and not just the symptoms.
How long until they figure out Zyprexa blocks the effects?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3973179/
This is an interesting comparison of the costs of Zyprexa compared to lithium by analyzing insurance claims. Zyprexa was wonderful drug to experience but just like other substances it is difficult to say the benefits outweigh the harms.
Diabetes and Parkinsons are just not worth the benefits.
It’s worth noting many of these areas use traditional medicine focused on lifestyle and restoring the body to balance. If conditions like depression, psychosis, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and Crohns are caused by the immune system being unbalanced then most medical professionals would agree lifestyle changes like should always be used instead of drugs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical_settlements
Most of these drugs are part of the ‘bipolar cocktail’ that is a prerequisite for the ‘treatment resistant’ form.
These are not civil cases, they are the result of the drug companies pleading guilty to criminal acts.
There’s actually really good research showing chemicals (vitamins, minerals, antioxidants) we consume in our daily diet are safer and more effective than prescription drugs. For example hop tea has been shown to work better than xanax.
My personal revenge fantasy is to make psychiatry obsolete with food that can beat the drugs in clinical trials.
Careful, I asked that as a teenager on a SSRI in 1994 and they put me on Haldol.
This is why I believe it is important to draw attention to parallels in other medical specialties and how they responded when their research was questioned. The American Psychological Association (the other APA) heard the whistle of cognitive dissonance and after reviewing their research blew an air horn on themselves in the form the the replication crisis. Recent developments in Alzheimers research are placing neurology and drug companies (again) where psychiatry was 15 years ago. Do they do what is right and correct the mistake or they do keep digging deeper and ignore the source of cognitive dissonance like psychiatry.
Sometimes the records aren’t even the right patient. As a preteen they had me confused with another patient and would argue with me when I resisted being given his treatments. At one point they gave me his EEG and him my ECG. The doctor thought I was going to have a heart attack from the meds and never realized what I meant when I said ‘it wasn’t my heart.’
Start here
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-congress-recommending-health-program
I don’t think the media is a matter of left or right as much as it is the advertisers threatening to pull their advertisements from legitimate sources of information. Is Tucker Carlson really considered are reliable source? He may be right on this one but people are able to brush it off as another part of the cult.
Actually very FEW drugs are illegal if you simply consider them a chemical that interacts with the body. The supplement industry is largely regulated by consumer fraud laws that prevent companies from making false claims about a drugs benefits. This is why the criminal guilty pleas by the drug companies were for making false claims about the benefits and deceiving customers about side effects.
I strongly agree with you on the problem of family making decisions for loved ones in the mental health system, especially for minors. Even in the best circumstances family is forced to make an unfair decision under pressure from psychiatrists and rarely with accurate information. It is important to recognize the family of the patients are just as much a victim of the fraud as the patients themselves. This same dynamic is occurring in elderly patients suffering from Alzheimers and just like with mental health we are seeing drugs based on fraudulent research that don’t work being given to individuals unable to give consent.
Yes, for many diseases 15% is great, but only if the side effects are benign. With antidepressants far more than 15% experience serious side effects that are often worse than the original disease.
As a child of cure I’m in.
Elon Musk is a missed opportunity for mental health reform. Saying ‘At least I didn’t buy Twitter’ can really put your own mental health into context withbthe bigger problem.
It creates a lot of the same informed consent issues present in using psych drugs in minors. Family is forced into the impossible position of making medical decisions based on questionable research like Study 329. I’m concerned we are recreating that situation except with children making the decision for parents. A single Alzheimers drug caused Medicare to change everyone’s rates. The approval process was sloppy and red flags were ignored. The initial research is based on bad science. Sounds like they didn’t learn and made all the same mistakes.
They’re hoping nobody sees the similarities between psych drugs and Alzheimers drugs not working and why.
