Comments by Eric Coates

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  • Good points, only I never specified the METHOD OF DELIVERY of God’s Control. I believe God uses chemicals, biology, neurological structure, and radio waves and electricity to deliver His Paradis. So, yes, you’re right. All those things cause cause voices. But what is CAUSING THEM to cause voices? That’s the real question, isn’t it? It goes back to God and the Devil, arguing as usual.

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  • Wow. I can see I really need to come back to this when I have rested.

    I just got off 2 admissions, one 6-week admission to the Brattleboro Retreat, one an 8-day admission to Parkland. One stressed me out but kept me well fed while some guy stalked me. My clothes were stolen, there was nicotine in the nicotine gum. Parkland had lots of nicotine, lots of great activities, but I like to walk.

    I lost about 30 pounds while locked up, pacing the hallways all day and all night.

    Good luck!

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  • An apology to Robert Whitaker and Mad In America.

    In an old article, I once dismissed the idea of “schizophrenia” as being only “so-called ‘schizophrenia'” as a real entity by writing in an Mad In America essay about my AOT hearing last year:

    “Expert testimony went on, descending to the most trivial of considerations. Even the most routine and ordinary of ambitions, for instance, was described as “grandiosity” — another so-called “symptom” of so-called “schizophrenia.”

    I wrote this in “Escaping from AOT: The Importance of the Incident with the Candle”.

    I see that I am entirely to blame in not having cleared up the simple fact that I have accepted schizophrenia as a group of interrelated experiences that carry the exact same groups of qualities, barring some that may have been caused by something like a disease (I forget its name at the moment, but there was in fact a disease that sort of explains catatonia that seems to have passed into history, thank God.)

    I have decided to simply embrace the terms of schizophrenia and the DSM in order to hang my hat up besides some of the classifications in order to establish an international standard. This is needed, not only to help people communicate simply, but for modern realities like what to call something when it comes to drug and insurance billing, which are important. (Hopefully we will soon have a better, single-payer, or simply free and without conditions healthcare of illnesses of any kind. I still do not speak of “mental illness”, as mental is not physical in any way except neurologically and I do not believe any “illness” is involved, except in cases where you have physical fallout on the body, such as physical exhaustion. You cannot have purely mental things (the mind) which is non-physical have a physical cause. I suppose you could become psychotic from drugs, yes, or lack of sleep, but that is not a mental illness unto itself.)

    I hope I have clarified the grounds of the error, which I know now was due to my own omission.

    Eric Coates

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  • I think that I was once in a similar place and I wish you good luck. You have to pay for some kind of character flaw or habit or indulgence or a sin like divorce or murder. I understand the impulses and the very real feeling the lie behind the breakup of a marriage, but God wants people to be resolute through our troubles, and if love is real then there are character issues to resolve, and which MUST be resolved for eternal happiness. The afterlife and past generations are eternal opposed to confinement and domestic and petty-cash work slaver’s wages. Marriage needs to be permanet or you simply have other needs, including companionship and even love and wonderful sex and domesticity and peace, and I believe that is only possible for some people if they live and function independently in supportive, community-based, functional workplaces and shopping centers and places of residences with plenty of sunlight and fresh air and relief form societal exploitation and drug addiction and sexual slavery and all that other crap, including abuse, neglect, economic control, and other such dehumanixing conditions, and some people function better as communities such as gated communities with freely available domestic entertainments and good music and food and entertainment.

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  • Have you considered the idea that God and the Devil are two halves of one cosmic being that envision, created and designed by God, but riddled with evil and damaging ideas and lies and misinformation and fraud and murder and evil intent? Have you considered the contest over control of our human destiny?

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  • One last note: All that this summary neglects to mention is the ACTUAL, root cause and the REAL resolution of schizophrenia, which is always — without any question — to be found in one’s relationship, to God whether one is aware of it or not. More research of this kind is urgently needed on precisely this question, and when someone does it, you will have almost the whole ball of wax in a single go.

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  • While I agree that the term “mental illness” needs to be scrapped, the terms “psychosis” and “schizophrenia” are clear and succinct labels for some people’s actual experience.

    Thanks for your comments. I agree with your general sentiments, but the labels are necessary and indispensable.

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  • Thanks for your comments about dreams. I think dreams are the clearest evidence of all that God exists. Life is essentially a dream of God’s, lived out in the universe we call planet Earth.

    I’m sorry that I have to disagree with you about labels. I do not find labels of the kind you object to insulting or demeaning. What else should I say to describe the conditions of my experience? I understand that in many people’s eyes that schizophrenia is just a demeaning and stigmatizing label, but I am, in fact, a schizophrenic, just as a depressive is a depressive and a bipolar is a bipolar. These labels may not sum up the whole of who a person is, but they do describe important elements of many, many millions of people’s experience, if not that of BILLIONS, and there HAS to be a simple way to describe them. I would not describe a mail carrier — a mailman, as some people still say — as “someone who gets up in the morning, puts on their uniform, and who then either drives or walks around to people’s houses and delivers their mail and picks up their packages before returning to the post office to deliver the mail he/she has picked up”. The mere idea of wasting your time describing things that way is absurd and would be a serious detriment to ordinary human communication. I am a schizophrenic, with a truly split mind, and there is no point in describing it any other way.

    All that said, thanks for your comments. I don’t mean to be harsh or offensive, but it’s of crucial importance to keep our language clear and succinct.

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  • I agree with you completely about the psychiatrists’ limited viewpoint and the total disaster of labeling people. However, I do believe the labels have a purpose, as long as they describe the CONDITION, not the PEOPLE, although I suppose even that is too strict. I have the EXPERIENCE of schizophrenia, but to label me as only a schizophrenic misses the whole purpose of simply describing the general experience. The mental health system is rife with problems, including its seeming sense of purposelessness. The “mental health” system is supposed to be about supporting people, not controlling them. Even the drugs are helpful sometimes, though their very real harms are constantly obscured and hidden.

    Keep up the good work!

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  • Wonderful thoughts. Thanks for sharing! I particularly agree with your comment that there is only one mind. God’s Creation will be perfected when we are united in a collective conscious, in which we both share others’ experiences, as well as our own, and we have our own lives and personalities and other experiences as well. Thanks again.

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  • Thank you for your extremely kind and perceptive comments. I like your description of your experience — it’s interesting to see someone write about an experience that so closely resembles mine. I’m sure you’ll get to roughly a similar place as what I myself have some day . . . that’s how schizophrenia (at first it’s just psychosis — that weird freaky feeling you get when you first experience a “delusion” for instance, or how you experience the kind of creative thoughts and experiences that you describe as an explosion . . . you’re probably much closer to true schizophrenia than you realize.)

    My only regret about the article as it appears here, which was mostly well edited, although it loses my original voice (obviously the editors went out of their way to make it as complete as they could) is that it contains one abominable change that I absolutely DETEST. When I chose the title “The Day I Became Schizophrenic”, that was exactly what I really meant, and when they change my words to read that “I don’t” believe in schizophenia — and the whole point of the article is to discuss how schizophrenia does and MUST exist for God to bring His Vision and His own Dreams to manifest on the earth . . . well, I can hardly express the rage I feel. I apologize for this truly ridiculous and disgusting change in my essay, and it pisses me off so much that I am literally seething with rage. I condemn the pretentiousness and presumption that possessed whoever changed my words in this way. Again, I’m sorry, but some people just don’t realize when their extremely limited opinions are completely wrong, and when they don’t know when to shut up and leave things alone. Other than that, I am pleased with the end result, even if they did edit and publish it WITHOUT my permisson, but what’s done is done and it was probably the right thing to do.

    Glad you could relate. Nice poem!

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  • I never met Dr. Burstow myself, but one of her articles — I forget the name of exactly which one it was, but it listed the basic tenets of antipsychiatry — affected my own writing so deeply, because when I read her idea that psychiatry is both “authoritarian” and that it “colonizes” society, I realized how powerful, invasive, and destructive psychiatry actually is. I based my entire conception of psychiatry on how she described it, but I added some details of my own that came to me almost immediately just from reading that word “colonizes” and also “authoritarian,” it came to me to add “irresponsible” and “unaccountable.” I wrote about these qualities in an essay I wrote for Mad In America that I called “Death of a Psychiatrist” which was unfortunately never published, probably because I was so angry from being held in a psych hospital for five months, where I was hooked and booked and bagged and tagged and forced to take Haldol, of all things, from which I got horrible akathisia. I dedicated the essay to Dr. Burstow, which she never commented on, and I regret that I was so angry that I called for the complete annihilation of psychiatry, challenged a mental health worker to a duel, and actually described how psychiatrists should go commit suicide with their own deadly drugs.

    Dr. Burstow’s writing affected me very deeply and she will be missed terribly.

    Rest in peace, Dr. Burstow.

