My personal experience with these diabolical drugs and the nightmare of coming off them, followed by gradual recovery (but enduring damage), echoes the experience of many others both on this site and in the studies cited.
I think of the battle for truth re these drugs as akin to that surrounding big tobacco, but infinitely more dangerous. The drug companies know full well the dangers, but actively cover them up, as do their financial and ideological allies, the prescribing doctors, because they will lose the bulk of their highly profitable businesses, and the latter would also lose their POWER over people and society should the truth be known.
This is the most dangerous part of the equation that sets it apart from big tobacco – the collusion of those bastions of respectability and trust – the medical establishment – in their pursuit of power.
The power and influence doctors and the medical establishment have in society and the media is unparalleled. They are seen as being beyond reproach, guardians of safety and sanity, and even a hint of a report that could have people question their medications causes massive outrage and dire warnings that the sky will fall.
Here in Australia our public broadcaster did make a science program presenting the facts on anti-depressants, but the medical establishment got wind of it and it never went to air. The highly-regarded science reporter was absolutely hung out to dry and the broadcaster was widely criticised for its irresponsibility for even thinking such a program might be warranted, especially given people might come off their meds and unleash a wave of suicide, murder and crime on society. Forget that the science that says otherwise.
It was disgusting.
These drugs give doctors ultimate power over individuals and society, and doctors are firmly addicted to that power. It is power that lies largely outside the law. Who else can lock up and drug people almost indefinitely with no evidence and no trial?
And therein lies the problem. It is a problem of medical establishments’ and doctors’ addiction to power, and it is underpinned by the psychiatric “medications” that doctors falsely claim keep society safe.
Question the drugs, and you are threatening the very heart of the doctors’ and the medical establishments’ power base….and they react just like meth addicts, only intellectually, and using the full force of their power addiction.
I couldn’t agree more with this statement!
Absolutely horrifying!!! If anything like this is ever rolled out, my computer will be redundant for everything other than online shopping, bill paying, and banking. I do not wish to be surveilled, diagnosed and drugged by some algorithm designed by money hungry shrinks and their even more money hungry drug companies!
How much more stupidly inhuman can humans possibly become?
Thanks for your story Daniel. I also had a whole heap of ghastly effects when the Zyprexa/Prozac combo was inflicted on me, including but not limited to migraines, mouth ulcers and nerve issues…oh and lets not forget the serious suicidal ideation, akathisia and eating problems!
It’s not supposed to happen to adults (I was in my 50’s) but those effects were very real, and I was very lightly dismissed by shrinks as being medication non-compliant, and having the dreaded anosognosia. So nothing was done to assist…they merely doubled down.
I agree that it is horribly demoralising, and akin to torture…a total breach of human rights.
I too found B12 helpful, but coming off the drugs was ultimately what helped most. I am sure you realise how carefully dose reduction must be done – it’s not pleasant and don’t rush it!
Since coming off them, my migraines have dropped right back to pre-drug levels and other symptoms have gradually abated. There is hope.
The trick I found was to slowly and quietly walk away from psychiatry – it is irredeemable. I’m afraid my experiences confirmed that complaining only increases the intensity of its attacks.
You’ll find lots of useful info on this site and others….all the best with your escape and recovery from any damage those charlatans may have done!
Anti-psychotics are appallingly overused here in Australia, even in people with no disability. People in aged care homes, anyone labelled with “psychiatric disorder” and anyone who a doctor simply doesn’t like, is likely to have these highly dangerous drugs forced on them.
Olanzapine, forced on me after admission as an involuntary psych patient, made my life a living (psychotic) hell – I was 50 and had never been “psychotic” in my life before. It was horrendous to come off, but thankfully, over 10 years down the track, I seem to have recovered OK apart from the PTSD resulting from the medical abuse I suffered.
These drugs should be withdrawn from the market as they are dangerous and ineffective and used almost exclusively as chemical straightjackets. They absolutely preclude any form of appropriate assistance being delivered to a person in any form of distress, physical or emotional.
Psychologist, I have been off all prescribed psychiatric drugs and without psych or shrink “support” for over 10 years and have been far better off without drugs or a shrink’s “support”. I had not attempted suicide before being put on psychiatric drugs and have not attempted suicide since being off them.
As far as I am concerned shrinks and their drugs are quite simply EVIL. I do not need to keep in touch with a shrink and neither should I have been locked up and drugged…and certainly not without my fully informed consent….the whole saga was extremely traumatic.
Please read the article and about the negative effects of anti-psychotics! They are dangerous, mind damaging drugs, and certainly should not be considered as therapeutic medications.
I was forced to take Mirtazapine and Olanzapine for severe depression and anxiety for a couple of years from 2004. They left me a total zombie, unable to think, sleep, or coordinate my movements properly, and with an uncontrollable urge to eat sugar and fat.
Whenever I was able, I stored them in my cheek and spat them out, but if given the dissolving on tongue variety this was not possible.
As soon as I was released from the treatment order, I gradually weaned off them…withdrawal took months of true hell.
I cannot even imagine nastier drugs, and can fully understand that they cause permanent brain damage. I still have problems with memory and co-ordination, and occasionally the weird muscle stiffness I had when on them.
They should be banned.
I actually find it really interesting that through recent events in my area in Australia where we have had massive bushfires, followed by Covid-19, I have witnessed people exhibiting (what they might call) signs of severe “mental illness”.
They have been doing far more in the way of weird behaviour (panic stockpiling of goods, displaying financially, emotionally, and socially appalling behaviours, circulating ridiculous conspiracy theories, talking to imaginary friends, excessive gambling, drinking and drug taking, increased use of anti depressants, psych services etc).
Some have actually sympathised with me for what they imagine I, as an officially designated “mentally ill” person, MUST be going through. Yet, while concerned and taking reasonable precautions, I have been no where near as flipped out as they have been.
I remember a time when I was locked up and forcibly drugged for far less extreme behaviour than many now exhibit. Yet, some in my community justify their behaviour as related to the “shocking events” (bushfire and Covid-19) while putting my (justifiable) response to events at the time of my struggles down to the character flaw of “mental illness”.
But through this period, their characters apparently will remain unblemished. Their “madness” (and need for “medication” and support-both financial and psychological etc) is a justifiable response to circumstance, while mine was, and apparently always will remain an irreparable failure of character, even though I have accessed neither “medication” nor psych support for over 10 years, including through recent events.
I guess acknowledgement of such facts would create within them cognitive dissonance too great to deal with, and so they need a screen on which to project their own fragility.
The nice white label of “mental illness” stuck firmly on someone else provides them with just such a screen.
It is interesting to watch the double standards and mental gymnastics people, and society in general employs in a bid to establish equilibrium, and the vital role in society those of us with the “mental illness” label actually fulfill.
Why haven’t the social workers been charged with making false and misleading statements to a court, given the testimony of psychiatrists and other against the actions of the social worker(s)The social worker(s) has also misrepresented the legal situation to the “patient”? Surely the patient has a right to be provided with accurate information.
Clearly they must be in breach of some law(s) given that proceedings initiated by them have been dropped on a number of occasions against this one patient. This is blatant harassment.
Ditto.
Kindredspirit,
I agree wholeheartedly, and can add that disclosing as an adult also brings enormous consequences. One is seen as lesser, as broken, as just plain wrong and incapable of healing and recovery. In the eyes of the mental health industry, you become no more than the worst of their projections.
Consider closely before disclosing…at any stage in life!
I was effectively kidnapped and held against my will in a Canberra (Australia) hospital. After an initial period of around 72 hours they had to let me go as I showed no signs of being a danger to myself or others. Indeed, never in my life had I even had a parking ticket or been in any trouble with the law, or shown any sign of or tendency towards violence.
As I was getting ready to leave, the head shrink asked me what I thought of the facility.
Being naive (it was my first ever brush with mental health services…age 50), I said I thought it would have been good to be able to have camomile tea, and thought that as a long term vegetarian who always marked the menu for meat free meals, I was often disappointed to receive a plate full of meat. I was quiet and respectful as I wanted to just get home and feel safe.
She said, “you seem angry, that means you get to stay longer”. After being put before the kangaroo court that was the “Mental Health Tribunal” the hospital was granted an involuntary treatment order that allowed them to keep me in and drug me with Olanzapine and Mertazapine, Stilnox (Ambien in the US) and whatever else they wanted for another few months. After release they could also force me to take their drugs. The time inside was pure hell…vicious nurses, male patients being sexually threatening towards me, witnessing violence between patients and between patients and staff and being refused access to even paper and pencil. I had had committed no crime and showed no signs of being dangerous, and simply could not believe I could be locked up like that. I was an educated, high achieving executive.
I got out after a truly terrifying and traumatising 6 weeks. Being effectively kidnapped, stripped of all my human rights and drugged had a profound effect on me. My mother couldn’t accept I had been locked up with “druggies and hopeless nut cases” and was “dangerous to self and others” and disinherited and disowned me. Over 15 years down the track we still have no contact…she is almost 90 and I don’t expect I’ll see her again.
Totally traumatised and having been advised by my private shrink it’d be fine to just stop taking the meds without tapering, within a month or two of discharge I had made a serious attempt at suicide and ended up inside again…more drugging…but this time I was smarter and pretended to be very compliant, tonguing the meds and spitting them out ASAP when ever I could.
I have now been psych drug free for a decade and totally shrink free for about 5 years. Slowly, ever so slowly, I am becoming more my usual self…intelligent, interested in life, able to sustain normal friendships, and creative.
Never again will I discuss my feelings/thoughts with a doctor of any shape or form…the damage they can do on a whim and “for your own good” is absolutely appalling. They must be stripped of the power to detain and torture human beings.
Thank you Richard.
Having had “therapy” from a male psychologist (1988) and a male psychiatrist (2004-2007), both of whom subscribed to Freud’s theories (explained them to me, in fact, as FACT!), I can personally attest to the unspeakable harm and trauma those theories, and the treatment they give rise to, result in.
The material in this article NEEDS to be very widely distributed, and the letters referenced NEED to be published in psychiatric journals and incorporated into psychiatry and psychology training so Freud’s work cannot do further harm.
He needs to be remembered as a fraud who actively perpetuated the abuse of women and children.
Agree. Zyprexa (olanzapine) is THE most evil drug ever concocted. The akathisia it causes is pure hell and resulted in my attempted suicide. I suspect that even after close on 10 years since my last dose I am still affected.
If given immunity from prosecution I would happily force it on those doctors who forced it on me. When I complained about it to them and asked if they had ever taken it, their response was universally, “I am not mentally ill, and so it wouldn’t do anything”. I’d like to see them to prove that!
I almost laughed when I read the following:
āIām really exhausted trying to get you to show a glimmer of compassion that indicates you have empathic understanding about the truth of why Iām suffering emotionally right now. But I must say I believe itās not because of a failure of empathy on your part. I believe you know exactly why Iām feeling the way I do, but you simply donāt care that Iām suffering, even though you understand why I am. So my blunt question for you is: You donāt really give a damn about my emotional pain right now, do you?ā
The day I walked out of therapy for good, that was pretty close to the discussion I had with my shrink. For the seven years he had sat there, his total failure to respond in any “real” way had in the end left me feeling …almost like …????… Kafka’s cockroach. Totally othered.Totally wrong.
In retrospect, I was probably too persistent in trying to develop some sort of rapport with him, and I think his lack of responsiveness was ultimately quite damaging.
TRM 123
Agree totally…I am unable to trust any medical practitioner since my “treatment” (read torture) for depression and sleeplessness that resulted in extreme akathisia and my first “psychotic” episode at age 50, which was then compounded by hospitalisation and more forced drugging with the offending substances and the most evil drugs on earth – “antipsychotics”.
The total corruption of medicine by drug companies and the refusal of doctors to listen to patients re their experiences of these drugs is fundamentally a crime against humanity…mass torture for financial gain…and should be labelled as such.
I really do believe that psychiatrists who have prescribed these drugs and dismissed patients’ complaints out of hand (as mine did) should be made to take the bloody drugs for a year or two then have them withdrawn cold turkey.
After all, they locked many of us up and forced us to take them, refusing to listen to our reports of adverse side effects to the point of having people held down and the drugs forcibly injected.
It is now getting towards 10 years since I took any of their drugs and even the thought of a sexual relationship is anathema to me, meaning I will likely remain unpartnered the rest of my life (I am in my 60s) Then there’s the trauma directly resulting from being so treated. Yes. I am angry.
While I do enjoy much life has to offer, intimate relationships, loving and being loved, are now out of my reach as a direct result of psychiatry and psychiatric drugging.
That they can do that with no repercussions and no forewarning or informed consent amounts to torture.
Yes, I am glad my misanthropy is relates mainly to the medical profession…including nurses and anyone who claims that the “mentally ill” are dangerous and/or need to be made to take medication and/or follow the medical model. I just avoid them like the plague.
Rachael
while suffering drug induced psychosis after being involuntarily detained and drugged in a Canberra (Australia) institution, I had almost precisely that vision/dream/hallucination…whatever. The psychiatrists were the “gods” and ONLY what they deemed acceptable was acceptable and was accepted as acceptable by government. These “gods” sat at a high table and handed down “treatments” to those admitted because they didn’t, in some way, conform. Their word was law, and I had broken that law.
In some ways I am glad I had the vision, as I henceforth (apparently) complied with treatment and was released in 5 weeks, rather than the six month “sentence” initially imposed by the godlike shrinks at a mental health tribunal “hearing” (with another three of “outpatient treatment”), and in the years since have become psychiatry and “medication” free.
The withdrawals were horrendous, but it’s coming up to 15 years since I was in very much the situation of the kangaroo court the author describes…drugged, denied legal representation…not even allowed a pencil and paper or a phone call or a shower or clean clothes, and never informed of my rights or of the harms of “treatment”. Bastards.
I moved interstate and still avoid doctors, and will never have any of my medical history transferred, despite now being in my 60s. I know I have a medical condition that is worsening, but going to a doctor isn’t an option any more.
I have new friends who don’t know my history and live a normal life…but I really do have some very major trauma responses that make life….problematic, to say the least.
Vancouver sounds like Canberra. I hope human rights win!
Yes…informed consent is crucial. I was not informed of any of the risks of psychotherapy, nor of the methods used by my psychiatrist. Those methods put me in hospital twice with my first “psychoses”, and resulted in involuntary commitment and forced treatment with psychoactive drugs (I had no history of “mental illness” or of being hospitalised previously). After we had managed to form an apparently “therapeutic” relationships he asked me for sex (which I declined), and later, he threw me out of his office, hurling diagnoses and abuse, using everything I had told him in confidence against me.
Then he said I’d be dangerous if my (newer) shrink had access to my records.
…and the ACT Human Rights Commission to whom I complained, took his word and stripped me of all my rights to have my treating doctor given access to my records.
Informed consent? Had I known that I stood to lose everything I had achieved at age 50, be drugged, labelled and would be thrown on the scrap heap, I would have run from psychotherapy as if the devil were after me…and it turned out he was, in the form a a psychiatrist.
Over a decade down the track and I still struggle in ways I never struggles before I enetered psychotherapy. I am isolated and unable to seek medical attention for some physical ailments I have because I am now totally aware of how unaccountable medical practitioners are – they just need to say you are/were a psych patient, and there go your human rights.
Informed consent MUST include not only treatment options but the human rights you give up when you see a “mental health” practitioner. They can hospitalise you against your will, they can forcibly drug you, and they can abuse you.
…and their “diagnoses” can never be expunged from your record.
This all should form part of informed consent.
Wonderful piece.
When he says,
“Many people with severe anxiety and/or depression are also anti-authoritarians. Often a major pain of their lives that fuels their anxiety and/or depression is fear that their contempt for illegitimate authorities will cause them to be financially and socially marginalized, but they fear that compliance with such illegitimate authorities will cause them existential death.”, he absolutely hits the nail on the head!
