Psychiatrists consider Tom Cruise’s character to be the bad guy in that movie, as he destroys their utopia.
The Star Wars character they identify with is the torture robot.
Etc
Also the false positive rate is probably an order of magnitude lower and generally people are in prison for something they actually did instead of something they might do.
If mental illness would exist and
If it could reliably be tested for and
If violence could reliably be predicted and
If violence could be prevented by treatment
Than forced treatment might be justified.
So that’s 4 ifs which currently aren’t satisfied.
The “last resort” part is just BS anyway.
Here’s a list of other resorts tried before I was involuntarily hospitalized for alledged suizidality:
As you can see it’s rather short.
I’m not a native english speaker, so my knowledge of english proverbs is limited. 😉
Luckily most people with autism diagnoses do not get “medicated”.
What you said about dogs reminded me of a truth I had long forgotten. Thanks for that.
Fantastic post.
This will surely come in handy.
Disgusting.
Cool.
Have they considered leaving the doors open, so interested people can have a look at their nice building and leave when they want to?
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
That’s a good one. I hope you don’t mind me stealing it.
As someone who works at a boarding school for autistic adolescents, I agree with the text. Some decisions are clearly made with money being a higher priority than the wellbeing of the kids. Others seem rooted in some form of helpers complex.
Every last bit of mental distress gets attributed to autism. Even when it very clearly is caused by e.g. abusive parents.
Thanks for the info. =)
Philip,
Obviously I know neither you nor Mr. Pies personally. But the lengths you go to here seem a bit over the top.
The treatment doesn’t work so the diagnosis was wrong is quite a reasonable assumption.
Way better than psychiatrys norm of the treatment doesn’t work so let’s try more of the same and add some electroshocks.
Max Planck said: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Let Pies rest and focus on educating the next generation. You’re arguing with delusions.
Thanks.
I wish you all the best in your recovery from this barbaric practise.
Sorry for the offtopic, but it seems you really need a dose of this:
Super common theme there with psychiatrists insisting they know how you feel better than you do yourself. Was the same for me.
“You’re suicidal.” ” No, I’m not.”
It’s gaslighting and mental rape.
Glad you got out of there and found someone who is a real doctor and foremost a decent human being.
Yeah, let’s just induce random electric currents into this unbelievably complex system we only have the vaguest of understandings of. What could possibly go wrong?
/sarcasm
“One colleague put it well when she described DSM diagnosis and treatment plans as “hate language.” For this is the language one would use to describe people they not only did not believe but also disliked.”
QFT
“While we know this can save lives”
Nope, actually you don’t. There’s zero evidence of coercive hospitalizations lowering the number of suicides.
Actually the evidence points the other direction. I.e. between german states there is a positive correlation between number of suicides and number of coercive hospitalizations.
You actually give the reason for that right there, Mrs. Hughes: “coercion can also cause lasting trauma and distress”
A friend of mine died from a brain tumor which was missdiagnosed as depression at first.
I doubt an earlier MRT would have saved him, but it should still have been done before diagnosing a mental illness.
I have to wonder how many people getting a psych diagnosis actually have a real physical illness causing psych symptoms. This real illness will never get treated once a mental illness is blamed.
Clearly Stea at al. are suffering from delusions (e.g. they seem to forget that psychiatry locks people up and forces them to take drugs, while they suffer from the delusion that psychiatric “treatment” is usually accompanied by informed consent).
These delusions are caused by chemical imbalances in their brains. (Because I said so.)
5 years in a “protected” psych ward and 150mg chlorpromazine daily for life should fix them right up.
Putting aside that such as endeavour is grotesquely huxleyian for a moment.
I’ve written some python code to download psychiatric research from medrchiv.org and train a word2vec model on it. Even in psychiatric literature schizophrenia and mood disorders are not distinguishable entities. This is especially true for bipolar, which has a cosinus similiarity of ~0.6 to schizophrenia. That’s one of the highest similiarities found out of all diagnoses. Off the top of my head only anxiety and depression (~0.7) are more closely related.
Even assuming psychiatric dianoses were valid (as in corresponding to a physical thing) the current terms used would be highly correlated and fail to describe different things. Birnbaum et al are trying to run before they can walk.
Edit: test accuracy should always be given in two numbers. sensitivity and specificity. A specificity of 80% is in no way even remotely acceptable. It would mean that 20% of test subjects would be called schizophrenic, even tho they aren’t. For comparision: the current covid tests have a specificity (and sensitivity) of >99% and even they produce a lot of false positives, when covid is relatively rare in the base population.
Sorry Steve, should have taken a closer look at your pic, begore diagnosing xou with baldness. xD
Too much hair obviously causes mania.
In a bold move bald man Steve McCrea suggests baldness as a biomarker for depression. While research hasn’t been conducted yet, top psychiatric experts agree this could be a breakthrough in finding the biological causes of depression. They assume there is a chemical imbalance at the root of hair and depression.