    — Eric Coates
    written at the Brattleboro Retreat in Brattleboro, VT

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  • Thank you, Phoebe, for the lovely words. To tell the truth, I do a lot of my writing when I’m in an altered state, both because of my mental experience and because I either drink or smoke a little dope — purely legal — while I’m doing it. Not so much drinking any more, but a little weed. When I was badly overdrugged on Zyprexa, it was in fact necessary for me to use some kind of substance to write, because my mind was so sluggish and I had to have some sort of stimulant. I simply couldn’t find the next thought, the next sentence. I had been very committed to writing as a young person, before voices and spiritual experiences started at 36, and I considered myself a writer, so it was a great loss when a drug took my most important form of personal expression away. It’s great to have it back. The drugs I’m on now have basically no impact on my creativity or how my mind works or what my experience is, so I’m able to really write again. It’s very satisfying.

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  • Rosalee, what I really need to do is find a psychiatrist who is willing to speak up for me and find a lawyer who is willing to do the work to get me off, but the problem is that people like these do not seem to exist in my state. If I could find them, believe me, I would be doing all I could to be released from AOT.

    But thanks for your thoughts.

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  • Thanks for asking about the forced drugging and AOT. Unfortunately, I lost with the judge, so I have another 3 years to look at. After that there’s another hearing. To tell the truth, I don’t EVER expect to be released from AOT. Once they get their claws into you in the mental health system, they never let go. But thanks for asking. I hope all is well with you.

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  • I’m not sure what your question is, other than a general thought about the nature of my experience.

    I would say, overall, that my experience since I first began to go into unusual states has been overwhelming. I like my voices now, and, regardless of the almost limitless suffering I have endured at the hands of my voices, etc., I am fully aware that I am having an experience that millions of people would gladly trade me for if they only knew what it’s really like and what it’s really about.

    If you have any specific question, please go ahead and ask. I’m not a big one for keeping secrets, so feel free to ask about whatever you’d like.

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  • I have also done my best to encourage Robert to stop using the medicalized language. This effort has been fruitless. I think there are two reasons for this.

    The first, which Robert himself cited when I asked him about his stance, was that psychiatry’s language is, unfortunately, the lingua franca of its time. There is simply no escaping the fact that psychiatry’s jargon is the one that most people understand the issues with, and therefore, if Mad In America is going to communicate with a wider audience, that is the language they must use.

    The second is a failure of our own. Although I have been desperately trying to get the people in our movement to pay attention to the problem of the language we use for a few years now, there has been no response at all to my cries for us all to hold a virtual conference, to take place over a few months, in which we iron out a new lingua franca for us all to use, and which, if we use it consistently, can replace psychiatry’s in the popular dialogue.

    A third reason might be that Mad In America has what is essentially NO editorial budget. There are simply no resources for the editors to spend thousands upon thousands of hours teaching the webzine’s various writers how to talk about psychiatric issues with any clarity while at the same time lacking the kind of consensually agreed-upon language that I have been advocating.

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  • Monica:

    It’s nice as always to see you’re still out there and active with the process. Good for you. I had wondered what you were up to, not having seen your name on MIA in a while.

    I think you described the difficulties of meditation well. I’d just like to add one thing from my own experience.

    There is a kind of resistance to letting go and just being there, as you described. For me, it comes in the form of a kind of nervousness and panic at the feeling of opening up and truly letting go and just being there. It’s alarming to feel your sense of yourself becoming exposed like that all of a sudden, and the instinct is to pull back and not do it. I think that is what you were describing.

    What I do is remain completely still for a few moments, and as this sense of panic begins in me (it’s gotten much milder with time and practice) what I do is literally nothing except to breath and let myself feel that. It moves through you, and it wakes up your awareness and your senses as the world begins to come into you. Then, all of a sudden, as you just breath and let the feelings move through you, all the resistance just vanishes, and you find yourself simply there. No resistance, no difficulty at all. Just there and perfectly comfortable being in the moment. It only takes a couple minutes of effort and then you’re home free.

    Thanks for the article. I think a lot of people try meditation and then they think it’s just not for them because they aren’t instantaneously enlightened, and the best thing for them is for people like ourselves to share the problems and what we’ve found for solutions.

    I hope you’re doing well and we hear more from you soon.

    Eric

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  • Dr. Breggin, I would like to say that, in reading the comments that precede this one, it seems to me that almost all of them reflect a lack of understanding of what you wrote. That may be understandable, but I think it’s still sad and a little alarming that the readers of a website that often talks about how adversity and trauma are the possible sources of so-called psychotic experience are unable to grasp that what that means is that a lack of love, protection, and companionship at an early age is almost sure to change us, not for the better or worse really, but simply in how we relate to the world and treat the others who are in it.

    I think you pretty much nailed the problem right on the head. I was particularly glad to see you contrast love with the survival of the fittest. It’s a sadly neglected understanding of how evolution works that there is not only competition between members of the same species but a great deal of cooperation that needs to take place between the various members of a society. Together we can do far more than we could ever do alone. That’s important.

    Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I’m sure there are many people who would agree with you.

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  • Thanks for asking about all this. My lawyer did his job to the best of his ability and his knowledge. He had no idea the “incident with the candle” was going to come up since he knew nothing about it. I couldn’t speak up during the counsellor’s testimony, and I was too engaged in what he was saying to write down what I was thinking in a note to my lawyer. It wasn’t a matter of incompetence, in other words. It was simply a matter of being caught off guard by the testimony.

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  • Yes, it was hard. It was more than 25 years ago, however, so the sting of it all is gone.

    Ann was very isolated. You never saw her on campus, or so seldom that I can’t remember anything more than seeing her outside the dining hall once. All she did was smile her strange smile, give me a tiny little wave that no one else would be able to see, and keep walking. It’s just who she was. She had more art in her room than I have ever seen in anyone’s house.

    She was a rare individual.

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  • Sorry for this very late response, but I have only just seen this now, on the first of December (occasionally I go back through the comments section to answer people’s questions and comments, if it seems like that’s what they’re looking for).

    There’s a simple reason that you can believe in God on a throne with choirs of angels, or in therians, etc., and never have any psychiatrist or other MH professional come after you. It’s about the simplest thing in the world. In the U.S., psychiatry never goes after religion. We have freedom of expression, thought, religion, etc., right there in the Constitution, and anyone — and I do mean anyone — who tries to go after religion will be attacked, harassed, etc. They do not allow anyone to attack them and get away with it. Also, the establishment is still, at least on the outside, religious, and when some psychiatrist decides he can go after people who believe in God or whatever else, all those politicians frown and clamp down on the psychiatrists.

    You will, quite literally, never see psychiatry go after religion in the United States.

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  • Yes, oldhead, it would be nice if some progressive psychologists and psychiatrists made themselves available to provide expert testimony. Unfortunately, everyone has to make a living, so instead of helping us they go to their jobs. I’m sure that many of them, if they had the time and money, would bend over backwards to help us in any way they could. Until it becomes an organized movement I wouldn’t count on that happening.

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  • Thanks for taking the time to respond to the article. However, I wanted to respond myself to something you said.

    As I understand it, the option to refuse drugs is something that varies state by state. In some states they can drug you immediately, no matter what you say or do. In some states you have to be shown to be a danger to yourself or others, that there is a danger of imminent harm. But both systems do exist. I live in a state where you can refuse, but once you are declared nuts they can do what they want with you or at least whatever your guardian (if the court has appointed one) will permit.

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  • I’m in the U.S., if you want to know. What I am describing in this article is probably a pretty common experience in the U.S.

    And also since you ask, they are aware that I write for MIA. I’m sure that they have no clue what MIA really is. They asked me about it at the hearing. They seemed to want to make MIA out to be this fly-by-night, amateur, fringe publication, which pretty clearly demonstrates that they don’t really know what they’re looking at, so they are probably unaware of the significance of anything we’re discussing here.

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  • Great article. I especially like how you took each statement of Dr. Frances’s and broke it down, or how you went back through the history of a diagnosis and showed the progression of changes. It takes a topic that people may not realize actually has a history that is relevant and important, and clears up the confusion. This is the kind of nuts-and-bolts thinking that we need to get out there for people to see so they can make up their own minds what they think of it all. This article is a great resource.

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  • “Our movement, right from the beginning with Patsy Hage, Marius Romme and Sandra Escher, has paved the way for voice hearers to finally be “seen” as wholly human. Creating a community that would accept us and the voices we hear, fully. We do not have to live at the mercy of a world that only accepts what it can personally understand. We have the right to hear voices and no longer be hidden away in the attic of taboo and misunderstood experiences. The freedom to hear voices is truly a fundamental human right.”

    I’m not sure that rights apply — I mean, you’re hearing voices, it’s not like you went out and got a license for it. There is nothing in any foundational legal document anywherere that talks about hearing voices as a “right.” It is not, after all, something one chooses to do. Otherwise I completely agree.

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  • Great article and list of resources! I was particularly struck by the part about “safety.” This was something that always struck me as very odd and very skewed when I was in a psych ward — the constant concern and questions about “safety.” “Are you safe?” seemed like this endless, meaningless refrain that could only result in horrible consequences if answered in the negative. There are lots of questions like this. At the hospital emergency room now (at least in my state) they ask “Are you thinking about hurting yourself or someone else?” Only a complete fool or someone with absolutely no experience of the system would ever answer this in the affirmative. Or: “Have you been feeling down, depressed, or lacked interest in things lately?” Again, another one-way trip to the psych ward, forced medication, and then AOT, if you’re lucky. If you’re not, it’s electroshock and God knows what else. Anyway, the safety thing struck me in particular, but the whole article is well thought out and informative. Thank you.

