What to say….every single drug that psychiatrists prescribe can be abused. Take for example Narcan… Addicts take it to lower their tolerance to opiates so the can get high. Stimulants get you high, there is no such thing as medicating someone for ADHD, your getting children high and making lots of money. Stimulants kill thousands every year, many stimulant users were prescribed AdHD, better known as Obediance pills as children. ADHD is caused by a lavk of EFA’s in diet, Cattle fattened on grain don’t make EFA’s…The used to be fed only by grazing on grass, this changed in the early 1900’s, cattled fattened on grains before slaughter made more money, this is when first cases began. Rehabs have a 1%success rate, people go to rehabs hundredsnof time and never get sober. But they make Rehab owners millions.
Kabat-Zinn just a businessman, thats all.
Go ahead laugh, and stay there for a moment, free of the chains of ideas.. And If you have really changed then you can drop it… Just drop it for awhile…And if you have really changed,it won’t matter …But if it does your ideas are just drugs…As buddha said, thought coverings…nothing is harder to take than a naked mind free of ideas….But that is real meditation.
Your comments are a good indication, of whats wrong with mindfulness. Its definitely not meditation. Meditation is about getting rid of the mind, not becoming more entrenched in ideas. Its mindlessness, mind is the obstacle. And as was mentioned before its a happening not a doing, not a business, not a training, not a study. A happening…You simply don’t understand, the bigger the degree, the less likely there will be meditation happening, because education strengthens the mind.. It doesn’t get rid of it.. Go ask, Buddha, Osho, Krishnamurti…
Unfortunately psychology, is subject to fads. Its been my own experience that mindfulness was created,, because it could be sold to the public where as meditation, could not. Mindfulness was created by those that wanted to use meditation by another name, to enrich themselves financially. Meditation itself, has a long history, with many religious underpinnings. There again, when one looks at what the experts say about meditation, their descriptions of meditation differ from what so called mindfulness instructs us. First of all. Osho, Krishnamurti, and many others have said that meditation, cannot be taught. That is is a “happening”, not a doing and that any lessons, teaching etc,, that purports to teach mediation is in fact its anti thesis. One can learn to experience it that is all. Its been my perception that mindfulness is a form of auto hypnosis, and that those under the influence of its practitioners, exhibit effects similar to being under hypnosis, i.e., they are highly suggestible. That being said, it may seem redundant, to say this but children, who need therapy, need therapy. Mindfulness cannot substitute for therapy, because that’s not what it does.
Just to be up front, I don’t particularly like your theoretical perspective, but that being said, I do agree with your view of the new DSM. The purpose of which is to provide a billing platform for insurance companies, and those that bill insurance. Couples counseling is rarely paid for by insurance, at any rate, its not considered to be therapy. It is considered to be counseling, though couples may get psychotherapy in addition to their couples counseling. There is no point in believing that the DSM people are going to change their views on this any time soon, because insurance companies are unlikely to consider relationship issues something that needs to be addressed by insurance. The DSM is oriented toward diagnosis that justifies a medication intervention. Counseling does not provide that justification.
Interestingly enough I would have to disagree, with the reasons why you believe psychiatry is a success. Probably because I view it as a catastrophic failure. That cannot come up with a cogent theory to explain the illnesses it creates, like depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, and drug addiction. Sill psychiatry, prescribes medications for those illness, none of which work, and some with make illness much worse. It also continues to use electroshock treatment, for those same illnesses, even though there is no reason to believe that it does anything but enrich the psychiatrists, who conduct it. If psychiatristy works its because people still believe in medicine, and this makes the psychiatrist an authority figure, whose advice has a gravitas that people want to believe in, because they believe in authority figures. The carnage of psychiatry is every where, in the lives of patients who desperately need help, but don’t get it, blame themselves for not getting well, and then become self destructive.The thousands of suicides each year, the thousands of overdose deaths on prescribed medications. But sill psychiatry, continues on as if its not responsible for any of this. All the while standing in the way of new treatments and approaches that appear promising, solely to protect its income.
“Drug Approval Reform: “Canadian and US regulatory agencies too often allow unsafe drugs to reach the market and inadequately monitor them after approval,” state the authors. In 2014, 69% of drugs that were submitted to the FDA received “expedited review” status, despite the majority of studies showing that shorter review periods lead to more problems. Thus, the Working Group proposes that regulatory agencies be fully funded by the government rather than industry. They also call for steep reductions in how many drugs are offered an expedited review. Additionally, no one with financial ties to industry should be able to vote on a drug’s approval. ”
These are not just problems, they are crimes. They are crimes that have killed thousands of people. 50,000 people died last year from Opiates, many thousands of which were related to prescription drugs like, Xanax, and Fentanyl, that should have never been approved. Drug companies, have known full well of the dangers of these medications, and they really don’t care, as long as they make billions. They are addicted to money, watch them go into withdrawals, when that money is taken away from them.
So sorry, that this happened to you, the mind is noting to F with. Most don’t know what their doing, and clearly, the MD who treated you didn’t, and I am not sure that many would. I didn’t hear anything about a follow up and the MD checking to see if you were ok either, so you were abandoned as well..
Happily I stumbled on this….. Its an argument I have had with “heady” co workers, for decades. Korzybski, or Whorf anyone? Ideas simply are not feelings. And to think of them this way, shifts therapeutic work away from feelings to reasoning. Yes you can change reasoning, but you can’t change feelings by changing ideas, because, once again, ideas are not feelings. A large percentage of therapists are academically trained, that means, books, books and more books. It also means, in most states they aren’t required to have much of their own therapy.. How can you be a therapist if you have never had your own therapy and have been exposed to many other forms of treatment, as a patient…?
The rest of the world is in some sort of drug induced fog, on cases like this. Medical Science has become a sort of a religion, and we all know of MD’s that have a God Complex… They rest of use don’t really belong on Olympus, so its O.K., to do what must be done with us. We lack the credentials for heaven.
Loved this article…. Psychiatric Enslavement, pretty much says it all. Those little tiny pills of Xanax, .5 mg, looks so harmless. What person can guess that they pack quite a punch, including inter dose dependency, seizures and easy OD’s, when mixed with Opiates or alcohol. Most people get them from their PCP, not a psychiatrist, who knows even less about psych meds than the psychiatrist. Because most of these meds are approved with fraudulent data submitted to the FDA.. In the cattle drive that managed care has become, theres no time to consider anything but writing that prescription. Maybe that’s why medical mistakes are the third leading cause of deaths in the USA, likely more since so much is covered up. Then of course the Insurers, are more concerned with increasing their profits so they slam dunk it all.
Thanks for writing this, considering that you are an MD, I wonder how many other parents, or even PCP’s missed something like this in one of their patients. This condition should be something that all PCP’s are aware of. .
Xanax, is one of the most dangerous drugs ever created. Twenty times stronger than Valium, it is the first medication known, to exhibit inter dose dependency. In other words, missing a single dose can send someone into withdrawals. Withdrawals, from Xanax, are also dangerous and protracted. Xanax, lowers the seizure threshold, and users often experience seizures during regular use and during Detox. Of particular concern is withdrawal from Xanax, which requires titrating down, with a Benzo that has a longer half life. Since Xanax is 20 times stronger than Valium, titrating down can take upwards of one full year, or longer. Some ex-users, never actually feel completely off the drug. Since Xanax, is easily available on the street, partly because prescribers are unaware of its danger and give it out like candy, Heroin users often use it along with their Heroin. This is why so many Opiate users overdose, the combination of Opiates and Xanax, is lethal. When its prescribed, the dose seems so small that, those who are prescribed the drug, think that its safe. It is definitely not. It should never be taken by anyone, let alone children.
It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” (Marcia Angell, MD, “Drug Companies and Doctors: A story of Corruption.” NY Review of Books, Jan. 15, 2009.)
You may have seen this statement before. The fact that it was made in 2009, so many years ago, is telling because of what’s happened since then. Upwards of 10’s of thousands dying from Opiate addiction every year most caused by prescribed meds. The professionals involved in this, act concerned and look around for solutions, unfortunately no one takes responsibility for whats happened. When in fact the people of this country know full well who is responsible. The medical profession, which includes the so called treatment facilities.
Those that become addicted to Opiates, have the difficult time of finding treatment. Usually the prescriber sends them to a facility, and realistically facilities have about a 1% success rate. They don’t even offer detox for stimulants, because they are taught that they don’t require medically monitored withdrawals. Yet the severe depression the accompanies withdrawal from stimulants, is likely to lead back to use. Its also true that facilities and treating medical directors, prescribe anti depressants, and other meds some time which further potentiate drug triggered psychiatric symptoms. With facility treatments costing as much as a $100,000 dollars a month for high end facilities, even though treatment doesn’t really have much to offer it is quite lucrative for those that own and operate treatment centers many of these are psychiatrists or medical corporations. The bottom line is that psychiatry exploits illness, purely for profit. There are many people who have been to rehab, literally 100’s of times, and who are not any better. A stimulant epidemic, likely will result once again, in lots of disinformation while people, are strung out to die.
Its hilarious to me how vehemently people defend mindfulness. When those defenses clearly indicate an ignorance of what meditation, is or is not. For it is clear that Mindfulness is not meditation in any sense of the world. Clearly religious leaders from Krishnamurti to Osho, have stated that meditation is not a doing, it is a happening. It happens, and any effort to practice meditation, or deliberately enter a meditative state is by definition not meditation. Meditation is a happening, not a doing. Mindfulness is really just autohypnosis, which makes the mind very suggestible, susceptible to false meditative states.
Neurotin andLyrica speed brain decline faster than any known substance…. Still heavily prescribed for withdrawal.
Everyone who reads this should be scared, because don’t think because your are a little younger you are safe from this kind of treatment.
Hospitals, and doctors in them, do what they like to you, whether its good medicine or not is beside the point. Your opinion, and your family’s opinion, or anyone else for that matter doesn’t mean very much to them.
They have a long list of, standard treatment options for you, depending on your age, and they make lots of money on you on each one of them, regardless of your need.
Remember always that medical mistakes are the third leading cause of death in this country, and you could be one of them quite easily, and if that’s the case, there will be no consequences to your killers.
I am happy for you….. Psychiatry, believes that when it puts you on drugs.. That what they are doing is different, than being a drug addict, and living in the streets homeless, hustling daily to feed your jones…
But that’s not true, what you describe, is what lots of addicts describe about what happens to them as addicts – Social isolation, depression, financial distress, loss of primary relationships… In your case, you had a psychiatrist as your drug dealer… someone who gave you addictive legal drugs.
Vyvance in my opinion is a very dangerous drug, and highly likely to cause dependency, its really just a form of Dexedrine, that is combined with a chemical that changes where and how fast its absorbed once you take it. Stimulant addicts, have learned how to get rid of this chemical, and release Dexedrine, from the chemical compound and use it to get high. Adderall, is loved and adored by Stimulant users everywhere, for its availability and the ease by which it can be obtained. Many psychiatrists consider it harmless.
Clearly, your psychiatrist did not know what she was doing, and if you had died from liver failure, nothing would have happened to her. Your death would have been considered as an unfortunate Side effect of your prescription medications. Something that happens everyday…. As witnessed by the fact that prescription drugs kill more people now in the U.S.A., each year than street drugs.
People in this country are woefully un educated about the drugs they are prescribed, and those that profit from those prescriptions like it that way. Unfortunately, you had to learn the hard way, that psychiatry, can be very hazardous to your health.
Unfortunately, that means you have very little experience of street drug users, some of whom are very high functioning criminals, who learn how to make meth with no back ground in chemistry, elude law enforcement for decades, and steal hundreds pf thousands of dollars per year to support their use. Some of whom are medical professionals, doctors and nurses. Of course you won’t admit it, because you don’t really know what your talking about. I’ve worked with medical professionals who have been sent to diversion to keep from losing their license, people like you are one of their biggest assets.
Unfortunately, that means you have very little experience of street drug users, some of whom are very high functioning criminals, who learn how to make meth with no back ground in chemistry, elude law enforcement for decades, and steal hundreds pf thousands of dollars
Actually thats a false assumption, because those that are prescribed ADHD medications are in fact substance users there is no difference.
I ran diversion groups for almost 10 years in LA County DAPO certified, lots of people on diversion get scripts to avoid testing dirty…So those who gather stats are actively interviewing biker gangs, who deal meth?
Its my own experience that most people are not prepared to deal with psychiatric treatment, especially when the go to the ER for help as you did in an emergency. That you were mistreated is clear, and my guess is that you take too much responsibility for everything that happened.
Psychiatrist are trained to give medication, that’s what they do. In fact most of the time their treatment interventions are solely designed to send you to medications, because of what they believe to be the cause of your distress. When you don’t respond to your interventions, that escalates them.
That is why you ended up on ECT. Also ECT is quite lucrative to those that conduct it. In my experience, it has no value at all in treatment, but only makes things worse. But, when it gets worse they increase the frequency, some people get ECT once weekly for years.
Your statements about what you needed were crystal clear, unfortunately, people rarely have their emotions validated, because once again, that’s not psychiatry’s view of things.
Its too bad you didn’t have someone to listen, you should have had that.
Something that is not considered here but which is an important consideration, is the potential for turning young children into drug addicts by prescribing them ADHD medications.
Its quite a contraction, to tell children that using street drugs to get high is bad, but then we turn around and hypocritically given them the same drugs to cure them of a disease. When its really a diseased ideology used to make money on them that causes their suffering.
Speed users love Adderall, and consume it just as readily as they consume Meth. Its often sold by those that get the prescription for it, to others.
Then of course they forget about past mistakes and liver failure in young children on now banned types of medications, and the fact that after amphetamines were banned as an over the counter drug, pharmaceutical companies continued to manufacture large quantities of it. They shipped it to Mexico where it could be bought legally, and smuggled back into the United States….
Thanks for writing this, Benzodiazepines are very dangerous drugs indeed, and they have killed lots of people. Not just celebrities. Many, many more will die because of these drugs, and the reckless FDA that approved them.
Sorry but i have very little respect for psychiatry, at this point its my opinion that psychiatry has very little to offer anyone, in terms of an understanding of what people need to heal.
Here’s why; “Stronger indicators of risk include a history of violent behavior, domestic violence, and drug or alcohol abuse.”
There is not difference between psychiatric medication and drug and alcohol abuse. In fact it is well documented that a high percentage of shooters in mass shootings have been on psychiatric medications. These drugs can trigger manic episodes, and damage a persons ability to function cognitively, thereby losing the ability to reason, and react with reason.
I would also venture to say that many of those shooters also used street drugs along with their medications, and that the psychiatrist was either aware of it or turned there back to it because they have little understanding of how to treat drug uses. They should not be given psychiatric medications, because it will further damage them cognitively..
At this point, the public and media will continue to turn to them for expert advise on these matters, which continues to be a huge mistake.
Sometimes its difficult to know just how bad things are, if you don’t have something to compare it to.
Just as a bright light, can blind, it also can inform you of just how deep is the darkness in which you dwell.
Clearly, we have been living in dark times, in which deeds are hidden away. Lies and perjury, are now called misinformation. While deceit doesn’t seem to exist for some unless someone knows about it.
Civilization used to have ideals, now the only concern, for some appears to be, don’t get caught.
Its good to know there a some people doing good work, for all of us.
Any belief system requires believers, whether that belief system is based on verifiable observation or pure fantasy.
But without belief, its difficult for a belief system to attract adherents. Belief, or in the case of psychiatry the suspension of disbelief is the problem.
Its one thing to entice people with rational sounding discussions, framed in scientific jargon, especially when people are trained to worship science, and few have formal training or experience in scientific process.
Since most people don’t understand what’s being said to them about their medication, or their diagnosis, they must accept it on faith alone. But when the medications, and the belief system no longer works, it becomes more difficult to accept it.
Psychiatry typically reacts either to blame the patient or change the medications, and when medication changes don’t work they go back to blaming the patient.
At this point, the belief system is failing, it can no longer convince a significant number of professionals that it has anything at all to offer, some, also a significant number have noted that it is dangerous, and life threatening.
Quite simply, the world is full of people who are strung out on psychiatric medications, and are not helped at all by them, naturally they want get better, because they are tired of suffering.
Psychiatry has been identified as the perpetrator.
Once it has completely lost the publics trust, it will be gone. Sure there may be a few, dangerous psychiatrists who will hold onto the notions of the past, because their incomes depend on them.
People will simply stop believing in it. I myself have worked in the field full time since the 80’s, not as a psychiatrist, but as another professional. I have seen or evaluated, 10’s of thousands of patients, and I have never seen anyone helped by any thing psychiatry has to offer. They are so far away from what’s real that is shocking.
Thanks for a wonderful article.
It should be clear, that many of those children in this so called clinical trial died. The hapless victims of a fraud, whose only purpose was to deceive the public and regulatory agencies, into selling a drug, that would result in more deaths.
It may be easier to deceive when deception is cloaked in scientific jargon. And then there is always the priest like status of medicine, that seems grant a religious like suspension of the critical faculties of reason, in a large segment of the public.