Well, at least that particular one was smart enough to not document his own misconduct. In fact he wrote a total of zero pages of documentation. Or it has been withheld from me.
As he acted ex officio during my coercive hospitalization in 2016, I don’t consider this to be a breach of his privacy.
When pressed on what a depression is supposed to be, psychiatrist Kay-Wilko Schierhorn told me it was an imbalance of seretonin in the brain.
So yes, psychiatrists do that.
So that was what? Two decades ago?
It’s great that the diagnosis has helped you, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be overused now.
And where it is overused it masks real struggles and prevents needed solutions. Abused children don’t need therapy for autism. They need therapy for their parents.
I’d expect more compassion and humanity from the average cop over the average psychiatrist. Less “mental health training” will make it more likely they understand something as a normal emotional reaction than as a magic mental illness.
Involuntary commitments are a crime against humanity. They need to stop, not be done by different persons.
“Understand that if they are using this label for themselves, it’s likely because it’s serving them somehow. Instead, ask them what autism means for them.”
That’s from your informed adult perspective.
I work with adolescents with autism diagnoses and for a lot of them it has been forced onto them, is not serving them and is experienced as degrading. In many cases it also seems completely unjustified to me.
A lot of child and youth psychiatrists seem to know exactly two labels, ADHS and ASD, and stamp them on everyone crossing their paths. Right on the cutoff of ADOS is something I see more often than not. The fishing for a diagnosis is super obvious.
Morning,
That’s why activism for rights of people with mental illness should focus on judges and lawmakers. They need to be able to make informed dicisions instead of being entranced by psychiatries propaganda.
Yes Steve,
when there are known causes for maladjusted behaviours in the physical realm like thyroid ilness or abuse there is no reason to resort to magical explanations like ASD or ADHD.
I was thinking of one of “my” boys in particular. His behaviour is a catastrophy. He’s provoking all the other kids and it seems he wants to be beaten up. He has an ADHS diagnosis and he is going to get an ASD diagnosis most likely just so he can stay in our institution, as it’s a boarding school for autistics.
He does not show any behaviour that falls under the label autism in any way. The ADHS label is more fitting … BUT he has a father that beat him up so thoroughly that he even stopped fighting back as “the beatings are shorter this way”. This is the most likely cause of his behaviour. As many victims of abuse and especially children he still loves his father (and his mother who talked him out of involving the police).
Now: should he wrongfully get an ASD diagnosis, so he can stay with us, where he is safe from physical violence? Should he get a more fitting diagnosis like CPTSD so he can get help elsewhere? Should he go to a regular childrens home? Should he get send back to his abusive parents?
Sometimes all options suck.
I meant it in more of a linguistic way.
As in: even within their language of disdain and devaluation they fail to use the correct term.
Also not all psychiatric terms are on an equal level of invalidity. Addictions exist in the physical reality sense of existing. Trauma exists at least in the psychological reality of the traumatized person and in social reality. Maybe even in physical reality, provable by increased levels of stress hormones or elevated heartrate.
Autisms’ plane of existance is the social one or with Wittgenstein: its meaning is it’s use in language. It doesn’t appear to have an underlying physical existance. The same is true of many other psychiatric terms. For example ASPD is basically the same term as “asshole” (the insult, not the physical thing 😉 ). It has a use in communication, but no physical existance.
I work with adolescents with autism diagnoses.
The points you bring up here mirror my experiences. I think autism is a useful word to describe a set of challenges some people face in life. To me there appears to be a distinct autistic way of problems with understanding social reality and thoughts of others. Still this makes autism a word to describe human behaviour and not a disease.
About half of the adolescents I work with do not show that at all. They might still have an “abnormal” way of social communication, but not in the autistic sense. It can usually be pointed down to abuse suffered during childhood and should be spoken of as CPTSD in the language of diagnostics or attachement disorder in the language of paedagogics.
Unfortunately a lot of psychiatrist suck at differential diagnostics and a lot of parents continue their abuse by seeking a diagnostic label for their child.
“We hospitalize people at risk of suicide, even though we don’t have any evidence that hospitalizing them is particularly helpful.”
So how about you don’t do that? It’s not that hard not to do.
Maybe you should teach your operators about the reality of it. Out of a 100 persons they want to call the cops on 1 will commit suicide anyway, 1 will be saved, 1 will be driven into suicide by the very measure that’s supposed to help them, 96 would have not commited suicide anyway, but you will traumatize at least half of them, and if you’re in the US 1 will get killed by cops or nurses.
If any of your operators still want to call the cops after that, fire them. They are clearly sadistic pos.
To a psychiatrist any belief you could have, that’s wrong in their eyes, can qualify as a delusion. That includes obviously true believes about facts outside the psychiatrists knowledge.