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  • As to the type of comments you are likely to receive, it should be more than obvious that ANY link between improved fitness and the types of drugs that those with SMI are taking is bound to be weak. Metabolic syndrome, for instance, as if the name weren’t enough of a hint already, basically shuts down your system. Massive increased weight gain, lethargy, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes . . . although it may be only anecdotal (will it be more official if I call it a “case study”?) after a couple years on antipsychotics I could not keep up on a walk with my 70 year old mother when previously I had been very fit, and in less than six months off them I was back to my old self — after a lot of work, of course. Add this neuroleptic malignant syndrome, with its loss of pleasure in any activities, including physical, and you not only largely account for what are called negative symptoms but which I believe are actually drug effects, and you describe a situation in which any studies of the effect of physical activity on those with SMI are bound to have weak results. Sorry to go on so long, but I figured I night just as well simply sum up the responses you should be able to expect since they are all so familiar to me.

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  • Never having been suicidal myself (except in those few moments of extreme duress when hearing voices that wouldn’t stop, day after day, hour after hour, minute by minute) my principal concern is psychosis, not depression or suicide. Yet the whole question involved in any of these is the effects of modern “treatment” modalities, including drugs, and it has been an eye-opening experience for me to learn about the increased violence and suicidality associated with modern antidepressants. Your report greatly deepens that knowledge. Thank you.

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  • Good luck with it all. As you say, it can be — or has been — a pretty rough environment at times, with people doing nothing but insulting psychiatrists, etc., who may not as a general class be my favorite group of people but most of whom I have found to be genuinely caring individuals, even if misguided by the medical model. Even that is something of a generalization — and I am guilty of the occasional generalization myself. However, your guidelines would certainly lead to a more civil discussion arena, in which the various gladiators put down their swords and instead embrace one another in fellowship. Best of luck to you. It’s not an easy job, I’m sure.

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  • I call a Nazi a Nazi, Rachel, not some new-fangled marketing term like alt-right. A Nazi is a Nazi, and that’s it.

    I don’t know anything about Breitbart, gay or not, but one thing I can guarantee you is this: when the Nazis take over, they don’t play games with who’s gay or a little different or maybe had a felony once. They kill you. They kill you. Hitler was more than happy to have the gay people and the criminals and the sadists working on his side — until he was actually in power. Then he killed them off, en masse. That’s the reality, regardless of any rhetoric you might have heard. And the Nazis now would do the same thing.

    Real Nazis are about conformity to a certain conception of power, and they have very, very strict ideas about purity and morality, and to deviate from them is to condemn yourself to death, regardless of how they may use you in the short term to achieve their ends.

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  • First, I’m afraid that my experience is not much different from yours. As for court-appointed lawyers, they seem to have already decided the case is hopeless and so, rather than listening to you explain things on their merits, they simply go into court and give the same speech they’ve given a thousand times, which might sound good on camera but which addresses none of your individual needs. Second, another thing I have encountered is that court-appointed lawyers tend to be second-rate burnouts who shouldn’t even be practicing law any more; after all, if they were really any good, they wouldn’t be taking cut-rate cases from kangaroo courts where the outcomes are basically predetermined. And third, never trust anyone who wears a badge issued by the institution they are supposedly opposing; if they are that cozy with the opposition, you can rest assured that their interests — their relationship with the other side and the judge — will easily take precedence over defending your case.

    As for the The Forced Drugging Defense Package, the attorney I am working with now, who seems honest and conscientious, said that most of it would be impermissible as it would be considered hearsay, but that he would try to work some of it in by having me read sections of it, along with sections of my own letter, into the record to show “the sort of thing that make me question the system of psychiatry and drugging.” At least he’s making an effort.

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  • As a person with lived experience who has also been misdiagnosed (over and over), I cannot adequately say how important this article is. I have told people over and over and over again (including in my articles for MIA) that the real way to go about things is to take people at their word, not as you choose to reinterpret it into some framework of your own. This would help things immensely, and clear up much misunderstanding.

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  • Thank you. Good luck to your sister. There are still a few states which do not follow AOT orders from other states, although it is not easy to determine which ones. What I suggest is looking around and exploring the options. The other option is simply to move to another country. If your sister receives disability, those payments should continue even in another country, where it might be cheaper to live and where the onerous system of AOT is not in place. Just put on a backpack, get a ticket, and go. This is what I may be forced to resort to myself. Again, good luck to you both.

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  • I suffer at times from chronic pain. Does meditation help? Yes, but only so much. Opiates are not the evil they are being made out to be. They may have been overprescribed to people who didn’t need them, but there are other people who do in fact need them. This is how it works: go too far in one direction (prescribing) and then have a reaction and go too far in the other direction (not prescribing) and treat those who need them as mere drug seekers looking for a thrill. This is how it works with medicine, and how it is working now.

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  • Thanks so much for sharing this. My mother also did not give up hope, even if she went with the drug model. I guess that’s the only choice for some people. I hope your son is doing well and that you yourself are doing okay. It’s very important for people to share their personal stories. I’m glad that you have.

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  • I am neither a scientist nor very well mathematically informed, but what you say about the numbers only makes sense. This is a very clear piece of data (NNT numbers) that I should hope the public would be informed about, but when even I, who reads everything he can about the subject, have no idea what all of this means, then the general public is bound to be hopelessly misinformed of what’s happening. I can only hope that these conclusions will form a chapter of your latest book.

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  • Thank you for your comments. Very interesting.

    Personally, I believe that neurofeedback in all its different forms will replace much of what psychiatry is doing now, and the more information we get out there as soon as possible about it, the better. It sounds like you had a more positive experience with it all than me, and I congratulate you on it. Perhaps it will become truly useful and safe in the future.

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  • I appreciate especially that you are going to deal with the issue of suffering among those with unusual experiences. There is far too often an emphasis by writers that what they experienced was purely an uplifting experience. This is something that is simply and blatantly untrue for many of us, if not most of us. I hope you are able to explore it well and that people come to a better understanding that it is not one, but both.

    Good for you that you are so willing to do the work that needs to be done.

    Best,
    Eric Coates

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  • Monica, it’s always great to hear from you.

    Like you, I believe that given enough time, we can recover from what was done to our brains.

    However, my experience unleashed a period of psychosis that lasted two and a half years. That was when I contacted you for the first time, and you were the only person to respond to my cries for help. For that, I am eternally grateful.

    However, neurofeedback is brand new, and they don’t know what they’re doing yet. I’m glad that it helped you, but it is very important that people know what they may be in store for. I myself had no idea of the profundity of what was about to happen.

    There are people who swear by the drugs, and I am sure there are people who swear by neurofeedback. In the end, I believe that neurofeedback will be a very powerful resource, but I am also sure that when done the wrong way on the wrong brains that it will be just as dangerous, just as powerful, and just as overwhelming as the drugs ever were.

    And with all that said, I hope that you call me some time. It’s always a great conversation, and regardless of our different perspectives, I always come away with something new.

    Best,
    Eric

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  • i appreciate your concerns, and I also believe that neurofeedback is the future. At this point, however, it is still in in its most dangerous stages, much like drugs in the latter half of the 20th century, or like metrazol or insulin shock in the thirties and forties. There is a lot of work to be done — and there is nothing to indicate that neurofeedback, practiced with our primitive tools, will be any better. In fact, in combination with brains surgery (implants like they do with depression) there is no indication that with our modern technology that they will be any better. But thank you for your response, which I am sure is based on good experience and may lead to improvements in the future.

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  • Ummm . . . diagnoses never go away. I hate to say this, but once your medical record is established, any practitioner who reads them will see what other say and what others have repeated. You can disagree, of course, but it’s like any institution. The records are the records. I have personal experience with getting something as simple as high blood sugar taken off my record (gone long ago), and yet no one listens or records this. Never mind a diagnosis of schizophrenia or depression. But good luck to you if you try.

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  • The doctor was quite concerned and wanted to do what he could to reverse the process. I guess that’s possible with the kind of neurofeedback I had experienced. At that point, however, with my voices back in full command of my mind, I didn’t feel that going back for more was really the answer. In fact, I will not be willing to undergo any form of neurofeedback or anything else, like transcranial magnetic whatever it is, as these strike me as dangerously powerful and yet very primitive in their effect, which no one really knows about. Thanks for your question.

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  • Believe it or not, it is directly physical. Sound entering your ears, magnets on the back of your brain, tapping your fingers to reinforce a good thought — these are all real, and they do have powerful effects. Nothing, however, affects your brain like light entering your eyes or like magnets pulsing in your brain. These are the equivalent of a nuclear bomb going off next to a computer. Your brain is an electric device, not just biological, and the power by whatever means that enters directly into your brain is considerable.

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  • “Precision medicine” — excuse me, but what the fuck is that? Is this like cancer, where you go after specific cells? Or is this like mainstream fundamentalist religion, where you tell desperate people what they want so awfully to hear?

