I have been an avid reader of JK and was a regular participant at the JK center and listening to his recorded tapes.I started reading JK quite early in life because I had my questions raised there by JK which usually are not considered
” practical” by our vast majority or the hoi-poloi.His debates with Aldous Huxley was worth reading although somewhere I would lose track of what he is actually trying to communicate.But he is worth a trial about his investigations into human mental faculties like attention,memory,past,living in the present,fear,the limitations of knowledge,meditation,society,love,
relationships,sex,desire,ending of time,freedom from the known,beauty,death,dying every moment,dying to your desires,dying to your past,not to project the image of what you want to be as against paying attention to what you are….etc.He was asking us to indulge in thought based experiments on ourselves in order to realize that the knower and the known are one.The observer and observed are one.He was very critical about the technological monsters that we have mass created all around.
What about the bureaucrats? Haven’t they hijacked the funds? Otherwise how come there is still a denial of mental health issues?
I am wondering why Dr Daniel Fisher an eminent psychiatrist who has recovered,not cured in his own words,is not active on MIA? He has a unique combination of therapy comprising of emotional CPR,diet therapy,interpersonal sharing of stressors,narrating their experiences and a community oriented approach towards psychiatry so that they don’t feel left out of the society.So he gives a great deal of importance to talking out the concerns and most importantly giving hope to the patients.Hope he says is the single most important factor in recovery.He has been part of Senior George W Bush’s task formed for psychiatry and in the old edition of Kaplan and Saddock textbook of psychiatry that I have,his name finds a mention.He was one of the 16 members of the year long new freedom commission on mental health announced in 2002.He was the director of the National empowerment center in Lawrence,in Massachusetts.He has mentioned in the first volume of Kaplan and saddock 8th edition that there is little evidence for a genetic or biochemical basis for severe mental illness.He advised the administration on improving the public mental health system.This he told the US news and world report.page 648 first volume 8th edition of Kaplan and Saddock textbook of psychiatry.chapter,sociopolitical trends in mental health care : the consumer/survivor movement and multiculturalism.
Society and psychiatry medicines gives 0% support to me as a patient but demands 100% effective and ethical work output from me as a practising doctor.
I am a practising MBBS doctor in india and I have been on various psychotropic drugs well over 15 years.I would surely vouch for Dr.Gotzsche’s claims of the ineffectiveness of these medicines from different classes.i have just gone slipping down the socioeconomic and professional ladder despite being fully compliant with the prescribed drugs.So what are we/I supposed to do? It’s become more of giving few medicines to an end-of-life patient.For symptom relief.A palliative therapy so to be more specific.
I wish Dr.Peter Gotzsche was equally famous and followed here in India.He has given us invaluable insights into how psychiatry and DSM modus operandi.He is one of the best watch dog that we have in the field of psychiatry.
Yes,we do have a very hard time fitting into a complex society which foes not offer any life-support system other than drugs.Drugs do help but it does not help in fixing the problems that life throws at us and the high social demands in the face of a Mental health issue which can be quite overwhelming.at times it’s just that ur psychiatrist behaved well with you that’s significant enough.
You exposed the lies and data manipulation of psychiatric clinical trials.It must be a genetic disorder on the part of the people who conducted this clinical trial to lie habitually like this. That was a great and monumental exposition.No other specialty patients are as victimized as psychiatry.patients who are born with genetically affected illness or affected later in life like sickle cell anemia,dwarfism,congenital hearing loss,downs syndrome are leading a near normal life.So it’s not so much about the gene debate.Its the lack of acceptability for this illness to exist where other people work and inhabit.Dr.Stephen Stahl’s memorable statement that DSM members evolved out of the genes and not the reverse way is worth mentioning.I myself an MBBS doctor has been suffering from depression and anxiety,so I got a lived experience about mental health in our Indian society.And how it has affected my job,relationships,peer support,housing,economics,legal non-support.I am of the strong opinion that multi axial system of diagnoses and means to resolve the 9 stressors mentioned in DSM 4 TR be given its due importance in our mental health bill.
Genetics or no genetics mental health disorders should get appropriate government and private fundings and support because many of the risk factors or the consequences of disabilities arising out of it are modifiable. Give them the support system mentioned in DSM 4 TR 9 stressors.Even VIP lifestyle diseases like hypertension cardiac ailments diabetes have a gene linked to them.If a taboo is created surrounding lifestyle diseases then their fate would be no different.They would be forced to be shut down in detention centers until they change their eating and sedentary habits.I would not like to agree that thinking and behaviors are linked to genes.Thinking and behaviors too are modified by the place you live and the era you live and the people who live amidst you.Their behavior and thinking pattern conditions yours.And over a period of decades of such ” contaminating ” people around you,it automates ones behavior.its just like what food stuff is,available in your area,only that will be consumed.Thinking too is like a food.Food for thought.The predominant political ideologies in your area or country will change your thinking and perception.role of genes upto the structural level of brain is comfortable enough.The debate on nurture and nature is ongoing.I believe thinking should alter the way your genes act.thats evolution.we do not as yet have a sound idea about mind brain consciousness interface.support system for mentally ill should always over ride the debate of genes or no genes.then this issue could spiral out to racism,invasion,suppression of genes,colonialism,political ideologies.we won’t get anywhere.
Politicians,their secretaries and psychiatrists,together are the ones who decides the fate of the psychiatry patients.Journalists too are involved if they do not publish accurate information about psychiatric conditions.They can very well mislead the people by printing that can only be considered myths.I have frequently come across articles which puts the blame on the patients,as if there is no problem with the chemical theories of psychiatry or the lack of a proper mental health care system.
Politicians are never concerned about providing psycho-social support to the patients.They have been somehow convinced by the psychiatrists and pharma lobby that drugs are all that is required.And these health ministers have not an iota of idea of what psychiatric conditions mean.They really are ignorant about what they are dealing with.
If a psychiatry patient is burnt by black magicians or at an illegal treatment center,killed or commits suicide,here in our country,neither the psychiatrist nor the health ministry is held responsible.The patient’s family does not get any compensation either,which is readily made available within seconds for other category of patients.Contrary to this if someone gets infected with a viral fever,the threat of the ruling party’s downfall looms large.Questions are posed through the media,facebook,twitter,newspapers as to why the govt was unable to contain this “self limiting”viral fever!Whether it is the leftist,rightist,center,forward,backward,all political parties are equally ignorant about psychiatry and do not want to do anything worthwhile for the patients.
That is the reason why India spends only 0.006% of it’s GDP for psychiatry.And most of this fund goes towards paying salaries and for other administrative related work.It is not meant to be spent on the patients.And whatever amount is left behind for the patients,the psychiatrists do not spend it for mental health activities because they do not have the will power or the fund gets misdirected towards some other sector.Finally at the end of the financial year that fund gets lapsed.It cannot be carried over to the next financial year.That’s how our bureaucracy works.
In our Indian culture-tradition-social-political setup,the entire burden of your illness and the complications arising out of it is shoved upon the patient.Neither the govt,the society or the medical profession will support or own you.
Contrary to that,a normal person will have multitude of support system from their political parties,trade onions,govt and society,banking system,housing system,loan and insurance etc.Those social incentives.Essentially the entire govt and private institution in India are providing their services only to life style diseased people and other “normals”.They are actually the most corrupt and the most irresponsible people who are carrying the nation backward to the stone age.Not the psychiatry patients.Because they are already thrown out of all social institutions.They are not wanted anywhere.They are not involved in our nation’s progression or regression.Most of them do not even have voting rights.Because they are not seen as SANE CITIZENS!And the criteria for a sane citizen is one who should be just be able to identify the symbol of a political party!Everything else will be taken care of the politician who suffers from Wernickes encephalopathy,speaking that which has no meaning.
So,I do not see anything that allows me to take pride in my diagnosis,from an Indian stand point of view.
The American patient’s view could be different because they have a better psychiatric health care system and accountability.Here, no one is accountable.The psychiatry guys can do anything and can get away with it.
Indian govt spends less than 0.006% of its GDP for psychiatry;not for psychiatry patients!Because all of the money goes to pay off the salaries to the workers in psychiatry and other establishment and recurring expenditures with nothing left for the patient’s treatment and welfare.They don’t even have the money to print posters to create awareness about psychiatry.Much of the amount gets lapsed because the psychiatrists do not use whatever little amount is given to them from the central or state govt.This only shows their lack of initiative and will power.Or, the money is diverted and the beneficiaries turns out to be the politicians,their loyals and other normal/life style diseased people.
This will only complicate issues for people who already have economic issues because the “normal”people will eat into their job opportunities,which they are already doing and also take away all the money that’s meant for the welfare of people who already have a psychiatry diagnosis,which is already happening.
The so called normal people are the real scamsters and criminals of the system and an irresponsible lot and you want to raise their wages for such “virtues”????
This newsletter is not meant for such people at all in the first place.You are talking about an hypothetical situation;imagining a bit too far and not seeing the immediate reality of psychiatry patients.
I would like to suggest that a percentage of the profit that the psychiatrists and the pharma industries are making should go towards the welfare of the psychiatry patients and their family.Other people are having their support system from their doctors,union leaders,ministers,political parties and of course the perks from their job,insurance,paid leave and the corruption they are prone to commit habitually.
In India psychiatry patients ought to have job reservations,but they are often thrown out of their jobs and there is no one to support them.They get very little or no loans when compared to other corrupt people who never repay it raising the country’s or the bank’s non-paying assets,NPA to several,several lakh crores of rupees.
Why not first discuss the minimum wages or higher minimum wages for people who are already suffering from mental health issues,work place discrimination and job insecurity and lack of leave before giving this advantage to people who have no mental health diagnosis as yet.They can get the necessary benefits as and when they have a psychiatric diagnosis.But certainly not in advance.
I have experienced low wages,workplace discrimination,lack of leave despite being a doctor.And this has led to not only relapse of my depressive illness but also frequent job loss which further fueled an economic crisis leading to death of my two family members.Not to speak of divorce and leading an isolated homeless life in lodges.And the psychiatrist is saying that “all is well” with people’s mental health.Continue taking more drugs and “all will be well for him”.That’s a pun!
“YOU ARE A USED CAR SALESMAN”…..Shouts Demi Moore at Tom Cruise in the film,A FEW GOOD MEN.
Physically disabled are living a very comfortable and luxurious lives.They consider physical disability as a genuine disability and psychiatric illness as some kind of nuisance or malingering.And nobody is willing to change this perceptual distortion of the society and psychiatrists alike.You know it’s very easy to practice psychiatry,because these patients can be manipulated by anyone,including the psychiatrists and no questions are asked.If they act smart,then he will get some dangerous drugs.Whether the treatment is bad or good can only be defined from the perspective of the psychiatrist.I went to the court to challenge this general apathy and callousness and filed a public interest litigation to change the way psychiatry is practising.But the courts and the democracy are all hand in gloves with their traditional believes about psychiatry.They don’t want to change the image of a patient who is tied with a chain or being given an ECT,or being lynched.
Well,I have seen psychiatrists hand over to us precisely the same.Shame,guilt,it,it’s all in my head,no questioning them,don’t ask for a better deal.They can even shout at you,criticize you.You lose faith in them.And when in a country where there are less than 3500 psychiatrists for 1,3 billion people,how do we get the treatment?They want only submissive patients.They are no different from street drug pedallars.Swallow these pills,and that’s all what you got to do do,when your life breaks down one after the other,despite taking the medicines.They will switch over to another class of drug,but won’t make any difference to our lives,but more side effects.Their effects are for short term and our lives are longer than that.It’s guess work that guides them to select a drug.Psychotherapy has to bridge the gap between the drugs and the patients.
