Ironic. Psychiatry comes from the root word–psyche or soul. Soul doctors who don’t believe in souls or materialists who claim to heal the spiritual.
I did that already. 🙂 Wonder if he’ll have time to read it?
It’s funny how reading a few books can make you “crazy.” I thought craziness was due to a chemical imbalance, not educating yourself! 😀
Maybe by those the big drug companies overlooked when they were passing out bribes?
Corinna, I no longer believe my brain is diseased. The only chemical imbalance up there is due to the drugs I’ve been tricked into taking.
What I don’t understand is why the disease model makes people hate us. Do they think it’s contagious somehow?
My sister has a genetic disorder that physically disables her. People don’t treat her as badly as “bipolar” or “schizophrenic” humans. Why do you think that is?
One thing both psychiatric survivors and the NAMI flock agree on is that we are human beings. Both groups might find a common ground if they were going to lock up everyone with a psych label…perhaps….
There are people in NAMI who might be won over though. I used to be a member because I thought they were going to help me with my civil rights.
Most of them don’t have any idea that educating folks about the “diseased brain” only serves to heighten the stigma they’re protesting.
Until I saw Daniel Mackler’s documentary I had no idea people could come off meds. Considering NAMI won’t allow those people to speak at their meetings I’m not sure open infiltration is the way to go.
May God send Murphy the Merciless and all his ilk to where they belong. Down with the Devil!
Pardon me. Anosognosia is the correct word. It’s still a polysyllabic word that spell check refuses to recognize. That makes it legitimate, right? 😛
Anosognia is faulty reasoning. Heads I win, tails you lose. If you agree that you are crazy you have “good insight” and are treated with lots of drugs and electroshock. If you disagree that you are crazy you have anosognia and…are treated with lots of drugs and electroshock. Who can argue with such a brilliant deduction as that?
As long as they are allowed to treat you with lots of drugs and electroshock. Sadistic monsters hiding behind their white lab coats and stethoscopes! I’d rather deal with a street dealer any day.
Right now I’m not taking them and saying I am. Not a lot of choice while I taper.
If the Bill goes through, as it probably will, should I even bother coming off my psych drugs? No point to it if it will just mean court mandated injections.
I did what little I could. I e mailed my congressman last week. He claimed he hadn’t had time to read my letter. I don’t think there’s much sense in voting anymore.
I always supported the NRA too. No more.
I barely made it through high school due to constant bullying and sexual harassment. In college I saw a couple therapists and one sent me to a shrink. Big mistake. At first it wasn’t too bad except he put me on Stellazine in a small dose and I felt numb and less creative. I used the numbness to become less shy, kind of like alcohol.
In my junior year I kept having thoughts I didn’t like and my shrink put me on a new drug called Anafranil. Worse mistake! I didn’t sleep for three weeks. I begged the creepy pdoc to take me off and he told me to keep taking it. Finally he let me go off, but I was already a psychotic wreck. I went to the hospital where they put me on “heroic” or villainous doses of Haldol. Mom told everyone at the college about my diagnosis–which had to be done to explain my seizures. A few months later I was asked to leave campus on the grounds that I wasn’t taking my medicine. That was simply not true at the time! I took the brain drugs religiously!! After all the doctor ALWAYS knows best!!! Right?
I decided to find a way to come off the drugs sooner or later five years ago. Robert Whitaker wasn’t the one who showed me the error of my ways–I didn’t read him till much later. I read William Glasser’s “Warning: Psychiatry can be hazardous to your mental health!” A light went on in my head and I realized the role that brain drugs had played in my life had been essentially a negative one.
Unfortunately no one I know offline has the time or mental energy to read Whitaker or Glasser.
Thank you TenaciousMe.
Yes. Thank you, Oldhead. Mindfreedom has some numbers. The medicine or drug giving me real problems is effexor. It makes me violently ill when I try to taper it. Last time, I tried tapering by 10% till I got down to 30%, then I became very suicidal and had to be admitted to the hospital for relief–which came in the form of the old dose of effexor. I cold turkeyed off the lamictal and hope to come off abilify in 6 more weeks.
Thank you for the article, Dr. Breggin. I’m very demoralized now because of the Murphy Bill passage and the continual demonizing of the “mentally ill” by the media. I wonder if they have something to gain by hurting us.
Right now I’m trying to taper off the drugs, which I’m doing alone and lying about. No support from anyone. Just praying I don’t get found out.
I’m seriously considering leaving America for some third-world country with “poor mental health services” where I won’t be imprisoned and tortured for the crime of existing.
Big Pharma must be desperate for more consumers!
Like Big Tobacco, their customers have a bad habit of dying prematurely.
I do fine without “antipsychotics” or “mood stabilizers” either. My omniscient, godlike shrink can’t even tell the difference, except to say my affect is better. The only reason I’m still on effexor is it causes severe reactions or withdrawal symptoms when I try to come off. I need a place to dry out.
I’ll bet if they prescribed meth, heroin, or cocaine to the “mentally ill” they would have similar benefits. FDA approved or not.
TLC or tender loving care is what most of the mentally different need. Psychosis and depression or mania are simply ways of coping with an out of control world. They are usually ineffective coping mechanisms, but they help deal with pain.
Rather than affirm the worth of the mentally different or show them unconditional love, talking to them in a respectful manner and meeting some of their physiological needs it’s easier to mock them, lock them up, and drug or electrocute them. I think that the reason people failed to recover from psychosis in the days before drugging is that they were locked up and abused. As a way of dealing with such treatment their psychotic symptoms only grew worse as they relied on them more and more to get through the days of cruelty and torment.
“Antipsychotic drugs are not the wonder drugs they are made out to be.” I’m pretty sure I’m not quoting this correctly, but one of the statements the doctor made was to that effect. I didn’t know what psychotic was till I was tricked into taking anafranil. After that demon drug was taken away from me and I went into severe withdrawals, they put me on mega-doses (“heroic”) of Haldol which only made my thoughts more confused and my evil thoughts impossible to control. They didn’t needle rape me–it was consensual, albeit I was lied to and seduced–I believed doctors had my best interests at heart and knew what they were doing. A few centuries ago, people probably had similar thoughts while they had knives and leeches applied to their veins to let the bad blood out.
I have never been given that kind of treatment, because I prefer to play the game. “Lawdy, lawdy! I’ll never stray again!”
I have a question for the people who imagine that:
A. Brain drugs have magical effects to restore reason.
B. Patients lack insight due to lack of brain drugs.
If that were so, then why do people already on these magical brain drugs so often wish to go off them? With or without consent they are in fact drugged–which according to such a rationale would lead to reason, insight (also known as self-loathing) and all that other stuff psychiatry wants consumers to have.
Depression especially is no fun. If my antidepressants made me feel better there is no way I would go off them! It’s the shrinks who have poor insight. Rather than it being due to chemical imbalances, it’s due to arrogance, stupidity, and the obscene amounts of money they make torturing their unwilling consumers.
Thank you for sharing this with us, Monica. In a world with little information of this sort you are a true pioneer.
I am just now feeling trauma due to my psychiatric experience. At the time I was naive and gullible enough to believe the “doctor” actually cared about me and knew what he was doing.
I have felt suicidal, though I have moral problems with it. That has done more to keep me alive than anything else.
People tempted to commit suicide do not need drugs, they need to know someone gives a rip about them!
If I were to write a book about the flaws inherent in “mental health” I think I would title it “Shut Up and Take Your Prozac!” People don’t want to hear about suffering or pain. They want people to take the magic wonder drugs and go around with smiles pasted on to “normalize” them so the normals won’t feel uncomfortable around them any more.
The mental illness system does little to help people’s morale when they are discouraged and downhearted. It also does absolutely nothing to solve the problems contributing to low morale. Joblessness, being treated like a social leper, poor or no housing, poverty, sickness, etc.
ll088, the problem with that is we menstruate every 4 weeks or so and coming off effexor will take 16 months the way I plan it. There is no way I can avoid PMS moodiness unless I wait till menopause–then I would have hot flashes. 🙁
Sorry, apparently I didn’t read enough of the bio.
Dr. Fava, thank you for your research. I needed that kind of thing so much more than zoloft or prozac when I was undergoing severe depressing thoughts. Belief that I can do more than pop pills to help my unhappiness makes me feel empowered.
I hope you will publish more and have it translated into English!
Would we say, “I’m a proud monster!” or “I’m not ashamed of being genetic garbage”?
People view “the mentally ill” as monsters and genetics gone awry, so that’s essentially what folks at NAMI and DBSA meetings are saying when they own up to their phony diagnoses.