    The acid test, of course, is whether it works. It won’t. But once again there is going to be a lot of hoopla to make people forget the last round of hoopla, which also meant and did nothing more than the meaningless round of hoopla that came before that. And so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

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  • I would like very much if you contacted me, phoenix. We seem to think in very similar ways, and to express ourselves in similar ways. I agree with almost everything you say about the experience, except this: perhaps there is something more to psychosis than we know. It’s horrible at times, yes, as you say, but there is also the incredibly enlightening aspect of it all in which one learns things that would never have been available to use as mere ordinary mortals. If you would like, please contact me at: [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you.

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  • I would like to add a corrective at this point, which is that there are, in fact, certain real things that psychiatrists should be dealing with sometimes, if only they were trained correctly.

    An example of this would be infantile paralysis, in certain manifestations. There would also be dementia. At one point in time, the only people who were making significant progress in protecting us from syphilitic brain problems or epilepsy by trying to find out what was at their heart, was psychiatry (with neurology for an assist). The problem, in other words, is not with psychiatry itself as a general field (there are actual brain diseases and disorders) but with how their practice is plagued by conditions that are simply outside their range of experience and ability to determine a cause because it lies outside medicine. Schizophrenia, so-called, is outside their domain. So is bipolar, or personality disorders, or whatever. But your daughter’s problem is exactly the sort of thing that a psychiatrist, a medical doctor dealing with the effect of disease on the mind, SHOULD be dealing with. And good for you that you stuck it out until a real medical problem was determined, rather than the elusive and chimerical “mental illnesses” that they talk about. If only they concentrated on actual diseases instead of these chimeras, there might not be such hatred of them as there is nowadays.

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  • Sounds like you had a pretty bad experience. Even as a man myself, I have a sort of knee-jerk dislike of anyone who harasses anyone else, and these harassers are usually men.

    I think the forgiveness thing is not so much for them as it is for yourself. I’m not advocating it, just noting that it has its effect on your mind. You relax a little more and you hope for the best, even when people don’t live up to it. Again, I’m not advocating it. Sometimes anger is a better route to go. Let it change how you think about yourself and world so that you are more motivated to change things for the better. Different ways of dealing with it has different benefits. Which one do you really want?

    Again, sorry to hear about your experience. Good luck.

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  • I’m sorry to hear that you’re suffering with the damage of the drugs. I have been extremely fortunate in that none of the damage done to me has been permanent, in terms of either my body or my mind, but I’m completely aware that things might have been otherwise. I hope you get better.

    I was also, by the way, an extremely self-conscious person when I was young, largely due to the bullying and hazing that I had to deal with from other people my age. I don’t have a story filled with the kinds of obvious trauma that so many people have had to deal with. But, between my older brother and my peers, I lived more or less in terror half the time as a kid, to the point where I not only developed such a hard shell that no one realized how nervous I was all the time because I got so I just kept an armor shell on all the time. I learned to at least look like I was fine, to the point where people thought I was extremely arrogant instead of realizing that I was just good at walking around like I couldn’t give a shit. Anyway, I feel for what you had to deal with, and I hope that you’re able to come to some sort of peace with it, if you haven’t already.

    Good luck to you.

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  • That’s an interesting thought. I have had it myself: why change the language, since anything you come up to replace it will only be warped and distorted in its turn? The recent spate of interest in abolishing the term “schizophrenia,” for instance, is often based on the ideas that 1) there is no discrete entity that could be called schizophrenia, since the diagnosis is based on such variable factors that you might as well say they’re just aspects of that person’s experience that may be unrelated to each other in the way that a disease entity actually would have its parts related to each other as part of a clearly distinguishable whole, more or less, or that 2) it’s just stigmatizing to label someone that way. In terms of the second, it might be an uncommon point of view, but to me switching the name instead of simply using it and then working to change the perception, as the gay pride movement has done with words like “queer” or “gay” or whatever, is sort of a waste of time. By switching to the term “psychosis spectrum,” we will in no way substantively change the perception that people have from how they saw the old schizophrenia. Sooner or later, some people will start talking about “psychotics” (or “psychos”) the same way they talk about “schizos” now. But who am I? The powers that be have largely decreed that the change of name will take place if they have any power over the situation, regardless of the fact that it’s just polishing brass on the Titanic, more or less. I would think the preferable alternative, if you have to switch names, is simply to abolish the naming things as a group completely and drop everything, including the catchall term “psychosis.” If someone hears voices, say that. If someone has unusual beliefs, say that. Just drop the whole thing about generalizing a category and call things by specific name.

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  • Couldn’t agree with you more. Unfortunately, the only vaguely complete language for it all — misleading and non-illuminating as it may be — is psychiatry’s. Some day I hope we will change that. I’ve brought the language issue up with people many times, but I can’t seem to find anyone who wants to sit down and create a new one that actually represents it all as it really is.

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  • Thank you. I’m glad you liked the piece. I am also, like you, opposed to forced treatment. Although it may actually have so-called “benefits” in the short term, I think that it inevitably costs you in the long run, whether in terms of turning you into a zombie, destroying your health, shortening your life, or actually denying you the opportunity to come out on the other side of it all as a new person with new possibilities and potentials in front of you. And like you, I do grow a little worn out from all the expressions of pain and rage, even though I can relate to them. There is, after all, a lot more to all of this than just what was done to you, important as that may be. But, people do need to get it out of their system sometimes, so I can more than understand, and I do my best to pay attention to the people who need to speak out. Hopefully we can get to a place where the first thing (forced treatment) and the need for the second (anger) will go away. Good luck to you and your daughter and the rest of your family.

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  • Thanks for this important podcast.

    My only complaint about all of this is that the very term “Power Threat Meaning Framework,” while it is quite clear about its different subject matters, is actually sort of alienating. Once one is familiar with its constituent parts, it makes sense, but when approaching it at first sight it is quite alienating. I hate to say it, but a simpler name would probably have put people off less.

    As usual, James, you home right in on important questions, and I want to thank Dr. Johnstone for explaining what she and the others in her working group have done to advance the cause of psychology.

    Best,
    Eric Coates

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  • I haven’t listened to every broadcast (they started before I was aware of them) but those I have listened to have always been full of valuable information. I thank you, James, once again, for taking the time to make these broadcasts available to us all.

    I want to also thank Dr. Moncrieff for taking the time to make her views clear. I have read many articles on MIA (and increasingly in the wider-spread media) that are critical of antidepressants and other drugs. As a psychiatric survivor who was on antipsychotics for many years (during which time I degraded and was turned into a zombie), I am still learning about the effects that all of these drugs — antidepressants, antipsychotics, anti-ADHD — have on the people who are unfortunately either convinced or forced to take them. Thank you.

    Best,
    Eric Coates

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  • Congratulations, Sera! You’ve now outed yourself as a voicehearer. Not every voicehearer is the same, but you seem to more than qualify. A voice in your head that seems to not be yourself that talks to you? No better definition of it. It may be subtle, it may be quiet, but if it’s talking to you from the outside, then you’re a voicehearer. Congratulations! It’s a very select, special club.

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  • Julie, love it!

    On my last psych admission I got really out of control. I basically stole a huge, plastic Scrabble board and the tiles to go with them (assembled from who knows how many different Scrabble games?). I had to get this monster out of the game room and into my own room and then sweet-talk the staff into letting me pay for it all with a replacement scrabble set, which I promptly handed to the biggest scrabble player in the place and encouraged her to steal.

    There was actually a sort of thievery ring at my last admission, who raided people’s rooms and sold stuff between the different units. I figured out who they were pretty quickly, and I would taunt them with my iPod Nano all the time. But I was smart: I kept the iPod in my pants pockets 24 hours a day, whether that was in my daytime shorts or my pajamas at night. No one was able to steal my iPod. I did the same thing with my money.

    One last thing I will say is that I always make sure to steal a book from the library. You can only have 1 book out at a time, and you pick the very best book you can and hold onto it until they let you out, and you take it home with you. I have two awesome books that I would never have otherwise had because of it. Thank God for the prison library! I have also acquired 4 Bibles in different versions (Bibles are a kind of addiction for me) and a magisterial version of the Koran — all books that were just out on the ward.

    Anyway, congratulations on that pool ball!

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  • Sa, I did perhaps overstate my case about violence a little bit. There are indeed some people who are so far out there with their beliefs that they can’t help reacting with violence, whether out of perceived self-defense or some other reason, and I appreciate that perspective. However, most of the people I’ve known in psych wards who were violent were simply aggressive persons to begin with, and they would have been violent in any aspect of life, whether in a psych institute or some other aspect of life — normal life included. But thanks for speaking up, because it is important to do so.

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  • Thank you for being one of the few psychiatrists out there who is willing to speak about the human cost to your profession as well of the medical model. People quote Dr. Szasz all the time, but tend to forget that he, too, was a psychiatrist. I hope there will be more like you in the future.