Sylvain, your comment is not quite complete…should read:
The dog has eaten my report! Thatās why I gave it late…and why it is a lump of dog poop!
Then why don’t Australian shrinks and their enablers STOP adding to the trauma these already vulnerable people have experienced? Surely adding further trauma by forcing “treatment” is NOT helpful.
Having being subjected to a psych ward in an Australian hospital (Canberra) I can say it was incredibly traumatic to be locked up and drugged with neurotoxic substances against my will. It was torture, not medical help. And I found just as destructive was ACT Human Rights Commission’s response (dismissal and shaming) to my complaint about my treatment at the hands of a psychiatrist.
All I can say is that the practice of psychiatry and all the structures that support its ability to coerce, abuse and further traumatise vulnerable people should be outlawed. NOW.
Bradford…Just did a search and found the 30 traits listed somewhre and thought, “but surely everyone would have those traits!”
I find it hard to believe that others don’t have them, especially the BS detector….when people are lying/being deceptive, it leaves my stomach churning for days and after a few times around them I simply can’t go there again.
Not “normal” to have these…surely it’s not “normal” not to?
Brilliant piece that really describes very well what goes on with me too. I have found any sort of psychiatric intervention (drugs, therapy etc) to be destructive in the extreme as none of them actually help deal with what’s going on by developing skills and approaches to these thoughts and feelings or to the super-sensitivity that underlies them.
Drugging, labelling, diagnosing, incarcerating etc only helped entrench and deepen the feelings of powerlessness that took me to those potentially destructive and decidedly unpleasant places and did nothing to help understand and address the original causes and resultant thought patterns.
Learning to manage super-sensitivity requires compassion, skill and persistence, and they are not things that psychiatry can offer.
I read somewhere that he was on significant doses of “medications”, so they’re likely the cause of this massacre.
What got me about the APA statement, though, was that it was basically a promo, and touting for business.
Call me cynical, but f they’re so concerned, why have they helped the military in the development of torture techniques and why aren’t they very actively campaigning against psychiatric drugging?
āImagine you were kidnapped and assaulted, and never even came close to getting justice for what was done to you. And then you saw someone, a member of the same profession as the people who hurt you and got away with it, and this person told you your anger over it was a psychiatric symptom, fixable with drugs. How would you react?ā
Yup…exactly what happened to me, and yes, if you express anything but gratitude for being kidnapped and drugged, and losing everything you have worked a lifetime to build, then, yes, according to them, you are ANGRY and in need of further imprisonment and drugging.
Psychiatrists are absolutely unreal, but like others here, I too have used my anger to escape my torturers rather than working on “gratitude lists” for the “help” I have received (whether I wanted it or not) from them. I had never been totally comfortable with anger, but now it is my companion. It lets me know when I have been violated or treated badly. It warns me that I am being taken advantage of or my experience is being discounted. My absolute rage reminds me of the severity of psychiatry’s abusiveness and my own powerlessness to stop it or to gain any recognition of the damage it has done to my life. That anger, that rage, has a cause and it has a purpose.
And that is not to harm others, it is to provide us with the wherewithal to free ourselves from our oppressors and reclaim our integrity.
Agreed, many of us have read this stuff before….but I think it extremely important that the articles on drug efficacy, fraud, debunking the chemical imbalance myth etc continue to appear very regularly so new victims of psychiatric abuse (ie all psychiatric “patients”) have easy and prominent access to such material when they come across this site.
It was such articles (and, of course Whitaker’s book) a number of years ago that helped me understand the totally fraudulent nature of the “mental health” industry, the lies I had been told, and the reasons the drugs forced on me were having such disastrous consequences.
Plus, the more new studies published that debunk psychiatry and its drugs on a range of sites, the less psychiatry is able to claim it’s just the Scientology “nutters” that are railing against them.
Such articles and studies are becoming more mainstream now, and their collective weight, even when they don’t get published in medical journals, cannot be denied.
They also provide us with access to the latest references to share with any newly questioning friends/acquaintances.
Wonderful resource indeed!
To clarify, Stephen
What was done to me (in Australia) wasn’t part of the ACE study, as such. However, the things ticked on my “dangerousness” assessment all would have been classed as adverse childhood experiences, with the exception of my having left a psychologically abusive husband.
I had, during my lifetime, acknowledged and grown/moved on from my not wonderful childhood and my violent rape at age 12, successfully and gently raising my own kids, and building a successful and secure life and career and a respected place in my communities.
It appalled me that psychiatry should list events from 35-40 years earlier that had ceased to be issues in my life as reasons to deem me potentially “a danger to others” and lock me up and drug me involuntarily.
I was going through a breakdown at the time, and really struggling and had sought psychiatric support, but had shown no evidence of being a danger to anyone. My breakdown related to work related stress and career burnout, and the situation in that workplace totally burnt out numerous others too.
What psychiatry actually did was saddle ME with the “dangerousness” that rested firmly with those who had abused me all those years ago…my parents, my rapists, and my former husband. It used these long since past events as reason to lock me up and drug me.
I had addressed many issues through therapy, meditation, counseling training, helping others, raising my own kids etc, and so thoroughly agree with your assessment that people can develop and change, but the hospital that captured and drugged me used those old experiences as evidence that I might be dangerous.
My point is that there is potentially massive danger in screening for ACE’s while ever psychiatry holds the power to detain and drug…you absolutely never know when or how anything they know about you will be used, either to justify diagnosing and drugging of kids or further down the track in adulthood.
Maybe they should just be red flags that are used to help people, but I have no confidence whatsoever that any information provided on such events will be used as anything but a reason to further punish the innocent.
Yes…and they are used to justify locking people up involuntarily.
The reason I was deprived of my liberty and had dangerous drugs forced upon me was assessed that I could be “a danger to others” based on the fact that I had several “ACEs”. NEVER in my life had I exhibited any violence or anti-social or unlawful behaviour (not even a parking ticket), I had successfully raised two children, had a high level exec career, been a volunteer telephone counselor, served on club committees etc. AND I was 50 and female.
And yet, when I sought “help” after a work related stress breakdown, I answered questions that disclosed that I had experienced not-too-good parenting and a violent rape, instead of being shown respect and caring for having survived and contributed to society, the information was used against me to deemed I was “a danger to others”.
Locked up and drugged. Treated appallingly. Totally traumatised.
What was done was far worse than anything that happened to me as a kid. It cost me my career, most of my friends, and my relationship with my mother, who couldn’t handle my being locked up in a psych ward and disowned me.
This is what assessment for “ACE’s” can be used for. Every box ticked on the violence assessment form (I got copies of my hospital records) was ticked because of childhood ACE’s I had disclosed as part of conversations with a shrink.
In their minds, we are forever defined (negatively) by our “ACEs”. We can never grow or learn from these experiences, they cannot shape us to be more compassionate and caring people, determined NOT to repeat the cruelties we suffered.
In the eyes of psychiatry, childhood “ACE’s” define us as being as irredeemably bad and broken, dangerous, and nothing positive we do in a lifetime can wipe that slate clean.
Screening for “ACE’s” is just another form of psychiatric abuse.
My comment above was agreeing with Steve’s comments!
I certainly cannot agree with Lenora22’s summation, but the way comments are displayed makes it a bit difficult to ascertain to whom I was responding, I suspect.
Agree completely with your comments.
From my experience the whole psychiatric field is absolutely patriarchal, even though it is inhabited by many women these days. Its underpinnings, its history and its attitudes …all of it!
Looks like a couple of people have.
Hear hear!
All through the article my brain was screaming, “NO!NO!NO!” because it was so wrong on so many levels. Thank you Slaying for putting the time and effort into nailing the issues with this article, and to the others above who also critiqued.
Yes…this was a really interesting article potentially offering some very valuable insights. It has taken me over 12 years to better understand the origins and content of my one and only fully blown “psychosis”, and in doing so I have come to understand better how I “work”, how I react, how I relate to situations and people, especially when under stress. That means I am better able to modulate my sensitivities and negotiate life more creatively and effectively.
The shrinks who drove me into psychosis put me on diabolically evil drugs and told me I’d be in and out of the “revolving door” of psych wards for the rest of my life, taking all hope and agency from me….or at least trying to.
It’s now over seven years since I used any of their nasty drugs, and around 10 years since I had “anti psychotics”.
Such studies as this, when combined with what we know about psycho-social factors, trauma and attachment might well ring psychiatric druggings’ death knell….and hopefully it’ll take psychiatry with it.
Fabulously powerful article. It really does raise and address most of the glaring shortcomings of psychiatry. Love the 11 points, and I too laughed at the crumbling, nonsensical, now openly snake-oiled facade the “profession” has become.
Debunking psychiatry is essential because of the danger it is to society, and this article is great at doing that. Psychiatry’s reversion to marketing, and marketing of the type suggested, what’s more, really does hold its scientific and medical shortcomings out for all to see.
The ones I have met are arrogance personified, coupled with a big slug of abusiveness and dishonesty.
They are not providing medical services and they know it… the campaign seems to admit as much!
Agreed. In the journal I kept in “hospital” as an “involuntary patient”, I referred to my captors as kidnappers, jailers and torturers and I referred to the experience as rape. I was terrified, and even reading this article has brought back the trauma of it all.
The experience was so traumatic and barbaric that it dumped me into my first ever and only “psychosis” at age 50 and into forced drugging, a very nearly successful suicide within a month or two of my release, and another coerced “hospital stay”.
That was 2004-05. In 2007 my psychiatrist threw me out of his office screaming at me when all I had done was turn up for a scheduled appointment. Twelve years on and I have been off all of those drugs of torture (that I was told I’d need for the rest of my life) for seven years, have moved cities because I could no longer feel safe in the city where I spent over 50 years, and have built new social networks and friendships.
I HATE and fear doctors. No more “medical” treatment for me.
Nah…US has got heaps more “mentally ill” than the rest of us….that you have Trump as POTUS and everyone walks round legally carrying deadly weapons proves it. Psychiatrists greatly underestimate the numbers because they don’t want to have to take responsibility for all the iatrogenic damage they and their drugs cause.
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Having been forced to take the toxic poisons (“antipsychotics” and “antidepressants”) for a period, but coming off all of them over 7 years ago, I now find diet, exercise and gentle friends are the only ways to control the ongoing damage/residual effect of these dangerous drugs.
I stayed with therapy for 5 years after coming off the drugs believing that there must be some underlying problem, but that only kept me believing there was something quite fundamentally deficient in my character, when the damage was iatrogenic.
For the past two years I have been totally free of psychiatry AND therapy and am gradually rebuilding the life that psychiatry had been so intent on destroying.
I have residual trauma and iatrogenic damage…both from psychiatric “help”, (being locked up and forcibly drugged with highly toxic substances and treated like a cockroach IS traumatic), and thinking more psychiatry/therapy could help me was totally wrong headed..sort of a variant on the Stockholm Syndrome, perhaps?
Being free of the psychiatry and understanding that the drugs and treatments (including traumatic “therapy”) have caused physical changes that mean I will need to be careful with my diet and environment and making new social contacts, friends and interests have probably been the greatest contributors to my ongoing wellbeing.
Wish we had that search facility in Australia!
Agreed. Throughout the article I was thinking about what happened to me when I was put on “medication”…I virtually COULDN”T move! AND all I wanted to eat was sugar and fat.
I had no energy or desire to move at all and my coordination was so compromised that if I walked on uneven ground in the park I fell over. I had been in the national ski team in my younger years and had continued with skiing, back country hiking, fly fishing, bike riding etc throughout my adult life…until I was forced to take “medication”.
After having been off all “medication” for over 7 years, my coordination is better than it was, but it isn’t as good as it should be…I still have difficulty skiing (I started skiing at age 3 and so it had been virtually second nature to me) and steep, difficult hikes are out of the question.
My desire to be active has never quite returned but I make sure I go to the gym a few times a week, walk 15,000 steps a day and am deliberately working to improve my co-ordination by walking on rough ground etc. but it is a bit of a battle. The “medication” totally switched off my energy, desire and ability, and flipping the switch back on is really, really hard.
That “medication” only seemed to get a passing glance in the research astounds me.
From over here down under it does appear that he is quite seriously unsuited to public office and the survival of the planet!
Whether he should be diagnosed with a fictitious “mental illness” is another matter…
I agree. Some of the TV coverage and statements made were totally inaccurate and brought back my memories of being locked up, drugged and treated horribly.
Most of the written articles don’t provide the opportunity to comment and address the misinformation, so added to the upset about misinformation is the powerlessness to do anything about them.
Now, as soon as I see something coming on TV re the week, I mute it or switch channels. All it is is a promotion of drugging and forced detention of people who have committed no crime.
Oh dear…you are in a horrible situation.
Your experience of being harassed by staff and patients in psych ward mirrors my own and while it would have been unpleasant in any place it was terrifying when combined with my own thoughts and the brutal setting.
The violent thoughts terrified and repelled me too, but what helped me was to think of them as a reflection of what had been/was being done to me and sit with them. Some of my stuff about good and evil/heaven and hell went back to early childhood stuff that had been retriggered by all the totally overwhelming events.
I am not sure whether it was the medication, but I became extremely noise sensitive…everything sensitive in fact…it was like an internal volume switch had been shifted to the highest possible setting. Ear plugs helped a little until I could get to a quieter environment…is there any possibility you could ask to be moved as soon as a quieter room becomes available?
I certainly feel for your predicament and hope you can manage to use your very significant skills and intelligence (yes, they are still there) to negotiate some improvements.
Hi Helpstillneeded
it is a very difficult situation to be in…needing help but being too terrified to seek it. I know it well.
But it most certainly is not your fault, so please, don’t blame yourself, and it certainly is not cowardice. Being abused and victimised leaves deep scars, but I find my art, my writing, meditation, music, and nature …all, at different times, help me. If praying helps you, then pray, but remember music art and nature have wonderfully healing properties too.
This site has benefited me enormously over the years as it has helped me understand how truly destructive psychiatry is from its false labels to its evil, soul-destroying “treatments”, be they drugs or “therapy” where the therapist can lock you up and/or drug you if you don’t accept your “diagnosis”, and where its practitioners are immune to legal responsibility because they, as judge, jury and executioner, are effectively untouchable.
We are of similar ages and I must admit that looking to the future I don’t much that enthuses me. However, I am trying to focus on the things that give me comfort and hope that eventually my trauma reactions will settle down a bit…10 years off “meds” and two years functioning in the community (although I will never return to paid work) psychiatry-free I am not quite as scared as I was.
The nightmares I used to have of being locked up and drugged have subsided somewhat and I think it has now been a while since I woke myself screaming in terror.
I hope you find some peace.
Yes…I had largely overcome the effects of childhood adversities and had constructed a successful career and life…a couple of lovely and high functioning kids, friends etc. Then at 50 I suffered work stress and was referred to a psychiatrist.
WOW! His “help” led to hospitalisation and my first ever (and only) psychotic experience, with forced drugging in a locked ward and no hope of returning to my career and former life.
Then, when I had finally developed a deep and trusting therapeutic relationship with him, I turned up for a session and he threw me out of his office for no apparent reason, while hurling diagnoses and verbal abuse.
I have been off all the medication for over 10 years and have never had another psychotic episode, but talk about devastated and demonised – 10 years on and I still have incredibly severe issues with trust in all my relationships and am terrified of going to the doctor. Friendship are difficult for me and social life seems like a minefield.
The destructiveness of psychiatry cannot be overstated. It is, by its very nature, victimisation. It labels and demonises people, places them in the role of “inferior and broken”, and then proceeds with a systematic attack on their rights and self hood.