Then there is big money, albeit blood money, that offers a certain amount of protection to organized criminals through legal strategies, until the evidence of their crimes become overwhelming.
It is a process, that attempts to sanitize mass murder.
Love this ” the line should have read, “Our global reach allow us to effectively prey upon an increasing number of people, causing long-term disability and contributing to early death for many. This collateral damage is unfortunate, but it’s only business. We are like the tobacco companies of the 1960s and the scorpion that killed the frog as it crossed the river. We do what it’s in our nature to do. We are amoral sociopathic opportunists – we profit at whatever cost necessary.”
Yes your right, the system is fraudulent and criminal, and the only thing that matters is how much money it makes.
I remember when Los Angeles county closed its community mental health centers like Santa Monica West. There was a belief that all that was needed was to place those suffering from Mental Illness on Meds, that they didn’t need anything else.
Unfortunately, that is still the belief held by many.
The police, are not equipped to deal with the enormity of this issue, nor are the jails. We expect them to deal with issues, that really can’t be address with current approaches by anyone. Often there are co occurring drug issues, and paranoia on the part of prisoners who don’t want the judicial system knowing about how they live or what the do.
Violence and brutality, may or may not be a mental health issues, but it is one of survival. Personality disorders, and sociopathy, help one survive in the streets, as does keeping your mouth shut. Often inmates, have a better understanding of what makes a person tick, and an intuitive sense of self, that is difficult to address from a psychological point of view.
If you don’t listen and try to impose some arbitrary judgment of who or what someone is you will find out the hard way, just how wrong you can be.
Disrespect or respect, its your choice.
Its disheartening to think that after all of this, Paxil is still being prescribed.
Indeed the medical/ psychiatric model of treatment in the United States, has at its foundations the prescribing of so called medicine like this. Its not really about helping people at all. Its primarily a business model, with slick marketing that brings in unbelievable profits, despite the fact that it has little to offer in real treatment to anyone.
To effectively challenge the therapeutic benefit of these medications, would be to shatter a trillion dollar industry. One with all the resources that a trillion dollar industry can muster, including disinformation campaigns against reform, the outright buying of political influence, and the sanitizing of high profile murder cases involving psychiatric drugs to prevent public awareness of how they trigger manic related homicidal rampages.
It is an industry that has destroyed millions of lives, with false promises, based on fraudulent treatments, by denying care, to suffering people, turning them into drug addicts instead.
The bottom line is they just don’t really care how many people they kill, or drive crazy as long as they are making a buck, and the general public doesn’t become aware of the truth.
Yes Fight on, more people are becoming aware.
Its a wonder your still alive Barry…. Benzodiazepines are very dangerous drugs and highly lethal.
Derived from Barbiturates, to make them safer, and counter act the the potential for death by respiratory failure caused by barbiturates two pronged tolerance. One to the respiratory effects of the drug, and the other to the sedative euphoric effects of the drug. So that at some point the dose that is required to get high is the does that kills you by respiratory failure.
Initially touted as safe and free of over dose risks, and less likely to cause addiction, they have proved more addictive than Heroin, with a much greater risk for over dose. Primarily responsible for the fact that prescription medications kill more people than street drugs.
Those that use these drugs, especially Xanax, are at risk for seizures, and with Xanax, inter dose dependency means a danger of going into withdrawal if you miss just one dose. Not many drugs can say that.
I remember years ago, when people abused T’s, and Blues, (Doridan and Codeine) they were at risk for seizures, any time long days after completing withdrawal. The same is true of these meds.
Part of the risk factor with these drugs, is there ability to blur your awareness of how intoxicated you are. Like many tranquilizers they, aren’t psychoactive in the way, intoxicating agents are like alcohol, or Cannabis. So you don’t get that kind of awareness that your very high. That’s another problem with them.
You don’t know just how debilitated you are, how out of it. And of course the disinhibiting effects of the drug come into full play, maybe that’s why so many people OD on them by taking other drugs alongside them.
Ask just about any psychiatrist, and they will tell you they are safe…. They prescribe them like candy…
and that’s a problem.
Psychiatric medicine, especially in the United States, is little more than a cattle drive…
Why bother to ask the cattle, what they think or feel? Because, they are obviously disturbed, or they wouldn’t be coming in for treatment. Their feelings are inconvenient, just another symptom of their pathology.
There is no more, collaboration between, those that suffer and those that provide care. Maybe its the times, authoritarian systems seemed to be favored by the political elite, at this point.
Treatment has become another way, to confine and control… The unhappy people.
With 120 drug over doses a day, most of which are prescription medications, questioning who is doing what to who, and why, needs a lot more asking.
When you struggle agains, psychiatric prejudice, and an ingrained belief system, that is both profitable, and deadly. It can feel a little like the lone voice crying in the wilderness.
Anorexia, is one of the most deadly illnesses that affect children, it is often a condition that goes on for decades, with residential treatments, and their regimentation becoming a part of every families lives.
While you desperately search for answers, and wonder why this happens to your child, and your family.
What you find in the end, often is that the end, is just as puzzling as the beginning, though not as examined.
Drugs, are what psychiatry has to offer, and behavior mod, and really nothing else. The Yoga and mindfulness, are adjuncts that really mean they don’t know what to do therapeutically, because it wasn’t in the text books they read to get their degree.
Yes, Yoga, can help but its a self discipline, something everyone needs, but it isn’t a therapy.
Good luck to you and your family, and thanks fore writing this.
Its difficult to screen for child abuse electronically, or if your not a based in the continental USA. How do you report it from the Philippines?
I liked your article…. DSM V is a disaster…
But it was not created by accident to be that way. The insurance companies have realized that they can save money by not employing clinicians to process claims, and take clinical when a therapist calls for an authorization. Because once clinical information is received that results in the likelihood of an authorization. Its my perception that the insurance industries received a healthy consideration on the formulation of the DSM V.
Eliminating the five axis diagnosis process saves them time, and allows them to shift work to third world countries like the Philippines, where it can be processed more cheaply. It also allows them to process things electronically, another savings for them.
Actually, I believe that is is problem with social workers who work with clients. No where in this material did I see anything positive about this person, in terms of his strengths.
My own experience with social workers is that they should not do therapy or counseling with anyone Because they lack an understanding of suffering, because they they themselves have never usually been the recipient of treatment.
The principal reason the DSM was reformed was to make it easier for the insurance companies to process billings, and to dispense with clinical information that is considered unnecessary by them, since people only need to be put on drugs.
I dislike educational settings, because there is a fundamental shift from feelings to head orientation, and this inevitably leads to devaluing the patients experiences, and a focusing instead on head oriented valuations, at the expense of people.
They don’t write books about what makes people healthy and well, so people always come up short in this kind of situation.
I think that is’ a mistake to think street drug users are always dysfunctional. A good percentage, no one knows how many, function adequately in society, are employed, are in relationships, and are not involved in the legal system.
Its not uncommon that people use Heroin for 30 to 40 years, and every once and a while go into a program, to clean up when their tolerance gets too high, then chip slowly at the drug for a while, until their tolerance gets high again, then go into a program again to clean up. This cycle repeats itself throughout their life time.
What treators, only see are the dysfunctional ones, people who cannot maintain, and who have problems that force them into treatment. Either through the legal system, or by family pressure etc.
Opiate, users will use just about any opiate, from Heroin to Methadone, to Suboxone, etc. Society would prefer them to use legal drugs, and some do by manipulating prescribers, who don’t understand addiction, or how to work with addictive personalities.
Treatment is an alternative, that society favors because it believes mistakenly that it works, when in fact it’s success rates are very low, compared to 12 step meeting, and quitting on your own. Quitting on your own actually has the highest success rate followed by 12 step meetings.
Its not uncommon to see addicts, go through 15 to 20 rehabs with no sobriety, simply because treatment doesn’t have much to offer. There again, because treatment is a business of taking insurance, and providing the lowest possible pay to those that provide direct services, usually ex addicts, or people on maintenance, who have little sobriety of their own.
This country has an insatiable desire for drugs, from morning coffee, cough medicine, antihistamines, alcohol, hundreds of different types of drugs, of all sorts, etc. We tend to favor those drugs that are associated with productivity. And disfavor those associated with indolence. Those that help us cope with the stress, of a society, that is crumbling economically.
People probably become addicted to opiates because its used so much in labor and delivery, and exposing neonates to opiates when they are so vulnerable, changes the way the receptor sites are formed in the brain, creating more opiate receptor sites due to early imprinting.
And also because Afghanistan, no longer controlled by the Taliban, has record Opiate production, with increased air traffic to and from that country, easing smuggling into this country.
Its also true that certain types of drug preference reflect economic conditions, with stimulants used during boom times, like the 80’s Cocaine, and now depressants, during the current economic depression.
I suppose I can say, that I never bought into the idea, that psychiatry, presented, that Mental Health issues, were caused, by some sort of biophysical process in the brain.
My experience goes back a very long time, and I have distrusted both the academic, approach to teaching psychotherapy, and the psychoanalytic method. Both seemed too head oriented to me.
My graduate program centered on learning how to conduct psychotherapy.
During my graduate school, I needed to work, to support myself, and the only paying internships that I found were drug treatment ones.
There I treated, thousands of addicts, ran diversion groups, individual treatment for drug uses, on all kinds of drugs. It was my perception, that many involved in the field, seemed to think that treating addicts was not real therapy, and most didn’t even have a basic understanding of drug addiction. Many treated patients who were using lots of street drugs, but never even assessed their patients for drug addiction.
So, when the biophysical model began putting people on psychiatric medication, I noticed right away that the same problems they were experiencing in treatment, were shared with drug users.
There were others, who shared this same perception, but they were drowned out, by the rush to put everyone on these drugs.
First of all, drugs are drugs, whether you call them psych meds, or drugs of abuse, they are the same fundamentally. They make insight difficult, connection impossible. and there is no pressure from symptoms driving a person to make changes.
Because psych meds, don’t appear to be intoxicants, there is a belief that somehow, they work differently than street drugs. However this is not the case.
For example, Tobacco, doesn’t seem to make a person intoxicated, and because of that, people are unaware of their lack of insight and self awareness, and inability to connect their feelings and their behaviors, in a feeling way. This profound lack of self awareness, is exactly what most psych medications do. And because they don’t appear to be intoxicants, then of course they seem to be ok to treat people.
Thats why psych meds, are accepted, because they don’t appear to intoxicate. But once you understand that they share the same ability to blur insight and self awareness, with street drugs. you can understand how similar their action is to street drugs.
Many psych meds, are also powerful intoxicants, and work by creating an intoxication, in which the patient doesn’t not have insight into the fact that they are high. Drugs like Xanax, seem ok to use because its prescribed by a psychiatrist, but they are more dangerous than Heroin. Because the user doesn’t have the insight to know how high they are.
There are more prescription overdoses now, than street drugs, for this very reason.
I was very happy to see this statement,
” The point here is that reformism will not serve us. As I have argued elsewhere (see Burstow, 2014b), and as the history of psychiatry clearly shows, reform agendas have always culminated with a return of biological psychiatry with a vengeance, and far from ridding us the problems posed by the institution, have guaranteed the continuation of those problems. ”
Psychiatry is and has become a form of institutionalized Madness, one that disguises itself behind reasons, that are presented in terms of an arcane, priest like liturgy. To the public their words, are as indecipherable as a witches incantation to a Demon.
I suspect that is a cognitive way of controlling their own symptoms, by controlling others. The question becomes can you control madness through reform? Not in this case, when so many people are denied the compassion, and attention that they needed as human beings, that would have nurtured them in the time of their suffering. Compassion that would have offered hope, instead of condemnation.
Instead they were treated as experimental animals. Given, Malaria, Insulin Coma therapy, ECT, and now psychotropic meds, with the fervency of a religious dictum, that shut out anyone who questioned the Sanity of this.
No, reform is not possible.
“David, are we just suppose to accept your word that you work in a program where everyone merrily tapers off synthetic opiates in two years and lives a wonderful life of total abstinence.”
You don’t cure people by switching out drugs, one drug for another drug. They are still on drugs..
Heroin, was supposed to be a cure for Morphine addition, Methadone for Heroin addiction, then came the nightmare of Fentanyl, and Suboxone, Subtext, DXM, and large opium farms in New Zealand that grow red poppies, with Opiates that activate different receptor sites… All these drugs have and are being abused. All of them are relatively easy to get, including Heroin.
“This name just sugar coats the fact that they are “opiate replacement” programs and further promotes the disease concept of addiction that falls within Biological Psychiatry’s paradigm of theory and practice”
Well put..
Someone on drugs, is still on drugs no matter what you call them, Methadone, Suboxone, Subutex, DXM, all drugs are drugs. No matter whether the get them from a psychiatrist, a nurse or a drug dealer.
When you legally string someone on drugs, that’s what you do. Over time the body doesn’t like drugs, and builds up tolerance. And when tolerance gets high, then, most addicts will get treatment, knowing that next time around they can get high again. This results in lots of OD’s, when people leave treatment early.
But addicts typically come into treatment, when their use is about, just using to keep from being sick, and not getting high again. Long term addicts those with 30 year histories of Opiate use, typically use programs, to clean up a while, lower tolerance,, and then in a couple of years, start chipping again.
Usually psychiatrists know very little about street drugs, about Opiate Street life, and how addicts live, and what they do. How easy it is to get prescriptions that can be sold, like Xanax, Klonopin, Ativan.. and many others.
Usually in Methadone maintenance, people will still use other drugs, making it easier to get loaded, rather than just keep from getting sick. These programs, are notoriously easy to manipulate. There are supposed to check for track marks etc… Do UA’s, etc, but still dirty tests happen all the time. And depending on the situation, programs tend to carry people with multiple dirty tests. Even in probation, they do the same because it means another jail bed, and more paper work. And Drugs are relatively easy to get in prison.
Its been my experience that with these programs, as time goes on there is less scrutiny of users, activities. Addicts build up trust, and learn how to gain confidence, and once they have it, well it gives them more license.
I’ve seen lots of programs come and go over the years, but I have yet to see a real understanding of what makes people addicts, Usually what is see is lots of administrators, and program operators making money.. And there are billions of dollars to be made off addicts. And lots supposed ex addicts running these programs.
Loved your article.
“In terms of listed side effects, naloxone causes anxiety, a decrease in pain tolerance, joint and muscle pain, and induces immediate withdrawal signs if taken by someone who is dependent on opiates. There’s a history of poor compliance among addicts with naloxone. SAMSHA knows this. Why would they introduce a drug option that could undermine all their efforts to set up a self-sustaining high compliance program?”
This is one of the main reasons drug substitution hardly ever works, someone on Methadone, or Suboxone is still addicted.
The small amount of Naltrexone is easily overwhelmed but increasing dosage levels of Opiates. There are lots of OD’s on Suboxone.
Treaters don’t get it, they don’t seem to understand that addicts are already suffering because they are short of natural endorphin production internally. Using any opiate keeps this suppressed. One of the problems of having treatment run by psychiatrist, they think that treatment consists of giving out more drugs. Drugs that have different names are still drugs.
Acupuncture is a much better solution. For detox, because then addicts aren’t given more drugs, in the withdrawal process.
My own experience is running one of the largest drug treatment families on the west coast for 8 years, and running drug diversion groups for Los Angeles County that treated thousands of drug users. I have literally worked with thousands of drug addicts. .
My experience working with Psychedelic drug users is they are people who typically are shut down emotionally, and are head oriented. They like psychedelic drugs because they can finally feel something intensely, unfortunately, continued and prolonged use of psychedelics, damages the brains ability to repress. That can lead to continual intrusion.
Once they begin dealing with intrusion on a continual basis, usually will gravitate toward drugs that help them repress. This is why you don’t see 12 step groups, that are oriented to psychedelic drug use solely, like say alcoholics anonymous. Because they cause psychosis, to emerge long term. I have treated any number of people who “lost it on these drugs.
Don’t confuse the lifting of repression with a cure, its not. Because people need defenses in order to process emotional pain. Without them they are always overloaded and in psychic distress.
One thing I know, for sure is that drugs are always a false hope. And when you are hopeless, anything that seems hopeful, is like a miracle.
Unfortunately, people who feel that way, will do just about anything to get some relief. And those that sell drugs are aware of this. Whether the are drug dealers or pharmaceutical companies.
Unfortunately, we cannot rely on anecdotal evidence for any treatment, because that isn’t realistic. Seems like there is always someone available to take advantage of this situation.
There are ample examples of hundreds of drugs that have been tried to treat depression, in the end they are either unpredictable, ineffective, cause serious damage to the brain, or appear to work because they blur cognitive awareness and insight of those prescribed.
Ketamine, and PCP, are dissociative anesthetics, and they have been studied for a long time. They were in fact not approved because of the serious side effect of triggering psychosis, through disassociation in roughly 40% of those given the drug. Many treatments cause disassociation, and in these drugs, with seriously depressed individual, encouraging dissociation, is a disaster.
I have had a long history of working with street drug users, and these drugs are dangerous and frightening. I have had real hands on experience working with lots and lots of users of these drugs.