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  • I am glad for you that you finally realized what was happening. It also took me about 8 years to realize what was happening to me, although I was on an antipsychotic (Zyprexa) which has very different effects. I am sorry that you had to lose as much as you lost, and I hope that you, as I have been able to do, are able to recover what you have lost now that you are not drugged into oblivion.

    Good luck!

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  • You write about how non-Western experiences all relate to spiritual experiences and shamanism. I appreciate that immensely.

    You might want to also consider how this is happening in the Western world. This is something that I wrote about for MIA about a month ago. There is not only a non-Western, shamanistic world; there is also a Western world, with its own spiritual and artistic tradition. Perhaps instead of privileging non-Western approaches, you might consider those closer to home, and realize that they are just as valid as any others.

    https://www.madinamerica.com/2017/10/channeling-dead-german-poets-alternate-realities/

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  • Thanks to you both for supplying us with this podcast.

    Even here on MIA, there is still talk (and the language) of “mental health” and of “diagnoses,” etc.

    It is time for this to end, and though I have spoken to Mr. Whitaker about rejecting this medical language, and have in fact called for a world conference for us all to get on the same page and begin to speak a unified language that calls it all what it is — spiritual emergence — I have so far been unsuccessful in garnering any support. I keep trying and trying and trying to get people to come together and create a new language, but to no avail.

    I understand fully that Mr. Whitaker is dealing with a situation where the language is controlled by psychiatry and Big Pharma, and that in order to successfully communicate with most people, that he has to allow medicalized language, just to bring people in. But at the same time, this is killing us. We have to update the language now, or we will never succeed.

    The power of the psychiatric/pharmaceutical establishment is that they control the dialogue. They all speak the same language — “mental illness”, “chemical imbalance”, etc. In this way they control the media, the advertising, and the public dialogue. Until we unify and begin to speak an alternate language that is consistent, rhetorically powerful, and related to what real people experience, we will fail. You, Mr. Hall, have written quite recently about how we can’t succeed until we reform campaign donations. The other half of this is to stop speaking THEIR language — to change the way that the situation is discussed, and so change the paradigm in people’s heads.

    Thanks for this podcast. It is what I personally relate to, and it is the direction that our movement needs to move in.

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  • Thank you, sir. I sincerely believe that the average psychiatrist, even today, started out with the best intentions, even if Big Pharma’s marketing money has mostly corrupted the entire establishment and skewed their conversation, with their relentless propaganda, in the direction of pharmaceuticals. It is good to see when a psychiatrist, especially one of his apparent eminence, also realized the dangers implicit in the use of psychotropic drugs. I am not opposed to the use of drugs in all circumstances, even if I believe that their long-term use is harmful. Thank you for reminding us of this person, who clearly meant to do good, and was humble enough and cautious enough that he did the best he could with a balance of therapy and drugs. Best to you, sir.

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  • This is a far, far more important issue than some people who are new to it all might realize.

    First of all, you start your advocacy group from the grassroots — real people with real issues.

    Then you get it organized and up and running. Success!

    Then, all of a sudden, when you are beginning to change the conversation for real, but maybe you’re still struggling to get those dollars to keep the thing going — like peer support agencies — you hear from a major pharmaceutical company or some other vested interest that offers to fund you.

    You accept the funding.

    What has now happened is that you have a board that is worried about whether they are performing up the expectations of the people from whom they are receiving their funding. All of a sudden, peers who are working in support are no longer encouraged to speak their minds all the time against drugs. All of a sudden, there is no longer a drive towards independent thinking in the organization. The organization is thinking about the source of its funding, and keeping that source happy with what it is doing.

    And this is how grassroots movements are co-opted: taken over by the organizations (drug companies, etc) that come in to fund them.

    The next thing you know, the organization no longer serves its original purpose. In fact, as it falls further and further away from that purpose, it starts to die. People are no longer motivated to come, people don’t want to come any more. Those peer support “professionals” no longer represent anyone. And what happens then?

    The pharmaceutical company sees that it has destroyed your organization quite successfully, and it stops funding you. And one more honest initiative has now been laid down by the side of the highway, as another piece of mental health roadkill. Congratulations! You’ve just been played.

    That’s how it works, folks. Never, ever accept money from any corporation who is outside your organization. It will destroy you. Accept only money from individual donors, or from people who have no agenda. That is the only way you can take money and not have it affect you. And as soon as you feel the money affecting you: get rid of it. Get rid of it, or it will destroy what you have worked so hard to build. That is what has destroyed the peer movement for the last 40 years, and it is what is destroying it now. Get rid of the donors, and fight through on your own. It’s the only way you will survive.

    Best,
    Eric

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  • I have been screaming about how nursing homes, schools, and jails all use drugs on people for a couple years now. In fact, I am trying to get Mr. Whitaker to take me seriously and publish an extended study that I wrote, called Death of a Psychiatrist, for a couple years now. The use of the drugs in these places, where people are held against their wills, and where they are subjected to all kinds of physical and mental torture, is unbelievable, and I salute your efforts in trying to address this. We are the very few who realize that schools, nursing homes, jails, and psych hospitals are all using the very same methods to confine and contain people, to drug them and control them, and to profit (both themselves and their subsidiaries, such as drug companies and security companies and the borderline “medical profession” such as nurses and aides), and all while they do it with no regard for the human rights and the dignity of the people who are in that way victimized. Thank you for doing this extremely important work. I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of people who are working on the behalf of the psychologically oppressed. You are the most important of them all, because you are addressing this very real need that is out there that no one else is addressing. I have tried my best, but even I have failed to get people’s attention to this very real situation. Good luck to you.

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  • I respond only to say: thank you. Schreber was obviously one of those who blazed our trail, and his successful bid to free himself from forced psychiatry at a time that was even more benighted than our own (believe it or not!) is a standard to measure one’s own efforts against. That he was a judge — which, in France, means that you are a lawyer who is trained to be a judge — no doubt helped him in his fight.

    He was adventurous, he was brave, and he was an unremitting critic of the system that held him hostage. And he was, like me, a brave “schizophrenic” who was not afraid to speak his own truth in public about what he had seen and experienced.

    I realize full well what I risk, in terms of public and private reputation, by coming right out and speaking about all of this. But what gives me strength is that I know, and I know it intensely, that no matter what else may be out there, is that there is a God who will protect me and sustain me, if not in this life then in the what will follow.

    Thank you. To be put in the same class as Schreber is a great honor. I will remember.

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  • Every single one of us who is chosen to go through this has unique qualities which are the reason they were chosen for it, and so God basically tailors what you as an individual will be expected to go through. So: there are similarities between one person’s experience and another’s, but not with every single part of it; while there are also similarities to another person’s experience, but not with all of it. What we go through is genuinely tailored to that specific individual. God is so all-encompassing in His knowledge that He truly can, and does, create a very specific experience for each of us.

    And it is not just we who hear voices or have visions or whatever: you are also chosen to be part of this, and your own experience, even if may feel that you are excluded from what is happening sometimes, was chosen for you quite specifically. This does not mean that you have a cross to bear that you can never leave behind if that is what you need. But you were chosen to experience this, just as your loved one was chosen for their own experience as well.

    I have not only been the one who was psychotic, I have also been around other psychotics a lot, and I have learned that all you really need to do is simply listen, and then do your best to believe that what they are describing is a very real experience, and once you accept that it actually might be real (sometimes it isn’t, but in the end God does integrate it all into one experience), you will begin to be able to relate to the world that they’re talking about. The hard part is finally just letting go of the world you are used to, but once you do, it actually becomes very interesting and sort of wonderful. Painful, yes. But amazing at the same time.

    Maybe that is the lesson that is meant for you.

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  • Yes, I have also been almost completely incapacitated for long periods of time. Yet I am a very logical person, and I think that God respects who you are as an individual in the end, and so in the middle of chaos He has reached out and given me the logic I need. I don’t know exactly what it is that your own loved one needs, but if you give it time, you might see that she gets it, even if it doesn’t resemble what I need. Each of us has our own purpose, and therefore our own understanding.

    As I said in the article itself, there was a period of very intense psychosis and voicehearing that I had to go through before all this stuff that I presently experience started to happen. In fact, it has taken a very long time for it to start happening, and then for it even to become the dominant thread in what I experience. I started to hear voices, etc., in 2005. There followed a period of about 8 years in which I was drugged to the gills and didn’t really feel anything or experience anything unusual. Then, after I finally got off drugs, the process resumed, and it took a few more months before the really meaningful stuff started to happen. It has taken another 2 years for it to really become the dominant type of experience that I have. So it takes a while, at least in my experience, for God to do His work with you.

    Let me suggest to you this: that God, looking through Time itself, decides that He wants you to have a special purpose of some kind. But along with that, He wants to put you through Hell — to make you suffer for your sins, and to learn the lessons from your own past life that He wants you to learn from — and that this needs (for reasons of His own) to take place before He truly brings you in. In other words, if you stay drugged, outside His reach, the process is never completed. But if you open yourself up and let it happen, you will — I promise you, based on what I have learned about so many others who have gone through this — you will, in fact, finally come to a point where all the confusion and the disorder and the chaos and the pain of it all finally reaches a point where all the voices and the delusions and what God is saying all come together and create a new kind of understanding of what is happening. Or at least that is what I have experienced, and what I have read about. All the stuff that you go through as you suffer and pay for your sins in order to make you a better person are, believe it or not, intended to teach you something that you would never be able to understand if you didn’t go through it first.