When I was locked up, I was allegedly psychotic. At no point in the documentation is there even a hint of what was supposed to be my psychotic belief. In a later court revision one of the psychiatrists explained it by me stating that I heard voices in the hallway before cops entered my appartement. Well, there were cops in the hallway who tried to annouce themselves. I just didn’t understand them as I was taking a shower. Reality is a delusion to those idiots.
One of the doctors (not a psychiatrist) asked me if I thought I was being locked up just for the money. I did neither hold nor express that belief. At least not until I was asked. Fucking psychiatrists confusing their own thoughts for my delusions.
It’s a good write up.
Yeah Steve,
The percentage of wrong convictions is also waaaaay lower. >95% of alleged suicidals who get hospitalized involuntarily would not have killed themselves anyway. If a judge would have a rate of >95% of his convicted being not guilty, I’d expect him to quit his job on the spot.
Exactly.
She got lucky and doesn’t even know it.
“…lacking direct experimental confirmation…”
That’s not how science works. To test a hypothesis you try to prove it wrong. You don’t confirm it.
Also the chemical imbalance theory dates back to the 4 humors in ancient greece.
Who let these pseudointelectuals anywhere near a university?
There is no ethical dilemma.
That would require working treatments. There are none. If there were working treatments, you’d get the dilemma of helping someone against their will. That’s not the case. Coerced psychiatry is harming people against their will, while under the delusion of helping. That’s abuse. It is the same thing abusive parents do, when they hit their child to “fix” it.
Death penalty is barbaric.
Every life saved from it is a good thing, even if it was done for the wrong reasons.
Great summary of psychiatrys core problems.
“Understandable” is an important concept. Most behaviours are if you actually know the background.
It’s going to take a while until this becomes mainstream with all the financial and power interests in keeping the status quo.
It has somehat fallen out of favour in psychology, but is still noted for its importance in the beginnings of systemtheory.
Great article.
I’ve been thinking along similar lines although in different language.
To me coercive psychiatry commits acts of hate in the name of (twisted) love, thereby creating the double binds Bateson theorized to cause schizophrenia.
Even assuming there is a genetically caused thing one could call schizophrenia, it would never be found, because the diagnostic process is such trash, that it barely improves upon monkeys assigning diagnosis by throwing darts. If even at all.
If most of the people called schizophrenic in fact aren’t, you’re not going to find what causes schizophrenia.
Assume schizophrenia is 100% explained by genetics. For a study of the entire genome to find only 2%, you’d have to have 98% missdiagnosis ratio.
*Thumps up*
“It is an uphill battle convincing my parents and nurse practitioner that these medications are more harmful than helpful.”
Your parents should support you as long as your goals aren’t immoral. Helping someone isn’t about forcing your goals on them. I hope they will find the strength to realise that, even if they have doubts.
I also hope you will find your place in the economy while upholding your morals. Not all commerce is bad. There’s nothing wrong with building tables or houses, growing crops, writing books and many other occupations.
You’ll find your way.
Good point.
Also anyone who claims to be right because he is an expert probably lacks expertise, while anyone with expertise will explain why they are right instead of claiming to be an expert.
It’s unbelievable such a barbaric treatment is still in use.
Would you try fixing a computer by random electric shocks? No? How about a brain, which is infinitely more complex and less understood?
Looking forward to this.
On the Kuhn part. Planck said it shorter (and way more pessimistic):
“A new scientific truth does not tend to assert itself in such a way that its opponents are convinced and declare themselves to be lectured, but rather by the fact that the opponents are gradually dying out and that the growing generation is familiar with the truth from the outset.”
Dying is a bit harsh. Retiring would be enough.
“Having a crisis is not an illness!”
Actual conversation from when I was locked up ina psych ward. I was never told a diagnosis, so I made a point of asking every day.
Me: can I go now?
Psycho: No.
Me: so have you figured out what I habe?
Psycho: you have a crisis.
Me: that’s not a category of ICD-10 and the only crisis I have is being locked up here. Are you an idiot?
Psycho: *silence*
Horrible those kids go from one hell to another.
They even get blamed for it by labeling them with a diagnosis, while in reality they have “shitty parents syndrome”.
Steve,
Literally everything will be interpreted as sign of mental illness.
I couldn’t sleep during my first night locked up. Pretty normal considering the circumstances. Quite a lot of people get stressed out to the point where they can’t sleep by far less, like going on vacation the day after. Not for psychiatrists. They wanted me to take neuroleptics for that.
I asked what the “up to” part of “can be held up to day X” in the court order meant. To the psychiatrist that was “concretism” and a sign of schizophrenia. To anyone else that would have been a perfectly normal question.
The psychiatrists I dealt with were mentally ill themself. Not surprising when your day job consists of abusing people, who in turn hate your guts and show it.
Thank you, Paula, and please keep your work.
Half a world away and that still mirrors what I experienced closely
Secret and bullshit diagnosis? Check.
Being pushed towards medication for no reason? Check.
The feeling it was about money? Check. (I got asked by one of the docs if I thought it was about money without me ever thinking or saying anything like that prior. It was her thought. I thought of them as merely incompetent.)