If the efficacy of a drug is statistically significant but not clinically,that means we are becoming guniea pigs.They must be concluding this from post marketing survellience.So the statistician decides whether we got to swallow this bitter pill or not.And this kind of research in psychiatry has other problems too.You got to rely on what the patient says.How he describes his symptom resolution,whether it improved or not and to what extent.you cannot scan his brain to detect any improvement in his depression after having introduced the drug.In short it the response cannot be quantified.I have also heard that patients are enticed with money,to give a positive response to their drugs so that it can be marketed.And they must be surely having some subtle communication network to get this done.
Someday,I see chatbots taking over the job of a psychiatrist.We already have online consultations on paying an online fees.
I had been to an international conference on OCD,Some 500 kilometers from my house.One of the former HOD of the psychiatry department confirmed that there is no association between OCD and ASD when somebody posed this question.But later,during the break while I was going through the photocopies of the literature displayed outside,I found a reference in small print of an author having reported a case of OCD transforming into ASD.I called a Japanese delegate,who spoke,I guess on psychotherapy stuff to look at the my observation.But he was in a hurry to board his plane,but somehow I whisked him towards the display table and showed him the article.This HOD probably weighed more than 100 Kg,probably he could be on some psychotropes,if not due to any other causes of morbid obesity.I think once they become psychiatrist,after some years they start acting like pharmacists.They are only concerned about the drugs,its dosage,it’s mechanism of action and so on.They should be selling medicines inside their pharmacies.
If you have seen the movie,THE FUGITIVE,where Harrison Ford plays the lead role,who finds out in the end that the research company was using the same pathological specimen of the liver,but with thousands of different names,age,sex,address etcetra to prove some hypothesis and also to promote a drug to cure this liver disease.It could be horrible with psychiatry,because nobody is really aware about anything in the field of psychiatry.The only tool,psychiatry has is the subjective mind of the psychiatrists and several conflict of interests that involves the pharma companies,the govt’s budget allocation (which is almost nothing here)the interests of the pharma companies,the interests of the psychiatrists and their association.
Society is a bit too much aware of the difficulties faced by communicable diseases and lifestyle diseases and degenerative diseases.Why have they excluded us?They want primary,secondary,prevention,then tertiary level treatment.Then rehabilitation and compensation.The govt does not pay compensation to a suicide victim’s relatives.But such compensations are given to other patients if they suffer even from complications arising out of the disease.That is outright discrimination.
DSM 4 atleast found out 9 stressors which needs to be addressed.Social support,education,occupation,peer support,easy access to health care,legal support,economic impact of psychiatric illness,…and 2 more.But DSM 5 has removed it.Why?
In our country,we have reservation in jobs for persons with mental health illness.But most often they do not get this job.Someone else like the physically disabled gets it.Also if you want to get a disability certificate,you got to wait for 4 years.This is utter nonsense.Whom are these psychiatrists actually serving?
I have had many toxic bosses.They destroy not only your mental,physical,emotional and economic health but also eradicate your family members as if they were some harmful microbe.
Why are the cities being cleaned off plastics,solid and liquid waste?Why are there Euro norms for controlling air pollution?Why do you they want to keep their cities,air,water,food,environment clean?Why are they trying to eradicate germs,vectors and diseases?Why are they propagating healthy lifestyle attitudes?Why can’t they simply drug the people when they fall sick,instead of preventing it like they do unto the psychiatry patients?It will reap more profit.Surely,because the government and the pharma company have signed a memoranda of understanding,on who will be provided health and who will be victimized and made to suffer for no fault of theirs.
Its only to keep a c class of people healthy,comfortable and lead a secure and luxurious life.But what have they got to offer for psychiatry patients,other than these toxic drugs?
1. Now they have borrowed the term from the telecommunication industry namely,”SPECTRUM”.You got depression spectrum disorder,schizo-freniform spectrum disorder,mood disorder spectrum disorder,anxiety spectrum disorder,autism spectrum disorder…..Do they have a tie-up with the silicon valley engineers??We must be getting auctioned as to which spectrum bandwidth should be allocated to us!!
2. There is more to the medical jargon getting electronic and electrical so much so that biological ,social and the psychological side is being buried.You got the signal transduction cascade mechanism.Is this the railway signalling system where patients often commit suicide.Then they got the serotonin,dopamine accelerator system,braking system,clutch system.Again the railway engine model,although the clutch system may not be there.
3. They are not talking about the patient at all.
There appears to be more flaws:
1. They prescribe antipsychotics for differing conditions like depression,anxiety,bipolar,hiccoughs,unexplained vomiting,mania.How do they explain this?They will similarly prescribe antidepressants for depression,anxiety,peripheral neuropathy due to diabetes or pain syndromes.They seem to be telling us that the neurotransmitter projections are interconnected so for serotonin deficiency they will prescribe antipsychotics which will improve serotoninergic pathways.This is nothing but market place speculation.Trading during bullish and bearish trend.They got to sell the stock of the drugs from their ware houses,so create a fake hypothesis to convince you.They got no proof whatsoever.Let me make a blind guess.The medical representative informs the psychiatrists that so and so class of psychotropes are lying in their ware house and their expiry date is due.So make all the patients who eneter your OPD or ward swallow it.They will hand over a nonsense journal article to justify the use of the drug concerned.All these psychotropic drugs can be substituted interchangeably for any condition.It is the subjective mind of the psychiatrist that selects the drug in favor of the drug company.And not for the patient.Mood stabilizers are not being marketed as membrane stabilizers which is their primary action.They will market it as bipolar drug,antiepileptic drug,antipsychotic drug,diabetic analgesic drug etcetra.
2. How is it that there is a delay of nearly a month or so in resolving acute depression,whereas the motor symptoms resolve earlier?
If you criticize the psychiatrist,he will label you with another diagnosis or diagnoses from the DSM and also prescribe a drug,saying,”Take this pill and you will stop criticizing and harming the profits of the psychiatry industry which is a crime.And psychiatric patients with “criminal attitude” is dangerous to the society!!!”
In mental hospitals they deliberately harm and torture the patients to make them violent or behave abnormally,so that they can administer these dangerous drugs and ECT.This is how psychiatry industry is earning now.How different are they from the criminals inside the jails?
The DSM must go.Because for any given patient,the psychiatrist can label him with a dozen diagnoses,because they all look so similar.All these new diagnoses were created by adding or deleting some symptoms provided by the patients,which cannot be investigated.And then they will prescribe drugs from different class of psychotropic drugs and hand over to you a cocktail of drugs.But in the acute setting these drugs are useful,even without a diagnosis,I suppose.All they do is sedate which is a nonspecific way of treatment,employed by various specialities for various indications.
Psychotherapy,psychosocial support needs to come up in a big way,until psychiatry becomes more scientific.Currently they are nothing but a bundle of sophisticated verbal jargons.
Their biological and chemical model for psychiatric disturbances has not been validated at all.Had it been scientific in the real sense,these drugs would have allowed the patients to lead a normal life like people suffering from diabetes and hypertension.And aren’t they using the diabetic model to explain away psychiatric illness?The drugs in those class works because there is a concordance between the pathology of the disease and the drug action.In psychiatry they have not been able to prove any deficiency or excess of the neurotransmitters or the triamino-monoaminergic projections.When they cannot prove the rationality of using these toxic drugs,they confuse you with such phantasmagoric theories of neurotransmitter projections,their deficiency or excess,receptor level problem,signal transduction problem and what not.All these are attempts to make this speciality look scientific and a part of clinical medicine,which is but very very borderline.A borderline medical speciality whose practitioners should be should be sitting outside the hospital and seeing the patients.
True.Social animosity between psychiatry and other class of patients is also the reason why the entire healthcare budget allocation goes to life style diseased patients and almost nothing for psychiatry patients.This is discrimination,a sort of apartheid against psychiatry.Their intent is to throw us out of life.Because of such animosity we lose our property and job as well.Their hostility is very much evident.
But then whom should the patient approach to resolve such housing,economic and occupational problems,to name a few.I’am from India and I have approached social workers,NGO’s,ministers,even written to our prime minister.The latter only replied with a happy birthday card.In other specialities doctors are working hand in gloves with the representatives of common public like the local leaders and ministers.There is an hyper-conscious reaction to physical cleanliness,to avoid paper and plastic but nothing for psychiatry.Why are the ministers and local leaders and the psychiatry community running away from their responsibilities towards the psychiatry patients.This amounts to negligence.
No other illness isolates you from the society and from people with whom you related well.This illness takes away everything from you.It’s not the illness per se,but the lack of our social institutions to resolve the issues in psychiatry despite being clearly evident.Just imagine what would be the fate of patients with physical or life style based illness,if they got no doctors,no medicines,no preventive approach,no 5 star hospitals,no sophisticated surgical procedures,no insurance,no diet plan,no exercise plan,no expensive investigations,no medical tourism,no paid-leave,no work place support,no job reservation of jobs (handicapped people),no cutting edge research,no effective medicines,no subsidized medicines,no medicolegal support…..They too will become isolated and crippled like us,no doubt about it.
The attitude of people to ignore the needs of psychiatry patients is the cause for all of their problems including loneliness.The govt. does not have the will power to improve the situation of such patients.They are only interested the cardio,nephro,neuro,gen medicine,gastro,uro….sort of specialities.Nothing wrong in that,so long as the needs of psychiatry patients are also met with,on par with them.
My suggestion would be to invest money and work force in preventive and curative psychiatry,creating awareness amongst the general public about psychiatry,integrate psychiatry with other specialities since it requires a multidisciplinary approach and there should be a public health approach for psychiatry.
Psychiatry patients who are educated and well informed about their condition must canvas to upgrade the existing level of psychiatry services.Nobody else will do it because of conflict of interests.
Since psychiatry services are ignored and is practically non-existent to the fullest measure in our country,I think social rejection is the single most important factor in the etiology of loneliness.The private hospitals and the govt health workers including the psychiatrists working in psychiatry are responsible for this cause.Their population falls far below the required numbers.The health ministry is also not interested in it.The social rejection is almost global.It affects every sphere of life like occupation,housing and accomodation,economics,access to health care and legal system,education etc.Every imaginable social service is denied to us.The basic right of a citizen also is denied.If this was not the case,the other factors would not have become overwhelmingly important requiring professional level intervention.
Other factors mentioned in the article with which I could identify were lack of intimacy,lack of emotional relations,situational and cultural factors,social information processing issues,self blame,avoidant attachment and characteristics of early care givers
That should be great otherwise they will start you on some dangerous psychotropes.Psychosocial interventions should be there always because these drugs are not very efficient on their own.They won’t help you to survive in this world.
There is some truth in it.In my experience the stigma and the taboo of mental health,the sedative effects of the drugs and repeated loss of jobs,economic crisis,and the resultant early death of all family members and inability to secure a new job,loss of house and property,divorce and debt,dependance on others,the extended period of time spent in a rehabilitation center with more adverse drug effects all makes you feel that you are a victim of this health industry.You lose your confidence in doing anything.I am overqualified for the job that I’am seeking but it just isn’t being given to me.Every Tom,Dick and Harry is getting it.
And when you realize that your crime is that you are suffering from a health condition to which you did not contribute anything by means of bad lifestyle or drug abuse,you do not want to be in the company of anyone who are messing up with other people’s resources but who still don’t stand to lose anything.
All of this also results in increased social anxiety when you are out there in the open.
