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.
There are serious, serious, serious medical consequences to having a diagnosis. You are, quite simply, not listened to, and your needs are almost NEVER taken seriously. Something needs to be done to seriously, seriously, seriously reform the system, soup to nuts.
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.
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.
Robert, thanks for taking the time to respond. Yes, I thought the other additions were valuable and obviously required a bit of research to put together, so thanks very much. My apologies if I was a bit over the top in my protestations.
I’ll be producing all my early work narative-style essays very soon. If Robert Whitaker wants, the intruduction is his to write, but only if he really wants.
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.
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?
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.
Absolutely outstanding. The best synopsis of the causes in a person’s life I have ever read. Only Paris Williams has done this well describing “schizophrenia” studies in the first couple chapters of his book on psychosis. Congratulations, Dr. Read. And a brilliant summary by the author as well.
Yes, there are countless people with experience more frustrating, overwhelming, and intense than mine. I didn’t mean to start a competition, so for that I apologize.
My sympathies — if that’s not offensive — to you and your wife. I think I understand the kind of difficulties you describe.
You have all my sympathy, and I do appreciate now how important lithium is for SOME people. For me it was inappropriate, but I definitely hear what you had to say.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Glad you liked the essay, Bradford. I’m sure we’ll run into each other on the street again soon, and we might even have a coffee or a slice of pizza, if you like. 🙂
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Thanks very much for being there for your daughter through her difficulties and for trying to understand what needs to be done for her in such a considerate and thoughtful way. I owe a lot to a mother such as yourself.
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.
I’m not sure what you mean, janeliz. “How” did she get me off lithium? She simply had it discontinued, and they gave me something else instead. She was the psychiatrist in charge at ISU, where I was, so she could do that.
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.
Very important stuff. Thanks for posting about this. The DSM is a terribly misguided book for all the reasons you say that psychologists talk about here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Very clever. It reminds me of Prof. Bentall’s proposition that happiness is a mental disorder, with symptoms of causing you to feel giddy and to engage in spontaneous, impulsive behavior.
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.
Good to know that you all didn’t give up on your battle. Congratulations on the settlement, and do — please — continue to pursue justice for the victims, both those who survived and those who didn’t, who have been ignored for too long. Thank you.
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.
I imagine that every state has its own variations on the procedure, but the enforcement of AOT usually involves the police. If you aren’t taking your meds or aren’t showing up for appointments, they consider this a violation of your AOT requirements, and then the cops come and drag you back to the state hospital.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, I meant another country. You can get a travel visa and move to a very inexpensive country and then seek asylum once you get there. This is what I myself may do at some point.
There actually already is an underground railroad for people trying to escape the system. You might not have heard about it, because they keep themselves very quiet, but they do exist already.
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.
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.
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.
Also, I have a supplementary document that addresses the AOT people’s complaints that covers many of these subjects. Don’t worry, I’ve got this covered from all angles. Not that it will do me any good.
Thank you. I don’t have time to find an attorney around here (very rural) who could do this, but if I could I would. In the meantime, I am submitting my own letter ahead of time in the hopes that it will be read. I don’t expect it to be, but I had to make the effort.
There is a whole separate section for submitting art, which you can find by looking for the art section on the right hand side of the page, where it lists the contact information to contact that editor and submit art.
Thank you for your time-consuming and considerate reply. Why no one with legal experience has yet orgnanized such a body is outside my understanding. Certainly I know of a few people who would be capable of starting such a movement. Perhaps I will contact a few of them and see what they say.
Thank you for the information. I have heard about other states as well that do not have AOT arrangements and do not follow the arrangements made in other states. They seem more attractive all the time.
Congratulations on your success. I also got off scot free for many years, but it was after I withdrew from drugs and had a dangerous neurofeedback session that I became psychotic again and checked myself into a hospital, where they promptly stripped me of my rights. Good luck to you in the future.
Thank you for the suggestion. In regards to your earlier comment, I also do not believe this letter will make any difference at all in the resolution of my case. Nevertheless, I am the sort of person who keeps fighting back, no matter how hopeless the cause, and so I had to write it.
Thank you for your story. All too common. Even in parts of Africa, those perceived to have mental afflictions are chained to trees very often. This sort of thing must end. The only questions are: when? and: what do we have to do to stop it?
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.
Thanks for your very enlightening and obviously time-consuming reply — I appreciate the effort. You did a better job of explaining my four points than I did, but I was going for brevity, not the whole experience itself.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I thought I was in, as you describe it, active neurofeedback. The passive form, where things are simply done to your brain without any control of what’s happening, strikes me as extremely perilous. Thank you for your clarification between the two.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for your response. I am not simply opposed to neurofeedback, but it seems to me that at this point what they are doing is essentially experimenting on people to see what happens. That’s not what I signed up for. I will, however, do my best to keep an open mind about it all.
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.
Thanks for your reference to the article. Neurology, as it is currently practiced, is a brand-new field with almost limitless potential for damage as well as possible enhancement of human abilities, but I happen to believe that letting nature do its thing like it has for a few million years now is probably the best course — especially with my experience of it all.
“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.
Thanks for the interview. Never having been the victim of sexual assault, it’s important to get that perspective and how it relates to psychiatric assault.
Thank you. And yes: Cool Hand Luke, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I consider it my moral duty to resist, if not for myself, then for others — or I did then, but I’m older and much too tired now to fight back that way again.
Yes, I have been force-sedated a few times. I have also been forced to take Haldol, which, as you probably know, can cause some pretty severe akithisia. Why? Is this some kind of contest about who’s had it worse, or was it maybe just that I eventually figured out how to deal with the system better than some other people have?
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.
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.
I’m glad to hear that you were able to figure it out. Maybe if more people paid attention to real medicine, we could avoid some, even if only some, of the needless drugging. Good luck to you, your daughter, and the rest of your family.
You’re right, Frank: just going along with what they say is usually the quickest way out.
That said, I have asked a psychiatrist why they were releasing me — what had made them decide on that course of action. What the psychiatrist said was, “We don’t feel we can help you.”
I’ve still got a few months of AOT left. Thanks for asking. Like you, I also act Normal in public if I can — though there have been some notable exceptions to that rule.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you. I hadn’t actually looked at your project, since I’m not actively a parent and didn’t think it would apply to me. However, I liked what I read and it gave me another point of view on a couple things. Thanks again.
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.
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.
This is a very important but largely neglected aspect of drugging people: all those who are reduced to this kind of state by antipsychotics, which, if you want to look at it that way, could be said to be whole point. Thanks for this report.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am a great fan of Dr. Healy’s work, and I would also like to thank you, Mr. James Moore, for what is your usual well-informed and insightful questions. (You are also a hell of a radio voice!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for this summation of where the genetic research stands. I was familiar with much but not all of this, so it’s good to know that someone like you is staying on top of it all. Valuable information indeed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Interesting. Wouldn’t have ever thought of increased weight as an eventual effect. Perhaps their metabolisms get burned out and so they gain weight. I suppose this will be looked into even more closely soon.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you, sir. With my only primitive Spanish (at best, believe me!), I can see that you got the idea. What a wonderful thing that this has crossed the language barrier! My best to you, sir, as you move ahead. A friend once told me that they say: Muerte o suerte! Maybe that’s how it works for us. Bon chance!
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.
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.
If anyone has had the patience to read this far, I would like to suggest that you watch the Rachel Maddow show from just last night, which was brought to my attention by my own long-suffering mother after she read this article. This specific show segment deals with eugenics (the genetics-based hypothesis of human superiority/inferiority):
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.
Thank you, sir. If you choose to do so, my email is [email protected], and I would very much like to see what you have in terms of how we in the United States were doing things in regards to eugenics. That would make a very good research project — people need to be informed about these things.
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.
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.
Thank you very much. Most people don’t realize how very tuned in most psychotics actually are, and it seems that you’re one of us. I welcome your contribution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As a young man, who was bullied and abused and generally made to feel like I was an odd individual (I was simply more verbal and a little smarter than the people around me: a geek, in other words), I came to the conclusion as an angry young adolescent that it was more important to be yourself than it was to fit in with everyone else. In other words, I came to believe what Emerson talked about in his essay “Self-Reliance”: “whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.” And this applies to what this research talks about. It is not important to feel happy so much as it is important to be who you genuinely are, whether that involves some anger or not (and I would point out that some social conditions of the countries that are described as
“less developed” might involve some social conditions, like poverty and blatant oppression, that might produce very, very natural feelings of resentment, anger, and sadness) and that it is actually MORE adaptive to feel those feelings than to simply feel bliss as you make lots of money and eat at fancy restaurants in America, where you might actually start to feel kind of inauthentic. It is, after all, more natural to be an angry black woman in the United States, who is fighting to change things and who has respect for herself, than to be a white man who goes to his office job every day in resignation to the white, privileged, capitalist system that gives him his big paycheck and his worthless existence. Thank you again. Good article. Being you and in tune with your actual surroundings, I believe, makes you happier. Dr. Martin Luther King was surrounded with some pretty horrible stuff, I imagine, but I also imagine that he was very happy in how he responded to it.
I know that I have been put on drugs that cost, most of the time, about $2,000 a month. I am at present given a shot every month (against my will) that costs about that. So my question is: is it really that it’s too expensive to pay for therapy? I don’t think it is, when you consider what they pay now for me to be drugged. What I think is that the money simply isn’t supplied for THAT specific form of “treatment.” The drug companies get every penny they want. People who actually help other people are, on the other hand, starved of any funds. What do you think?
This is an incredible piece of work, sir. Thank you so much. I’m sure that SAMHSA is going to sit up and pay very close attention to this. We who write for MIA may feel at times that we’re screaming in a vacuum. We are, however, the heart of the loyal opposition itself, and in reality, I’m sure that whatever appears on this site is very closely attended to by all of the powers that be, from Big Pharma to Washington, and you just fired the shot that starts the Civil War. Congratulations on your fine work.
I am not in any way a fan of antipsychotics, and I am fully aware that the bias of this webzine is against them. I am myself a writer for this webzine, and the last thing I would want to do is to support the use of drugs. However, in the spirit of fairness and science, it must be admitted that you have said that antipsychotic use is associated with better functioning, and this cannot be ignored.
I have myself been on psych wards, and I have myself seen how various individuals who were psychotic and/or dangerous (I have been both threatened and assaulted by such individuals on psych wards) have actually improved, and improved greatly, with the use of antipsychotics. I have myself also benefited from them at various times. Now, I don’t actually like their use, or approve of it over the long term, but it is simply an undeniable fact that sometimes — SOMETIMES — the use of antipsychotics is helpful. Not always, but sometimes. And I think that this is worth thinking about. We are not here to condemn Big Pharma. That is what I usually do, but that is not our purpose in being here. It is to find out what helps, not what gets in the way.
Thank you for your article. I find, when reading your work, that you are succinct, pithy, and very informative. Thank you.
Thank you for your article, which is clearly and succinctly written.
I would like to make two suggestions for two anomalies that you point out in your article for which the authors of the study apparently have no answer. They are both social explanations.
First, you point out that children exposed to antidepressants need fewer special needs classes but miss more of their final exams. Well, I hate to have to put it this way (I’m trying to keep it brief), but perhaps the children of depressed mothers are as intelligent as their mothers were (they may be impaired in some areas but fully functional in others, since not all forms of intelligence are the same), and yet they are also disillusioned. Depression, after all, seems to come out of life circumstances, and if your parents were smart enough to notice the problems of the world and of their own circumstances and perhaps become depressed, then you too might be 1) pretty smart also, and 2) disillusioned enough to blow off your final exams, since none of it really matters anyway. Why bother? This points to a social cause, not a biological one, for depression.
Second, you point out the increased rate of poverty among those who have parents who used antidepressants. You might need to have actually been in a psych ward at some point yourself, or have been caught in a probation system or a prison system or any other kind of social system that we currently have, but you do not, in general, ever see rich people in psych wards. Rich people get to go somewhere else. Rich people do not end up in the social systems like probation or prison, and if they do, they get the very nice form of it all. And so, once again, you have a social determinant for who ends up on psych drugs: poor people, who don’t have a fancy lawyer to show up and bail them out when they get in trouble, and who get steamrolled into a cut-and-dried form of “treatment” by a stressed-out, overworked psychiatrist whom you might, if you’re lucky, see for five minutes a couple times a week, if that.
Thank you, sir. I realize that many people have very strong feelings about all of this, but I do also feel that there are, believe it or not, legitimate questions on both sides of every debate among us here on MIA. Is there one everywhere in the outside world? No, because people are only too willing to manipulate discussions to serve their own purposes. But here on MIA, I believe that most people are sincere, even though we have some Big Pharma lurkers out there, and so I really do see both sides of it.
I hope and pray that you and your wife are well. It takes patience and kindness and forbearance. Good luck.
I’m sorry, Mr. Blankenship, but I don’t believe that I have suggested here that anyone is less human than anyone else. However, I do believe, and I know from experience, that when you are in a psychotic state that you may simply be living in a different version of reality than others are, and that the expectations about responsibility that apply to the world that others are in but you are not in might not be responsibly applied to you. I am not in any way suggesting that there is a special category for some people, or that they are some sort of privileged “child” who is allowed to rampage as they want to. If you get right down to it, I believe that society should protect itself from dangerous, irresponsible people. But I also believe that there are times when society should make allowances for what someone is going through. That’s all I meant to say.
Thank you for thoughtfully presenting this article.
Perhaps I misunderstand your personal comments, but I thought that they actually represented views similar to those of Dr. Thomas Szasz, for whom I have the deepest respect. His illumination of the myth of mental illness is fundamental to what I believe. I do, however, have two issues with Dr. Szasz. He was, after all, a very right wing conservative, a libertarian, and I believe that while he had important points to make, that he was mistaken about the fundamental nature of two things in regards to “mental illness.” Both of these issues involve the idea of personal responsibility.
Let me say first of all that psychosis and schizophrenia, when you first experience them, are usually quite devastating experiences. You might find yourself truly believing that the President is trying to kill everyone, or that your neighbor is murdering people and burying them in the basement, and you might believe this totally and sincerely. You might, then, try to kill either the President or your neighbor whom you think is murdering people, and you might do this not because you are a malingering asshole, which is how Dr. Szasz essentially describes such people, but because you sincerely believe that you are helping people. This is not to justify or support such behavior. But there is, in fact, a case to be made for the insanity defense and the idea that you are not culpable for your actions in a criminal way. It’s not that you weren’t acting responsibly. It’s that you simply didn’t have the connection with the world that would enable you to act as other would act, but you were, in fact, trying to be responsible. And I don’t say that because I haven’t known people who were in mental hospitals, having used the insanity defense to escape personal responsibility for actions that they were fully aware were wrong. But there are some people who are so out of it (I would have been one of them) that they are truly unable to understand what their culpability might have been. This is a basic issue that goes to the heart of antipsychiatry’s personal responsibility issue, and I think that Dr. Szasz, as a right wing libertarian, got it wrong.
As a personal note, I have not only seen people abuse the system to escape culpability, I have also seen people who were genuinely way out there who were dangerous. I have been threatened and personally assaulted by such individuals, and yet these very same individuals, when restored to their usual selves, have sometimes come to me, admitted that what they did was wrong, and apologized. So there is hope, but there are also times when people simply cannot be held responsible for what they have done, but without taking all sense of responsibility away from them for the rest of their lives.
Deeper than that is the concept of disability. There is, quite simply, no way that some people who suffer from psychosis or schizophrenia could work. None at all. I know that I, personally, would have been so distracted by the phenomena that I saw happening around me that I would have followed them, become wrapped up in them, and been unable either to recall what my work assignment was or to even understand its importance in the light of what I was experiencing. Are there actually people who use their diagnosis to create excuses for themselves and malinger? Yes, certainly there are. But the reason that this is accepted as an excuse for claiming disability is actually valid, because some of us are disabled in that fashion. So Dr. Szasz, while doing an admirable job of pointing out one very small problem has actually stigmatized those who are having a genuine problem, which I know is real, because I had it. Now, denying people the role of social responsibility is in fact used as a justification for taking their power of making their own decisions away from them, and I deplore that situation and the people who do it. However, there are actually circumstances in which a person cannot be a responsible member of society as we normally construe it, and using Dr. Szasz’s rationale about it all is not sensible. Dr. Szasz saw social interaction as games. I do not. There is a real game element to it all, but it is certainly not the sum of what interaction or psychology is about.
I find it unfortunate that antipsychiatry, in its efforts to create liberation for the “mentally ill,” is willing to close its eyes to the reality that these people (myself among them) actually face, simply in order to embrace an ideological position that is intended to liberate us.
In other words, it’s not cut and dried. There ARE two sides to these questions, and simply brushing them away is neither intellectually honest nor psychologically sensitive. These are the two problems that I have with antipsychiatry’s excessively ideological position in these two areas.
Thank you, sir. I have read this twice. Once earlier in the day, and then again tonight.
I have been held captive in the psychiatric hospital a couple of times, and I always wonder what it is like for the kids. Here in New Hampshire we have two different wards in the state hospital for children. There is the one for the very young kids, like eleven or twelve years old and less (the pre-pubescents) and we have one where the older kids are. It’s strange. You seem them in the building, always in a group (the adults can get individual building “privileges,” but the kids don’t), most often as they are coming from the gym, where they engage in some serious play time and exercise, or from the library. They have the irrepressible spirits of children. I have always watched them, and they just don’t look disturbed in any way. They just look like kids. I’m sure that they have lives that are as complex as what the adults in the hospital go through. An institution is still an institution. A label is still a label. A psychiatrist is still a psychiatrist, and drugs are still drugs. Being away from home and a regular life is being in a kind of penitentiary, and you still want to escape.
Thanks for sharing this. I really do always wonder what it’s like for the kids. You are obviously a humane and decent individual, and it’s nice to know that some people do escape. I am something of a nut about wanting to know the history of my state hospital, and I have had mental health workers who had been working at the hospital for thirty or forty years tell me the stories about the children they had seen who then spent their entire lives at the hospital. There was one girl that I was told about who had a bizarre, Kafkaesque story. Her father had simply left his daughter in the hospital, a perfectly normal girl, while he traveled to Europe on business, and unfortunately he died while she was there. She then spent her entire life as an inmate of the hospital. She had no one on the outside to help her leave — to find a job and an apartment and actually be able to leave. She was trapped there. I’m not saying that she was a better or more deserving person simply because she had never had problems. Far from it. But once you are caught in the system, it is almost impossible for most of us to really ever escape.
I hope to see more of your writing soon. You obviously have a very important story to tell.
First of all, thanks very much for your article. I appreciate how it succinctly and clearly lays out some of the issues involved, and that it retains a humane sense of fallibility about one’s own decisions about what is right and what is wrong. It’s refreshing to see.
Second, I doubt very much that this was a case of “mental illness.” I believe it was a case where the physical source(s) of his physical pain were simply unknown, which is a medical and scientific problem, not a psychological one. It is a reflexive habit of medical doctors these days to refer physical problems that they don’t understand to a psychiatrist. I believe this should be addressed, and that it should stop.
And third, I have had plenty of time to consider whether mental difficulties are themselves a sufficient reason to kill oneself. There are two answers to this: 1) I believe that suffering is suffering, and that’s all there is to it, and you can die if you want to, and 2) that even more important is your right to die, for any reason, and at any time, and there shouldn’t even BE a debate about “mental illness” at all. The whole debate is a false dichotomy, or so I believe, and I think it should be stated clearly in those terms so we can all get over it and allow people to exercise free choice about their own fates.
If God (I happen to believe in God, but have no problem with anyone who doesn’t: I was an atheist for a very long time myself) wants to keep you alive for some reason of His own, He will. Otherwise we should all get out of the way and permit people to exercise their own God-given will to make decisions about their own lives.
Thanks again for the article. I hope I see more of your commentary in the future.
I’ve always thought — or at least I have in recent years, since I got old enough to think about it and had a reason to question what voices really are — that it was basically a case of words developing as a grunt to get another hominid’s attention, and then pointing. And then after a while they realized that there was no need to point. They could just grunt in the right way, and it got the whole job done.
I’d be happy to check out what you say about John Mace if you could send me a good link. You probably know some.
I like that phrase “symptomatic beliefs.” I hope I remember that one.
However, I hope I can dissuade you from the idea that I think that ALL voices are evolution-based developments of the brain. I believe that our own internal voice, the one that everyone has, is from evolution, but that voices, so-called — the kind that voicehearers hear in addition to the usual voice — is NOT evolution-based.
Think of it this way: God let us develop on our own (you might call that free will, although I don’t really think of it in those exact terms) and that then he might decide to pick a few people here and there to talk to himself. Or to have other beings talk to. I really do not believe that ALL voices are from our own brains. In fact, I’m pretty confident that it’s very different from that.
Thanks for your comments. Glad to hear that you’re doing well with it all.
I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear exactly what I was writing about. I was NOT addressing the subject of the kinds of voices that voicehearers hear. Those are entirely different from that voice that EVERYONE has inside them, which sounds like your own voice talking to you. That is an entirely different affair. Also, I am not at all in agreement with the idea that voices (plural, as in voicehearers, not “normal” people) come from inside. I very much believe in God, for instance, and that he can talk to you and sometimes does. I believe that my voices are external, not internal. But I will be getting to that subject on my blog in another week or two, or whenever the editors choose to publish it. I hope you will find more to agree with in that one.
I really do agree with most of what you say. I’m not sure about the lacking accountability part — not being held responsible for what you do — because society does, after all, need to protect itself from harmful human beings who might prey on or hurt others, and punishment (and attempted reform) is sometimes necessary if society IS going to protect itself. Aside from that, I agree with you.
This is a very interesting discussion. I would be curious to know: are you a voicehearer? It sounds like you aren’t, since it is easier to discount the idea of an outside force when you haven’t been exposed to things like voices that you can clearly tell are NOT your own, and then you see enough things in the outside world that cannot be easily accounted for by the usual empirical world. Especially when the voices either tell you that something going to happen, or tell you what to do, and then when you do it, something extraordinary happens.