I pity, rather than get angry at them though. I used to be one of them.
Too abashed and scared to try “tonguing” or “cheeking” some of the meds. Just as well I didn’t. For me, they were a temporary solution. Temporary–but a solution nevertheless. A hair of the dog that bit me. The dog is named Psychiatry.
In slavery people were denied the right to (legally) marry and any children they might have anyhow were taken from them if the master deemed it expedient.
In psychiatric slavery, we are often punished for marrying or coerced out of marriage and our children are taken from us if the system deems it best. And it often does. Worse yet, the children are watched zealously for signs of “abnormality”–after all they have our flawed genes–and often wind up slaves of psychiatry as well.
Thus I refuse to have children.
I have a therapist who is after me because I refuse to have sex, preferring to remain a virgin. No, she doesn’t want to have sex with me; it would be easier to prove her lack of ethics if she did. She just keeps telling me to have sex and making light of my religious and moral beliefs. I’m beginning to dislike if not hate her. I never want to sit through another session with her again.
I have a boyfriend, but she hasn’t even told me to have relations with him. Apparently she just wants me to go out and screw something that moves. That’s “normal” and “healthy” to her way of thinking. I shouldn’t have to have sex with some stranger I meet in a bar just to make her happy!
My parents are furious with her, but there’s nothing they can do because I’m an adult.
I have been on abilify for 7 years or more. Came off it in 10 weeks with few problems. Effexor is a horse of a different color! I felt so awful coming off it that I contemplated suicide and wound up back in the psych hospital. Am back on the same old meds. Came off lamictal, the latest addition, after taking it for a week. I was able to cold turkey that one. I am now at 75% of abilify or 15 of the 20 mg.
I am going to microtaper effexor this time. Once I have been completely off the abilify for 2 weeks, I will try reducing the effexor by a grain or two at a time. The only thing I learned from the hospitalization is that my addiction is much worse than I supposed and goes unacknowledged by almost everyone. Psychiatrists are worse than quacks–they are glorified drug dealers. I think they’re more dangerous than the kind you find on street corners!
Oddly enough, I have been diagnosed with bipolar, but experience no mania in coming off my antipsychotic or mood stabilizer. I think the doctors insist on calling me that so they can put me on a “cocktail” but if they knew anything, they would see I merely suffer from depression. Idiots!
Just want you people to know that I went to the hospital, but am out now and am going to try a different kind of tapering for effexor this time–called micro-tapering. A good friend (by supernatural means) stopped me from killing myself. She called up just in time with a premonition that I was going to take the easy way out. As Christians, we believe the Holy Spirit told her to.
Thanks for your support. I will be much more careful this next time! 🙂 On a full dosage of effexor, but coming off abilify again. Amazing how easy the anti-psychotic and mood stabilizer were to withdraw from compared to the anti-depressant!
I lived in a “rest-home” for over a month after I was released from a hospital where I had gone for suicidal thoughts. Ugh! I almost took to the streets.
The whole place reeked of urine and stale cigarettes. We were crammed 4-6 women into a tiny room and not allowed to leave except for meals.
I was supposed to get $50 a month for toothpaste and other personal items. Turned out the lying sneak who ran the hell-hole was keeping it for herself. She was an old hag when I went there twenty years ago. I wonder if she went to a similar place like the one she ran when she died. I could easily imagine an after-life like that rest-home as punishment for evil doers.
Hi Emily, if you could magically talk to a younger version of yourself what would you tell her?
I don’t believe in drugging away your problems and I think you don’t either. What would you recommend to someone else having extreme ups and downs?
I seem to be numb most of the time, till I start to taper my effexor. Then I alternate between numb, rotten, and really suicidal. It’s like all the bad stuff I used to feel comes back as bad or worse than ever with none of the good feelings. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever feel good again.
One major difference between this and the doctrine of Original Sin is that that doctrine is at least supposed to be a great equalizer among all people of different races, classes, and walks of life, including the kinds of sin they prefer. Since we are all sinners we should all be humble and help and love one another. With the idea of the Broken Brain, there is the idea that only some of us possess the Essence of Evil and therefore, being born with this evil essence should feel honored to be allowed to exist on the fringes of society. Think Hannibal Lecter and Norman Bates. This enables others to feel good about themselves by scapegoating the “mentally ill”.” We are Evil while they are sane and normal and therefore good. We are un-redeemable while they need no redemption.
I keep having thoughts of suicide right now and feel I have nowhere to turn. I don’t want to be hospitalized and drugged again. So there’s no way I’ll be reaching out for help!
Killing myself seems like the logical and right thing to do on so many levels.
1. It’s logical because I have no hope for the future. I am suffering from nerve damage for effexor withdrawal and can’t tell anyone. Very sick most of the time and I haven’t even gotten off the blasted stuff yet. Still tapering. Things will never improve. I’m sick of the way people treat me and the never-ending poverty. Who wouldn’t prefer death to the kind of life I lead?
2. It’s right because I’m a burden on society and am no use to anyone.
My only regret, if I can screw up the courage to go through with it, is that I didn’t go through with it 22 years ago when I was first diagnosed. Suicide is the rational and sane response to a diagnosis of mental illness. I know that mental illnesses as such do not exist but in the minds of most people they do. Everybody hates people with such diagnoses. This makes life unbearable for most of us. Along with the imprisonment and torture. I feel no guilt for my diagnosis, but shame. Guilt is for what you have done. Shame is for what you are–and in my case I’m flawed and rotten to the core. Statistics show most people would rather live near a convicted felon than someone like me with a diagnosis of bipolar.
Knowing the things I know and with no real hope for this life, how can anyone say this desire for death is just my illness talking? I’ve never been so sane in all my life.
Thanotos is the rational choice in my situation.
He certainly does Bcharris! Sherlock Holmes’s deductions were not based solely on circumstantial evidence and he didn’t try to frame innocent people.
I was diagnosed as genetic garbage with a hopelessly flawed biology at age 20. That’s when I decided my life was worthless and wanted to kill myself. Psychiatry is directly responsible.
A good psychiatrist? Hmm. A good torturer? A good drug dealer?
I wish my psychiatrist had put a bullet in my head instead of “diagnosing” me with a damning stigma and forcing me to take drugs that gave me seizures every day! It would have been much kinder. But he wouldn’t have made as much money either….
I have a neighbor below me who talks to people that aren’t there. I leave her alone with them when she carries on conversations at night. She’s not hurting anybody. They seem to keep her company.
Yeah if they banned psychiatry he might have to turn to another branch of science for his career, such as phrenology, astrology, alchemy, or blood-letting. 🙂
I believe what you say. Yet I here these myths every week when I attend coerced workshops at my mental illness center known as adult day treatment.
Some of the clients with a mean streak seem to like the idea that they have a chemical imbalance and go around proudly boasting of the fact. I guess it’s kind of an excuse for their nasty behaviors. A get out of jail free card.
I believe mine stem from trauma, including the trauma of a medication reaction and subsequent toxic druggings that I was forced to undergo afterward. In a just world that doctor would have paid me $1,000,000 for ruining my life.
Or take a page from the 80’s. “Just say no: to shrinks!”
What a monster! He has the almost comical audacity to claim to want to reduce stigma (How? By spending money in “educating” people.) when he does nothing but defame and stigmatize those he considers damaged.
I believe there is an especially hot place in Hell for that creep where demons will put him in five point restraint and give him infinite administrations of ECT and put him on an endless IV drip of Haldol. For eternity. Yay!
Btw, I’m writing a dystopian story in which the central villain is named Murphy. Just a coincidence of course. 🙂
All through childhood and adolescence I was mocked for being too sensitive and easily frightened. Then I went on zoloft. I never watched real-life snuff flicks, but I did start watching creepy things like The Shining and The Omen. Nothing but horror and violence could fascinate me. A bit of a personality change!
Now, as I taper off my effexor I find my sensitivity is returning with a renewed sense of empathy. I’m curious to discover who I really am after 24 years of constant drugging.
I had voices that refused to go away no matter what medications I took. Finally I started listening to them, because I had no choice. Shortly after I realized what they were trying to tell me–it had something to do with my religious beliefs–they went away with no drugs. Apparently they had served their purpose and I no longer needed them.
If it makes you feel better, I don’t believe my parents have much if any responsibility for my “mental health” issues. I blame the bullies in high school who sexually harassed me for two years. It may not sound like much, but it was very traumatizing to me as a teenager. I would come home and cry almost every afternoon.