Oh dear…and if dogs become aggressive as a result of SSRIs (as many humans do), after attacking and maiming people, other animals, etc they will be labelled vicious and killed.
Sad that we would be encouraged to do this to our beloved furry companions.
Yep..BINGO!
I hate it when potentially interesting and informative articles turn out to be subscription only.
Yep…I too found Olanzapine akin to torture, and yeah, I too tried suicide while on it. Far out that is an EVIL drug!
For me, being carted off and locked up when I had done nothing wrong, had threatened no-one, and had not threatened or attempted self harm was THE most traumatic event in my life. I was in a sensitive and stressed state and the act of locking me up in a mental hospital plunged me into my first (and only) psychotic episode at age 50. It took me years to get off their “medication” (ie highly destructive and addictive and totally revolting mind-altering drugs) and to be able to function in society and form friendships etc again.
Thirteen years down the track and I still have significant issues with trust, particularly of people in positions of respect or trust, because I know how easily I can have all my rights and freedoms removed on their whim.
In my journals at the time I didn’t write of doctors or people trying to help me, I wrote of my “gaolers” (jailers to the US readers) and “tormentors”. Because they had kidnapped, imprisoned and drugged me, plunging me into such a terrifying altered state, how else would I have seen them?
…and yet they seemed to think I should be thankful…and had trouble understanding why I would be fearful and uncooperative.
I still don’t think it was me who was suffering anosognosia!
Dr Breggin
What an absolutely tragic story and massive miscarriage of justice for this young woman. I am just so glad that you are in her corner, and I hope you can help her in a way that can bring some trust and sense back into what must be a totally cruel and non-sensical world to her.
The mistreatment she has been put through is truly sickening, and that the judge let the inaccuracies and misrepresentations pass unchecked is, in itself, criminal.
I personally know the confusion and terror medication can induce, and I was 50 when I went through it. How a distressed teenager is supposed to deal with it or be held responsible for her (likely inaccurate) memories and feelings is totally beyond my comprehension.
The whole situation is so far beyond Kafkaesque it really is incomprehensible.
Please, keep fighting for her!
Thank you Richard, for an excellent response.
Agree totally. For me the experience of being kidnapped, locked up and drugged when I had committed no crime was truly traumatic. I was stripped of my rights and my humanity. I was forced to take drugs that made me unable to think or function (olanzapine and Mertazapine), and that made it impossible to sit still and caused visual and audtiroy hallucinations. There was Ambien and/or other sleeping stuff thrown in for good luck too, from memory.
That was my first experience of “mental illness”..I was 50 with no history of “mental illness” or any untoward behaviour. I was, in fact, a successful senior exec….until this experience.
Within a couple of months of getting out I did make an extremely serious attempt on my life as I figured that I was destined to live my life drugged to the eyeballs with extreme side effects, virtually under house arrest and having been told I had embarked on the revolving door of psychiatric hsopitalisation, and made unable to contribute to society in any way, I did not want to live.
Plus, the experience of PSYCH WARD was deeply traumatising. This was in 2004…I have been psych drug and totally “treatment” free (therapy sort of helped) for a number of years and now participate fully in society, although I never returned to my exec position.
But I would still rather be dead than go to a psych ward again.
I have deleted the comment I made as I wonder whether I am just being somewhat dense today and wish to consider further before adding more to the debate. The edit feature will not allow you to enter an empty comment and so I could not delete it completely
Disagree.
Even drug company research has shown that anti-depressants can have dangerous effects on mood. Ditto with extensive meta-analyses of the effects of these drugs.
When also having therapy, if I started SSRIs I would very promptly become manic, closely followed by extreme suicidality. That ONLY happened if and when I took the drugs. If I stopped the drugs, these effects would lessen and disappear.
While I absolutely agree with your assessment that the chemical imbalance story leads to hopelessness and further depression, especially when the drugs don’t work, I never particularly believed the drugs would work (that was my doctor’s assessment), but they still had a massive effect on me.
Study 329(?) and others show that drug companies have covered up the harms these drugs do.
Breggin and other doctors active on this site have written a plethora of books on the research around these drugs, and I think you might find that the research does actually indicate that there’s slightly more than the placebo effect at work and that these drugs actively disrupt very complex brain and gut chemistry!!
yes it also concerns me greatly that the author claims that anti-depressants are just placebos.
They are active chemicals and can have massive negative effects by disrupting brain chemistry. Plus, they are known to increase the risk of suicide and/or homicide in some users.
I thoroughly agree that their use and the bio model of psychiatry also actively prevent people seeking help that might actually do some good, but essentially dismissing anti-depressants as chemically neutral I think is quite dangerous.
I know the effect they had on me – I promptly became manic, then suicidal, then…well…it was just a nightmarish roller-coaster. Coming off them was hell too.
Yes, agreed. Do it, but certainly don’t let on to anyone in the “mental health” industry…you’ll just have your drugs/diagnoses increased and/or be locked up for longer.
I have found that third person does help in both journalling and general situations, but if I let something along those lines slip out when I was in therapy, I’d get that “special” look from the psychiatrist. I have been a psychiatry-and-therapy-free zone for going on two years now , and the third person approach has come in very handy to provide a little distance and create some internal empathy when I have been short of it.
Totally agree, Steve.
A truly excellent comment that anyone who has ever proclaimed a diagnosis should contemplate, whether it be about their “friends”, families, enemies or a public figure. To diagnose is to place yourself above the other and is a power game and a put down.
It proclaims more about the diagnoser than it does about the diagnosed.
Really?
It looks like neuro-imaging might be both expensive AND useless in the case of “mental illness”. I wonder whether any of the people using imaging actually considered asking their patients why they were feeling the way they were feeling and/or what THEY thought might make them feel better ….but I guess that might be too radical for these “highly skilled medical specialists” given the causes are likely to be hidden in plain sight (food, shelter, jobs, respect, freedom from abuse etc), and that just doesn’t happen to be where they want to look and/or what they want to see!
Golly..my story echoes hers so closely it is scary.
I think this is a very valuable article, and hope that the documentary is screened here in Australia, ‘cos doctors here simply won’t listen if you say their drugs are causing really weird and dangerous stuff. Plus, they made me take Olanzapine and Ambien (Stilnox) as well as antidepressants. Deadly.
Everyone should be made to read this piece BEFORE they take a single dose.
Thank you for sharing your story. I too tried to comply with the psychiatrists, all three of whom did talk therapy (and at times forced drugs and hurled diagnoses), and it was disastrous for me. I too cried rivers after every session, ‘cos I’d got it wrong yet again, and I too took to journaling and exercise. After 12 years of what in retrospect amounts to significant twice weekly emotional abuse (called therapy) by those psychiatrists, 18 months ago I walked away with far more serious difficulties than when that particular journey began.
Journalling and exercise are now my mainstays too, but there’s no way I’ll go near another professional “helper”. I am still recovering from the overwhelming destructiveness of the “mental health” industry – it may take a very long time before I can trust another human being again…I need to regain trust in and knowledge of myself first as that was what they attacked most viciously. However, I am now beginning to have glimmers of hope that life can be different, better.
Labelling people, and shaming them into accepting treatments that are inappropriate, uninformed, cruel and demeaning is not helpful, and the sooner our society makes psychiatry responsible for the harms it perpetrates by doing this, the sooner people will be free to pursue the paths that actually heal, rather than harm.
Thank you again for sharing your story – I am sure it will help many others too.
Really???
Why on earth is this given space on MIA?
Yes, my experience was that being kidnapped, locked up and drugged against my will when I had done nothing wrong was THE single most traumatic experience of my life. And yes, within three months of discharge I very nearly succeeded in suiciding. Another woman on the ward succeeded within a week of her discharge.
They totally shattered my trust in justice and human rights, and to this day (over 10 years later) I still am very fearful of seeing a medical doctor for any complaint at all – I have a trauma reaction from the instance I suspect I need to see one that takes a week or two after the visit to fully settle.
I now see doctors as totally untrustworthy and as operating outside the law and as people who can lock me up and deprive me of my human rights without need for cause and without any real checks and balances.
Really, I dont understand why “normal”, non-psychiatric doctors don’t work to get psychiatry thrown out of the medical profession as it has no evidence base and brings the rest of the profession into disrepute.
Hear hear.
Encountering random strangers (ie health “carers”) who demand unconditional trust and then say you’re “mentally ill” because you can’t/won’t do it is a really destructive thing. After trying and succeeding in trusting them against my inner voice only to be absolutely betrayed leads me to know that anyone who demands trust is inherently untrustworthy, and is seeking a victim.
It has been a hard and painful lesson for me to learn but there’s no way I’ll fall for that crap again.
Those who neither expect nor demand are far more likely to be capable of building a therapeutic relationship, whether it is called that or not.
Standra
you seem to be confusing physically identifiable actual physical illness/diseases with differences in being. A physical disease such as polio can and probably should be prevented and/or cured (by vaccines and other physical means) where possible.
With differences in ways of being it is a little more nuanced. We know that SSRIs used in pregnancy increase the risk of a child having struggles, and for sure, when such difficulties have a direct physical cause that could be prevented, that would be a desirable to prevent them. That could be done by not allowing pregnant woment to take anti-depresants. After all, “normal” (whatever that may mean) IS easier, for the person with the condition and their family.
However, when “autism” is just part of the spectrum of normal functioning, as it seems to have become, and is a front for raising money for pharmaceutical companies and lobby groups, something has gone way off track. I have no doubt that I could be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder or whatever the current term might be, and I could invest many thousands of dollars in drugs to become more “normal” because I really do struggle at times – neuro-diversity has its drawbacks – but on the other hand, I am unique and I don’t want to be told I NEED drugs to function.
The pharmaceutical companies exploiting people’s fear of neuro-diversity would prefer we were not unique and that people fear “unique” simply because it offers them the opportunity for making PROFIT…something they are very good at.
Neuro-diversity is valuable. It is not an “illness” that should be used for profit. Causing brain damage with drugs that purportedly treat an illness that has not been shown to have a physical cause may profit drug companies, but all it does for neuro-diverse people is DAMAGE their brains and make it more difficult for them to function!
In psychiatry it’s often more than, “recommends ātreatmentsā that are unnecessary and potentially dangerous, in violation of medical ethics?ā
It should have a separate note for psychiatry that reads,” incarcerates and forces treatments that have been proven to be neither efficacious nor safe and that are frequently known to be dangerous, upon people who cannot be proven to have any illness, in violation of medical ethics, human rights and international agreements”.
Thanks Steve, well put.
Yes, I too still suffer the repercussions of being kidnapped, locked up and drugged by psychiatry. It plunged me into my first ever and only “psychosis” at age 50. Now over 60 I still find it almost impossible to trust my fellow human beings and am terrified of the power doctors have to detain and drug.
In my journals at the time I referred to them as my “gaolers” and “torturers”, and it took me quite a while to get off their drugs…Olanzapine and Mertazapine and then Prozac. What hell they caused me.
Community treatment orders, especially with depot injections are another horrific means of torturing innocent people who have done nothing that could warrant their sentence under regular mechanisms.
Psychiatry is there purely to control and torture innocent people, to act as judge, jury and gaoler and to step in where, because of human rights and the letter of the law, the general judicial systems dare not go.
I am actually pleased articles such as this are published here as it gives readers and researchers who have learned the ACTUAL facts about early intervention, “anti-psychotics” etc a chance to rebut what would appear to new/undeucated readers to be a plausible, reasoned piece by an expert.
This sort of pieces appears unchallenged throughout the internet, and quite often opposing views go unpublished. Here, however, there is likely to be reasoned, researched and balanced critique that not only educates the public, but also the writer.
The danger of NOT publishing such pieces, I believe is that MIA will become merely an echo chamber.
To me, part of MIA’s great value lies in the fact that many of the commenters provide me with both a structure to critique such pieces myself, and facts that I can use when people in every day environments start spouting such crap about the need for more of the same, more drugs, more psych wards, more labelling, more oppression.
I strongly disagree with the views expressed in the article, but the more such articles that get published here, the more likely it is that a wider audience will see the medical model dissembled and understand that psychiatry is a total and very dangerous scam.
Yes…I think the therapists almost have to be dishonest and that comes through at some level in the relationship and can leave the patient uneasy.
I do believe that before the therapist was so destructive, I was actually getting quite a bit from it, and it opened paths and interests within me that I hadn’t previously appreciated, so in those ways it was positive, and I have managed to hold onto some gains.
However, the brutal ending made that extremely difficult and did cause new problems that I still struggle with.
I have been reflecting too, that when in therapy we are actually looking for things that are “wrong”, and making things that we may have seen as positive in the past into negatives. The handing over of power and trust was a condition of working with that particular therapist, and that, of course, exacerbated the power imbalance.
I read a piece recently (not sure where) that actually examined whether therapy helped and came to the conclusion it frequently did more harm than good.
Kallena….I actually hope she doesn’t risk going there again!
After extensive therapy that has included appalling behaviour by therapists which was then somehow the fault of MY diagnosed “mental Illness” , I have decided that therapy, and the power imbalance it involves, is just far too open to abuse.
Actually, therapy IS abuse. Its basic premise is that the therapist is ALWAYS “healthier” than the patient, and that the patient has less insight and less ability to see what’s happening than does the therapist. Hence, it is also intrinsically devaluing.
I had a psychiatrist unilaterally, totally unexpectedly and brutally end what had seemed to be a productive three-year therapy relationship by throwing me out of his office with a string of abusive and totally inexplicable statements, and throwing back at me the most sensitive things I had told him as evidence of my deficits. He didn’t have to give any explanation of his behaviour because he was the doctor and I was the patient and there were no witnesses.
Ten years and 14 days later, I still have nightmares and real trust issues that were not there before “therapy”. I had formed a deep and trusting attachment to him and to have it shattered like that was devastating. My next therapist suggested that perhaps the first therapist was “lovesick” and didn’t manage his emotions very well….uhmmmmm…and that was supposed to make it OK? The second therapist didn’t want to say anything though, because therapist #1 was “a more senior psychiatrist”.
I would encourage anyone to seek genuine, equal, relationships instead. This takes time and effort, and yes, there will be setbacks, but such relationships, particularly if approached mindfully, are fundamentally healthier and less likely to lead to catastrophic injury and/or devaluation.
CBT is freely available online, there are plenty of apps for meditation – there’s no need to put yourself through the risk of allowing an attachment to develop with a therapist/psychiatrist who is hiding their deficits behind their professional status!
…and why is the blatant deception inherent in this study so unsurprising?
The truth is that psychiatry and pharmaceutical companies will do ANYTHING possible to ensure the continuing flow of human fodder to ensure their money-making machines continue to grow. It doesn’t matter to them that it’s CHILDREN who are being irreparably damaged and hooked into the system for life – they see it as a major achievement.
And what’s more, it’s children of higher than average intelligence whose parents are being sold the lie that their children are quite fundamentally defective.Tragic.
Can psychiatry become any more morally and ethically bankrupt?
I too got to that sentence and thought WTF???!!!!
The serotonin/chemical imbalance stuff has been long defunct, and yet here is an article that says the serotonin gene has no link to depression, also saying that SSRI’s work. Don’t they see the blatant contradiction here?
My thought exactly…remission??
Uhmmmm, what about recovered?
The use of “remission” for full functioning after 10 years validates false arguments that “mental illness” is there for life and that there can be no permanent recovery. Friends of mine have been told they have gone into remission immediately after cancer treatment and are fully recovered after five years clear of cancer, and yet 10 years clear of “psychosis” is still considered “remission”?
So, how long does one have to be fully functioning, “medication”-free etc to be considered recovered?
…Or, perhaps more poignantly, why is a “psychotic” event considered an illness at all, rather than an event that can lead to personal understanding, growth, and development if treated sensitively, compassionately and wisely?