I’m also not sure about the stripping layers away part. I think that’s a very deceptive metaphor that comes out of an outdated (i.e., we’ve grown past that conception of things) form of psychology. They’ve been talking about a “subconscious,” for instance, since long before either you or I were born. Yet there is no scientific proof for its existence at all. So: we can build nuclear reactors and spaceships headed to Mars, but we just haven’t found where this subconscious is located in the brain? I’m sorry, but I just don’t buy it. There are things we do that are NOT conscious, but I don’t think there’s a real SUBconscious, if you know what I mean.
When you talk about “stripping thoughts away,” I think what you’re really talking about is learning to do 2 things. 1) You learn to see through what that prefrontal cortex (what I call the parasite) is saying, and this is what we achieve when we become mindful, whether that’s through the Buddhist tradition or the Jewish tradition or, hell, you just learn it on your own. Buddhists say that some people are just naturally enlightened and they never need to learn about it at all; it just comes naturally. And the other thing I think that you’re really talking about is 2) how hardwired many of our thoughts and habits are, right in our brain structure, and that you can learn to spot what’s there. For instance, I have what is now an instinctive reaction to much of life that is to simply relax about it. Yet when I was younger, I had a lot (and I mean a lot) of social anxiety and fear about the bigger world and about school. What I did was teach myself, through many years of effort, to basically just shake it off. It is almost impossible for anything to make me worry any more. And that was basically just a case of rewiring my own brain so that it doesn’t do the same thing any more. These are not “layers” after all. In no way does the brain resemble an onion. It’s more like a circuit board, where you can solder new connections into place.
Anyway, sorry for the long ramble, but the subject interests me. Nice talking, and thanks for the thoughtful responses.
I don’t want to intrude on your own personal discussion here, but there is actually a Buddhist theory that the mind itself is the sixth sense. In other words, there is vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell, all of which come from the outside world. Buddhism — Tibetan Buddhism, at least — says that the mind is also a sense organ. We don’t know where our thoughts come from. They just appear and disappear. And in this sense, they are just like the other senses. We can’t explain where it comes from, what it’s really doing, or where it will go. The mind, the thought process, is in other words just another sense organ. So: are you responsible for your own thoughts? Do you create them? Probably not.
So good luck with it all, and I hope you have a good discussion about it all.
First of all, although I am an actual voicehearer, I am not talking about “voices.” I am talking about the same voice that you and I have both heard in our own heads. Second, I thank you that you think I have actually summed up a lot of what’s hurting people. I’m glad about that.
But to move on to the rest of what you have to say. YOUR internal voice may very well be different from mine. Yours may be helpful in some ways, just as my own was very, very helpful in some ways. And hurtful in some ways. But it really is not the same thing as who I feel I am. I am very much that deeper sense of my own self, and not the other thing that is talking to me. Your own internal voice seems to be more constructive than mine was. Even in my the realms of my own hypothesis, there is a lot of room for variation. Perhaps those of us who are loners, who are writers, who are a little bit too selfish — and I have been all of those things — don’t have a parasite that is quite as benign and helpful as other people might have? Perhaps you are pointing something out here that I hadn’t thought of — our human variation. Perhaps for some people it is not a parasite, but merely symbiotic. I can accept that idea. It’s a good one.
However, I will have to disagree with you about “it’s not part of me.” I am quite confident that this thing that used to talk in my head was NOT, quite clearly, part of the me that is part of my deeper awareness. No. Not at all, and that’s not trying to disown it. It just wasn’t me, and I remember quite clearly how it has tried to impose itself on me. So maybe you actually have a symbiotic relationship with it, while mine is a little more . . . predatory. It might be just human variation. Or maybe it’s the Devil — that snake which is the power of speech — coming in to hurt us.
I appreciate your idea of how evil actually serves what is good. That is a very old idea, actually, that comes from at least the time of the middle ages. In Dante’s Inferno, the Devil is trapped at the bottom of Hell, which is not made of fire, actually, but of ice. The worst traitors — and the Devil is a traitor, to God Himself — are trapped in this ice at the bottommost layer of Hell. And the Devil, who was an angel at one time, still has wings. And as he flaps his wings, trying to escape the ice, he also creates such a powerful wind that it cools the ice and keeps it frozen. That is how it all works. The evil that we do keeps us trapped in evil, simply because of who we are. And the good that we do also frees us to do more good, because that is who we are.
The voice inside is also a part of that. I’m glad to have talked to you. I hope we meet again.
Psychosis is a hell of an experience, isn’t it? Glad you made it through. I’m psychotic all day long, every day, but it’s manageable for me most of the time. I would go back to “normal” any day, because it does get pretty exhausting. Nevertheless it’s a pretty remarkable thing to experience, and I wouldn’t be the same person without it. In fact, the old me is long gone. I hope you get a chance to revisit if you want.
I know: who says that? But psychosis is a hell of a trip, and if it isn’t too horrifying, it’s something that everyone should experience at least once. There’s nothing like it.
I can tell that you are also another psych-ward survivor, or at least another one of us from the streets. We are a special breed, that’s for sure.
I think of myself as being bilingual. I can talk psychotic or I can talk normal. I love talking to psychotics. I love talking to normal people too. Anyway, I really appreciate the poetry. It’s great. I have a whole wall here at home of psych ward art. It’s great. And I can talk in rhyme all day long, just like a rapper. It’s fun. Tiring, but fun.
I hope that you do well. I am a REAL voicehearer — all day, every day, at times — so I know how painful and troubling and hopeless it can all seem. I do truly hope that you get to the other side of it all. I have, at least for now, and I wouldn’t want anyone to get stuck there. Good luck, and God bless.
I’m not interested in “promotion,” as it were (not to denigrate what you’re about, if that’s what you do), but I would certainly be happy to get out there and help the voicehearing cause. I’m also interested in psychology in general, so I would be happy to talk. I will email very soon with my own contact information.
Thank you for this report. The business practices of Big Pharma are more than familiar to me, but I hadn’t been following this particular story closely.
Perhaps we could also have denial-based therapy, collusion-based empathy, and non-existential based decision making. What do you think?
I think that we could expand the healthcare system infinitely — if it hasn’t gotten there already (about which I have my suspicions — if only we created enough hyphenised adjectives to describe it all. We could even soon have raw-based cooking, shrimp-based gigantism, and even, most unbelievable of them all, human-based living. Wow!
I would like only to add this: I do not believe in “rebound”, but I do believe that when you come off the drugs, in the physical universe that God created, that you do, once again, enter his universe. There is no “rebound.” What there is is a kind of re-entry into God’s world, and that He created it this way on purpose. I am not trying to discredit any “science” of the brain. I am simply trying to emphasize the power of the world that God made.
I believe in the gradual discontinuation of drugs, but I do not believe in taking years to do it. I believe that one drug should be discontinued at at time — the most powerful one — but that each drug can be discontinued in a matter of a few months.
Schizophrenia is a whole other topic, and the “rebound syndrome” is something that I do not believe exists. Rebound is not a result of drugs.
Think of it this way. God knew exactly what human beings were a few thousand years ago. Religious — which is to say, schizophrenic — experience has been with us that whole time. Jesus and Mary, if they were with us now, would be subjected to a whole range of drug and neuro treatments.j
There is no such thing as rebound. What there is is a re-emergence of the experience of God, which is nothing at all like what is described as “schizo” in the DSM. It is simply the re-emergence of the God experience — which is, yes, very painful and very difficult and very, very hard to get through. But there is no drug rebound. There is simply the re-emergence of the spiritual experience. And that is very different.
I was myself a psychiatric prisoner for a very long time. Although there were no criminal charges involved — which very likely spared me the fate you are going through — I was also forced to endure the system, not because I was a problem, but because I resisted it.
I am very, very, very interested in your case and will make it a priority to see that it is righted.
I am the former bestselling author of “Hearing Voices” and a former blogger for this site.
Issues of civil liberties are paramount for me. I will do what I can to see that you are freed.
My email is: [email protected]. If you or your trusted contacts wish to communicate with me, this is where you should do it.
It’s time for the bullshit to stop. In solidarity with you, my brother and fellow prisoner, I can only wish you courage to endure. I know it’s hard. I haven’t had to deal with it as bad as you, but I’ve been there. Love and peace, brother.
While it’s probably great for you to make thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars from giving all your speeches (look at the top of the website for Robert Whitaker’s speaking schedule!), I guess that there hasn’t yet been enough of my people who are poisoned and killed by metabolic syndrome, and whose lives are rendered painful and meaningless before that happens, for you to get off your lazy ass and actually do the real reporting.
The reporting that actually takes guts. I know, it’s really hard to cross swords with Allen Frances and Ronald Pies from a position of privilege, cause that must be really, really hard. I know it is, because you spend so much time telling us all about it that it must be a really, really big thing for you. Cause that’s the most important thing for us all to hear about. While millions of my people die. Millions and millions of them. Metabolic syndrome — you know what that is, right? Weight gain that distorts your body and makes life miserable. High blood pressure, and hyperlipidemia, and diabetes. Hey, if you’re lucky, you might even have them cut off your legs and even go blind before you die of a heart attack or a massive infection, twenty-five years before your time! But thank God that Robert Whitaker got to wear the black hat in his debate against Ronald Pies or Allen Frances! And now we can all hear about it again!
Thank God that Mr. Robert Whitaker is on our side! He’s so bold and courageous. He hasn’t actually held anyone to account yet, but he’s a really tough customer. He even almost won the Pulitzer once.
You’re a journalist — and, according to most reliable and honest people, a pretty good one. You were even part of a team that was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, right? Of course, I have a couple of those in the family, so I know what they actually mean, but hey? At least you got that much.
One wonders why, after fifteen or twenty years of studying this subject, and reading all those medical reports and all those drug studies, and being paid large sums to trot all over the globe and give big speeches to all those audiences, why you haven’t yet reached a fairly obvious conclusion — one that should be fairly obvious to a big-time, almost-Pulitzer winner like you who runs this big investigative website.
Which would be: Maybe the studies are designed NOT to reveal the information you’re looking for.
I mean, you know David Healy and everything, right? So maybe you could have noticed — and maybe even pointed out for everyone in your really big audience that’s so impressed by your really, really big brain — that maybe all those studies you like to talk about (over and over and over and over again) don’t contain the information you’re looking for because . . . they’re deliberately designed not to reveal those things?
Wow. What an idea! Would a major company — like a big pharmaceutical company, say? — actually HIDE what their drugs do?
Are you a student of history, Mr. Whitaker? Because I’m pretty sure that there’s another guy down there in Boston, also affiliated with Harvard, who wrote a book called “The Cigarette Century”, in which he described how Big Tobacco — “a specialized part of the pharmaceutical industry”, in their own words — used their so-called research and published information to cover up what they were doing.
Hmm. Maybe it’s time to be a little less timid about your conclusions and start asking why the studies don’t seem to supply the relevant information.
You might even get that Pulitzer if you did. Then you could run around and shoot your mouth off even more and even get higher fees for your speeches, and use even more psychiatric conferences as stops on your book tours.
Thank you, Mr. Whitaker, for all that you and your wonderful staff are doing for the world. At some point in the future, they will write the history of our time, and they will write the history of what you did in the same terms as they write now about the Abolitionists who helped stop slavery. It’s truly that important, and I admire you and your staff, regardless of whatever minor disagreements we might have.
I have tried to increase my monthly donation, and the website wouldn’t let me do it. It told me that I couldn’t. You might want to check into how all that business stuff works.
Thanks, Sarah. It’s a pleasure to see it all summed up so concisely. Although I’m still relatively new to reaching out to others through online sources, it’s a pleasure to see that the “hundreds of groups” you speak of are forming, and that there are more and more of us every day who are starting to take some kind of action. Personally, I believe it is time for us to form a sort of Underground Railroad and start moving people outside the system to where they can get help. I don’t believe we can stop the Murphy Bill, unfortunately. Which doesn’t, of course, mean that we shouldn’t try. But the history of prejudice that got us into this position in the first place, where the whole industrial/psychiatric/neurological/pharmaceutical/prison complex was able to capitalize on our weakness to build their damaging model and to profit from it all is exactly what is giving them the money to fund people like Murphy, and to keep control of the conversation by funding the psychiatry programs and the research and the endless, endless, endless drug ads. This is not to say that I despair. But I do think about this question of how we are going to free ourselves for much of every day, and I don’t know yet what can be done. But I’m thinking about it all, and I’m sure that there are plenty of other people who know the moral rightness of our position who are thinking about it too, like you are. Anyway, thanks for the article. It was a pleasure to read.
I was thinking that you might do a blog entry on just that — alternative approaches that would be compliant with the UN. I know that I would certainly find it useful, and one thing I do have to complain about with MIA is that there isn’t enough attention given to the positive alternatives. I know that someone like me would certainly benefit from a summation, with citations, of what can be done to comply with the UN. Otherwise, if no one is in compliance, what hope is there to create something that IS in compliance? I don’t mean to create work for you, but that positive next step is clearly crucial to what we’re all trying to do here.
I hope I’m not too late to get your attention with a question regarding some of the contents of your writings. I am definitely now in the antipsychiatry camp, and I have read some of what you wrote about Canada’s violation of UN agreements about the forced treatment and incarceration of the mentally troubled. You seemed to suggest that the UN was very clear that such detainment of the “disabled” (I don’t consider myself disabled, but I guess we just have to deal with whatever language the agreements adopt) is illegal or unacceptable for the signatories of the agreement (I’m not sure what the exact language is) to engage in. What I did NOT find in your writing is what the alternatives are — i.e., rather than locking people up when they are, say, perceived to be unstable, what is done in other countries that are not in violation of the agreement? And how well does that work out for them? Even if you could simply point me in the direction of articles or books that might address that question, I would greatly appreciate it. I’m against the coercion, but I’m just wondering what is done in its stead by countries that do comply with UN standards of human rights.
I hope I’m not too late to get your attention with a question regarding some of the contents of your writings. I am definitely now in the antipsychiatry camp, and I have read some of what you wrote about Canada’s violation of UN agreements about the forced treatment and incarceration of the mentally troubled. You seemed to suggest that the UN was very clear that such detainment of the “disabled” (I don’t consider myself disabled, but I guess we just have to deal with whatever language the agreements adopt) is illegal or unacceptable for the signatories of the agreement (I’m not sure what the exact language is) to engage in. What I did not find in your writing is what the alternatives are — i.e., rather than locking people up when they are, say, perceived to be unstable, what is done in other countries that are not in violation of the agreement? And how well does that work out for them? Even if you could simply point me in the direction of articles or books that might address that question, I would greatly appreciate it. I’m against the coercion, but I’m just wondering what is done in its stead by countries that do comply with UN standards of human rights.
Your situation is one to which I have given a lot thought over the last few months. I was, until quite recently, a prisoner at New Hampshire Hospital in Concord, N.H., and the role and the feelings of the “mental health workers” and the nurses and even some of the psychiatrists was something that used to bother me. Obviously, you don’t get into those sorts of professions unless you start off with the belief on some level (1) that you care about people and (2) that you might be able to help in some way. Yet, when I looked around at what was, quite blatantly, a model based on nothing more than coercion and incarceration, and one where I was forced to take drugs and where I was taken down into restraints and isolated when I didn’t comply with whoever might be in charge, I couldn’t help but wonder what sorts of feelings were being felt by those people ass they manhandled me and forced a needle into my ass.
In particular, there was a small group of nurses and “mental health workers” who obviously went out of their way to be compassionate and responsive “caregivers”. Yet, when it came right down to it, they would respond in line with the goals of the very same force of coercion (going in to care for or watch a restrained “patient”, etc.) that I was doing my utmost to resist, and though they did so looking unhappy about it, they did it nonetheless.
I can see that not everyone, like some of the people I saw there, was a complete sellout who just wanted to uphold the system as it was then in operation. When I saw your comment about wondering what exactly “behavioral health” might be, I had to laugh, because I have wondered the exact same thing in the exact same words, and the only conclusion I could come to is that I just have no idea what “behavioral health” might be, unless one were to turn it into some kind of sick joke about not crashing your car through barriers on the highway and not having sex with someone who has a venereal disease. Seriously: what the hell is “behavioral health”? Can anyone answer that question without resorting to some circular explanation about “not harming yourself” or any of the other nonsense that is used as an excuse to forcibly drug people to “prevent harm”, especially when “harm” is usually the last thing that is being threatened? I have heard more rationalizations for brutality based on the excuse of “safety” than I could ever have imagined would be possible.
I salute your courage in openly stating your problems with your institution and in openly admitting what is going on there and how you feel about it. Unless others also question their consciences, nothing can change. On the other hand, I have a fear centered on when all the compassionate “caregivers” abandon the system: after all, who will be left behind to run them? How much worse will it get without people like you there, or without all the people I saw myself who wanted to genuinely help? In the end, the whole system will be run by willing and eager collaborators in oppression. I don’t suggest that you stay, because to do so is to be a collaborator, and yet one can understand the argument for trying to stick around and mitigate the harm being done. It’s a terrible conundrum, and I can only say that I admire your willingness to risk exposure and to speak up publicly about this terrible conflict. I wish you the best, and I mean that sincerely, even as someone who so recently had to put up with the very kind of coercion you’re talking about, even when it came from people who I could tell were very like you in their deepest beliefs. Good luck.
Awesome. All you have to do is point at the facts and their own publications, and the whole story comes apart. And thanks for pointing out the work done by Philip Hickey. He and Bonnie Burstow are personal heroes of mine for pointing out some things that just don’t get attention, like what psychiatry’s dependence on the drug theory, absolute and unaccountable authority, and endless mendacity are keeping us all prisoners. Thanks as always.
Thanks for your courageous post. One thing I’ll mention. When whistleblowers started coming down on Big Tobacco, they were only a fraction of the size of Big Pharma. I’m not saying you need to watch out for your life, but the bottom line is that speaking up this way to these kinds of companies can be dangerous. I just spent 4 months in a psychiatric hospital, where the first thing I told them was that I was an MiA author and an author of books about Hearing Voices, and they kept me a prisoner for much longer than could ever be justified.
Also, while I was there, a young woman came in who was a whistleblower on Medicare and the health industry. She was concerned when her family was overbilling Medicare, and she reported it to the FBI, I believe. The next thing she knew, she was a psychiatric “patient.”
People who speak up on these issues are in danger. Big Tobacco used to threaten people’s lives, and I wonder how Jeffrey Milligand, who blew the whistle on Y-1, is doing now. People who speak up when there is this kind of money on the line — $24 billion to market drugs to doctors in recent years, as opposed to the merely $4 billion it takes to paralyze the evening news with drug ads — tend to have problems. I can only caution anyone who speaks up, or they might have a fate like I did.
For 4 months I raged, argued, and tried to fight back. In the end I was drugged, against my will, and all the people who told me how “normal” I seemed came and went. I can only hope that this author, and others who speak out, will take precautions against the Big Pharma machine. It may not be very long before you too are “having problems,” according to the people around you.
In China, this is called being “mentally illed.” They actually have a word for it. It’s like when, in Russia, a dissident was jailed and sent off to a gulag, called a “psychiatric hospital.”
Please take all the cautions you can. You have a little too much courage for the current “system.”
A “conditional discharge” is New-Hampshire-speak for saying they can haul you back in any time they say. Technically, it means that 1) if you don’t take the meds, and they check your blood or your urine or whatever, and if the drugs aren’t there in the right levels, or 2) you, say, disagree with a social worker (“case worker”) or a psychiatrist, or, hell, the receptionist, I guess, then . . . you can be hauled back up to the state “hospital” and confined, with NO DUE PROCESS OF LAW, until they say.
This creates an interesting situation where, for instance, you could be hauled in if your “psychiatrist”, say, decides they don’t like you having a beer now and then. One of the most menacing aspects of the collusion between all the “health professionals” who think they know something about the mind (without ever having studied it, according to the syllabi of the psychiatric schools) is that now, with it all combined into one institution, with “mental health” and “substance abuse” all paired into one system, the pharmaceutical companies now control the whole ball of wax. If you’re distressed, say, from the loss of a loved one, and you have a couple drinks down at the local bar, they can now haul you in for having had that drink. What this means in practice is that, while charging you loads of moolah for a prescription for Attivan or Lorazepam or whatever they call it, you can now go to what is more or less a jail if you dare to indulge in a non-prescription, non-pharmaceutical company drug.
One of the most interesting aspects of my experience in the state institution was how nicotine was handled. I swear that 90% of the problems were caused by locked doors that no one could leave to go outside and have a cigarette. Rather than hand out some good nicotine gum, they handed out what was clearly some sort of substandard “polycrilex” nonsense that had virtually no impact, did it AT MOST every two hours, and then stood back and watched people scream and pound the counter for more.
That’s the new Psychiatric-Neurological-Pharmaceutical-Prison Complex at work. Watch and see what it does next. They just installed ARMOR on the front of the building. I’m not kidding.
Mr. N, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your words. I have the greatest respect for someone who managed to get through what you described without being trapped by the system and who has actually managed to come through it all, to disavow none of it, and to actually find words to say plainly what they felt they experienced without making any excuses for it or trying to redefine it or hush it up or squeeze it into some paradigm they either don’t believe in or would find artificial. I can only express my greatest respect for managing all of that and doing it with such seeming grace and wisdom that I can do little more than gesture toward it and say it’s there.
I recently went through a very similar experience, in a very similar geographical area (southwest New Hampshire), but I was not able to find the kind of community you are talking about, though I tried desperately to find one, and I was swept up in the “mental health system” (I hate to even use the words, but they have yet to be replaced, so that I feel like I am using the words of the oppressor to describe the very experience I am talking about in an alien, evil, and misleading language), and all in spite of my best efforts to avoid it. I was trapped, literally, at the New Hampshire Hospital for several months while going through what I think are very similar experiences to what you describe, as best I understand them, and I can only wish I had been able to reach someone like you and the groups you facilitate. Again, I tried, but failed to find anyone like you, failed to avoid the system, and now I am more or less trapped again, on a conditional discharge that denies the validity of my experiences and that forces me to take drugs, which I regard as poison.