What if psychosis was on a spectrum dependent on the severity of the trauma? There is growing evidence showing psychosis may be the immune systems defense against contradictory beliefs as in cognitive dissonance (this is often highly visible in politics and religion). Past trauma causes the immune system to over react to future stresses resulting in damage from stress hormones. One theory is that the stress hormones cause physical damage to the brain related to the damage of prescription psych drugs and the result is psychosis.
I may to totally wrong but my bigger point is that there is value exploring theories bridge that darkness between objective science and the subjective theories that brought us to MIA.
I agree genetics are overrated but if mental illness is a response to environmental stress then from an evolutionary view rapid changes to society would create new stressors and new stress response. An example of this would be variable moods over the course of a year with periods of mania during resource rich times and depressed activity when resources are scarce. This was tremendously helpful for thousands of years in an agrarian society but maladaptive in modern society that requires 8 hr shifts worked 5 days a week for 50 weeks a year instead of simply 2000 hours when needed over the course of a year.
Psychiatrists are like physicists who deny the theory of relativity.
Most mental illness can probably be traced back to the immune systems fight or flight response and the cascade of events triggered. The real illness is the variability in how an individual responds to stress. A malnourished sleep deprived body will react differently than a healthy body. Even a healthy body can be overwhelmed if the stress is either extreme in severity or in cumulative exposure. Ultimately the psychosis is a symptom of damage done to the ‘lizard brain’ from prolonged exposure to the adrenaline, epinephrine, and cortisol etc (precursors to IL’s and cytokines) released during the stressful event. This is consistent with the inflammation theory and explains SSRI’s are better understood as anti-inflammatory agents and not antidepressants.
We’re giving Paxil to dogs and ketamine to humans, which is more inhumane?
What really helped me was viewing my mood disorder through an unemotional lense of evolution. It is stunning how different it is in the context of thousands of years evolving in an agrarian society where times of extreme activity to collect resources intermixed with periods of low activity to preserve resources. It also explains how an evolutionary advantage can to turn into a disadvantage due to stark societal changes like the industrial revolution.
I’m interested in the cost benefit analysis that says this is a good use of scarce resources. On the surface it sounds like a great idea but does it actually help people? My medical provider is currently hiring for this hotline and as someone a BA in psychology and way to much personal experience it is a tempting employment solution to my Medicaid problem.
My concern is when I searched for studies to justify the costs of the 988 number with objective research I ended up here. Mad in America is a great organization but ending up here usually means there is no scientific justification for the policy I am researching.
My theory (and not necessarily a correct theory) is that ‘antidepressants’ mechanism of action is through inflammation changes that alter the permeability of the blood brain barrier. I believe my ‘bipolar’ mood disorder is a presentation of changes in inflammation with low inflammation being associated elevated moods and high inflammation being associated with depressed moods. I also believe depression is like a fever and simply a component of a larger immune response. If you think of the ‘fight or flight’ response as your immune system responding to a threat then the path to a medically based cause and eventual treatments.
Be careful making the mistake that depression has a single cause and generalizing my experience to your own. A virus and a bacteria both cause the immune response of fever but treating the cause of that fever requires two very different treatment protocols.
From a mental health standpoint the real concerns are the unintended consequences. Personally it’s none of my business what another person decides to do with their body. My concern is that legislating morality is itself is often an immoral act. Psychiatry has a checkered history largely because of its attempt to pathologize morality and much of it is rooted in the same religious movement responsible for the current abortion debate. Many of the solutions we need are not possible without legislative action and the mental health community must quit accepting condescending lip service and start demanding evidence based solutions.
This is an interesting subject that I initially wanted dismiss but second glance realized it is a foundational obstacle to receiving medical care for anyone harmed by the system.
I am a difficult anxious patient with PTSD from mood disorder treatments so when a medical professional documents my anxiety with a blood pressure cuff without realizing the hell I’m in it feels like I’m being discriminated against. The real problem is that if they ask about my blood pressure I’m more than happy share my accurate data from when I practice biofeedback.