At 20, after two or three years I was still suffering from social anxiety issues in college. Dr. M. put me on an anti-depressant. When I told him it was making me psychotic he denied it despite what was obvious in the pill manual. After I had gone 3 weeks without sleeping they had me locked up and drugged with toxic levels of Haldol that gave me multiple seizures every day. I wish I had never seen that quack Dr. M. My life would have been a lot better. I might have had to take a year off from college.
As it was, my xenophobic dorm mom kicked me out under the pretense that I was not meds compliant. Finally I’ve made the decision to quit taking my meds! I only wish I had done it 22 years ago.
Those who separate themselves from us also enjoy the idea of a DNA error or chemical imbalance in the brain because it shows how superior they are. They have healthy genes and perfect harmony in their brains, showing how above us subhumans they are in their sanity. Just like the German Aryans derived their nationalistic pride from hating the Jews.
Some mentally “normal” people are insensitive, unimaginative, and lacking in humor. Therefore I guess they feel they need something to feel smug about.
Seems society has a built in need to hate some group of scapegoats. Witches, Comanche “savages,” African-Americans, Communists, and now the Insane.
Don’t be prejudiced against those dangerous nut jobs! They aren’t truly dangerous as long as we keep them properly drugged!
This provides the useful function of stereotyping us as a bunch of rampaging mad dogs. But, not to worry, they have a wide assortment of safe and effective muzzles!
Still, who wants to be around a rabid dog even if it is wearing a muzzle? Thanks for nothing, mental illness experts.
I only wish I had the choice between wearing a muzzle and letting them rape my poor brain.
I believe everyone has a role to play in society. Even the man with the mind of a three-year-old who has to lie in bed and can’t go to the bathroom without help performs a valuable function. He forces the rest of us to come to grips with our selfishness and learn to love more unconditionally.
Suicide is not always selfish. At one time a year after my diagnosis I seriously considered killing myself. Why? Nobody wanted me around. I felt I’d be doing them a favor.
Apparently imagination which includes empathy and a sense of humor are severe psychoses. Psychiatrists are certainly devoid of them. Once they get through messing with your brain you will be too!
People do manage to kill themselves in hospital wards too. I had a friend whose father was so depressed that although he was locked up in a psychiatric ward, he found a way to strangle himself. His mother sued that hospital, but I don’t think she won.
Sometimes I wonder why They want to keep us alive seeing what low-quality of life they expect us to settle for. I doubt that they honestly care about our happiness or well-being. Hmm. That’s right. If enough of us kill ourselves they won’t be able to bill Medicaid/Medicaire for our expensive drugs.
If Hitler had had a system like that set up for “lunatics” in Nazi Germany he might have let the mental patients live.
IF mental illness professionals want people to integrate into society (which I sincerely doubt) they certainly do a rotten job of it! All I have gotten from mental illness professionals is more marginalized and discriminated against thanks to their diagnoses and debilitating drugs which I faithfully swallowed for 24 years. I’m sick of their lies which I swallowed with their pills.
Social workers kept me taking the drugs which made me too sick to work for most of my life. I also had seizures for years thanks to massive quantities of Haldol and Stellazine. Lo and behold they went away as soon as I went off the drugs!
Integration into society is a joke the way mental illness people (I refuse to call them mental health or mental wellness) go about it. Take some pills, then go to group therapy with the other losers–healthy people will never want to touch you again thanks to us–take some more pills, then attend a NAMI meeting in which you whine about stigma (which we feed into) and keep taking your pills while we the experts ridicule you for being fat and sleeping so much and stinking. Why can’t you take a shower? You must have low self-esteem! Gosh, I wonder why?
My Great-Aunt was diagnosed with “schizophrenia” when she was seventeen. I believe she had a nervous break-down when she realized she had been conceived out of wedlock (back then that was a big deal.) She was given lots of ECT and hospitalized for a long time. Grandma says the shocks cured her hallucinations, but her brain may have been too fried to produce any or she may have not been able to tell people. Or she may have wised up enough to keep them to herself so as not to get more ECT.
At least my Great-Aunt never had to take the neuroleptics that I did. She lived into her late 80’s which most “mentally ill” people don’t any more. She might have recovered if her brain hadn’t been damaged by the ECT’s.
Wow BetterLife! Have you been through that?
All I can do is offer my condolences.
No one should have to go through all that.
Forgive them, Father. They don’t know what they are doing.
B, you make a great point. My Mom would want me on more Haldol, because it kept me too quiet to be agitated and say depressing things. Why was I so agitated and depressed? Because the Haldol caused seizures every day and numbness and fatigue so I couldn’t take a full course load at college and my grades went down. Oh yes, and the “experts” told me I would have to take massive amounts of Haldol till I died and basically labeled me a “schizophrenic” monster so no one would talk to me and I wasn’t allowed to live on campus. Why did dying suddenly seem so wonderful that suicide was a real temptation?
Sorry my first comment was insensitive, Dorritt. I am truly sorry about Luise. She probably just needed some TLC, like a lot of people with psychotic symptoms or mood swings or depression need, rather than forced poisonings.
I believe someday God will judge all people who torture and kill others. Their white lab coats and string of paper credentials won’t save them then, unless they repent. Dr. Mingula was a certified doctor I believe.
(TLC stands for tender loving care.)
There is a reason why forced psychiatric druggings are standard treatment, Dorrit. Follow the money trail. 🙁 Psychiatry isn’t about helping people at all. It’s about the shrinks or psychiatrists milking the “consumers” for all the money they can bill insurance company for.
Are the black sheep the one’s that are still non-meds compliant? They need more brainwashing–I mean education.
Their freedom to choose their careers? Boo hoo!
They don’t care about how they ruin our freedom to choose careers.
And worried about stigma? That’s as stupid as the southern slave-owners saying the abolitionists up north didn’t understand what the “darkies” needed like they did. Of course the fact that the slave-owners were making a killing in the cotton industry due to the low overhead (slave labor is cheap) had nothing to do with why they kept people in bondage. It was all done for the slaves’ own good, out of the pure goodness of “massah’s” heart. Ha ha.
Slaves that ran away were mentally ill with a classic case of “drapetomania.” Good slaves stayed on the plantation and liked it, proving how mentally sound they were. If they blacked the masters’ boots well enough they got to eat leftovers, wear his cast-off clothing, and got a warm place to sleep by the fire.
Today’s mental health house slaves blog for “Healthy Place” about the importance of taking your cocktail exactly as prescribed. And they are sometimes elected President of the local NAMI chapter.
I used to be compliant in every possible way, because I believed the lie that “Mental Health” was here to help me. I took my drugs exactly as prescribed.
Now I am a rebel and a passive-aggressive liar. Oh, well, one good Lie deserves another.
They told me I had a chemical imbalance and needed to spend the rest of my life in a drugged haze. NO MORE. Even if they lock me up and drug me I will know that I’m sane and they are the liars and phonies they have always been.
They lied to me, so I will lie to them whenever necessary. If they find out I’m off my drugs, and I will never tell them I am, I will shed tears of sorrow (I’m a great actress and can sometimes cry on command.) I will pretend to have regained insight into my condition and promise to take the drugs exactly as prescribed. All the while, I will be planning how soon I can taper off of them again, even as I swallow them meekly and passively in the hospital. I can be a model patient–luckily I have a long record as one so they won’t suspect me as much.
Even as I begin tapering off my final drug–Effexor–I attend meetings at the local “Mental Health facility” in order to avoid suspicion. I see my psychiatrist regularly and religiously order refills on her prescriptions (which I carefully bury deep in my garbage.) I see my therapist and pretend to agree with her when she tells me I should only date other “bipolars” because only one of the could understand someone like me. (Stick to your own kind!)
I finally got her to quit talking about it, by saying I had discovered I was asexual.She has no business telling me who to date. If it hadn’t been for my accursed diagnosis I probably would be married with children by now. And have a decent career. Thanks modern psychiatry! You have really helped with the quality of my life! 😛
I’m thinking about relocating, but of course my diagnosis will follow me wherever I go. At least, if I move to the state capital–my current community numbers 6,000–I will be sure not to sign up for any “services” beyond necessary. Low-income housing is hard to come by. I have a plan that may work though, in a big city. I may post it in one of the forums.
Thanks Kim. Australia sounds worse than the USA, if possible!
I’m steering clear of the Land Down Under. If I had to make a trip there, I would have to hide out in the bush and only associate with wild animals and the aborigines who lack the “science” to force psychotropic drugs and ECT on me. From what I hear about aborigines of all races and countries they seem to be healthier and happier in general than civilized people. I wonder why? 😀
All I’m on now is Effexor–150 mg. Wish me luck. I start tapering by 10% this weekend. I have already come off Trileptal and Abilify. I have reasons to believe the latter was causing me to have deep cysts continually. The other kept me from walking much at all. I have done it all myself with no help from anyone who lives nearby–certainly no medical help.