This and other studies have shown that “antipsychotics” lead to worse outcomes and/or permanent brain damage, and yet psychiatry continues to prescribe these drugs at ever increasing rates.
When will psychiatry remit and allow it’s victims to recover?
Here in Australia people have been charged with offences for refusing recommended life prolonging, but painful and invasive treatment to terminally ill children!
Heavens above….the doctors can force appallingly distressing treatments on kids to give them an extra few weeks of living hell, and their decision can overrule that of the parents. WTF? That’s torture too.
As an unwilling recipient of psychiatry’s torture which has left me with some deep emotional scars, I can only but agree that until psychiatry is wiped off the face of the earth and, in fact, ANY other forced medical treatment is totally outlawed, every person is at risk from doctors. They have far too much power.
My thoughts exactly…there’s just as much scientific evidence for prescribing them off-label as there is for prescribing them on-label…..NONE.
Plus, prescribing them at all risks great harm as they CREATE chemical imbalances in the brain (and probably gut also), are addictive, and have horrible side effect profiles.
The argument isn’t about whether they are prescribed off-label, it’s about whether they should have been approved in the first place, and now we know the extent of the misrepresentations of their efficacy and safety that got them approved, whether that approval should be revoked and they should be removed from the marketplace.
What the study appears to highlight is how “mental health treatment” is totally ineffective and simply captures more and more people without providing any effective results whatsoever. A psychiatric diagnosis is a diagnosis for life. The profession refuses to see that recovery is possible and, indeed, it is nigh on impossible once hooked on psychiatry’s drugs and weighted down with the concrete boots of a DSM diagnosis.
In reality it stigmatises people and gets them hooked on both diagnoses and addictive “medication” (ie legally prescribed drugs). The nature of psychiatry is to consign people to the scrap heap of permanent disability while it’s practitioners and drugs companies rake in enormous profits.
So why does anyone let it continue? I don’t get it!
Agree completely. These places are crimes against humanity.
Very sad news.
His blogs were informative and challenging, and he was passionate about his subject(s).
That was my stance on my second stay….be very nice, take the meds (and where possible spit them out ASAP), agree with everything, smile.
You get out quicker that way. Haven’t been back since.
Absolutely agree.
As a woman of 50 with no history of violence or psychosis, I was stripped of my human rights, and locked up in a psychiatric “hospital”. The trauma of it dumped me into my first and ONLY “major psychosis”, for which I was forcibly drugged with Olanzapine and Mertazapine. I was held in “hospital” and drugged for six weeks.
Being so totally stripped of my human rights was the biggest trauma of my life and within four months of being released I had made a very serious suicide attempt.
Twelve years later I am free of psychiatry and have been off the “drugs I would have to take for the rest of my life” for more than seven years, and have had no further “psychotic” episodes.
However, I still have nightmares and my responses to stress are extremely difficult for me to deal with. I was unable to return to my former highly successful career.
The psychiatric violence committed against me and total denial of my human rights (I was treated as a sub-human life form) changed my life…and not for the better.
I had committed no crime, had no history of violence and psychiatry’s violent and abusive actions against me have traumatised me…no doubt at all.
Being reduced to a sub-human life form without rights IS traumatic, it IS violence. It CANNOT be otherwise.
It is NOT health care.
Precisely what I am doing/have done, Julie.
I sold up my house etc and moved interstate, breaking all ties with “mental health” services. No-one here will ever be aware of my past, and, thankfully, as I make new friends and reach into my creative and artistic skills, I find I am being treated with respect and that I have value as a human being.
This is something that was stripped bare by the “mental health” industry and the human rights commission. To those in it I was sick, flawed, valueless, dangerous – a scapegoat for all their projections.
Now I am regaining the status of human being, each week I am feeling slightly less down and fractured, and sometimes happiness appears – I thought I might never feel hope or satisfaction or joy again, but it is returning, albeit sporadically, as I tentatively re-establish human connectedness.
What I say to anyone unfortunate to be captured by the “mental health” industry is RUN AWAY! They are committed to keeping you sick as that protects them from having to face their own human fragility.
Yes, these examples abound. Psychiatrists can and do get away with appalling behaviour towards their “patients” .
They just use the trump card – “mentally ill liar”. If that doesn’t work, they use the joker – “potentially dangerous”. They don’t need proof to use the “potentially dangerous” joker, because the dangerousness is only POTENTIAL, and hence it is impossible to disprove. Additionally, the law sees psychiatrist status as unquestionable evidence of god-like infallibility. You can have a totally clean record (not so much as a parking fine), be a responsible member of society, educated, a mother, and be over 60 and not very big, but if the shrink says you are “potentially dangerous” you can be totally stripped of all human rights. I couldn’t get my records transferred from the shrink who labelled me that way to my new treating shrink, because the old one said that if my new shrink saw my records, I would become dangerous!!! I tried to convince the human rights commission that I really was not able to read my new shrink’s mind, but they wouldn’t believe me.
The ACT Human Rights Commission sided with the first shrink and called me a liar. Wouldn’t let me know why they were calling me a liar (maybe they truly believed I COULD read my new shrink’s mind), wouldn’t tell me what evidence, if any, the first shrink had presented, as he would not give them his permission. He said my seeing the evidence against me could also make me dangerous, apparently.
It was traumatic in the extreme, really, knowing that even the body charged with protecting my human rights could be used by a psychiatrist who hadn’t seen me for years to further demean and continue his abuse of me.
However, there is a bright side – the whole sick and abusive charade gave me the angry impetus I needed to walk away from psychiatry and all “mental health” services forever.
…and if I come across another struggling human being, what I accord them is respect, and my honest presence IF (and only IF), they want it.
Thank you…this is a beautifully told story that reflects my own experience when my “consumer” status has, by either myself or someone else, been revealed.
The fact is, it leads to massive abuse both in the form of ostracism and in the form of discounting, dismissing, condescension, blaming, gaslighting and contempt. I found that if I raised any issues whatsoever about my own or others’ treatment or concerns, or if I was in any way not totally harmonious and “normal” ALL the time, it was blamed on my being “mentally ill”. Normal moods and feelings are viewed as “symptoms”, as are views that differ from those of others.
Outing yourself or being outed, even with people you have come to know quite well, inevitably seems to lead to scapegoating, sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant, so I too no longer “fess up” to my former consumer status. Not to doctors, friends, acquaintances. I no longer extend my arms to have them tied into their straight jacket.
In society’s eyes there can be no recovery from a “mental illness”….not ever….perhaps because the chemical imbalance lie was (and is) so wholeheartedly promoted by psychiatry. It certainly serves to maintain psychiatry’s customer base, as people who are blamed, ostracized, marginalized etc ARE bound to be unhappy and unwell and hence seek “help” which inflicts further harm.
markps2
“just say ā It is between me and my doctor what medicines I takeā.”
Sage advice indeed, and the only way I have found to circumvent people’s overwhelming insistence that I’d be better than well if I’d just persist in finding the right combination of “medication”.
That I persisted in seeking that combination and ended up very actively suicidal, psychotic and totally unable to function because of those “medications” is totally irrelevant to them (and the doctors).
I no longer have any engagement with psychiatry and haven’t taken “medication” for 7 years, but for a few years, if anyone asked or commented etc, I also say, “That’s between me and my doctor”.
Since I have moved to another city and formed new friendship groups no-one asks, and it’s nice not to be judged and pressured.
On the other hand, might it encourage greater wariness by both prescribing doctors and the general public when it comes to “medication”?
Drug approval in the US would become meaningless and prescribers and users alike would have to turn to other countries’ assessment of drugs, effectively making all of the apparently already-dubious FDA processes less influential.
Would this really matter? Might it be a good thing, in fact, if the FDA, which appears to be run largely by and for the drug companies, were to finally drop the charade of being the protector of public health and safety?
The requirements for trials are still going to be there in other countries, and I see this as potentially taking away the influence Pharma can use internationally by saying the US FDA has approved this drug, as I doubt many would follow the US down this track.
It just really makes drug/device approval in the US even more meaningless than it already is.
Well said, Julie Greene.
If people were given full facts and truly knew the damage “mental health care” and psych drugs can do, they’d run very far away very fast!
It’s a known fact that many psych drugs are known to CAUSE irregular heart beat, heart damage, brain damage and lasting problems, as well as stigma and massive personal and interpersonal problems. To be locked up, tied down and drugged or shocked is appalling, but that is exactly what psychiatrists are allowed, by law, to do, and even if they don’t go to the extremes, their drugs are dangerous and ineffective…research has repeatedly shown this.
People should not believe it cannot happen to them. I was a well paid professional who at age 50 had her life hijacked by psychiatry. Over a decade later I am still recovering, but at least I have my life. Many others (including Carrie Fisher) don’t.
no.
I have noticed this seemingly deliberate shift in the site’s message too.
Some articles are definitely giving credence to psychiatric labels and talking of mind altering psych drugs as if they are real medications for real illnesses.
Sad, really….but I am glad that comments are not being censored….however, the people who countered them may slowly drift away.
I certainly get your drift and agree with you 100%, Oldhead.
Yes, I experienced that too. Start as a voluntary patient seeking support for some transient emotional distress, get given allegedly safe and effective “medication” and when that “medication” makes you really ill you’re forced to keep taking it while they say they have unmasked underlying “disease” (for which there are no tests) and proceed to increase the “medication” that caused the reaction and add a few more for good measure.
Because there’s no tests to show that psychiatric “diseases” exist, it is equally impossible to prove you don’t have one! They’ve got you and they won’t let you go.
I am sure that if the general public was aware of how easily psychiatry can strip them of ALL their human and legal rights, no-one would ever consent to seeing a psychiatrist.
Frank, I couldn’t agree more!
“Now how do we return to āhealthā/society when ādiseaseā/(āreasonā for quarantine) is whatever they want it to be?”
Herein lies the rub…if you criticize psychiatry, they simply say it is because you “lack insight” into your “disease/illness”, and that, in itself, is a “disease” (anosognosia). Psychiatry does not and cannot provide any evidence at all that its “patients” actually have any disease or illness, and yet it is free to kidnap, imprison and drug people, and then to do it some more if they object.
And because there are no tests or scans, there is no way to prove you do NOT have one of their “diseases”.
I have been functioning in society without the “medications” (read psychiatrically prescribed mind altering drugs that pitched me headlong into hell when I had lived for the first 50 years of my life with no “mental illness”) for over 6 years, and yet I am still considered for “medical” purposes a psychiatric patient, so can’t refuse those same drugs that made me so ill.
It really is very frightening to know that a “doctor” could force drugs on me which I know will plunge me back into absolute hell and there is nothing I can do about it because advance care directives can be ignored when it comes to psychiatry’s “diseases” and drugs.
Psychiatry has left me very deeply traumatised… it is NEVER OK to imprison and forcibly drug someone, but doing it under the guise of treating a disease that cannot be shown to even exist with mind altering drugs is an absolute betrayal of both our trust in the medical profession and in human rights and justice.
Yes, from my personal experience, being on Olanzapine was pure hell, but coming off it was pure hell times three. Not only did I have to contend with the ongoing effects of the drug, but had severe drug withdrawal symptoms thrown in on top for months and months.
No human being should be forced to take this stuff (I was drugged under a “treatment order”) – it is cruel and inhuman torture.
Given there are no benefits and massive harms, no new patients should be started. I stop short of saying “ban it outright” because some people simply might not be able to get off the stuff it is so addictive.
Thank you…a nice piece.
I think one of the major reasons go on psych drugs to being with is that their doctors really do push the point – not only do they dismiss any concerns about addiction and withdrawal, they also deny side effects, and they sell the “chemical imbalance” lie.
We have been raised to trust and respect doctors, but in the case of psych meds, they are the snake oil salesmen of modern times. There is no informed consent with these drugs and no respect for the patient’s well being.
As you note, coming off them is to say the least, challenging, even with support. That doctors will do almost anything to convince people to “take their meds!” (including the use of incarceration, force and depot injections), makes it really tough for many to actually listen to their inner voice, and even tougher for them to act on it.
I think anything that can help people make that single minded decision NOT to take the drugs to begin with will always be the best position….but yes, helping people get off them once they go wrong, as they almost certainly will, is indeed a high calling.
In my case, being detained, totally stripped of my rights, forced to take drugs that made me feel like hell AND hallucinate AND plunge into psychosis (for the first time in my life), and then told I’d have to keep taking them for the rest of my life and that I could never hope to recover was more than a little traumatic.
At no stage was I violent or abusive…my response was freeze and/or flight rather than fight.
They told me that they could come to my home and lock me up again when ever they felt like it, which left me nowhere to feel safe. I own my home and it has always been my safest space. They threatened to invade it as they had invaded my mind and body.
It was abuse piled on top of abuse with no hope of reprieve, and it was called psychiatric “care”!
Then, after I got out, my shrink said I could stop taking the meds (Zyprexa and Avanza) if I didn’t like them (no suggestion of a taper and no warning of what would happen if I did stop), and said I had to go back to work even though I was still hallucinating and feeling terrified. And it was the workplace that had caused my breakdown in the first place.
No prizes for guessing what happened next. Thankfully, I didn’t succeed….obviously….but was put back on the drugs and it took me 4 years to finally get off them. That was 6 years ago and the more I read, the more I realize I still have residual symptoms that weren’t there before.
Psychiatric “care” is cruel torture and those who practice it need to be locked up and put on the same “medications” (quantities, combinations etc) that they have inflicted on their “patients”, before being released to fend for themselves.
I suspect we’d have fewer psychiatrists if that occurred as such treatment really does make one feel very suicidal indeed.
Our experience of the “medications” is so very similar it’s eerie, despite us living at opposite ends of the earth.
I have only been off the drugs for around 6 or 7 years, and although I still struggle with symptoms that weren’t there before I was put on them, I am certainly far better than I was while taking them. Hopefully one day I will be asymptomatic.
The drugs made me unable to function. They took away my career and livelihood. A simple little anti-depressant tablet prescribe by my GP and taken exactly as prescribed. When I reported side effects, I was dismissed and told I must keep taking these magic pills.
It is a cruel thing to force a human being to take drugs that the human being knows are making them insanely unwell. Psychiatrists, however, do this on a daily basis. I think THEY are cruel and insane.
Nomadic
Doctors are giving them out ‘cos they want to be able to offer something, and they have been convinced by big pharma money and falsified trials that they work. Drug companies also fund universities, studies, doctors’ professional development etc as part of their marketing. They pay eminent doctors BIG money to promote the drugs to their colleagues, and they aggressively put down anyone who questions this megabuck business.
People accept them because doctors tell them to and in western society we have been conditioned to trust our doctors. People also want relief from difficult feelings and are very vulnerable when tough times come along.
Greatly simplified answer, I know….but that’s the basis of it.
Uhhmmm…please quote the actual research regarding serotonin levels….even the American Psychiatric Association acknowledges that the chemical imbalance theory of depression was only ever a theory with no evidence to support it. A past president of the APA went as far as to say it was an urban myth that no serious psychiatrist had ever believed, but it was a convenient way to get patients to take their drugs.
There is no way of measuring serotonin levels in the brain of a living person.
Some “anti-depressants” that are thought to lower serotonin levels work (as well as a placebo), as do some that raise serotonin levels, and both types can be equally effective in the same patient. Other “anti-depressants” that do not target serotonin at all are equally as effective…but again, they are only about as effective as a placebo.
If you have research that proves the serotonin theory of depression I am sure the scientific world and the drug companies would love to see it – please share!
..and I should add, that they never even thought to conduct thyroid tests on me BEFORE putting me on dangerous drugs. It was only a few years down the track that a doc actually ordered a thyroid function test and discovered a problem.
Diagnosing a fictitious “mental illness” likely meant a real physical illness that was perhaps the cause of my struggles went untreated.