Even in the drug using sub culture, users of these drugs are considered dangerous. Its not just a scare story, this is what I have observed first hand, on the streets where these drugs are used habitually.
John Lily loved Ketamine, and drug users love it too. Especially when they can’t get PCP, its little brother.
PCP, was almost approved as an anesthetic for Labor and delivery, but a significant number of mothers who got the drug developed psychosis. Those that take it, Latino Gangs, just love to get “out there”, in the “Void”, that it creates for them.
But one thing, they know, you can’t use this drug by yourself, cause if you do, you won’t have anyone to keep your from going off the deep end permanently.
” even in the United States, there is a real problem. When we participate in clinical trials today, companies get to sequester the data from these trials in flagrant breach of the ethics and norms of science and yet parade their representations of those results as science. The participation of some of us in those trials puts all of us in a state of legal jeopardy. In the US, we may get our day in Court, but we will have the data from clinical trials in which our friends and families participated used against us.”
In the United States medical care is controlled by insurance companies. Insurance companies are run by businessmen who are profit driven. Although they do not directly control the services they provide to those who are members of their insurance plan they do appoint medical directors who are physicians who do just that.
Psychiatrists control the services that their insurance company provides to those who suffer from so called behavioral illness. Because of their view that psychiatric issues are really medical ones, their response to member psychiatric issues, is through medication.
This is highly profitable to the insurance companies. If one considers the cost of medication management 2 sessions a year at $250 on average per session, compared with 1 time weekly sessions at $40 to $75 per session, with an upper cost range of about $4000 per year.
This has led to an emphasis, on medication management as a form of treatment, with a huge vested interest in continuing along this line. The pharmaceutical companies, benefit enormously from this state of affairs, and when people seek treatment, they are directed toward medication management instead of psychotherapy.
Once someone is placed on medication management case review is only cursory. Most insurance companies allow someone to be on medication management forever, without any review at all.
In fact because of the insurance industries stance that medication management is the way to treat biological/mental health problems, the amount of clinical information submitted on any case, is minimal, and getting smaller and smaller. In instances in which medications have failed to provide the desired response, ECT is the favored alternative. It is usually authorized with minimal clinical information, and is routinely authorized by MA level staff, sometimes no review is required at all.
Psychiatrists control every aspect of treatment in the U.S.. This in spite of the fact that they have very little training in psychology, or psychotherapy, they are making life and death decisions with the lives of millions of their members, to the detriment of those members.
As witnessed by the staggering number of drug over doses on prescription medications, in the United States each year, now out numbering those of street drugs. Clearly medication management has only created a new class of drug dependent individual. Who doesn’t understand how he or she got there.
To be cursed by the Devil is to truly be blessed.
Although I look forward to reading your book my gut reaction is that you have mis perceived what to expect from the main stream media, as you called it.
In the last several decades the main stream media has become the corporate media, and it is owned and operated by only a small hand full of people. Their purpose is solely one of profit, and they do not want anything in the public’s eye that would cause them to lose even a cent.
Psychiatric treatment is big business, and the drugs that are sold to the people under the mantle of medicine, make billions upon billions of dollars each year. They know full well that these drugs, are at worst dangerous, and at best worthless. and they don’t really care. Because they are extremely profitable, cheap to make and they are sold for top dollar.
At one time, the truth had some force to it. And many of us believed that by just airing the truth we could changes things. Unfortunately corporate media will not allow the truth to be widely known especially when it comes to what psychiatry has become, that would cost them a lot of money.
As crazy as it seems, they will seek to expand their ability to dispense dangerous drugs to the public, and relax drug laws, as a means of social control, and to keep the money pipeline growing…
Years ago something like this article below would never happen, I expect that in the near future the public will have access to many more drugs that were once considered dangerous.
While I have not given up hope, those that want to provide the public with the truth will be marginalized if not out right censored. Its going to be a long up hill battle.
My own belief is that only legal challenges in the form of lawsuits, coordinated against the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance companies, treatment facilities, psychiatrists, and others who profit from this industry, will bring the publics attention to this urgent matter.
I have to disagree, with this and the idea that alcohol and drug treatment is better conceptualized than Mental Health treatment.
For many, many reasons.
First of all Drug and Alcohol treatment is largely a failure. Most treatment facilities have a success rate of about 1%, which means that after a year of treatment 1 out of a hundred is sober. Treatment facilities actually offer very little to patients, except to limit access to drugs. To make success rates higher they import 12 step panels, and encourage patients to become involved in 12 step groups, this to boost their success rate. A.A. for instance claims a 20% success rate, but it very hard to verify, because participation, is anonymous.
Hospital staff is largely paraprofessional, people in recovery themselves, with very little formal education or training. With rates at some facilities topping $1000 a day, keeping staff costs low is quite profitable for Hospitals.
Its also true that drug involved patients are often given other drugs in facilities, as a way of dealing with their drug involvement. This only compounds the problem, and is not really treatment at all its just a faster way of getting patients discharged.
The terms, that you used, to conceptualize addicts states of minds, like Denial etc., are borrowed from 12 step groups, and don’t really represent a valid conceptualization of addictive thinking. Most addicts are in fact not in denial at all , but are desperately aware of their situation, desperately wanting to get help and not finding it anywhere. It s not usual, for addicts to have 15, to 20 residential treatment episodes and still no clean time.
Remember that the founder of A.A., was only able to stop drinking by helping others to stop. His book came later on.
Most insurance companies rely on tools such as ASAM to determine treatment and authorize care, its like the DSM in many ways, but gives them justification to deny care, and skirt the expensive costs that treatment presents for them. It simply does not really address addiction or the need for treatment at all. Its central problem is that there are few capable professionals who can evaluate someone in treatment with it from staff at facilities, so the insurance companies do it for them.
Which is illegal, because, its like diagnosing someone with information provided by someone else.
If anything treatment is dominated by money, and has very little to do with actually helping people get well. Studies show statistically that someone is more likely to get well, simply by quitting on their own.
Very nice, concise… thank you..
Really, they needed a research team for that? The DSM always has been an obstacle, its meant to be, and that’s just what the insurance companies like.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view. I think that articles and points of view, that are academically based, and presented in the format of Academia… Have very little to do with the Mental Health business….
Mental health treatment as it exists in the USA, is capitalism at its worst.
Its really about maximizing profit, not helping people. Its structures and functions are designed to minimize cost, while maximizing profit. Ultimately People are viewed as someone to profit from. Those that care, those that want something different are systemically dehumanized and devalued. By the so called medical profession of psychiatry.
And articles can be written from any point of view, but they will never understand that they are a moot point.
As long as the meat grinding system remains, to harvest pain and make the most profit possible form it.
I liked what you said AcidPop5
Recently it was discovered that meth, causes increased aging in the cells by speeding up the process of cell Aptosis.
Vyvance has also been known to cause severe joint pain, and GI upset. Drug users love the stuff, its really Dexedrine bound to a protein that’s absorbed differently.
. But there are already recipes on line teaching users how to free the Dexedrine from the other parts of the drug.
” In fact, I think I am in full agreement with Ted that psychiatry cannot be reformed any more than slavery. ”
I have to agree with this statement completely. Each day more revelations about the FDA”s, hiding of fraudulent drug data are revealed. This makes it clearer just how deep the issues regarding medication and psychiatric medications go.
People simply do not get better on psychiatric medications, they do not get cured. All they get is their symptoms controlled. Symptoms that bother others. Unfortunately the use of medications to treat symptoms, for a significant percentage of people, in the long run make them worse. Unfortunately many of individuals may become disabled. Its also true that those that stop taking their medications, improve and become symptom free without any treatment at all.
Primarily because there is absolutely no understanding of what causes the symptoms in the first place. Consequently any treatment with medications is just guess work.
While there are probably individuals who do not fit into this scenario, that does not mean that what is happening to them can be accounted for by psychiatric interventions. Once again because there is no understanding of causative factors, its also true that positive outcomes are not understood either. In fact it makes them more problematic because they may result in justifying increased treatment approaches based on a misunderstanding.
I thought that Robert Whitaker’s article on increased SSI assistance was great and to the point.
One thing I have read, is that Zyprexa was marketed in Japan differently than the USA. In japan the drug company sales reps were told to go ahead and acknowledge its issues with regard to type 2 Diabetes/metabolic syndrome, while they were told to hide them here in the USA.
This drug continues to be widely prescribed, and makes its manufacturer billions a year.
” Insel has not yet given up on the biological model of mental illnesses or the idea that mental disorders are discrete entities. On the contrary, in launching the Research Domain Criteria Project, he hopes that genetics, brain imaging and neuroscience will unlock the biological causes of mental illness. ”
Of course, he has to. Because without that, he is not only out of a job, but he’s responsible for lots of damage to millions upon millions of people…
I am not going to try and make you feel better or be consoling. But instead I encourage you to remain angry. To keep getting angry.
Everything you said is true, I know because I have worked on the inside of that system for a long time. I know that the insurance companies are blood thirsty and make billions mistreating people, walking away from them, because a psychiatrist believes that he understands depression or another mental illness because he read about it in a book somewhere.
Psych residency’s are short nowadays, and are about dispensing medications, and medication is not treatment. Those medications are powerful disinhibitors, and brain damaging.
In a court of law, psychiatry’s ability to predict what someone will or will not do, is not admissible. Yet those decisions are made on a routine basis by insurance company psychiatrists, with catastrophic consequences.
In my own life, after a long custody battle, my ex wife dropped my 12 year old daughter off in front of my apartment, on the street with all her worldly possessions, after threatening to kill her cat. I was unaware that she had put her on medications and had hidden it from me. The medication became a further basis for my lawsuit. I was considered irrational by the court for objecting to my daughters medications. Eventually I won my case, and got custody of my daughter.
It has taken a good 10 years for her to get beyond the depression that those medications and her mistreatment caused her.
It takes a long time to heal, and it requires patience, and understanding and a willingness, to feel the anger and express the hurts as you feel them. Its very hard to find validation from professionals who believe that what you feel is what makes you sick.
Sometimes, anger makes you fight harder, for what you believe in.
Thank you for writing… Its been my experience working with those that use Xanax, that this drug is one of the most dangerous ever approved. I am seldom wrong when I suspect seizure activity, even with very small doses. The withdrawal, seems to be in a class by itself, several orders of magnitude worse than Heroin.
And of course, the drug as a causative agent of your symptoms is completely overlooked by whoever prescribed it for you. Blaming, those victimized by their process comes naturally to those that profit from prescribing this drug.
Sadly there are many hundreds of thousands of people who have been affected, just as you were, unfortunately, they have lost the ability to warn others about the disaster that awaits them, when they are prescribed this s0 called medication.
Thanks again for writing.
I appreciate your candor, and your willingness to speak out. I think that its true, that our awareness of what we do as therapists or psychiatrists depends to a great deal on our emotional awareness, and progress in our own emotional development.
Unfortunately, training often seems to be nothing more than amassing more and more knowledge, rather than becoming more and more conscious, more aware of what we feel and experience as human beings.
Apparently it is next to impossible for intellectually based training programs to understand this, and it often results in becoming insensitive to what your supposed to be sensing.
There is simply no intellectual substitute for compassion, understanding, empathy, caring. Connecting with people through your heart,and not necessarily your head.
In the United States Psychiatry, as its practiced has become a sort of cattle drive, wherein people are placed on psychiatric medications, as quickly as possible, without regard to the consequences.
The result has been catastrophic.
In one sense to question the police and the sanity of their role, is tantamount to saying your insane.
Many years ago, in graduate school, one of my professors told me that her job was to give psych tests to police recruits. The testing was biased to select for paranoia. Because it was felt that those with a slight paranoid personality would survive better in the streets.
There you have it…
It may well be that certain types of personality disorders favor the role of being police. Certainly the paranoid personality person does survive better, however that cannot be said for those that he or she comes in contact with.
That being said, the police shouldn’t have to be in a position to deal with someone suffering from mental health issues. That should got to mental health professionals. The police have enough to do already.
Send a therapist or someone whose been there instead, it will be better for everyone.
“You don’t need to save it in order to do your therapeutic work to help people. Today psychiatry clearly stands as an obstacle to the work of ALL caregivers, and especially to all those people dealing with extreme psychological distress who are forced to come in contact with it.” ….
Thanks…. Psychiatry right now is the basis for all Mental Health treatment in this country. It is the foundation for behavioral treatments offered by the insurance companies. It is those insurance companies who decide who gets help, and how much help they get. Those insurance companies love medication management. Putting people on drugs, is very profitable to them. If you consider therapy costing $100 and hour for 2 years at about $10,000. Versus medication management at four time a year $250 a visit 2 years is only $2000. The rest is profit. When people realize that they have been strung out on drugs, very much like a drug dealer stings and addict out, there will be a catastrophic problem for the insurance companies.
But what else can they do?
The delivery system functions as if mental health issues are medical in nature. When in fact they are not.
All so called psychoactive drugs affect insight. Especially drugs that don’t appear to induce a drug high. When someone is under the influence, its much easier for those around them to see and understand they are impaired. Those under the influence may also to some extent know that they are intoxicated. And that what has happened to them is a result of their intoxication.
But there are other drugs, very powerful ones that produce no obvious high that do affect a persons thinking in profound ways.
I like to think that in this respect, psychiatric medication, and tobacco are very similar. Tobacco, works by disconnecting thoughts and feelings, so a person cannot connect the dots in their life. What there thinking, feeling, and doing, are not all together but miles apart. Whats happening to their lungs, is not connected to them.
The same is true of psychiatric medications, especially tranquilizers. This is why symptoms no longer push the medicated toward getting better, making changes in themselves and their life. They just can’t connect the dots.
I couldn’t help but thinking, when reading this, that once again, psychiatry gets it all wrong. Maybe its the training, the way systems of the body are broken down and examined for disfunction. With the eye to putting things back together once again in the right order.
What always strikes me about analytical thinking, is the thought that feelings are just other ideas. And that cognition, reasoning, thinking different thoughts can change how people feel.
First their must be a realization that feelings are not intellectual processes in the sense that working a math problem is. Changing the way problems are solved may help with reasoning, but emotions don’t respond that way.
Approaching emotional issues, by subtilely shifting to the intellect, is of itself, dismissive of a patients concerns.
Emotional issues are not about faulty reasoning, many, many, patients have advanced skills in Math and Physics, and can reason just fine.
There is more missing from psychiatry than just a knowledge about talk therapy. Whats missing is caring, empathy, and love.
But fundamentally, it is very difficult if not impossible, to learn about talk therapy in an intellectual way, that’s just another attempt to intellectualize things.
You have to be in therapy, you have to spend many long years plumbing your own emotional depths, a process that never really ends. Otherwise you will be unable to feel, and to be smart enough about your own feelings, your own process to help others.
Thanks for writing this.
I have often thought about death, its unavoidable at a certain age, when so many people you know and love die.
Its been my own experience that death seems to feel reasonable when you think that theres no way out of the pain. But I found the courage and freedom to do and be what ever I want instead. For me, it was the willingness, to let go of myself, to lay down and become the pain, that set me free from its hold. It gave me a tremendous freedom. A freedom to understand my hurt from the inside-out, that was curative for me. The objectified outside- in version I was taught in Grad school, seldom makes any difference.
The profession of main stream psychiatry often hides behind a veneer of science and medicine, when in point of fact, its practices, and techniques are not based on either one.
“here it is: agitation may be caused by “underlying agitated depression,” the spurious superficiality of which notion is self-evident. Or: high voltage electric shocks delivered to the brain may fix aberrant brain circuits, a contingency which in any context other than psychiatric orthodoxy would be considered laughable. Electric shock treatment causes brain damage, and any putative gains claimed by psychiatrists are attributable to a well-known transient effect called post-concussional euphoria. Memory loss, in many cases, is more or less permanent. ”
The Elderly are much more vulnerable to both the effects of ECT, and also often lack the ability to resist pressures from hospitals and treatment providers who aggressively encourage ECT treatments for them, regardless of the outcome.
They are also very susceptible to the damaging effects of psychiatric medications, and can easily develop whats called treatment refractory depression, after decades of being prescribed brain damaging medication. When this happens, ECT is usually the treatment of choice. Many insurance providers, don’t require psychiatric review of these procedures, some handle it on a clerical basis.
ECT, is quite lucrative to those that do it, they can bill thousands of dollars per session, and many schedule dozens of sessions a day on multiple patients. With cursory approval by insurance companies, psychiatrists purse these treatments quite aggressively for their patients.
When an elderly patient, becomes little more than a vegetable afterward, there are no consequences to the treating psychiatrist, who callously then may recommend more ECT treatments.
Some patients get routine maintenance ECT, of weekly sessions for years on end. And if these sessions result in severe disability, the patient and family are in no position to question, what has happened, or to pursue legal redress. Yet severe disability often results.
The use of psychiatric medications, that have little more effectiveness than a placebo, often results in the very same symptoms they were supposed to treat. In addition the use of Benzodiazapenes, increases a persons likelihood of getting Alzheimers, by a whopping 52%.