In the coming days I will begin pubishing a regular blog for MIA in which I will describe my experience of this horrible “mental hospital,” and I will attempt to address the same sorts of issues you raised so eloquently and gracefully in your article. I can only hope that you will read it and contribute something to the discussion that ensues. I have the greatest respect for your points of view and for the Hearing Voices Network, and I remain, once and always, an admirer of the words you put down.
I see both sides of this issue. While it’s lamentable that people are put on antipsychotics, as I was for ten years (and was just forced to start them again when I couldn’t find a social support system like Soteria or Open Dialogue), I will say openly that I had great social support from my family and that it was indeed crucial. Without it, I would have been lost. I wish we didn’t have a system that forces us down the drug route, and I wish it was ALL socially based. That is what matters most to me and what I try to do with my time: give support to others around me. Even in a small town like my own, there are numerous individuals who need help on a daily basis, whether it’s something as simple as taking the time to talk to them, or taking the time and a little money to get someone a bottle of Benadryl so that when the antipsychotics akithisia (the tension and the shakes) gets too bad they can relax a little. At least this doctor — I wish we didn’t have to deal with them at all, but while we have to — is willing to look at something a little more than just the drugs. If we can start with people like that, maybe we can move the system back to where it used to be, where there were no drugs at all.
Thank you. I’m a big fan of what you’re doing, and while I know this isn’t a personal issue, it’s nice to get some response and know that you’re making a difference. You are.
I’ve always wondered what the difference is between “clinical” depression and other, theoretically non-clinical depression is. I suspect that what is going on there is that psychiatrists have figured out they can bullshit the system for a few more dollars, and drag out the “medication adjustment” period for a few more days, and fill the beds a little longer, and so on and so forth, with Medicare dollars as the bottom line and goal about it all. Is clinical depression “real depression”? Is non-clinical depression “real depression”? Or does it take some legitimizer in a lab coat to say so for your feelings to be real? Does a Medicare billing form make the difference?
First of all, I wanted to agree with what Andrew said about what Whitaker was really doing — looking at the real effects of these drugs, versus how they’re portrayed in the rhetoric/marketing of the psychiatrists, the pharmaceutical companies, and picked up without examination by the press — and that I had the same reaction I did when I read Kelly’s piece: that it just didn’t make sense, that it was disconnected from what we’re actually talking about. And I felt exactly the same way Richard did about keeping our focus on the issue we’re coming together around, not getting lost in accomodation or lost in the crowd, compromising our goals away for minor gains. When the piece in question appeared, I was so annoyed at the idea of “decentering” that I couldn’t resist replying at greater length than I might have. The main points were:
“First, I never got the impression that Robert Whitaker was trying to explain every change in disability (SSI/SSDI) as a consequence of psychotropic use. In fact, I’ve never gotten the impression that disability, per se, was even Mr. Whitaker’s larger concern. Mr. Whitaker is a medical journalist, and his focus is on medicine — specifically, on psychiatry, if I understand him correctly. While people tend to focus on his book Anatomy of an Epidemic, which talks about antidepressant use and the rise in disability, I see the focus on disability as a way of looking at the real-world effects of psychotropic use — in other words, psychiatric practice. The other book, which I’m sure you know but which people talk about less, is Mad In America, which focuses on the history of psychiatric treatment of “psychosis” and does not really focus on disability. Thus, the common theme of his work is psychiatry, and I see his discussion of disability as only one pathway — the one he has chosen to explore, possibly because it is a clear way to demonstrate what is really going on and what the long-term effects are of current psychiatric practice — to talk about psychiatric practice in general. So, to bring it back around to the unfortunate title of your piece — that Mr. Whitaker “missed the mark” in how he talks about the rise in disability due to the use of psychotropic meds, I think that it might actually be you who missed the point. He’s not talking about everything that’s happening with disability, because that’s not his main concern. He’s using disability to draw a larger picture of the effects of modern psychiatry. The name of this website, after all, is “Mad In America”, not “Disability In America”, and while your concern with the larger issues surrounding disability is laudable and important and it’s good for us to know about other issues, you may have mistaken what Mr. Whitaker’s larger focus is, if I understand it correctly myself.
Second, I disagree with you completely that we need to “decenter” from the discussion of medication. While some people who are well acquainted with the subject may be familiar with its broad outlines and ready to expand their focus to other areas, there are lots of other people who are using this website to explore the subject for the first time, or to keep up on current information and perspectives. The movement to change psychiatric practice — which is the real focus of this website, not disability — is starting to gather some steam, but the broad societal change hasn’t happened yet, and to “decenter” from medication is the very last thing we need to do at this point. If anything, we need to center on it even more and with even greater purpose: tie the broad range of perspectives together into a cohesive and panoramic picture that the public and practitioners can understand so that enough people will grasp enough of the whole dynamic that we’ll create enough momentum for change. Right now, many pieces of the picture are out there — the emptiness and failures of the current chemical imbalance model, the long history of psychiatry’s failures and the dangers of its coercive power, the long-term consequences of psychotropic use, the dangerously corrupt practices of the pharmaceutical industry and how it is intertwined with the psychiatric establishment. The pieces are out there, and I would like to see someone come along and create a unified picture of how it all works. And, if I get my druthers, there will be someone like you who has a broad knowledge of how public policy and government programs actually work involved in putting that picture together, because without that knowledge of the system, any attempts to implement change will be hampered along the way by institutional interests, just as Big Tobacco did, in order to preserve their own interests and profits, often by seeming to concede to changes while ensuring they were implemented in ways that worked to their own advantage.”
In short, I thought the whole piece took a great idea — broadening awareness to other issues — and presented it in the most tone deaf way possible, not only by suggesting we aren’t aware of the broader social issues and learning from and supporting other movements (I know I am, but I don’t talk about that here) but by suggesting we should reach some sort of false accomodation over our central issues in order to achieve . . . what? Our own defeat?
To be honest, I thought that Kelly, even if he thinks he’s on some higher path of unity, is actually a great voice for the other side of this issue. He’s got lived experience, he’s getting his Ph.D., and he can throw around quotes about structural this and structural that and sound perfectly reasonable to someone who hasn’t got their eye on the prize: stopping the drugs and the coercion, and replacing it with something that actually works. The tobacco industry set up a thing called the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) that was staffed with all kinds of well-meaning academics who were willing to confuse the issues in pretty much the same way and keep the public confused about what cigarettes were really doing to people, just like they’re trying to pretend the psych drugs aren’t just about as bad. If Kelly hasn’t gotten a call from one of their PR firms yet, offering him a corner office at NAMI or some other institution they bankroll, he might expect one soon after he graduates. I’ve got lived experience too, and it annoys me that he used that as a claim of authority in his comments up at the top of this section to try to delegitimize and beat down someone else’s point of view that a lot of people with lived experience would agree with and when having lived experience doesn’t mean you know everything and that you can’t learn from other people who don’t have it. I think people have been pretty respectful overall in how they responded to him, and tried to focus on the good things he had to say, but that’s only another example of his tone deaf approach. We need every ally we can get, and that doesn’t include trying to fault Whitaker’s argument for failing to make a point it wasn’t even looking at or talking about, and it doesn’t include deligitimizing anyone’s point of view on the basis of who they are. He complained about a “straw man” argument? Catechizing us all again? And then he concludes with one that’s “ad hominem.”
“Zombie” is exactly the word I always use to describe it. Just to shake it up a little now and then, I sometimes use the expression “brain dead”, or I might compare it to being in solitary confinement for a few years: a kind of mental and social jail cell where you can’t really think, feel, or relate to anyone around you. Lately, I’ve been seeing this guy at the gym, and you can spot it right away: the weight gain, the dead staring eyes and expressionless face, the slow shuffling steps. I say this not to shame anyone for their appearance, but because that was me for a few years, and once you’ve seen it in the mirror for a while, you can spot it immediately. The guy is so doped up that it’s like broadcasting to everyone around him that something is wrong, and everyone acts accordingly — the same way I was treated for years — which is to ignore him completely. Being in that state essentially enacts a social death on top of the internal death you’re already being subjected to, at least if it’s as bad for you as it was for me and lots of other people I see, and now when I see him I can’t help thinking that he’s been buried alive. He’s been buried alive, and no one is listening, because he probably doesn’t even realize that he should be screaming his lungs out. And if he did, how many people would actually listen to him? Or would they just tell him these are “side effects” that he needs to get used to? Side effects, they call them — as if reducing him to this state wasn’t the whole point. They can’t fix you, but they sure can keep you quiet and manageable, and that works out great for a who doesn’t want to feel uncomfortable or inconvenienced by the ugliness of your struggle while you’re working things out.
Jeffrey, I’m going to quote you some day. The amazing way our experience is disregarded — that our point of view is almost always invalidated and disregarded, whether it’s viewing any concerns we might raise as a “lack of insight” or “non-compliance”, regardless of how legitimate it would be coming out of anyone else’s mouth in any other circumstance, or the way our point of view is deliberately excluded from the profession by quietly keeping us out, when in any other circumstance someone who’s actually dealt with a problem themselves (diabetes, sports injuries, cancer . . . anything at all) is considered a valuable resource — all of that speaks volumes about how the psychiatric profession really works and what its priorities are. It seems that it’s only when one of their own finally points out the elephant in the room that it’s considered legit, and as outrageous as it may be that this report even needed to appear, maybe we’ve got an ally out there — someone in the profession who’s willing to go through the motions of dressing it all up as a study in order to get our point of view out there. It’s easy to forget that a few of them still have functioning consciences, that they’re appalled at what they’re seeing, that it was psychiatrists like Szasz and Laing who got the conversation moving, or that there are some of them out there now who want to change how it works, but you see signs of it now and then. I figure any psychiatrist who dares to write for this site has to have a lot of guts and integrity to run the risk of being excluded by the rest of their own profession, taking a chance with whether they’ll be able to hold onto a job while expressing their doubts or their opposition — the same kind of courage and integrity that it takes for a cop or a member of the maffia who dares to come clean about what’s really going on — and I have to give the people who put this article out there some kudos.
I’m having a little trouble with my browser at the moment, so if my comments appear in the feed more than once, I apologize. Here are my comments:
Thanks for taking the time to write your article and trying to expand the discussion.
First of all, I’d like to say that I agree with some of your main points, at least at this point in my process of learning about the whole subject of “mental illness.” For instance, I also believe that there is a physiological process involved in every aspect of being human, whether it’s the way our minds work and our bodies function, and that the whole system is intertwined, and that we ignore it at our peril. Shifting the emphasis away from crude, blunt-force manipulation of the brain with chemicals or electroshock, with all their disastrous long-term effects, does not mean that we shouldn’t pay attention to and study the brain. A renewed emphasis on psychological processes as actually lived does not exclude understanding the biological processes that underlie them. If anything, understanding the important effects of nutrition and how that affects the body’s ability to handle stress or the brain’s ability to regulate itself is hugely important, as are the effects of exercise and meditation or a practice like yoga, etc., in giving us the tools to change how we use our minds and our bodies for the better. Supportive social environments and meaningful work also affect the whole system, and psychiatry, if it was truly concerned with the whole person — mind and body and environment — would look at all of it. So even if antipsychiatry makes some very important points, I am not opposed to the idea of psychiatry in principle — the study and practice of medicine as it relates to the mind — if it could be brought around to actual medicine that optimizes the functioning of the whole person, instead of the crude and shortsighted and often disastrous methods it uses now, which the forces of institutional complacency and conformity reinforce through a myopic focus on incremental and virtually meaningless changes to those methods while blinding them to their disastrous results and deflecting attention away from other solutions. Of course, I don’t know if you agree with all that, but it’s my take on the subject.
I agree with you also that medication needs to be less the sole focus of our concern than it is now, but that’s also where we seem to part ways.
First, I never got the impression that Robert Whitaker was trying to explain every change in disability (SSI/SSDI) as a consequence of psychotropic use. In fact, I’ve never gotten the impression that disability, per se, was even Mr. Whitaker’s larger concern. Mr. Whitaker is a medical journalist, and his focus is on medicine — specifically, on psychiatry, if I understand him correctly. While people tend to focus on his book Anatomy of an Epidemic, which talks about antidepressant use and the rise in disability, I see the focus on disability as a way of looking at the real-world effects of psychotropic use — in other words, psychiatric practice. The other book, which I’m sure you know but which people talk about less, is Mad In America, which focuses on the history of psychiatric treatment of “psychosis” and does not really focus on disability. Thus, the common theme of his work is psychiatry, and I see his discussion of disability as only one pathway — the one he has chosen to explore, possibly because it is a clear way to demonstrate what is really going on and what the long-term effects are of current psychiatric practice — to talk about psychiatric practice in general. So, to bring it back around to the unfortunate title of your piece — that Mr. Whitaker “missed the mark” in how he talks about the rise in disability due to the use of psychotropic meds, I think that it might actually be you who missed the point. He’s not talking about everything that’s happening with disability, because that’s not his main concern. He’s using disability to draw a larger picture of the effects of modern psychiatry. The name of this website, after all, is “Mad In America”, not “Disability In America”, and while your concern with the larger issues surrounding disability is laudable and important and it’s good for us to know about other issues, you may have mistaken what Mr. Whitaker’s larger focus is, if I understand it correctly myself.
Second, I disagree with you completely that we need to “decenter” from the discussion of medication. While some people who are well acquainted with the subject may be familiar with its broad outlines and ready to expand their focus to other areas, there are lots of other people who are using this website to explore the subject for the first time, or to keep up on current information and perspectives. The movement to change psychiatric practice — which is the real focus of this website, not disability — is starting to gather some steam, but the broad societal change hasn’t happened yet, and to “decenter” from medication is the very last thing we need to do at this point. If anything, we need to center on it even more and with even greater purpose: tie the broad range of perspectives together into a cohesive and panoramic picture that the public and practitioners can understand so that enough people will grasp enough of the whole dynamic that we’ll create enough momentum for change. Right now, many pieces of the picture are out there — the emptiness and failures of the current chemical imbalance model, the long history of psychiatry’s failures and the dangers of its coercive power, the long-term consequences of psychotropic use, the dangerously corrupt practices of the pharmaceutical industry and how it is intertwined with the psychiatric establishment. The pieces are out there, and I would like to see someone come along and create a unified picture of how it all works. And, if I get my druthers, there will be someone like you who has a broad knowledge of how public policy and government programs actually work involved in putting that picture together, because without that knowledge of the system, any attempts to implement change will be hampered along the way by institutional interests, just as Big Tobacco did, in order to preserve their own interests and profits, often by seeming to concede to changes while ensuring they were implemented in ways that worked to their own advantage.
To take just a moment to address your point about the potential usefulness of psychotropics, while I too have lived experience, as you do, and while I take listening to what people with lived experience have to say about their experience extremely seriously, as you also seem to do, I do not automatically think that makes every one of those people universally and unquestionably well-informed on every single issue that affects them — and I say that out of lived experience too. For many years I was the model psychiatric patient: always medication-compliant, never questioning the good judgment or enlightened care of my psychiatrist. I took the minimal and skewed information he gave me (“You might gain some weight, and we’ll need to monitor your blood sugar” — not that they would probably skyrocket, with all the bad effects that follow) as sufficient information to give my “informed consent”, never suspecting that the process had been reduced to a parody of what it was meant to be. I believed he was saving my life — even as my body ballooned up and I developed high blood sugar and high cholesterol and more and more medications of other kinds were pumped into my body as a result of the whole metabolic syndrome, and over the years of his treatment I gradually grew more and more physically and mentally incapacitated, until I reached a point where I stopped functioning in any meaningful way as a human being and spent what few hours of the day I wasn’t sleeping just staring off into space, with nothing at all going on in my head — no thought, no emotion — and made never a peep as all meaningful connection to other people and the quality of my own life disappeared. Yet I would have reported to anyone who asked, as they sometimes did, that I was doing the best that could be hoped for — or that’s what I believed, according to my assessment of the possibilities within the framework of limited expectations that I had been taught. And so, in my present life, when I listen to a couple people I know who claim that they couldn’t get through the day without their antidepressants, that it enables them to function, I don’t accept their statements without looking into it further. It’s possible they’re right. Maybe they couldn’t cope without psychotropics. I don’t fight with depression, and I can’t claim to be an expert on it. But if being “medicated” for depression resembles being “medicated” for psychosis in any way, then I suspect there is a lot more to the picture than they may even be aware of themselves. That antidepressants are almost exactly as effective as placebos leads me to suspect that that’s all these friends of mine are experiencing — the placebo effect — as difficult as that might be to see in oneself (although it’s a very interesting effect of how our thinking can determine our experience, and deserves more exploration). Or that, like me, they are coming from a place where they simply don’t realize that there are other ways to do this — that although they may think antidepressants are the best they can hope for, maybe they don’t know about exercise and good nutrition and meditation and getting into the effects of trauma and developing some insight into what’s going on for them and how to deal with it more effectively. That is, they might know the words for those things, but not the experience of those things from the inside. They may, as I did, be mistaking impairment for the best possible outcome out of a sheer lack of knowledge, and who knows what they might learn if they could get outside the information bubble and seemingly unavoidable alternative of modern psychiatry and its presentation of itself as the principal if not sole authority on the subject of “mental health,” which is how it presents itself in spite of its limited perspective and unacceptably poor outcomes, and which is so thoughtlessly accepted without question and then repeated in the media to the exclusion of what I and many others believe to be more effective solutions. So, yes, we should listen to people with lived experience, but we should also not forget that their experience is also — in a phrase you seem to favor — contextually dependent.
The last main thing I’d like to mention also relates to the “decentering” of the discussion away from medication. As I said, I wouldn’t remove it from a central position at all. But I would like to expand the center to include a complementary focus on the alternatives — the effective alternatives. If one wants to replace something, one should do one’s best to show what it might be replaced with. There is a great deal of attention paid to psychiatry’s harms and its need to reform, but less attention paid to what will be done to reform it. I guess it’s natural that anger and outrage motivates people to protest, and that happiness and contentment draws less attention or the desire to make noise. The personal stories on this website often focus on the harms of psychotropics and coercion, while going less often into what the positive solutions are. That’s only natural, of course, since so many of us, either ourselves or our loved ones, have been subjected to those harms: that’s our common ground. And if less focus is put on exploring the solutions together, that might also be because a lot of us haven’t found them yet, or are only just learning about them. We see articles that talk about Soteria or Open Dialogue — but mostly as general outlines, lacking focus on the real mechanics of how they work. In some personal stories, we see references to nutrition and exercise and meditation and so forth — but all we get, for the most part, is the broad outlines, a passing reference. But these are complex and sometimes difficult topics, and what people need — or what I needed, and still sometimes need — is a place to start with it all. For instance, I meditate, but that came about because I had the intuitive sense that meditation was about self-understanding, which I sensed I needed, and since no one (and certainly not my psychiatrist) was going to come along and just give me that information, I had to explore the subject on my own. Fortunately I like reading, I’m not intimidated by new subjects, and I’m willing to read things over and over again until I connect with them. The books are out there if you go out and hunt them down and dig through enough of them until you find one you can understand. But without that determination, and the good fortune of being pretty well educated and a reader by nature, I would most likely have never gotten into it all. And I know from talking to other people that most people don’t meditate because they don’t know what meditation really is. They have this notion, probably picked up from popular representations of people who have meditated a long time and who are pretty happy as a result, that you just sit down one day and a little magical lightbulb of bliss goes off over your head right away, and if it doesn’t then you’re doing it wrong — that you’re supposed to just instantly arrive at enlightenment or something, or you “just can’t do it right” — and they quit trying. But meditation doesn’t work that way, and maybe no one has ever told them that. To understand your own mind, you have to actually watch it for a while, experience what it’s going through, and just live with it. The end of the suffering — at least as I’ve experienced it — isn’t because you don’t feel pain any more. If anything, you’ll feel the pain even more deeply for a while. But you have to open yourself to it, go through it, in order to see where it comes from and how to work with it and how it loses its power over you, the same way a con man or a liar loses their power over you once you catch on to what they’re doing. But I don’t see a lot of discussion of the actual mechanics of meditation or the other positive alternatives. I see lots of documentation of all the miseries of psychotropics and withdrawal from them, which are necessary, but only passing references to the details of the positives, and while it’s at least mentioned in passing, it doesn’t do much to share the experience and get some insight into how things might work. So, yes, there needs to be more of a focus on things besides medication. Not at the cost of focussing on psychotropics, because that’s a fight that needs to be fought until it is won. Only that besides focussing on the harms of psychiatry, there needs to be an additional focus on the positive alternatives — which may even have the added benefit of reforming psychiatry from the outside, since, like Western medicine in general, they tend to not pick up on (or even dismiss and undermine) the importance of issues outside their traditional focus until the public forces them to look at what everyone else already knows (at which point they look around, do some “validation studies,” write some popular books, set up an institute to appropriate control of the conversation, and then give each other awards and honorary degrees in order to publicly congratulate themselves once again on how they’re moving in ever more progressive directions . . . but I don’t really care who takes the credit in the end as long the change finally happens!).
Thanks for your article. Even if I disagree on what I think you meant on some points, the discussion itself is important to have. I guess I went rather far afield in my comments, but I thought you deserved a thorough response. I suspect that some other responses will not be as civil, but I recognize the good intent behind your thinking. But, while I wholeheartedly endorse free discussion, I wouldn’t catechize Mr. Whitaker on the failures of his work with a sensationalist title when you don’t seem to have taken quite enough time to consider its purpose or — there’s that word again — the context it depends on.
I’d be interested to know where the money really went for a couple reasons.
When the Master Settlement came along between the tobacco companies and the states in the late 90s, the idea was that a certain percentage of tobacco revenue had to be paid to each state each year. This agreement was reached with a clear and stated purpose: to provide funding for tobacco education and anti-smoking campaigns, particularly for young people, who have been the historical targets of Big Tobacco’s marketing, with the result that many of them were hooked at a young age, which is to say when they didn’t know better and couldn’t make truly informed decisions about tobacco’s harms and so became lifelong consumers of the product (a general strategy on the part of people who sell mind-altering chemicals that we might find familiar).