As usual, excellent piece.
My personal experience with these diabolical drugs and the nightmare of coming off them, followed by gradual recovery (but enduring damage), echoes the experience of many others both on this site and in the studies cited.
I think of the battle for truth re these drugs as akin to that surrounding big tobacco, but infinitely more dangerous. The drug companies know full well the dangers, but actively cover them up, as do their financial and ideological allies, the prescribing doctors, because they will lose the bulk of their highly profitable businesses, and the latter would also lose their POWER over people and society should the truth be known.
This is the most dangerous part of the equation that sets it apart from big tobacco – the collusion of those bastions of respectability and trust – the medical establishment – in their pursuit of power.
The power and influence doctors and the medical establishment have in society and the media is unparalleled. They are seen as being beyond reproach, guardians of safety and sanity, and even a hint of a report that could have people question their medications causes massive outrage and dire warnings that the sky will fall.
Here in Australia our public broadcaster did make a science program presenting the facts on anti-depressants, but the medical establishment got wind of it and it never went to air. The highly-regarded science reporter was absolutely hung out to dry and the broadcaster was widely criticised for its irresponsibility for even thinking such a program might be warranted, especially given people might come off their meds and unleash a wave of suicide, murder and crime on society. Forget that the science that says otherwise.
It was disgusting.
These drugs give doctors ultimate power over individuals and society, and doctors are firmly addicted to that power. It is power that lies largely outside the law. Who else can lock up and drug people almost indefinitely with no evidence and no trial?
And therein lies the problem. It is a problem of medical establishments’ and doctors’ addiction to power, and it is underpinned by the psychiatric “medications” that doctors falsely claim keep society safe.
Question the drugs, and you are threatening the very heart of the doctors’ and the medical establishments’ power base….and they react just like meth addicts, only intellectually, and using the full force of their power addiction.
I couldn’t agree more with this statement!
Absolutely horrifying!!! If anything like this is ever rolled out, my computer will be redundant for everything other than online shopping, bill paying, and banking. I do not wish to be surveilled, diagnosed and drugged by some algorithm designed by money hungry shrinks and their even more money hungry drug companies!
How much more stupidly inhuman can humans possibly become?
Thanks for your story Daniel. I also had a whole heap of ghastly effects when the Zyprexa/Prozac combo was inflicted on me, including but not limited to migraines, mouth ulcers and nerve issues…oh and lets not forget the serious suicidal ideation, akathisia and eating problems!
It’s not supposed to happen to adults (I was in my 50’s) but those effects were very real, and I was very lightly dismissed by shrinks as being medication non-compliant, and having the dreaded anosognosia. So nothing was done to assist…they merely doubled down.
I agree that it is horribly demoralising, and akin to torture…a total breach of human rights.
I too found B12 helpful, but coming off the drugs was ultimately what helped most. I am sure you realise how carefully dose reduction must be done – it’s not pleasant and don’t rush it!
Since coming off them, my migraines have dropped right back to pre-drug levels and other symptoms have gradually abated. There is hope.
The trick I found was to slowly and quietly walk away from psychiatry – it is irredeemable. I’m afraid my experiences confirmed that complaining only increases the intensity of its attacks.
You’ll find lots of useful info on this site and others….all the best with your escape and recovery from any damage those charlatans may have done!
Anti-psychotics are appallingly overused here in Australia, even in people with no disability. People in aged care homes, anyone labelled with “psychiatric disorder” and anyone who a doctor simply doesn’t like, is likely to have these highly dangerous drugs forced on them.
Olanzapine, forced on me after admission as an involuntary psych patient, made my life a living (psychotic) hell – I was 50 and had never been “psychotic” in my life before. It was horrendous to come off, but thankfully, over 10 years down the track, I seem to have recovered OK apart from the PTSD resulting from the medical abuse I suffered.
These drugs should be withdrawn from the market as they are dangerous and ineffective and used almost exclusively as chemical straightjackets. They absolutely preclude any form of appropriate assistance being delivered to a person in any form of distress, physical or emotional.
Psychologist, I have been off all prescribed psychiatric drugs and without psych or shrink “support” for over 10 years and have been far better off without drugs or a shrink’s “support”. I had not attempted suicide before being put on psychiatric drugs and have not attempted suicide since being off them.
As far as I am concerned shrinks and their drugs are quite simply EVIL. I do not need to keep in touch with a shrink and neither should I have been locked up and drugged…and certainly not without my fully informed consent….the whole saga was extremely traumatic.
Please read the article and about the negative effects of anti-psychotics! They are dangerous, mind damaging drugs, and certainly should not be considered as therapeutic medications.
I was forced to take Mirtazapine and Olanzapine for severe depression and anxiety for a couple of years from 2004. They left me a total zombie, unable to think, sleep, or coordinate my movements properly, and with an uncontrollable urge to eat sugar and fat.
Whenever I was able, I stored them in my cheek and spat them out, but if given the dissolving on tongue variety this was not possible.
As soon as I was released from the treatment order, I gradually weaned off them…withdrawal took months of true hell.
I cannot even imagine nastier drugs, and can fully understand that they cause permanent brain damage. I still have problems with memory and co-ordination, and occasionally the weird muscle stiffness I had when on them.
They should be banned.
I actually find it really interesting that through recent events in my area in Australia where we have had massive bushfires, followed by Covid-19, I have witnessed people exhibiting (what they might call) signs of severe “mental illness”.
They have been doing far more in the way of weird behaviour (panic stockpiling of goods, displaying financially, emotionally, and socially appalling behaviours, circulating ridiculous conspiracy theories, talking to imaginary friends, excessive gambling, drinking and drug taking, increased use of anti depressants, psych services etc).
Some have actually sympathised with me for what they imagine I, as an officially designated “mentally ill” person, MUST be going through. Yet, while concerned and taking reasonable precautions, I have been no where near as flipped out as they have been.
I remember a time when I was locked up and forcibly drugged for far less extreme behaviour than many now exhibit. Yet, some in my community justify their behaviour as related to the “shocking events” (bushfire and Covid-19) while putting my (justifiable) response to events at the time of my struggles down to the character flaw of “mental illness”.
But through this period, their characters apparently will remain unblemished. Their “madness” (and need for “medication” and support-both financial and psychological etc) is a justifiable response to circumstance, while mine was, and apparently always will remain an irreparable failure of character, even though I have accessed neither “medication” nor psych support for over 10 years, including through recent events.
I guess acknowledgement of such facts would create within them cognitive dissonance too great to deal with, and so they need a screen on which to project their own fragility.
The nice white label of “mental illness” stuck firmly on someone else provides them with just such a screen.
It is interesting to watch the double standards and mental gymnastics people, and society in general employs in a bid to establish equilibrium, and the vital role in society those of us with the “mental illness” label actually fulfill.
Why haven’t the social workers been charged with making false and misleading statements to a court, given the testimony of psychiatrists and other against the actions of the social worker(s)The social worker(s) has also misrepresented the legal situation to the “patient”? Surely the patient has a right to be provided with accurate information.
Clearly they must be in breach of some law(s) given that proceedings initiated by them have been dropped on a number of occasions against this one patient. This is blatant harassment.
Ditto.
Kindredspirit,
I agree wholeheartedly, and can add that disclosing as an adult also brings enormous consequences. One is seen as lesser, as broken, as just plain wrong and incapable of healing and recovery. In the eyes of the mental health industry, you become no more than the worst of their projections.
Consider closely before disclosing…at any stage in life!
I was effectively kidnapped and held against my will in a Canberra (Australia) hospital. After an initial period of around 72 hours they had to let me go as I showed no signs of being a danger to myself or others. Indeed, never in my life had I even had a parking ticket or been in any trouble with the law, or shown any sign of or tendency towards violence.
As I was getting ready to leave, the head shrink asked me what I thought of the facility.
Being naive (it was my first ever brush with mental health services…age 50), I said I thought it would have been good to be able to have camomile tea, and thought that as a long term vegetarian who always marked the menu for meat free meals, I was often disappointed to receive a plate full of meat. I was quiet and respectful as I wanted to just get home and feel safe.
She said, “you seem angry, that means you get to stay longer”. After being put before the kangaroo court that was the “Mental Health Tribunal” the hospital was granted an involuntary treatment order that allowed them to keep me in and drug me with Olanzapine and Mertazapine, Stilnox (Ambien in the US) and whatever else they wanted for another few months. After release they could also force me to take their drugs. The time inside was pure hell…vicious nurses, male patients being sexually threatening towards me, witnessing violence between patients and between patients and staff and being refused access to even paper and pencil. I had had committed no crime and showed no signs of being dangerous, and simply could not believe I could be locked up like that. I was an educated, high achieving executive.
I got out after a truly terrifying and traumatising 6 weeks. Being effectively kidnapped, stripped of all my human rights and drugged had a profound effect on me. My mother couldn’t accept I had been locked up with “druggies and hopeless nut cases” and was “dangerous to self and others” and disinherited and disowned me. Over 15 years down the track we still have no contact…she is almost 90 and I don’t expect I’ll see her again.
Totally traumatised and having been advised by my private shrink it’d be fine to just stop taking the meds without tapering, within a month or two of discharge I had made a serious attempt at suicide and ended up inside again…more drugging…but this time I was smarter and pretended to be very compliant, tonguing the meds and spitting them out ASAP when ever I could.
I have now been psych drug free for a decade and totally shrink free for about 5 years. Slowly, ever so slowly, I am becoming more my usual self…intelligent, interested in life, able to sustain normal friendships, and creative.
Never again will I discuss my feelings/thoughts with a doctor of any shape or form…the damage they can do on a whim and “for your own good” is absolutely appalling. They must be stripped of the power to detain and torture human beings.
Thank you Richard.
Having had “therapy” from a male psychologist (1988) and a male psychiatrist (2004-2007), both of whom subscribed to Freud’s theories (explained them to me, in fact, as FACT!), I can personally attest to the unspeakable harm and trauma those theories, and the treatment they give rise to, result in.
The material in this article NEEDS to be very widely distributed, and the letters referenced NEED to be published in psychiatric journals and incorporated into psychiatry and psychology training so Freud’s work cannot do further harm.
He needs to be remembered as a fraud who actively perpetuated the abuse of women and children.
Agree. Zyprexa (olanzapine) is THE most evil drug ever concocted. The akathisia it causes is pure hell and resulted in my attempted suicide. I suspect that even after close on 10 years since my last dose I am still affected.
If given immunity from prosecution I would happily force it on those doctors who forced it on me. When I complained about it to them and asked if they had ever taken it, their response was universally, “I am not mentally ill, and so it wouldn’t do anything”. I’d like to see them to prove that!
I almost laughed when I read the following:
āIām really exhausted trying to get you to show a glimmer of compassion that indicates you have empathic understanding about the truth of why Iām suffering emotionally right now. But I must say I believe itās not because of a failure of empathy on your part. I believe you know exactly why Iām feeling the way I do, but you simply donāt care that Iām suffering, even though you understand why I am. So my blunt question for you is: You donāt really give a damn about my emotional pain right now, do you?ā
The day I walked out of therapy for good, that was pretty close to the discussion I had with my shrink. For the seven years he had sat there, his total failure to respond in any “real” way had in the end left me feeling …almost like …????… Kafka’s cockroach. Totally othered.Totally wrong.
In retrospect, I was probably too persistent in trying to develop some sort of rapport with him, and I think his lack of responsiveness was ultimately quite damaging.
TRM 123
Agree totally…I am unable to trust any medical practitioner since my “treatment” (read torture) for depression and sleeplessness that resulted in extreme akathisia and my first “psychotic” episode at age 50, which was then compounded by hospitalisation and more forced drugging with the offending substances and the most evil drugs on earth – “antipsychotics”.
The total corruption of medicine by drug companies and the refusal of doctors to listen to patients re their experiences of these drugs is fundamentally a crime against humanity…mass torture for financial gain…and should be labelled as such.
I really do believe that psychiatrists who have prescribed these drugs and dismissed patients’ complaints out of hand (as mine did) should be made to take the bloody drugs for a year or two then have them withdrawn cold turkey.
After all, they locked many of us up and forced us to take them, refusing to listen to our reports of adverse side effects to the point of having people held down and the drugs forcibly injected.
It is now getting towards 10 years since I took any of their drugs and even the thought of a sexual relationship is anathema to me, meaning I will likely remain unpartnered the rest of my life (I am in my 60s) Then there’s the trauma directly resulting from being so treated. Yes. I am angry.
While I do enjoy much life has to offer, intimate relationships, loving and being loved, are now out of my reach as a direct result of psychiatry and psychiatric drugging.
That they can do that with no repercussions and no forewarning or informed consent amounts to torture.
Yes, I am glad my misanthropy is relates mainly to the medical profession…including nurses and anyone who claims that the “mentally ill” are dangerous and/or need to be made to take medication and/or follow the medical model. I just avoid them like the plague.
Rachael
while suffering drug induced psychosis after being involuntarily detained and drugged in a Canberra (Australia) institution, I had almost precisely that vision/dream/hallucination…whatever. The psychiatrists were the “gods” and ONLY what they deemed acceptable was acceptable and was accepted as acceptable by government. These “gods” sat at a high table and handed down “treatments” to those admitted because they didn’t, in some way, conform. Their word was law, and I had broken that law.
In some ways I am glad I had the vision, as I henceforth (apparently) complied with treatment and was released in 5 weeks, rather than the six month “sentence” initially imposed by the godlike shrinks at a mental health tribunal “hearing” (with another three of “outpatient treatment”), and in the years since have become psychiatry and “medication” free.
The withdrawals were horrendous, but it’s coming up to 15 years since I was in very much the situation of the kangaroo court the author describes…drugged, denied legal representation…not even allowed a pencil and paper or a phone call or a shower or clean clothes, and never informed of my rights or of the harms of “treatment”. Bastards.
I moved interstate and still avoid doctors, and will never have any of my medical history transferred, despite now being in my 60s. I know I have a medical condition that is worsening, but going to a doctor isn’t an option any more.
I have new friends who don’t know my history and live a normal life…but I really do have some very major trauma responses that make life….problematic, to say the least.
Vancouver sounds like Canberra. I hope human rights win!
Yes…informed consent is crucial. I was not informed of any of the risks of psychotherapy, nor of the methods used by my psychiatrist. Those methods put me in hospital twice with my first “psychoses”, and resulted in involuntary commitment and forced treatment with psychoactive drugs (I had no history of “mental illness” or of being hospitalised previously). After we had managed to form an apparently “therapeutic” relationships he asked me for sex (which I declined), and later, he threw me out of his office, hurling diagnoses and abuse, using everything I had told him in confidence against me.
Then he said I’d be dangerous if my (newer) shrink had access to my records.
…and the ACT Human Rights Commission to whom I complained, took his word and stripped me of all my rights to have my treating doctor given access to my records.
Informed consent? Had I known that I stood to lose everything I had achieved at age 50, be drugged, labelled and would be thrown on the scrap heap, I would have run from psychotherapy as if the devil were after me…and it turned out he was, in the form a a psychiatrist.
Over a decade down the track and I still struggle in ways I never struggles before I enetered psychotherapy. I am isolated and unable to seek medical attention for some physical ailments I have because I am now totally aware of how unaccountable medical practitioners are – they just need to say you are/were a psych patient, and there go your human rights.
Informed consent MUST include not only treatment options but the human rights you give up when you see a “mental health” practitioner. They can hospitalise you against your will, they can forcibly drug you, and they can abuse you.
…and their “diagnoses” can never be expunged from your record.
This all should form part of informed consent.
Wonderful piece.
When he says,
“Many people with severe anxiety and/or depression are also anti-authoritarians. Often a major pain of their lives that fuels their anxiety and/or depression is fear that their contempt for illegitimate authorities will cause them to be financially and socially marginalized, but they fear that compliance with such illegitimate authorities will cause them existential death.”, he absolutely hits the nail on the head!