The fact that we allow these practices despite the fact that they do not effectively treat any anyone, and further damage people is a testament to the destructive nature of the profession of psychiatry, and to our antidiluvian belief system in its regard. Psychiatry, does not know what causes these illnesses, and because of that it does not know how to treat them. Believing in psychiatry, however lucrative for the medical corporations, has no basis in science or medicine, its pure witchcraft.
The principal of first do no harm, has long ago been forgotten, by those whose only real concern is how to enrich themselves, by exploiting human suffering.
i always read with interest articles like this one. Whether its Ketamine, LSD, MDA, or EX. Psychiatry seems to always gravitate toward drugs for treatment.
Was it John Lily that took Ketamine, in his isolation tank, with an IV drip so he could communicate with God…
If drugs can cure you why are so many addicts uncured. And why are there so many addicted to psychiatric medications.
When i read this article, I new right away, where it was heading. That being said, I believe that there are many sincere Psychiatrists, out who really want to help those with psychiatric illness.
However, its been my experience, that the education they receive makes this practically impossible. Once they graduate from medical school, and take a psych residence their approach is usually set for the rest of their career. Only a handful in every given generation, become dissatisfied, and learn to take a different approach.
Medicine, is not experimentation usually,. it has a set play book, of standards of care. People, patients are diagnosed and treated along those lines. First comes a diagnosis, then comes, the treatment. And since medicine believes that psychiatric illness is a result of some biophysical problem, that usually that means drugs of some kind.
Other, models view treatment much different. In my on training as a psychotherapist, i learned to first listen to the patient, and use my clinical skills to get a feeling for what they are experiencing. The DSM was only after thought. Treatment consisted of psycho therapy, not medications. I learned quite early that medications, interfered with he healing process. One that I had experienced myself prior to becoming a therapist.
Medicine on the other hand almost never gets beyond, the you are sick, I am well mentality. Doctors unlike therapists, are not required to go through therapy of their own, not encouraged to engage in personal growth to understand that what is happening to their patients is also happening to them.
I have seen the you are sick I am well, mentality played over and over again, when patients come to their doctors, their feelings are anesthetized by medications, and remain unheard. They are considered to be problematic, if they don’t take their pills and go away quietly. To just do what they do.
And of course now, especially in the USA, the insurance companies control treatment by what they will pay for. Its much more profitable to to pay for drugs, for them, than talk therapy. Which makes monetary considerations of the most important, yet ethically treatment decisions should never be based on those considerations. But ethical considerations no longer seem to matter, once prescribing psych meds whether the work or not doesn’t matters since they are so highly profitable. Consider the fact that now psychiatric medications, cause more fatalities than car accidents.
Psychiatrists run mental health, through insurance companies. Their job is really to deny treatment, to ensure that the gargantuan profits for this companies continue.
Psychiatry as it is now, is primary one of drug dealing, and addiction. Yes there are psychiatrists that are good and who care. but they have been trained, to work in a system, that is not based on science but on profit.
There are cures for mental health issues, that don’t involve drug use, that involve instead, therapy, counseling, therapeutic relationships, and psychotherapy. And there are therapists, who help people get well despite everything, they have been fed by the medical model.
Its my understanding that Benzodiazpenes were initially derived from Barbiturates.
Barbiturates, as a class of drugs have a unique problem with duel tolerance , in that the tolerance to the respiratory suppressant effects of the drug, develops at a different rate than the tolerance to the sedative effects of the drug. In other words. people using the drug developed a tolerance to sedative effects, while not developing a sufficient tolerance to the respiratory effects. The result was that eventually the dose that they had to take to get high was the one that killed them due to respiratory failure.
Benzodiazepines, were supposed to fix that problem… Unfortunately all Benzo’s seem to create problems with seizures, probably because of their lowering the seizure threshold. Probably by creating some sort of parasympathetic excess…
I am sorry about your loss.
Most so called addiction-ologists. Know very little about drugs, especially street drugs, its sad but true. They just go by what the PDR, or Merck manual says. If its not in there, they don’t know about it.. Having worked as a director of a Detox facility, without a medical degree, I have seen first hand the difficulties that doctors have with these drugs. They don’t give enough time for withdrawal symptoms to subside. And its not unusual for users to come back, to the hospital days after they were thought to be finished, in acute withdrawal… This is something they aren’t usually aware of…
Currently there are problems with Xanax, and seizures. Even small prescriptions for this drug can be dangerous, due to what appears to be a lowering of the seizure thresh hold. Anyone remember, Halcyon? Their chemically related.
Either that or psychiatrists will label you as paranoid for not blindly doing what your told.
Melissa thanks for writing this. I am so glad that you are free, of medication.
Your story is an inspiration, to many, who are trapped just like you were. And many more who need hope to get free.
These drugs are very dangerous medications, given out like Candy by psychiatrists and a medical and insurance system that really doesn’t care, if you live or die.
Please don’t stop writing about this, please don’t stop bringing this information to the public. You will save many lives, and many people from the hell you once experienced.
I have read the reactions, to this post, and I agree that there is a need for action, against psychiatry. While I believe that it is a good idea to write and publish challenges to their lies and prevarications. I don’t believe that this is enough, because basically those that consume services, don’t believe they have alternatives and also the psychiatric model of treatment is accepted by the public because it is aligned with the medical model of care.
I believe that if we continue to purse this course, change will be slow, and people will continue to suffer needlessly. Simply because we are not seen as authority figures, and the public looks to those authority figures for validation.
However there are good counter authority figures. A good examples is Dr. Petter Breggin. His testimony in law suits against psychiatric medicines, are important, though not widely known by the public. I think ti would be important to reach out and organize professionals who understand how harmful the current system is.
I think it could also be important to seek legal help, and pursue qui tam lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, and psychiatric providers who knowingly damage people with harmful treatment and care. This could also increase resources for future legal actions, challenges and providing high profile information to protect the public.
Another focus should be identifying political leaders who support reform, and those that are against it.
Part of the reason psychiatry gets away with murder is because, its done in secrecy, hidden behind psychiatric jargon that the public doesn’t understand, and people feel they have not place to turn to.
Most people don’t even know the difference between a Psychiatrist, Psychologist, LPC, or an LCSW.
So they have no idea what they are getting into when they seek help.
Thanks for writing this……I think its important to challenge corporate psychiatry’s lies, and pay ops.. A medical license shouldn’t be a license to kill.
“A growing number of people appear to have killed themselves precisely because of the mental health ‘treatment’ they have received. Some of them weren’t even suicidal before they got on the psychiatric drugs that directly preceded their self-inflicted deaths. We’re talking kids, in a lot of instances. Williams had over 40 years of life on many of them. (And, by the way, I think the jury is still out on exactly how ‘treatment’ or psych drugs might have been used or impacted Williams himself.)”
Great post… There are reports that Robin Williams was started on psychiatric medication, and anti Parkinsons Disease meds, according to a friend of his actor Rob Schneider.
emotional states can be caused by physical states, that have nothing to do with and are not caused by medical conditions..
I also have the perspective of being a patient before I became a clinician.
I remember how vulnerable and need, I was. How much I was really hurting. I would have done anything to feel better, and unfortunately that was used against me.
I had no idea, what I was getting into… I am lucky that I survived, many people don’t.. I have seen many others die. At first I was alone, when I began speaking out, those that I spoke too, tried as they always do, to turn what I said into my personal pathology…
Many long years, later I received validation from other professionals. There are people that care, and all of us together, can make a difference, so others won’t have to suffer what we did.
Thanks for your post.
First of all theres a difference between blaming and responsibility. Thats what professionals do they take responsibility.
You have to recognize that.. There are plenty of examples of clinicians here that have taken responsibility for trying to change things.
That’s the first step taking responsibility, being willing to step forward and testify to the fact of what the current system is and what it does to people, and supporting people that have survived the process.
I am not going to let you frame the issues, from your point of view.Thats just your opinion, its not a fact. Yours is not the only voice..
I think that here what is happening is that people have gotten off these meds, often on their own, and their lives have improved, immeasurably…
Initially people were likely to feel that something was wrong with themselves for questioning their psychiatrists, and may have tried to comply more. They were isolated, and without support. This place is a good place to find support for each other, by listening, to what people have to say. And benefiting from others experiences. Coming together, like this is much more positive for most of those people, just as having support is necessary to heal .
MIA has never existed before….And its a good place to begin…
I think that debates like the one on this thread seem to go no where for a number of reasons, first of all there is a lack of clinical exposure to the current health delivery system, and over concern on the personalities of people who deliver the message.
Psychiatry, as it is now, is just an extension of corporate medicine. Many decades ago this was not the case, but it is most definitely the case now. Psychiatry is about making a profit for medical corporations, its not about helping people get better.
For example Gastric Bi-Passes, make lots of money for hospitals, usually about $40,000 per surgery. Do gastric surgeries really people people with weight problems, in my experience its a mixed bag. I would say no. But there is a sales department and a marketing department that sells people on the idea.
This is also true of hospital based treatment programs for mental health, they do very little, are expensive, and are designed to maximize profit.
Its the same for outpatient treatment.
Consider this. Seeing a therapist 1 time weekly for a year, is based on the therapists fee. In larger Metropolitan areas its about $100 an hour.. 100 x 52 is $5,200 a year. If the therapist is on an insurance panel, then insurers see this as a significant cost compared to medication management., of 1 or 2 sessions a year at about $250 per fifteen minute session. .
This is one of the reasons why psychiatry favors drugs, over talk therapy, because its more profitable for medical corporations.
People get hung up on the idea that psychiatry is there to help people, those days are long gone. Its really only about making money.
Psychiatric medications do not help people, yes there may be a few people that think they are helped. But we don’t prescribe medications on whats good for a few people.
I have met pilots who can fly a fighter jet on LSD, perfectly well. Does this mean we should legalize LSD?
Psychiatric meds, are about making money, whether or not they hurt or help anyone, is not the primary consideration of their use. Its about profit that’s all.
So debating, the effectiveness of various treatment, and whether or not they work, is an issue, ignores, the sickness, that corporate medicine has become…
We simply have no way to tell, because the caring system of people trying to help others, and having an interest in what makes people better no longer exists.
Compared to the cost of a hospital detox that can run up to $1000 dollars a day for withdrawal, $75 is a bargain. I am glad you were able to get it… Hospitals don’t like it because , you can come and go, while having it done, so theres no $1000 a day admit..
Supplements are better, but sometimes B Vitamins can do that, if you can tolerate organic brown rice, its rich in B vitamins, and seems absorbed easily, giving you stamina without the stimulating effect of B Vitamins in pill form.
I read what you said… and in a way, I think that your experience on Benzo’s was very similar to what most people here have experienced, that’s why we are here..
There are many terrifying stories of people who have gone through hell on these drugs…
That being said, I don’t really think that anyone really understands what these drugs do, not even the drug companies that make them. After all they are prone to lying about, and falsifying the data on drugs. The FDA, doesn’t really do much about it, except add a black box warning…
Currently right now in this country there is an epidemic of Xanax addiction. Xanax is a very dangerous drug, because it lowers the seizure threshold of people using it, so seizures are a common occurrence… especially in withdrawal…
Still, trying to find information on this is next to impossible….
As to you belief that there should be a better way to go through withdrawal, there is.. Its called acupuncture… I ran a drug clinic on the West Coast at one time that had an acupuncture detox, that worked well for hard core Heroin addicts…
You won’t find this treatment, much here in the USA because its too cheap, and the medical profession can’t make money with it….
Unfortunately, for most of us, both psychiatry and Medicine have become just another form of business enterprise. The education, as well as practice of both is controlled to a high degree by medical corporations and insurance companies, whose desire is to maximize profit and reduce overhead..
So your comment about medicine not going away, is already too late… There is a striking difference between corporate medicine and medicine controlled by those that wish to help people, who receive their training in an orientation settings different that the ones we find ourselves in now.
Both Medicine and Psychiatry have become a cattle drive, with the goal to keep them, the patients, moving, and prescribe certain drugs for certain conditions at certain stages of life, whether or not those treatments are of benefit makes very little difference as long as they are profitable.
Psychiatry has become the same, Psychiatrists typically receive very little training in conducting psycho therapy, but instead rely on drugs, and those 15 minute med management sessions, which are highly profitable. Psych residency requirements provide little knowledge and expertise actually conducting therapy.
In time psychiatry will die out, simply because its underlying assumptions about what causes psychological issues have absolutely nothing to offer… And there are real cures, that lie outside the accepted belief system, that in time will grow to supplant psychiatry…
Unfortunately medicine does not have such a happy fate, but will continue to exploit medical illnesses, until once and for all it rids itself of the poison of corporatism.
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I really love your honesty Dr. Gotzsche. That you care about people is also quite evident. Care enough to speak out…. and to identify, what happens as what it is murder…
Unfortunately, as long as prescribers, seem to be immune from criminal penalties for killing people, who are under their care, because they ignore the facts and prescribe dangerous drugs anyway, nothing will happen. The death toll will continue to rise…
The whole apparatus of so called psychiatric medicine in the United States is based on prescribing, and getting paid by insurance. The insurance companies don’t want to pay for therapy. because it costs more and cuts into their profits….
Its a murderous system, those who care should not support it.
What can I say, a systematic attempt to talk about the internal problems that psychiatrists face in their profession. Unfortunately that’s all it is…
in my own experience, psychiatrists treat mental illness, because they define it as an illness. The public is also indoctrinated, into believing in the medical profession, and believe further that to get helped they must turn to a doctor.
I remember what that was like. To be so needy, and gullible, and convinced, that there were “big people” namely psychiatrists who understood how to help, and that they knew just what was causing my distress.
Now I count myself lucky that I escaped, from them while I was still sane. Skip a ahead many decades, to multiple clinical degrees, and many tens of thousands of cases, handled by me in various professional organizations, both state and private run, and I can tell you that psychiatrists, and psychiatric medicine, is brutal, murderous and debilitating.
So when I see calm discussion like this, in which psychiatrists themselves, openly admit, that they really don’t know what they doing….I respond
Tell that to the people who have been turned into vegetables, by ECT? Some people get it once a week for years? Tell that to the shooters, in manic episodes that calmly walk through a college campus, and murder people at random..Tell that to their families too.. . Tell that to the drug addict, shooting oxycontin, or now suboxone, because a psychiatrist, who thinks he’s an expert on drug addiction and knows absolutely nothing about it prescribed them the medications.
Psychiatry, is a license to kill…. And there is very little that can be cone about it right now…
But, the psychiatrists that I have worked with, and I have worked with hundreds of them, over the years, are just a bunch of educated idiots, who live in their heads… And that would be ok there are plenty of those around, if they weren’t killing people.
Actually I think this is all wrong…… Because getting well is not an idea, and there is no comparison between observing yourself getting well and having an idea of what its supposed to look like.
Lots of people begin to act as if they are well because its so much easier than actually getting well. This will prevent them from actually getting well and in fact makes more difficulty for them…
Another powerful thing is observing other people like you getting well, and observing them doing what they need to do to get there.
Its not an abstract idea, and its not one that I think can be measured with ideas, but rather emotionally. After all your the expert o0 yourself. Not the psychiatrist.
I remember those times all to well… When nothing I could do seemed to make any difference. My emotional pain, was there like a cloud over my head, sending an occasional lighting bolt to my heart, to remind my just how depressed and unhappy I was.
At times the most important thing I could do was listen to other people in group, and eventually learn to talk about my own injuries, courage I learned from them.
I came to know that I didn’t have to figure everything out, that my feelings, explained themselves adequately without lots of words. And that in time just by being them, they would resolve.
And more importantly that someone would be there while I was hurting. Self help, can be just as simple as accepting yourself, just as you are and not trying to improve upon it.
Without their medications, what do they have to offer? I am sure many will try to become therapists. But the whole process of becoming a therapist, is not really suited to a traditional education setting. Its more of an ongoing and life long process of self discovery, and empathy for others.
I will say I am sorry that you lost your mother…Its hard to have a childhood under those circumstances… that’s been my experience as well having committed my father, who eventually died at an early age, he could not get real help either.
My own experience is much different, than his.. I don’t believe psychiatry has much to offer at all. It doesn’t understand much of anything about how emotions work, because they are too busy repressing them. And if you have a feeling it calls for an immediate dose of some drug.
There is so much fear, when people have symptoms of any kind, especially those that are labeled psychosis…
I think that its very difficult to empathize or really understand what someone is going through unless you have gone through it yourself. And when your in it yourself there are few reliable guides to help you through to the other sides.
Most don’t even believe in it, and have never experienced… All they have is a perpetual struggle with symptoms. Perpetual medications, that prevent, and destroy any hope of cure.
And no belief in a cure….Which is why psychiatry has no future.
I always think that interviews in which I am asked questions like that, make me feel dehumanized…Like the interviewer doesn’t feel I am worthy enough to try and relate to me on a human level….Its just so much easier to fill out the forms, that way…for them…
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/antidepressants-linked-rise-superbugs-new-study-reveals
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What to say….every single drug that psychiatrists prescribe can be abused. Take for example Narcan… Addicts take it to lower their tolerance to opiates so the can get high. Stimulants get you high, there is no such thing as medicating someone for ADHD, your getting children high and making lots of money. Stimulants kill thousands every year, many stimulant users were prescribed AdHD, better known as Obediance pills as children. ADHD is caused by a lavk of EFA’s in diet, Cattle fattened on grain don’t make EFA’s…The used to be fed only by grazing on grass, this changed in the early 1900’s, cattled fattened on grains before slaughter made more money, this is when first cases began. Rehabs have a 1%success rate, people go to rehabs hundredsnof time and never get sober. But they make Rehab owners millions.