I am off abilify for the first time in 8 years and feeling things again. My therapist remarked how good my affect was, I’m smiling more! Little does she know.
I felt better when I first took a Zoloft. Unfortunately the happy buzz died away in less than a month. I wonder if being permanently drunk or high on marijuana would have had a similar effect.
Anothervoice I agree with you. And I am a Christian psychiatric survivor. A lot of Christians reject science’s idea of how life started. Why can’t they reject psychiatry? Social Darwinism is at the root of it, along with a materialistic world view.
The Book of Christianity, the Bible, says we are more than bodies and brains with biochemical reactions. We are indeed animals, but we are in the image of God, meaning we’re free moral agents. Psychiatry says we’re machines without souls, just chemical balances, or in our case imbalances.
I hope I’m not offending you atheists unnecessarily. I’m just saying I can no longer reconcile Christianity and psychiatry. How others do is beyond me.
Sanist? Seems like you got one letter wrong. 🙂
One possibility is that those in less developed countries are less likely to label “different” people as mentally ill. In order to be labeled as mentally ill in those countries one must show more violent behaviors then over here in the good old USA. That’s my hypothesis anyhow.
Uh, wouldn’t there be a decrease in the chicken population?
Congratulations to Prof. Gum. It was hard for me to accept and I am not a psychologist. Changing your beliefs is always difficult.
I hate lying! But right now I have no choice. I refuse to steal, but lying to people who have lied to me all the time bothers me less. Besides to continue to take the neurotoxic poisons I have been dished out would be another moral crime. Suicide is wrong and if I continue with the drugging I will be guilty of that.
“Thou shalt not lie,” is not one of the Ten Commandments. “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor,” is.
The men and women in white coats with stethoscopes around their necks are those who have defamed me and told society around me that I am a monster willing to kill them at the drop of a hat if I don’t take my medicines. Who does it sound like is bearing false witness against their neighbor? Hmm?
My question is could the synaptic over-pruning be related to neuroleptic drugs given for people with schizophrenic diagnoses? In order to rule out such a possibility they would need the brains of people with “schizophrenic” symptoms who were not medicated or given ECT to compare with the other brains. Maybe they did such a thing, but psychiatry is notorious for proving only what they want to prove–at the expense of scientific inquiry and openness and honesty.
I am coming off my meds with very few side effects, aside from some headaches and one night I started shivering like I had a fever when I didn’t. Funny how the withdrawals for me are of the physical variety. If they were my symptoms remanifesting themselves wouldn’t I hear voices, have mood swings or become suicidal?
I’m very thankful things are going so well since I have no support from family or friends and have to taper in secret. If things go badly and I’m found out, back to the psych ward I go!
I think God is watching out for me.
No offense Monica, but the thought of becoming an iatrogenic invalid like you did, made me put off coming off my meds for at least a year longer than I would otherwise have. I live alone and have no one except my pro-psychiatry parents to care for me. If I became as sick as you did, I would never hear the end of it from them! And I would just wind up drugged again anyhow–only probably more so.
Isn’t that circular reasoning? It’s like saying, “All swans are white. My friend showed me what he said was a black swan, but I knew better. It was the wrong color.”
Apparently psychiatrists get to opt out of Philosophy 101.
That’s a good point Emmeline.
My case manager/behavioral clinician (think social worker lite) keeps getting on my case because once or twice a week I pick up junk food at a local convenience store nearby. She is trying to talk me into going to the county retirement center. I have my own reasons not to. The more my case manager tries to bully me out of going to the convenience store the more I want to do it, and lie about it. I think I am going to get a new case manager–or better yet none at all. My therapist doesn’t think I need one.
Sorry, I forgot the quotation marks. “Mentally ill.”
We all know how Germany went downhill after scapegoating and persecuting weaker, marginalized elements of society. They were creamed in World War II! Interesting that the mentally ill were targets before the Jews and others.
Peru (or Nicaragua) here I come!
Here’s another idea–have our side find a way to remove the microchip from the pills so “patients” can swallow the chips without the drug.
Or manufacture a counterfeit device with identical coding. I doubt that each chip would have a unique, complicated code if they plan on mass-producing it to embed in the gazillion pills we have to swallow.
I guess we’re not that high tech, but it’s worth trying. It’s either go underground or leave the country.
I used to support the N.R.A. till the current president called us monsters and said we should ALL be locked up. Apparently his right to own guns overrides our more basic freedoms.
Or if they don’t measure our meds we can lie about them…. 🙂
If the Murphy Bill passes, are there any measures we psychiatric victims can take to protect ourselves? Just wondering.
Peru looks like a nice country….
I believe a lot of the NAMI parents like the organization because it absolves them of misbehavior. Robert Whittaker implies something like that in one of his books, I believe. “No Magic Bullet.”
If the Murphy Bill is passed I’m leaving the country.
Locking up and torturing people (ECT and drugging) when they have done nothing wrong is just plain evil. Congressman Murphy is a very evil man. How’s that for black and white thinking?
Punishing people before they commit crimes makes me think of the Tom Cruiz movie, The Minority Report. Murphy believes he’s psychic and can foretell crimes before they happen. Hmm, maybe he’s delusional?
One of the reasons I have remained on medicine for so long is I have no means of income without SSI. Now that my parents are retiring in the spring, I hope to get on SSDI which will mean I can refuse drugs.
At 42 I have never been gainfully employed and have no real hope of ever being so because of the stigma, as well perhaps, of the iatrogenic nerve damage after 24 years of damaging my nervous system with drugs. I wish I had never gone to that evil psychiatrist when I was 18. He ruined my life with his brain drugs and diagnosis. I wish I hadn’t been obedient for once.
I agree!
I am in a Catch-22 situation. I can’t do much of anything now including keeping my government subsidized apartment clean due to the sedative affects of my drugs. I need to be weaned off them gradually. Since no doctor will do it, I would have to do it myself. Only because I can’t keep my apartment up to code I am going to have to check into a retirement home where I will have no control over the medicines. Not sure what I should do.
I may move out to my parents’ property eventually (9-10 months from now.) There I would have more control of things.
At least I can be thankful my mind is relatively clear. It’s mostly my physical being that has been messed with (so far!)
It’s neat that you are coming up with non-medical ways to help people that hear voices cope with the world–ways that work better than the psychiatric model.
Many of us did have problems before psychiatry screwed around with our brains and nervous systems. (Mine were more of the mood swings and depression type.) The question is: does the bio-medical model work? It doesn’t seem too, except perhaps in a short-term way. Someone should write an article with a costs-benefits analysis of the drugs we are prescribed or have been in the past. I began to question psych meds even before reading Robert Whitaker or joining MIA.
It just seems illogical to take them. 1. Do they help us enjoy better quality of life? Short term, maybe. Long term, no. 2. Do they lengthen our lives like insulin or other drugs they have been compared to? No. They shorten our lives by 25 years on average. 3. Do they even prevent suicide? Research is showing that the answer to that may be no, along with preventing homicide and other dangerous behaviors.
In which case, I began to ask myself, why should I be taking my pills even if I am “different” from other people? It’s like telling people of darker skinned races that they have to artificially bleach their skin to look like Caucasians. Even if the bleach is toxic and shortens their lives while diminishing the quality significantly. Stupid and unfair.
Two things the psych establishment held against me after my diagnosis. One was that I believed in good and evil. The other, according to them, was that I had “the sexuality of a twelve-year-old” at 23.
I’m sure they wouldn’t have liked it either if I had been a hyper-sexual sociopath…With the psych establishment you just can’t win. That way they can prescribe more drugs!
And I have never even stolen anything! Not even a pencil. 🙁
I wasn’t even suicidal. I was taking meds that led to mini-seizures. The dorm mom had a bunch of session where every girl in the unit was invited but me to tell them that I was a sick and dangerous person and they shouldn’t talk to me. I was very depressed and became more so. The seizures got worse and the dorm mom lied that I wasn’t taking my drugs (though I was religiously) so I was “asked to leave.”
This was a Christian university. I guess they ought to make people promise not to get a mental health diagnosis as a condition for admittance along with not drinking, dancing, or playing cards!
That was my experience too, Someone Else.
Sometimes I had thoughts of harming others that sickened me. I guess that shows I wasn’t about to act on them. Still it made me afraid to be around others and isolate.
The psychosis came about through the magical wonder drugs known as Haldol and Stellazine.
Right about the imaginary labels!