But that hasn’t happened. For instance, in my state of New Hampshire, Big Tobacco has been ponying up about $50 million a year. Where is that money going? Not to tobacco education or anti-smoking campaigns. No, it’s actually going to balance the budget. Instead of addressing the harms it was meant to address, and prevent them, it’s now being treated as just another revenue source. In fact, it has in a way made the state complicit with Big Tobacco. The state now has an interest in Big Tobacco getting as much money as possible, in order to get more money every year as its share. Probably the last thing we can expect is for this windfall to ever be used for what it was meant for. But that’s getting a little off topic.
I would be very interested to know if California is using the new revenue to provide new or expanded programs and services in addition to what was already there, or if the money is only being used to pay for services that already existed, allowing the state to shift money that used to go to mental health services to other areas. If how the states are using the tobacco settlement money is any indication, the people of California need to demand accountability and transparency in how the money is being spent.
Thanks for your comments. I have been thinking lately that the way to stop current psychiatric practices — the drugs that debilitate and eventually kill people, which consumes simply enormous public resources, and the extremely expensive recurrent hospital stays and endless psychiatric bills — might be the way to attack the system and put something else in its place. For instance, just to use my own case as an example: A hospital stay, even a brief one, costs many thousands of dollars. When I became psychotic, I cost the system more than $10,000 in just a few days. After I became psychotic, I was given disability — at a cost of more than $1,000 a month. Since I was prevented by the drugs from ever truly recovering, and in fact further disabled by medication even after the real psychosis passed, that meant it became a permanent expense to the public. (In the interests of total disclosure, I’ve only just completely eliminated meds and haven’t yet rebuilt my life enough to get off it, even though I’m getting there.) Psych meds also come at a premium: more than $700 a month for the single drug I was on, and I was one of the lucky ones who resisted being sucked into the system of polypharmacy, where you might be juggling numerous expensive meds. Because that antipsychotic stopped my metabolism, it caused immense weight gain and high cholesterol and high blood pressure and high cholesterol — and now we’re talking more bills to medicare, not only for drugs (insulin alone is $350 for a supply that might last as little as a month, but that really does vary, so it’s only a ballpark number . . . but then there’s the other stuff, which added up to at least a $100 a month.) Now add doctor’s bills — for follow ups and dealing with new problems as they emerge. Even now, I am dealing with the fallout of what happened to my body, and though I have eliminated the big-ticket items like antipsychotics and insulin, the expenses haven’t ended. And there’s another cost: while disabled, social security paid my child support to the tune of $500 a month. So: instead of my returning to being productive as soon as I might be able, for many years I have been an enormous drain on the system — to the tune of roughly $30,000 a year. And since I haven’t had to be rehospitalized or had multiple psych drugs, I suspect that I’m one of the cheap ones.
Perhaps what we need to do is reframe the entire public debate away from the personal costs of current psychiatry, because there seems to be a kind of blind spot about mental difficulties in our country. The public debate is framed mostly by fear of what those with mental difficulties are going to do, and it is from this fear, unthinkingly played on by the media, that psychiatry derives its power. Desperate people will turn to the people who present themselves as having the answers, and in our society, that’s psychiatry. The human picture of what actually happens to most people who come under the influence of that system is completely obscured. Psychiatry’s harms are swept under the rug, maybe because there is this constant triumphal march about their supposed progress, how they’re supposedly helping, while their actual record is almost never examined. That ten years on antipsychotic shortens your life expectancy by five years, for example. And maybe the way to attack the system is to reframe the discussion outside their rhetoric of illusory scientific progress and cast it in terms of actual economic costs. If we can contrast the public cost of community-based models like Soteria, or even the costs of a program like Open Dialogue in Finland, we might discover that all of a sudden people will stop being distracted by psychiatry’s rhetoric and become more openminded to examining actual outcomes. Talking money might wake people up to shift the model away from the current system and get us the funding we need to set up something that works — based on humane conditions, mutual respect, no forced medication, and community support — long enough for us to prove on a large scale that it works.
Thanks! If this was easy to figure out, it would have been done a long time ago. Sharing perspectives from different sides of the debate is important and valid. My feeling is that community-based programs have never been funded sufficiently to be as effective as they could be, and that models like Soteria are given up on far too soon. They’re never treated as more than pilot programs — and expected to produce instant results by people with vested interests, like psychiatrist, who can’t show instant results either — if they can show any results at all — and who feel threatened that someone else would set up a model of support that isn’t under their own control. If someone had a physical illness, like cancer, everyone would expect that it might take years to ever solve it and for that person to recover. But with mental difficulties, there’s no realistic picture in people’s heads. Some people work through their troubles quickly, while others need time, and maybe a lot of time — but we’re so fixated as a society on a quick fix that we expect instant results. It can be scary to deal with people who seem out of control, and if drugging them and locking them up relieves the public’s anxiety, the public will go for that option, and community-based programs will never get a chance to show their long-term outcomes. And I’m quite confident that the psychiatric establishment, given a chance, will pay no more than lip service to community solutions while actually undermining them at every step, whether by strangling their funding (every dime lost to community support is a dime not collected for appointments or medication) or by coopting them and turning them into yet another channel for coercion — turning them into the deceptively named “assisted” outpatient treatment programs. An object lesson is the history of state asylums. The original success of asylums was a result of the respectful and humane environment of the moral treatment model brought from Europe, where everyone was respected and no one’s freedom curtailed, and people had time to recover. It was so successful that state hospitals were built all over the country. But what happened next was that they were gradually corrupted by outside forces. Doctors — the self-appointed experts — took over and began to impose their treatments: cold baths, spinning, wrapping, insulin shock, electroshock, lobotomies, disabling drugs — and they brought with them the whole hierarchical structure of coercion and control, of the “expert” who supposedly knows more about the “patient” that she does herself, thus justifying their control. At the same time, the hospitals became a dumping ground for society’s undesirables. While those who recovered were able to return to the community, only those who didn’t were left behind, and they accumulated in number. Other undesirables — hopeless drunks, and teen rebels, and the socially disobedient, and blacks who spoke out for their civil rights, and communists, and unmarried pregnant women — were confined there, and kept there, because they were committed by other people who had been granted that coercive power. (The way the Soviet Union used mental hospitals and diagnosis and drugs should be a lesson to us all.) The whole purpose and structure of the asylums was subverted. If asylums were to return in something that resembled their original form, where it was about respect and freedom and being part of real community, I’d be all in favor. That would be a haven, not a prison. But if asylums return in the form they had in the past few decades, I have little hope that they will help anyone recover. Are the old asylums any better than the de facto system of “mental health care” that now dominates the country in the form of the prisons and jails? I don’t think so. Thanks for speaking up about the complex issues involved and your concerns.
I think it’s a good idea in its basics — remove the power of pharma to bias researchers. But that doesn’t mean the public should be paying the bill for the research they need done. They should have to foot the bill for research into products they expect to profit from, with the name and producer of the drug completely blinded to the people doing the studies. And while we’re at it, let’s start requiring them to do real studies. No more mini-studies where you take someone withdrawing from one drug and put them up against someone else who’s using the drug for the first time, and then only watch for six weeks, and never study the long-term effects, or — almost as important, and completely neglected — what it’s like to withdraw from that drug and what the dangers are. The whole system needs to be radically reformed.
I knew that this was true in my own life. Bullying and abuse make you hypervigilant — alert and reactive to small things. You begin to react to small threats and stresses in excessive ways. You develop a tendency to react with a mindset of paranoia, without every realizing that that’s what it is happening. You believe your reactions are reasonable. And then, at some point in adulthood, you encounter some new source of stress, and you believe that your own bizarre and extreme thoughts are reality — and that’s how you go over the edge into madness. I have never seen the case laid out like this. I don’t understand half the references to different structures of the brain (I’m still learning!), but I can see the common theme. Abuse, followed by the brain adapting to it, followed by an inability to deal with new stressors. Thanks for confirming empirically what I knew in my gut had to be true.
“For example, 33 miners were trapped underground for 69 days in a copper mine near Copiapó, Chile in 2010. Although the miners were finally rescued and were treated as heroes, and in some cases as celebrities, many subsequently developed severe psychological symptoms caused by their ordeal, such as depression, anxiety, nightmares, and avoidant behavior. Because the causes of these symptoms are obvious and recognized, no one to my knowledge has suggested that the miners have genetically based brain disorders or “chemical imbalances.” It is clear that the miners’ experiences caused their symptoms, and the symptoms of most psychiatric conditions can also be seen in this way.”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone put it so clearly before — so clear, concise, and virtually beyond any further discussion. Wonderful piece!
First of all, I’m sorry that I haven’t read all the comments. But I do want to respond to your article, and on the basis of personal experience.
I’m tapering off medication. I’ve been doing it in small steps. After trying to stop all in one shot, and suffering from bad results, I was finally told by my prescriber that the neurons in the brain adjust after 6 weeks to a new dose of this stuff. I stepped down what I was doing at a quarter dose at a time — based on what I was taking, of course — and it’s gone very well. I’ve had changes in mood and thinking, but after a short time I’ve gotten back to “normal”.
When I went on “medication” I needed something to slow down what was happening in my head. The voices, the delusions: the intensity was too much to survive. But after a few months, when I’d slowed down, the drugs no longer helped me. What they did was kill my ability to think, to feel, to interact with other people. They slowed down my psychosis, yes, but at the same time they took away everything else: my ability to be human. I don’t believe these drugs are entirely wrong, but I believe that they should only be used for the shortest time possible. As a brake, to halt the psychosis — not as a long term solution. In the end, they were killing me. I gained 100 pounds, developed diabetes, and finally spent my hours staring into space. I’m a writer. I write books, and do very well at it. Yet these drugs, while I was on them, were destroying my ability to write, to dream, to imagine, and to be one of the human race.
Please keep doing your research. Get people to look at all this stuff, and to do the research that shows what they really do.
First of all, I’d like to thank you for laying out your case in a clear and logical way. I wish I had your breadth of knowledge about all the different harms of psychiatry, and I’ll bookmark your article so as to read further among the sources you cite.
If I have one reservation about the current state of affairs with people who’ve chosen to speak up about psychiatry, it’s that there’s an awful lot of consciousness raising and yet a curious lack of proposals for what we can do about it on a systemic level. Maybe that’s just my ignorance showing, but that’s what I see when I look around. I wish I saw more articles like yours.
So, when I offer some words of criticism, it is not intended to defeat positive action, but simply to point out some problems which you may very well have anticipated but simply neglected to go into here.
My belief is that psychiatry cannot be effectively abolished. I don’t know what steps you would take to abolish it, but if there is one thing we should all know from both evolution and economics, it is that when a profitable niche opens up, something will come along to fill it. You may abolish psychiatry, but it will crop up again under another name, just as slavery did when it turned itself into Jim Crow, where you may not actually have one person legally owning another but where you have a system of laws that deprives people of their freedom to move around or to choose their terms of employment or to vote their own interests, etc. With psychiatry, you may succeed in eliminating it as a specialty practice in medicine, but soon you will have new specialists cropping up to take their place — neuroscientists, nutrition experts, etc., etc. — all of whom will soon unite to protest the “stifling effect on science and medicine” that prohibiting any of their practices would entail. It will be only too easy for them to claim that the barbaric practices of the past have been left behind, even as they revive them in new forms, just as insulin shock gave way to electroshock, which gave way to lobotomies, which gave way to medications, and whose purpose was always the same: to incapacitate, pacify and silence all those unruly defectives. The other day I was talking to a friend, the mother of a woman with some psychological issues, about why I was mostly opposed to medication. She would hear absolutely none of it, except to tell me that I should “think of the families” and that it was important to have a range of options, a “balance” (just as you mentioned in your article), and I realized that what she was really saying, as much by the nature of her resistance as by anything she said, was that she was simply afraid. Her daughter has suffered, she has suffered, and she is afraid that without medication her daughter will suffer even more, and I think this is what people are mostly afraid of: that without medication, without psychiatry to hold their hands and assure them that this is the best possible treatment, that no one knows what will happen. They have a very real and very legitimate fear of chaos and suffering, and the pseudo-medical charlatans of the future will exploit that fear in the unlikely even that you should ever succeed in getting rid of the charlatans we have now.
My other belief is that abolishing psychiatry is irresponsible. Someone in the medical profession has to know how the brain works and how chemicals affect it, if only to reverse their current role of perpetrating harm to one where they protect us from harm in the future. If there were some way to liberate psychiatry from the malign influence of the pharmaceutical industry and from practicing on patients, if they simply did research about the brain and so forth, we might actually benefit from what they find out. In fact, by removing their motives to turn a blind eye to what is really going on with psychopharmacology, we might get them to turn out some honest results that have value. I have no idea how this change would come about, except through the continued efforts of people like yourself to learn the facts of psychiatry, think about the whole picture, and publish your conclusions so that the public can see what is going on and hopefully force the profession into meaningful reform by stripping away its abusive powers where possible and setting up a system of meaningful regulation to create transparency and accountability with their use of any powers that remain. As they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
I am not in favor of the current system and I would like to see it changed. But I don’t see how simply abolishing psychiatry is going to solve a problem that seems intrinsic to human nature, with its propensity toward greed, opportunism, and fear.
People who haven’t experienced “hallucinations” have no more standing in discussing them, whether philosophically or psychologically, than someone who has never balanced their checkbook talking about the workings of the stock market. You might sound very smart to people who haven’t been there, and even convince the committees that grant fellowships and awards and publications that you know something. All these people are ignorant. But in the end — when history looks back on you — you will sound exactly as well-informed as those who speculated about dragons in distant lands, and what would happen when you sailed off the edge of the earth. The only people who have any standing to talk about “hallucinations” are those who have had them, and those with the humility and long experience to work with such people. Imagine a free white man, with every privilege, writing in the nineteenth century about the experience of a black slave woman. That’s what we can expect from these outside experts. They can amuse themselves, and play with ideas, and in the end they will contribute nothing.
Dr. Steingard, I celebrate your central and concluding point: that we need to worry about what would take the place of psychiatry if psychiatry was banished. In the USSR, capitalism and private ownership of business was abolished. And what took its place? Another dysfunctional system, one which did no better than capitalism in fulfilling the public’s needs. I agree with you that what is needed is not a complete revolution against, but an evolution within, the practice of psychiatry.
I was the ultimate compliant patient with schizophrenia. As a result, I lost ten years of my life to a chemical lobotomy that left me unable to function for more than a couple hours at a time, that left me sleeping 14 hours a day, that left me completely unconnected to other people, and that destroyed my health — all because of the drugs that I was put on because psychiatrists would rather drug you into submissive quietude than support a system, like the Soteria model and others practiced throughout the world where modern medical psychiatry doesn’t dominate but that supports you during the difficult time that you go through your crisis.
I agree with you that in that I believe that psychiatry can be reformed and made useful. But first it must:
• completely reject the medical model
• completely reject the use of any coercion except in the case of threatened harm
• completely reject the use of any medication except when the patient is capable of truly informed consent without any form of coercion by others (see other recent MIA articles on the meaning of consent)
• completely embrace the trauma model of psychological distress, including social factors like abuse, bullying, ostracization, and the effects of poverty, racism, and classism
• completely embrace a system of community support where local agencies provide an environment where peer support from others with the same experience on a day-to-day basis, free of charge, replaces occasional appointments with “professionals” who restrict their services to hours of their own choosing and charge high prices to those in need
My list is only a beginning of what needs to be done to reform psychiatry. Can you expand on it, or will you remain only an apologist? As I said at the beginning of my response, I respect your position. But you will need to expand on what that really means in order to be credible to this disillusioned audience.
A fascinating article. I’ve wondered lately, as I get more and more interested in non-medical, community-based support systems, just where the limits of non-intervention lie. Much food for thought here. Thanks.
It is simply unbelievable that in this day and age that these kinds of experiments are going on. The United Kingdom is, in general, more responsive to the needs of those in mental distress than in the rest of the industrialized world. That these kinds of experiments continue even there is a reproach to the unfettered and unquestioned role of psychiatry as a pseudo-medical practice.
I don’t think that my commentary can illuminate anything that you haven’t. I just want to thank you for taking the time to make it clear to people that the backtracking bullshit that is now being put out there — probably with the purpose of heading off criticism and what I hope will be the massive class-action lawsuits to come for all this blatantly bad science, bad medicine, and damage to people’s lives — will not escape anyone notice any more than the lies and misrepresentations of the tobacco industry were able to escape detection in the end. I hope that your post becomes the basis of a book. Someone needs to document all this. Someone needs to put it all down so that history and society have a record of what really happened — now, before it is too late to make restitution to the victims.
As Robert Whitaker notes in his book Mad in America, antipsychotics are no longer “clean” drugs. The early antispychotics targeted specific dopamine pathways. Now, however, the atypical antispychotics target other pathways as well — such as serotonin, glutamate, etc. Which means that they are not only antipsychotics, but antidepressants as well.
Antidepressants have been shown to lead, for some people, to an increase in violence and psychotic experiences. Having had experience with this class of drugs myself, I can tell you that at least one of them leads to an increase in aggressive feelings and confrontational behaviors.
I would not be in any way surprised to learn that the newer atypical antipsychotics are leading to an increase in violent behavior on the part of what is otherwise a very peaceful population.
My only regret in reading this post is in learning that Dr. Leitner is retiring. I hope that in his leisure time he will devote some small part of his time to producing books and articles that might help enlighten us all.
Great article. The only thing I would add is that, in describing the idea of an imbalance as some kind of “metaphor,” I would suspect that the establishment is trying to head off suits for malpractice. There is, after all, nothing about the idea of an imbalance that is metaphorical. “My luv is like a red, red rose” — that’s metaphorical. Putting the idea out there, — a quite specific, detailed, and scientifically based idea — that the chemicals in your brain are out of balance is not metaphorical in any way. The problem is not the use of poetic language. It is the theory itself, and the actions that followed, using that theory as justification. Letting them call it a metaphor is to let them wriggle out of responsibility.
Nice work, Tina. There needs to be respect for the rights of those who are experiencing mental distress. No issue regarding mental illness is clear: the value of diagnosis; the value of hospitalization; the value of medication; the value of how we are represented in the media. But the world needs to address the almost unchecked power of psychiatry, which in the past meant forced hospitalizations, forced medications, forced treatments, and forced supervisions through the self-appointed bodies of psychiatry. It is time for us to be heard. As our British colleagues might say, “Good on you, love!”
Thanks. Just check out my author page on Amazon. They’re doing free promotions and book samples and pre-orders right now.
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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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There are serious, serious, serious medical consequences to having a diagnosis. You are, quite simply, not listened to, and your needs are almost NEVER taken seriously. Something needs to be done to seriously, seriously, seriously reform the system, soup to nuts.
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That’s great. Thank you so much.
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A terrible commentary on how deeply the establishment really is established.
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Simply shameful.
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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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That is quite profound. Thanks a lot. Would you have anything to share about psychosis or drugs or anything?
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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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Robert, thanks for taking the time to respond. Yes, I thought the other additions were valuable and obviously required a bit of research to put together, so thanks very much. My apologies if I was a bit over the top in my protestations.
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I’m delighted to see that my corrections have now been made perfect. Congratulations, MIA team! It’s perfect.
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I’ll be producing all my early work narative-style essays very soon. If Robert Whitaker wants, the intruduction is his to write, but only if he really wants.
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I completely sympathize with that sentiment.
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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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A very Buddhist point of view.
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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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Absolutely outstanding. The best synopsis of the causes in a person’s life I have ever read. Only Paris Williams has done this well describing “schizophrenia” studies in the first couple chapters of his book on psychosis. Congratulations, Dr. Read. And a brilliant summary by the author as well.
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Yes, there are countless people with experience more frustrating, overwhelming, and intense than mine. I didn’t mean to start a competition, so for that I apologize.
My sympathies — if that’s not offensive — to you and your wife. I think I understand the kind of difficulties you describe.
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Thank you.
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Thanks for your comments.
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Thank you. You are always a sympathetic reader. I appreciate that.
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You have all my sympathy, and I do appreciate now how important lithium is for SOME people. For me it was inappropriate, but I definitely hear what you had to say.
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Outstanding article — the best and most compelling thing that I’ve read in years. You make me look like an amateur.
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Thanks to everyone who has chosen to comment. I appreciate and welcome them all.
God bless!
— Eric Coates
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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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Thank you. That means a lot to me. I do the best (we) can, but you never know exactly how people will take it.
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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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I agree with you completely in every aspect. Keep on trucking! And God bless.
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Glad you liked the essay, Bradford. I’m sure we’ll run into each other on the street again soon, and we might even have a coffee or a slice of pizza, if you like. 🙂
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Thanks for your generous reply. I like your thoughts. Obviously, we think along similar lines.
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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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Thanks very much for being there for your daughter through her difficulties and for trying to understand what needs to be done for her in such a considerate and thoughtful way. I owe a lot to a mother such as yourself.
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Thanks for the important information.
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Thanks for doing this important work. It might impact millions.
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Why, thank you, that’s very kind. I appreciate it.
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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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Thanks for writing about this important topic.
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I’m not sure what you mean, janeliz. “How” did she get me off lithium? She simply had it discontinued, and they gave me something else instead. She was the psychiatrist in charge at ISU, where I was, so she could do that.
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Great article. Thanks for writing.
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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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Great article. Clears up a lot of big questions. Thanks, Sera!
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Very, very important stuff. Thanks for posting.
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Very important stuff. Thanks for posting about this. The DSM is a terribly misguided book for all the reasons you say that psychologists talk about here.
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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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That’s probably the nicest thing anyone has ever said about my writing, and I do appreciate the feedback. Good luck.
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Thank you.
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Thanks very much.
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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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Nice observations.
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Good point!
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Very clever. It reminds me of Prof. Bentall’s proposition that happiness is a mental disorder, with symptoms of causing you to feel giddy and to engage in spontaneous, impulsive behavior.
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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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Good to know that you all didn’t give up on your battle. Congratulations on the settlement, and do — please — continue to pursue justice for the victims, both those who survived and those who didn’t, who have been ignored for too long. Thank you.
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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 imagine that every state has its own variations on the procedure, but the enforcement of AOT usually involves the police. If you aren’t taking your meds or aren’t showing up for appointments, they consider this a violation of your AOT requirements, and then the cops come and drag you back to the state hospital.