People still try to pull your strings by bullying you,or abusing you physically and sexually.e.g.frotteurism in the public transport buses or pulling you out of your seat.You can’t go out for a walk to improve your health because of gait problems resulting from the drugs as also musculoskeletal issues like sciatica and root/cord compression and grade 1 diastolic function resulting from psychotropic drug induced obesity and hypertension which can leave you breathless at times.This has also been the cause for some injuries.Very profuse sweating,again due to the drugs also forces you to stay indoors.Such profuse sweating is accompanied by heating up of the body so much that you feel you are residing in the Sahara desert and not in a tropical region.
To sum up,you feel you have been excommunicated from the society,very systematically.Lonlieness was imposed upon you.It was not something that I choose.
Psychiatric disabilities are assessed from time to time and accordingly they rate your percentage disability.But the board of doctors have immense power in denying you a disability and it cannot be easily verified because its not as tangible as a physical disability.There can be inter observer and intra observer bias,just like a BP or blood sugar reading is never uniform,although they may be still normal or abnormal depending upon the circumstance when it is being checked.White coat hypertension hypertension is one such example of pseudo-hypertension that is not there to be treated,but needs to be followed up.
A physically handicapped also can throw hay bales and do heavy work.Why certify him as disabled?Aren’t they taking part in para-olympics?So they can certainly do all the physical work that a normal individual does.Ask them to attend gymnasiums and they will become weight lifters.They will eventually not only throw hay bales on the truck,but probably even throw the truck onto the hay bales!!Cyclist Armstrong.He got real strong arms.I think I am referring to the handicapped….
Who is going to define what is meaningful and sensible work for a patient?Is going to be the bump ass politician or the intellectual who is out of touch with reality
Physically handicapped are only doing that quantum of work that they can.And those who are healthy in the conventional sense have the support of politicians,trade unions,organizations,ideologies,strikes and violences which helps them survive.As far as homicidal patients are concerned,the jails all around the world are full of criminals who are not psychiatric cases.Psychiatry patients has no takers,no support system,no scientific model,no good drugs,worse still even the family will forsake them.If they have an excuse for not doing something,use the strategy of the right person for the right job,i.e ergonomics.But then their behavior should become a source of concern for anyone,because that is what they will.Society will have to change for them because they are the majority.You got to give a special status to the patient because your drugs and theories are not helping him unlike the drugs for life style diseases.
Just imagine for a while,if the support system of the life style diseased patients are withdrawn,what would happen?They will go mad.It would be utter chaos.They are strong because of their union is strength proverb and not because these clowns have an iota of grey mater more than psychiatry patients.
A healthy individual is one who has physical,mental,social and economic health.It’s not the mere absence of a disease.The new generation of doctors are dumb fools cramming books but while handling cases they are zeros added up together.They don’t have a psychiatry curriculum.They can skip psychiatry and still become specialists and superspecilists.In India,once they even scrapped psychiatry from our MBBS curriculum saying that its a useless subject.This is how our health ministry is serving the psychiatry population which will only enhance the public perception that psychiatry is not a clinical discipline.These people are malingerers and should be harassed till they stop “malingering”.And that is the reason why atrocities committed against them are never investigated thoroughly.They are burnt alive,killed and hanged apart from the suicides.
I have been taking drugs for 15 years now,and I do not see much of a change when you take into account that it is 15 years.Apart from that a constellation of iatrogenic illness have emerged and you got to consume more drugs to stabilise them.Even when you are working better than others,they have a low threshold to kick you out of your job.
Despite all these years of treatment,I have only slipped down the social ladder and my family members perished as a result.Even if you are a workaholic,this illness and the drugs will put you to sleep or tire you off.But people will say,he is lazy.They have been brain washed to believe that the illness is not the culprit but the personality trait is responsible and therefore attack the patient and not the illness.If you cannot kill the illness then kill the patient is society’s attitude.
DSM 4 TR has a list of 9 stressors that needs to be mitigated and that is exactly what we are discussing.Why not tax those people who are not following a proper life style and eventually end up gulping the entire health budget.If the govt. wants and has the will it can raise the money for the psychiatrically disabled.It’s their right and not alms.Look at the difference in health resources allocated to the life style diseased patients and the psychiatry cases.Look at their quality of life.They should get increased number of paid absenteeism.Cut the insurance of people of people who are exploiting the health industry.Also identify those fake case sheets tailor made for such people for reimbursements.If psychiatry people are dying,let the patients from the life style disease also meet the same fate.Those who go for more than 2 deliveries,deny them any insurance or sops.Tax the third child heavily because he/she will turn out to be another parasite on the health budget.Tax heavily anything that is bad for a persons health and divert that fund towards psychiatry because in psychiatry there is no food or life style that causes psychiatric illness.
I have been on valproate for long and have gained more than 15 kg,developed alopecia,diabetes,hypertension.Then they substituted it with carbamazepine and immediately my hormone level dropped and I have to take testosterone every month and I also got a divorce immediately after that.
Do you think I can take valproate and CBZ to the court?Valproate and CBZ interaction is mentioned in the literature.
So why not opt for a drug based diagnoses.Since few drugs are managing so many hundreds of conditions that the DSM has pulled out of their hat.So-and-so drug responsive psychiatric condition.One drug can be used for multiple conditions,hence this argument.
We are increasingly getting information based society.In the international classification of diseases on mental health,there are more than 400 psychiatric diagnosis.Hair splitting diagnoses.But on the other hand we have only a handful of drugs for all these conditions.And they will try it using a trial and error basis.So we have stigmas of all these diagnoses and then medicines with serious side effects,except for the lucky few.
If the psychology theories are of no use in the practical sense,then we must not allow the techies to market such apps.It is certainly going to harm us unless it is in the hands of people with compassion.Others will use it and make guinea pigs of us.Anybody and everybody.
I don’t think,for eg.the technique of flooding and re-experiencing are good,unless it is done inside a counsellor’s office.But its dirty when used through an App,which is highly technical,without any human face to it.This can only amount to something like carrying out a psychological counselling in a public place.
What is desirable is to stick as many posters in public creating awareness about psychiatry.Small banners,big one’s,bill boards.They will remain static and the people wont be able to ignore it,because it will be staring at them.On a television screen or in papers and net,one can easily ignore it.
If the psychiatry theories are invalid,then these Apps are also invalid and should be banned.No Apps which makes the treatment painful,resenting,hurting,insulting should be allowed.They should not become proxy-psychiatrist or psychologists in the hands of toms-dicks and harry’s.Are they going to practice psychiatry?Is this how psychiatry is going to be practised?Information tech cannot replace anything and everything.People are having an utopian dreams about this tech,that it will become a panacea for everything.They are deluding themselves in believing so.
I have been sexually abused in the buses,people indulging in frotteurism.No use complaining.Nudging,elbowing,whistling into my ears,no servicing being done in my room,no protection form hostile people while on duty from the employers.The world is run by a majority,belonging to non-psychiatry people and they want more funds allocated to them.More hospitals,cheap drugs,more research,more incentives,no complications,more leave.Their greed knows no limit.
no govt officer would act against another.Even if the patient is hanged by another criminal,the final report would be that it was a suicide.People are only too willing to forget it,because most often even the family members desert such patients inside such hospitals and never turn back due to the economic burden that the society has posited upon them.No serious investigations are carried out.I think people are still living in the age of dinosaurs.
But atleast in the west,the people take to streets and protest.They are active online
and spreading the message of the false propaganda that is prevalent in psychiatry.
why do we then,sir have accident related and heart attack help line numbers?They can very well drive safely,eat a good diet exercise and keep away from accidents and heart attacks.Eat less sugar and salt and prevent metabolic syndromes and thereby a host of target organ damage.These people are also beggars of the medical industry asking for labels that are albeit decent,but they are the real and magnificient examples of people who are eating into the tax payers money and contributing very little to it.The cardiac,nephro,neuro,gastro industry is worth billions and billions.If somebody keeps insulting you day in and out,you will know what literal and poetic injury is all about.The so called patients are the most corrupt in our society.They make money by creating scams for their tomorrow.Why cant these people lead a healthy life,after all most of the diseases are life style based.Change your life style and ease the tax payers money.
To the author,Noel.The issue that is voiced in this news letter is no different here except for the fact that we do not have a social media that discusses psychiatry.Even the print media ignores psychiatry.psychiatric hospitals,rehab centers are all suspected centers which probably do not meet the recognition criteria and the fine imposed upon them is very nominal.That makes practicing psychiatry in a sub-standard fashion risk free.It will not attract de-recognition or demolition from the law of the land.Re-application procedure is very simple.They have to pay just a few rupees without taking any corrective measures.
There are risks involved in a trauma informed society.I don’t know how to put it.But the techies will come up with new technologies which will re-create psychiatric symptoms in those who don’t have it,or target someone repeatedly,or try to force it on just on anybody to increase the volume of sales of the drugs.They have already created different types of Apps models for different psychiatric conditions,which seems over simplified and coming right out of the psychiatrists manual or provided by the pharma companies.If the model of psychiatry is not acceptable to us and if we find it unscientific and invalid,then what is the point in having these Apps around us.The networking capacity of the non-psychiatry people are getting more stronger and cohesive which isolates the psychiatry people who are not inside the network amongst themselves.They do not have any defense system against their networking which is getting smarter with each passing day.
My sister committed suicide.She had a bone tumor also called as multiple osteochondroma.She lost her job,she was harassed by the bus conductors,bus passengers and some relatives before committing suicide.Most importantly we had relocated our residence to a state that is endemic to psychiatric suicide.One century back our saint who had visited a religious convention in California called swami Vivekananda had termed this state as a MENTAL ASSYLUM OF INDIA.People do not understand psychiatry and unless somebody took the initiative to teach them through awareness classes,poster campaigns,special events,television advertisements, the suggested information will not reach out to the people.I guess its happening in the west,but our people are aping the bad side of western culture and ignoring their good qualities.If I type epilepsy and psychiatry support groups in India in a search engine box,I will get zero response.Maybe one or two,very recently that too defunct.There is no active discussion going on and u cannot expect anything from them.
The staff inside the psychiatric hospitals are probably the most insensitive to the needs of the patients.Is it because of lack of information on psychiatry?Out here,no.Its because they do not have the money to take care of institutionalised patients and so they just knock them off by giving a joule shock or a high dose drug.Now in this condition,the patient won’t ask for anything and the staff won’t feel irritated and won’t have to attend upon them.But to do this they need an indication on record.An indication to give a joule shock or a heavy dose of a drug or to transfer him to a criminals cell.They do it by constantly harming and irritating him till he can tolerate it no more and expresses his dissent in an outburst or get violent.This is the modus-operandi as I have come to know.Very recently a law student was murdered by a govt mental health male nurses and other patients.His head was banged against the wall,till he died.Now reports says he got violent and in the scuffle he died.He had come to our place for spiritual solace and they sent him directly to the source of spiritualism so that he does not have to depend on any human entity for his spiritual aspirations.