.
.
.
Miata? Check. xD
Boans,
That sounds horrible. Where do you live, if I may ask. So I can never go there…
30 watt,
I can relate. I luckily have some friends who know the story and are sympathetic. I’ve also lost some people. They usually gave the “advice” to talk about it with a therapist.
I never know when to bring it up with new people.
It has been a significant contributor to losing a romantic relationship.
Sam,
Gladly I’ve never been raped, but it is the only analogy I can think of. Total powerlessness.
I’ve had my life believably threatened by someone and there was a moment I thought I’d die, but I called the cops, he got sentenced and it took a whileybut I’m over it now. Thoughts about it are rare and not threatening anymore.
Being locked up in a psychward was so much worse it wasn’t in the same ballpark, the same league, the same friggin universe. It haunts me to this day. I’ll never get justice. (But I have a bottle of Champagne reserved for the day coercive psychiatry gets outlawed here.)
And I got lucky. It was just 7 days. I did not take any drugs. I got rid of the alledged schizophrenia diagnosis. I’m certain I walked with minor injuries compared to many others. Survivors guilt ain’t no fun either.
I hope you can find a doc you can trust for physical needs.
“Fear of being called mentally ill and all that follows from that, including losing support from friends and family, who want you to confine your talk to a therapist behind closed doors, just take psychiatric drugs, and/or agree to be hospitalized.”
You are understating this.
It is absolute terror of being locked up, abused and losing all control over your life.
I’ve been locked up for alledged suicidality and there is no way I’ll talk to any psychiatrist about how I feel ever again.
Most psychopharmalogical research is such trash, that it’s methodology would also show that rum cures the flu.
1. Get a bunch of people payed by the rum industry to be your researchers.
2. Get a bunch of alcoholics with a flu as test subjects.
3. Use water as placebo.
4. Have your scale for flu symptoms also include symptoms caused by alcohol withdrawl like headaches.
5. Subjects on rum will do better.
6. Rum cures the flu proven.
“That aspect of our site is designed to give voice to a community of readers, and given that many in this community had horrible experiences as psychiatric patients (or were forcibly treated in hospitals), you can find such sentiments there.”
At the heart of this is the delusion that proponents of psychiarty are rational and non emotional, while its critics are irrational and emotional.*
It is delusional for two reasons:
1. Psychiatrist are not unemotional. Critics of psychiatry being right would turn their life into a lie and make them criminals of the worst sort. Psychiatrists can not face this.
2. Critics of psychiatry are not irrational. It is the critics of psychiatry interpreting the data in a rational way. I.e. forced deprivation of liberty in case of suicide risk. Someone feeling better and becoming less suicidal by being locked up against their will is a very strong claim and counter to common human experience, therefore it would need strong evidence to support it. Alas there is none. Yet “experts” claim it’s the right thing to do.
*That’s tied into the sexism of man=rational=good and woman=emotional=bad. But that’s taking it too far here.
I work with teens and young adults with autism diagnosises. I estimate at least 1/3 of them to be complete bullshit. As in no or barely any autistic traits whatsoever. Often times it is parents who have severe problems themselves, mistreat their kids and then seek a diagnosis, when the kids behavioural problems are actually caused by their own abuse. (Psyhiatrist assesment) ADOS right on the cutoff with a way higher (parental assesment) ADI-R is more common than not. Some of them have done a (self assesment) AQ, none of them qualified for autism on that.
The collusion/codependance between psychiatry and the justice system is the worst of it all.
Psychiatrist can imprison, abuse and murder people basically at will, because judiciary is turning a blind eye in exchange for diagnosis of people they deem especially dangerous.
The missing 83% are most likely just arbitrariness in diagnosis.
They told the judge I might be schizophrenic. They just knew it was bullshit. After they withheld the court order from me, I got hold of it through a lawyer. Confronted with their bullshit they didn’t even try to defend it. They also withheld parts of the documentation from me and still are four years later. Going so far as to have their secretary lying to me about never receiving my request to see the documentation, while taking notes on that very request.
In Germany there has to be an ICD-10 diagnosis for reimbursement by insurance companies. The diagnosis towards the insurance company was adjustment disorder.
One of the psychos also gave me that crap about not putting people in boxes when asked for a diagnosis. Pretty insulting considering I was actually locked up in a very real box without a reason given.
The imaginary dialogue really hit home. I’ve had basically the same dialogue with a psychiatrist, when I was locked up in a psych ward. As it was never disclosed to me what mental illness I was supposed to have, I made a point of asking every day.
Me: can I go home now?
Psycho: no
Me: so have you made up your mind about what I have?
Psycho: you’re in crisis.
Me: that’s no category of icd 10 and the only crisis I’m in is being locked up here.
Psycho: you aren’t locked up. You are accomodated (orig. german: untergebracht).
Me: are you an idiot?
Psycho: ….