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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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I liked your story. You have a wonderful attitude about it all. I am also right out in the open about my unusual beliefs. Good luck.
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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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Thanks for posting this. Staying aware of this kind of stuff is important.
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Well done, Dr. Levine.
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Nicely written piece and informative. Thanks.
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Great to read your story. I hope you are and remain well.
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Thanks for your article. It was very informative and well-written.
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Thanks. An important subject.
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Let me congratulate you on your good work.
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Thank you.
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There’s a reason that Central Park in New York City is crowded every weekend.
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Nicely put.
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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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Nice story. Glad you followed your dreams. God bless.
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An important but neglected topic.
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Good article.
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Thanks for this important update.
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Important information. Thanks.
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Great to see you all sticking with this effort to change things with antidepressants.
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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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I can think of few things as despicable as experimenting in this way on children, especially if they do a more extensive study.
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Good news for once!
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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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The whole article is interesting, actually, and well worth reading. It covers much more than just the so-called “personality disorders.”
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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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No, I meant another country. You can get a travel visa and move to a very inexpensive country and then seek asylum once you get there. This is what I myself may do at some point.
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Go right ahead.
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There actually already is an underground railroad for people trying to escape the system. You might not have heard about it, because they keep themselves very quiet, but they do exist already.
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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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Also, I have a supplementary document that addresses the AOT people’s complaints that covers many of these subjects. Don’t worry, I’ve got this covered from all angles. Not that it will do me any good.
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Thank you. I don’t have time to find an attorney around here (very rural) who could do this, but if I could I would. In the meantime, I am submitting my own letter ahead of time in the hopes that it will be read. I don’t expect it to be, but I had to make the effort.
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There is a whole separate section for submitting art, which you can find by looking for the art section on the right hand side of the page, where it lists the contact information to contact that editor and submit art.
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I’m sorry you went through what you went through. Some day this will end. We may not see the day soon, but it will end.
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Thank you.
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Thank you for your time-consuming and considerate reply. Why no one with legal experience has yet orgnanized such a body is outside my understanding. Certainly I know of a few people who would be capable of starting such a movement. Perhaps I will contact a few of them and see what they say.
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Thank you for the information. I have heard about other states as well that do not have AOT arrangements and do not follow the arrangements made in other states. They seem more attractive all the time.
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Congratulations on your success. I also got off scot free for many years, but it was after I withdrew from drugs and had a dangerous neurofeedback session that I became psychotic again and checked myself into a hospital, where they promptly stripped me of my rights. Good luck to you in the future.
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Thank you for the suggestion. In regards to your earlier comment, I also do not believe this letter will make any difference at all in the resolution of my case. Nevertheless, I am the sort of person who keeps fighting back, no matter how hopeless the cause, and so I had to write it.
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Thank you. Very well composed and thought out.
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Important work. The emphasis is so much these days on quantitative studies that the importance of in-depth qualitative work is lost.
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Good luck in your endeavors.
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Good to see this work expanding beyond the purely English-speaking world.
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Thank you for your story. All too common. Even in parts of Africa, those perceived to have mental afflictions are chained to trees very often. This sort of thing must end. The only questions are: when? and: what do we have to do to stop it?
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Thank you as always.
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A wonderful idea, regardless of how it was executed.
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Very nice, well-composed article that lays out the issues clearly and succinctly. Thank you.
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Thanks to Dr. Moncrieff for her excellent article.
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I was unaware of that. Thanks for the information.
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Important as always. Thanks.
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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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Thanks for your very enlightening and obviously time-consuming reply — I appreciate the effort. You did a better job of explaining my four points than I did, but I was going for brevity, not the whole experience itself.
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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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Nice article. Thanks for sharing your experience.
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Nice article.
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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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And good luck to you too!
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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 thought I was in, as you describe it, active neurofeedback. The passive form, where things are simply done to your brain without any control of what’s happening, strikes me as extremely perilous. Thank you for your clarification between the two.
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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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Great podcast. Hope you both continue the good work.
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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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Thanks for your response. I am not simply opposed to neurofeedback, but it seems to me that at this point what they are doing is essentially experimenting on people to see what happens. That’s not what I signed up for. I will, however, do my best to keep an open mind about it all.
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I wish all of you well.
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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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Thanks for your reference to the article. Neurology, as it is currently practiced, is a brand-new field with almost limitless potential for damage as well as possible enhancement of human abilities, but I happen to believe that letting nature do its thing like it has for a few million years now is probably the best course — especially with my experience of it all.
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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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Thanks for your article. It was most clear and succinct.
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I move pretty freely between the two at this point.
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Thanks for the interview. Never having been the victim of sexual assault, it’s important to get that perspective and how it relates to psychiatric assault.
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I hope it does not turn out as grim as that, but I am also alarmed at what I see.
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Great work. Thank you.
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Thank you. And yes: Cool Hand Luke, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I consider it my moral duty to resist, if not for myself, then for others — or I did then, but I’m older and much too tired now to fight back that way again.
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Yes, I have been force-sedated a few times. I have also been forced to take Haldol, which, as you probably know, can cause some pretty severe akithisia. Why? Is this some kind of contest about who’s had it worse, or was it maybe just that I eventually figured out how to deal with the system better than some other people have?
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Congratulations to you both (Laura and James) on this fine work.
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As Fiachra said: “Thank you James + Professor John”
This is a very important issue that I am very glad to see you are not allowing to die from lack of attention.
Best to all.
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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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I’m glad to hear that you were able to figure it out. Maybe if more people paid attention to real medicine, we could avoid some, even if only some, of the needless drugging. Good luck to you, your daughter, and the rest of your family.
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You’re right, Frank: just going along with what they say is usually the quickest way out.
That said, I have asked a psychiatrist why they were releasing me — what had made them decide on that course of action. What the psychiatrist said was, “We don’t feel we can help you.”
Sometimes it does work to resist.
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I’ve still got a few months of AOT left. Thanks for asking. Like you, I also act Normal in public if I can — though there have been some notable exceptions to that rule.
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No, I haven’t seen it. I will have to check it out.
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Thank you for this article. It’s very well thought out and well written. I liked it.
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Thanks for the article. Very important.
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Good observations, Bradford. We’ll probably pass each other by the coffee shop some time, and we can chat if you have time.
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Thank you very much.
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Normally I try to reply to people only when it seems like they want me to, but I liked your poem so much that I had to thank you for posting it.
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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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Thank you. I hadn’t actually looked at your project, since I’m not actively a parent and didn’t think it would apply to me. However, I liked what I read and it gave me another point of view on a couple things. Thanks again.
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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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This is a very important but largely neglected aspect of drugging people: all those who are reduced to this kind of state by antipsychotics, which, if you want to look at it that way, could be said to be whole point. Thanks for this report.
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Thank you for your very well-written article. This is a very important subject.
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Very important stuff. Thanks for the article.
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Important to hear about. Thanks for the article.
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Thanks for this report.
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Thanks for your story.
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Thanks for the podcast. Good to learn about.
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An important subject to clarify. Thanks for the article.
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Thank you for your story.
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Fantastically written and very important piece. I had no idea about any of this at all. Thank you very much.
Eric Coates
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Thank you. Obviously, this is an important issue, and it’s good to know how things stand.
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Thank you for further clarifying an issue about which I had heard a lot but without such details.
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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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Thanks for your thoughtful and considerate comments.
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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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Thank you for your usual well-conceived article.
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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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I’m sorry, but that’s ridiculously funny.
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Thank you, as always.
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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. Your comments, as usual, are concise, clear, and to the point. I appreciate the awareness that you are trying to raise.
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I am a great fan of Dr. Healy’s work, and I would also like to thank you, Mr. James Moore, for what is your usual well-informed and insightful questions. (You are also a hell of a radio voice!)
Best,
Eric Coates
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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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Thanks for this summation of where the genetic research stands. I was familiar with much but not all of this, so it’s good to know that someone like you is staying on top of it all. Valuable information indeed.
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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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It’s about time. Good luck!
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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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Interesting. Wouldn’t have ever thought of increased weight as an eventual effect. Perhaps their metabolisms get burned out and so they gain weight. I suppose this will be looked into even more closely soon.
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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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Thanks for the great podcast. I’d heard some of the results Dr. Kirsch’s work, but didn’t know who had originally done that work.
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Thank you, sir, for attempting to shed light on all of this, and thank you to Mr. Whitaker also. This is important information. Best to you both.
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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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Thank you, sir. With my only primitive Spanish (at best, believe me!), I can see that you got the idea. What a wonderful thing that this has crossed the language barrier! My best to you, sir, as you move ahead. A friend once told me that they say: Muerte o suerte! Maybe that’s how it works for us. Bon chance!
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Thank you.
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I can’t say how good this was. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Congratulations to you both, Dr. Breggin and Mr. Moore.
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Great videos. Very compelling and thought provoking. Thank you.
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Excellent. Thank you.
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Thank you.
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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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If anyone has had the patience to read this far, I would like to suggest that you watch the Rachel Maddow show from just last night, which was brought to my attention by my own long-suffering mother after she read this article. This specific show segment deals with eugenics (the genetics-based hypothesis of human superiority/inferiority):
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show
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Thank you, sir. Your comments are appreciated. I am a great reader of the literature of the Shoa, and I appreciate all observations on it.
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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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Thank you, sir. If you choose to do so, my email is [email protected], and I would very much like to see what you have in terms of how we in the United States were doing things in regards to eugenics. That would make a very good research project — people need to be informed about these things.
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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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I would also be interested to learn this information. Best, Eric
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Thank you very much. Most people don’t realize how very tuned in most psychotics actually are, and it seems that you’re one of us. I welcome your contribution.
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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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Thank you.
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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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I can only hope that your vision comes true. We are the ones who have to fight for it; I hope we can all stand together and do that. Best.
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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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Thank you also!
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Thank you.
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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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Thanks for your comments. I will certainly check them out.
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I’m glad that you see what I was talking about. Best to you.
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Thank you, sir. Your scientific acumen is always appreciated.
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Thank you.
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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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Thanks for your article.
As a young man, who was bullied and abused and generally made to feel like I was an odd individual (I was simply more verbal and a little smarter than the people around me: a geek, in other words), I came to the conclusion as an angry young adolescent that it was more important to be yourself than it was to fit in with everyone else. In other words, I came to believe what Emerson talked about in his essay “Self-Reliance”: “whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.” And this applies to what this research talks about. It is not important to feel happy so much as it is important to be who you genuinely are, whether that involves some anger or not (and I would point out that some social conditions of the countries that are described as
“less developed” might involve some social conditions, like poverty and blatant oppression, that might produce very, very natural feelings of resentment, anger, and sadness) and that it is actually MORE adaptive to feel those feelings than to simply feel bliss as you make lots of money and eat at fancy restaurants in America, where you might actually start to feel kind of inauthentic. It is, after all, more natural to be an angry black woman in the United States, who is fighting to change things and who has respect for herself, than to be a white man who goes to his office job every day in resignation to the white, privileged, capitalist system that gives him his big paycheck and his worthless existence. Thank you again. Good article. Being you and in tune with your actual surroundings, I believe, makes you happier. Dr. Martin Luther King was surrounded with some pretty horrible stuff, I imagine, but I also imagine that he was very happy in how he responded to it.
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Was it too expensive? Or was it just a hassle?
I know that I have been put on drugs that cost, most of the time, about $2,000 a month. I am at present given a shot every month (against my will) that costs about that. So my question is: is it really that it’s too expensive to pay for therapy? I don’t think it is, when you consider what they pay now for me to be drugged. What I think is that the money simply isn’t supplied for THAT specific form of “treatment.” The drug companies get every penny they want. People who actually help other people are, on the other hand, starved of any funds. What do you think?
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This is an incredible piece of work, sir. Thank you so much. I’m sure that SAMHSA is going to sit up and pay very close attention to this. We who write for MIA may feel at times that we’re screaming in a vacuum. We are, however, the heart of the loyal opposition itself, and in reality, I’m sure that whatever appears on this site is very closely attended to by all of the powers that be, from Big Pharma to Washington, and you just fired the shot that starts the Civil War. Congratulations on your fine work.
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I am not in any way a fan of antipsychotics, and I am fully aware that the bias of this webzine is against them. I am myself a writer for this webzine, and the last thing I would want to do is to support the use of drugs. However, in the spirit of fairness and science, it must be admitted that you have said that antipsychotic use is associated with better functioning, and this cannot be ignored.
I have myself been on psych wards, and I have myself seen how various individuals who were psychotic and/or dangerous (I have been both threatened and assaulted by such individuals on psych wards) have actually improved, and improved greatly, with the use of antipsychotics. I have myself also benefited from them at various times. Now, I don’t actually like their use, or approve of it over the long term, but it is simply an undeniable fact that sometimes — SOMETIMES — the use of antipsychotics is helpful. Not always, but sometimes. And I think that this is worth thinking about. We are not here to condemn Big Pharma. That is what I usually do, but that is not our purpose in being here. It is to find out what helps, not what gets in the way.
Thank you for your article. I find, when reading your work, that you are succinct, pithy, and very informative. Thank you.
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Thank you for your article, which is clearly and succinctly written.
I would like to make two suggestions for two anomalies that you point out in your article for which the authors of the study apparently have no answer. They are both social explanations.
First, you point out that children exposed to antidepressants need fewer special needs classes but miss more of their final exams. Well, I hate to have to put it this way (I’m trying to keep it brief), but perhaps the children of depressed mothers are as intelligent as their mothers were (they may be impaired in some areas but fully functional in others, since not all forms of intelligence are the same), and yet they are also disillusioned. Depression, after all, seems to come out of life circumstances, and if your parents were smart enough to notice the problems of the world and of their own circumstances and perhaps become depressed, then you too might be 1) pretty smart also, and 2) disillusioned enough to blow off your final exams, since none of it really matters anyway. Why bother? This points to a social cause, not a biological one, for depression.
Second, you point out the increased rate of poverty among those who have parents who used antidepressants. You might need to have actually been in a psych ward at some point yourself, or have been caught in a probation system or a prison system or any other kind of social system that we currently have, but you do not, in general, ever see rich people in psych wards. Rich people get to go somewhere else. Rich people do not end up in the social systems like probation or prison, and if they do, they get the very nice form of it all. And so, once again, you have a social determinant for who ends up on psych drugs: poor people, who don’t have a fancy lawyer to show up and bail them out when they get in trouble, and who get steamrolled into a cut-and-dried form of “treatment” by a stressed-out, overworked psychiatrist whom you might, if you’re lucky, see for five minutes a couple times a week, if that.
Thanks again for your article. Very informative.
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Thank you, sir. I realize that many people have very strong feelings about all of this, but I do also feel that there are, believe it or not, legitimate questions on both sides of every debate among us here on MIA. Is there one everywhere in the outside world? No, because people are only too willing to manipulate discussions to serve their own purposes. But here on MIA, I believe that most people are sincere, even though we have some Big Pharma lurkers out there, and so I really do see both sides of it.
I hope and pray that you and your wife are well. It takes patience and kindness and forbearance. Good luck.
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I’m sorry, Mr. Blankenship, but I don’t believe that I have suggested here that anyone is less human than anyone else. However, I do believe, and I know from experience, that when you are in a psychotic state that you may simply be living in a different version of reality than others are, and that the expectations about responsibility that apply to the world that others are in but you are not in might not be responsibly applied to you. I am not in any way suggesting that there is a special category for some people, or that they are some sort of privileged “child” who is allowed to rampage as they want to. If you get right down to it, I believe that society should protect itself from dangerous, irresponsible people. But I also believe that there are times when society should make allowances for what someone is going through. That’s all I meant to say.
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Thank you for thoughtfully presenting this article.
Perhaps I misunderstand your personal comments, but I thought that they actually represented views similar to those of Dr. Thomas Szasz, for whom I have the deepest respect. His illumination of the myth of mental illness is fundamental to what I believe. I do, however, have two issues with Dr. Szasz. He was, after all, a very right wing conservative, a libertarian, and I believe that while he had important points to make, that he was mistaken about the fundamental nature of two things in regards to “mental illness.” Both of these issues involve the idea of personal responsibility.
Let me say first of all that psychosis and schizophrenia, when you first experience them, are usually quite devastating experiences. You might find yourself truly believing that the President is trying to kill everyone, or that your neighbor is murdering people and burying them in the basement, and you might believe this totally and sincerely. You might, then, try to kill either the President or your neighbor whom you think is murdering people, and you might do this not because you are a malingering asshole, which is how Dr. Szasz essentially describes such people, but because you sincerely believe that you are helping people. This is not to justify or support such behavior. But there is, in fact, a case to be made for the insanity defense and the idea that you are not culpable for your actions in a criminal way. It’s not that you weren’t acting responsibly. It’s that you simply didn’t have the connection with the world that would enable you to act as other would act, but you were, in fact, trying to be responsible. And I don’t say that because I haven’t known people who were in mental hospitals, having used the insanity defense to escape personal responsibility for actions that they were fully aware were wrong. But there are some people who are so out of it (I would have been one of them) that they are truly unable to understand what their culpability might have been. This is a basic issue that goes to the heart of antipsychiatry’s personal responsibility issue, and I think that Dr. Szasz, as a right wing libertarian, got it wrong.
As a personal note, I have not only seen people abuse the system to escape culpability, I have also seen people who were genuinely way out there who were dangerous. I have been threatened and personally assaulted by such individuals, and yet these very same individuals, when restored to their usual selves, have sometimes come to me, admitted that what they did was wrong, and apologized. So there is hope, but there are also times when people simply cannot be held responsible for what they have done, but without taking all sense of responsibility away from them for the rest of their lives.
Deeper than that is the concept of disability. There is, quite simply, no way that some people who suffer from psychosis or schizophrenia could work. None at all. I know that I, personally, would have been so distracted by the phenomena that I saw happening around me that I would have followed them, become wrapped up in them, and been unable either to recall what my work assignment was or to even understand its importance in the light of what I was experiencing. Are there actually people who use their diagnosis to create excuses for themselves and malinger? Yes, certainly there are. But the reason that this is accepted as an excuse for claiming disability is actually valid, because some of us are disabled in that fashion. So Dr. Szasz, while doing an admirable job of pointing out one very small problem has actually stigmatized those who are having a genuine problem, which I know is real, because I had it. Now, denying people the role of social responsibility is in fact used as a justification for taking their power of making their own decisions away from them, and I deplore that situation and the people who do it. However, there are actually circumstances in which a person cannot be a responsible member of society as we normally construe it, and using Dr. Szasz’s rationale about it all is not sensible. Dr. Szasz saw social interaction as games. I do not. There is a real game element to it all, but it is certainly not the sum of what interaction or psychology is about.
I find it unfortunate that antipsychiatry, in its efforts to create liberation for the “mentally ill,” is willing to close its eyes to the reality that these people (myself among them) actually face, simply in order to embrace an ideological position that is intended to liberate us.
In other words, it’s not cut and dried. There ARE two sides to these questions, and simply brushing them away is neither intellectually honest nor psychologically sensitive. These are the two problems that I have with antipsychiatry’s excessively ideological position in these two areas.
Respectfully, of course,
Eric Coates
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Thank you, sir. I have read this twice. Once earlier in the day, and then again tonight.
I have been held captive in the psychiatric hospital a couple of times, and I always wonder what it is like for the kids. Here in New Hampshire we have two different wards in the state hospital for children. There is the one for the very young kids, like eleven or twelve years old and less (the pre-pubescents) and we have one where the older kids are. It’s strange. You seem them in the building, always in a group (the adults can get individual building “privileges,” but the kids don’t), most often as they are coming from the gym, where they engage in some serious play time and exercise, or from the library. They have the irrepressible spirits of children. I have always watched them, and they just don’t look disturbed in any way. They just look like kids. I’m sure that they have lives that are as complex as what the adults in the hospital go through. An institution is still an institution. A label is still a label. A psychiatrist is still a psychiatrist, and drugs are still drugs. Being away from home and a regular life is being in a kind of penitentiary, and you still want to escape.
Thanks for sharing this. I really do always wonder what it’s like for the kids. You are obviously a humane and decent individual, and it’s nice to know that some people do escape. I am something of a nut about wanting to know the history of my state hospital, and I have had mental health workers who had been working at the hospital for thirty or forty years tell me the stories about the children they had seen who then spent their entire lives at the hospital. There was one girl that I was told about who had a bizarre, Kafkaesque story. Her father had simply left his daughter in the hospital, a perfectly normal girl, while he traveled to Europe on business, and unfortunately he died while she was there. She then spent her entire life as an inmate of the hospital. She had no one on the outside to help her leave — to find a job and an apartment and actually be able to leave. She was trapped there. I’m not saying that she was a better or more deserving person simply because she had never had problems. Far from it. But once you are caught in the system, it is almost impossible for most of us to really ever escape.
I hope to see more of your writing soon. You obviously have a very important story to tell.
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First of all, thanks very much for your article. I appreciate how it succinctly and clearly lays out some of the issues involved, and that it retains a humane sense of fallibility about one’s own decisions about what is right and what is wrong. It’s refreshing to see.
Second, I doubt very much that this was a case of “mental illness.” I believe it was a case where the physical source(s) of his physical pain were simply unknown, which is a medical and scientific problem, not a psychological one. It is a reflexive habit of medical doctors these days to refer physical problems that they don’t understand to a psychiatrist. I believe this should be addressed, and that it should stop.
And third, I have had plenty of time to consider whether mental difficulties are themselves a sufficient reason to kill oneself. There are two answers to this: 1) I believe that suffering is suffering, and that’s all there is to it, and you can die if you want to, and 2) that even more important is your right to die, for any reason, and at any time, and there shouldn’t even BE a debate about “mental illness” at all. The whole debate is a false dichotomy, or so I believe, and I think it should be stated clearly in those terms so we can all get over it and allow people to exercise free choice about their own fates.
If God (I happen to believe in God, but have no problem with anyone who doesn’t: I was an atheist for a very long time myself) wants to keep you alive for some reason of His own, He will. Otherwise we should all get out of the way and permit people to exercise their own God-given will to make decisions about their own lives.