After getting into a rehab center,they messed up with my previous medication and prescribed a drug contraindicated for my condition.It caused a drop in my testosterone level and now I have to take the injection regularly.These are iatrogenic disorders which psychiatrists create.They just replace a drug to show off their superiority over another psychiatrists prescription.For my Petit mal condition carbamazepine is contraindicated.Valproate is the right one.But it has side effects that is a problem but not as bad as CBZ.Lamotrigine can be very good but as expensive as gold.I kept losing my job because the employers would not allow time for the drug to take its effect.Before that there would be some problem mongers who would kick me out.A physically handicapped won’t have to face such problems.Advocating for such conditions is a better job,but it has no takers here.I am on the look for it.But it requires some formal training which I don’t have.
who does not belong to a special group,dear Itay? Children,women.old men,patients from different specialities,LGBT,politicians,leaders,workers,teachers,students etc,etc.They all have their own groups and unions.Do the psychiatry patients have a special group,a leader,a politician in the ministry?Call it special or otherwise,just highlight our problems and ask of them to rectify them.Its about getting united and getting our rights.The outsiders are only exploiting us.If you were a patient who is on a sedative drug and if you do not get a seat in a bus and you see other healthy and fat h#gs enjoying a ride u would like to do what I did.Asked in a forum to have seats reserved in public transport for us.If I had the time I would have met the transport minister also.I have done this before,but out here its a waste of time.This is India.A relic of the past.
A psychiatrist or a psychologist can be seen as a prototype of professionals who are very well informed of psychological traumas.But what have they been doing or not is well known to everyone.They are just thrusting more pills down your throat.If an entire society were to become as well informed as a psychiatrist,what good is it going to do?Are these psychiatrists championing for our rights?Sensitizing the people to our needs and handicap?They are doing nothing of these.tHE SOCIETY ALSO CANNOT BE RELIED UPON because the psychiatrist is just one amongst them.An agent and an alienator.These psychiatrists will only lead us to hell.What we need is a leader from patients who have survived the ordeal and still have the strength to lead others.Leaders from other section of the society are not going to do anything.Since we are not able to influence our place in their world,we don’t want any help from their side since its only going to be harmful.Only the survivors should lead us and guide us in every matters that concern us.Only they shall represent us in the govt.or any other places.The womens right,men’s right,blind man’s right,are all lead by an individual amongst them.A women’s right movement is not led by a man.A US president is elected from one of its own citizen and not from any other country.Or the psychiatry movement should be led by someone who has been a caregiver;sincere caregiver and compassionate.Or anybody who is genuinely trustworthy.We need a strong voice in every country.Not one,but many who will be there inside every establishment to ensure that no one is abused for being psychologically different.The politicians and trade unions of the non-psychiatry world are our enemies,because they will not accept psychiatry but as a nonsense to their by-laws and their ideology that their founder fathers had laid down in their charter of demands which will never have the word psychiatry mentioned in any unambiguous way.Their aim would be always to corner all the resources and rights for them and their kind of people.To keep us deprived of everything,because according to them we are not deserving of anything that they consider it as austerities.They will eat tonnes of salt and sugar and then eat away the insurance sector by falling sick.They will thus also become chronic absenteeism workers but these are all adjusted by their leaders.They will get a flu for one week and enjoy a leave for one whole month.They will manipulate the economy,budget,just about everything and it is this corruption of theirs,their by-laws which is denying us what is or was due fully ours.They will over spend and ignore or crush our genuine demands.The mental health policy budget year marked in our country goes to paying the salaries,perks,bonuses,festival purchases,amusements,foreign trips,spend thrifting etc for the staff working in the mental health sector.Nothing for the patients.The hospitals too are worthy of demolition and the laws governing them draconian.
The so called normal people are living a luxurious life because of their political clout,trade unions which support them.Without such supports they too would end up disbled in a different category.The entire establishment reflects and understands their needs and concern but not that of psychiatry.For reasons unknown to me,psychiatry has not been able to integrate with these establishments;not even inside the medical industry.A psychiatry patient compared to any other patient is not useful.He or she is considered to be a burden to the nations economy,public life,social events,peer group get togethers.He will not find employement,will not find accomodation,wont be able to vote,cannot travel or walk peacefully outside,cannot marry,won’t be able to enter any establishment with peace.Because he is an outsider and the moment the insiders recognizes it,they become stiff lipped,morose,counter-attacking,non-cooperative and will find himself being virtually thrown out.Every services that are needed by him are expensive given his purchasing powers.Medicines are far too costly.The worst medicines are cheap.Whenever a price control for medicines are on the anvil,psychiatric drugs are almost always ignored.Eventually he looses his fundamental right as the citizen of his country.He lives like a shadow.I have asked my country to extend subsidies to psychiatry in every area of life.
hOW CAN SOMEONE BE NOT INFORMED ABOUT A PERSON’S TRAUMA and be compassionate as well.Those who are leading a healthy and productive life can take care of their needs for compassion and help.The entire system and industry is made by them and for them.They run the show and manipulate it as and when it suits their convenience.Psychiatry is powerless.Which Government,politician,trade unions or celebrity stands up for them?None.Usually the compassion flows towards those who need it.Those who are traumatised and victims of the system.But today we are seeing that the care givers are marginalising psychiatry,which includes the govt and private sector and the NGO’s as well.If the entire society becomes compassionate then it cannot exclude those who have suffered psychological trauma and their experiences will remain informed in the minds of those who extend compassion.Every patient,every victim in our society is deserving of compassion,care,understanding,help etc,except psychiatry because they think they are problem makers,lazy,pretending to be sick and so should be ignored.
That is why mental health patients and epileptics are often beaten or burnt to death,in their attempt to drive away the demons from the patients body.These people are living in the stone age with a calcified cerebrum and a calcified heart that they have invented such superb technology for psychiatry and epilepsy.They will speak freely about their piles and prolapsed rectum but would find it very offensive to share issues in psychiatry.Its considered to be bad manners to speak about psychiatry.Even doctors are just as ill informed about psychiatry as are lay persons.On October 10th,world mental health day,I put up a poster on my window enumerating the DSM 4 TR criterias.The next day I found someone had written a comment in red ink which read as follows;” SO U R MAD,AREN’T YOU”.It was written in English.So this is how literate but uneducated people behave.Only an educated society can create a better living conditions for psychiatry.Being informed need not always translate into a supportive action.Information can be manipulated also and used against us.But information is necessary but it should be in proper and understanding hands as well.Our country had at one point of time even deleted psychiatry from our syllabus.I think I read it somewhere.Even today the psychiatry teaching at an undergraduate level is just about 2-weeks.And it is not considered very important.They are bad cases with poor prognosis,so why spend time on such a subject.Turn around the pages of Davidson’s and Harrison’s textbook of medicine,you will find that very few pages are devoted for psychiatry.Just a fraction of the total pages.That shows the apathy of our Medical schools towards psychaitry.And these people would be the on call recepients when a psychiatry patient shows up in the ED.
But our country wants to join hands and wants to become a member in every venture that the international communities are into.They want to go to mars and become diggers to get water,but they won’t do it here.They want to supply nuclear materials and have a voice in controlling non-proliferation,they want to go to moon.Why do they want to go to moon and mars?Why can’t they first and foremost take care of the last minority,i.e the psychiatry here on earth?.They treated my epilepsy with anti-psychotics without even taking an EEG.They will prepare their rocket for the moon-mission and end up inside saturn.The capitalist and communists here are no different.They are all anti-psychiatry.Epilepsy or mental health issues means the same to them.I dont understand why India’s spiritualism is not living upto its reputation.Has it been over glorified?I think so,because our Ayurveda describes mental health issues and treatment under the chapter of demoniac science.
The idea of a trauma-informed society is what we all want.But what is happening in America is no different here in India.We have just 3500 psychiatrists approximatley, for a population of over 2.5 billion.And out of these 3500 majority of them are working abroad.Its expenditure that I read some time back was just 0.06% of its Gross Domestic Production.There is just one psychiatrist for more than 3 lac population and 7% of Indians suffer from some or the other kind of Psychiatric disturbance.But still they will shift the blame on the patients.All the govt spending goes as salary for the staff.Where is the money then to create an awareness about psychiatry without which we cannot communicate the needs and helplessness of psychiatry?And without which a trauma-informed society in psychiatry won’t come into vogue.Our society is quite informed about stroke,kidney faiure,heart attacks and many other disorders.That is because the society and their leaders have taken an initiative to inform them and are spending heavily on it.But come October 10 or March 26,we do not find anybody running or walking for mental health or epilepsy.But our people are all the time,otherwise aping Americans in their dresses,jargons,body language,fashion etc.They do not have such a forum like MIA or other forums that are available on the net.
communists in our country i.e,India have never supported psychiatry nor those affected by it.That is why the mortality and morbidity rate is so high here.In Erawadi,26 patients chained inside a dargah were barbecued to death and it was considered as an accident.In insurance companies term,god’s act.I myself have spent some time inside a rehab center.It is a gutter,or call it a ghetto.The media is not reporting on mental health issues.File a public interest litigation in the court,no one bothers to look at it.Go and meet the ministers,write to the judge who is in charge of the special bench for psychiatry,no response.Such judges are supposed to be watch dogs for psychiatry,but they do not not even bark at our assailants,leave alone biting.I think countries who do not protect their psychiatry or neuropsychiatry patients should not be given any role to play in the international community.They should be isolated.At least it can be done with India.Thank u.
you had advised through the New Freedom Commission to improve the public mental health system.Has it been successful? It was in 2002 that you reported this to the US News and World report.You also favour herbs and natural remedies.Are you totally against pharmaceutical agents?
actually having a psychiatric diagnosis itself isolates the individual,because people do not care for your problem.Its not visible like a physical handicap.The individual gets isolated from all spheres of social activities,all rights taken away,tossed around without any apologies.
I was in an ER with a panic attack due to guillain barre syndrome.I was already depressed.Lying on a cot inside a crowded ER can be very distressing.And the GBS had already caused paresis of one half of the body.Its very scary and hellish when an acute medical emergency strikes you,the attendant psychiatric problem also pops out.They do not have any mechanism to handle such dual situations.Ear plugs can be good to mask the noise which can further compound the panic attack.Especially when you are alone.
Which drug is a mood stabilizer? Anti epileptic drugs usually.Psychiatrists usually add this to their prescription to prevent any anti-depressant poop out.The rationale is that antidepressants are activating agents and mood stabilizers does the opposite.A patient who is in depression and also has suicidal ideas,when he gets activated upon starting antidepressants,he will commit that act because the antidepressant action takes time to set in,before which his motor activities are stimulated to carry out the suicidal mission.
The psychiatrists have to come out with a patient-centric classification rather than a pharma centered classification of illness.And it should be devoid of labeling patients.
Is there anything wrong?If so where? The classification,the drugs,the practical difficulties in diagnosing using such a complicated classification,secondary medical illness which presents with psychiatric illnesses,compliance,consuming more SSRI’s can lead to extreme hyperactivity and reckless behaviour due to serotonin syndrome.
Bipolar spectrum extends from 1.4 to 6.o.0.25 is depression,0.5 is hypomania,mania,1,5 is hypomania without depression,2.5 is cyclothymic with depression,3.0 is depression with AD induced hypomania,3.5 is bipolar disorder due to substance abuse,4.0 is depression with hyperthymic temperament,5.0 is depression with mixed hypomania,6.0 is bipolar in the setting of dementia.
These psychiatrists are a confused lot trying to appease the govt and the pharma company.Theses drugs do not respect the classification.For ease of treatment they add a mood stabilizer along with an anti depressant.Trying to diagnose a bipolar from this spectrum is like searching for a needle in a hay-stack.More over the unipolar depression has also been included into the bipolar spectrum.Such a classification may benefit the pharma company,which treats LABELS as against PATIENTS.Genetic theory too,does not have any role in psychiatric disorders.They are all multifactorial causes.This genetic theory in psychiatry is a big witch hunting to dismantle the public health care system in psychiatry,by the pharma company.To do this they invent such theories.No genes have been found which encodes for any psychiatric illness.