I didn’t choose my mental illness; my psychiatrist chose it for me! 😀
Ironic. Psychiatry comes from the root word–psyche or soul. Soul doctors who don’t believe in souls or materialists who claim to heal the spiritual.
I did that already. 🙂 Wonder if he’ll have time to read it?
It’s funny how reading a few books can make you “crazy.” I thought craziness was due to a chemical imbalance, not educating yourself! 😀
Maybe by those the big drug companies overlooked when they were passing out bribes?
Corinna, I no longer believe my brain is diseased. The only chemical imbalance up there is due to the drugs I’ve been tricked into taking.
What I don’t understand is why the disease model makes people hate us. Do they think it’s contagious somehow?
My sister has a genetic disorder that physically disables her. People don’t treat her as badly as “bipolar” or “schizophrenic” humans. Why do you think that is?
One thing both psychiatric survivors and the NAMI flock agree on is that we are human beings. Both groups might find a common ground if they were going to lock up everyone with a psych label…perhaps….
There are people in NAMI who might be won over though. I used to be a member because I thought they were going to help me with my civil rights.
Most of them don’t have any idea that educating folks about the “diseased brain” only serves to heighten the stigma they’re protesting.
Until I saw Daniel Mackler’s documentary I had no idea people could come off meds. Considering NAMI won’t allow those people to speak at their meetings I’m not sure open infiltration is the way to go.
May God send Murphy the Merciless and all his ilk to where they belong. Down with the Devil!
Pardon me. Anosognosia is the correct word. It’s still a polysyllabic word that spell check refuses to recognize. That makes it legitimate, right? 😛
Anosognia is faulty reasoning. Heads I win, tails you lose. If you agree that you are crazy you have “good insight” and are treated with lots of drugs and electroshock. If you disagree that you are crazy you have anosognia and…are treated with lots of drugs and electroshock. Who can argue with such a brilliant deduction as that?
As long as they are allowed to treat you with lots of drugs and electroshock. Sadistic monsters hiding behind their white lab coats and stethoscopes! I’d rather deal with a street dealer any day.
Right now I’m not taking them and saying I am. Not a lot of choice while I taper.
If the Bill goes through, as it probably will, should I even bother coming off my psych drugs? No point to it if it will just mean court mandated injections.
I did what little I could. I e mailed my congressman last week. He claimed he hadn’t had time to read my letter. I don’t think there’s much sense in voting anymore.
I always supported the NRA too. No more.
I barely made it through high school due to constant bullying and sexual harassment. In college I saw a couple therapists and one sent me to a shrink. Big mistake. At first it wasn’t too bad except he put me on Stellazine in a small dose and I felt numb and less creative. I used the numbness to become less shy, kind of like alcohol.
In my junior year I kept having thoughts I didn’t like and my shrink put me on a new drug called Anafranil. Worse mistake! I didn’t sleep for three weeks. I begged the creepy pdoc to take me off and he told me to keep taking it. Finally he let me go off, but I was already a psychotic wreck. I went to the hospital where they put me on “heroic” or villainous doses of Haldol. Mom told everyone at the college about my diagnosis–which had to be done to explain my seizures. A few months later I was asked to leave campus on the grounds that I wasn’t taking my medicine. That was simply not true at the time! I took the brain drugs religiously!! After all the doctor ALWAYS knows best!!! Right?
I decided to find a way to come off the drugs sooner or later five years ago. Robert Whitaker wasn’t the one who showed me the error of my ways–I didn’t read him till much later. I read William Glasser’s “Warning: Psychiatry can be hazardous to your mental health!” A light went on in my head and I realized the role that brain drugs had played in my life had been essentially a negative one.
Unfortunately no one I know offline has the time or mental energy to read Whitaker or Glasser.
Thank you TenaciousMe.
Yes. Thank you, Oldhead. Mindfreedom has some numbers. The medicine or drug giving me real problems is effexor. It makes me violently ill when I try to taper it. Last time, I tried tapering by 10% till I got down to 30%, then I became very suicidal and had to be admitted to the hospital for relief–which came in the form of the old dose of effexor. I cold turkeyed off the lamictal and hope to come off abilify in 6 more weeks.
Thank you for the article, Dr. Breggin. I’m very demoralized now because of the Murphy Bill passage and the continual demonizing of the “mentally ill” by the media. I wonder if they have something to gain by hurting us.
Right now I’m trying to taper off the drugs, which I’m doing alone and lying about. No support from anyone. Just praying I don’t get found out.
I’m seriously considering leaving America for some third-world country with “poor mental health services” where I won’t be imprisoned and tortured for the crime of existing.
Big Pharma must be desperate for more consumers!
Like Big Tobacco, their customers have a bad habit of dying prematurely.
I do fine without “antipsychotics” or “mood stabilizers” either. My omniscient, godlike shrink can’t even tell the difference, except to say my affect is better. The only reason I’m still on effexor is it causes severe reactions or withdrawal symptoms when I try to come off. I need a place to dry out.
I’ll bet if they prescribed meth, heroin, or cocaine to the “mentally ill” they would have similar benefits. FDA approved or not.
TLC or tender loving care is what most of the mentally different need. Psychosis and depression or mania are simply ways of coping with an out of control world. They are usually ineffective coping mechanisms, but they help deal with pain.
Rather than affirm the worth of the mentally different or show them unconditional love, talking to them in a respectful manner and meeting some of their physiological needs it’s easier to mock them, lock them up, and drug or electrocute them. I think that the reason people failed to recover from psychosis in the days before drugging is that they were locked up and abused. As a way of dealing with such treatment their psychotic symptoms only grew worse as they relied on them more and more to get through the days of cruelty and torment.
“Antipsychotic drugs are not the wonder drugs they are made out to be.” I’m pretty sure I’m not quoting this correctly, but one of the statements the doctor made was to that effect. I didn’t know what psychotic was till I was tricked into taking anafranil. After that demon drug was taken away from me and I went into severe withdrawals, they put me on mega-doses (“heroic”) of Haldol which only made my thoughts more confused and my evil thoughts impossible to control. They didn’t needle rape me–it was consensual, albeit I was lied to and seduced–I believed doctors had my best interests at heart and knew what they were doing. A few centuries ago, people probably had similar thoughts while they had knives and leeches applied to their veins to let the bad blood out.
I have never been given that kind of treatment, because I prefer to play the game. “Lawdy, lawdy! I’ll never stray again!”
I have a question for the people who imagine that:
A. Brain drugs have magical effects to restore reason.
B. Patients lack insight due to lack of brain drugs.
If that were so, then why do people already on these magical brain drugs so often wish to go off them? With or without consent they are in fact drugged–which according to such a rationale would lead to reason, insight (also known as self-loathing) and all that other stuff psychiatry wants consumers to have.
Depression especially is no fun. If my antidepressants made me feel better there is no way I would go off them! It’s the shrinks who have poor insight. Rather than it being due to chemical imbalances, it’s due to arrogance, stupidity, and the obscene amounts of money they make torturing their unwilling consumers.
Thank you for sharing this with us, Monica. In a world with little information of this sort you are a true pioneer.
I am just now feeling trauma due to my psychiatric experience. At the time I was naive and gullible enough to believe the “doctor” actually cared about me and knew what he was doing.
I have felt suicidal, though I have moral problems with it. That has done more to keep me alive than anything else.
People tempted to commit suicide do not need drugs, they need to know someone gives a rip about them!
If I were to write a book about the flaws inherent in “mental health” I think I would title it “Shut Up and Take Your Prozac!” People don’t want to hear about suffering or pain. They want people to take the magic wonder drugs and go around with smiles pasted on to “normalize” them so the normals won’t feel uncomfortable around them any more.
The mental illness system does little to help people’s morale when they are discouraged and downhearted. It also does absolutely nothing to solve the problems contributing to low morale. Joblessness, being treated like a social leper, poor or no housing, poverty, sickness, etc.
ll088, the problem with that is we menstruate every 4 weeks or so and coming off effexor will take 16 months the way I plan it. There is no way I can avoid PMS moodiness unless I wait till menopause–then I would have hot flashes. 🙁
Sorry, apparently I didn’t read enough of the bio.
Dr. Fava, thank you for your research. I needed that kind of thing so much more than zoloft or prozac when I was undergoing severe depressing thoughts. Belief that I can do more than pop pills to help my unhappiness makes me feel empowered.
I hope you will publish more and have it translated into English!
Would we say, “I’m a proud monster!” or “I’m not ashamed of being genetic garbage”?
People view “the mentally ill” as monsters and genetics gone awry, so that’s essentially what folks at NAMI and DBSA meetings are saying when they own up to their phony diagnoses.