Psychiatrists consider Tom Cruise’s character to be the bad guy in that movie, as he destroys their utopia.
The Star Wars character they identify with is the torture robot.
Etc
Also the false positive rate is probably an order of magnitude lower and generally people are in prison for something they actually did instead of something they might do.
If mental illness would exist and
If it could reliably be tested for and
If violence could reliably be predicted and
If violence could be prevented by treatment
Than forced treatment might be justified.
So that’s 4 ifs which currently aren’t satisfied.
The “last resort” part is just BS anyway.
Here’s a list of other resorts tried before I was involuntarily hospitalized for alledged suizidality:
As you can see it’s rather short.
I’m not a native english speaker, so my knowledge of english proverbs is limited. 😉
Luckily most people with autism diagnoses do not get “medicated”.
What you said about dogs reminded me of a truth I had long forgotten. Thanks for that.
Fantastic post.
This will surely come in handy.
Disgusting.
Cool.
Have they considered leaving the doors open, so interested people can have a look at their nice building and leave when they want to?
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
That’s a good one. I hope you don’t mind me stealing it.
As someone who works at a boarding school for autistic adolescents, I agree with the text. Some decisions are clearly made with money being a higher priority than the wellbeing of the kids. Others seem rooted in some form of helpers complex.
Every last bit of mental distress gets attributed to autism. Even when it very clearly is caused by e.g. abusive parents.
Thanks for the info. =)
Philip,
Obviously I know neither you nor Mr. Pies personally. But the lengths you go to here seem a bit over the top.
The treatment doesn’t work so the diagnosis was wrong is quite a reasonable assumption.
Way better than psychiatrys norm of the treatment doesn’t work so let’s try more of the same and add some electroshocks.
Max Planck said: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Let Pies rest and focus on educating the next generation. You’re arguing with delusions.
Thanks.
I wish you all the best in your recovery from this barbaric practise.
Sorry for the offtopic, but it seems you really need a dose of this:
https://youtube.com/c/ThreeArrows
Super common theme there with psychiatrists insisting they know how you feel better than you do yourself. Was the same for me.
“You’re suicidal.” ” No, I’m not.”
It’s gaslighting and mental rape.
Glad you got out of there and found someone who is a real doctor and foremost a decent human being.
Yeah, let’s just induce random electric currents into this unbelievably complex system we only have the vaguest of understandings of. What could possibly go wrong?
/sarcasm
“One colleague put it well when she described DSM diagnosis and treatment plans as “hate language.” For this is the language one would use to describe people they not only did not believe but also disliked.”
QFT
“While we know this can save lives”
Nope, actually you don’t. There’s zero evidence of coercive hospitalizations lowering the number of suicides.
Actually the evidence points the other direction. I.e. between german states there is a positive correlation between number of suicides and number of coercive hospitalizations.
You actually give the reason for that right there, Mrs. Hughes: “coercion can also cause lasting trauma and distress”
A friend of mine died from a brain tumor which was missdiagnosed as depression at first.
I doubt an earlier MRT would have saved him, but it should still have been done before diagnosing a mental illness.
I have to wonder how many people getting a psych diagnosis actually have a real physical illness causing psych symptoms. This real illness will never get treated once a mental illness is blamed.
Clearly Stea at al. are suffering from delusions (e.g. they seem to forget that psychiatry locks people up and forces them to take drugs, while they suffer from the delusion that psychiatric “treatment” is usually accompanied by informed consent).
These delusions are caused by chemical imbalances in their brains. (Because I said so.)
5 years in a “protected” psych ward and 150mg chlorpromazine daily for life should fix them right up.
Putting aside that such as endeavour is grotesquely huxleyian for a moment.
I’ve written some python code to download psychiatric research from medrchiv.org and train a word2vec model on it. Even in psychiatric literature schizophrenia and mood disorders are not distinguishable entities. This is especially true for bipolar, which has a cosinus similiarity of ~0.6 to schizophrenia. That’s one of the highest similiarities found out of all diagnoses. Off the top of my head only anxiety and depression (~0.7) are more closely related.
Even assuming psychiatric dianoses were valid (as in corresponding to a physical thing) the current terms used would be highly correlated and fail to describe different things. Birnbaum et al are trying to run before they can walk.
Edit: test accuracy should always be given in two numbers. sensitivity and specificity. A specificity of 80% is in no way even remotely acceptable. It would mean that 20% of test subjects would be called schizophrenic, even tho they aren’t. For comparision: the current covid tests have a specificity (and sensitivity) of >99% and even they produce a lot of false positives, when covid is relatively rare in the base population.
Sorry Steve, should have taken a closer look at your pic, begore diagnosing xou with baldness. xD
Too much hair obviously causes mania.
In a bold move bald man Steve McCrea suggests baldness as a biomarker for depression. While research hasn’t been conducted yet, top psychiatric experts agree this could be a breakthrough in finding the biological causes of depression. They assume there is a chemical imbalance at the root of hair and depression.