There are obvious benefits to looking at raising awareness to discriminatory practices like daylight savings time, past failed treatments, and a mental health system more similar to the criminal justice system than medicine. That said it is important not repeat the mistakes of idiot, moron, and imbecile.
I wish they would stop the false marketing of calling SSRI’s antidepressants. If they actually listened to the patients they would realize they are anti-inflammatory drugs.
What about the CR (controlled release) scam. I started on Paxil CR (GSK plc) pretty soon after it came out and within weeks had a depressive episodes. At the time they blamed it on me and not production facility in Puerto Rico the FDA ended up shutting down.
It’s like they’re arguing about if they should throw the baby out with the bathwater without realizing they already killed the baby.
Psychiatric fraud has major implications. Modern vaccine resistance is rooted in mainstream medicine’s failure to respond to autism thus creating a desperate group of patients willing to accept an explanation of their condition with zero scientific basis. This is a great example of the ‘white wall of silence’ where doctors protect themselves at the expense of society.
What do I use to refer to the SSRI and cannabis I use to alleviate PTSD symptoms caused by substances prescribed by a cultist?
Imagining can be misleading in all areas of medicine but psychiatry has very little objective data to work with. Currently describing symptoms to psychiatrist is about as useful as trying to describe the color blue to someone who has been blind since birth. Excessive unnecessary imagining can be harmful but it is minimally invasive and provides information that can be reviewed by more than one individual for interpretation. It probably is not very useful right now but neither are the invasive medications. As we all know profit is a major driver American healthcare and we’re pretty hard to make profitable which is why we’re either ignored or drugged. I feel like a psychiatrist justifying their profession but imagining is highly profitable and has the advantage of being minimally invasive. It may require new techniques and take milli9ns to establish the needed imagining data base but I’m pretty sure my manic brain will look quit different when compared to my depressed brain.
I had to cut off contact to a neurologist relative over this issue. He said informed consent simply is not possible without medical school. I understand his point but at least be honest about what you don’t know. Imaging technology has advanced enough to justify advanced imaging for mental illness.
I think lithium was a missed opportunity to focus more on natural treatments as opposed to patented pharmaceuticals the body has no experience with. My personal experience is that foods high in B vitamins and electrolytes help me manage my mood fluctuations in a way I can adjust as needed unlike pharmaceuticals.
‘Problems in living’ sounds a lot like how ‘failure to adjust’ is used to turn behaviors that are beneficial during millions of years of evolution but suddenly abnormal in an industrialized world. My body tends to respond to the sun and not to a clock that is arbitrarily changed by an hour twice a day.
I was wondered if Einstein’s definition of insanity was commentary on psychiatry.
There is great benefit for a well educated consumer. It is also morally dishonest to disregard that information on MIA could be dangerous in the wrong context.
A well educated patient, being necessary to the maintenance of a working mental health system, should not have their access to information infringed.
Almost every drug used to treat bipolar disorder was involved in some form of criminal settlement and lithium is the only drug that I don’t feel defrauded me. It was easy to understand why it would work. Learning how all those elements around it helped my mental health benefited my health more than any other treatment. Unlike prescription drugs they can be altered on a seasonal basis more in line with our seasonal changes. Lithium seems like a great candidate for microdosing studies.
When I was a teenager and in group therapy I always wondered why people had to include their diagnosis and medications in their introduction. Almost like they’re trying to get you to believe something that doesn’t have any scientific basis. A primary care doctor focused on improving your overall health is a far better mental health professional than any psychiatrist not willing to acknowledge the problems in their own profession.
There’s any number of Planters products that could beat most psychiatric drugs. In the US they have a heart logo because they showed a strong relationship to heart health. Pretty sure the science is a lot better for a brain logo.
When I was 16 (1994) I tried to blow the whistle about how the SSRI made me feel weird. The doctors response was Haldol on which I subsequently overdosed. This was two years after a different SSRI lead to a tricyclic overdose. I was always confused about how easily they believed me about those not being suicide attempts. In hindsight I wonder if they new something I didn’t.