Thanks again for the article. I hope I see more of your commentary in the future.
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I’ve always thought — or at least I have in recent years, since I got old enough to think about it and had a reason to question what voices really are — that it was basically a case of words developing as a grunt to get another hominid’s attention, and then pointing. And then after a while they realized that there was no need to point. They could just grunt in the right way, and it got the whole job done.
I’d be happy to check out what you say about John Mace if you could send me a good link. You probably know some.
Good luck!
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Thanks, Monica! So nice to hear from you. I hope you’re well!
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I like that phrase “symptomatic beliefs.” I hope I remember that one.
However, I hope I can dissuade you from the idea that I think that ALL voices are evolution-based developments of the brain. I believe that our own internal voice, the one that everyone has, is from evolution, but that voices, so-called — the kind that voicehearers hear in addition to the usual voice — is NOT evolution-based.
Think of it this way: God let us develop on our own (you might call that free will, although I don’t really think of it in those exact terms) and that then he might decide to pick a few people here and there to talk to himself. Or to have other beings talk to. I really do not believe that ALL voices are from our own brains. In fact, I’m pretty confident that it’s very different from that.
Thanks for your comments. Glad to hear that you’re doing well with it all.
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I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear exactly what I was writing about. I was NOT addressing the subject of the kinds of voices that voicehearers hear. Those are entirely different from that voice that EVERYONE has inside them, which sounds like your own voice talking to you. That is an entirely different affair. Also, I am not at all in agreement with the idea that voices (plural, as in voicehearers, not “normal” people) come from inside. I very much believe in God, for instance, and that he can talk to you and sometimes does. I believe that my voices are external, not internal. But I will be getting to that subject on my blog in another week or two, or whenever the editors choose to publish it. I hope you will find more to agree with in that one.
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I really do agree with most of what you say. I’m not sure about the lacking accountability part — not being held responsible for what you do — because society does, after all, need to protect itself from harmful human beings who might prey on or hurt others, and punishment (and attempted reform) is sometimes necessary if society IS going to protect itself. Aside from that, I agree with you.
Thanks for responding!
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This is a very interesting discussion. I would be curious to know: are you a voicehearer? It sounds like you aren’t, since it is easier to discount the idea of an outside force when you haven’t been exposed to things like voices that you can clearly tell are NOT your own, and then you see enough things in the outside world that cannot be easily accounted for by the usual empirical world. Especially when the voices either tell you that something going to happen, or tell you what to do, and then when you do it, something extraordinary happens.
I’m also not sure about the stripping layers away part. I think that’s a very deceptive metaphor that comes out of an outdated (i.e., we’ve grown past that conception of things) form of psychology. They’ve been talking about a “subconscious,” for instance, since long before either you or I were born. Yet there is no scientific proof for its existence at all. So: we can build nuclear reactors and spaceships headed to Mars, but we just haven’t found where this subconscious is located in the brain? I’m sorry, but I just don’t buy it. There are things we do that are NOT conscious, but I don’t think there’s a real SUBconscious, if you know what I mean.
When you talk about “stripping thoughts away,” I think what you’re really talking about is learning to do 2 things. 1) You learn to see through what that prefrontal cortex (what I call the parasite) is saying, and this is what we achieve when we become mindful, whether that’s through the Buddhist tradition or the Jewish tradition or, hell, you just learn it on your own. Buddhists say that some people are just naturally enlightened and they never need to learn about it at all; it just comes naturally. And the other thing I think that you’re really talking about is 2) how hardwired many of our thoughts and habits are, right in our brain structure, and that you can learn to spot what’s there. For instance, I have what is now an instinctive reaction to much of life that is to simply relax about it. Yet when I was younger, I had a lot (and I mean a lot) of social anxiety and fear about the bigger world and about school. What I did was teach myself, through many years of effort, to basically just shake it off. It is almost impossible for anything to make me worry any more. And that was basically just a case of rewiring my own brain so that it doesn’t do the same thing any more. These are not “layers” after all. In no way does the brain resemble an onion. It’s more like a circuit board, where you can solder new connections into place.
Anyway, sorry for the long ramble, but the subject interests me. Nice talking, and thanks for the thoughtful responses.
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I don’t want to intrude on your own personal discussion here, but there is actually a Buddhist theory that the mind itself is the sixth sense. In other words, there is vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell, all of which come from the outside world. Buddhism — Tibetan Buddhism, at least — says that the mind is also a sense organ. We don’t know where our thoughts come from. They just appear and disappear. And in this sense, they are just like the other senses. We can’t explain where it comes from, what it’s really doing, or where it will go. The mind, the thought process, is in other words just another sense organ. So: are you responsible for your own thoughts? Do you create them? Probably not.
So good luck with it all, and I hope you have a good discussion about it all.
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First of all, although I am an actual voicehearer, I am not talking about “voices.” I am talking about the same voice that you and I have both heard in our own heads. Second, I thank you that you think I have actually summed up a lot of what’s hurting people. I’m glad about that.
But to move on to the rest of what you have to say. YOUR internal voice may very well be different from mine. Yours may be helpful in some ways, just as my own was very, very helpful in some ways. And hurtful in some ways. But it really is not the same thing as who I feel I am. I am very much that deeper sense of my own self, and not the other thing that is talking to me. Your own internal voice seems to be more constructive than mine was. Even in my the realms of my own hypothesis, there is a lot of room for variation. Perhaps those of us who are loners, who are writers, who are a little bit too selfish — and I have been all of those things — don’t have a parasite that is quite as benign and helpful as other people might have? Perhaps you are pointing something out here that I hadn’t thought of — our human variation. Perhaps for some people it is not a parasite, but merely symbiotic. I can accept that idea. It’s a good one.
However, I will have to disagree with you about “it’s not part of me.” I am quite confident that this thing that used to talk in my head was NOT, quite clearly, part of the me that is part of my deeper awareness. No. Not at all, and that’s not trying to disown it. It just wasn’t me, and I remember quite clearly how it has tried to impose itself on me. So maybe you actually have a symbiotic relationship with it, while mine is a little more . . . predatory. It might be just human variation. Or maybe it’s the Devil — that snake which is the power of speech — coming in to hurt us.
I appreciate your idea of how evil actually serves what is good. That is a very old idea, actually, that comes from at least the time of the middle ages. In Dante’s Inferno, the Devil is trapped at the bottom of Hell, which is not made of fire, actually, but of ice. The worst traitors — and the Devil is a traitor, to God Himself — are trapped in this ice at the bottommost layer of Hell. And the Devil, who was an angel at one time, still has wings. And as he flaps his wings, trying to escape the ice, he also creates such a powerful wind that it cools the ice and keeps it frozen. That is how it all works. The evil that we do keeps us trapped in evil, simply because of who we are. And the good that we do also frees us to do more good, because that is who we are.
The voice inside is also a part of that. I’m glad to have talked to you. I hope we meet again.
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Thank you. I’m glad to be doing this sort of thing again. Thank you for the links as well. I’ll check them out.
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Psychosis is a hell of an experience, isn’t it? Glad you made it through. I’m psychotic all day long, every day, but it’s manageable for me most of the time. I would go back to “normal” any day, because it does get pretty exhausting. Nevertheless it’s a pretty remarkable thing to experience, and I wouldn’t be the same person without it. In fact, the old me is long gone. I hope you get a chance to revisit if you want.
I know: who says that? But psychosis is a hell of a trip, and if it isn’t too horrifying, it’s something that everyone should experience at least once. There’s nothing like it.
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I can tell that you are also another psych-ward survivor, or at least another one of us from the streets. We are a special breed, that’s for sure.
I think of myself as being bilingual. I can talk psychotic or I can talk normal. I love talking to psychotics. I love talking to normal people too. Anyway, I really appreciate the poetry. It’s great. I have a whole wall here at home of psych ward art. It’s great. And I can talk in rhyme all day long, just like a rapper. It’s fun. Tiring, but fun.
Good luck out there. It’s a crazy world.
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Nice, dude! That’s awesome.
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I hope that you do well. I am a REAL voicehearer — all day, every day, at times — so I know how painful and troubling and hopeless it can all seem. I do truly hope that you get to the other side of it all. I have, at least for now, and I wouldn’t want anyone to get stuck there. Good luck, and God bless.
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I’m not interested in “promotion,” as it were (not to denigrate what you’re about, if that’s what you do), but I would certainly be happy to get out there and help the voicehearing cause. I’m also interested in psychology in general, so I would be happy to talk. I will email very soon with my own contact information.
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Thank you for this report. The business practices of Big Pharma are more than familiar to me, but I hadn’t been following this particular story closely.
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Thank you once again, sir, for spreading some light in this darkness.
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Perhaps we could also have denial-based therapy, collusion-based empathy, and non-existential based decision making. What do you think?
I think that we could expand the healthcare system infinitely — if it hasn’t gotten there already (about which I have my suspicions — if only we created enough hyphenised adjectives to describe it all. We could even soon have raw-based cooking, shrimp-based gigantism, and even, most unbelievable of them all, human-based living. Wow!
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I would like only to add this: I do not believe in “rebound”, but I do believe that when you come off the drugs, in the physical universe that God created, that you do, once again, enter his universe. There is no “rebound.” What there is is a kind of re-entry into God’s world, and that He created it this way on purpose. I am not trying to discredit any “science” of the brain. I am simply trying to emphasize the power of the world that God made.
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Thank you for your article, Dr. Burstow. You are as conscientious as always.
Best,
Eric Coates
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I am an MIA author myself.
I believe in the gradual discontinuation of drugs, but I do not believe in taking years to do it. I believe that one drug should be discontinued at at time — the most powerful one — but that each drug can be discontinued in a matter of a few months.
Schizophrenia is a whole other topic, and the “rebound syndrome” is something that I do not believe exists. Rebound is not a result of drugs.
Think of it this way. God knew exactly what human beings were a few thousand years ago. Religious — which is to say, schizophrenic — experience has been with us that whole time. Jesus and Mary, if they were with us now, would be subjected to a whole range of drug and neuro treatments.j
There is no such thing as rebound. What there is is a re-emergence of the experience of God, which is nothing at all like what is described as “schizo” in the DSM. It is simply the re-emergence of the God experience — which is, yes, very painful and very difficult and very, very hard to get through. But there is no drug rebound. There is simply the re-emergence of the spiritual experience. And that is very different.
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Mr. Bertino an supporters:
I was myself a psychiatric prisoner for a very long time. Although there were no criminal charges involved — which very likely spared me the fate you are going through — I was also forced to endure the system, not because I was a problem, but because I resisted it.
I am very, very, very interested in your case and will make it a priority to see that it is righted.
I am the former bestselling author of “Hearing Voices” and a former blogger for this site.
Issues of civil liberties are paramount for me. I will do what I can to see that you are freed.
My email is: [email protected]. If you or your trusted contacts wish to communicate with me, this is where you should do it.
It’s time for the bullshit to stop. In solidarity with you, my brother and fellow prisoner, I can only wish you courage to endure. I know it’s hard. I haven’t had to deal with it as bad as you, but I’ve been there. Love and peace, brother.
Best,
Eric Coates
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Oh, but damn. It only just occurred to me.
While it’s probably great for you to make thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars from giving all your speeches (look at the top of the website for Robert Whitaker’s speaking schedule!), I guess that there hasn’t yet been enough of my people who are poisoned and killed by metabolic syndrome, and whose lives are rendered painful and meaningless before that happens, for you to get off your lazy ass and actually do the real reporting.
The reporting that actually takes guts. I know, it’s really hard to cross swords with Allen Frances and Ronald Pies from a position of privilege, cause that must be really, really hard. I know it is, because you spend so much time telling us all about it that it must be a really, really big thing for you. Cause that’s the most important thing for us all to hear about. While millions of my people die. Millions and millions of them. Metabolic syndrome — you know what that is, right? Weight gain that distorts your body and makes life miserable. High blood pressure, and hyperlipidemia, and diabetes. Hey, if you’re lucky, you might even have them cut off your legs and even go blind before you die of a heart attack or a massive infection, twenty-five years before your time! But thank God that Robert Whitaker got to wear the black hat in his debate against Ronald Pies or Allen Frances! And now we can all hear about it again!
Thank God that Mr. Robert Whitaker is on our side! He’s so bold and courageous. He hasn’t actually held anyone to account yet, but he’s a really tough customer. He even almost won the Pulitzer once.
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You’re a journalist — and, according to most reliable and honest people, a pretty good one. You were even part of a team that was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, right? Of course, I have a couple of those in the family, so I know what they actually mean, but hey? At least you got that much.
One wonders why, after fifteen or twenty years of studying this subject, and reading all those medical reports and all those drug studies, and being paid large sums to trot all over the globe and give big speeches to all those audiences, why you haven’t yet reached a fairly obvious conclusion — one that should be fairly obvious to a big-time, almost-Pulitzer winner like you who runs this big investigative website.
Which would be: Maybe the studies are designed NOT to reveal the information you’re looking for.
I mean, you know David Healy and everything, right? So maybe you could have noticed — and maybe even pointed out for everyone in your really big audience that’s so impressed by your really, really big brain — that maybe all those studies you like to talk about (over and over and over and over again) don’t contain the information you’re looking for because . . . they’re deliberately designed not to reveal those things?
Wow. What an idea! Would a major company — like a big pharmaceutical company, say? — actually HIDE what their drugs do?
Are you a student of history, Mr. Whitaker? Because I’m pretty sure that there’s another guy down there in Boston, also affiliated with Harvard, who wrote a book called “The Cigarette Century”, in which he described how Big Tobacco — “a specialized part of the pharmaceutical industry”, in their own words — used their so-called research and published information to cover up what they were doing.
Hmm. Maybe it’s time to be a little less timid about your conclusions and start asking why the studies don’t seem to supply the relevant information.
You might even get that Pulitzer if you did. Then you could run around and shoot your mouth off even more and even get higher fees for your speeches, and use even more psychiatric conferences as stops on your book tours.
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Thank you, Mr. Whitaker, for all that you and your wonderful staff are doing for the world. At some point in the future, they will write the history of our time, and they will write the history of what you did in the same terms as they write now about the Abolitionists who helped stop slavery. It’s truly that important, and I admire you and your staff, regardless of whatever minor disagreements we might have.
I have tried to increase my monthly donation, and the website wouldn’t let me do it. It told me that I couldn’t. You might want to check into how all that business stuff works.
Best,
Eric Coates
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Thanks, Sarah. It’s a pleasure to see it all summed up so concisely. Although I’m still relatively new to reaching out to others through online sources, it’s a pleasure to see that the “hundreds of groups” you speak of are forming, and that there are more and more of us every day who are starting to take some kind of action. Personally, I believe it is time for us to form a sort of Underground Railroad and start moving people outside the system to where they can get help. I don’t believe we can stop the Murphy Bill, unfortunately. Which doesn’t, of course, mean that we shouldn’t try. But the history of prejudice that got us into this position in the first place, where the whole industrial/psychiatric/neurological/pharmaceutical/prison complex was able to capitalize on our weakness to build their damaging model and to profit from it all is exactly what is giving them the money to fund people like Murphy, and to keep control of the conversation by funding the psychiatry programs and the research and the endless, endless, endless drug ads. This is not to say that I despair. But I do think about this question of how we are going to free ourselves for much of every day, and I don’t know yet what can be done. But I’m thinking about it all, and I’m sure that there are plenty of other people who know the moral rightness of our position who are thinking about it too, like you are. Anyway, thanks for the article. It was a pleasure to read.
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It’s very important that all this be investigated. Very important.
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I was thinking that you might do a blog entry on just that — alternative approaches that would be compliant with the UN. I know that I would certainly find it useful, and one thing I do have to complain about with MIA is that there isn’t enough attention given to the positive alternatives. I know that someone like me would certainly benefit from a summation, with citations, of what can be done to comply with the UN. Otherwise, if no one is in compliance, what hope is there to create something that IS in compliance? I don’t mean to create work for you, but that positive next step is clearly crucial to what we’re all trying to do here.
Thanks for your consideration.
Best,
Eric Coates
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I hope I’m not too late to get your attention with a question regarding some of the contents of your writings. I am definitely now in the antipsychiatry camp, and I have read some of what you wrote about Canada’s violation of UN agreements about the forced treatment and incarceration of the mentally troubled. You seemed to suggest that the UN was very clear that such detainment of the “disabled” (I don’t consider myself disabled, but I guess we just have to deal with whatever language the agreements adopt) is illegal or unacceptable for the signatories of the agreement (I’m not sure what the exact language is) to engage in. What I did NOT find in your writing is what the alternatives are — i.e., rather than locking people up when they are, say, perceived to be unstable, what is done in other countries that are not in violation of the agreement? And how well does that work out for them? Even if you could simply point me in the direction of articles or books that might address that question, I would greatly appreciate it. I’m against the coercion, but I’m just wondering what is done in its stead by countries that do comply with UN standards of human rights.
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I hope I’m not too late to get your attention with a question regarding some of the contents of your writings. I am definitely now in the antipsychiatry camp, and I have read some of what you wrote about Canada’s violation of UN agreements about the forced treatment and incarceration of the mentally troubled. You seemed to suggest that the UN was very clear that such detainment of the “disabled” (I don’t consider myself disabled, but I guess we just have to deal with whatever language the agreements adopt) is illegal or unacceptable for the signatories of the agreement (I’m not sure what the exact language is) to engage in. What I did not find in your writing is what the alternatives are — i.e., rather than locking people up when they are, say, perceived to be unstable, what is done in other countries that are not in violation of the agreement? And how well does that work out for them? Even if you could simply point me in the direction of articles or books that might address that question, I would greatly appreciate it. I’m against the coercion, but I’m just wondering what is done in its stead by countries that do comply with UN standards of human rights.
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Your situation is one to which I have given a lot thought over the last few months. I was, until quite recently, a prisoner at New Hampshire Hospital in Concord, N.H., and the role and the feelings of the “mental health workers” and the nurses and even some of the psychiatrists was something that used to bother me. Obviously, you don’t get into those sorts of professions unless you start off with the belief on some level (1) that you care about people and (2) that you might be able to help in some way. Yet, when I looked around at what was, quite blatantly, a model based on nothing more than coercion and incarceration, and one where I was forced to take drugs and where I was taken down into restraints and isolated when I didn’t comply with whoever might be in charge, I couldn’t help but wonder what sorts of feelings were being felt by those people ass they manhandled me and forced a needle into my ass.
In particular, there was a small group of nurses and “mental health workers” who obviously went out of their way to be compassionate and responsive “caregivers”. Yet, when it came right down to it, they would respond in line with the goals of the very same force of coercion (going in to care for or watch a restrained “patient”, etc.) that I was doing my utmost to resist, and though they did so looking unhappy about it, they did it nonetheless.
I can see that not everyone, like some of the people I saw there, was a complete sellout who just wanted to uphold the system as it was then in operation. When I saw your comment about wondering what exactly “behavioral health” might be, I had to laugh, because I have wondered the exact same thing in the exact same words, and the only conclusion I could come to is that I just have no idea what “behavioral health” might be, unless one were to turn it into some kind of sick joke about not crashing your car through barriers on the highway and not having sex with someone who has a venereal disease. Seriously: what the hell is “behavioral health”? Can anyone answer that question without resorting to some circular explanation about “not harming yourself” or any of the other nonsense that is used as an excuse to forcibly drug people to “prevent harm”, especially when “harm” is usually the last thing that is being threatened? I have heard more rationalizations for brutality based on the excuse of “safety” than I could ever have imagined would be possible.
I salute your courage in openly stating your problems with your institution and in openly admitting what is going on there and how you feel about it. Unless others also question their consciences, nothing can change. On the other hand, I have a fear centered on when all the compassionate “caregivers” abandon the system: after all, who will be left behind to run them? How much worse will it get without people like you there, or without all the people I saw myself who wanted to genuinely help? In the end, the whole system will be run by willing and eager collaborators in oppression. I don’t suggest that you stay, because to do so is to be a collaborator, and yet one can understand the argument for trying to stick around and mitigate the harm being done. It’s a terrible conundrum, and I can only say that I admire your willingness to risk exposure and to speak up publicly about this terrible conflict. I wish you the best, and I mean that sincerely, even as someone who so recently had to put up with the very kind of coercion you’re talking about, even when it came from people who I could tell were very like you in their deepest beliefs. Good luck.
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Lovely article. Good for you and your family and the world around us. I hope you keep it up.
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Awesome. All you have to do is point at the facts and their own publications, and the whole story comes apart. And thanks for pointing out the work done by Philip Hickey. He and Bonnie Burstow are personal heroes of mine for pointing out some things that just don’t get attention, like what psychiatry’s dependence on the drug theory, absolute and unaccountable authority, and endless mendacity are keeping us all prisoners. Thanks as always.
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Thanks for your courageous post. One thing I’ll mention. When whistleblowers started coming down on Big Tobacco, they were only a fraction of the size of Big Pharma. I’m not saying you need to watch out for your life, but the bottom line is that speaking up this way to these kinds of companies can be dangerous. I just spent 4 months in a psychiatric hospital, where the first thing I told them was that I was an MiA author and an author of books about Hearing Voices, and they kept me a prisoner for much longer than could ever be justified.
Also, while I was there, a young woman came in who was a whistleblower on Medicare and the health industry. She was concerned when her family was overbilling Medicare, and she reported it to the FBI, I believe. The next thing she knew, she was a psychiatric “patient.”
People who speak up on these issues are in danger. Big Tobacco used to threaten people’s lives, and I wonder how Jeffrey Milligand, who blew the whistle on Y-1, is doing now. People who speak up when there is this kind of money on the line — $24 billion to market drugs to doctors in recent years, as opposed to the merely $4 billion it takes to paralyze the evening news with drug ads — tend to have problems. I can only caution anyone who speaks up, or they might have a fate like I did.
For 4 months I raged, argued, and tried to fight back. In the end I was drugged, against my will, and all the people who told me how “normal” I seemed came and went. I can only hope that this author, and others who speak out, will take precautions against the Big Pharma machine. It may not be very long before you too are “having problems,” according to the people around you.