Well, at least that particular one was smart enough to not document his own misconduct. In fact he wrote a total of zero pages of documentation. Or it has been withheld from me.
As he acted ex officio during my coercive hospitalization in 2016, I don’t consider this to be a breach of his privacy.
When pressed on what a depression is supposed to be, psychiatrist Kay-Wilko Schierhorn told me it was an imbalance of seretonin in the brain.
So yes, psychiatrists do that.
So that was what? Two decades ago?
It’s great that the diagnosis has helped you, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be overused now.
And where it is overused it masks real struggles and prevents needed solutions. Abused children don’t need therapy for autism. They need therapy for their parents.
I’d expect more compassion and humanity from the average cop over the average psychiatrist. Less “mental health training” will make it more likely they understand something as a normal emotional reaction than as a magic mental illness.
Involuntary commitments are a crime against humanity. They need to stop, not be done by different persons.
“Understand that if they are using this label for themselves, it’s likely because it’s serving them somehow. Instead, ask them what autism means for them.”
That’s from your informed adult perspective.
I work with adolescents with autism diagnoses and for a lot of them it has been forced onto them, is not serving them and is experienced as degrading. In many cases it also seems completely unjustified to me.
A lot of child and youth psychiatrists seem to know exactly two labels, ADHS and ASD, and stamp them on everyone crossing their paths. Right on the cutoff of ADOS is something I see more often than not. The fishing for a diagnosis is super obvious.
Morning,
That’s why activism for rights of people with mental illness should focus on judges and lawmakers. They need to be able to make informed dicisions instead of being entranced by psychiatries propaganda.
Yes Steve,
when there are known causes for maladjusted behaviours in the physical realm like thyroid ilness or abuse there is no reason to resort to magical explanations like ASD or ADHD.
I was thinking of one of “my” boys in particular. His behaviour is a catastrophy. He’s provoking all the other kids and it seems he wants to be beaten up. He has an ADHS diagnosis and he is going to get an ASD diagnosis most likely just so he can stay in our institution, as it’s a boarding school for autistics.
He does not show any behaviour that falls under the label autism in any way. The ADHS label is more fitting … BUT he has a father that beat him up so thoroughly that he even stopped fighting back as “the beatings are shorter this way”. This is the most likely cause of his behaviour. As many victims of abuse and especially children he still loves his father (and his mother who talked him out of involving the police).
Now: should he wrongfully get an ASD diagnosis, so he can stay with us, where he is safe from physical violence? Should he get a more fitting diagnosis like CPTSD so he can get help elsewhere? Should he go to a regular childrens home? Should he get send back to his abusive parents?
Sometimes all options suck.
I meant it in more of a linguistic way.
As in: even within their language of disdain and devaluation they fail to use the correct term.
Also not all psychiatric terms are on an equal level of invalidity. Addictions exist in the physical reality sense of existing. Trauma exists at least in the psychological reality of the traumatized person and in social reality. Maybe even in physical reality, provable by increased levels of stress hormones or elevated heartrate.
Autisms’ plane of existance is the social one or with Wittgenstein: its meaning is it’s use in language. It doesn’t appear to have an underlying physical existance. The same is true of many other psychiatric terms. For example ASPD is basically the same term as “asshole” (the insult, not the physical thing 😉 ). It has a use in communication, but no physical existance.
I work with adolescents with autism diagnoses.
The points you bring up here mirror my experiences. I think autism is a useful word to describe a set of challenges some people face in life. To me there appears to be a distinct autistic way of problems with understanding social reality and thoughts of others. Still this makes autism a word to describe human behaviour and not a disease.
About half of the adolescents I work with do not show that at all. They might still have an “abnormal” way of social communication, but not in the autistic sense. It can usually be pointed down to abuse suffered during childhood and should be spoken of as CPTSD in the language of diagnostics or attachement disorder in the language of paedagogics.
Unfortunately a lot of psychiatrist suck at differential diagnostics and a lot of parents continue their abuse by seeking a diagnostic label for their child.
“We hospitalize people at risk of suicide, even though we don’t have any evidence that hospitalizing them is particularly helpful.”
So how about you don’t do that? It’s not that hard not to do.
Maybe you should teach your operators about the reality of it. Out of a 100 persons they want to call the cops on 1 will commit suicide anyway, 1 will be saved, 1 will be driven into suicide by the very measure that’s supposed to help them, 96 would have not commited suicide anyway, but you will traumatize at least half of them, and if you’re in the US 1 will get killed by cops or nurses.
If any of your operators still want to call the cops after that, fire them. They are clearly sadistic pos.
To a psychiatrist any belief you could have, that’s wrong in their eyes, can qualify as a delusion. That includes obviously true believes about facts outside the psychiatrists knowledge.