I pity, rather than get angry at them though. I used to be one of them.
Too abashed and scared to try “tonguing” or “cheeking” some of the meds. Just as well I didn’t. For me, they were a temporary solution. Temporary–but a solution nevertheless. A hair of the dog that bit me. The dog is named Psychiatry.
In slavery people were denied the right to (legally) marry and any children they might have anyhow were taken from them if the master deemed it expedient.
In psychiatric slavery, we are often punished for marrying or coerced out of marriage and our children are taken from us if the system deems it best. And it often does. Worse yet, the children are watched zealously for signs of “abnormality”–after all they have our flawed genes–and often wind up slaves of psychiatry as well.
Thus I refuse to have children.
I have a therapist who is after me because I refuse to have sex, preferring to remain a virgin. No, she doesn’t want to have sex with me; it would be easier to prove her lack of ethics if she did. She just keeps telling me to have sex and making light of my religious and moral beliefs. I’m beginning to dislike if not hate her. I never want to sit through another session with her again.
I have a boyfriend, but she hasn’t even told me to have relations with him. Apparently she just wants me to go out and screw something that moves. That’s “normal” and “healthy” to her way of thinking. I shouldn’t have to have sex with some stranger I meet in a bar just to make her happy!
My parents are furious with her, but there’s nothing they can do because I’m an adult.
I have been on abilify for 7 years or more. Came off it in 10 weeks with few problems. Effexor is a horse of a different color! I felt so awful coming off it that I contemplated suicide and wound up back in the psych hospital. Am back on the same old meds. Came off lamictal, the latest addition, after taking it for a week. I was able to cold turkey that one. I am now at 75% of abilify or 15 of the 20 mg.
I am going to microtaper effexor this time. Once I have been completely off the abilify for 2 weeks, I will try reducing the effexor by a grain or two at a time. The only thing I learned from the hospitalization is that my addiction is much worse than I supposed and goes unacknowledged by almost everyone. Psychiatrists are worse than quacks–they are glorified drug dealers. I think they’re more dangerous than the kind you find on street corners!
Oddly enough, I have been diagnosed with bipolar, but experience no mania in coming off my antipsychotic or mood stabilizer. I think the doctors insist on calling me that so they can put me on a “cocktail” but if they knew anything, they would see I merely suffer from depression. Idiots!
Just want you people to know that I went to the hospital, but am out now and am going to try a different kind of tapering for effexor this time–called micro-tapering. A good friend (by supernatural means) stopped me from killing myself. She called up just in time with a premonition that I was going to take the easy way out. As Christians, we believe the Holy Spirit told her to.
Thanks for your support. I will be much more careful this next time! 🙂 On a full dosage of effexor, but coming off abilify again. Amazing how easy the anti-psychotic and mood stabilizer were to withdraw from compared to the anti-depressant!
I lived in a “rest-home” for over a month after I was released from a hospital where I had gone for suicidal thoughts. Ugh! I almost took to the streets.
The whole place reeked of urine and stale cigarettes. We were crammed 4-6 women into a tiny room and not allowed to leave except for meals.
I was supposed to get $50 a month for toothpaste and other personal items. Turned out the lying sneak who ran the hell-hole was keeping it for herself. She was an old hag when I went there twenty years ago. I wonder if she went to a similar place like the one she ran when she died. I could easily imagine an after-life like that rest-home as punishment for evil doers.
Hi Emily, if you could magically talk to a younger version of yourself what would you tell her?
I don’t believe in drugging away your problems and I think you don’t either. What would you recommend to someone else having extreme ups and downs?
I seem to be numb most of the time, till I start to taper my effexor. Then I alternate between numb, rotten, and really suicidal. It’s like all the bad stuff I used to feel comes back as bad or worse than ever with none of the good feelings. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever feel good again.
One major difference between this and the doctrine of Original Sin is that that doctrine is at least supposed to be a great equalizer among all people of different races, classes, and walks of life, including the kinds of sin they prefer. Since we are all sinners we should all be humble and help and love one another. With the idea of the Broken Brain, there is the idea that only some of us possess the Essence of Evil and therefore, being born with this evil essence should feel honored to be allowed to exist on the fringes of society. Think Hannibal Lecter and Norman Bates. This enables others to feel good about themselves by scapegoating the “mentally ill”.” We are Evil while they are sane and normal and therefore good. We are un-redeemable while they need no redemption.
I keep having thoughts of suicide right now and feel I have nowhere to turn. I don’t want to be hospitalized and drugged again. So there’s no way I’ll be reaching out for help!
Killing myself seems like the logical and right thing to do on so many levels.
1. It’s logical because I have no hope for the future. I am suffering from nerve damage for effexor withdrawal and can’t tell anyone. Very sick most of the time and I haven’t even gotten off the blasted stuff yet. Still tapering. Things will never improve. I’m sick of the way people treat me and the never-ending poverty. Who wouldn’t prefer death to the kind of life I lead?
2. It’s right because I’m a burden on society and am no use to anyone.
My only regret, if I can screw up the courage to go through with it, is that I didn’t go through with it 22 years ago when I was first diagnosed. Suicide is the rational and sane response to a diagnosis of mental illness. I know that mental illnesses as such do not exist but in the minds of most people they do. Everybody hates people with such diagnoses. This makes life unbearable for most of us. Along with the imprisonment and torture. I feel no guilt for my diagnosis, but shame. Guilt is for what you have done. Shame is for what you are–and in my case I’m flawed and rotten to the core. Statistics show most people would rather live near a convicted felon than someone like me with a diagnosis of bipolar.
Knowing the things I know and with no real hope for this life, how can anyone say this desire for death is just my illness talking? I’ve never been so sane in all my life.
Thanotos is the rational choice in my situation.
He certainly does Bcharris! Sherlock Holmes’s deductions were not based solely on circumstantial evidence and he didn’t try to frame innocent people.
I was diagnosed as genetic garbage with a hopelessly flawed biology at age 20. That’s when I decided my life was worthless and wanted to kill myself. Psychiatry is directly responsible.
A good psychiatrist? Hmm. A good torturer? A good drug dealer?
I wish my psychiatrist had put a bullet in my head instead of “diagnosing” me with a damning stigma and forcing me to take drugs that gave me seizures every day! It would have been much kinder. But he wouldn’t have made as much money either….
I have a neighbor below me who talks to people that aren’t there. I leave her alone with them when she carries on conversations at night. She’s not hurting anybody. They seem to keep her company.
Yeah if they banned psychiatry he might have to turn to another branch of science for his career, such as phrenology, astrology, alchemy, or blood-letting. 🙂
I believe what you say. Yet I here these myths every week when I attend coerced workshops at my mental illness center known as adult day treatment.
Some of the clients with a mean streak seem to like the idea that they have a chemical imbalance and go around proudly boasting of the fact. I guess it’s kind of an excuse for their nasty behaviors. A get out of jail free card.
I believe mine stem from trauma, including the trauma of a medication reaction and subsequent toxic druggings that I was forced to undergo afterward. In a just world that doctor would have paid me $1,000,000 for ruining my life.
Or take a page from the 80’s. “Just say no: to shrinks!”
What a monster! He has the almost comical audacity to claim to want to reduce stigma (How? By spending money in “educating” people.) when he does nothing but defame and stigmatize those he considers damaged.
I believe there is an especially hot place in Hell for that creep where demons will put him in five point restraint and give him infinite administrations of ECT and put him on an endless IV drip of Haldol. For eternity. Yay!
Btw, I’m writing a dystopian story in which the central villain is named Murphy. Just a coincidence of course. 🙂
All through childhood and adolescence I was mocked for being too sensitive and easily frightened. Then I went on zoloft. I never watched real-life snuff flicks, but I did start watching creepy things like The Shining and The Omen. Nothing but horror and violence could fascinate me. A bit of a personality change!
Now, as I taper off my effexor I find my sensitivity is returning with a renewed sense of empathy. I’m curious to discover who I really am after 24 years of constant drugging.
I had voices that refused to go away no matter what medications I took. Finally I started listening to them, because I had no choice. Shortly after I realized what they were trying to tell me–it had something to do with my religious beliefs–they went away with no drugs. Apparently they had served their purpose and I no longer needed them.
If it makes you feel better, I don’t believe my parents have much if any responsibility for my “mental health” issues. I blame the bullies in high school who sexually harassed me for two years. It may not sound like much, but it was very traumatizing to me as a teenager. I would come home and cry almost every afternoon.