In China, this is called being “mentally illed.” They actually have a word for it. It’s like when, in Russia, a dissident was jailed and sent off to a gulag, called a “psychiatric hospital.”
Please take all the cautions you can. You have a little too much courage for the current “system.”
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A “conditional discharge” is New-Hampshire-speak for saying they can haul you back in any time they say. Technically, it means that 1) if you don’t take the meds, and they check your blood or your urine or whatever, and if the drugs aren’t there in the right levels, or 2) you, say, disagree with a social worker (“case worker”) or a psychiatrist, or, hell, the receptionist, I guess, then . . . you can be hauled back up to the state “hospital” and confined, with NO DUE PROCESS OF LAW, until they say.
This creates an interesting situation where, for instance, you could be hauled in if your “psychiatrist”, say, decides they don’t like you having a beer now and then. One of the most menacing aspects of the collusion between all the “health professionals” who think they know something about the mind (without ever having studied it, according to the syllabi of the psychiatric schools) is that now, with it all combined into one institution, with “mental health” and “substance abuse” all paired into one system, the pharmaceutical companies now control the whole ball of wax. If you’re distressed, say, from the loss of a loved one, and you have a couple drinks down at the local bar, they can now haul you in for having had that drink. What this means in practice is that, while charging you loads of moolah for a prescription for Attivan or Lorazepam or whatever they call it, you can now go to what is more or less a jail if you dare to indulge in a non-prescription, non-pharmaceutical company drug.
One of the most interesting aspects of my experience in the state institution was how nicotine was handled. I swear that 90% of the problems were caused by locked doors that no one could leave to go outside and have a cigarette. Rather than hand out some good nicotine gum, they handed out what was clearly some sort of substandard “polycrilex” nonsense that had virtually no impact, did it AT MOST every two hours, and then stood back and watched people scream and pound the counter for more.
That’s the new Psychiatric-Neurological-Pharmaceutical-Prison Complex at work. Watch and see what it does next. They just installed ARMOR on the front of the building. I’m not kidding.
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Mr. N, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your words. I have the greatest respect for someone who managed to get through what you described without being trapped by the system and who has actually managed to come through it all, to disavow none of it, and to actually find words to say plainly what they felt they experienced without making any excuses for it or trying to redefine it or hush it up or squeeze it into some paradigm they either don’t believe in or would find artificial. I can only express my greatest respect for managing all of that and doing it with such seeming grace and wisdom that I can do little more than gesture toward it and say it’s there.
I recently went through a very similar experience, in a very similar geographical area (southwest New Hampshire), but I was not able to find the kind of community you are talking about, though I tried desperately to find one, and I was swept up in the “mental health system” (I hate to even use the words, but they have yet to be replaced, so that I feel like I am using the words of the oppressor to describe the very experience I am talking about in an alien, evil, and misleading language), and all in spite of my best efforts to avoid it. I was trapped, literally, at the New Hampshire Hospital for several months while going through what I think are very similar experiences to what you describe, as best I understand them, and I can only wish I had been able to reach someone like you and the groups you facilitate. Again, I tried, but failed to find anyone like you, failed to avoid the system, and now I am more or less trapped again, on a conditional discharge that denies the validity of my experiences and that forces me to take drugs, which I regard as poison.
In the coming days I will begin pubishing a regular blog for MIA in which I will describe my experience of this horrible “mental hospital,” and I will attempt to address the same sorts of issues you raised so eloquently and gracefully in your article. I can only hope that you will read it and contribute something to the discussion that ensues. I have the greatest respect for your points of view and for the Hearing Voices Network, and I remain, once and always, an admirer of the words you put down.
Best,
Eric Coates
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I see both sides of this issue. While it’s lamentable that people are put on antipsychotics, as I was for ten years (and was just forced to start them again when I couldn’t find a social support system like Soteria or Open Dialogue), I will say openly that I had great social support from my family and that it was indeed crucial. Without it, I would have been lost. I wish we didn’t have a system that forces us down the drug route, and I wish it was ALL socially based. That is what matters most to me and what I try to do with my time: give support to others around me. Even in a small town like my own, there are numerous individuals who need help on a daily basis, whether it’s something as simple as taking the time to talk to them, or taking the time and a little money to get someone a bottle of Benadryl so that when the antipsychotics akithisia (the tension and the shakes) gets too bad they can relax a little. At least this doctor — I wish we didn’t have to deal with them at all, but while we have to — is willing to look at something a little more than just the drugs. If we can start with people like that, maybe we can move the system back to where it used to be, where there were no drugs at all.
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Thank you. I’m a big fan of what you’re doing, and while I know this isn’t a personal issue, it’s nice to get some response and know that you’re making a difference. You are.
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I’ve always wondered what the difference is between “clinical” depression and other, theoretically non-clinical depression is. I suspect that what is going on there is that psychiatrists have figured out they can bullshit the system for a few more dollars, and drag out the “medication adjustment” period for a few more days, and fill the beds a little longer, and so on and so forth, with Medicare dollars as the bottom line and goal about it all. Is clinical depression “real depression”? Is non-clinical depression “real depression”? Or does it take some legitimizer in a lab coat to say so for your feelings to be real? Does a Medicare billing form make the difference?
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All I wanted to say when I read this was: Bravo!
Then I read the comments.
First of all, I wanted to agree with what Andrew said about what Whitaker was really doing — looking at the real effects of these drugs, versus how they’re portrayed in the rhetoric/marketing of the psychiatrists, the pharmaceutical companies, and picked up without examination by the press — and that I had the same reaction I did when I read Kelly’s piece: that it just didn’t make sense, that it was disconnected from what we’re actually talking about. And I felt exactly the same way Richard did about keeping our focus on the issue we’re coming together around, not getting lost in accomodation or lost in the crowd, compromising our goals away for minor gains. When the piece in question appeared, I was so annoyed at the idea of “decentering” that I couldn’t resist replying at greater length than I might have. The main points were:
“First, I never got the impression that Robert Whitaker was trying to explain every change in disability (SSI/SSDI) as a consequence of psychotropic use. In fact, I’ve never gotten the impression that disability, per se, was even Mr. Whitaker’s larger concern. Mr. Whitaker is a medical journalist, and his focus is on medicine — specifically, on psychiatry, if I understand him correctly. While people tend to focus on his book Anatomy of an Epidemic, which talks about antidepressant use and the rise in disability, I see the focus on disability as a way of looking at the real-world effects of psychotropic use — in other words, psychiatric practice. The other book, which I’m sure you know but which people talk about less, is Mad In America, which focuses on the history of psychiatric treatment of “psychosis” and does not really focus on disability. Thus, the common theme of his work is psychiatry, and I see his discussion of disability as only one pathway — the one he has chosen to explore, possibly because it is a clear way to demonstrate what is really going on and what the long-term effects are of current psychiatric practice — to talk about psychiatric practice in general. So, to bring it back around to the unfortunate title of your piece — that Mr. Whitaker “missed the mark” in how he talks about the rise in disability due to the use of psychotropic meds, I think that it might actually be you who missed the point. He’s not talking about everything that’s happening with disability, because that’s not his main concern. He’s using disability to draw a larger picture of the effects of modern psychiatry. The name of this website, after all, is “Mad In America”, not “Disability In America”, and while your concern with the larger issues surrounding disability is laudable and important and it’s good for us to know about other issues, you may have mistaken what Mr. Whitaker’s larger focus is, if I understand it correctly myself.
Second, I disagree with you completely that we need to “decenter” from the discussion of medication. While some people who are well acquainted with the subject may be familiar with its broad outlines and ready to expand their focus to other areas, there are lots of other people who are using this website to explore the subject for the first time, or to keep up on current information and perspectives. The movement to change psychiatric practice — which is the real focus of this website, not disability — is starting to gather some steam, but the broad societal change hasn’t happened yet, and to “decenter” from medication is the very last thing we need to do at this point. If anything, we need to center on it even more and with even greater purpose: tie the broad range of perspectives together into a cohesive and panoramic picture that the public and practitioners can understand so that enough people will grasp enough of the whole dynamic that we’ll create enough momentum for change. Right now, many pieces of the picture are out there — the emptiness and failures of the current chemical imbalance model, the long history of psychiatry’s failures and the dangers of its coercive power, the long-term consequences of psychotropic use, the dangerously corrupt practices of the pharmaceutical industry and how it is intertwined with the psychiatric establishment. The pieces are out there, and I would like to see someone come along and create a unified picture of how it all works. And, if I get my druthers, there will be someone like you who has a broad knowledge of how public policy and government programs actually work involved in putting that picture together, because without that knowledge of the system, any attempts to implement change will be hampered along the way by institutional interests, just as Big Tobacco did, in order to preserve their own interests and profits, often by seeming to concede to changes while ensuring they were implemented in ways that worked to their own advantage.”
In short, I thought the whole piece took a great idea — broadening awareness to other issues — and presented it in the most tone deaf way possible, not only by suggesting we aren’t aware of the broader social issues and learning from and supporting other movements (I know I am, but I don’t talk about that here) but by suggesting we should reach some sort of false accomodation over our central issues in order to achieve . . . what? Our own defeat?
To be honest, I thought that Kelly, even if he thinks he’s on some higher path of unity, is actually a great voice for the other side of this issue. He’s got lived experience, he’s getting his Ph.D., and he can throw around quotes about structural this and structural that and sound perfectly reasonable to someone who hasn’t got their eye on the prize: stopping the drugs and the coercion, and replacing it with something that actually works. The tobacco industry set up a thing called the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) that was staffed with all kinds of well-meaning academics who were willing to confuse the issues in pretty much the same way and keep the public confused about what cigarettes were really doing to people, just like they’re trying to pretend the psych drugs aren’t just about as bad. If Kelly hasn’t gotten a call from one of their PR firms yet, offering him a corner office at NAMI or some other institution they bankroll, he might expect one soon after he graduates. I’ve got lived experience too, and it annoys me that he used that as a claim of authority in his comments up at the top of this section to try to delegitimize and beat down someone else’s point of view that a lot of people with lived experience would agree with and when having lived experience doesn’t mean you know everything and that you can’t learn from other people who don’t have it. I think people have been pretty respectful overall in how they responded to him, and tried to focus on the good things he had to say, but that’s only another example of his tone deaf approach. We need every ally we can get, and that doesn’t include trying to fault Whitaker’s argument for failing to make a point it wasn’t even looking at or talking about, and it doesn’t include deligitimizing anyone’s point of view on the basis of who they are. He complained about a “straw man” argument? Catechizing us all again? And then he concludes with one that’s “ad hominem.”
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“Zombie” is exactly the word I always use to describe it. Just to shake it up a little now and then, I sometimes use the expression “brain dead”, or I might compare it to being in solitary confinement for a few years: a kind of mental and social jail cell where you can’t really think, feel, or relate to anyone around you. Lately, I’ve been seeing this guy at the gym, and you can spot it right away: the weight gain, the dead staring eyes and expressionless face, the slow shuffling steps. I say this not to shame anyone for their appearance, but because that was me for a few years, and once you’ve seen it in the mirror for a while, you can spot it immediately. The guy is so doped up that it’s like broadcasting to everyone around him that something is wrong, and everyone acts accordingly — the same way I was treated for years — which is to ignore him completely. Being in that state essentially enacts a social death on top of the internal death you’re already being subjected to, at least if it’s as bad for you as it was for me and lots of other people I see, and now when I see him I can’t help thinking that he’s been buried alive. He’s been buried alive, and no one is listening, because he probably doesn’t even realize that he should be screaming his lungs out. And if he did, how many people would actually listen to him? Or would they just tell him these are “side effects” that he needs to get used to? Side effects, they call them — as if reducing him to this state wasn’t the whole point. They can’t fix you, but they sure can keep you quiet and manageable, and that works out great for a who doesn’t want to feel uncomfortable or inconvenienced by the ugliness of your struggle while you’re working things out.
Jeffrey, I’m going to quote you some day. The amazing way our experience is disregarded — that our point of view is almost always invalidated and disregarded, whether it’s viewing any concerns we might raise as a “lack of insight” or “non-compliance”, regardless of how legitimate it would be coming out of anyone else’s mouth in any other circumstance, or the way our point of view is deliberately excluded from the profession by quietly keeping us out, when in any other circumstance someone who’s actually dealt with a problem themselves (diabetes, sports injuries, cancer . . . anything at all) is considered a valuable resource — all of that speaks volumes about how the psychiatric profession really works and what its priorities are. It seems that it’s only when one of their own finally points out the elephant in the room that it’s considered legit, and as outrageous as it may be that this report even needed to appear, maybe we’ve got an ally out there — someone in the profession who’s willing to go through the motions of dressing it all up as a study in order to get our point of view out there. It’s easy to forget that a few of them still have functioning consciences, that they’re appalled at what they’re seeing, that it was psychiatrists like Szasz and Laing who got the conversation moving, or that there are some of them out there now who want to change how it works, but you see signs of it now and then. I figure any psychiatrist who dares to write for this site has to have a lot of guts and integrity to run the risk of being excluded by the rest of their own profession, taking a chance with whether they’ll be able to hold onto a job while expressing their doubts or their opposition — the same kind of courage and integrity that it takes for a cop or a member of the maffia who dares to come clean about what’s really going on — and I have to give the people who put this article out there some kudos.
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I’m having a little trouble with my browser at the moment, so if my comments appear in the feed more than once, I apologize. Here are my comments:
Thanks for taking the time to write your article and trying to expand the discussion.
First of all, I’d like to say that I agree with some of your main points, at least at this point in my process of learning about the whole subject of “mental illness.” For instance, I also believe that there is a physiological process involved in every aspect of being human, whether it’s the way our minds work and our bodies function, and that the whole system is intertwined, and that we ignore it at our peril. Shifting the emphasis away from crude, blunt-force manipulation of the brain with chemicals or electroshock, with all their disastrous long-term effects, does not mean that we shouldn’t pay attention to and study the brain. A renewed emphasis on psychological processes as actually lived does not exclude understanding the biological processes that underlie them. If anything, understanding the important effects of nutrition and how that affects the body’s ability to handle stress or the brain’s ability to regulate itself is hugely important, as are the effects of exercise and meditation or a practice like yoga, etc., in giving us the tools to change how we use our minds and our bodies for the better. Supportive social environments and meaningful work also affect the whole system, and psychiatry, if it was truly concerned with the whole person — mind and body and environment — would look at all of it. So even if antipsychiatry makes some very important points, I am not opposed to the idea of psychiatry in principle — the study and practice of medicine as it relates to the mind — if it could be brought around to actual medicine that optimizes the functioning of the whole person, instead of the crude and shortsighted and often disastrous methods it uses now, which the forces of institutional complacency and conformity reinforce through a myopic focus on incremental and virtually meaningless changes to those methods while blinding them to their disastrous results and deflecting attention away from other solutions. Of course, I don’t know if you agree with all that, but it’s my take on the subject.
I agree with you also that medication needs to be less the sole focus of our concern than it is now, but that’s also where we seem to part ways.
First, I never got the impression that Robert Whitaker was trying to explain every change in disability (SSI/SSDI) as a consequence of psychotropic use. In fact, I’ve never gotten the impression that disability, per se, was even Mr. Whitaker’s larger concern. Mr. Whitaker is a medical journalist, and his focus is on medicine — specifically, on psychiatry, if I understand him correctly. While people tend to focus on his book Anatomy of an Epidemic, which talks about antidepressant use and the rise in disability, I see the focus on disability as a way of looking at the real-world effects of psychotropic use — in other words, psychiatric practice. The other book, which I’m sure you know but which people talk about less, is Mad In America, which focuses on the history of psychiatric treatment of “psychosis” and does not really focus on disability. Thus, the common theme of his work is psychiatry, and I see his discussion of disability as only one pathway — the one he has chosen to explore, possibly because it is a clear way to demonstrate what is really going on and what the long-term effects are of current psychiatric practice — to talk about psychiatric practice in general. So, to bring it back around to the unfortunate title of your piece — that Mr. Whitaker “missed the mark” in how he talks about the rise in disability due to the use of psychotropic meds, I think that it might actually be you who missed the point. He’s not talking about everything that’s happening with disability, because that’s not his main concern. He’s using disability to draw a larger picture of the effects of modern psychiatry. The name of this website, after all, is “Mad In America”, not “Disability In America”, and while your concern with the larger issues surrounding disability is laudable and important and it’s good for us to know about other issues, you may have mistaken what Mr. Whitaker’s larger focus is, if I understand it correctly myself.
Second, I disagree with you completely that we need to “decenter” from the discussion of medication. While some people who are well acquainted with the subject may be familiar with its broad outlines and ready to expand their focus to other areas, there are lots of other people who are using this website to explore the subject for the first time, or to keep up on current information and perspectives. The movement to change psychiatric practice — which is the real focus of this website, not disability — is starting to gather some steam, but the broad societal change hasn’t happened yet, and to “decenter” from medication is the very last thing we need to do at this point. If anything, we need to center on it even more and with even greater purpose: tie the broad range of perspectives together into a cohesive and panoramic picture that the public and practitioners can understand so that enough people will grasp enough of the whole dynamic that we’ll create enough momentum for change. Right now, many pieces of the picture are out there — the emptiness and failures of the current chemical imbalance model, the long history of psychiatry’s failures and the dangers of its coercive power, the long-term consequences of psychotropic use, the dangerously corrupt practices of the pharmaceutical industry and how it is intertwined with the psychiatric establishment. The pieces are out there, and I would like to see someone come along and create a unified picture of how it all works. And, if I get my druthers, there will be someone like you who has a broad knowledge of how public policy and government programs actually work involved in putting that picture together, because without that knowledge of the system, any attempts to implement change will be hampered along the way by institutional interests, just as Big Tobacco did, in order to preserve their own interests and profits, often by seeming to concede to changes while ensuring they were implemented in ways that worked to their own advantage.
To take just a moment to address your point about the potential usefulness of psychotropics, while I too have lived experience, as you do, and while I take listening to what people with lived experience have to say about their experience extremely seriously, as you also seem to do, I do not automatically think that makes every one of those people universally and unquestionably well-informed on every single issue that affects them — and I say that out of lived experience too. For many years I was the model psychiatric patient: always medication-compliant, never questioning the good judgment or enlightened care of my psychiatrist. I took the minimal and skewed information he gave me (“You might gain some weight, and we’ll need to monitor your blood sugar” — not that they would probably skyrocket, with all the bad effects that follow) as sufficient information to give my “informed consent”, never suspecting that the process had been reduced to a parody of what it was meant to be. I believed he was saving my life — even as my body ballooned up and I developed high blood sugar and high cholesterol and more and more medications of other kinds were pumped into my body as a result of the whole metabolic syndrome, and over the years of his treatment I gradually grew more and more physically and mentally incapacitated, until I reached a point where I stopped functioning in any meaningful way as a human being and spent what few hours of the day I wasn’t sleeping just staring off into space, with nothing at all going on in my head — no thought, no emotion — and made never a peep as all meaningful connection to other people and the quality of my own life disappeared. Yet I would have reported to anyone who asked, as they sometimes did, that I was doing the best that could be hoped for — or that’s what I believed, according to my assessment of the possibilities within the framework of limited expectations that I had been taught. And so, in my present life, when I listen to a couple people I know who claim that they couldn’t get through the day without their antidepressants, that it enables them to function, I don’t accept their statements without looking into it further. It’s possible they’re right. Maybe they couldn’t cope without psychotropics. I don’t fight with depression, and I can’t claim to be an expert on it. But if being “medicated” for depression resembles being “medicated” for psychosis in any way, then I suspect there is a lot more to the picture than they may even be aware of themselves. That antidepressants are almost exactly as effective as placebos leads me to suspect that that’s all these friends of mine are experiencing — the placebo effect — as difficult as that might be to see in oneself (although it’s a very interesting effect of how our thinking can determine our experience, and deserves more exploration). Or that, like me, they are coming from a place where they simply don’t realize that there are other ways to do this — that although they may think antidepressants are the best they can hope for, maybe they don’t know about exercise and good nutrition and meditation and getting into the effects of trauma and developing some insight into what’s going on for them and how to deal with it more effectively. That is, they might know the words for those things, but not the experience of those things from the inside. They may, as I did, be mistaking impairment for the best possible outcome out of a sheer lack of knowledge, and who knows what they might learn if they could get outside the information bubble and seemingly unavoidable alternative of modern psychiatry and its presentation of itself as the principal if not sole authority on the subject of “mental health,” which is how it presents itself in spite of its limited perspective and unacceptably poor outcomes, and which is so thoughtlessly accepted without question and then repeated in the media to the exclusion of what I and many others believe to be more effective solutions. So, yes, we should listen to people with lived experience, but we should also not forget that their experience is also — in a phrase you seem to favor — contextually dependent.