When I was locked up, I was allegedly psychotic. At no point in the documentation is there even a hint of what was supposed to be my psychotic belief. In a later court revision one of the psychiatrists explained it by me stating that I heard voices in the hallway before cops entered my appartement. Well, there were cops in the hallway who tried to annouce themselves. I just didn’t understand them as I was taking a shower. Reality is a delusion to those idiots.
One of the doctors (not a psychiatrist) asked me if I thought I was being locked up just for the money. I did neither hold nor express that belief. At least not until I was asked. Fucking psychiatrists confusing their own thoughts for my delusions.
It’s a good write up.
Yeah Steve,
The percentage of wrong convictions is also waaaaay lower. >95% of alleged suicidals who get hospitalized involuntarily would not have killed themselves anyway. If a judge would have a rate of >95% of his convicted being not guilty, I’d expect him to quit his job on the spot.
Exactly.
She got lucky and doesn’t even know it.
“…lacking direct experimental confirmation…”
That’s not how science works. To test a hypothesis you try to prove it wrong. You don’t confirm it.
Also the chemical imbalance theory dates back to the 4 humors in ancient greece.
Who let these pseudointelectuals anywhere near a university?
There is no ethical dilemma.
That would require working treatments. There are none. If there were working treatments, you’d get the dilemma of helping someone against their will. That’s not the case. Coerced psychiatry is harming people against their will, while under the delusion of helping. That’s abuse. It is the same thing abusive parents do, when they hit their child to “fix” it.
Death penalty is barbaric.
Every life saved from it is a good thing, even if it was done for the wrong reasons.
Great summary of psychiatrys core problems.
“Understandable” is an important concept. Most behaviours are if you actually know the background.
It’s going to take a while until this becomes mainstream with all the financial and power interests in keeping the status quo.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bs.3830010402
It has somehat fallen out of favour in psychology, but is still noted for its importance in the beginnings of systemtheory.
Great article.
I’ve been thinking along similar lines although in different language.
To me coercive psychiatry commits acts of hate in the name of (twisted) love, thereby creating the double binds Bateson theorized to cause schizophrenia.
Even assuming there is a genetically caused thing one could call schizophrenia, it would never be found, because the diagnostic process is such trash, that it barely improves upon monkeys assigning diagnosis by throwing darts. If even at all.
If most of the people called schizophrenic in fact aren’t, you’re not going to find what causes schizophrenia.
Assume schizophrenia is 100% explained by genetics. For a study of the entire genome to find only 2%, you’d have to have 98% missdiagnosis ratio.
*Thumps up*
“It is an uphill battle convincing my parents and nurse practitioner that these medications are more harmful than helpful.”
Your parents should support you as long as your goals aren’t immoral. Helping someone isn’t about forcing your goals on them. I hope they will find the strength to realise that, even if they have doubts.
I also hope you will find your place in the economy while upholding your morals. Not all commerce is bad. There’s nothing wrong with building tables or houses, growing crops, writing books and many other occupations.
You’ll find your way.
Good point.
Also anyone who claims to be right because he is an expert probably lacks expertise, while anyone with expertise will explain why they are right instead of claiming to be an expert.
It’s unbelievable such a barbaric treatment is still in use.
Would you try fixing a computer by random electric shocks? No? How about a brain, which is infinitely more complex and less understood?
Looking forward to this.
On the Kuhn part. Planck said it shorter (and way more pessimistic):
“A new scientific truth does not tend to assert itself in such a way that its opponents are convinced and declare themselves to be lectured, but rather by the fact that the opponents are gradually dying out and that the growing generation is familiar with the truth from the outset.”
Dying is a bit harsh. Retiring would be enough.
“Having a crisis is not an illness!”
Actual conversation from when I was locked up ina psych ward. I was never told a diagnosis, so I made a point of asking every day.
Me: can I go now?
Psycho: No.
Me: so have you figured out what I habe?
Psycho: you have a crisis.
Me: that’s not a category of ICD-10 and the only crisis I have is being locked up here. Are you an idiot?
Psycho: *silence*
Horrible those kids go from one hell to another.
They even get blamed for it by labeling them with a diagnosis, while in reality they have “shitty parents syndrome”.
Steve,
Literally everything will be interpreted as sign of mental illness.
I couldn’t sleep during my first night locked up. Pretty normal considering the circumstances. Quite a lot of people get stressed out to the point where they can’t sleep by far less, like going on vacation the day after. Not for psychiatrists. They wanted me to take neuroleptics for that.
I asked what the “up to” part of “can be held up to day X” in the court order meant. To the psychiatrist that was “concretism” and a sign of schizophrenia. To anyone else that would have been a perfectly normal question.
The psychiatrists I dealt with were mentally ill themself. Not surprising when your day job consists of abusing people, who in turn hate your guts and show it.
Thank you, Paula, and please keep your work.
Half a world away and that still mirrors what I experienced closely
Secret and bullshit diagnosis? Check.
Being pushed towards medication for no reason? Check.
The feeling it was about money? Check. (I got asked by one of the docs if I thought it was about money without me ever thinking or saying anything like that prior. It was her thought. I thought of them as merely incompetent.)