Sylvain, your comment is not quite complete…should read:
The dog has eaten my report! Thatās why I gave it late…and why it is a lump of dog poop!
Then why don’t Australian shrinks and their enablers STOP adding to the trauma these already vulnerable people have experienced? Surely adding further trauma by forcing “treatment” is NOT helpful.
Having being subjected to a psych ward in an Australian hospital (Canberra) I can say it was incredibly traumatic to be locked up and drugged with neurotoxic substances against my will. It was torture, not medical help. And I found just as destructive was ACT Human Rights Commission’s response (dismissal and shaming) to my complaint about my treatment at the hands of a psychiatrist.
All I can say is that the practice of psychiatry and all the structures that support its ability to coerce, abuse and further traumatise vulnerable people should be outlawed. NOW.
Bradford…Just did a search and found the 30 traits listed somewhre and thought, “but surely everyone would have those traits!”
I find it hard to believe that others don’t have them, especially the BS detector….when people are lying/being deceptive, it leaves my stomach churning for days and after a few times around them I simply can’t go there again.
Not “normal” to have these…surely it’s not “normal” not to?
Brilliant piece that really describes very well what goes on with me too. I have found any sort of psychiatric intervention (drugs, therapy etc) to be destructive in the extreme as none of them actually help deal with what’s going on by developing skills and approaches to these thoughts and feelings or to the super-sensitivity that underlies them.
Drugging, labelling, diagnosing, incarcerating etc only helped entrench and deepen the feelings of powerlessness that took me to those potentially destructive and decidedly unpleasant places and did nothing to help understand and address the original causes and resultant thought patterns.
Learning to manage super-sensitivity requires compassion, skill and persistence, and they are not things that psychiatry can offer.
I read somewhere that he was on significant doses of “medications”, so they’re likely the cause of this massacre.
What got me about the APA statement, though, was that it was basically a promo, and touting for business.
Call me cynical, but f they’re so concerned, why have they helped the military in the development of torture techniques and why aren’t they very actively campaigning against psychiatric drugging?
āImagine you were kidnapped and assaulted, and never even came close to getting justice for what was done to you. And then you saw someone, a member of the same profession as the people who hurt you and got away with it, and this person told you your anger over it was a psychiatric symptom, fixable with drugs. How would you react?ā
Yup…exactly what happened to me, and yes, if you express anything but gratitude for being kidnapped and drugged, and losing everything you have worked a lifetime to build, then, yes, according to them, you are ANGRY and in need of further imprisonment and drugging.
Psychiatrists are absolutely unreal, but like others here, I too have used my anger to escape my torturers rather than working on “gratitude lists” for the “help” I have received (whether I wanted it or not) from them. I had never been totally comfortable with anger, but now it is my companion. It lets me know when I have been violated or treated badly. It warns me that I am being taken advantage of or my experience is being discounted. My absolute rage reminds me of the severity of psychiatry’s abusiveness and my own powerlessness to stop it or to gain any recognition of the damage it has done to my life. That anger, that rage, has a cause and it has a purpose.
And that is not to harm others, it is to provide us with the wherewithal to free ourselves from our oppressors and reclaim our integrity.
Agreed, many of us have read this stuff before….but I think it extremely important that the articles on drug efficacy, fraud, debunking the chemical imbalance myth etc continue to appear very regularly so new victims of psychiatric abuse (ie all psychiatric “patients”) have easy and prominent access to such material when they come across this site.
It was such articles (and, of course Whitaker’s book) a number of years ago that helped me understand the totally fraudulent nature of the “mental health” industry, the lies I had been told, and the reasons the drugs forced on me were having such disastrous consequences.
Plus, the more new studies published that debunk psychiatry and its drugs on a range of sites, the less psychiatry is able to claim it’s just the Scientology “nutters” that are railing against them.
Such articles and studies are becoming more mainstream now, and their collective weight, even when they don’t get published in medical journals, cannot be denied.
They also provide us with access to the latest references to share with any newly questioning friends/acquaintances.
Wonderful resource indeed!
To clarify, Stephen
What was done to me (in Australia) wasn’t part of the ACE study, as such. However, the things ticked on my “dangerousness” assessment all would have been classed as adverse childhood experiences, with the exception of my having left a psychologically abusive husband.
I had, during my lifetime, acknowledged and grown/moved on from my not wonderful childhood and my violent rape at age 12, successfully and gently raising my own kids, and building a successful and secure life and career and a respected place in my communities.
It appalled me that psychiatry should list events from 35-40 years earlier that had ceased to be issues in my life as reasons to deem me potentially “a danger to others” and lock me up and drug me involuntarily.
I was going through a breakdown at the time, and really struggling and had sought psychiatric support, but had shown no evidence of being a danger to anyone. My breakdown related to work related stress and career burnout, and the situation in that workplace totally burnt out numerous others too.
What psychiatry actually did was saddle ME with the “dangerousness” that rested firmly with those who had abused me all those years ago…my parents, my rapists, and my former husband. It used these long since past events as reason to lock me up and drug me.
I had addressed many issues through therapy, meditation, counseling training, helping others, raising my own kids etc, and so thoroughly agree with your assessment that people can develop and change, but the hospital that captured and drugged me used those old experiences as evidence that I might be dangerous.
My point is that there is potentially massive danger in screening for ACE’s while ever psychiatry holds the power to detain and drug…you absolutely never know when or how anything they know about you will be used, either to justify diagnosing and drugging of kids or further down the track in adulthood.
Maybe they should just be red flags that are used to help people, but I have no confidence whatsoever that any information provided on such events will be used as anything but a reason to further punish the innocent.
Yes…and they are used to justify locking people up involuntarily.
The reason I was deprived of my liberty and had dangerous drugs forced upon me was assessed that I could be “a danger to others” based on the fact that I had several “ACEs”. NEVER in my life had I exhibited any violence or anti-social or unlawful behaviour (not even a parking ticket), I had successfully raised two children, had a high level exec career, been a volunteer telephone counselor, served on club committees etc. AND I was 50 and female.
And yet, when I sought “help” after a work related stress breakdown, I answered questions that disclosed that I had experienced not-too-good parenting and a violent rape, instead of being shown respect and caring for having survived and contributed to society, the information was used against me to deemed I was “a danger to others”.
Locked up and drugged. Treated appallingly. Totally traumatised.
What was done was far worse than anything that happened to me as a kid. It cost me my career, most of my friends, and my relationship with my mother, who couldn’t handle my being locked up in a psych ward and disowned me.
This is what assessment for “ACE’s” can be used for. Every box ticked on the violence assessment form (I got copies of my hospital records) was ticked because of childhood ACE’s I had disclosed as part of conversations with a shrink.
In their minds, we are forever defined (negatively) by our “ACEs”. We can never grow or learn from these experiences, they cannot shape us to be more compassionate and caring people, determined NOT to repeat the cruelties we suffered.
In the eyes of psychiatry, childhood “ACE’s” define us as being as irredeemably bad and broken, dangerous, and nothing positive we do in a lifetime can wipe that slate clean.
Screening for “ACE’s” is just another form of psychiatric abuse.
My comment above was agreeing with Steve’s comments!
I certainly cannot agree with Lenora22’s summation, but the way comments are displayed makes it a bit difficult to ascertain to whom I was responding, I suspect.
Agree completely with your comments.
From my experience the whole psychiatric field is absolutely patriarchal, even though it is inhabited by many women these days. Its underpinnings, its history and its attitudes …all of it!
Looks like a couple of people have.
Hear hear!
All through the article my brain was screaming, “NO!NO!NO!” because it was so wrong on so many levels. Thank you Slaying for putting the time and effort into nailing the issues with this article, and to the others above who also critiqued.
Yes…this was a really interesting article potentially offering some very valuable insights. It has taken me over 12 years to better understand the origins and content of my one and only fully blown “psychosis”, and in doing so I have come to understand better how I “work”, how I react, how I relate to situations and people, especially when under stress. That means I am better able to modulate my sensitivities and negotiate life more creatively and effectively.
The shrinks who drove me into psychosis put me on diabolically evil drugs and told me I’d be in and out of the “revolving door” of psych wards for the rest of my life, taking all hope and agency from me….or at least trying to.
It’s now over seven years since I used any of their nasty drugs, and around 10 years since I had “anti psychotics”.
Such studies as this, when combined with what we know about psycho-social factors, trauma and attachment might well ring psychiatric druggings’ death knell….and hopefully it’ll take psychiatry with it.
Fabulously powerful article. It really does raise and address most of the glaring shortcomings of psychiatry. Love the 11 points, and I too laughed at the crumbling, nonsensical, now openly snake-oiled facade the “profession” has become.
Debunking psychiatry is essential because of the danger it is to society, and this article is great at doing that. Psychiatry’s reversion to marketing, and marketing of the type suggested, what’s more, really does hold its scientific and medical shortcomings out for all to see.
The ones I have met are arrogance personified, coupled with a big slug of abusiveness and dishonesty.
They are not providing medical services and they know it… the campaign seems to admit as much!
Agreed. In the journal I kept in “hospital” as an “involuntary patient”, I referred to my captors as kidnappers, jailers and torturers and I referred to the experience as rape. I was terrified, and even reading this article has brought back the trauma of it all.
The experience was so traumatic and barbaric that it dumped me into my first ever and only “psychosis” at age 50 and into forced drugging, a very nearly successful suicide within a month or two of my release, and another coerced “hospital stay”.
That was 2004-05. In 2007 my psychiatrist threw me out of his office screaming at me when all I had done was turn up for a scheduled appointment. Twelve years on and I have been off all of those drugs of torture (that I was told I’d need for the rest of my life) for seven years, have moved cities because I could no longer feel safe in the city where I spent over 50 years, and have built new social networks and friendships.
I HATE and fear doctors. No more “medical” treatment for me.
Nah…US has got heaps more “mentally ill” than the rest of us….that you have Trump as POTUS and everyone walks round legally carrying deadly weapons proves it. Psychiatrists greatly underestimate the numbers because they don’t want to have to take responsibility for all the iatrogenic damage they and their drugs cause.
š
Having been forced to take the toxic poisons (“antipsychotics” and “antidepressants”) for a period, but coming off all of them over 7 years ago, I now find diet, exercise and gentle friends are the only ways to control the ongoing damage/residual effect of these dangerous drugs.
I stayed with therapy for 5 years after coming off the drugs believing that there must be some underlying problem, but that only kept me believing there was something quite fundamentally deficient in my character, when the damage was iatrogenic.
For the past two years I have been totally free of psychiatry AND therapy and am gradually rebuilding the life that psychiatry had been so intent on destroying.
I have residual trauma and iatrogenic damage…both from psychiatric “help”, (being locked up and forcibly drugged with highly toxic substances and treated like a cockroach IS traumatic), and thinking more psychiatry/therapy could help me was totally wrong headed..sort of a variant on the Stockholm Syndrome, perhaps?
Being free of the psychiatry and understanding that the drugs and treatments (including traumatic “therapy”) have caused physical changes that mean I will need to be careful with my diet and environment and making new social contacts, friends and interests have probably been the greatest contributors to my ongoing wellbeing.
Wish we had that search facility in Australia!
Agreed. Throughout the article I was thinking about what happened to me when I was put on “medication”…I virtually COULDN”T move! AND all I wanted to eat was sugar and fat.
I had no energy or desire to move at all and my coordination was so compromised that if I walked on uneven ground in the park I fell over. I had been in the national ski team in my younger years and had continued with skiing, back country hiking, fly fishing, bike riding etc throughout my adult life…until I was forced to take “medication”.
After having been off all “medication” for over 7 years, my coordination is better than it was, but it isn’t as good as it should be…I still have difficulty skiing (I started skiing at age 3 and so it had been virtually second nature to me) and steep, difficult hikes are out of the question.
My desire to be active has never quite returned but I make sure I go to the gym a few times a week, walk 15,000 steps a day and am deliberately working to improve my co-ordination by walking on rough ground etc. but it is a bit of a battle. The “medication” totally switched off my energy, desire and ability, and flipping the switch back on is really, really hard.
That “medication” only seemed to get a passing glance in the research astounds me.
From over here down under it does appear that he is quite seriously unsuited to public office and the survival of the planet!
Whether he should be diagnosed with a fictitious “mental illness” is another matter…
I agree. Some of the TV coverage and statements made were totally inaccurate and brought back my memories of being locked up, drugged and treated horribly.
Most of the written articles don’t provide the opportunity to comment and address the misinformation, so added to the upset about misinformation is the powerlessness to do anything about them.
Now, as soon as I see something coming on TV re the week, I mute it or switch channels. All it is is a promotion of drugging and forced detention of people who have committed no crime.
Oh dear…you are in a horrible situation.
Your experience of being harassed by staff and patients in psych ward mirrors my own and while it would have been unpleasant in any place it was terrifying when combined with my own thoughts and the brutal setting.
The violent thoughts terrified and repelled me too, but what helped me was to think of them as a reflection of what had been/was being done to me and sit with them. Some of my stuff about good and evil/heaven and hell went back to early childhood stuff that had been retriggered by all the totally overwhelming events.
I am not sure whether it was the medication, but I became extremely noise sensitive…everything sensitive in fact…it was like an internal volume switch had been shifted to the highest possible setting. Ear plugs helped a little until I could get to a quieter environment…is there any possibility you could ask to be moved as soon as a quieter room becomes available?
I certainly feel for your predicament and hope you can manage to use your very significant skills and intelligence (yes, they are still there) to negotiate some improvements.
Hi Helpstillneeded
it is a very difficult situation to be in…needing help but being too terrified to seek it. I know it well.
But it most certainly is not your fault, so please, don’t blame yourself, and it certainly is not cowardice. Being abused and victimised leaves deep scars, but I find my art, my writing, meditation, music, and nature …all, at different times, help me. If praying helps you, then pray, but remember music art and nature have wonderfully healing properties too.
This site has benefited me enormously over the years as it has helped me understand how truly destructive psychiatry is from its false labels to its evil, soul-destroying “treatments”, be they drugs or “therapy” where the therapist can lock you up and/or drug you if you don’t accept your “diagnosis”, and where its practitioners are immune to legal responsibility because they, as judge, jury and executioner, are effectively untouchable.
We are of similar ages and I must admit that looking to the future I don’t much that enthuses me. However, I am trying to focus on the things that give me comfort and hope that eventually my trauma reactions will settle down a bit…10 years off “meds” and two years functioning in the community (although I will never return to paid work) psychiatry-free I am not quite as scared as I was.
The nightmares I used to have of being locked up and drugged have subsided somewhat and I think it has now been a while since I woke myself screaming in terror.
I hope you find some peace.
Yes…I had largely overcome the effects of childhood adversities and had constructed a successful career and life…a couple of lovely and high functioning kids, friends etc. Then at 50 I suffered work stress and was referred to a psychiatrist.
WOW! His “help” led to hospitalisation and my first ever (and only) psychotic experience, with forced drugging in a locked ward and no hope of returning to my career and former life.
Then, when I had finally developed a deep and trusting therapeutic relationship with him, I turned up for a session and he threw me out of his office for no apparent reason, while hurling diagnoses and verbal abuse.
I have been off all the medication for over 10 years and have never had another psychotic episode, but talk about devastated and demonised – 10 years on and I still have incredibly severe issues with trust in all my relationships and am terrified of going to the doctor. Friendship are difficult for me and social life seems like a minefield.
The destructiveness of psychiatry cannot be overstated. It is, by its very nature, victimisation. It labels and demonises people, places them in the role of “inferior and broken”, and then proceeds with a systematic attack on their rights and self hood.