The last main thing I’d like to mention also relates to the “decentering” of the discussion away from medication. As I said, I wouldn’t remove it from a central position at all. But I would like to expand the center to include a complementary focus on the alternatives — the effective alternatives. If one wants to replace something, one should do one’s best to show what it might be replaced with. There is a great deal of attention paid to psychiatry’s harms and its need to reform, but less attention paid to what will be done to reform it. I guess it’s natural that anger and outrage motivates people to protest, and that happiness and contentment draws less attention or the desire to make noise. The personal stories on this website often focus on the harms of psychotropics and coercion, while going less often into what the positive solutions are. That’s only natural, of course, since so many of us, either ourselves or our loved ones, have been subjected to those harms: that’s our common ground. And if less focus is put on exploring the solutions together, that might also be because a lot of us haven’t found them yet, or are only just learning about them. We see articles that talk about Soteria or Open Dialogue — but mostly as general outlines, lacking focus on the real mechanics of how they work. In some personal stories, we see references to nutrition and exercise and meditation and so forth — but all we get, for the most part, is the broad outlines, a passing reference. But these are complex and sometimes difficult topics, and what people need — or what I needed, and still sometimes need — is a place to start with it all. For instance, I meditate, but that came about because I had the intuitive sense that meditation was about self-understanding, which I sensed I needed, and since no one (and certainly not my psychiatrist) was going to come along and just give me that information, I had to explore the subject on my own. Fortunately I like reading, I’m not intimidated by new subjects, and I’m willing to read things over and over again until I connect with them. The books are out there if you go out and hunt them down and dig through enough of them until you find one you can understand. But without that determination, and the good fortune of being pretty well educated and a reader by nature, I would most likely have never gotten into it all. And I know from talking to other people that most people don’t meditate because they don’t know what meditation really is. They have this notion, probably picked up from popular representations of people who have meditated a long time and who are pretty happy as a result, that you just sit down one day and a little magical lightbulb of bliss goes off over your head right away, and if it doesn’t then you’re doing it wrong — that you’re supposed to just instantly arrive at enlightenment or something, or you “just can’t do it right” — and they quit trying. But meditation doesn’t work that way, and maybe no one has ever told them that. To understand your own mind, you have to actually watch it for a while, experience what it’s going through, and just live with it. The end of the suffering — at least as I’ve experienced it — isn’t because you don’t feel pain any more. If anything, you’ll feel the pain even more deeply for a while. But you have to open yourself to it, go through it, in order to see where it comes from and how to work with it and how it loses its power over you, the same way a con man or a liar loses their power over you once you catch on to what they’re doing. But I don’t see a lot of discussion of the actual mechanics of meditation or the other positive alternatives. I see lots of documentation of all the miseries of psychotropics and withdrawal from them, which are necessary, but only passing references to the details of the positives, and while it’s at least mentioned in passing, it doesn’t do much to share the experience and get some insight into how things might work. So, yes, there needs to be more of a focus on things besides medication. Not at the cost of focussing on psychotropics, because that’s a fight that needs to be fought until it is won. Only that besides focussing on the harms of psychiatry, there needs to be an additional focus on the positive alternatives — which may even have the added benefit of reforming psychiatry from the outside, since, like Western medicine in general, they tend to not pick up on (or even dismiss and undermine) the importance of issues outside their traditional focus until the public forces them to look at what everyone else already knows (at which point they look around, do some “validation studies,” write some popular books, set up an institute to appropriate control of the conversation, and then give each other awards and honorary degrees in order to publicly congratulate themselves once again on how they’re moving in ever more progressive directions . . . but I don’t really care who takes the credit in the end as long the change finally happens!).
Thanks for your article. Even if I disagree on what I think you meant on some points, the discussion itself is important to have. I guess I went rather far afield in my comments, but I thought you deserved a thorough response. I suspect that some other responses will not be as civil, but I recognize the good intent behind your thinking. But, while I wholeheartedly endorse free discussion, I wouldn’t catechize Mr. Whitaker on the failures of his work with a sensationalist title when you don’t seem to have taken quite enough time to consider its purpose or — there’s that word again — the context it depends on.
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I’d be interested to know where the money really went for a couple reasons.
When the Master Settlement came along between the tobacco companies and the states in the late 90s, the idea was that a certain percentage of tobacco revenue had to be paid to each state each year. This agreement was reached with a clear and stated purpose: to provide funding for tobacco education and anti-smoking campaigns, particularly for young people, who have been the historical targets of Big Tobacco’s marketing, with the result that many of them were hooked at a young age, which is to say when they didn’t know better and couldn’t make truly informed decisions about tobacco’s harms and so became lifelong consumers of the product (a general strategy on the part of people who sell mind-altering chemicals that we might find familiar).
But that hasn’t happened. For instance, in my state of New Hampshire, Big Tobacco has been ponying up about $50 million a year. Where is that money going? Not to tobacco education or anti-smoking campaigns. No, it’s actually going to balance the budget. Instead of addressing the harms it was meant to address, and prevent them, it’s now being treated as just another revenue source. In fact, it has in a way made the state complicit with Big Tobacco. The state now has an interest in Big Tobacco getting as much money as possible, in order to get more money every year as its share. Probably the last thing we can expect is for this windfall to ever be used for what it was meant for. But that’s getting a little off topic.
I would be very interested to know if California is using the new revenue to provide new or expanded programs and services in addition to what was already there, or if the money is only being used to pay for services that already existed, allowing the state to shift money that used to go to mental health services to other areas. If how the states are using the tobacco settlement money is any indication, the people of California need to demand accountability and transparency in how the money is being spent.
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Thanks for your comments. I have been thinking lately that the way to stop current psychiatric practices — the drugs that debilitate and eventually kill people, which consumes simply enormous public resources, and the extremely expensive recurrent hospital stays and endless psychiatric bills — might be the way to attack the system and put something else in its place. For instance, just to use my own case as an example: A hospital stay, even a brief one, costs many thousands of dollars. When I became psychotic, I cost the system more than $10,000 in just a few days. After I became psychotic, I was given disability — at a cost of more than $1,000 a month. Since I was prevented by the drugs from ever truly recovering, and in fact further disabled by medication even after the real psychosis passed, that meant it became a permanent expense to the public. (In the interests of total disclosure, I’ve only just completely eliminated meds and haven’t yet rebuilt my life enough to get off it, even though I’m getting there.) Psych meds also come at a premium: more than $700 a month for the single drug I was on, and I was one of the lucky ones who resisted being sucked into the system of polypharmacy, where you might be juggling numerous expensive meds. Because that antipsychotic stopped my metabolism, it caused immense weight gain and high cholesterol and high blood pressure and high cholesterol — and now we’re talking more bills to medicare, not only for drugs (insulin alone is $350 for a supply that might last as little as a month, but that really does vary, so it’s only a ballpark number . . . but then there’s the other stuff, which added up to at least a $100 a month.) Now add doctor’s bills — for follow ups and dealing with new problems as they emerge. Even now, I am dealing with the fallout of what happened to my body, and though I have eliminated the big-ticket items like antipsychotics and insulin, the expenses haven’t ended. And there’s another cost: while disabled, social security paid my child support to the tune of $500 a month. So: instead of my returning to being productive as soon as I might be able, for many years I have been an enormous drain on the system — to the tune of roughly $30,000 a year. And since I haven’t had to be rehospitalized or had multiple psych drugs, I suspect that I’m one of the cheap ones.
Perhaps what we need to do is reframe the entire public debate away from the personal costs of current psychiatry, because there seems to be a kind of blind spot about mental difficulties in our country. The public debate is framed mostly by fear of what those with mental difficulties are going to do, and it is from this fear, unthinkingly played on by the media, that psychiatry derives its power. Desperate people will turn to the people who present themselves as having the answers, and in our society, that’s psychiatry. The human picture of what actually happens to most people who come under the influence of that system is completely obscured. Psychiatry’s harms are swept under the rug, maybe because there is this constant triumphal march about their supposed progress, how they’re supposedly helping, while their actual record is almost never examined. That ten years on antipsychotic shortens your life expectancy by five years, for example. And maybe the way to attack the system is to reframe the discussion outside their rhetoric of illusory scientific progress and cast it in terms of actual economic costs. If we can contrast the public cost of community-based models like Soteria, or even the costs of a program like Open Dialogue in Finland, we might discover that all of a sudden people will stop being distracted by psychiatry’s rhetoric and become more openminded to examining actual outcomes. Talking money might wake people up to shift the model away from the current system and get us the funding we need to set up something that works — based on humane conditions, mutual respect, no forced medication, and community support — long enough for us to prove on a large scale that it works.
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Wow. The rest of us owe you a debt we can never repay.
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Thanks! If this was easy to figure out, it would have been done a long time ago. Sharing perspectives from different sides of the debate is important and valid. My feeling is that community-based programs have never been funded sufficiently to be as effective as they could be, and that models like Soteria are given up on far too soon. They’re never treated as more than pilot programs — and expected to produce instant results by people with vested interests, like psychiatrist, who can’t show instant results either — if they can show any results at all — and who feel threatened that someone else would set up a model of support that isn’t under their own control. If someone had a physical illness, like cancer, everyone would expect that it might take years to ever solve it and for that person to recover. But with mental difficulties, there’s no realistic picture in people’s heads. Some people work through their troubles quickly, while others need time, and maybe a lot of time — but we’re so fixated as a society on a quick fix that we expect instant results. It can be scary to deal with people who seem out of control, and if drugging them and locking them up relieves the public’s anxiety, the public will go for that option, and community-based programs will never get a chance to show their long-term outcomes. And I’m quite confident that the psychiatric establishment, given a chance, will pay no more than lip service to community solutions while actually undermining them at every step, whether by strangling their funding (every dime lost to community support is a dime not collected for appointments or medication) or by coopting them and turning them into yet another channel for coercion — turning them into the deceptively named “assisted” outpatient treatment programs. An object lesson is the history of state asylums. The original success of asylums was a result of the respectful and humane environment of the moral treatment model brought from Europe, where everyone was respected and no one’s freedom curtailed, and people had time to recover. It was so successful that state hospitals were built all over the country. But what happened next was that they were gradually corrupted by outside forces. Doctors — the self-appointed experts — took over and began to impose their treatments: cold baths, spinning, wrapping, insulin shock, electroshock, lobotomies, disabling drugs — and they brought with them the whole hierarchical structure of coercion and control, of the “expert” who supposedly knows more about the “patient” that she does herself, thus justifying their control. At the same time, the hospitals became a dumping ground for society’s undesirables. While those who recovered were able to return to the community, only those who didn’t were left behind, and they accumulated in number. Other undesirables — hopeless drunks, and teen rebels, and the socially disobedient, and blacks who spoke out for their civil rights, and communists, and unmarried pregnant women — were confined there, and kept there, because they were committed by other people who had been granted that coercive power. (The way the Soviet Union used mental hospitals and diagnosis and drugs should be a lesson to us all.) The whole purpose and structure of the asylums was subverted. If asylums were to return in something that resembled their original form, where it was about respect and freedom and being part of real community, I’d be all in favor. That would be a haven, not a prison. But if asylums return in the form they had in the past few decades, I have little hope that they will help anyone recover. Are the old asylums any better than the de facto system of “mental health care” that now dominates the country in the form of the prisons and jails? I don’t think so. Thanks for speaking up about the complex issues involved and your concerns.
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Thanks for your article and for the discussion it created.
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Valuable work. Thanks.
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I think it’s a good idea in its basics — remove the power of pharma to bias researchers. But that doesn’t mean the public should be paying the bill for the research they need done. They should have to foot the bill for research into products they expect to profit from, with the name and producer of the drug completely blinded to the people doing the studies. And while we’re at it, let’s start requiring them to do real studies. No more mini-studies where you take someone withdrawing from one drug and put them up against someone else who’s using the drug for the first time, and then only watch for six weeks, and never study the long-term effects, or — almost as important, and completely neglected — what it’s like to withdraw from that drug and what the dangers are. The whole system needs to be radically reformed.
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I knew that this was true in my own life. Bullying and abuse make you hypervigilant — alert and reactive to small things. You begin to react to small threats and stresses in excessive ways. You develop a tendency to react with a mindset of paranoia, without every realizing that that’s what it is happening. You believe your reactions are reasonable. And then, at some point in adulthood, you encounter some new source of stress, and you believe that your own bizarre and extreme thoughts are reality — and that’s how you go over the edge into madness. I have never seen the case laid out like this. I don’t understand half the references to different structures of the brain (I’m still learning!), but I can see the common theme. Abuse, followed by the brain adapting to it, followed by an inability to deal with new stressors. Thanks for confirming empirically what I knew in my gut had to be true.
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“For example, 33 miners were trapped underground for 69 days in a copper mine near Copiapó, Chile in 2010. Although the miners were finally rescued and were treated as heroes, and in some cases as celebrities, many subsequently developed severe psychological symptoms caused by their ordeal, such as depression, anxiety, nightmares, and avoidant behavior. Because the causes of these symptoms are obvious and recognized, no one to my knowledge has suggested that the miners have genetically based brain disorders or “chemical imbalances.” It is clear that the miners’ experiences caused their symptoms, and the symptoms of most psychiatric conditions can also be seen in this way.”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone put it so clearly before — so clear, concise, and virtually beyond any further discussion. Wonderful piece!
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First of all, I’m sorry that I haven’t read all the comments. But I do want to respond to your article, and on the basis of personal experience.
I’m tapering off medication. I’ve been doing it in small steps. After trying to stop all in one shot, and suffering from bad results, I was finally told by my prescriber that the neurons in the brain adjust after 6 weeks to a new dose of this stuff. I stepped down what I was doing at a quarter dose at a time — based on what I was taking, of course — and it’s gone very well. I’ve had changes in mood and thinking, but after a short time I’ve gotten back to “normal”.
When I went on “medication” I needed something to slow down what was happening in my head. The voices, the delusions: the intensity was too much to survive. But after a few months, when I’d slowed down, the drugs no longer helped me. What they did was kill my ability to think, to feel, to interact with other people. They slowed down my psychosis, yes, but at the same time they took away everything else: my ability to be human. I don’t believe these drugs are entirely wrong, but I believe that they should only be used for the shortest time possible. As a brake, to halt the psychosis — not as a long term solution. In the end, they were killing me. I gained 100 pounds, developed diabetes, and finally spent my hours staring into space. I’m a writer. I write books, and do very well at it. Yet these drugs, while I was on them, were destroying my ability to write, to dream, to imagine, and to be one of the human race.
Please keep doing your research. Get people to look at all this stuff, and to do the research that shows what they really do.
My thanks.
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First of all, I’d like to thank you for laying out your case in a clear and logical way. I wish I had your breadth of knowledge about all the different harms of psychiatry, and I’ll bookmark your article so as to read further among the sources you cite.
If I have one reservation about the current state of affairs with people who’ve chosen to speak up about psychiatry, it’s that there’s an awful lot of consciousness raising and yet a curious lack of proposals for what we can do about it on a systemic level. Maybe that’s just my ignorance showing, but that’s what I see when I look around. I wish I saw more articles like yours.
So, when I offer some words of criticism, it is not intended to defeat positive action, but simply to point out some problems which you may very well have anticipated but simply neglected to go into here.
My belief is that psychiatry cannot be effectively abolished. I don’t know what steps you would take to abolish it, but if there is one thing we should all know from both evolution and economics, it is that when a profitable niche opens up, something will come along to fill it. You may abolish psychiatry, but it will crop up again under another name, just as slavery did when it turned itself into Jim Crow, where you may not actually have one person legally owning another but where you have a system of laws that deprives people of their freedom to move around or to choose their terms of employment or to vote their own interests, etc. With psychiatry, you may succeed in eliminating it as a specialty practice in medicine, but soon you will have new specialists cropping up to take their place — neuroscientists, nutrition experts, etc., etc. — all of whom will soon unite to protest the “stifling effect on science and medicine” that prohibiting any of their practices would entail. It will be only too easy for them to claim that the barbaric practices of the past have been left behind, even as they revive them in new forms, just as insulin shock gave way to electroshock, which gave way to lobotomies, which gave way to medications, and whose purpose was always the same: to incapacitate, pacify and silence all those unruly defectives. The other day I was talking to a friend, the mother of a woman with some psychological issues, about why I was mostly opposed to medication. She would hear absolutely none of it, except to tell me that I should “think of the families” and that it was important to have a range of options, a “balance” (just as you mentioned in your article), and I realized that what she was really saying, as much by the nature of her resistance as by anything she said, was that she was simply afraid. Her daughter has suffered, she has suffered, and she is afraid that without medication her daughter will suffer even more, and I think this is what people are mostly afraid of: that without medication, without psychiatry to hold their hands and assure them that this is the best possible treatment, that no one knows what will happen. They have a very real and very legitimate fear of chaos and suffering, and the pseudo-medical charlatans of the future will exploit that fear in the unlikely even that you should ever succeed in getting rid of the charlatans we have now.
My other belief is that abolishing psychiatry is irresponsible. Someone in the medical profession has to know how the brain works and how chemicals affect it, if only to reverse their current role of perpetrating harm to one where they protect us from harm in the future. If there were some way to liberate psychiatry from the malign influence of the pharmaceutical industry and from practicing on patients, if they simply did research about the brain and so forth, we might actually benefit from what they find out. In fact, by removing their motives to turn a blind eye to what is really going on with psychopharmacology, we might get them to turn out some honest results that have value. I have no idea how this change would come about, except through the continued efforts of people like yourself to learn the facts of psychiatry, think about the whole picture, and publish your conclusions so that the public can see what is going on and hopefully force the profession into meaningful reform by stripping away its abusive powers where possible and setting up a system of meaningful regulation to create transparency and accountability with their use of any powers that remain. As they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
I am not in favor of the current system and I would like to see it changed. But I don’t see how simply abolishing psychiatry is going to solve a problem that seems intrinsic to human nature, with its propensity toward greed, opportunism, and fear.
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People who haven’t experienced “hallucinations” have no more standing in discussing them, whether philosophically or psychologically, than someone who has never balanced their checkbook talking about the workings of the stock market. You might sound very smart to people who haven’t been there, and even convince the committees that grant fellowships and awards and publications that you know something. All these people are ignorant. But in the end — when history looks back on you — you will sound exactly as well-informed as those who speculated about dragons in distant lands, and what would happen when you sailed off the edge of the earth. The only people who have any standing to talk about “hallucinations” are those who have had them, and those with the humility and long experience to work with such people. Imagine a free white man, with every privilege, writing in the nineteenth century about the experience of a black slave woman. That’s what we can expect from these outside experts. They can amuse themselves, and play with ideas, and in the end they will contribute nothing.
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Dr. Steingard, I celebrate your central and concluding point: that we need to worry about what would take the place of psychiatry if psychiatry was banished. In the USSR, capitalism and private ownership of business was abolished. And what took its place? Another dysfunctional system, one which did no better than capitalism in fulfilling the public’s needs. I agree with you that what is needed is not a complete revolution against, but an evolution within, the practice of psychiatry.
I was the ultimate compliant patient with schizophrenia. As a result, I lost ten years of my life to a chemical lobotomy that left me unable to function for more than a couple hours at a time, that left me sleeping 14 hours a day, that left me completely unconnected to other people, and that destroyed my health — all because of the drugs that I was put on because psychiatrists would rather drug you into submissive quietude than support a system, like the Soteria model and others practiced throughout the world where modern medical psychiatry doesn’t dominate but that supports you during the difficult time that you go through your crisis.
I agree with you that in that I believe that psychiatry can be reformed and made useful. But first it must:
• completely reject the medical model
• completely reject the use of any coercion except in the case of threatened harm
• completely reject the use of any medication except when the patient is capable of truly informed consent without any form of coercion by others (see other recent MIA articles on the meaning of consent)
• completely embrace the trauma model of psychological distress, including social factors like abuse, bullying, ostracization, and the effects of poverty, racism, and classism
• completely embrace a system of community support where local agencies provide an environment where peer support from others with the same experience on a day-to-day basis, free of charge, replaces occasional appointments with “professionals” who restrict their services to hours of their own choosing and charge high prices to those in need
My list is only a beginning of what needs to be done to reform psychiatry. Can you expand on it, or will you remain only an apologist? As I said at the beginning of my response, I respect your position. But you will need to expand on what that really means in order to be credible to this disillusioned audience.
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A fascinating article. I’ve wondered lately, as I get more and more interested in non-medical, community-based support systems, just where the limits of non-intervention lie. Much food for thought here. Thanks.
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A thoughtful and informative piece. Thank you.
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It is simply unbelievable that in this day and age that these kinds of experiments are going on. The United Kingdom is, in general, more responsive to the needs of those in mental distress than in the rest of the industrialized world. That these kinds of experiments continue even there is a reproach to the unfettered and unquestioned role of psychiatry as a pseudo-medical practice.
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Well done, Laura. You might take this comment thread and turn it into a free-standing piece. It cuts right to the heart of the matter.
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I don’t think that my commentary can illuminate anything that you haven’t. I just want to thank you for taking the time to make it clear to people that the backtracking bullshit that is now being put out there — probably with the purpose of heading off criticism and what I hope will be the massive class-action lawsuits to come for all this blatantly bad science, bad medicine, and damage to people’s lives — will not escape anyone notice any more than the lies and misrepresentations of the tobacco industry were able to escape detection in the end. I hope that your post becomes the basis of a book. Someone needs to document all this. Someone needs to put it all down so that history and society have a record of what really happened — now, before it is too late to make restitution to the victims.
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As Robert Whitaker notes in his book Mad in America, antipsychotics are no longer “clean” drugs. The early antispychotics targeted specific dopamine pathways. Now, however, the atypical antispychotics target other pathways as well — such as serotonin, glutamate, etc. Which means that they are not only antipsychotics, but antidepressants as well.
Antidepressants have been shown to lead, for some people, to an increase in violence and psychotic experiences. Having had experience with this class of drugs myself, I can tell you that at least one of them leads to an increase in aggressive feelings and confrontational behaviors.
I would not be in any way surprised to learn that the newer atypical antipsychotics are leading to an increase in violent behavior on the part of what is otherwise a very peaceful population.
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My only regret in reading this post is in learning that Dr. Leitner is retiring. I hope that in his leisure time he will devote some small part of his time to producing books and articles that might help enlighten us all.
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Great article. Sorry for what you went through. Thanks for sharing. I will soon be pursuing my own records as well.
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Wonderful article. Thanks.
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Great article. The only thing I would add is that, in describing the idea of an imbalance as some kind of “metaphor,” I would suspect that the establishment is trying to head off suits for malpractice. There is, after all, nothing about the idea of an imbalance that is metaphorical. “My luv is like a red, red rose” — that’s metaphorical. Putting the idea out there, — a quite specific, detailed, and scientifically based idea — that the chemicals in your brain are out of balance is not metaphorical in any way. The problem is not the use of poetic language. It is the theory itself, and the actions that followed, using that theory as justification. Letting them call it a metaphor is to let them wriggle out of responsibility.
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Nice work, Tina. There needs to be respect for the rights of those who are experiencing mental distress. No issue regarding mental illness is clear: the value of diagnosis; the value of hospitalization; the value of medication; the value of how we are represented in the media. But the world needs to address the almost unchecked power of psychiatry, which in the past meant forced hospitalizations, forced medications, forced treatments, and forced supervisions through the self-appointed bodies of psychiatry. It is time for us to be heard. As our British colleagues might say, “Good on you, love!”
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