Kindly check out the conflict of interests.
I have been an avid reader of JK and was a regular participant at the JK center and listening to his recorded tapes.I started reading JK quite early in life because I had my questions raised there by JK which usually are not considered
” practical” by our vast majority or the hoi-poloi.His debates with Aldous Huxley was worth reading although somewhere I would lose track of what he is actually trying to communicate.But he is worth a trial about his investigations into human mental faculties like attention,memory,past,living in the present,fear,the limitations of knowledge,meditation,society,love,
relationships,sex,desire,ending of time,freedom from the known,beauty,death,dying every moment,dying to your desires,dying to your past,not to project the image of what you want to be as against paying attention to what you are….etc.He was asking us to indulge in thought based experiments on ourselves in order to realize that the knower and the known are one.The observer and observed are one.He was very critical about the technological monsters that we have mass created all around.
What about the bureaucrats? Haven’t they hijacked the funds? Otherwise how come there is still a denial of mental health issues?
I am wondering why Dr Daniel Fisher an eminent psychiatrist who has recovered,not cured in his own words,is not active on MIA? He has a unique combination of therapy comprising of emotional CPR,diet therapy,interpersonal sharing of stressors,narrating their experiences and a community oriented approach towards psychiatry so that they don’t feel left out of the society.So he gives a great deal of importance to talking out the concerns and most importantly giving hope to the patients.Hope he says is the single most important factor in recovery.He has been part of Senior George W Bush’s task formed for psychiatry and in the old edition of Kaplan and Saddock textbook of psychiatry that I have,his name finds a mention.He was one of the 16 members of the year long new freedom commission on mental health announced in 2002.He was the director of the National empowerment center in Lawrence,in Massachusetts.He has mentioned in the first volume of Kaplan and saddock 8th edition that there is little evidence for a genetic or biochemical basis for severe mental illness.He advised the administration on improving the public mental health system.This he told the US news and world report.page 648 first volume 8th edition of Kaplan and Saddock textbook of psychiatry.chapter,sociopolitical trends in mental health care : the consumer/survivor movement and multiculturalism.
Society and psychiatry medicines gives 0% support to me as a patient but demands 100% effective and ethical work output from me as a practising doctor.
I am a practising MBBS doctor in india and I have been on various psychotropic drugs well over 15 years.I would surely vouch for Dr.Gotzsche’s claims of the ineffectiveness of these medicines from different classes.i have just gone slipping down the socioeconomic and professional ladder despite being fully compliant with the prescribed drugs.So what are we/I supposed to do? It’s become more of giving few medicines to an end-of-life patient.For symptom relief.A palliative therapy so to be more specific.
I wish Dr.Peter Gotzsche was equally famous and followed here in India.He has given us invaluable insights into how psychiatry and DSM modus operandi.He is one of the best watch dog that we have in the field of psychiatry.
Yes,we do have a very hard time fitting into a complex society which foes not offer any life-support system other than drugs.Drugs do help but it does not help in fixing the problems that life throws at us and the high social demands in the face of a Mental health issue which can be quite overwhelming.at times it’s just that ur psychiatrist behaved well with you that’s significant enough.
You exposed the lies and data manipulation of psychiatric clinical trials.It must be a genetic disorder on the part of the people who conducted this clinical trial to lie habitually like this. That was a great and monumental exposition.No other specialty patients are as victimized as psychiatry.patients who are born with genetically affected illness or affected later in life like sickle cell anemia,dwarfism,congenital hearing loss,downs syndrome are leading a near normal life.So it’s not so much about the gene debate.Its the lack of acceptability for this illness to exist where other people work and inhabit.Dr.Stephen Stahl’s memorable statement that DSM members evolved out of the genes and not the reverse way is worth mentioning.I myself an MBBS doctor has been suffering from depression and anxiety,so I got a lived experience about mental health in our Indian society.And how it has affected my job,relationships,peer support,housing,economics,legal non-support.I am of the strong opinion that multi axial system of diagnoses and means to resolve the 9 stressors mentioned in DSM 4 TR be given its due importance in our mental health bill.
Genetics or no genetics mental health disorders should get appropriate government and private fundings and support because many of the risk factors or the consequences of disabilities arising out of it are modifiable. Give them the support system mentioned in DSM 4 TR 9 stressors.Even VIP lifestyle diseases like hypertension cardiac ailments diabetes have a gene linked to them.If a taboo is created surrounding lifestyle diseases then their fate would be no different.They would be forced to be shut down in detention centers until they change their eating and sedentary habits.I would not like to agree that thinking and behaviors are linked to genes.Thinking and behaviors too are modified by the place you live and the era you live and the people who live amidst you.Their behavior and thinking pattern conditions yours.And over a period of decades of such ” contaminating ” people around you,it automates ones behavior.its just like what food stuff is,available in your area,only that will be consumed.Thinking too is like a food.Food for thought.The predominant political ideologies in your area or country will change your thinking and perception.role of genes upto the structural level of brain is comfortable enough.The debate on nurture and nature is ongoing.I believe thinking should alter the way your genes act.thats evolution.we do not as yet have a sound idea about mind brain consciousness interface.support system for mentally ill should always over ride the debate of genes or no genes.then this issue could spiral out to racism,invasion,suppression of genes,colonialism,political ideologies.we won’t get anywhere.
Politicians,their secretaries and psychiatrists,together are the ones who decides the fate of the psychiatry patients.Journalists too are involved if they do not publish accurate information about psychiatric conditions.They can very well mislead the people by printing that can only be considered myths.I have frequently come across articles which puts the blame on the patients,as if there is no problem with the chemical theories of psychiatry or the lack of a proper mental health care system.
Politicians are never concerned about providing psycho-social support to the patients.They have been somehow convinced by the psychiatrists and pharma lobby that drugs are all that is required.And these health ministers have not an iota of idea of what psychiatric conditions mean.They really are ignorant about what they are dealing with.
If a psychiatry patient is burnt by black magicians or at an illegal treatment center,killed or commits suicide,here in our country,neither the psychiatrist nor the health ministry is held responsible.The patient’s family does not get any compensation either,which is readily made available within seconds for other category of patients.Contrary to this if someone gets infected with a viral fever,the threat of the ruling party’s downfall looms large.Questions are posed through the media,facebook,twitter,newspapers as to why the govt was unable to contain this “self limiting”viral fever!Whether it is the leftist,rightist,center,forward,backward,all political parties are equally ignorant about psychiatry and do not want to do anything worthwhile for the patients.
That is the reason why India spends only 0.006% of it’s GDP for psychiatry.And most of this fund goes towards paying salaries and for other administrative related work.It is not meant to be spent on the patients.And whatever amount is left behind for the patients,the psychiatrists do not spend it for mental health activities because they do not have the will power or the fund gets misdirected towards some other sector.Finally at the end of the financial year that fund gets lapsed.It cannot be carried over to the next financial year.That’s how our bureaucracy works.
In our Indian culture-tradition-social-political setup,the entire burden of your illness and the complications arising out of it is shoved upon the patient.Neither the govt,the society or the medical profession will support or own you.
Contrary to that,a normal person will have multitude of support system from their political parties,trade onions,govt and society,banking system,housing system,loan and insurance etc.Those social incentives.Essentially the entire govt and private institution in India are providing their services only to life style diseased people and other “normals”.They are actually the most corrupt and the most irresponsible people who are carrying the nation backward to the stone age.Not the psychiatry patients.Because they are already thrown out of all social institutions.They are not wanted anywhere.They are not involved in our nation’s progression or regression.Most of them do not even have voting rights.Because they are not seen as SANE CITIZENS!And the criteria for a sane citizen is one who should be just be able to identify the symbol of a political party!Everything else will be taken care of the politician who suffers from Wernickes encephalopathy,speaking that which has no meaning.
So,I do not see anything that allows me to take pride in my diagnosis,from an Indian stand point of view.
The American patient’s view could be different because they have a better psychiatric health care system and accountability.Here, no one is accountable.The psychiatry guys can do anything and can get away with it.
Indian govt spends less than 0.006% of its GDP for psychiatry;not for psychiatry patients!Because all of the money goes to pay off the salaries to the workers in psychiatry and other establishment and recurring expenditures with nothing left for the patient’s treatment and welfare.They don’t even have the money to print posters to create awareness about psychiatry.Much of the amount gets lapsed because the psychiatrists do not use whatever little amount is given to them from the central or state govt.This only shows their lack of initiative and will power.Or, the money is diverted and the beneficiaries turns out to be the politicians,their loyals and other normal/life style diseased people.
This will only complicate issues for people who already have economic issues because the “normal”people will eat into their job opportunities,which they are already doing and also take away all the money that’s meant for the welfare of people who already have a psychiatry diagnosis,which is already happening.
The so called normal people are the real scamsters and criminals of the system and an irresponsible lot and you want to raise their wages for such “virtues”????
This newsletter is not meant for such people at all in the first place.You are talking about an hypothetical situation;imagining a bit too far and not seeing the immediate reality of psychiatry patients.
I would like to suggest that a percentage of the profit that the psychiatrists and the pharma industries are making should go towards the welfare of the psychiatry patients and their family.Other people are having their support system from their doctors,union leaders,ministers,political parties and of course the perks from their job,insurance,paid leave and the corruption they are prone to commit habitually.
In India psychiatry patients ought to have job reservations,but they are often thrown out of their jobs and there is no one to support them.They get very little or no loans when compared to other corrupt people who never repay it raising the country’s or the bank’s non-paying assets,NPA to several,several lakh crores of rupees.
Why not first discuss the minimum wages or higher minimum wages for people who are already suffering from mental health issues,work place discrimination and job insecurity and lack of leave before giving this advantage to people who have no mental health diagnosis as yet.They can get the necessary benefits as and when they have a psychiatric diagnosis.But certainly not in advance.
I have experienced low wages,workplace discrimination,lack of leave despite being a doctor.And this has led to not only relapse of my depressive illness but also frequent job loss which further fueled an economic crisis leading to death of my two family members.Not to speak of divorce and leading an isolated homeless life in lodges.And the psychiatrist is saying that “all is well” with people’s mental health.Continue taking more drugs and “all will be well for him”.That’s a pun!
“YOU ARE A USED CAR SALESMAN”…..Shouts Demi Moore at Tom Cruise in the film,A FEW GOOD MEN.
Physically disabled are living a very comfortable and luxurious lives.They consider physical disability as a genuine disability and psychiatric illness as some kind of nuisance or malingering.And nobody is willing to change this perceptual distortion of the society and psychiatrists alike.You know it’s very easy to practice psychiatry,because these patients can be manipulated by anyone,including the psychiatrists and no questions are asked.If they act smart,then he will get some dangerous drugs.Whether the treatment is bad or good can only be defined from the perspective of the psychiatrist.I went to the court to challenge this general apathy and callousness and filed a public interest litigation to change the way psychiatry is practising.But the courts and the democracy are all hand in gloves with their traditional believes about psychiatry.They don’t want to change the image of a patient who is tied with a chain or being given an ECT,or being lynched.
Well,I have seen psychiatrists hand over to us precisely the same.Shame,guilt,it,it’s all in my head,no questioning them,don’t ask for a better deal.They can even shout at you,criticize you.You lose faith in them.And when in a country where there are less than 3500 psychiatrists for 1,3 billion people,how do we get the treatment?They want only submissive patients.They are no different from street drug pedallars.Swallow these pills,and that’s all what you got to do do,when your life breaks down one after the other,despite taking the medicines.They will switch over to another class of drug,but won’t make any difference to our lives,but more side effects.Their effects are for short term and our lives are longer than that.It’s guess work that guides them to select a drug.Psychotherapy has to bridge the gap between the drugs and the patients.