At 20, after two or three years I was still suffering from social anxiety issues in college. Dr. M. put me on an anti-depressant. When I told him it was making me psychotic he denied it despite what was obvious in the pill manual. After I had gone 3 weeks without sleeping they had me locked up and drugged with toxic levels of Haldol that gave me multiple seizures every day. I wish I had never seen that quack Dr. M. My life would have been a lot better. I might have had to take a year off from college.
As it was, my xenophobic dorm mom kicked me out under the pretense that I was not meds compliant. Finally I’ve made the decision to quit taking my meds! I only wish I had done it 22 years ago.
Those who separate themselves from us also enjoy the idea of a DNA error or chemical imbalance in the brain because it shows how superior they are. They have healthy genes and perfect harmony in their brains, showing how above us subhumans they are in their sanity. Just like the German Aryans derived their nationalistic pride from hating the Jews.
Some mentally “normal” people are insensitive, unimaginative, and lacking in humor. Therefore I guess they feel they need something to feel smug about.
Seems society has a built in need to hate some group of scapegoats. Witches, Comanche “savages,” African-Americans, Communists, and now the Insane.
Don’t be prejudiced against those dangerous nut jobs! They aren’t truly dangerous as long as we keep them properly drugged!
This provides the useful function of stereotyping us as a bunch of rampaging mad dogs. But, not to worry, they have a wide assortment of safe and effective muzzles!
Still, who wants to be around a rabid dog even if it is wearing a muzzle? Thanks for nothing, mental illness experts.
I only wish I had the choice between wearing a muzzle and letting them rape my poor brain.
I believe everyone has a role to play in society. Even the man with the mind of a three-year-old who has to lie in bed and can’t go to the bathroom without help performs a valuable function. He forces the rest of us to come to grips with our selfishness and learn to love more unconditionally.
Suicide is not always selfish. At one time a year after my diagnosis I seriously considered killing myself. Why? Nobody wanted me around. I felt I’d be doing them a favor.
Apparently imagination which includes empathy and a sense of humor are severe psychoses. Psychiatrists are certainly devoid of them. Once they get through messing with your brain you will be too!
People do manage to kill themselves in hospital wards too. I had a friend whose father was so depressed that although he was locked up in a psychiatric ward, he found a way to strangle himself. His mother sued that hospital, but I don’t think she won.
Sometimes I wonder why They want to keep us alive seeing what low-quality of life they expect us to settle for. I doubt that they honestly care about our happiness or well-being. Hmm. That’s right. If enough of us kill ourselves they won’t be able to bill Medicaid/Medicaire for our expensive drugs.
If Hitler had had a system like that set up for “lunatics” in Nazi Germany he might have let the mental patients live.
IF mental illness professionals want people to integrate into society (which I sincerely doubt) they certainly do a rotten job of it! All I have gotten from mental illness professionals is more marginalized and discriminated against thanks to their diagnoses and debilitating drugs which I faithfully swallowed for 24 years. I’m sick of their lies which I swallowed with their pills.
Social workers kept me taking the drugs which made me too sick to work for most of my life. I also had seizures for years thanks to massive quantities of Haldol and Stellazine. Lo and behold they went away as soon as I went off the drugs!
Integration into society is a joke the way mental illness people (I refuse to call them mental health or mental wellness) go about it. Take some pills, then go to group therapy with the other losers–healthy people will never want to touch you again thanks to us–take some more pills, then attend a NAMI meeting in which you whine about stigma (which we feed into) and keep taking your pills while we the experts ridicule you for being fat and sleeping so much and stinking. Why can’t you take a shower? You must have low self-esteem! Gosh, I wonder why?
My Great-Aunt was diagnosed with “schizophrenia” when she was seventeen. I believe she had a nervous break-down when she realized she had been conceived out of wedlock (back then that was a big deal.) She was given lots of ECT and hospitalized for a long time. Grandma says the shocks cured her hallucinations, but her brain may have been too fried to produce any or she may have not been able to tell people. Or she may have wised up enough to keep them to herself so as not to get more ECT.
At least my Great-Aunt never had to take the neuroleptics that I did. She lived into her late 80’s which most “mentally ill” people don’t any more. She might have recovered if her brain hadn’t been damaged by the ECT’s.
Wow BetterLife! Have you been through that?
All I can do is offer my condolences.
No one should have to go through all that.
Forgive them, Father. They don’t know what they are doing.
B, you make a great point. My Mom would want me on more Haldol, because it kept me too quiet to be agitated and say depressing things. Why was I so agitated and depressed? Because the Haldol caused seizures every day and numbness and fatigue so I couldn’t take a full course load at college and my grades went down. Oh yes, and the “experts” told me I would have to take massive amounts of Haldol till I died and basically labeled me a “schizophrenic” monster so no one would talk to me and I wasn’t allowed to live on campus. Why did dying suddenly seem so wonderful that suicide was a real temptation?
Sorry my first comment was insensitive, Dorritt. I am truly sorry about Luise. She probably just needed some TLC, like a lot of people with psychotic symptoms or mood swings or depression need, rather than forced poisonings.
I believe someday God will judge all people who torture and kill others. Their white lab coats and string of paper credentials won’t save them then, unless they repent. Dr. Mingula was a certified doctor I believe.
(TLC stands for tender loving care.)
There is a reason why forced psychiatric druggings are standard treatment, Dorrit. Follow the money trail. 🙁 Psychiatry isn’t about helping people at all. It’s about the shrinks or psychiatrists milking the “consumers” for all the money they can bill insurance company for.
Are the black sheep the one’s that are still non-meds compliant? They need more brainwashing–I mean education.
Their freedom to choose their careers? Boo hoo!
They don’t care about how they ruin our freedom to choose careers.
And worried about stigma? That’s as stupid as the southern slave-owners saying the abolitionists up north didn’t understand what the “darkies” needed like they did. Of course the fact that the slave-owners were making a killing in the cotton industry due to the low overhead (slave labor is cheap) had nothing to do with why they kept people in bondage. It was all done for the slaves’ own good, out of the pure goodness of “massah’s” heart. Ha ha.
Slaves that ran away were mentally ill with a classic case of “drapetomania.” Good slaves stayed on the plantation and liked it, proving how mentally sound they were. If they blacked the masters’ boots well enough they got to eat leftovers, wear his cast-off clothing, and got a warm place to sleep by the fire.
Today’s mental health house slaves blog for “Healthy Place” about the importance of taking your cocktail exactly as prescribed. And they are sometimes elected President of the local NAMI chapter.
I used to be compliant in every possible way, because I believed the lie that “Mental Health” was here to help me. I took my drugs exactly as prescribed.
Now I am a rebel and a passive-aggressive liar. Oh, well, one good Lie deserves another.
They told me I had a chemical imbalance and needed to spend the rest of my life in a drugged haze. NO MORE. Even if they lock me up and drug me I will know that I’m sane and they are the liars and phonies they have always been.
They lied to me, so I will lie to them whenever necessary. If they find out I’m off my drugs, and I will never tell them I am, I will shed tears of sorrow (I’m a great actress and can sometimes cry on command.) I will pretend to have regained insight into my condition and promise to take the drugs exactly as prescribed. All the while, I will be planning how soon I can taper off of them again, even as I swallow them meekly and passively in the hospital. I can be a model patient–luckily I have a long record as one so they won’t suspect me as much.
Even as I begin tapering off my final drug–Effexor–I attend meetings at the local “Mental Health facility” in order to avoid suspicion. I see my psychiatrist regularly and religiously order refills on her prescriptions (which I carefully bury deep in my garbage.) I see my therapist and pretend to agree with her when she tells me I should only date other “bipolars” because only one of the could understand someone like me. (Stick to your own kind!)
I finally got her to quit talking about it, by saying I had discovered I was asexual.She has no business telling me who to date. If it hadn’t been for my accursed diagnosis I probably would be married with children by now. And have a decent career. Thanks modern psychiatry! You have really helped with the quality of my life! 😛
I’m thinking about relocating, but of course my diagnosis will follow me wherever I go. At least, if I move to the state capital–my current community numbers 6,000–I will be sure not to sign up for any “services” beyond necessary. Low-income housing is hard to come by. I have a plan that may work though, in a big city. I may post it in one of the forums.
Thanks Kim. Australia sounds worse than the USA, if possible!
I’m steering clear of the Land Down Under. If I had to make a trip there, I would have to hide out in the bush and only associate with wild animals and the aborigines who lack the “science” to force psychotropic drugs and ECT on me. From what I hear about aborigines of all races and countries they seem to be healthier and happier in general than civilized people. I wonder why? 😀
All I’m on now is Effexor–150 mg. Wish me luck. I start tapering by 10% this weekend. I have already come off Trileptal and Abilify. I have reasons to believe the latter was causing me to have deep cysts continually. The other kept me from walking much at all. I have done it all myself with no help from anyone who lives nearby–certainly no medical help.