    So what I am saying is: Let it happen. It’s bizarre and chaotic and horrible, because your sins are being burned out of you, even if you are forced to repeat them (nothing will make you sick of a sin as much as being forced to repeat it!), but when you finally come through on the other side, which takes a lot of endurance and patience, you will finally be the instrument that God wants to use. I know that’s a horrible thing to contemplate, as it can take years, but it’s what I’ve seen.

    And there is this one thing: once you finally comprehend what is happening, once you finally see for the first time that there really is a purpose to it all and that it is so much greater than anything you ever knew about in your old life, you would never, no matter how much suffering is demanded from you, ever go back to your old life. Never. Trust me. Once you catch a glimpse of the bigger meaning and purpose that is there, you would never go back to the ignorant, meaningless life that you thought you were living before.

    God bless, and good luck.

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  • Thanks for alerting us to this very important article. I have bookmarked the site itself for inclusion in my list of regular news sources.

    I would like to point out that the use of PR firms and the fake “institutes” and fake grassroots organizations they organize (called “astroturf”) was a system that was developed by Big Tobacco’s principal PR firm in the 1960s, immediately following the publication of the Surgeon General’s report on smoking in 1963 or 64, I forget which. At that time it was crucial for Big Tobacco to start making sure they controlled the conversation about smoking, and they did this largely by paying fringe “experts” (sort of like climate deniers today) to produce spurious position papers, etc., and then distributing them to the media and counting on false equivalence on the part of newspaper and magazine editors to gin up the idea that there was still a “controversy” about the effects of smoking.

    For a detailed account of how they did this, which I assure you is quite educational (or it was for me), check out the book The Cigarette Century, which I believe was produced by a Harvard Medical historian. I’ve never seen the world the same way since I read it.

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  • As you write, money in politics is indeed our greatest obstacle.

    I had considered leaving the movement entirely a couple years ago, and actually did check out for a while, on the very same basis that you talk about: that the movement was a failure, although what I thought was that it would remain one because everyone was doing their own little thing with no unity between them, and unless someone went out and did the necessary work to change things on their own, nothing would ever actually change. My mind has since changed about that. My own specific way of looking at the problem was centered on different issues than the one that you present here, but I can see that without the kind of change you are talking about, even the changes that I was considering would stand very little chance of ever succeeding.

    Thanks for advocating for your point of view.

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  • Thank you, Sarah. Your experience and knowledge really show here. I hate to complain about it, but one sees and hears so many screeds — well-intentioned, and informed by some pretty harsh experiences, but still screeds — that seeing someone lay out a well-reasoned and well-informed and articulate expression of their concerns about the need to uphold human rights against the usual practices of the “mental health system” in a way that makes clear how important those concerns are for all of us is quite unusual and quite welcome. Thank you. I’ll share this.

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  • Thanks very much for this very informative article, Mr. Oaks. I would like to respond in the spirit that you requested we do.

    I have been working recently on a new article for MIA which contained a section which, unfortunately, it was best to cut simply because the piece was a little too long as it was and, even though the ideas were important, it wasn’t directly connected to the main thrust of the piece. However, the part that was cut bears on a subject which I feel is extremely important, and which I have been trying to draw attention to for some time now, and which I had thought I might devote an entire article to. However, if Mind Freedom is actually looking for these sorts of initiatives, you might be more successful in gaining some traction for it than I have been. This issue is our use of medicalized language.

    In this article of yours, for instance, you used the expression “mental health system.” I’m sure that you’re more than aware of the idea that “mental illness,” so-called, is a contradiction in terms and that no such creature ever has or ever will exist — that it is nothing more than a metaphor at best, yet it is a very dangerous and perilous metaphor for us to allow people to believe in. One of the ways that we allow it to continue is by allowing others to use such terms as “disorder” and “disease” (as opposed to difficulties) “mental health” (as opposed to state of mind or experiences or alternative realities), “medication” (as opposed to drugs or chemicals), and so on ad nauseam. Even worse is when we adopt this misleading and damaging language ourselves and in so doing perpetuate their system by allowing it to remain the dominant paradigm in both our language and in the public’s conception of what we are experiencing. As I say, I’m sure that you’re fully aware of this, and in fact MIA itself uses a default medicalized language, probably for lack of anything else, and though I have approached Mr. Whitaker about it, he seems to be unable at this time to be able to see what would be a solution to that problem at this time. So this is not just you, this is many of us.

    But it’s a major problem. The continued success and power of the psychiatric establishment and their cohorts (the pharmaceutical industry and the prison industry/Jim Crow system that is disguised as psychiatric hospitals and as AOT, for instance) are only able to maintain their power by maintaining control of how people perceive what is going on. As long as I have a “mental illness” which can only be “medicated” because it is an inherent “disorder” and would otherwise be “uncontrolled,” then it is perfectly justifiable for society to take over my “health care” and also protect itself from my potentially dangerous “delusional behavior.” And if that were in fact the case, I would probably agree. And that is how the public perceives the situation, a situation that is created by the power of psychiatrists to move in lockstep with each other on a rhetorical basis by speaking a unified language which everyone thinks they understand, even though we (and they, most of them) are fully aware that it is false. This rhetorical unity and universal understanding then gives them the power to enlist the media, which promotes their ideas, and to publish articles and talk to people on the street and publish ads that then go to perpetuate this rhetorical hold on public discourse and public power. And until that hold is broken, we will never succeed.

    We have no unity. One person calls it extreme experiences, another calls it alternate realities, another calls it spiritual emergence, while others default to psychiatry’s own language. We fail to break down their power structure even when not actively supporting it by default. It is imperative to change this situation and for us all to get on the same page so that we can shift the course of this public conversation into the path that we need for it to go and into which we know it must go in order to save lives. It’s that simple. As the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states, the structure of my language is the structure of my world. Until we set up the right structure, one that accurately reflects our shared reality (even though composed of many different perspectives), we will get nowhere. It’s really that simple. The first thing to do is clean up how we talk and get on the same page with each other and start talking in unison so that we can finally change the whole conversation. Until then, no one will ever understand what we’re talking about. The word will never spread.

    Just as one for instance, I myself do not care for or ever use the expression “extreme experiences.” For one thing, my experiences are not at all “extreme” — for me they are perfectly normal and routine, even if they might be odd to an outsider. Yet I am being branded with that outsider’s perception. Likewise, I do not ever use the expression “mental distress.” I am not at all distressed. I am “schizophrenic” as hell, all day long, every day, but I am not distressed. Maybe some people are, and maybe outsiders are, but I am not, and the term is not up to being a catch-all for every form of mental oddity or individual experience out there. Some manic people are quite delighted with what they’re going through, after all, and so am I.

    So let’s have a conversation. I believe that a conference of some kind, or some other kind of organized communication, and some sort of organized body, such as Mind Freedom might be capable of organizing, should be brought together in order to sort through the various language paradigms, where everyone can say their piece and we can all have some debate and discussion and maybe even some disagreement with each other for a while (in a polite and respectful forum, of course) so that we can finally come to agreement with each other on what you might call “a party line.” This could very well be a virtual conference, one that even meets periodically in order to have new reports and an evolving discussion instead of trying to get it all done in one single shot. There could even be little subcommittees that put reports together. Who knows what such a diverse group of extremely creative people could do?

    For instance, I use the term “alternate reality” myself because 1) I believe that what I am experiencing, no matter how strange it might seem to you, is quite real, and that it’s time for people to open their minds to that possibility and have it acknowledged, and 2) because it’s actually quite inclusive. There are, after all, many, many, many different realities that people like us talk about, and I see absolutely no reason at all that every single one of them isn’t legitimate and important. You don’t have to buy what I say, but what I say needs to be respected in exactly the same way as what the next person says, and it’s time that that was acknowledged. In this way, we could replace the term “psychosis” and “delusion” with a simple term: people who are experiencing another reality. It’s really that simple. Yet I am sure that my own term might not reflect everything that others might think is important to express in our new language that we’re creating, so I think it’s absolutely crucial that there be a forum in which all viewpoints are heard, discussed, and if possible a consensus reached so that we can finally, finally, finally make some progress. We are losing this fight. Badly. And until we begin to move like an army, with a common language and set of goals, we will never get where we want to be. That’s what psychiatry and the whole “mental health establishment” and the pharmaceutical industry does. And that’s why they’re winning. And probably only an organization like Mind Freedom could pull something like this off. I’ve tried on my own, and gotten nowhere. Maybe you would be more successful.

    Bear this one thing in mind: No political party that ever let itself be controlled by the terms that its opposition created the way that we are controlled by their terms would ever be successful. You have to take control of the conversation, or you will never be heard, and you will never succeed. This is not a fight against psychiatry, because they will never concede. This is a fight for public opinion, and with that on our side we can do anything.

    Thanks for your efforts. And good luck with that new chair!