If the efficacy of a drug is statistically significant but not clinically,that means we are becoming guniea pigs.They must be concluding this from post marketing survellience.So the statistician decides whether we got to swallow this bitter pill or not.And this kind of research in psychiatry has other problems too.You got to rely on what the patient says.How he describes his symptom resolution,whether it improved or not and to what extent.you cannot scan his brain to detect any improvement in his depression after having introduced the drug.In short it the response cannot be quantified.I have also heard that patients are enticed with money,to give a positive response to their drugs so that it can be marketed.And they must be surely having some subtle communication network to get this done.
Someday,I see chatbots taking over the job of a psychiatrist.We already have online consultations on paying an online fees.
I had been to an international conference on OCD,Some 500 kilometers from my house.One of the former HOD of the psychiatry department confirmed that there is no association between OCD and ASD when somebody posed this question.But later,during the break while I was going through the photocopies of the literature displayed outside,I found a reference in small print of an author having reported a case of OCD transforming into ASD.I called a Japanese delegate,who spoke,I guess on psychotherapy stuff to look at the my observation.But he was in a hurry to board his plane,but somehow I whisked him towards the display table and showed him the article.This HOD probably weighed more than 100 Kg,probably he could be on some psychotropes,if not due to any other causes of morbid obesity.I think once they become psychiatrist,after some years they start acting like pharmacists.They are only concerned about the drugs,its dosage,it’s mechanism of action and so on.They should be selling medicines inside their pharmacies.
If you have seen the movie,THE FUGITIVE,where Harrison Ford plays the lead role,who finds out in the end that the research company was using the same pathological specimen of the liver,but with thousands of different names,age,sex,address etcetra to prove some hypothesis and also to promote a drug to cure this liver disease.It could be horrible with psychiatry,because nobody is really aware about anything in the field of psychiatry.The only tool,psychiatry has is the subjective mind of the psychiatrists and several conflict of interests that involves the pharma companies,the govt’s budget allocation (which is almost nothing here)the interests of the pharma companies,the interests of the psychiatrists and their association.
Society is a bit too much aware of the difficulties faced by communicable diseases and lifestyle diseases and degenerative diseases.Why have they excluded us?They want primary,secondary,prevention,then tertiary level treatment.Then rehabilitation and compensation.The govt does not pay compensation to a suicide victim’s relatives.But such compensations are given to other patients if they suffer even from complications arising out of the disease.That is outright discrimination.
DSM 4 atleast found out 9 stressors which needs to be addressed.Social support,education,occupation,peer support,easy access to health care,legal support,economic impact of psychiatric illness,…and 2 more.But DSM 5 has removed it.Why?
In our country,we have reservation in jobs for persons with mental health illness.But most often they do not get this job.Someone else like the physically disabled gets it.Also if you want to get a disability certificate,you got to wait for 4 years.This is utter nonsense.Whom are these psychiatrists actually serving?
I have had many toxic bosses.They destroy not only your mental,physical,emotional and economic health but also eradicate your family members as if they were some harmful microbe.
Why are the cities being cleaned off plastics,solid and liquid waste?Why are there Euro norms for controlling air pollution?Why do you they want to keep their cities,air,water,food,environment clean?Why are they trying to eradicate germs,vectors and diseases?Why are they propagating healthy lifestyle attitudes?Why can’t they simply drug the people when they fall sick,instead of preventing it like they do unto the psychiatry patients?It will reap more profit.Surely,because the government and the pharma company have signed a memoranda of understanding,on who will be provided health and who will be victimized and made to suffer for no fault of theirs.
Its only to keep a c class of people healthy,comfortable and lead a secure and luxurious life.But what have they got to offer for psychiatry patients,other than these toxic drugs?
1. Now they have borrowed the term from the telecommunication industry namely,”SPECTRUM”.You got depression spectrum disorder,schizo-freniform spectrum disorder,mood disorder spectrum disorder,anxiety spectrum disorder,autism spectrum disorder…..Do they have a tie-up with the silicon valley engineers??We must be getting auctioned as to which spectrum bandwidth should be allocated to us!!
2. There is more to the medical jargon getting electronic and electrical so much so that biological ,social and the psychological side is being buried.You got the signal transduction cascade mechanism.Is this the railway signalling system where patients often commit suicide.Then they got the serotonin,dopamine accelerator system,braking system,clutch system.Again the railway engine model,although the clutch system may not be there.
3. They are not talking about the patient at all.
There appears to be more flaws:
1. They prescribe antipsychotics for differing conditions like depression,anxiety,bipolar,hiccoughs,unexplained vomiting,mania.How do they explain this?They will similarly prescribe antidepressants for depression,anxiety,peripheral neuropathy due to diabetes or pain syndromes.They seem to be telling us that the neurotransmitter projections are interconnected so for serotonin deficiency they will prescribe antipsychotics which will improve serotoninergic pathways.This is nothing but market place speculation.Trading during bullish and bearish trend.They got to sell the stock of the drugs from their ware houses,so create a fake hypothesis to convince you.They got no proof whatsoever.Let me make a blind guess.The medical representative informs the psychiatrists that so and so class of psychotropes are lying in their ware house and their expiry date is due.So make all the patients who eneter your OPD or ward swallow it.They will hand over a nonsense journal article to justify the use of the drug concerned.All these psychotropic drugs can be substituted interchangeably for any condition.It is the subjective mind of the psychiatrist that selects the drug in favor of the drug company.And not for the patient.Mood stabilizers are not being marketed as membrane stabilizers which is their primary action.They will market it as bipolar drug,antiepileptic drug,antipsychotic drug,diabetic analgesic drug etcetra.
2. How is it that there is a delay of nearly a month or so in resolving acute depression,whereas the motor symptoms resolve earlier?
If you criticize the psychiatrist,he will label you with another diagnosis or diagnoses from the DSM and also prescribe a drug,saying,”Take this pill and you will stop criticizing and harming the profits of the psychiatry industry which is a crime.And psychiatric patients with “criminal attitude” is dangerous to the society!!!”
In mental hospitals they deliberately harm and torture the patients to make them violent or behave abnormally,so that they can administer these dangerous drugs and ECT.This is how psychiatry industry is earning now.How different are they from the criminals inside the jails?
The DSM must go.Because for any given patient,the psychiatrist can label him with a dozen diagnoses,because they all look so similar.All these new diagnoses were created by adding or deleting some symptoms provided by the patients,which cannot be investigated.And then they will prescribe drugs from different class of psychotropic drugs and hand over to you a cocktail of drugs.But in the acute setting these drugs are useful,even without a diagnosis,I suppose.All they do is sedate which is a nonspecific way of treatment,employed by various specialities for various indications.
Psychotherapy,psychosocial support needs to come up in a big way,until psychiatry becomes more scientific.Currently they are nothing but a bundle of sophisticated verbal jargons.
Their biological and chemical model for psychiatric disturbances has not been validated at all.Had it been scientific in the real sense,these drugs would have allowed the patients to lead a normal life like people suffering from diabetes and hypertension.And aren’t they using the diabetic model to explain away psychiatric illness?The drugs in those class works because there is a concordance between the pathology of the disease and the drug action.In psychiatry they have not been able to prove any deficiency or excess of the neurotransmitters or the triamino-monoaminergic projections.When they cannot prove the rationality of using these toxic drugs,they confuse you with such phantasmagoric theories of neurotransmitter projections,their deficiency or excess,receptor level problem,signal transduction problem and what not.All these are attempts to make this speciality look scientific and a part of clinical medicine,which is but very very borderline.A borderline medical speciality whose practitioners should be should be sitting outside the hospital and seeing the patients.
True.Social animosity between psychiatry and other class of patients is also the reason why the entire healthcare budget allocation goes to life style diseased patients and almost nothing for psychiatry patients.This is discrimination,a sort of apartheid against psychiatry.Their intent is to throw us out of life.Because of such animosity we lose our property and job as well.Their hostility is very much evident.
But then whom should the patient approach to resolve such housing,economic and occupational problems,to name a few.I’am from India and I have approached social workers,NGO’s,ministers,even written to our prime minister.The latter only replied with a happy birthday card.In other specialities doctors are working hand in gloves with the representatives of common public like the local leaders and ministers.There is an hyper-conscious reaction to physical cleanliness,to avoid paper and plastic but nothing for psychiatry.Why are the ministers and local leaders and the psychiatry community running away from their responsibilities towards the psychiatry patients.This amounts to negligence.
No other illness isolates you from the society and from people with whom you related well.This illness takes away everything from you.It’s not the illness per se,but the lack of our social institutions to resolve the issues in psychiatry despite being clearly evident.Just imagine what would be the fate of patients with physical or life style based illness,if they got no doctors,no medicines,no preventive approach,no 5 star hospitals,no sophisticated surgical procedures,no insurance,no diet plan,no exercise plan,no expensive investigations,no medical tourism,no paid-leave,no work place support,no job reservation of jobs (handicapped people),no cutting edge research,no effective medicines,no subsidized medicines,no medicolegal support…..They too will become isolated and crippled like us,no doubt about it.
The attitude of people to ignore the needs of psychiatry patients is the cause for all of their problems including loneliness.The govt. does not have the will power to improve the situation of such patients.They are only interested the cardio,nephro,neuro,gen medicine,gastro,uro….sort of specialities.Nothing wrong in that,so long as the needs of psychiatry patients are also met with,on par with them.
My suggestion would be to invest money and work force in preventive and curative psychiatry,creating awareness amongst the general public about psychiatry,integrate psychiatry with other specialities since it requires a multidisciplinary approach and there should be a public health approach for psychiatry.
Psychiatry patients who are educated and well informed about their condition must canvas to upgrade the existing level of psychiatry services.Nobody else will do it because of conflict of interests.
Since psychiatry services are ignored and is practically non-existent to the fullest measure in our country,I think social rejection is the single most important factor in the etiology of loneliness.The private hospitals and the govt health workers including the psychiatrists working in psychiatry are responsible for this cause.Their population falls far below the required numbers.The health ministry is also not interested in it.The social rejection is almost global.It affects every sphere of life like occupation,housing and accomodation,economics,access to health care and legal system,education etc.Every imaginable social service is denied to us.The basic right of a citizen also is denied.If this was not the case,the other factors would not have become overwhelmingly important requiring professional level intervention.
Other factors mentioned in the article with which I could identify were lack of intimacy,lack of emotional relations,situational and cultural factors,social information processing issues,self blame,avoidant attachment and characteristics of early care givers
That should be great otherwise they will start you on some dangerous psychotropes.Psychosocial interventions should be there always because these drugs are not very efficient on their own.They won’t help you to survive in this world.
There is some truth in it.In my experience the stigma and the taboo of mental health,the sedative effects of the drugs and repeated loss of jobs,economic crisis,and the resultant early death of all family members and inability to secure a new job,loss of house and property,divorce and debt,dependance on others,the extended period of time spent in a rehabilitation center with more adverse drug effects all makes you feel that you are a victim of this health industry.You lose your confidence in doing anything.I am overqualified for the job that I’am seeking but it just isn’t being given to me.Every Tom,Dick and Harry is getting it.
And when you realize that your crime is that you are suffering from a health condition to which you did not contribute anything by means of bad lifestyle or drug abuse,you do not want to be in the company of anyone who are messing up with other people’s resources but who still don’t stand to lose anything.
All of this also results in increased social anxiety when you are out there in the open.