Oh dear…and if dogs become aggressive as a result of SSRIs (as many humans do), after attacking and maiming people, other animals, etc they will be labelled vicious and killed.
Sad that we would be encouraged to do this to our beloved furry companions.
Yep..BINGO!
I hate it when potentially interesting and informative articles turn out to be subscription only.
Yep…I too found Olanzapine akin to torture, and yeah, I too tried suicide while on it. Far out that is an EVIL drug!
For me, being carted off and locked up when I had done nothing wrong, had threatened no-one, and had not threatened or attempted self harm was THE most traumatic event in my life. I was in a sensitive and stressed state and the act of locking me up in a mental hospital plunged me into my first (and only) psychotic episode at age 50. It took me years to get off their “medication” (ie highly destructive and addictive and totally revolting mind-altering drugs) and to be able to function in society and form friendships etc again.
Thirteen years down the track and I still have significant issues with trust, particularly of people in positions of respect or trust, because I know how easily I can have all my rights and freedoms removed on their whim.
In my journals at the time I didn’t write of doctors or people trying to help me, I wrote of my “gaolers” (jailers to the US readers) and “tormentors”. Because they had kidnapped, imprisoned and drugged me, plunging me into such a terrifying altered state, how else would I have seen them?
…and yet they seemed to think I should be thankful…and had trouble understanding why I would be fearful and uncooperative.
I still don’t think it was me who was suffering anosognosia!
Dr Breggin
What an absolutely tragic story and massive miscarriage of justice for this young woman. I am just so glad that you are in her corner, and I hope you can help her in a way that can bring some trust and sense back into what must be a totally cruel and non-sensical world to her.
The mistreatment she has been put through is truly sickening, and that the judge let the inaccuracies and misrepresentations pass unchecked is, in itself, criminal.
I personally know the confusion and terror medication can induce, and I was 50 when I went through it. How a distressed teenager is supposed to deal with it or be held responsible for her (likely inaccurate) memories and feelings is totally beyond my comprehension.
The whole situation is so far beyond Kafkaesque it really is incomprehensible.
Please, keep fighting for her!
Thank you Richard, for an excellent response.
Agree totally. For me the experience of being kidnapped, locked up and drugged when I had committed no crime was truly traumatic. I was stripped of my rights and my humanity. I was forced to take drugs that made me unable to think or function (olanzapine and Mertazapine), and that made it impossible to sit still and caused visual and audtiroy hallucinations. There was Ambien and/or other sleeping stuff thrown in for good luck too, from memory.
That was my first experience of “mental illness”..I was 50 with no history of “mental illness” or any untoward behaviour. I was, in fact, a successful senior exec….until this experience.
Within a couple of months of getting out I did make an extremely serious attempt on my life as I figured that I was destined to live my life drugged to the eyeballs with extreme side effects, virtually under house arrest and having been told I had embarked on the revolving door of psychiatric hsopitalisation, and made unable to contribute to society in any way, I did not want to live.
Plus, the experience of PSYCH WARD was deeply traumatising. This was in 2004…I have been psych drug and totally “treatment” free (therapy sort of helped) for a number of years and now participate fully in society, although I never returned to my exec position.
But I would still rather be dead than go to a psych ward again.
I have deleted the comment I made as I wonder whether I am just being somewhat dense today and wish to consider further before adding more to the debate. The edit feature will not allow you to enter an empty comment and so I could not delete it completely
Disagree.
Even drug company research has shown that anti-depressants can have dangerous effects on mood. Ditto with extensive meta-analyses of the effects of these drugs.
When also having therapy, if I started SSRIs I would very promptly become manic, closely followed by extreme suicidality. That ONLY happened if and when I took the drugs. If I stopped the drugs, these effects would lessen and disappear.
While I absolutely agree with your assessment that the chemical imbalance story leads to hopelessness and further depression, especially when the drugs don’t work, I never particularly believed the drugs would work (that was my doctor’s assessment), but they still had a massive effect on me.
Study 329(?) and others show that drug companies have covered up the harms these drugs do.
Breggin and other doctors active on this site have written a plethora of books on the research around these drugs, and I think you might find that the research does actually indicate that there’s slightly more than the placebo effect at work and that these drugs actively disrupt very complex brain and gut chemistry!!
yes it also concerns me greatly that the author claims that anti-depressants are just placebos.
They are active chemicals and can have massive negative effects by disrupting brain chemistry. Plus, they are known to increase the risk of suicide and/or homicide in some users.
I thoroughly agree that their use and the bio model of psychiatry also actively prevent people seeking help that might actually do some good, but essentially dismissing anti-depressants as chemically neutral I think is quite dangerous.
I know the effect they had on me – I promptly became manic, then suicidal, then…well…it was just a nightmarish roller-coaster. Coming off them was hell too.
Yes, agreed. Do it, but certainly don’t let on to anyone in the “mental health” industry…you’ll just have your drugs/diagnoses increased and/or be locked up for longer.
I have found that third person does help in both journalling and general situations, but if I let something along those lines slip out when I was in therapy, I’d get that “special” look from the psychiatrist. I have been a psychiatry-and-therapy-free zone for going on two years now , and the third person approach has come in very handy to provide a little distance and create some internal empathy when I have been short of it.
Totally agree, Steve.
A truly excellent comment that anyone who has ever proclaimed a diagnosis should contemplate, whether it be about their “friends”, families, enemies or a public figure. To diagnose is to place yourself above the other and is a power game and a put down.
It proclaims more about the diagnoser than it does about the diagnosed.
Really?
It looks like neuro-imaging might be both expensive AND useless in the case of “mental illness”. I wonder whether any of the people using imaging actually considered asking their patients why they were feeling the way they were feeling and/or what THEY thought might make them feel better ….but I guess that might be too radical for these “highly skilled medical specialists” given the causes are likely to be hidden in plain sight (food, shelter, jobs, respect, freedom from abuse etc), and that just doesn’t happen to be where they want to look and/or what they want to see!
Golly..my story echoes hers so closely it is scary.
I think this is a very valuable article, and hope that the documentary is screened here in Australia, ‘cos doctors here simply won’t listen if you say their drugs are causing really weird and dangerous stuff. Plus, they made me take Olanzapine and Ambien (Stilnox) as well as antidepressants. Deadly.
Everyone should be made to read this piece BEFORE they take a single dose.
Thank you for sharing your story. I too tried to comply with the psychiatrists, all three of whom did talk therapy (and at times forced drugs and hurled diagnoses), and it was disastrous for me. I too cried rivers after every session, ‘cos I’d got it wrong yet again, and I too took to journaling and exercise. After 12 years of what in retrospect amounts to significant twice weekly emotional abuse (called therapy) by those psychiatrists, 18 months ago I walked away with far more serious difficulties than when that particular journey began.
Journalling and exercise are now my mainstays too, but there’s no way I’ll go near another professional “helper”. I am still recovering from the overwhelming destructiveness of the “mental health” industry – it may take a very long time before I can trust another human being again…I need to regain trust in and knowledge of myself first as that was what they attacked most viciously. However, I am now beginning to have glimmers of hope that life can be different, better.
Labelling people, and shaming them into accepting treatments that are inappropriate, uninformed, cruel and demeaning is not helpful, and the sooner our society makes psychiatry responsible for the harms it perpetrates by doing this, the sooner people will be free to pursue the paths that actually heal, rather than harm.
Thank you again for sharing your story – I am sure it will help many others too.
Really???
Why on earth is this given space on MIA?
Yes, my experience was that being kidnapped, locked up and drugged against my will when I had done nothing wrong was THE single most traumatic experience of my life. And yes, within three months of discharge I very nearly succeeded in suiciding. Another woman on the ward succeeded within a week of her discharge.
They totally shattered my trust in justice and human rights, and to this day (over 10 years later) I still am very fearful of seeing a medical doctor for any complaint at all – I have a trauma reaction from the instance I suspect I need to see one that takes a week or two after the visit to fully settle.
I now see doctors as totally untrustworthy and as operating outside the law and as people who can lock me up and deprive me of my human rights without need for cause and without any real checks and balances.
Really, I dont understand why “normal”, non-psychiatric doctors don’t work to get psychiatry thrown out of the medical profession as it has no evidence base and brings the rest of the profession into disrepute.
Hear hear.
Encountering random strangers (ie health “carers”) who demand unconditional trust and then say you’re “mentally ill” because you can’t/won’t do it is a really destructive thing. After trying and succeeding in trusting them against my inner voice only to be absolutely betrayed leads me to know that anyone who demands trust is inherently untrustworthy, and is seeking a victim.
It has been a hard and painful lesson for me to learn but there’s no way I’ll fall for that crap again.
Those who neither expect nor demand are far more likely to be capable of building a therapeutic relationship, whether it is called that or not.
Standra
you seem to be confusing physically identifiable actual physical illness/diseases with differences in being. A physical disease such as polio can and probably should be prevented and/or cured (by vaccines and other physical means) where possible.
With differences in ways of being it is a little more nuanced. We know that SSRIs used in pregnancy increase the risk of a child having struggles, and for sure, when such difficulties have a direct physical cause that could be prevented, that would be a desirable to prevent them. That could be done by not allowing pregnant woment to take anti-depresants. After all, “normal” (whatever that may mean) IS easier, for the person with the condition and their family.
However, when “autism” is just part of the spectrum of normal functioning, as it seems to have become, and is a front for raising money for pharmaceutical companies and lobby groups, something has gone way off track. I have no doubt that I could be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder or whatever the current term might be, and I could invest many thousands of dollars in drugs to become more “normal” because I really do struggle at times – neuro-diversity has its drawbacks – but on the other hand, I am unique and I don’t want to be told I NEED drugs to function.
The pharmaceutical companies exploiting people’s fear of neuro-diversity would prefer we were not unique and that people fear “unique” simply because it offers them the opportunity for making PROFIT…something they are very good at.
Neuro-diversity is valuable. It is not an “illness” that should be used for profit. Causing brain damage with drugs that purportedly treat an illness that has not been shown to have a physical cause may profit drug companies, but all it does for neuro-diverse people is DAMAGE their brains and make it more difficult for them to function!
In psychiatry it’s often more than, “recommends ātreatmentsā that are unnecessary and potentially dangerous, in violation of medical ethics?ā
It should have a separate note for psychiatry that reads,” incarcerates and forces treatments that have been proven to be neither efficacious nor safe and that are frequently known to be dangerous, upon people who cannot be proven to have any illness, in violation of medical ethics, human rights and international agreements”.
Thanks Steve, well put.
Yes, I too still suffer the repercussions of being kidnapped, locked up and drugged by psychiatry. It plunged me into my first ever and only “psychosis” at age 50. Now over 60 I still find it almost impossible to trust my fellow human beings and am terrified of the power doctors have to detain and drug.
In my journals at the time I referred to them as my “gaolers” and “torturers”, and it took me quite a while to get off their drugs…Olanzapine and Mertazapine and then Prozac. What hell they caused me.
Community treatment orders, especially with depot injections are another horrific means of torturing innocent people who have done nothing that could warrant their sentence under regular mechanisms.
Psychiatry is there purely to control and torture innocent people, to act as judge, jury and gaoler and to step in where, because of human rights and the letter of the law, the general judicial systems dare not go.
I am actually pleased articles such as this are published here as it gives readers and researchers who have learned the ACTUAL facts about early intervention, “anti-psychotics” etc a chance to rebut what would appear to new/undeucated readers to be a plausible, reasoned piece by an expert.
This sort of pieces appears unchallenged throughout the internet, and quite often opposing views go unpublished. Here, however, there is likely to be reasoned, researched and balanced critique that not only educates the public, but also the writer.
The danger of NOT publishing such pieces, I believe is that MIA will become merely an echo chamber.
To me, part of MIA’s great value lies in the fact that many of the commenters provide me with both a structure to critique such pieces myself, and facts that I can use when people in every day environments start spouting such crap about the need for more of the same, more drugs, more psych wards, more labelling, more oppression.
I strongly disagree with the views expressed in the article, but the more such articles that get published here, the more likely it is that a wider audience will see the medical model dissembled and understand that psychiatry is a total and very dangerous scam.
Yes…I think the therapists almost have to be dishonest and that comes through at some level in the relationship and can leave the patient uneasy.
I do believe that before the therapist was so destructive, I was actually getting quite a bit from it, and it opened paths and interests within me that I hadn’t previously appreciated, so in those ways it was positive, and I have managed to hold onto some gains.
However, the brutal ending made that extremely difficult and did cause new problems that I still struggle with.
I have been reflecting too, that when in therapy we are actually looking for things that are “wrong”, and making things that we may have seen as positive in the past into negatives. The handing over of power and trust was a condition of working with that particular therapist, and that, of course, exacerbated the power imbalance.
I read a piece recently (not sure where) that actually examined whether therapy helped and came to the conclusion it frequently did more harm than good.
Kallena….I actually hope she doesn’t risk going there again!
After extensive therapy that has included appalling behaviour by therapists which was then somehow the fault of MY diagnosed “mental Illness” , I have decided that therapy, and the power imbalance it involves, is just far too open to abuse.
Actually, therapy IS abuse. Its basic premise is that the therapist is ALWAYS “healthier” than the patient, and that the patient has less insight and less ability to see what’s happening than does the therapist. Hence, it is also intrinsically devaluing.
I had a psychiatrist unilaterally, totally unexpectedly and brutally end what had seemed to be a productive three-year therapy relationship by throwing me out of his office with a string of abusive and totally inexplicable statements, and throwing back at me the most sensitive things I had told him as evidence of my deficits. He didn’t have to give any explanation of his behaviour because he was the doctor and I was the patient and there were no witnesses.
Ten years and 14 days later, I still have nightmares and real trust issues that were not there before “therapy”. I had formed a deep and trusting attachment to him and to have it shattered like that was devastating. My next therapist suggested that perhaps the first therapist was “lovesick” and didn’t manage his emotions very well….uhmmmmm…and that was supposed to make it OK? The second therapist didn’t want to say anything though, because therapist #1 was “a more senior psychiatrist”.
I would encourage anyone to seek genuine, equal, relationships instead. This takes time and effort, and yes, there will be setbacks, but such relationships, particularly if approached mindfully, are fundamentally healthier and less likely to lead to catastrophic injury and/or devaluation.
CBT is freely available online, there are plenty of apps for meditation – there’s no need to put yourself through the risk of allowing an attachment to develop with a therapist/psychiatrist who is hiding their deficits behind their professional status!
…and why is the blatant deception inherent in this study so unsurprising?
The truth is that psychiatry and pharmaceutical companies will do ANYTHING possible to ensure the continuing flow of human fodder to ensure their money-making machines continue to grow. It doesn’t matter to them that it’s CHILDREN who are being irreparably damaged and hooked into the system for life – they see it as a major achievement.
And what’s more, it’s children of higher than average intelligence whose parents are being sold the lie that their children are quite fundamentally defective.Tragic.
Can psychiatry become any more morally and ethically bankrupt?
I too got to that sentence and thought WTF???!!!!
The serotonin/chemical imbalance stuff has been long defunct, and yet here is an article that says the serotonin gene has no link to depression, also saying that SSRI’s work. Don’t they see the blatant contradiction here?
My thought exactly…remission??
Uhmmmm, what about recovered?
The use of “remission” for full functioning after 10 years validates false arguments that “mental illness” is there for life and that there can be no permanent recovery. Friends of mine have been told they have gone into remission immediately after cancer treatment and are fully recovered after five years clear of cancer, and yet 10 years clear of “psychosis” is still considered “remission”?
So, how long does one have to be fully functioning, “medication”-free etc to be considered recovered?
…Or, perhaps more poignantly, why is a “psychotic” event considered an illness at all, rather than an event that can lead to personal understanding, growth, and development if treated sensitively, compassionately and wisely?