I am off abilify for the first time in 8 years and feeling things again. My therapist remarked how good my affect was, I’m smiling more! Little does she know.
I felt better when I first took a Zoloft. Unfortunately the happy buzz died away in less than a month. I wonder if being permanently drunk or high on marijuana would have had a similar effect.
Anothervoice I agree with you. And I am a Christian psychiatric survivor. A lot of Christians reject science’s idea of how life started. Why can’t they reject psychiatry? Social Darwinism is at the root of it, along with a materialistic world view.
The Book of Christianity, the Bible, says we are more than bodies and brains with biochemical reactions. We are indeed animals, but we are in the image of God, meaning we’re free moral agents. Psychiatry says we’re machines without souls, just chemical balances, or in our case imbalances.
I hope I’m not offending you atheists unnecessarily. I’m just saying I can no longer reconcile Christianity and psychiatry. How others do is beyond me.
Sanist? Seems like you got one letter wrong. 🙂
One possibility is that those in less developed countries are less likely to label “different” people as mentally ill. In order to be labeled as mentally ill in those countries one must show more violent behaviors then over here in the good old USA. That’s my hypothesis anyhow.
Uh, wouldn’t there be a decrease in the chicken population?
Congratulations to Prof. Gum. It was hard for me to accept and I am not a psychologist. Changing your beliefs is always difficult.
I hate lying! But right now I have no choice. I refuse to steal, but lying to people who have lied to me all the time bothers me less. Besides to continue to take the neurotoxic poisons I have been dished out would be another moral crime. Suicide is wrong and if I continue with the drugging I will be guilty of that.
“Thou shalt not lie,” is not one of the Ten Commandments. “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor,” is.
The men and women in white coats with stethoscopes around their necks are those who have defamed me and told society around me that I am a monster willing to kill them at the drop of a hat if I don’t take my medicines. Who does it sound like is bearing false witness against their neighbor? Hmm?
My question is could the synaptic over-pruning be related to neuroleptic drugs given for people with schizophrenic diagnoses? In order to rule out such a possibility they would need the brains of people with “schizophrenic” symptoms who were not medicated or given ECT to compare with the other brains. Maybe they did such a thing, but psychiatry is notorious for proving only what they want to prove–at the expense of scientific inquiry and openness and honesty.
I am coming off my meds with very few side effects, aside from some headaches and one night I started shivering like I had a fever when I didn’t. Funny how the withdrawals for me are of the physical variety. If they were my symptoms remanifesting themselves wouldn’t I hear voices, have mood swings or become suicidal?
I’m very thankful things are going so well since I have no support from family or friends and have to taper in secret. If things go badly and I’m found out, back to the psych ward I go!
I think God is watching out for me.
No offense Monica, but the thought of becoming an iatrogenic invalid like you did, made me put off coming off my meds for at least a year longer than I would otherwise have. I live alone and have no one except my pro-psychiatry parents to care for me. If I became as sick as you did, I would never hear the end of it from them! And I would just wind up drugged again anyhow–only probably more so.
Isn’t that circular reasoning? It’s like saying, “All swans are white. My friend showed me what he said was a black swan, but I knew better. It was the wrong color.”
Apparently psychiatrists get to opt out of Philosophy 101.
That’s a good point Emmeline.
My case manager/behavioral clinician (think social worker lite) keeps getting on my case because once or twice a week I pick up junk food at a local convenience store nearby. She is trying to talk me into going to the county retirement center. I have my own reasons not to. The more my case manager tries to bully me out of going to the convenience store the more I want to do it, and lie about it. I think I am going to get a new case manager–or better yet none at all. My therapist doesn’t think I need one.
Sorry, I forgot the quotation marks. “Mentally ill.”
We all know how Germany went downhill after scapegoating and persecuting weaker, marginalized elements of society. They were creamed in World War II! Interesting that the mentally ill were targets before the Jews and others.
Peru (or Nicaragua) here I come!
Here’s another idea–have our side find a way to remove the microchip from the pills so “patients” can swallow the chips without the drug.
Or manufacture a counterfeit device with identical coding. I doubt that each chip would have a unique, complicated code if they plan on mass-producing it to embed in the gazillion pills we have to swallow.
I guess we’re not that high tech, but it’s worth trying. It’s either go underground or leave the country.
I used to support the N.R.A. till the current president called us monsters and said we should ALL be locked up. Apparently his right to own guns overrides our more basic freedoms.
Or if they don’t measure our meds we can lie about them…. 🙂
If the Murphy Bill passes, are there any measures we psychiatric victims can take to protect ourselves? Just wondering.
Peru looks like a nice country….
I believe a lot of the NAMI parents like the organization because it absolves them of misbehavior. Robert Whittaker implies something like that in one of his books, I believe. “No Magic Bullet.”
If the Murphy Bill is passed I’m leaving the country.
Locking up and torturing people (ECT and drugging) when they have done nothing wrong is just plain evil. Congressman Murphy is a very evil man. How’s that for black and white thinking?
Punishing people before they commit crimes makes me think of the Tom Cruiz movie, The Minority Report. Murphy believes he’s psychic and can foretell crimes before they happen. Hmm, maybe he’s delusional?
One of the reasons I have remained on medicine for so long is I have no means of income without SSI. Now that my parents are retiring in the spring, I hope to get on SSDI which will mean I can refuse drugs.
At 42 I have never been gainfully employed and have no real hope of ever being so because of the stigma, as well perhaps, of the iatrogenic nerve damage after 24 years of damaging my nervous system with drugs. I wish I had never gone to that evil psychiatrist when I was 18. He ruined my life with his brain drugs and diagnosis. I wish I hadn’t been obedient for once.
I agree!
I am in a Catch-22 situation. I can’t do much of anything now including keeping my government subsidized apartment clean due to the sedative affects of my drugs. I need to be weaned off them gradually. Since no doctor will do it, I would have to do it myself. Only because I can’t keep my apartment up to code I am going to have to check into a retirement home where I will have no control over the medicines. Not sure what I should do.
I may move out to my parents’ property eventually (9-10 months from now.) There I would have more control of things.
At least I can be thankful my mind is relatively clear. It’s mostly my physical being that has been messed with (so far!)
It’s neat that you are coming up with non-medical ways to help people that hear voices cope with the world–ways that work better than the psychiatric model.
Many of us did have problems before psychiatry screwed around with our brains and nervous systems. (Mine were more of the mood swings and depression type.) The question is: does the bio-medical model work? It doesn’t seem too, except perhaps in a short-term way. Someone should write an article with a costs-benefits analysis of the drugs we are prescribed or have been in the past. I began to question psych meds even before reading Robert Whitaker or joining MIA.
It just seems illogical to take them. 1. Do they help us enjoy better quality of life? Short term, maybe. Long term, no. 2. Do they lengthen our lives like insulin or other drugs they have been compared to? No. They shorten our lives by 25 years on average. 3. Do they even prevent suicide? Research is showing that the answer to that may be no, along with preventing homicide and other dangerous behaviors.
In which case, I began to ask myself, why should I be taking my pills even if I am “different” from other people? It’s like telling people of darker skinned races that they have to artificially bleach their skin to look like Caucasians. Even if the bleach is toxic and shortens their lives while diminishing the quality significantly. Stupid and unfair.
Two things the psych establishment held against me after my diagnosis. One was that I believed in good and evil. The other, according to them, was that I had “the sexuality of a twelve-year-old” at 23.
I’m sure they wouldn’t have liked it either if I had been a hyper-sexual sociopath…With the psych establishment you just can’t win. That way they can prescribe more drugs!
And I have never even stolen anything! Not even a pencil. 🙁
I wasn’t even suicidal. I was taking meds that led to mini-seizures. The dorm mom had a bunch of session where every girl in the unit was invited but me to tell them that I was a sick and dangerous person and they shouldn’t talk to me. I was very depressed and became more so. The seizures got worse and the dorm mom lied that I wasn’t taking my drugs (though I was religiously) so I was “asked to leave.”
This was a Christian university. I guess they ought to make people promise not to get a mental health diagnosis as a condition for admittance along with not drinking, dancing, or playing cards!
That was my experience too, Someone Else.
Sometimes I had thoughts of harming others that sickened me. I guess that shows I wasn’t about to act on them. Still it made me afraid to be around others and isolate.
The psychosis came about through the magical wonder drugs known as Haldol and Stellazine.
Right about the imaginary labels!
I didn’t choose my mental illness; my psychiatrist chose it for me! 😀