Kabat-Zinn just a businessman, thats all.
Go ahead laugh, and stay there for a moment, free of the chains of ideas.. And If you have really changed then you can drop it… Just drop it for awhile…And if you have really changed,it won’t matter …But if it does your ideas are just drugs…As buddha said, thought coverings…nothing is harder to take than a naked mind free of ideas….But that is real meditation.
Your comments are a good indication, of whats wrong with mindfulness. Its definitely not meditation. Meditation is about getting rid of the mind, not becoming more entrenched in ideas. Its mindlessness, mind is the obstacle. And as was mentioned before its a happening not a doing, not a business, not a training, not a study. A happening…You simply don’t understand, the bigger the degree, the less likely there will be meditation happening, because education strengthens the mind.. It doesn’t get rid of it.. Go ask, Buddha, Osho, Krishnamurti…
Unfortunately psychology, is subject to fads. Its been my own experience that mindfulness was created,, because it could be sold to the public where as meditation, could not. Mindfulness was created by those that wanted to use meditation by another name, to enrich themselves financially. Meditation itself, has a long history, with many religious underpinnings. There again, when one looks at what the experts say about meditation, their descriptions of meditation differ from what so called mindfulness instructs us. First of all. Osho, Krishnamurti, and many others have said that meditation, cannot be taught. That is is a “happening”, not a doing and that any lessons, teaching etc,, that purports to teach mediation is in fact its anti thesis. One can learn to experience it that is all. Its been my perception that mindfulness is a form of auto hypnosis, and that those under the influence of its practitioners, exhibit effects similar to being under hypnosis, i.e., they are highly suggestible. That being said, it may seem redundant, to say this but children, who need therapy, need therapy. Mindfulness cannot substitute for therapy, because that’s not what it does.
Just to be up front, I don’t particularly like your theoretical perspective, but that being said, I do agree with your view of the new DSM. The purpose of which is to provide a billing platform for insurance companies, and those that bill insurance. Couples counseling is rarely paid for by insurance, at any rate, its not considered to be therapy. It is considered to be counseling, though couples may get psychotherapy in addition to their couples counseling. There is no point in believing that the DSM people are going to change their views on this any time soon, because insurance companies are unlikely to consider relationship issues something that needs to be addressed by insurance. The DSM is oriented toward diagnosis that justifies a medication intervention. Counseling does not provide that justification.
Interestingly enough I would have to disagree, with the reasons why you believe psychiatry is a success. Probably because I view it as a catastrophic failure. That cannot come up with a cogent theory to explain the illnesses it creates, like depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, and drug addiction. Sill psychiatry, prescribes medications for those illness, none of which work, and some with make illness much worse. It also continues to use electroshock treatment, for those same illnesses, even though there is no reason to believe that it does anything but enrich the psychiatrists, who conduct it. If psychiatristy works its because people still believe in medicine, and this makes the psychiatrist an authority figure, whose advice has a gravitas that people want to believe in, because they believe in authority figures. The carnage of psychiatry is every where, in the lives of patients who desperately need help, but don’t get it, blame themselves for not getting well, and then become self destructive.The thousands of suicides each year, the thousands of overdose deaths on prescribed medications. But sill psychiatry, continues on as if its not responsible for any of this. All the while standing in the way of new treatments and approaches that appear promising, solely to protect its income.
“Drug Approval Reform: “Canadian and US regulatory agencies too often allow unsafe drugs to reach the market and inadequately monitor them after approval,” state the authors. In 2014, 69% of drugs that were submitted to the FDA received “expedited review” status, despite the majority of studies showing that shorter review periods lead to more problems. Thus, the Working Group proposes that regulatory agencies be fully funded by the government rather than industry. They also call for steep reductions in how many drugs are offered an expedited review. Additionally, no one with financial ties to industry should be able to vote on a drug’s approval. ”
These are not just problems, they are crimes. They are crimes that have killed thousands of people. 50,000 people died last year from Opiates, many thousands of which were related to prescription drugs like, Xanax, and Fentanyl, that should have never been approved. Drug companies, have known full well of the dangers of these medications, and they really don’t care, as long as they make billions. They are addicted to money, watch them go into withdrawals, when that money is taken away from them.
So sorry, that this happened to you, the mind is noting to F with. Most don’t know what their doing, and clearly, the MD who treated you didn’t, and I am not sure that many would. I didn’t hear anything about a follow up and the MD checking to see if you were ok either, so you were abandoned as well..
Happily I stumbled on this….. Its an argument I have had with “heady” co workers, for decades. Korzybski, or Whorf anyone? Ideas simply are not feelings. And to think of them this way, shifts therapeutic work away from feelings to reasoning. Yes you can change reasoning, but you can’t change feelings by changing ideas, because, once again, ideas are not feelings. A large percentage of therapists are academically trained, that means, books, books and more books. It also means, in most states they aren’t required to have much of their own therapy.. How can you be a therapist if you have never had your own therapy and have been exposed to many other forms of treatment, as a patient…?
The rest of the world is in some sort of drug induced fog, on cases like this. Medical Science has become a sort of a religion, and we all know of MD’s that have a God Complex… They rest of use don’t really belong on Olympus, so its O.K., to do what must be done with us. We lack the credentials for heaven.
Loved this article…. Psychiatric Enslavement, pretty much says it all. Those little tiny pills of Xanax, .5 mg, looks so harmless. What person can guess that they pack quite a punch, including inter dose dependency, seizures and easy OD’s, when mixed with Opiates or alcohol. Most people get them from their PCP, not a psychiatrist, who knows even less about psych meds than the psychiatrist. Because most of these meds are approved with fraudulent data submitted to the FDA.. In the cattle drive that managed care has become, theres no time to consider anything but writing that prescription. Maybe that’s why medical mistakes are the third leading cause of deaths in the USA, likely more since so much is covered up. Then of course the Insurers, are more concerned with increasing their profits so they slam dunk it all.
Thanks for writing this, considering that you are an MD, I wonder how many other parents, or even PCP’s missed something like this in one of their patients. This condition should be something that all PCP’s are aware of. .
Xanax, is one of the most dangerous drugs ever created. Twenty times stronger than Valium, it is the first medication known, to exhibit inter dose dependency. In other words, missing a single dose can send someone into withdrawals. Withdrawals, from Xanax, are also dangerous and protracted. Xanax, lowers the seizure threshold, and users often experience seizures during regular use and during Detox. Of particular concern is withdrawal from Xanax, which requires titrating down, with a Benzo that has a longer half life. Since Xanax is 20 times stronger than Valium, titrating down can take upwards of one full year, or longer. Some ex-users, never actually feel completely off the drug. Since Xanax, is easily available on the street, partly because prescribers are unaware of its danger and give it out like candy, Heroin users often use it along with their Heroin. This is why so many Opiate users overdose, the combination of Opiates and Xanax, is lethal. When its prescribed, the dose seems so small that, those who are prescribed the drug, think that its safe. It is definitely not. It should never be taken by anyone, let alone children.
It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” (Marcia Angell, MD, “Drug Companies and Doctors: A story of Corruption.” NY Review of Books, Jan. 15, 2009.)
You may have seen this statement before. The fact that it was made in 2009, so many years ago, is telling because of what’s happened since then. Upwards of 10’s of thousands dying from Opiate addiction every year most caused by prescribed meds. The professionals involved in this, act concerned and look around for solutions, unfortunately no one takes responsibility for whats happened. When in fact the people of this country know full well who is responsible. The medical profession, which includes the so called treatment facilities.
Those that become addicted to Opiates, have the difficult time of finding treatment. Usually the prescriber sends them to a facility, and realistically facilities have about a 1% success rate. They don’t even offer detox for stimulants, because they are taught that they don’t require medically monitored withdrawals. Yet the severe depression the accompanies withdrawal from stimulants, is likely to lead back to use. Its also true that facilities and treating medical directors, prescribe anti depressants, and other meds some time which further potentiate drug triggered psychiatric symptoms. With facility treatments costing as much as a $100,000 dollars a month for high end facilities, even though treatment doesn’t really have much to offer it is quite lucrative for those that own and operate treatment centers many of these are psychiatrists or medical corporations. The bottom line is that psychiatry exploits illness, purely for profit. There are many people who have been to rehab, literally 100’s of times, and who are not any better. A stimulant epidemic, likely will result once again, in lots of disinformation while people, are strung out to die.
Its hilarious to me how vehemently people defend mindfulness. When those defenses clearly indicate an ignorance of what meditation, is or is not. For it is clear that Mindfulness is not meditation in any sense of the world. Clearly religious leaders from Krishnamurti to Osho, have stated that meditation is not a doing, it is a happening. It happens, and any effort to practice meditation, or deliberately enter a meditative state is by definition not meditation. Meditation is a happening, not a doing. Mindfulness is really just autohypnosis, which makes the mind very suggestible, susceptible to false meditative states.
http://fibroawareness.info/clinical-research-finds-neurontin-lyrica-death-sentence-new-brain-synapses/
Neurotin andLyrica speed brain decline faster than any known substance…. Still heavily prescribed for withdrawal.
Everyone who reads this should be scared, because don’t think because your are a little younger you are safe from this kind of treatment.
Hospitals, and doctors in them, do what they like to you, whether its good medicine or not is beside the point. Your opinion, and your family’s opinion, or anyone else for that matter doesn’t mean very much to them.
They have a long list of, standard treatment options for you, depending on your age, and they make lots of money on you on each one of them, regardless of your need.
Remember always that medical mistakes are the third leading cause of death in this country, and you could be one of them quite easily, and if that’s the case, there will be no consequences to your killers.
I am happy for you….. Psychiatry, believes that when it puts you on drugs.. That what they are doing is different, than being a drug addict, and living in the streets homeless, hustling daily to feed your jones…
But that’s not true, what you describe, is what lots of addicts describe about what happens to them as addicts – Social isolation, depression, financial distress, loss of primary relationships… In your case, you had a psychiatrist as your drug dealer… someone who gave you addictive legal drugs.
Vyvance in my opinion is a very dangerous drug, and highly likely to cause dependency, its really just a form of Dexedrine, that is combined with a chemical that changes where and how fast its absorbed once you take it. Stimulant addicts, have learned how to get rid of this chemical, and release Dexedrine, from the chemical compound and use it to get high. Adderall, is loved and adored by Stimulant users everywhere, for its availability and the ease by which it can be obtained. Many psychiatrists consider it harmless.
Clearly, your psychiatrist did not know what she was doing, and if you had died from liver failure, nothing would have happened to her. Your death would have been considered as an unfortunate Side effect of your prescription medications. Something that happens everyday…. As witnessed by the fact that prescription drugs kill more people now in the U.S.A., each year than street drugs.
People in this country are woefully un educated about the drugs they are prescribed, and those that profit from those prescriptions like it that way. Unfortunately, you had to learn the hard way, that psychiatry, can be very hazardous to your health.
Unfortunately, that means you have very little experience of street drug users, some of whom are very high functioning criminals, who learn how to make meth with no back ground in chemistry, elude law enforcement for decades, and steal hundreds pf thousands of dollars per year to support their use. Some of whom are medical professionals, doctors and nurses. Of course you won’t admit it, because you don’t really know what your talking about. I’ve worked with medical professionals who have been sent to diversion to keep from losing their license, people like you are one of their biggest assets.
Unfortunately, that means you have very little experience of street drug users, some of whom are very high functioning criminals, who learn how to make meth with no back ground in chemistry, elude law enforcement for decades, and steal hundreds pf thousands of dollars
Actually thats a false assumption, because those that are prescribed ADHD medications are in fact substance users there is no difference.
I ran diversion groups for almost 10 years in LA County DAPO certified, lots of people on diversion get scripts to avoid testing dirty…So those who gather stats are actively interviewing biker gangs, who deal meth?
Its my own experience that most people are not prepared to deal with psychiatric treatment, especially when the go to the ER for help as you did in an emergency. That you were mistreated is clear, and my guess is that you take too much responsibility for everything that happened.
Psychiatrist are trained to give medication, that’s what they do. In fact most of the time their treatment interventions are solely designed to send you to medications, because of what they believe to be the cause of your distress. When you don’t respond to your interventions, that escalates them.
That is why you ended up on ECT. Also ECT is quite lucrative to those that conduct it. In my experience, it has no value at all in treatment, but only makes things worse. But, when it gets worse they increase the frequency, some people get ECT once weekly for years.
Your statements about what you needed were crystal clear, unfortunately, people rarely have their emotions validated, because once again, that’s not psychiatry’s view of things.
Its too bad you didn’t have someone to listen, you should have had that.
Something that is not considered here but which is an important consideration, is the potential for turning young children into drug addicts by prescribing them ADHD medications.
Its quite a contraction, to tell children that using street drugs to get high is bad, but then we turn around and hypocritically given them the same drugs to cure them of a disease. When its really a diseased ideology used to make money on them that causes their suffering.
Speed users love Adderall, and consume it just as readily as they consume Meth. Its often sold by those that get the prescription for it, to others.
Then of course they forget about past mistakes and liver failure in young children on now banned types of medications, and the fact that after amphetamines were banned as an over the counter drug, pharmaceutical companies continued to manufacture large quantities of it. They shipped it to Mexico where it could be bought legally, and smuggled back into the United States….
Thanks for writing this, Benzodiazepines are very dangerous drugs indeed, and they have killed lots of people. Not just celebrities. Many, many more will die because of these drugs, and the reckless FDA that approved them.
http://www.naturalnews.com/049921_psychiatric_medications_homicide_risk_drug_violence.html
Sorry but i have very little respect for psychiatry, at this point its my opinion that psychiatry has very little to offer anyone, in terms of an understanding of what people need to heal.
Here’s why; “Stronger indicators of risk include a history of violent behavior, domestic violence, and drug or alcohol abuse.”
There is not difference between psychiatric medication and drug and alcohol abuse. In fact it is well documented that a high percentage of shooters in mass shootings have been on psychiatric medications. These drugs can trigger manic episodes, and damage a persons ability to function cognitively, thereby losing the ability to reason, and react with reason.
I would also venture to say that many of those shooters also used street drugs along with their medications, and that the psychiatrist was either aware of it or turned there back to it because they have little understanding of how to treat drug uses. They should not be given psychiatric medications, because it will further damage them cognitively..
At this point, the public and media will continue to turn to them for expert advise on these matters, which continues to be a huge mistake.
Sometimes its difficult to know just how bad things are, if you don’t have something to compare it to.
Just as a bright light, can blind, it also can inform you of just how deep is the darkness in which you dwell.
Clearly, we have been living in dark times, in which deeds are hidden away. Lies and perjury, are now called misinformation. While deceit doesn’t seem to exist for some unless someone knows about it.
Civilization used to have ideals, now the only concern, for some appears to be, don’t get caught.
Its good to know there a some people doing good work, for all of us.
Any belief system requires believers, whether that belief system is based on verifiable observation or pure fantasy.
But without belief, its difficult for a belief system to attract adherents. Belief, or in the case of psychiatry the suspension of disbelief is the problem.
Its one thing to entice people with rational sounding discussions, framed in scientific jargon, especially when people are trained to worship science, and few have formal training or experience in scientific process.
Since most people don’t understand what’s being said to them about their medication, or their diagnosis, they must accept it on faith alone. But when the medications, and the belief system no longer works, it becomes more difficult to accept it.
Psychiatry typically reacts either to blame the patient or change the medications, and when medication changes don’t work they go back to blaming the patient.
At this point, the belief system is failing, it can no longer convince a significant number of professionals that it has anything at all to offer, some, also a significant number have noted that it is dangerous, and life threatening.
Quite simply, the world is full of people who are strung out on psychiatric medications, and are not helped at all by them, naturally they want get better, because they are tired of suffering.
Psychiatry has been identified as the perpetrator.
Once it has completely lost the publics trust, it will be gone. Sure there may be a few, dangerous psychiatrists who will hold onto the notions of the past, because their incomes depend on them.
People will simply stop believing in it. I myself have worked in the field full time since the 80’s, not as a psychiatrist, but as another professional. I have seen or evaluated, 10’s of thousands of patients, and I have never seen anyone helped by any thing psychiatry has to offer. They are so far away from what’s real that is shocking.
Thanks for a wonderful article.
It should be clear, that many of those children in this so called clinical trial died. The hapless victims of a fraud, whose only purpose was to deceive the public and regulatory agencies, into selling a drug, that would result in more deaths.
It may be easier to deceive when deception is cloaked in scientific jargon. And then there is always the priest like status of medicine, that seems grant a religious like suspension of the critical faculties of reason, in a large segment of the public.