People still try to pull your strings by bullying you,or abusing you physically and sexually.e.g.frotteurism in the public transport buses or pulling you out of your seat.You can’t go out for a walk to improve your health because of gait problems resulting from the drugs as also musculoskeletal issues like sciatica and root/cord compression and grade 1 diastolic function resulting from psychotropic drug induced obesity and hypertension which can leave you breathless at times.This has also been the cause for some injuries.Very profuse sweating,again due to the drugs also forces you to stay indoors.Such profuse sweating is accompanied by heating up of the body so much that you feel you are residing in the Sahara desert and not in a tropical region.
To sum up,you feel you have been excommunicated from the society,very systematically.Lonlieness was imposed upon you.It was not something that I choose.
Psychiatric disabilities are assessed from time to time and accordingly they rate your percentage disability.But the board of doctors have immense power in denying you a disability and it cannot be easily verified because its not as tangible as a physical disability.There can be inter observer and intra observer bias,just like a BP or blood sugar reading is never uniform,although they may be still normal or abnormal depending upon the circumstance when it is being checked.White coat hypertension hypertension is one such example of pseudo-hypertension that is not there to be treated,but needs to be followed up.
A physically handicapped also can throw hay bales and do heavy work.Why certify him as disabled?Aren’t they taking part in para-olympics?So they can certainly do all the physical work that a normal individual does.Ask them to attend gymnasiums and they will become weight lifters.They will eventually not only throw hay bales on the truck,but probably even throw the truck onto the hay bales!!Cyclist Armstrong.He got real strong arms.I think I am referring to the handicapped….
Who is going to define what is meaningful and sensible work for a patient?Is going to be the bump ass politician or the intellectual who is out of touch with reality
Physically handicapped are only doing that quantum of work that they can.And those who are healthy in the conventional sense have the support of politicians,trade unions,organizations,ideologies,strikes and violences which helps them survive.As far as homicidal patients are concerned,the jails all around the world are full of criminals who are not psychiatric cases.Psychiatry patients has no takers,no support system,no scientific model,no good drugs,worse still even the family will forsake them.If they have an excuse for not doing something,use the strategy of the right person for the right job,i.e ergonomics.But then their behavior should become a source of concern for anyone,because that is what they will.Society will have to change for them because they are the majority.You got to give a special status to the patient because your drugs and theories are not helping him unlike the drugs for life style diseases.
Just imagine for a while,if the support system of the life style diseased patients are withdrawn,what would happen?They will go mad.It would be utter chaos.They are strong because of their union is strength proverb and not because these clowns have an iota of grey mater more than psychiatry patients.
A healthy individual is one who has physical,mental,social and economic health.It’s not the mere absence of a disease.The new generation of doctors are dumb fools cramming books but while handling cases they are zeros added up together.They don’t have a psychiatry curriculum.They can skip psychiatry and still become specialists and superspecilists.In India,once they even scrapped psychiatry from our MBBS curriculum saying that its a useless subject.This is how our health ministry is serving the psychiatry population which will only enhance the public perception that psychiatry is not a clinical discipline.These people are malingerers and should be harassed till they stop “malingering”.And that is the reason why atrocities committed against them are never investigated thoroughly.They are burnt alive,killed and hanged apart from the suicides.
I have been taking drugs for 15 years now,and I do not see much of a change when you take into account that it is 15 years.Apart from that a constellation of iatrogenic illness have emerged and you got to consume more drugs to stabilise them.Even when you are working better than others,they have a low threshold to kick you out of your job.
Despite all these years of treatment,I have only slipped down the social ladder and my family members perished as a result.Even if you are a workaholic,this illness and the drugs will put you to sleep or tire you off.But people will say,he is lazy.They have been brain washed to believe that the illness is not the culprit but the personality trait is responsible and therefore attack the patient and not the illness.If you cannot kill the illness then kill the patient is society’s attitude.
DSM 4 TR has a list of 9 stressors that needs to be mitigated and that is exactly what we are discussing.Why not tax those people who are not following a proper life style and eventually end up gulping the entire health budget.If the govt. wants and has the will it can raise the money for the psychiatrically disabled.It’s their right and not alms.Look at the difference in health resources allocated to the life style diseased patients and the psychiatry cases.Look at their quality of life.They should get increased number of paid absenteeism.Cut the insurance of people of people who are exploiting the health industry.Also identify those fake case sheets tailor made for such people for reimbursements.If psychiatry people are dying,let the patients from the life style disease also meet the same fate.Those who go for more than 2 deliveries,deny them any insurance or sops.Tax the third child heavily because he/she will turn out to be another parasite on the health budget.Tax heavily anything that is bad for a persons health and divert that fund towards psychiatry because in psychiatry there is no food or life style that causes psychiatric illness.
I have been on valproate for long and have gained more than 15 kg,developed alopecia,diabetes,hypertension.Then they substituted it with carbamazepine and immediately my hormone level dropped and I have to take testosterone every month and I also got a divorce immediately after that.
Do you think I can take valproate and CBZ to the court?Valproate and CBZ interaction is mentioned in the literature.
So why not opt for a drug based diagnoses.Since few drugs are managing so many hundreds of conditions that the DSM has pulled out of their hat.So-and-so drug responsive psychiatric condition.One drug can be used for multiple conditions,hence this argument.
We are increasingly getting information based society.In the international classification of diseases on mental health,there are more than 400 psychiatric diagnosis.Hair splitting diagnoses.But on the other hand we have only a handful of drugs for all these conditions.And they will try it using a trial and error basis.So we have stigmas of all these diagnoses and then medicines with serious side effects,except for the lucky few.
If the psychology theories are of no use in the practical sense,then we must not allow the techies to market such apps.It is certainly going to harm us unless it is in the hands of people with compassion.Others will use it and make guinea pigs of us.Anybody and everybody.
I don’t think,for eg.the technique of flooding and re-experiencing are good,unless it is done inside a counsellor’s office.But its dirty when used through an App,which is highly technical,without any human face to it.This can only amount to something like carrying out a psychological counselling in a public place.
What is desirable is to stick as many posters in public creating awareness about psychiatry.Small banners,big one’s,bill boards.They will remain static and the people wont be able to ignore it,because it will be staring at them.On a television screen or in papers and net,one can easily ignore it.
If the psychiatry theories are invalid,then these Apps are also invalid and should be banned.No Apps which makes the treatment painful,resenting,hurting,insulting should be allowed.They should not become proxy-psychiatrist or psychologists in the hands of toms-dicks and harry’s.Are they going to practice psychiatry?Is this how psychiatry is going to be practised?Information tech cannot replace anything and everything.People are having an utopian dreams about this tech,that it will become a panacea for everything.They are deluding themselves in believing so.
I have been sexually abused in the buses,people indulging in frotteurism.No use complaining.Nudging,elbowing,whistling into my ears,no servicing being done in my room,no protection form hostile people while on duty from the employers.The world is run by a majority,belonging to non-psychiatry people and they want more funds allocated to them.More hospitals,cheap drugs,more research,more incentives,no complications,more leave.Their greed knows no limit.
no govt officer would act against another.Even if the patient is hanged by another criminal,the final report would be that it was a suicide.People are only too willing to forget it,because most often even the family members desert such patients inside such hospitals and never turn back due to the economic burden that the society has posited upon them.No serious investigations are carried out.I think people are still living in the age of dinosaurs.
But atleast in the west,the people take to streets and protest.They are active online
and spreading the message of the false propaganda that is prevalent in psychiatry.
why do we then,sir have accident related and heart attack help line numbers?They can very well drive safely,eat a good diet exercise and keep away from accidents and heart attacks.Eat less sugar and salt and prevent metabolic syndromes and thereby a host of target organ damage.These people are also beggars of the medical industry asking for labels that are albeit decent,but they are the real and magnificient examples of people who are eating into the tax payers money and contributing very little to it.The cardiac,nephro,neuro,gastro industry is worth billions and billions.If somebody keeps insulting you day in and out,you will know what literal and poetic injury is all about.The so called patients are the most corrupt in our society.They make money by creating scams for their tomorrow.Why cant these people lead a healthy life,after all most of the diseases are life style based.Change your life style and ease the tax payers money.
To the author,Noel.The issue that is voiced in this news letter is no different here except for the fact that we do not have a social media that discusses psychiatry.Even the print media ignores psychiatry.psychiatric hospitals,rehab centers are all suspected centers which probably do not meet the recognition criteria and the fine imposed upon them is very nominal.That makes practicing psychiatry in a sub-standard fashion risk free.It will not attract de-recognition or demolition from the law of the land.Re-application procedure is very simple.They have to pay just a few rupees without taking any corrective measures.
There are risks involved in a trauma informed society.I don’t know how to put it.But the techies will come up with new technologies which will re-create psychiatric symptoms in those who don’t have it,or target someone repeatedly,or try to force it on just on anybody to increase the volume of sales of the drugs.They have already created different types of Apps models for different psychiatric conditions,which seems over simplified and coming right out of the psychiatrists manual or provided by the pharma companies.If the model of psychiatry is not acceptable to us and if we find it unscientific and invalid,then what is the point in having these Apps around us.The networking capacity of the non-psychiatry people are getting more stronger and cohesive which isolates the psychiatry people who are not inside the network amongst themselves.They do not have any defense system against their networking which is getting smarter with each passing day.
My sister committed suicide.She had a bone tumor also called as multiple osteochondroma.She lost her job,she was harassed by the bus conductors,bus passengers and some relatives before committing suicide.Most importantly we had relocated our residence to a state that is endemic to psychiatric suicide.One century back our saint who had visited a religious convention in California called swami Vivekananda had termed this state as a MENTAL ASSYLUM OF INDIA.People do not understand psychiatry and unless somebody took the initiative to teach them through awareness classes,poster campaigns,special events,television advertisements, the suggested information will not reach out to the people.I guess its happening in the west,but our people are aping the bad side of western culture and ignoring their good qualities.If I type epilepsy and psychiatry support groups in India in a search engine box,I will get zero response.Maybe one or two,very recently that too defunct.There is no active discussion going on and u cannot expect anything from them.
The staff inside the psychiatric hospitals are probably the most insensitive to the needs of the patients.Is it because of lack of information on psychiatry?Out here,no.Its because they do not have the money to take care of institutionalised patients and so they just knock them off by giving a joule shock or a high dose drug.Now in this condition,the patient won’t ask for anything and the staff won’t feel irritated and won’t have to attend upon them.But to do this they need an indication on record.An indication to give a joule shock or a heavy dose of a drug or to transfer him to a criminals cell.They do it by constantly harming and irritating him till he can tolerate it no more and expresses his dissent in an outburst or get violent.This is the modus-operandi as I have come to know.Very recently a law student was murdered by a govt mental health male nurses and other patients.His head was banged against the wall,till he died.Now reports says he got violent and in the scuffle he died.He had come to our place for spiritual solace and they sent him directly to the source of spiritualism so that he does not have to depend on any human entity for his spiritual aspirations.