.
.
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Miata? Check. xD
Boans,
That sounds horrible. Where do you live, if I may ask. So I can never go there…
30 watt,
I can relate. I luckily have some friends who know the story and are sympathetic. I’ve also lost some people. They usually gave the “advice” to talk about it with a therapist.
I never know when to bring it up with new people.
It has been a significant contributor to losing a romantic relationship.
Sam,
Gladly I’ve never been raped, but it is the only analogy I can think of. Total powerlessness.
I’ve had my life believably threatened by someone and there was a moment I thought I’d die, but I called the cops, he got sentenced and it took a whileybut I’m over it now. Thoughts about it are rare and not threatening anymore.
Being locked up in a psychward was so much worse it wasn’t in the same ballpark, the same league, the same friggin universe. It haunts me to this day. I’ll never get justice. (But I have a bottle of Champagne reserved for the day coercive psychiatry gets outlawed here.)
And I got lucky. It was just 7 days. I did not take any drugs. I got rid of the alledged schizophrenia diagnosis. I’m certain I walked with minor injuries compared to many others. Survivors guilt ain’t no fun either.
I hope you can find a doc you can trust for physical needs.
“Fear of being called mentally ill and all that follows from that, including losing support from friends and family, who want you to confine your talk to a therapist behind closed doors, just take psychiatric drugs, and/or agree to be hospitalized.”
You are understating this.
It is absolute terror of being locked up, abused and losing all control over your life.
I’ve been locked up for alledged suicidality and there is no way I’ll talk to any psychiatrist about how I feel ever again.
Most psychopharmalogical research is such trash, that it’s methodology would also show that rum cures the flu.
1. Get a bunch of people payed by the rum industry to be your researchers.
2. Get a bunch of alcoholics with a flu as test subjects.
3. Use water as placebo.
4. Have your scale for flu symptoms also include symptoms caused by alcohol withdrawl like headaches.
5. Subjects on rum will do better.
6. Rum cures the flu proven.
“That aspect of our site is designed to give voice to a community of readers, and given that many in this community had horrible experiences as psychiatric patients (or were forcibly treated in hospitals), you can find such sentiments there.”
At the heart of this is the delusion that proponents of psychiarty are rational and non emotional, while its critics are irrational and emotional.*
It is delusional for two reasons:
1. Psychiatrist are not unemotional. Critics of psychiatry being right would turn their life into a lie and make them criminals of the worst sort. Psychiatrists can not face this.
2. Critics of psychiatry are not irrational. It is the critics of psychiatry interpreting the data in a rational way. I.e. forced deprivation of liberty in case of suicide risk. Someone feeling better and becoming less suicidal by being locked up against their will is a very strong claim and counter to common human experience, therefore it would need strong evidence to support it. Alas there is none. Yet “experts” claim it’s the right thing to do.
*That’s tied into the sexism of man=rational=good and woman=emotional=bad. But that’s taking it too far here.
I work with teens and young adults with autism diagnosises. I estimate at least 1/3 of them to be complete bullshit. As in no or barely any autistic traits whatsoever. Often times it is parents who have severe problems themselves, mistreat their kids and then seek a diagnosis, when the kids behavioural problems are actually caused by their own abuse. (Psyhiatrist assesment) ADOS right on the cutoff with a way higher (parental assesment) ADI-R is more common than not. Some of them have done a (self assesment) AQ, none of them qualified for autism on that.
The collusion/codependance between psychiatry and the justice system is the worst of it all.
Psychiatrist can imprison, abuse and murder people basically at will, because judiciary is turning a blind eye in exchange for diagnosis of people they deem especially dangerous.
The missing 83% are most likely just arbitrariness in diagnosis.
They told the judge I might be schizophrenic. They just knew it was bullshit. After they withheld the court order from me, I got hold of it through a lawyer. Confronted with their bullshit they didn’t even try to defend it. They also withheld parts of the documentation from me and still are four years later. Going so far as to have their secretary lying to me about never receiving my request to see the documentation, while taking notes on that very request.
In Germany there has to be an ICD-10 diagnosis for reimbursement by insurance companies. The diagnosis towards the insurance company was adjustment disorder.
One of the psychos also gave me that crap about not putting people in boxes when asked for a diagnosis. Pretty insulting considering I was actually locked up in a very real box without a reason given.
The imaginary dialogue really hit home. I’ve had basically the same dialogue with a psychiatrist, when I was locked up in a psych ward. As it was never disclosed to me what mental illness I was supposed to have, I made a point of asking every day.
Me: can I go home now?
Psycho: no
Me: so have you made up your mind about what I have?
Psycho: you’re in crisis.
Me: that’s no category of icd 10 and the only crisis I’m in is being locked up here.
Psycho: you aren’t locked up. You are accomodated (orig. german: untergebracht).
Me: are you an idiot?
Psycho: ….