Then there is big money, albeit blood money, that offers a certain amount of protection to organized criminals through legal strategies, until the evidence of their crimes become overwhelming.
It is a process, that attempts to sanitize mass murder.
Love this ” the line should have read, “Our global reach allow us to effectively prey upon an increasing number of people, causing long-term disability and contributing to early death for many. This collateral damage is unfortunate, but it’s only business. We are like the tobacco companies of the 1960s and the scorpion that killed the frog as it crossed the river. We do what it’s in our nature to do. We are amoral sociopathic opportunists – we profit at whatever cost necessary.”
Yes your right, the system is fraudulent and criminal, and the only thing that matters is how much money it makes.
I remember when Los Angeles county closed its community mental health centers like Santa Monica West. There was a belief that all that was needed was to place those suffering from Mental Illness on Meds, that they didn’t need anything else.
Unfortunately, that is still the belief held by many.
The police, are not equipped to deal with the enormity of this issue, nor are the jails. We expect them to deal with issues, that really can’t be address with current approaches by anyone. Often there are co occurring drug issues, and paranoia on the part of prisoners who don’t want the judicial system knowing about how they live or what the do.
Violence and brutality, may or may not be a mental health issues, but it is one of survival. Personality disorders, and sociopathy, help one survive in the streets, as does keeping your mouth shut. Often inmates, have a better understanding of what makes a person tick, and an intuitive sense of self, that is difficult to address from a psychological point of view.
If you don’t listen and try to impose some arbitrary judgment of who or what someone is you will find out the hard way, just how wrong you can be.
Disrespect or respect, its your choice.
Its disheartening to think that after all of this, Paxil is still being prescribed.
Indeed the medical/ psychiatric model of treatment in the United States, has at its foundations the prescribing of so called medicine like this. Its not really about helping people at all. Its primarily a business model, with slick marketing that brings in unbelievable profits, despite the fact that it has little to offer in real treatment to anyone.
To effectively challenge the therapeutic benefit of these medications, would be to shatter a trillion dollar industry. One with all the resources that a trillion dollar industry can muster, including disinformation campaigns against reform, the outright buying of political influence, and the sanitizing of high profile murder cases involving psychiatric drugs to prevent public awareness of how they trigger manic related homicidal rampages.
It is an industry that has destroyed millions of lives, with false promises, based on fraudulent treatments, by denying care, to suffering people, turning them into drug addicts instead.
The bottom line is they just don’t really care how many people they kill, or drive crazy as long as they are making a buck, and the general public doesn’t become aware of the truth.
Yes Fight on, more people are becoming aware.
Its a wonder your still alive Barry…. Benzodiazepines are very dangerous drugs and highly lethal.
Derived from Barbiturates, to make them safer, and counter act the the potential for death by respiratory failure caused by barbiturates two pronged tolerance. One to the respiratory effects of the drug, and the other to the sedative euphoric effects of the drug. So that at some point the dose that is required to get high is the does that kills you by respiratory failure.
Initially touted as safe and free of over dose risks, and less likely to cause addiction, they have proved more addictive than Heroin, with a much greater risk for over dose. Primarily responsible for the fact that prescription medications kill more people than street drugs.
Those that use these drugs, especially Xanax, are at risk for seizures, and with Xanax, inter dose dependency means a danger of going into withdrawal if you miss just one dose. Not many drugs can say that.
I remember years ago, when people abused T’s, and Blues, (Doridan and Codeine) they were at risk for seizures, any time long days after completing withdrawal. The same is true of these meds.
Part of the risk factor with these drugs, is there ability to blur your awareness of how intoxicated you are. Like many tranquilizers they, aren’t psychoactive in the way, intoxicating agents are like alcohol, or Cannabis. So you don’t get that kind of awareness that your very high. That’s another problem with them.
You don’t know just how debilitated you are, how out of it. And of course the disinhibiting effects of the drug come into full play, maybe that’s why so many people OD on them by taking other drugs alongside them.
Ask just about any psychiatrist, and they will tell you they are safe…. They prescribe them like candy…
and that’s a problem.
Psychiatric medicine, especially in the United States, is little more than a cattle drive…
Why bother to ask the cattle, what they think or feel? Because, they are obviously disturbed, or they wouldn’t be coming in for treatment. Their feelings are inconvenient, just another symptom of their pathology.
There is no more, collaboration between, those that suffer and those that provide care. Maybe its the times, authoritarian systems seemed to be favored by the political elite, at this point.
Treatment has become another way, to confine and control… The unhappy people.
With 120 drug over doses a day, most of which are prescription medications, questioning who is doing what to who, and why, needs a lot more asking.
When you struggle agains, psychiatric prejudice, and an ingrained belief system, that is both profitable, and deadly. It can feel a little like the lone voice crying in the wilderness.
Anorexia, is one of the most deadly illnesses that affect children, it is often a condition that goes on for decades, with residential treatments, and their regimentation becoming a part of every families lives.
While you desperately search for answers, and wonder why this happens to your child, and your family.
What you find in the end, often is that the end, is just as puzzling as the beginning, though not as examined.
Drugs, are what psychiatry has to offer, and behavior mod, and really nothing else. The Yoga and mindfulness, are adjuncts that really mean they don’t know what to do therapeutically, because it wasn’t in the text books they read to get their degree.
Yes, Yoga, can help but its a self discipline, something everyone needs, but it isn’t a therapy.
Good luck to you and your family, and thanks fore writing this.
Its difficult to screen for child abuse electronically, or if your not a based in the continental USA. How do you report it from the Philippines?
I liked your article…. DSM V is a disaster…
But it was not created by accident to be that way. The insurance companies have realized that they can save money by not employing clinicians to process claims, and take clinical when a therapist calls for an authorization. Because once clinical information is received that results in the likelihood of an authorization. Its my perception that the insurance industries received a healthy consideration on the formulation of the DSM V.
Eliminating the five axis diagnosis process saves them time, and allows them to shift work to third world countries like the Philippines, where it can be processed more cheaply. It also allows them to process things electronically, another savings for them.
Actually, I believe that is is problem with social workers who work with clients. No where in this material did I see anything positive about this person, in terms of his strengths.
My own experience with social workers is that they should not do therapy or counseling with anyone Because they lack an understanding of suffering, because they they themselves have never usually been the recipient of treatment.
The principal reason the DSM was reformed was to make it easier for the insurance companies to process billings, and to dispense with clinical information that is considered unnecessary by them, since people only need to be put on drugs.
I dislike educational settings, because there is a fundamental shift from feelings to head orientation, and this inevitably leads to devaluing the patients experiences, and a focusing instead on head oriented valuations, at the expense of people.
They don’t write books about what makes people healthy and well, so people always come up short in this kind of situation.
I think that is’ a mistake to think street drug users are always dysfunctional. A good percentage, no one knows how many, function adequately in society, are employed, are in relationships, and are not involved in the legal system.
Its not uncommon that people use Heroin for 30 to 40 years, and every once and a while go into a program, to clean up when their tolerance gets too high, then chip slowly at the drug for a while, until their tolerance gets high again, then go into a program again to clean up. This cycle repeats itself throughout their life time.
What treators, only see are the dysfunctional ones, people who cannot maintain, and who have problems that force them into treatment. Either through the legal system, or by family pressure etc.
Opiate, users will use just about any opiate, from Heroin to Methadone, to Suboxone, etc. Society would prefer them to use legal drugs, and some do by manipulating prescribers, who don’t understand addiction, or how to work with addictive personalities.
Treatment is an alternative, that society favors because it believes mistakenly that it works, when in fact it’s success rates are very low, compared to 12 step meeting, and quitting on your own. Quitting on your own actually has the highest success rate followed by 12 step meetings.
Its not uncommon to see addicts, go through 15 to 20 rehabs with no sobriety, simply because treatment doesn’t have much to offer. There again, because treatment is a business of taking insurance, and providing the lowest possible pay to those that provide direct services, usually ex addicts, or people on maintenance, who have little sobriety of their own.
This country has an insatiable desire for drugs, from morning coffee, cough medicine, antihistamines, alcohol, hundreds of different types of drugs, of all sorts, etc. We tend to favor those drugs that are associated with productivity. And disfavor those associated with indolence. Those that help us cope with the stress, of a society, that is crumbling economically.
People probably become addicted to opiates because its used so much in labor and delivery, and exposing neonates to opiates when they are so vulnerable, changes the way the receptor sites are formed in the brain, creating more opiate receptor sites due to early imprinting.
And also because Afghanistan, no longer controlled by the Taliban, has record Opiate production, with increased air traffic to and from that country, easing smuggling into this country.
Its also true that certain types of drug preference reflect economic conditions, with stimulants used during boom times, like the 80’s Cocaine, and now depressants, during the current economic depression.
I suppose I can say, that I never bought into the idea, that psychiatry, presented, that Mental Health issues, were caused, by some sort of biophysical process in the brain.
My experience goes back a very long time, and I have distrusted both the academic, approach to teaching psychotherapy, and the psychoanalytic method. Both seemed too head oriented to me.
My graduate program centered on learning how to conduct psychotherapy.
During my graduate school, I needed to work, to support myself, and the only paying internships that I found were drug treatment ones.
There I treated, thousands of addicts, ran diversion groups, individual treatment for drug uses, on all kinds of drugs. It was my perception, that many involved in the field, seemed to think that treating addicts was not real therapy, and most didn’t even have a basic understanding of drug addiction. Many treated patients who were using lots of street drugs, but never even assessed their patients for drug addiction.
So, when the biophysical model began putting people on psychiatric medication, I noticed right away that the same problems they were experiencing in treatment, were shared with drug users.
There were others, who shared this same perception, but they were drowned out, by the rush to put everyone on these drugs.
First of all, drugs are drugs, whether you call them psych meds, or drugs of abuse, they are the same fundamentally. They make insight difficult, connection impossible. and there is no pressure from symptoms driving a person to make changes.
Because psych meds, don’t appear to be intoxicants, there is a belief that somehow, they work differently than street drugs. However this is not the case.
For example, Tobacco, doesn’t seem to make a person intoxicated, and because of that, people are unaware of their lack of insight and self awareness, and inability to connect their feelings and their behaviors, in a feeling way. This profound lack of self awareness, is exactly what most psych medications do. And because they don’t appear to be intoxicants, then of course they seem to be ok to treat people.
Thats why psych meds, are accepted, because they don’t appear to intoxicate. But once you understand that they share the same ability to blur insight and self awareness, with street drugs. you can understand how similar their action is to street drugs.
Many psych meds, are also powerful intoxicants, and work by creating an intoxication, in which the patient doesn’t not have insight into the fact that they are high. Drugs like Xanax, seem ok to use because its prescribed by a psychiatrist, but they are more dangerous than Heroin. Because the user doesn’t have the insight to know how high they are.
There are more prescription overdoses now, than street drugs, for this very reason.
I was very happy to see this statement,
” The point here is that reformism will not serve us. As I have argued elsewhere (see Burstow, 2014b), and as the history of psychiatry clearly shows, reform agendas have always culminated with a return of biological psychiatry with a vengeance, and far from ridding us the problems posed by the institution, have guaranteed the continuation of those problems. ”
Psychiatry is and has become a form of institutionalized Madness, one that disguises itself behind reasons, that are presented in terms of an arcane, priest like liturgy. To the public their words, are as indecipherable as a witches incantation to a Demon.
I suspect that is a cognitive way of controlling their own symptoms, by controlling others. The question becomes can you control madness through reform? Not in this case, when so many people are denied the compassion, and attention that they needed as human beings, that would have nurtured them in the time of their suffering. Compassion that would have offered hope, instead of condemnation.
Instead they were treated as experimental animals. Given, Malaria, Insulin Coma therapy, ECT, and now psychotropic meds, with the fervency of a religious dictum, that shut out anyone who questioned the Sanity of this.
No, reform is not possible.
“David, are we just suppose to accept your word that you work in a program where everyone merrily tapers off synthetic opiates in two years and lives a wonderful life of total abstinence.”
You don’t cure people by switching out drugs, one drug for another drug. They are still on drugs..
Heroin, was supposed to be a cure for Morphine addition, Methadone for Heroin addiction, then came the nightmare of Fentanyl, and Suboxone, Subtext, DXM, and large opium farms in New Zealand that grow red poppies, with Opiates that activate different receptor sites… All these drugs have and are being abused. All of them are relatively easy to get, including Heroin.
“This name just sugar coats the fact that they are “opiate replacement” programs and further promotes the disease concept of addiction that falls within Biological Psychiatry’s paradigm of theory and practice”
Well put..
Someone on drugs, is still on drugs no matter what you call them, Methadone, Suboxone, Subutex, DXM, all drugs are drugs. No matter whether the get them from a psychiatrist, a nurse or a drug dealer.
When you legally string someone on drugs, that’s what you do. Over time the body doesn’t like drugs, and builds up tolerance. And when tolerance gets high, then, most addicts will get treatment, knowing that next time around they can get high again. This results in lots of OD’s, when people leave treatment early.
But addicts typically come into treatment, when their use is about, just using to keep from being sick, and not getting high again. Long term addicts those with 30 year histories of Opiate use, typically use programs, to clean up a while, lower tolerance,, and then in a couple of years, start chipping again.
Usually psychiatrists know very little about street drugs, about Opiate Street life, and how addicts live, and what they do. How easy it is to get prescriptions that can be sold, like Xanax, Klonopin, Ativan.. and many others.
Usually in Methadone maintenance, people will still use other drugs, making it easier to get loaded, rather than just keep from getting sick. These programs, are notoriously easy to manipulate. There are supposed to check for track marks etc… Do UA’s, etc, but still dirty tests happen all the time. And depending on the situation, programs tend to carry people with multiple dirty tests. Even in probation, they do the same because it means another jail bed, and more paper work. And Drugs are relatively easy to get in prison.
Its been my experience that with these programs, as time goes on there is less scrutiny of users, activities. Addicts build up trust, and learn how to gain confidence, and once they have it, well it gives them more license.
I’ve seen lots of programs come and go over the years, but I have yet to see a real understanding of what makes people addicts, Usually what is see is lots of administrators, and program operators making money.. And there are billions of dollars to be made off addicts. And lots supposed ex addicts running these programs.
Loved your article.
“In terms of listed side effects, naloxone causes anxiety, a decrease in pain tolerance, joint and muscle pain, and induces immediate withdrawal signs if taken by someone who is dependent on opiates. There’s a history of poor compliance among addicts with naloxone. SAMSHA knows this. Why would they introduce a drug option that could undermine all their efforts to set up a self-sustaining high compliance program?”
This is one of the main reasons drug substitution hardly ever works, someone on Methadone, or Suboxone is still addicted.
The small amount of Naltrexone is easily overwhelmed but increasing dosage levels of Opiates. There are lots of OD’s on Suboxone.
Treaters don’t get it, they don’t seem to understand that addicts are already suffering because they are short of natural endorphin production internally. Using any opiate keeps this suppressed. One of the problems of having treatment run by psychiatrist, they think that treatment consists of giving out more drugs. Drugs that have different names are still drugs.
Acupuncture is a much better solution. For detox, because then addicts aren’t given more drugs, in the withdrawal process.
My own experience is running one of the largest drug treatment families on the west coast for 8 years, and running drug diversion groups for Los Angeles County that treated thousands of drug users. I have literally worked with thousands of drug addicts. .
My experience working with Psychedelic drug users is they are people who typically are shut down emotionally, and are head oriented. They like psychedelic drugs because they can finally feel something intensely, unfortunately, continued and prolonged use of psychedelics, damages the brains ability to repress. That can lead to continual intrusion.
Once they begin dealing with intrusion on a continual basis, usually will gravitate toward drugs that help them repress. This is why you don’t see 12 step groups, that are oriented to psychedelic drug use solely, like say alcoholics anonymous. Because they cause psychosis, to emerge long term. I have treated any number of people who “lost it on these drugs.
Don’t confuse the lifting of repression with a cure, its not. Because people need defenses in order to process emotional pain. Without them they are always overloaded and in psychic distress.
One thing I know, for sure is that drugs are always a false hope. And when you are hopeless, anything that seems hopeful, is like a miracle.
Unfortunately, people who feel that way, will do just about anything to get some relief. And those that sell drugs are aware of this. Whether the are drug dealers or pharmaceutical companies.
Unfortunately, we cannot rely on anecdotal evidence for any treatment, because that isn’t realistic. Seems like there is always someone available to take advantage of this situation.
There are ample examples of hundreds of drugs that have been tried to treat depression, in the end they are either unpredictable, ineffective, cause serious damage to the brain, or appear to work because they blur cognitive awareness and insight of those prescribed.
Ketamine, and PCP, are dissociative anesthetics, and they have been studied for a long time. They were in fact not approved because of the serious side effect of triggering psychosis, through disassociation in roughly 40% of those given the drug. Many treatments cause disassociation, and in these drugs, with seriously depressed individual, encouraging dissociation, is a disaster.
I have had a long history of working with street drug users, and these drugs are dangerous and frightening. I have had real hands on experience working with lots and lots of users of these drugs.