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  • I had a numerous short conversations with him, although I never knew what his real name was. It seemed that whenever I visited the comments section of an MIA post, he was there, commenting on something. Whenever I had a post up, he would comment, always in the most supportive way, and when I was gone from posting for a while and then came back, he was kind enough to take the time to be very welcoming and to express the thought that he was glad to see me writing again. A wonderful individual, and I can understand why the staff of MIA and so many others have taken the time to write so many tributes to him following his death.

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  • You’re describing something that all of us who are willing to be right out there about what we have experienced have to go through. Even I, a noted author on the subject of voicehearing and schizophrenia, have to go through this. Fortunately, I decided a few years ago to simply stand right up and say fuck you and just be who I am, and it hasn’t really hurt me a whole lot in society. Yet, I have been taken to psych hospitals and confined, and when I was there it didn’t really help me to say fuck you and fight back, saying that I am who I am.

    It doesn’t help me now that I say fuck you and fight back against the local community mental health center.

    But you know what? In the end, all we can live with is ourselves. Yes, it makes life harder to fight back the way that we do. And yet that is what God demands of us. I’m not trying to be delusional here. It’s simply that what God demands of us — that we truly obey our own consciences — is what we do. We have to do it, whether we like it or not. It’s just how it is, even if it hurts us most of the time.

    I’m sorry that the churches don’t understand, but they aren’t the spiritually informed that people like you and me are. They see Jesus up on the wall, on his cross, but they don’t see that Jesus is sitting in the aisle next to them, suffering on a cross that is called society. You have to forgive them. That doesn’t mean you have to hang out with them. Just forgive them, and then go do your own thing. A real saint isn’t worried about what people in a church say anyway. A real saint is doing whatever God tells them to do, and you’re probably out there in the world, working for people. Like in a soup kitchen. A soup kitchen is worth 10,000 times what a church service is worth, believe me. And in a soup kitchen, you will be appreciated. Not judged for what you are, but appreciated for who you are and how hard you are willing to work and what you are willing to give. That’s how it really works. I’m sorry that your churches are full of people who don’t understand that. But you know what? The people who created the churches were creating a space for the weak and the lost and the confused to gather together in safety. The real warriors are the ones who create the churches to protect the weak and the unimaginative. Don’t be one of the weak ones. Be one of the ones who creates something new. You can do it. I believe in you.

    Best, Eric

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  • Too true, too true. The scary thing is that most of them probably don’t even realize it. I call it “The Ever-Expanding Mental Health System.” Everyone bitches about how “the system is broken.” Yet all that they do is add yet another professional, at yet another salary, to the system as it already exists. There is never any fundamental questioning of the system as it exists. “The system is broken.” You hear this every day. Yet the very people who say this, from inside the system itself, never actually do anything to change it all radically, from the ground up. It’s the same thing, over and over.

    Thanks for your comments. Be well.

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  • I believe that God created a physical universe. And in a physical universe, there are many things that can happen that affect our spiritual universe, which is also physical. And I do believe, quite sincerely, that it is possible that mercury fillings, or even a bad tooth, can cause you to have interactions with a so-called “spiritual universe” that might have been giving you trouble. I hope that you are truly feeling better now, and that you sleep the sleep of the blessed. I’m sorry that it took me so long to reply to your post, but I haven’t been paying close attention to this one for a while. My best to you.

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  • I have read the comments by Elaha, Sa, Stephen, and AnotherAccount, and I would like to say right now that you are the most important people on our side of this discussion. There are those who understand the social dynamics, etc: those are the others in this conversation. I wrote this article with those people in mind. Yet I, myself, am one of you. And I believe that this is all a spiritual question, and I am on YOUR side when it comes to all of this as a larger question. God bless you all. I can tell by your comments that you are all God’s people, and that you are all on the right side of things. God bless. Thank you for bringing our side into this conversation — even if no one realizes what you are doing. I hope to see you all again, especially after my next article is posted.

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  • You certainly seem to have a real grasp of what was going on for these people. Are you German, or of German descent? You are describing the kind of thing that normally only someone inside the situation would know — much as one can tell immediately from a written account if someone has actually spent time on a psych ward. There are certain things about an experience that are almost impossible to imagine unless you’ve actually had the experience.

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  • After your inquiry yesterday, I did ask Mr. Whitaker to put one of them back up. He immediately CCed his associate to have it put back up. However, I hesitate to burden Mr. Whitaker or his staff on the basis of my own requests, which might seem needless. If you find the material valuable and would like to ask him to put them back up yourself, please do so. I have no problem with the material being available again. In fact, I would like it if it was. But I wouldn’t want to ask him to put himself or his staff out just to satisfy my own vain, personal desires, especially after I made such an ass of myself when I was psychotic a couple years ago.

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  • There is certainly a lot of information here, and I won’t pretend that I can comprehend all of it. However, there are certain things that I would like to state in going forward, and to which I hope both of you can reply.

    1.) there is the sincere acknowledgment that both of you are very sincere in your efforts, and that I hope everyone realizes that.

    2.) although I am not aware of the origin of your disagreement, I will have to state, going from what I have read, that I am completely opposed to any sort of institutionalization of peer support, whether paid or not.

    One of the simplest ways that any professional organization (like psychiatry) can destroy the opposition of a grass roots organization is to buy it. Yes, that’s right: by deciding to “certify” (according to exactly whose expertise?) and then to pay for the work of peer specialists (who chooses them? to what authority, like an institutionalized psychiatrist, or another mental health agency, do they answer?), we turn over our authority to an outside agency. And the psychiatric profession can buy our peers, take control of their training, then control who manages them and what they are allowed to say. And what this means is: certification by ANYONE as some kind of authority is a way to take over and control and then destroy our movement.

    If you want to work in peer support, good for you. But if you want to work for an agency, or a department of something-something-something (the bullshit department), you are not working in peer support. You are working in a system that is about psychiatry and you are supporting psychiatry’s control, because that is who is at the top of your food chain. And if you tell yourself anything different, you are lying to yourself.

    And once they get you on their payroll? Once they have silenced you, as you answer to their managers and their system? Then they cut your funding, and you are back out on the street again. This is how social movements too numerous to mention have been coopted and destroyed: by accepting a paycheck, and being silenced by it, and then not seeing what was really coming.

    Please don’t sell us out. That’s what the whole alliance between the deadly mental-illness system and the mentally ill is really all about. Don’t let this happen.

    And I hope that you two have a lovely debate.

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  • All I can say is: Trust God, and let yourself go through it. You will come out on the other side eventually, and even if you don’t, it is because that is the way that God wants you to serve Him. You can never know what purpose He is using you for. Just have faith. He will take care of you in the hereafter. I don’t say that in any glib way. I am one who has reason to know that He is there. Trust me.

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  • You are opening up a whole field of discussion here, and I would love to respond sufficiently. However, there simply isn’t time or space right now. But I will at least suggest the outline of my own views to you.

    What if God had decided that there were certain people who were so good that He would make them suffer even more than they otherwise would have, just so as to teach them even more about the world and what it means to sacrifice ourselves for others and for Him? What if trauma is not a biological factor in the situation, but one that comes from God Himself? That it is not a causation in terms of brain development, but a sign that God is testing you and preparing you to become one of His Chosen?

    I realize that this point of view is outside the boundaries that everyone believes in right now, but this is what I believe. And if you are a true schizophrenic, with a split mind — two forms of consciousness at once: the human being’s, and the consciousness that God has given you — then you will understand what it means. This is why I do not use quotes around the word schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is real, real, real — a split mind. Maybe people haven’t encountered it, and maybe most people wouldn’t know what it is when they see it, and maybe a whole lot of people who aren’t schizophrenic at all are mislabeled by people who don’t know better. But we do exist, and I have no doubt at all about what that means. God is here.

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  • Your comments are very interesting. To someone outside our movement, they might seem paranoid. Yet to someone who knows about the high incidence of childhood sexual abuse among those who later hear voices, or how common abuse is with “borderlines”, what you have to say makes very good sense. It’s interesting that a doctor actually told you what you say — that doctors would cover up the sexual abuses of the establishment in return for having their own harmful acts ignored. This is not even remotely as crazy as some people might think. These kinds of unspoken — or even spoken — backroom deals used to be very, very common, and in some circles (I’m thinking of governmental power interests here) they probably still are. Thanks for your post.

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  • I was very, very psychotic a couple years ago (I won’t pretend otherwise: it was that period that you need to go through before you re-integrate, if you’re a schizophrenic) and I took down those blogs myself in a pique of psychotic rage. I won’t try to explain what I was going through at the time. If you would like a copy of any of that material, I would be happy to supply it. There was one about hearing music as a voicehearer, one about beginning to hear voices again, one about time spent as a prisoner in a mental hospital, and one about what it is like to become awakened, both politically and socially, against the practice of psychiatry. My email is [email protected], and if you would like to write to me and tell me which articles you’re interested in, I can send them to you.

    Best,
    Eric

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  • Thank you so much! It’s always nice when people actually remember you and what you wrote. And I would LOVE IT if Torrey responded. He won’t, of course — he’s much too highly placed to ever respond to us mere victims of what he’s propounding — but if he did then I would absolutely love to cross swords with him. He would go down in seconds, you can be sure.