This and other studies have shown that “antipsychotics” lead to worse outcomes and/or permanent brain damage, and yet psychiatry continues to prescribe these drugs at ever increasing rates.
When will psychiatry remit and allow it’s victims to recover?
Here in Australia people have been charged with offences for refusing recommended life prolonging, but painful and invasive treatment to terminally ill children!
Heavens above….the doctors can force appallingly distressing treatments on kids to give them an extra few weeks of living hell, and their decision can overrule that of the parents. WTF? That’s torture too.
As an unwilling recipient of psychiatry’s torture which has left me with some deep emotional scars, I can only but agree that until psychiatry is wiped off the face of the earth and, in fact, ANY other forced medical treatment is totally outlawed, every person is at risk from doctors. They have far too much power.
My thoughts exactly…there’s just as much scientific evidence for prescribing them off-label as there is for prescribing them on-label…..NONE.
Plus, prescribing them at all risks great harm as they CREATE chemical imbalances in the brain (and probably gut also), are addictive, and have horrible side effect profiles.
The argument isn’t about whether they are prescribed off-label, it’s about whether they should have been approved in the first place, and now we know the extent of the misrepresentations of their efficacy and safety that got them approved, whether that approval should be revoked and they should be removed from the marketplace.
What the study appears to highlight is how “mental health treatment” is totally ineffective and simply captures more and more people without providing any effective results whatsoever. A psychiatric diagnosis is a diagnosis for life. The profession refuses to see that recovery is possible and, indeed, it is nigh on impossible once hooked on psychiatry’s drugs and weighted down with the concrete boots of a DSM diagnosis.
In reality it stigmatises people and gets them hooked on both diagnoses and addictive “medication” (ie legally prescribed drugs). The nature of psychiatry is to consign people to the scrap heap of permanent disability while it’s practitioners and drugs companies rake in enormous profits.
So why does anyone let it continue? I don’t get it!
Agree completely. These places are crimes against humanity.
Very sad news.
His blogs were informative and challenging, and he was passionate about his subject(s).
That was my stance on my second stay….be very nice, take the meds (and where possible spit them out ASAP), agree with everything, smile.
You get out quicker that way. Haven’t been back since.
Absolutely agree.
As a woman of 50 with no history of violence or psychosis, I was stripped of my human rights, and locked up in a psychiatric “hospital”. The trauma of it dumped me into my first and ONLY “major psychosis”, for which I was forcibly drugged with Olanzapine and Mertazapine. I was held in “hospital” and drugged for six weeks.
Being so totally stripped of my human rights was the biggest trauma of my life and within four months of being released I had made a very serious suicide attempt.
Twelve years later I am free of psychiatry and have been off the “drugs I would have to take for the rest of my life” for more than seven years, and have had no further “psychotic” episodes.
However, I still have nightmares and my responses to stress are extremely difficult for me to deal with. I was unable to return to my former highly successful career.
The psychiatric violence committed against me and total denial of my human rights (I was treated as a sub-human life form) changed my life…and not for the better.
I had committed no crime, had no history of violence and psychiatry’s violent and abusive actions against me have traumatised me…no doubt at all.
Being reduced to a sub-human life form without rights IS traumatic, it IS violence. It CANNOT be otherwise.
It is NOT health care.
Precisely what I am doing/have done, Julie.
I sold up my house etc and moved interstate, breaking all ties with “mental health” services. No-one here will ever be aware of my past, and, thankfully, as I make new friends and reach into my creative and artistic skills, I find I am being treated with respect and that I have value as a human being.
This is something that was stripped bare by the “mental health” industry and the human rights commission. To those in it I was sick, flawed, valueless, dangerous – a scapegoat for all their projections.
Now I am regaining the status of human being, each week I am feeling slightly less down and fractured, and sometimes happiness appears – I thought I might never feel hope or satisfaction or joy again, but it is returning, albeit sporadically, as I tentatively re-establish human connectedness.
What I say to anyone unfortunate to be captured by the “mental health” industry is RUN AWAY! They are committed to keeping you sick as that protects them from having to face their own human fragility.
Yes, these examples abound. Psychiatrists can and do get away with appalling behaviour towards their “patients” .
They just use the trump card – “mentally ill liar”. If that doesn’t work, they use the joker – “potentially dangerous”. They don’t need proof to use the “potentially dangerous” joker, because the dangerousness is only POTENTIAL, and hence it is impossible to disprove. Additionally, the law sees psychiatrist status as unquestionable evidence of god-like infallibility. You can have a totally clean record (not so much as a parking fine), be a responsible member of society, educated, a mother, and be over 60 and not very big, but if the shrink says you are “potentially dangerous” you can be totally stripped of all human rights. I couldn’t get my records transferred from the shrink who labelled me that way to my new treating shrink, because the old one said that if my new shrink saw my records, I would become dangerous!!! I tried to convince the human rights commission that I really was not able to read my new shrink’s mind, but they wouldn’t believe me.
The ACT Human Rights Commission sided with the first shrink and called me a liar. Wouldn’t let me know why they were calling me a liar (maybe they truly believed I COULD read my new shrink’s mind), wouldn’t tell me what evidence, if any, the first shrink had presented, as he would not give them his permission. He said my seeing the evidence against me could also make me dangerous, apparently.
It was traumatic in the extreme, really, knowing that even the body charged with protecting my human rights could be used by a psychiatrist who hadn’t seen me for years to further demean and continue his abuse of me.
However, there is a bright side – the whole sick and abusive charade gave me the angry impetus I needed to walk away from psychiatry and all “mental health” services forever.
…and if I come across another struggling human being, what I accord them is respect, and my honest presence IF (and only IF), they want it.
Thank you…this is a beautifully told story that reflects my own experience when my “consumer” status has, by either myself or someone else, been revealed.
The fact is, it leads to massive abuse both in the form of ostracism and in the form of discounting, dismissing, condescension, blaming, gaslighting and contempt. I found that if I raised any issues whatsoever about my own or others’ treatment or concerns, or if I was in any way not totally harmonious and “normal” ALL the time, it was blamed on my being “mentally ill”. Normal moods and feelings are viewed as “symptoms”, as are views that differ from those of others.
Outing yourself or being outed, even with people you have come to know quite well, inevitably seems to lead to scapegoating, sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant, so I too no longer “fess up” to my former consumer status. Not to doctors, friends, acquaintances. I no longer extend my arms to have them tied into their straight jacket.
In society’s eyes there can be no recovery from a “mental illness”….not ever….perhaps because the chemical imbalance lie was (and is) so wholeheartedly promoted by psychiatry. It certainly serves to maintain psychiatry’s customer base, as people who are blamed, ostracized, marginalized etc ARE bound to be unhappy and unwell and hence seek “help” which inflicts further harm.
markps2
“just say ā It is between me and my doctor what medicines I takeā.”
Sage advice indeed, and the only way I have found to circumvent people’s overwhelming insistence that I’d be better than well if I’d just persist in finding the right combination of “medication”.
That I persisted in seeking that combination and ended up very actively suicidal, psychotic and totally unable to function because of those “medications” is totally irrelevant to them (and the doctors).
I no longer have any engagement with psychiatry and haven’t taken “medication” for 7 years, but for a few years, if anyone asked or commented etc, I also say, “That’s between me and my doctor”.
Since I have moved to another city and formed new friendship groups no-one asks, and it’s nice not to be judged and pressured.
On the other hand, might it encourage greater wariness by both prescribing doctors and the general public when it comes to “medication”?
Drug approval in the US would become meaningless and prescribers and users alike would have to turn to other countries’ assessment of drugs, effectively making all of the apparently already-dubious FDA processes less influential.
Would this really matter? Might it be a good thing, in fact, if the FDA, which appears to be run largely by and for the drug companies, were to finally drop the charade of being the protector of public health and safety?
The requirements for trials are still going to be there in other countries, and I see this as potentially taking away the influence Pharma can use internationally by saying the US FDA has approved this drug, as I doubt many would follow the US down this track.
It just really makes drug/device approval in the US even more meaningless than it already is.
Well said, Julie Greene.
If people were given full facts and truly knew the damage “mental health care” and psych drugs can do, they’d run very far away very fast!
It’s a known fact that many psych drugs are known to CAUSE irregular heart beat, heart damage, brain damage and lasting problems, as well as stigma and massive personal and interpersonal problems. To be locked up, tied down and drugged or shocked is appalling, but that is exactly what psychiatrists are allowed, by law, to do, and even if they don’t go to the extremes, their drugs are dangerous and ineffective…research has repeatedly shown this.
People should not believe it cannot happen to them. I was a well paid professional who at age 50 had her life hijacked by psychiatry. Over a decade later I am still recovering, but at least I have my life. Many others (including Carrie Fisher) don’t.
no.
I have noticed this seemingly deliberate shift in the site’s message too.
Some articles are definitely giving credence to psychiatric labels and talking of mind altering psych drugs as if they are real medications for real illnesses.
Sad, really….but I am glad that comments are not being censored….however, the people who countered them may slowly drift away.
I certainly get your drift and agree with you 100%, Oldhead.
Yes, I experienced that too. Start as a voluntary patient seeking support for some transient emotional distress, get given allegedly safe and effective “medication” and when that “medication” makes you really ill you’re forced to keep taking it while they say they have unmasked underlying “disease” (for which there are no tests) and proceed to increase the “medication” that caused the reaction and add a few more for good measure.
Because there’s no tests to show that psychiatric “diseases” exist, it is equally impossible to prove you don’t have one! They’ve got you and they won’t let you go.
I am sure that if the general public was aware of how easily psychiatry can strip them of ALL their human and legal rights, no-one would ever consent to seeing a psychiatrist.
Frank, I couldn’t agree more!
“Now how do we return to āhealthā/society when ādiseaseā/(āreasonā for quarantine) is whatever they want it to be?”
Herein lies the rub…if you criticize psychiatry, they simply say it is because you “lack insight” into your “disease/illness”, and that, in itself, is a “disease” (anosognosia). Psychiatry does not and cannot provide any evidence at all that its “patients” actually have any disease or illness, and yet it is free to kidnap, imprison and drug people, and then to do it some more if they object.
And because there are no tests or scans, there is no way to prove you do NOT have one of their “diseases”.
I have been functioning in society without the “medications” (read psychiatrically prescribed mind altering drugs that pitched me headlong into hell when I had lived for the first 50 years of my life with no “mental illness”) for over 6 years, and yet I am still considered for “medical” purposes a psychiatric patient, so can’t refuse those same drugs that made me so ill.
It really is very frightening to know that a “doctor” could force drugs on me which I know will plunge me back into absolute hell and there is nothing I can do about it because advance care directives can be ignored when it comes to psychiatry’s “diseases” and drugs.
Psychiatry has left me very deeply traumatised… it is NEVER OK to imprison and forcibly drug someone, but doing it under the guise of treating a disease that cannot be shown to even exist with mind altering drugs is an absolute betrayal of both our trust in the medical profession and in human rights and justice.
Yes, from my personal experience, being on Olanzapine was pure hell, but coming off it was pure hell times three. Not only did I have to contend with the ongoing effects of the drug, but had severe drug withdrawal symptoms thrown in on top for months and months.
No human being should be forced to take this stuff (I was drugged under a “treatment order”) – it is cruel and inhuman torture.
Given there are no benefits and massive harms, no new patients should be started. I stop short of saying “ban it outright” because some people simply might not be able to get off the stuff it is so addictive.
Thank you…a nice piece.
I think one of the major reasons go on psych drugs to being with is that their doctors really do push the point – not only do they dismiss any concerns about addiction and withdrawal, they also deny side effects, and they sell the “chemical imbalance” lie.
We have been raised to trust and respect doctors, but in the case of psych meds, they are the snake oil salesmen of modern times. There is no informed consent with these drugs and no respect for the patient’s well being.
As you note, coming off them is to say the least, challenging, even with support. That doctors will do almost anything to convince people to “take their meds!” (including the use of incarceration, force and depot injections), makes it really tough for many to actually listen to their inner voice, and even tougher for them to act on it.
I think anything that can help people make that single minded decision NOT to take the drugs to begin with will always be the best position….but yes, helping people get off them once they go wrong, as they almost certainly will, is indeed a high calling.
In my case, being detained, totally stripped of my rights, forced to take drugs that made me feel like hell AND hallucinate AND plunge into psychosis (for the first time in my life), and then told I’d have to keep taking them for the rest of my life and that I could never hope to recover was more than a little traumatic.
At no stage was I violent or abusive…my response was freeze and/or flight rather than fight.
They told me that they could come to my home and lock me up again when ever they felt like it, which left me nowhere to feel safe. I own my home and it has always been my safest space. They threatened to invade it as they had invaded my mind and body.
It was abuse piled on top of abuse with no hope of reprieve, and it was called psychiatric “care”!
Then, after I got out, my shrink said I could stop taking the meds (Zyprexa and Avanza) if I didn’t like them (no suggestion of a taper and no warning of what would happen if I did stop), and said I had to go back to work even though I was still hallucinating and feeling terrified. And it was the workplace that had caused my breakdown in the first place.
No prizes for guessing what happened next. Thankfully, I didn’t succeed….obviously….but was put back on the drugs and it took me 4 years to finally get off them. That was 6 years ago and the more I read, the more I realize I still have residual symptoms that weren’t there before.
Psychiatric “care” is cruel torture and those who practice it need to be locked up and put on the same “medications” (quantities, combinations etc) that they have inflicted on their “patients”, before being released to fend for themselves.
I suspect we’d have fewer psychiatrists if that occurred as such treatment really does make one feel very suicidal indeed.
Our experience of the “medications” is so very similar it’s eerie, despite us living at opposite ends of the earth.
I have only been off the drugs for around 6 or 7 years, and although I still struggle with symptoms that weren’t there before I was put on them, I am certainly far better than I was while taking them. Hopefully one day I will be asymptomatic.
The drugs made me unable to function. They took away my career and livelihood. A simple little anti-depressant tablet prescribe by my GP and taken exactly as prescribed. When I reported side effects, I was dismissed and told I must keep taking these magic pills.
It is a cruel thing to force a human being to take drugs that the human being knows are making them insanely unwell. Psychiatrists, however, do this on a daily basis. I think THEY are cruel and insane.
Nomadic
Doctors are giving them out ‘cos they want to be able to offer something, and they have been convinced by big pharma money and falsified trials that they work. Drug companies also fund universities, studies, doctors’ professional development etc as part of their marketing. They pay eminent doctors BIG money to promote the drugs to their colleagues, and they aggressively put down anyone who questions this megabuck business.
People accept them because doctors tell them to and in western society we have been conditioned to trust our doctors. People also want relief from difficult feelings and are very vulnerable when tough times come along.
Greatly simplified answer, I know….but that’s the basis of it.
Uhhmmm…please quote the actual research regarding serotonin levels….even the American Psychiatric Association acknowledges that the chemical imbalance theory of depression was only ever a theory with no evidence to support it. A past president of the APA went as far as to say it was an urban myth that no serious psychiatrist had ever believed, but it was a convenient way to get patients to take their drugs.
There is no way of measuring serotonin levels in the brain of a living person.
Some “anti-depressants” that are thought to lower serotonin levels work (as well as a placebo), as do some that raise serotonin levels, and both types can be equally effective in the same patient. Other “anti-depressants” that do not target serotonin at all are equally as effective…but again, they are only about as effective as a placebo.
If you have research that proves the serotonin theory of depression I am sure the scientific world and the drug companies would love to see it – please share!
..and I should add, that they never even thought to conduct thyroid tests on me BEFORE putting me on dangerous drugs. It was only a few years down the track that a doc actually ordered a thyroid function test and discovered a problem.
Diagnosing a fictitious “mental illness” likely meant a real physical illness that was perhaps the cause of my struggles went untreated.