Even in the drug using sub culture, users of these drugs are considered dangerous. Its not just a scare story, this is what I have observed first hand, on the streets where these drugs are used habitually.
John Lily loved Ketamine, and drug users love it too. Especially when they can’t get PCP, its little brother.
PCP, was almost approved as an anesthetic for Labor and delivery, but a significant number of mothers who got the drug developed psychosis. Those that take it, Latino Gangs, just love to get “out there”, in the “Void”, that it creates for them.
But one thing, they know, you can’t use this drug by yourself, cause if you do, you won’t have anyone to keep your from going off the deep end permanently.
” even in the United States, there is a real problem. When we participate in clinical trials today, companies get to sequester the data from these trials in flagrant breach of the ethics and norms of science and yet parade their representations of those results as science. The participation of some of us in those trials puts all of us in a state of legal jeopardy. In the US, we may get our day in Court, but we will have the data from clinical trials in which our friends and families participated used against us.”
In the United States medical care is controlled by insurance companies. Insurance companies are run by businessmen who are profit driven. Although they do not directly control the services they provide to those who are members of their insurance plan they do appoint medical directors who are physicians who do just that.
Psychiatrists control the services that their insurance company provides to those who suffer from so called behavioral illness. Because of their view that psychiatric issues are really medical ones, their response to member psychiatric issues, is through medication.
This is highly profitable to the insurance companies. If one considers the cost of medication management 2 sessions a year at $250 on average per session, compared with 1 time weekly sessions at $40 to $75 per session, with an upper cost range of about $4000 per year.
This has led to an emphasis, on medication management as a form of treatment, with a huge vested interest in continuing along this line. The pharmaceutical companies, benefit enormously from this state of affairs, and when people seek treatment, they are directed toward medication management instead of psychotherapy.
Once someone is placed on medication management case review is only cursory. Most insurance companies allow someone to be on medication management forever, without any review at all.
In fact because of the insurance industries stance that medication management is the way to treat biological/mental health problems, the amount of clinical information submitted on any case, is minimal, and getting smaller and smaller. In instances in which medications have failed to provide the desired response, ECT is the favored alternative. It is usually authorized with minimal clinical information, and is routinely authorized by MA level staff, sometimes no review is required at all.
Psychiatrists control every aspect of treatment in the U.S.. This in spite of the fact that they have very little training in psychology, or psychotherapy, they are making life and death decisions with the lives of millions of their members, to the detriment of those members.
As witnessed by the staggering number of drug over doses on prescription medications, in the United States each year, now out numbering those of street drugs. Clearly medication management has only created a new class of drug dependent individual. Who doesn’t understand how he or she got there.
To be cursed by the Devil is to truly be blessed.
Although I look forward to reading your book my gut reaction is that you have mis perceived what to expect from the main stream media, as you called it.
In the last several decades the main stream media has become the corporate media, and it is owned and operated by only a small hand full of people. Their purpose is solely one of profit, and they do not want anything in the public’s eye that would cause them to lose even a cent.
Psychiatric treatment is big business, and the drugs that are sold to the people under the mantle of medicine, make billions upon billions of dollars each year. They know full well that these drugs, are at worst dangerous, and at best worthless. and they don’t really care. Because they are extremely profitable, cheap to make and they are sold for top dollar.
At one time, the truth had some force to it. And many of us believed that by just airing the truth we could changes things. Unfortunately corporate media will not allow the truth to be widely known especially when it comes to what psychiatry has become, that would cost them a lot of money.
As crazy as it seems, they will seek to expand their ability to dispense dangerous drugs to the public, and relax drug laws, as a means of social control, and to keep the money pipeline growing…
Years ago something like this article below would never happen, I expect that in the near future the public will have access to many more drugs that were once considered dangerous.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/18/dea-mdma-study_n_6888972.html
While I have not given up hope, those that want to provide the public with the truth will be marginalized if not out right censored. Its going to be a long up hill battle.
My own belief is that only legal challenges in the form of lawsuits, coordinated against the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance companies, treatment facilities, psychiatrists, and others who profit from this industry, will bring the publics attention to this urgent matter.
I have to disagree, with this and the idea that alcohol and drug treatment is better conceptualized than Mental Health treatment.
For many, many reasons.
First of all Drug and Alcohol treatment is largely a failure. Most treatment facilities have a success rate of about 1%, which means that after a year of treatment 1 out of a hundred is sober. Treatment facilities actually offer very little to patients, except to limit access to drugs. To make success rates higher they import 12 step panels, and encourage patients to become involved in 12 step groups, this to boost their success rate. A.A. for instance claims a 20% success rate, but it very hard to verify, because participation, is anonymous.
Hospital staff is largely paraprofessional, people in recovery themselves, with very little formal education or training. With rates at some facilities topping $1000 a day, keeping staff costs low is quite profitable for Hospitals.
Its also true that drug involved patients are often given other drugs in facilities, as a way of dealing with their drug involvement. This only compounds the problem, and is not really treatment at all its just a faster way of getting patients discharged.
The terms, that you used, to conceptualize addicts states of minds, like Denial etc., are borrowed from 12 step groups, and don’t really represent a valid conceptualization of addictive thinking. Most addicts are in fact not in denial at all , but are desperately aware of their situation, desperately wanting to get help and not finding it anywhere. It s not usual, for addicts to have 15, to 20 residential treatment episodes and still no clean time.
Remember that the founder of A.A., was only able to stop drinking by helping others to stop. His book came later on.
Most insurance companies rely on tools such as ASAM to determine treatment and authorize care, its like the DSM in many ways, but gives them justification to deny care, and skirt the expensive costs that treatment presents for them. It simply does not really address addiction or the need for treatment at all. Its central problem is that there are few capable professionals who can evaluate someone in treatment with it from staff at facilities, so the insurance companies do it for them.
Which is illegal, because, its like diagnosing someone with information provided by someone else.
If anything treatment is dominated by money, and has very little to do with actually helping people get well. Studies show statistically that someone is more likely to get well, simply by quitting on their own.
Very nice, concise… thank you..
Really, they needed a research team for that? The DSM always has been an obstacle, its meant to be, and that’s just what the insurance companies like.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view. I think that articles and points of view, that are academically based, and presented in the format of Academia… Have very little to do with the Mental Health business….
Mental health treatment as it exists in the USA, is capitalism at its worst.
Its really about maximizing profit, not helping people. Its structures and functions are designed to minimize cost, while maximizing profit. Ultimately People are viewed as someone to profit from. Those that care, those that want something different are systemically dehumanized and devalued. By the so called medical profession of psychiatry.
And articles can be written from any point of view, but they will never understand that they are a moot point.
As long as the meat grinding system remains, to harvest pain and make the most profit possible form it.
I liked what you said AcidPop5
Recently it was discovered that meth, causes increased aging in the cells by speeding up the process of cell Aptosis.
Vyvance has also been known to cause severe joint pain, and GI upset. Drug users love the stuff, its really Dexedrine bound to a protein that’s absorbed differently.
. But there are already recipes on line teaching users how to free the Dexedrine from the other parts of the drug.
” In fact, I think I am in full agreement with Ted that psychiatry cannot be reformed any more than slavery. ”
I have to agree with this statement completely. Each day more revelations about the FDA”s, hiding of fraudulent drug data are revealed. This makes it clearer just how deep the issues regarding medication and psychiatric medications go.
People simply do not get better on psychiatric medications, they do not get cured. All they get is their symptoms controlled. Symptoms that bother others. Unfortunately the use of medications to treat symptoms, for a significant percentage of people, in the long run make them worse. Unfortunately many of individuals may become disabled. Its also true that those that stop taking their medications, improve and become symptom free without any treatment at all.
Primarily because there is absolutely no understanding of what causes the symptoms in the first place. Consequently any treatment with medications is just guess work.
While there are probably individuals who do not fit into this scenario, that does not mean that what is happening to them can be accounted for by psychiatric interventions. Once again because there is no understanding of causative factors, its also true that positive outcomes are not understood either. In fact it makes them more problematic because they may result in justifying increased treatment approaches based on a misunderstanding.
I thought that Robert Whitaker’s article on increased SSI assistance was great and to the point.
One thing I have read, is that Zyprexa was marketed in Japan differently than the USA. In japan the drug company sales reps were told to go ahead and acknowledge its issues with regard to type 2 Diabetes/metabolic syndrome, while they were told to hide them here in the USA.
This drug continues to be widely prescribed, and makes its manufacturer billions a year.
And the approval process is rife with fraud..
http://www.vocativ.com/culture/health-culture/fraud-behind-common-prescription-drugs/
” Insel has not yet given up on the biological model of mental illnesses or the idea that mental disorders are discrete entities. On the contrary, in launching the Research Domain Criteria Project, he hopes that genetics, brain imaging and neuroscience will unlock the biological causes of mental illness. ”
Of course, he has to. Because without that, he is not only out of a job, but he’s responsible for lots of damage to millions upon millions of people…
I am not going to try and make you feel better or be consoling. But instead I encourage you to remain angry. To keep getting angry.
Everything you said is true, I know because I have worked on the inside of that system for a long time. I know that the insurance companies are blood thirsty and make billions mistreating people, walking away from them, because a psychiatrist believes that he understands depression or another mental illness because he read about it in a book somewhere.
Psych residency’s are short nowadays, and are about dispensing medications, and medication is not treatment. Those medications are powerful disinhibitors, and brain damaging.
In a court of law, psychiatry’s ability to predict what someone will or will not do, is not admissible. Yet those decisions are made on a routine basis by insurance company psychiatrists, with catastrophic consequences.
In my own life, after a long custody battle, my ex wife dropped my 12 year old daughter off in front of my apartment, on the street with all her worldly possessions, after threatening to kill her cat. I was unaware that she had put her on medications and had hidden it from me. The medication became a further basis for my lawsuit. I was considered irrational by the court for objecting to my daughters medications. Eventually I won my case, and got custody of my daughter.
It has taken a good 10 years for her to get beyond the depression that those medications and her mistreatment caused her.
It takes a long time to heal, and it requires patience, and understanding and a willingness, to feel the anger and express the hurts as you feel them. Its very hard to find validation from professionals who believe that what you feel is what makes you sick.
Sometimes, anger makes you fight harder, for what you believe in.
Thank you for writing… Its been my experience working with those that use Xanax, that this drug is one of the most dangerous ever approved. I am seldom wrong when I suspect seizure activity, even with very small doses. The withdrawal, seems to be in a class by itself, several orders of magnitude worse than Heroin.
And of course, the drug as a causative agent of your symptoms is completely overlooked by whoever prescribed it for you. Blaming, those victimized by their process comes naturally to those that profit from prescribing this drug.
Sadly there are many hundreds of thousands of people who have been affected, just as you were, unfortunately, they have lost the ability to warn others about the disaster that awaits them, when they are prescribed this s0 called medication.
Thanks again for writing.
I appreciate your candor, and your willingness to speak out. I think that its true, that our awareness of what we do as therapists or psychiatrists depends to a great deal on our emotional awareness, and progress in our own emotional development.
Unfortunately, training often seems to be nothing more than amassing more and more knowledge, rather than becoming more and more conscious, more aware of what we feel and experience as human beings.
Apparently it is next to impossible for intellectually based training programs to understand this, and it often results in becoming insensitive to what your supposed to be sensing.
There is simply no intellectual substitute for compassion, understanding, empathy, caring. Connecting with people through your heart,and not necessarily your head.
In the United States Psychiatry, as its practiced has become a sort of cattle drive, wherein people are placed on psychiatric medications, as quickly as possible, without regard to the consequences.
The result has been catastrophic.
In one sense to question the police and the sanity of their role, is tantamount to saying your insane.
Many years ago, in graduate school, one of my professors told me that her job was to give psych tests to police recruits. The testing was biased to select for paranoia. Because it was felt that those with a slight paranoid personality would survive better in the streets.
There you have it…
It may well be that certain types of personality disorders favor the role of being police. Certainly the paranoid personality person does survive better, however that cannot be said for those that he or she comes in contact with.
That being said, the police shouldn’t have to be in a position to deal with someone suffering from mental health issues. That should got to mental health professionals. The police have enough to do already.
Send a therapist or someone whose been there instead, it will be better for everyone.
“You don’t need to save it in order to do your therapeutic work to help people. Today psychiatry clearly stands as an obstacle to the work of ALL caregivers, and especially to all those people dealing with extreme psychological distress who are forced to come in contact with it.” ….
Thanks…. Psychiatry right now is the basis for all Mental Health treatment in this country. It is the foundation for behavioral treatments offered by the insurance companies. It is those insurance companies who decide who gets help, and how much help they get. Those insurance companies love medication management. Putting people on drugs, is very profitable to them. If you consider therapy costing $100 and hour for 2 years at about $10,000. Versus medication management at four time a year $250 a visit 2 years is only $2000. The rest is profit. When people realize that they have been strung out on drugs, very much like a drug dealer stings and addict out, there will be a catastrophic problem for the insurance companies.
But what else can they do?
The delivery system functions as if mental health issues are medical in nature. When in fact they are not.
All so called psychoactive drugs affect insight. Especially drugs that don’t appear to induce a drug high. When someone is under the influence, its much easier for those around them to see and understand they are impaired. Those under the influence may also to some extent know that they are intoxicated. And that what has happened to them is a result of their intoxication.
But there are other drugs, very powerful ones that produce no obvious high that do affect a persons thinking in profound ways.
I like to think that in this respect, psychiatric medication, and tobacco are very similar. Tobacco, works by disconnecting thoughts and feelings, so a person cannot connect the dots in their life. What there thinking, feeling, and doing, are not all together but miles apart. Whats happening to their lungs, is not connected to them.
The same is true of psychiatric medications, especially tranquilizers. This is why symptoms no longer push the medicated toward getting better, making changes in themselves and their life. They just can’t connect the dots.
Very Nice reply
Its just the tip of the ice berg.
http://webspecial.mercurynews.com/druggedkids/?page=pt1
I couldn’t help but thinking, when reading this, that once again, psychiatry gets it all wrong. Maybe its the training, the way systems of the body are broken down and examined for disfunction. With the eye to putting things back together once again in the right order.
What always strikes me about analytical thinking, is the thought that feelings are just other ideas. And that cognition, reasoning, thinking different thoughts can change how people feel.
First their must be a realization that feelings are not intellectual processes in the sense that working a math problem is. Changing the way problems are solved may help with reasoning, but emotions don’t respond that way.
Approaching emotional issues, by subtilely shifting to the intellect, is of itself, dismissive of a patients concerns.
Emotional issues are not about faulty reasoning, many, many, patients have advanced skills in Math and Physics, and can reason just fine.
There is more missing from psychiatry than just a knowledge about talk therapy. Whats missing is caring, empathy, and love.
But fundamentally, it is very difficult if not impossible, to learn about talk therapy in an intellectual way, that’s just another attempt to intellectualize things.
You have to be in therapy, you have to spend many long years plumbing your own emotional depths, a process that never really ends. Otherwise you will be unable to feel, and to be smart enough about your own feelings, your own process to help others.
Thanks for writing this.
I have often thought about death, its unavoidable at a certain age, when so many people you know and love die.
Its been my own experience that death seems to feel reasonable when you think that theres no way out of the pain. But I found the courage and freedom to do and be what ever I want instead. For me, it was the willingness, to let go of myself, to lay down and become the pain, that set me free from its hold. It gave me a tremendous freedom. A freedom to understand my hurt from the inside-out, that was curative for me. The objectified outside- in version I was taught in Grad school, seldom makes any difference.
The profession of main stream psychiatry often hides behind a veneer of science and medicine, when in point of fact, its practices, and techniques are not based on either one.
“here it is: agitation may be caused by “underlying agitated depression,” the spurious superficiality of which notion is self-evident. Or: high voltage electric shocks delivered to the brain may fix aberrant brain circuits, a contingency which in any context other than psychiatric orthodoxy would be considered laughable. Electric shock treatment causes brain damage, and any putative gains claimed by psychiatrists are attributable to a well-known transient effect called post-concussional euphoria. Memory loss, in many cases, is more or less permanent. ”
The Elderly are much more vulnerable to both the effects of ECT, and also often lack the ability to resist pressures from hospitals and treatment providers who aggressively encourage ECT treatments for them, regardless of the outcome.
They are also very susceptible to the damaging effects of psychiatric medications, and can easily develop whats called treatment refractory depression, after decades of being prescribed brain damaging medication. When this happens, ECT is usually the treatment of choice. Many insurance providers, don’t require psychiatric review of these procedures, some handle it on a clerical basis.
ECT, is quite lucrative to those that do it, they can bill thousands of dollars per session, and many schedule dozens of sessions a day on multiple patients. With cursory approval by insurance companies, psychiatrists purse these treatments quite aggressively for their patients.
When an elderly patient, becomes little more than a vegetable afterward, there are no consequences to the treating psychiatrist, who callously then may recommend more ECT treatments.
Some patients get routine maintenance ECT, of weekly sessions for years on end. And if these sessions result in severe disability, the patient and family are in no position to question, what has happened, or to pursue legal redress. Yet severe disability often results.