    As far as being fair and like Mr. Whitaker himself, I can only say this: that we who are not on the side of big corporations, making money from them for being paid shills, we who are standing for the truth know that our only reward is in being honest, and if that means that we represent the arguments of our opponents in order to show how wrong they are, that is what we have to do. It is an obligation of conscience, and you really can’t fake it. If you believe in the truth — the real truth, which will help everyone when it is recognized as the truth of our situation so that we can effectively deal with it — well, that’s what you have to do. And thank you so much for recognizing that! It is a great compliment to be compared favorably with Mr. Whitaker, who is my own hero and teacher in so many ways.

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  • Thank you. I’m doing my best. We don’t have the sheer mass of paid professional writers and trained “experts” on our side, which is what gives them such an advantage even though it’s obvious that they’re wrong. They control the airwaves and the propaganda and the advertising through simple economic power. We do have to fight, even if we are a David against a Goliath. In the end we will win. It’s only a question of how long it will take. Mr. Whitaker’s success in bringing this webzine together, and the newly emerging conferences and consensus among formerly “radical” thinkers is a very good sign. Let’s hope for the best.

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  • I take it that you are referring to the experience of schizophrenia or psychosis itself.

    Yes, you can eventually come through it all, and you will not be the person you were before the experience. It can be a terrible period of suffering, doubt and fear, but in the end it does resolve into a new kind of awareness and a sense of possibility. I say this as someone who has endured the most terrible kind of experience that can be imagined (short of actually being physically tortured myself, except by God) and I do not take it lightly at all.

    I hope that your own journey is at a point where it is calm, peaceful and satisfying. If it isn’t yet, then I hope that it will be soon. As Eleanor Longden said (to paraphrase): “Sometimes, you know, it snows as late as May, but the summer always comes eventually.”

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  • All the things you mention are very important concerns for me also, especially since I am a schizophrenic myself (I’m sorry, but there is no other term for it at this time, and it is a very, very real experience that needs a word to describe it in some way, even if the old term has come to have a taint of medicalization that shouldn’t be there; perhaps we should simply reclaim the term in the same way that people have reclaimed “gay” or “queer” or anything else that was considered offensive for a while). In any case, I agree with you on all the points you made and this is the focus of almost all my writing these days. Good luck to you, sir.

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  • It’s funny, I read the article that Torrey and Yolken had written and I was just sort of puzzled for a while, because it is a very dense piece of material and it takes a while to get your head around terms like “incidence rate” and “prevalence rate” and so forth . . . in other words, to think like an epidemiologist rather than like a normal person. It’s hard to penetrate. But I could immediately sense that there was something wrong with it all, and by the time I got to the end that first time, I had started to spot what was wrong with it all, and their explanations at the end struck me as a lot of smoke and mirrors — that they were essentially lying to themselves and to their public. So this idea sat in the back of my head for the last couple years, and I finally decided to write it down, just to sort of scratch an itch because it bugged me so much, and it is certainly a surprise and a pleasure to think that someone might use it as a resource. That’s really the point of writing for me in the end — sharing ideas, etc. — so I’m glad you consider it so, even if all I meant to be doing was getting a bugbear off my back.

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  • Yes, I think that starvation is often one of the roots of the origins of schizophrenia and psychosis. That’s what everything I have read indicates. Anything that puts survival stress on an individual, even if they are still in the womb and are simply being part of a mother’s experience indirectly, it seems to affect things. Even when there is stress a couple generations back, it can affect a person in terms of health and their mental welfare. Thanks for your comments.

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  • Thank you. The cat poop theory of schizophrenia, which I believe was Torrey’s pet idea, was certainly one of the more absurd ideas in retrospect that has ever been produced. Yet, you have to sort of admire the doggedness of the psychiatric profession. If they actually had a clue about anything — if they could get over their bias that schizophrenia is physiological or psychological in origin and start to actually examine the evidence of what their own patients are telling them about their experience — they probably would have solved the problem for us long ago. Thanks again.

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  • The question of how we all talk about experiences like that we now call “schizophrenia” is something that a friend and myself have been talking about how to address. We are considering how to organize what we are calling a “virtual conference” that takes place over two or three weekends so that people can talk about what we as a community want as a common language to describe things. The biopsych and psychopharm people move in lockstep, with a common vocabulary and rhetoric. We, on the other hand, are divided, and our lack of progress in penetrating the public discourse is one of the results of that. Thanks for your comments.

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  • So, once again Sera hits it out of the park. The thing about Sera is that she writes in a popular form about what only professionals usually write about, i.e., how calling someone (like the president) “crazy” is not stigmatizing to that person but stigmatizing to the actual crazy people. In other words, don’t blame me for your violent racist bullshit; the problem isn’t being crazy, like me, the problem is being an asshole like you, and I’m tired of taking the blame for your bullshit, motherfucker. If you really want to read the ultimate on this, you have to read a book about voicehearing called “Voices of Reason, Voices of Insanity: Studies of Verbal Hallucinations” that has an article about how every time a schizo kills someone, he is identified in the newspapers immediately as a schizo (“Howard Johnson, a schizophrenic, killed his father last night” is the lead, immediately associating schizophrenia with violence), when everyone knows that schizos are no more violent than anyone else, whereas no one who kills someone is immediately identified as a diabetic, which is also a condition that has no history of violence. It’s a brilliant chapter in the book, probably the best one. Maybe if we all start walking around and saying, yeah, he was a real fucking asshole, and he drove a taxi and he lived on that side of town and he had cancer and he killed people, maybe the public would start to believe that driving a taxi while living on that side of town while fighting with cancer is a serious, serious danger sign.

    Sera, one day you and I are going to start our own magazine. Some day it will happen. If I have to slave in New York 8 days a week to pay for it, it will happen. Bank on it.

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  • I am glad to see that someone beside this author and myself also recognizes that:

    1.) Raising awareness is a vital first step in the process of societal change.

    2.) That after raising awareness, we need to begin to push for actual change. It is not enough merely to speak out. We have to actually push for REAL change, and this does not mean attending conferences all the time or merely publishing our views. Those are vital, yes, in spreading the word; but they are not the end goal. The end goal is completely changing the system to a new one. We need to remember that.

    3.) That actual change takes place, whatever it takes to get there. I am not personally comfortable with allying ourselves with other transectional movements, because a) we will always be put last, when confronted with other, much bigger racial and/or sexual and or/gender movements, so we need to stand on our own, and b) because we are not actually concerned with anything that resembles the same issues. We are not concerned about the color of our skin, or the language we speak, or about what genitalia we possess or don’t possess. We are concerned about the content of our mental experience, and that means that we are not actually the same kind of movement as other transectional movements are. We are mental; they are physical. We are all social, but their form of social is not the same as ours. A black schizophrenic is still treated in the same outcast way by black society as he/she is by white society, here in America, which shows that it is not a problem of skin color but a problem of how others perceive and label our behavior and our mental experiences. We should not confuse the issue. A schizophrenic is dealing with a mentally based societal problem, which is social, but not what a black person or a woman or anyone else is dealing with, which is also social but not at all the same thing. And we should NOT ally ourselves with any groups that would take our support to help themselves and then ignore us when we need theirs. This is simple politics. Don’t waste your time on a fake ally. Work for your own cause. Don’t lose sight of what you want. And never forget what you are really about. And allying ourselves with others is one of the worst mistakes we could make. We would lose all our own time working for others, and get nothing ourselves. Let’s be sensible.

    Best,
    Eric Coates

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  • I will freely admit that I have not read all the comments, as it looked like a small book unto itself. But I am sure, having read your post, that you stimulated a lot of intelligent discussion. Certainly some of the names that I saw would suggest that.

    I am going to instead make a comment in solidarity with you. I began to believe, a couple years ago, that MIA (and the conferences, most likely) was basically preaching to the choir and that no one, at least not in this movement, was actually getting anything real done in terms of changing things. I began to believe that if anything was really, really going to change, that we would have to go out on our own and do things independently. That is why I left for a while. And while I am not yet certain that anything is very different from that, I am now focusing my own articles and my own efforts on how to change things for real.

    I will be writing very soon about the actual cost of the “mental health” system, in the hopes that by taking people’s attention away from “efficacy” and instead focusing it on their bottom dollar as well as efficacy (“Why isn’t anything getting done when we’re paying this much?”) I might spread the conversation out beyond our own little group and maybe reach a wider public. That’s just one thing I’m doing. Public information is still a consideration. But I’m doing more than that.

    In addition, myself and a friend of mine are thinking of hosting a virtual conference in which we can begin to address the language of it all. As the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states, the shape of your language is the shape of the world. In other words, the words you think in control how you think. And if we want to change things, we need to adopt a revolutionary new language which actually represents our own experience if we want it to ever be honestly represented and then to change how things are done.

    I hope to see you there. You are obviously a very brightly shining light, and I can only imagine that you will contribute much to our cause if you continue to be honest enough to make the kind of statement that you did. We don’t need cowards. We need mavericks. You might be one of them.

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