After getting into a rehab center,they messed up with my previous medication and prescribed a drug contraindicated for my condition.It caused a drop in my testosterone level and now I have to take the injection regularly.These are iatrogenic disorders which psychiatrists create.They just replace a drug to show off their superiority over another psychiatrists prescription.For my Petit mal condition carbamazepine is contraindicated.Valproate is the right one.But it has side effects that is a problem but not as bad as CBZ.Lamotrigine can be very good but as expensive as gold.I kept losing my job because the employers would not allow time for the drug to take its effect.Before that there would be some problem mongers who would kick me out.A physically handicapped won’t have to face such problems.Advocating for such conditions is a better job,but it has no takers here.I am on the look for it.But it requires some formal training which I don’t have.
who does not belong to a special group,dear Itay? Children,women.old men,patients from different specialities,LGBT,politicians,leaders,workers,teachers,students etc,etc.They all have their own groups and unions.Do the psychiatry patients have a special group,a leader,a politician in the ministry?Call it special or otherwise,just highlight our problems and ask of them to rectify them.Its about getting united and getting our rights.The outsiders are only exploiting us.If you were a patient who is on a sedative drug and if you do not get a seat in a bus and you see other healthy and fat h#gs enjoying a ride u would like to do what I did.Asked in a forum to have seats reserved in public transport for us.If I had the time I would have met the transport minister also.I have done this before,but out here its a waste of time.This is India.A relic of the past.
A psychiatrist or a psychologist can be seen as a prototype of professionals who are very well informed of psychological traumas.But what have they been doing or not is well known to everyone.They are just thrusting more pills down your throat.If an entire society were to become as well informed as a psychiatrist,what good is it going to do?Are these psychiatrists championing for our rights?Sensitizing the people to our needs and handicap?They are doing nothing of these.tHE SOCIETY ALSO CANNOT BE RELIED UPON because the psychiatrist is just one amongst them.An agent and an alienator.These psychiatrists will only lead us to hell.What we need is a leader from patients who have survived the ordeal and still have the strength to lead others.Leaders from other section of the society are not going to do anything.Since we are not able to influence our place in their world,we don’t want any help from their side since its only going to be harmful.Only the survivors should lead us and guide us in every matters that concern us.Only they shall represent us in the govt.or any other places.The womens right,men’s right,blind man’s right,are all lead by an individual amongst them.A women’s right movement is not led by a man.A US president is elected from one of its own citizen and not from any other country.Or the psychiatry movement should be led by someone who has been a caregiver;sincere caregiver and compassionate.Or anybody who is genuinely trustworthy.We need a strong voice in every country.Not one,but many who will be there inside every establishment to ensure that no one is abused for being psychologically different.The politicians and trade unions of the non-psychiatry world are our enemies,because they will not accept psychiatry but as a nonsense to their by-laws and their ideology that their founder fathers had laid down in their charter of demands which will never have the word psychiatry mentioned in any unambiguous way.Their aim would be always to corner all the resources and rights for them and their kind of people.To keep us deprived of everything,because according to them we are not deserving of anything that they consider it as austerities.They will eat tonnes of salt and sugar and then eat away the insurance sector by falling sick.They will thus also become chronic absenteeism workers but these are all adjusted by their leaders.They will get a flu for one week and enjoy a leave for one whole month.They will manipulate the economy,budget,just about everything and it is this corruption of theirs,their by-laws which is denying us what is or was due fully ours.They will over spend and ignore or crush our genuine demands.The mental health policy budget year marked in our country goes to paying the salaries,perks,bonuses,festival purchases,amusements,foreign trips,spend thrifting etc for the staff working in the mental health sector.Nothing for the patients.The hospitals too are worthy of demolition and the laws governing them draconian.
The so called normal people are living a luxurious life because of their political clout,trade unions which support them.Without such supports they too would end up disbled in a different category.The entire establishment reflects and understands their needs and concern but not that of psychiatry.For reasons unknown to me,psychiatry has not been able to integrate with these establishments;not even inside the medical industry.A psychiatry patient compared to any other patient is not useful.He or she is considered to be a burden to the nations economy,public life,social events,peer group get togethers.He will not find employement,will not find accomodation,wont be able to vote,cannot travel or walk peacefully outside,cannot marry,won’t be able to enter any establishment with peace.Because he is an outsider and the moment the insiders recognizes it,they become stiff lipped,morose,counter-attacking,non-cooperative and will find himself being virtually thrown out.Every services that are needed by him are expensive given his purchasing powers.Medicines are far too costly.The worst medicines are cheap.Whenever a price control for medicines are on the anvil,psychiatric drugs are almost always ignored.Eventually he looses his fundamental right as the citizen of his country.He lives like a shadow.I have asked my country to extend subsidies to psychiatry in every area of life.
hOW CAN SOMEONE BE NOT INFORMED ABOUT A PERSON’S TRAUMA and be compassionate as well.Those who are leading a healthy and productive life can take care of their needs for compassion and help.The entire system and industry is made by them and for them.They run the show and manipulate it as and when it suits their convenience.Psychiatry is powerless.Which Government,politician,trade unions or celebrity stands up for them?None.Usually the compassion flows towards those who need it.Those who are traumatised and victims of the system.But today we are seeing that the care givers are marginalising psychiatry,which includes the govt and private sector and the NGO’s as well.If the entire society becomes compassionate then it cannot exclude those who have suffered psychological trauma and their experiences will remain informed in the minds of those who extend compassion.Every patient,every victim in our society is deserving of compassion,care,understanding,help etc,except psychiatry because they think they are problem makers,lazy,pretending to be sick and so should be ignored.
That is why mental health patients and epileptics are often beaten or burnt to death,in their attempt to drive away the demons from the patients body.These people are living in the stone age with a calcified cerebrum and a calcified heart that they have invented such superb technology for psychiatry and epilepsy.They will speak freely about their piles and prolapsed rectum but would find it very offensive to share issues in psychiatry.Its considered to be bad manners to speak about psychiatry.Even doctors are just as ill informed about psychiatry as are lay persons.On October 10th,world mental health day,I put up a poster on my window enumerating the DSM 4 TR criterias.The next day I found someone had written a comment in red ink which read as follows;” SO U R MAD,AREN’T YOU”.It was written in English.So this is how literate but uneducated people behave.Only an educated society can create a better living conditions for psychiatry.Being informed need not always translate into a supportive action.Information can be manipulated also and used against us.But information is necessary but it should be in proper and understanding hands as well.Our country had at one point of time even deleted psychiatry from our syllabus.I think I read it somewhere.Even today the psychiatry teaching at an undergraduate level is just about 2-weeks.And it is not considered very important.They are bad cases with poor prognosis,so why spend time on such a subject.Turn around the pages of Davidson’s and Harrison’s textbook of medicine,you will find that very few pages are devoted for psychiatry.Just a fraction of the total pages.That shows the apathy of our Medical schools towards psychaitry.And these people would be the on call recepients when a psychiatry patient shows up in the ED.
But our country wants to join hands and wants to become a member in every venture that the international communities are into.They want to go to mars and become diggers to get water,but they won’t do it here.They want to supply nuclear materials and have a voice in controlling non-proliferation,they want to go to moon.Why do they want to go to moon and mars?Why can’t they first and foremost take care of the last minority,i.e the psychiatry here on earth?.They treated my epilepsy with anti-psychotics without even taking an EEG.They will prepare their rocket for the moon-mission and end up inside saturn.The capitalist and communists here are no different.They are all anti-psychiatry.Epilepsy or mental health issues means the same to them.I dont understand why India’s spiritualism is not living upto its reputation.Has it been over glorified?I think so,because our Ayurveda describes mental health issues and treatment under the chapter of demoniac science.
The idea of a trauma-informed society is what we all want.But what is happening in America is no different here in India.We have just 3500 psychiatrists approximatley, for a population of over 2.5 billion.And out of these 3500 majority of them are working abroad.Its expenditure that I read some time back was just 0.06% of its Gross Domestic Production.There is just one psychiatrist for more than 3 lac population and 7% of Indians suffer from some or the other kind of Psychiatric disturbance.But still they will shift the blame on the patients.All the govt spending goes as salary for the staff.Where is the money then to create an awareness about psychiatry without which we cannot communicate the needs and helplessness of psychiatry?And without which a trauma-informed society in psychiatry won’t come into vogue.Our society is quite informed about stroke,kidney faiure,heart attacks and many other disorders.That is because the society and their leaders have taken an initiative to inform them and are spending heavily on it.But come October 10 or March 26,we do not find anybody running or walking for mental health or epilepsy.But our people are all the time,otherwise aping Americans in their dresses,jargons,body language,fashion etc.They do not have such a forum like MIA or other forums that are available on the net.
communists in our country i.e,India have never supported psychiatry nor those affected by it.That is why the mortality and morbidity rate is so high here.In Erawadi,26 patients chained inside a dargah were barbecued to death and it was considered as an accident.In insurance companies term,god’s act.I myself have spent some time inside a rehab center.It is a gutter,or call it a ghetto.The media is not reporting on mental health issues.File a public interest litigation in the court,no one bothers to look at it.Go and meet the ministers,write to the judge who is in charge of the special bench for psychiatry,no response.Such judges are supposed to be watch dogs for psychiatry,but they do not not even bark at our assailants,leave alone biting.I think countries who do not protect their psychiatry or neuropsychiatry patients should not be given any role to play in the international community.They should be isolated.At least it can be done with India.Thank u.
you had advised through the New Freedom Commission to improve the public mental health system.Has it been successful? It was in 2002 that you reported this to the US News and World report.You also favour herbs and natural remedies.Are you totally against pharmaceutical agents?
actually having a psychiatric diagnosis itself isolates the individual,because people do not care for your problem.Its not visible like a physical handicap.The individual gets isolated from all spheres of social activities,all rights taken away,tossed around without any apologies.
I was in an ER with a panic attack due to guillain barre syndrome.I was already depressed.Lying on a cot inside a crowded ER can be very distressing.And the GBS had already caused paresis of one half of the body.Its very scary and hellish when an acute medical emergency strikes you,the attendant psychiatric problem also pops out.They do not have any mechanism to handle such dual situations.Ear plugs can be good to mask the noise which can further compound the panic attack.Especially when you are alone.
Which drug is a mood stabilizer? Anti epileptic drugs usually.Psychiatrists usually add this to their prescription to prevent any anti-depressant poop out.The rationale is that antidepressants are activating agents and mood stabilizers does the opposite.A patient who is in depression and also has suicidal ideas,when he gets activated upon starting antidepressants,he will commit that act because the antidepressant action takes time to set in,before which his motor activities are stimulated to carry out the suicidal mission.
The psychiatrists have to come out with a patient-centric classification rather than a pharma centered classification of illness.And it should be devoid of labeling patients.
Is there anything wrong?If so where? The classification,the drugs,the practical difficulties in diagnosing using such a complicated classification,secondary medical illness which presents with psychiatric illnesses,compliance,consuming more SSRI’s can lead to extreme hyperactivity and reckless behaviour due to serotonin syndrome.
Bipolar spectrum extends from 1.4 to 6.o.0.25 is depression,0.5 is hypomania,mania,1,5 is hypomania without depression,2.5 is cyclothymic with depression,3.0 is depression with AD induced hypomania,3.5 is bipolar disorder due to substance abuse,4.0 is depression with hyperthymic temperament,5.0 is depression with mixed hypomania,6.0 is bipolar in the setting of dementia.
These psychiatrists are a confused lot trying to appease the govt and the pharma company.Theses drugs do not respect the classification.For ease of treatment they add a mood stabilizer along with an anti depressant.Trying to diagnose a bipolar from this spectrum is like searching for a needle in a hay-stack.More over the unipolar depression has also been included into the bipolar spectrum.Such a classification may benefit the pharma company,which treats LABELS as against PATIENTS.Genetic theory too,does not have any role in psychiatric disorders.They are all multifactorial causes.This genetic theory in psychiatry is a big witch hunting to dismantle the public health care system in psychiatry,by the pharma company.To do this they invent such theories.No genes have been found which encodes for any psychiatric illness.
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