The use of psychiatric medications, that have little more effectiveness than a placebo, often results in the very same symptoms they were supposed to treat. In addition the use of Benzodiazapenes, increases a persons likelihood of getting Alzheimers, by a whopping 52%.
The fact that we allow these practices despite the fact that they do not effectively treat any anyone, and further damage people is a testament to the destructive nature of the profession of psychiatry, and to our antidiluvian belief system in its regard. Psychiatry, does not know what causes these illnesses, and because of that it does not know how to treat them. Believing in psychiatry, however lucrative for the medical corporations, has no basis in science or medicine, its pure witchcraft.
The principal of first do no harm, has long ago been forgotten, by those whose only real concern is how to enrich themselves, by exploiting human suffering.
i always read with interest articles like this one. Whether its Ketamine, LSD, MDA, or EX. Psychiatry seems to always gravitate toward drugs for treatment.
Was it John Lily that took Ketamine, in his isolation tank, with an IV drip so he could communicate with God…
If drugs can cure you why are so many addicts uncured. And why are there so many addicted to psychiatric medications.
When i read this article, I new right away, where it was heading. That being said, I believe that there are many sincere Psychiatrists, out who really want to help those with psychiatric illness.
However, its been my experience, that the education they receive makes this practically impossible. Once they graduate from medical school, and take a psych residence their approach is usually set for the rest of their career. Only a handful in every given generation, become dissatisfied, and learn to take a different approach.
Medicine, is not experimentation usually,. it has a set play book, of standards of care. People, patients are diagnosed and treated along those lines. First comes a diagnosis, then comes, the treatment. And since medicine believes that psychiatric illness is a result of some biophysical problem, that usually that means drugs of some kind.
Other, models view treatment much different. In my on training as a psychotherapist, i learned to first listen to the patient, and use my clinical skills to get a feeling for what they are experiencing. The DSM was only after thought. Treatment consisted of psycho therapy, not medications. I learned quite early that medications, interfered with he healing process. One that I had experienced myself prior to becoming a therapist.
Medicine on the other hand almost never gets beyond, the you are sick, I am well mentality. Doctors unlike therapists, are not required to go through therapy of their own, not encouraged to engage in personal growth to understand that what is happening to their patients is also happening to them.
I have seen the you are sick I am well, mentality played over and over again, when patients come to their doctors, their feelings are anesthetized by medications, and remain unheard. They are considered to be problematic, if they don’t take their pills and go away quietly. To just do what they do.
And of course now, especially in the USA, the insurance companies control treatment by what they will pay for. Its much more profitable to to pay for drugs, for them, than talk therapy. Which makes monetary considerations of the most important, yet ethically treatment decisions should never be based on those considerations. But ethical considerations no longer seem to matter, once prescribing psych meds whether the work or not doesn’t matters since they are so highly profitable. Consider the fact that now psychiatric medications, cause more fatalities than car accidents.
Psychiatrists run mental health, through insurance companies. Their job is really to deny treatment, to ensure that the gargantuan profits for this companies continue.
Psychiatry as it is now, is primary one of drug dealing, and addiction. Yes there are psychiatrists that are good and who care. but they have been trained, to work in a system, that is not based on science but on profit.
There are cures for mental health issues, that don’t involve drug use, that involve instead, therapy, counseling, therapeutic relationships, and psychotherapy. And there are therapists, who help people get well despite everything, they have been fed by the medical model.
Its my understanding that Benzodiazpenes were initially derived from Barbiturates.
Barbiturates, as a class of drugs have a unique problem with duel tolerance , in that the tolerance to the respiratory suppressant effects of the drug, develops at a different rate than the tolerance to the sedative effects of the drug. In other words. people using the drug developed a tolerance to sedative effects, while not developing a sufficient tolerance to the respiratory effects. The result was that eventually the dose that they had to take to get high was the one that killed them due to respiratory failure.
Benzodiazepines, were supposed to fix that problem… Unfortunately all Benzo’s seem to create problems with seizures, probably because of their lowering the seizure threshold. Probably by creating some sort of parasympathetic excess…
I am sorry about your loss.
Most so called addiction-ologists. Know very little about drugs, especially street drugs, its sad but true. They just go by what the PDR, or Merck manual says. If its not in there, they don’t know about it.. Having worked as a director of a Detox facility, without a medical degree, I have seen first hand the difficulties that doctors have with these drugs. They don’t give enough time for withdrawal symptoms to subside. And its not unusual for users to come back, to the hospital days after they were thought to be finished, in acute withdrawal… This is something they aren’t usually aware of…
Currently there are problems with Xanax, and seizures. Even small prescriptions for this drug can be dangerous, due to what appears to be a lowering of the seizure thresh hold. Anyone remember, Halcyon? Their chemically related.
Either that or psychiatrists will label you as paranoid for not blindly doing what your told.
Melissa thanks for writing this. I am so glad that you are free, of medication.
Your story is an inspiration, to many, who are trapped just like you were. And many more who need hope to get free.
These drugs are very dangerous medications, given out like Candy by psychiatrists and a medical and insurance system that really doesn’t care, if you live or die.
Please don’t stop writing about this, please don’t stop bringing this information to the public. You will save many lives, and many people from the hell you once experienced.
I have read the reactions, to this post, and I agree that there is a need for action, against psychiatry. While I believe that it is a good idea to write and publish challenges to their lies and prevarications. I don’t believe that this is enough, because basically those that consume services, don’t believe they have alternatives and also the psychiatric model of treatment is accepted by the public because it is aligned with the medical model of care.
I believe that if we continue to purse this course, change will be slow, and people will continue to suffer needlessly. Simply because we are not seen as authority figures, and the public looks to those authority figures for validation.
However there are good counter authority figures. A good examples is Dr. Petter Breggin. His testimony in law suits against psychiatric medicines, are important, though not widely known by the public. I think ti would be important to reach out and organize professionals who understand how harmful the current system is.
I think it could also be important to seek legal help, and pursue qui tam lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, and psychiatric providers who knowingly damage people with harmful treatment and care. This could also increase resources for future legal actions, challenges and providing high profile information to protect the public.
Another focus should be identifying political leaders who support reform, and those that are against it.
Part of the reason psychiatry gets away with murder is because, its done in secrecy, hidden behind psychiatric jargon that the public doesn’t understand, and people feel they have not place to turn to.
Most people don’t even know the difference between a Psychiatrist, Psychologist, LPC, or an LCSW.
So they have no idea what they are getting into when they seek help.
Thanks for writing this……I think its important to challenge corporate psychiatry’s lies, and pay ops.. A medical license shouldn’t be a license to kill.
“A growing number of people appear to have killed themselves precisely because of the mental health ‘treatment’ they have received. Some of them weren’t even suicidal before they got on the psychiatric drugs that directly preceded their self-inflicted deaths. We’re talking kids, in a lot of instances. Williams had over 40 years of life on many of them. (And, by the way, I think the jury is still out on exactly how ‘treatment’ or psych drugs might have been used or impacted Williams himself.)”
Great post… There are reports that Robin Williams was started on psychiatric medication, and anti Parkinsons Disease meds, according to a friend of his actor Rob Schneider.
emotional states can be caused by physical states, that have nothing to do with and are not caused by medical conditions..
I also have the perspective of being a patient before I became a clinician.
I remember how vulnerable and need, I was. How much I was really hurting. I would have done anything to feel better, and unfortunately that was used against me.
I had no idea, what I was getting into… I am lucky that I survived, many people don’t.. I have seen many others die. At first I was alone, when I began speaking out, those that I spoke too, tried as they always do, to turn what I said into my personal pathology…
Many long years, later I received validation from other professionals. There are people that care, and all of us together, can make a difference, so others won’t have to suffer what we did.
Thanks for your post.
First of all theres a difference between blaming and responsibility. Thats what professionals do they take responsibility.
You have to recognize that.. There are plenty of examples of clinicians here that have taken responsibility for trying to change things.
That’s the first step taking responsibility, being willing to step forward and testify to the fact of what the current system is and what it does to people, and supporting people that have survived the process.
I am not going to let you frame the issues, from your point of view.Thats just your opinion, its not a fact. Yours is not the only voice..
I think that here what is happening is that people have gotten off these meds, often on their own, and their lives have improved, immeasurably…
Initially people were likely to feel that something was wrong with themselves for questioning their psychiatrists, and may have tried to comply more. They were isolated, and without support. This place is a good place to find support for each other, by listening, to what people have to say. And benefiting from others experiences. Coming together, like this is much more positive for most of those people, just as having support is necessary to heal .
MIA has never existed before….And its a good place to begin…
I think that debates like the one on this thread seem to go no where for a number of reasons, first of all there is a lack of clinical exposure to the current health delivery system, and over concern on the personalities of people who deliver the message.
Psychiatry, as it is now, is just an extension of corporate medicine. Many decades ago this was not the case, but it is most definitely the case now. Psychiatry is about making a profit for medical corporations, its not about helping people get better.
For example Gastric Bi-Passes, make lots of money for hospitals, usually about $40,000 per surgery. Do gastric surgeries really people people with weight problems, in my experience its a mixed bag. I would say no. But there is a sales department and a marketing department that sells people on the idea.
This is also true of hospital based treatment programs for mental health, they do very little, are expensive, and are designed to maximize profit.
Its the same for outpatient treatment.
Consider this. Seeing a therapist 1 time weekly for a year, is based on the therapists fee. In larger Metropolitan areas its about $100 an hour.. 100 x 52 is $5,200 a year. If the therapist is on an insurance panel, then insurers see this as a significant cost compared to medication management., of 1 or 2 sessions a year at about $250 per fifteen minute session. .
This is one of the reasons why psychiatry favors drugs, over talk therapy, because its more profitable for medical corporations.
People get hung up on the idea that psychiatry is there to help people, those days are long gone. Its really only about making money.
Psychiatric medications do not help people, yes there may be a few people that think they are helped. But we don’t prescribe medications on whats good for a few people.
I have met pilots who can fly a fighter jet on LSD, perfectly well. Does this mean we should legalize LSD?
Psychiatric meds, are about making money, whether or not they hurt or help anyone, is not the primary consideration of their use. Its about profit that’s all.
So debating, the effectiveness of various treatment, and whether or not they work, is an issue, ignores, the sickness, that corporate medicine has become…
We simply have no way to tell, because the caring system of people trying to help others, and having an interest in what makes people better no longer exists.
Compared to the cost of a hospital detox that can run up to $1000 dollars a day for withdrawal, $75 is a bargain. I am glad you were able to get it… Hospitals don’t like it because , you can come and go, while having it done, so theres no $1000 a day admit..
Supplements are better, but sometimes B Vitamins can do that, if you can tolerate organic brown rice, its rich in B vitamins, and seems absorbed easily, giving you stamina without the stimulating effect of B Vitamins in pill form.
I read what you said… and in a way, I think that your experience on Benzo’s was very similar to what most people here have experienced, that’s why we are here..
There are many terrifying stories of people who have gone through hell on these drugs…
That being said, I don’t really think that anyone really understands what these drugs do, not even the drug companies that make them. After all they are prone to lying about, and falsifying the data on drugs. The FDA, doesn’t really do much about it, except add a black box warning…
Currently right now in this country there is an epidemic of Xanax addiction. Xanax is a very dangerous drug, because it lowers the seizure threshold of people using it, so seizures are a common occurrence… especially in withdrawal…
Still, trying to find information on this is next to impossible….
As to you belief that there should be a better way to go through withdrawal, there is.. Its called acupuncture… I ran a drug clinic on the West Coast at one time that had an acupuncture detox, that worked well for hard core Heroin addicts…
You won’t find this treatment, much here in the USA because its too cheap, and the medical profession can’t make money with it….
Unfortunately, for most of us, both psychiatry and Medicine have become just another form of business enterprise. The education, as well as practice of both is controlled to a high degree by medical corporations and insurance companies, whose desire is to maximize profit and reduce overhead..
So your comment about medicine not going away, is already too late… There is a striking difference between corporate medicine and medicine controlled by those that wish to help people, who receive their training in an orientation settings different that the ones we find ourselves in now.
Both Medicine and Psychiatry have become a cattle drive, with the goal to keep them, the patients, moving, and prescribe certain drugs for certain conditions at certain stages of life, whether or not those treatments are of benefit makes very little difference as long as they are profitable.
Psychiatry has become the same, Psychiatrists typically receive very little training in conducting psycho therapy, but instead rely on drugs, and those 15 minute med management sessions, which are highly profitable. Psych residency requirements provide little knowledge and expertise actually conducting therapy.
In time psychiatry will die out, simply because its underlying assumptions about what causes psychological issues have absolutely nothing to offer… And there are real cures, that lie outside the accepted belief system, that in time will grow to supplant psychiatry…
Unfortunately medicine does not have such a happy fate, but will continue to exploit medical illnesses, until once and for all it rids itself of the poison of corporatism.
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I really love your honesty Dr. Gotzsche. That you care about people is also quite evident. Care enough to speak out…. and to identify, what happens as what it is murder…
Unfortunately, as long as prescribers, seem to be immune from criminal penalties for killing people, who are under their care, because they ignore the facts and prescribe dangerous drugs anyway, nothing will happen. The death toll will continue to rise…
The whole apparatus of so called psychiatric medicine in the United States is based on prescribing, and getting paid by insurance. The insurance companies don’t want to pay for therapy. because it costs more and cuts into their profits….
Its a murderous system, those who care should not support it.
What can I say, a systematic attempt to talk about the internal problems that psychiatrists face in their profession. Unfortunately that’s all it is…
in my own experience, psychiatrists treat mental illness, because they define it as an illness. The public is also indoctrinated, into believing in the medical profession, and believe further that to get helped they must turn to a doctor.
I remember what that was like. To be so needy, and gullible, and convinced, that there were “big people” namely psychiatrists who understood how to help, and that they knew just what was causing my distress.
Now I count myself lucky that I escaped, from them while I was still sane. Skip a ahead many decades, to multiple clinical degrees, and many tens of thousands of cases, handled by me in various professional organizations, both state and private run, and I can tell you that psychiatrists, and psychiatric medicine, is brutal, murderous and debilitating.
So when I see calm discussion like this, in which psychiatrists themselves, openly admit, that they really don’t know what they doing….I respond
Tell that to the people who have been turned into vegetables, by ECT? Some people get it once a week for years? Tell that to the shooters, in manic episodes that calmly walk through a college campus, and murder people at random..Tell that to their families too.. . Tell that to the drug addict, shooting oxycontin, or now suboxone, because a psychiatrist, who thinks he’s an expert on drug addiction and knows absolutely nothing about it prescribed them the medications.
Psychiatry, is a license to kill…. And there is very little that can be cone about it right now…
But, the psychiatrists that I have worked with, and I have worked with hundreds of them, over the years, are just a bunch of educated idiots, who live in their heads… And that would be ok there are plenty of those around, if they weren’t killing people.
Actually I think this is all wrong…… Because getting well is not an idea, and there is no comparison between observing yourself getting well and having an idea of what its supposed to look like.
Lots of people begin to act as if they are well because its so much easier than actually getting well. This will prevent them from actually getting well and in fact makes more difficulty for them…
Another powerful thing is observing other people like you getting well, and observing them doing what they need to do to get there.
Its not an abstract idea, and its not one that I think can be measured with ideas, but rather emotionally. After all your the expert o0 yourself. Not the psychiatrist.
I remember those times all to well… When nothing I could do seemed to make any difference. My emotional pain, was there like a cloud over my head, sending an occasional lighting bolt to my heart, to remind my just how depressed and unhappy I was.
At times the most important thing I could do was listen to other people in group, and eventually learn to talk about my own injuries, courage I learned from them.
I came to know that I didn’t have to figure everything out, that my feelings, explained themselves adequately without lots of words. And that in time just by being them, they would resolve.
And more importantly that someone would be there while I was hurting. Self help, can be just as simple as accepting yourself, just as you are and not trying to improve upon it.
Without their medications, what do they have to offer? I am sure many will try to become therapists. But the whole process of becoming a therapist, is not really suited to a traditional education setting. Its more of an ongoing and life long process of self discovery, and empathy for others.
I will say I am sorry that you lost your mother…Its hard to have a childhood under those circumstances… that’s been my experience as well having committed my father, who eventually died at an early age, he could not get real help either.
My own experience is much different, than his.. I don’t believe psychiatry has much to offer at all. It doesn’t understand much of anything about how emotions work, because they are too busy repressing them. And if you have a feeling it calls for an immediate dose of some drug.
There is so much fear, when people have symptoms of any kind, especially those that are labeled psychosis…
I think that its very difficult to empathize or really understand what someone is going through unless you have gone through it yourself. And when your in it yourself there are few reliable guides to help you through to the other sides.
Most don’t even believe in it, and have never experienced… All they have is a perpetual struggle with symptoms. Perpetual medications, that prevent, and destroy any hope of cure.
And no belief in a cure….Which is why psychiatry has no future.
I always think that interviews in which I am asked questions like that, make me feel dehumanized…Like the interviewer doesn’t feel I am worthy enough to try and relate to me on a human level….Its just so much easier to fill out the forms, that way…for them…