That’s because the so-called psychiatric “diseases” are actually syndromes, collections of signs and symptoms that aren’t independent disease entities unto themselves, but that sometimes have identifiable causes that you won’t find by standard psychiatric means, but will find with proper investigation.
Psychedelic/hallucinogenic experiences should be part of psychiatric training, including being taken to the ER while tripping as a part thereof.
Well, the first problem is that “schizophrenia” is a diagnostic wastebasket, rather than a disease unto itself. It’s no surprise that magic sources haven’t been found, because the group being studied is corrupt.
Well, companies taking responsibility for their opioids won’t be happening soon. I’m afraid we’re going to see the Great Cannabis Persecution get back in gear, instead, likely under the pretext of stopping opioid use, a modern version of reefer being a steppingstone to narcotics addiction. When this fails (as it certainly will, being totally misdirected), comes the frenzied days of universal spying and suspension of the Bill of Rights, as the poorly conceived original efforts did nothing to curb the rate of addiction to opioids.
I won’t have anything to do with these guys. They’re sure to regard my taking B3 a sign of untreated serious mental illness and try to compel me to consume zombie drugs again. I had a brief encounter with them decades ago, when the VA was busy failing to identify my caffeine sensitivity, and never renewed my script.
The companies and their tame MD’s don’t discuss long-term stimulant treatment for a reason- patients start becoming strange on long-term stimulant therapy, a condition which only despised medical mavericks and non-medical outlaws like myself know how to successfully treat- and neither the mavericks nor I rely on drugs.
Well, you do have a bunch of dealers looking everywhere for new markets for selling their addictive products.
Shades of the Serbsky Institute.
This marks the beginning of an era where you don’t go to shrinks at all, if you find yourself beginning to feel weird. In big cities, you could now go to an SA meeting instead of the E-room. Someone there likely has an HOD test, if only the pocket version, giving you the opportunity to see just how weird you’re becoming. They’ll also know at least one trustworthy practitioner who doesn’t rely on zombie drugs as the core of treatment.
Fortunately, if you chanced to get the correct treatment (seldom to never at the hands of the trainee and his master), you’d never go back, with good reason. If trainee and master found out, you’d be even more heavily medicated- this time in a way trainee and master could witness- while your diagnostic statement pointed out you were completely delusional because you thought the “unacceptable” treatment was effective.
Maybe the medication induces nutrient deficiencies, the weight gain caused by the insufficient amounts of said nutrients in the individuals’ diets, so they eat more trying to get them. Remember, none of this needs conscious awareness of the situation by the individuals involved.
Alas, he didn’t seem to know many of us orthomolecular types, who don’t need to use psych drugs but do know how to use nutrients to properly manage extreme states. I hope he didn’t avoid us just because we take a medically oriented view of extreme states, because he didn’t realize our version of medical treatment is viewed in a very hostile manner by orthodox “mental health” professionals.
One of the headaches is that the suicide rate of “schizophrenics” is 20 times that of countries’ national suicide rates, a ratio certainly not helped by drug therapies. Orthomolecular treatments bring this ratio down to 1:1, but aren’t commonly seen, because they drive many pharma oriented psychiatrists into homicidal rages.
The APA’s wasting its time. With AG Sessions in charge and his “drug czar” a former apologist for Big Pharma, we’re probably about to see a no-holds-barred campaign against cannabis- less dangerous than dealing with the hard drug guys, while simultaneously providing opportunities for thousands of existence-justifying busts that make cops’ records look good. Since the AG is likely one of those 2d Amendment guys who want unlimited infantry firepower in civilian hands, the above strategy looks like the only one possible, as hard drug billionaires now have enough money to afford enough antitank weapons, heavy machine guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition to create dope houses surrounded by the 21st Century version of the Siegfried Line.
By definition, psychiatry isn’t even medicine- the notion of being able to treat diseases that correspond to no material origin, and only those, bears more resemblance to shamanism (minus scary masks, dances around the campfire and rattles) than medicine as we know it.
They’d have to arrange for the receptionist to do all the talking if they were chemically forced to tell the truth. the big trouble would come if the receptionist asked if the extra duties of doing all the communication with the shrink’s patients meant the receptionist was going to get a raise for doing the additional work.
These are guys who’ve never read the 13th Chapter of Sun Tzu, in which the expendable (death or dead) agent and his purpose are described. Given false information, the dead agent is set up to be caught and the spurious data forced out of him in order to deceive the enemy. Naturally, when the data proves false and disaster occurs, the enemy becomes enraged and executes the agent, thereby proving the title.
Maybe it would be better to simply use the name of the instigating entity, once you’ve teased it out of the general syndrome; e.g., vitamin resistant pellagra for those who find B3 effective in big doses, or post partum copper poisoning for “post partum depression” should the syndrome respond to B6 and zinc.
Uprising’s right. Psych patients seldom get nutritional screenings, and they’re likely to get fewer, because the dreaded orthomolecular shrinks do them regularly, which forces the orthodox to shun such wicked quackery by reflex.
To find out in advance who’s likely to freak out when stoned, I’d use the Hoffer-Osmond Diagnostic test, which was used 50+ years ago to screen alcoholics for whether they were appropriate for LSD treatments. Not a personality test, it’s used to establish the stability of one’s perceptions- perceptual instability is a contraindication for hallucinogenic drug use. I don’t know if the International Schiz. Foundation still has a cheap pocket patient copy of the test, which it did when it was the old Canadian Schiz. Foundation.
Maybe we’re seeing an example of prodromal senility in our leader trying to return to an imaginary past.
Because treatments that actually work on chronic patients (e.g., prolonged nutrient therapy, therapeutic fasting and substance challenges, food sensitivity and gluten avoidance) are from the realm of fantasy and humbug, according to pharmaceutically oriented shrinks.
Stephen.You’re sharper than you think. Being a dude who thinks only of himself, Fearless Leader’s certainly under pressure to want to run the country by fiat, getting rid of everyone and everything in government except a staff of toadies (you sure are a genius, Mr. Trump!) to do the dirty work and get regularly shipped off to Alaska when things go wrong (they botched the execution of our Fearless Leader’s Divinely Inspired ideas!).
The medical schools are doing neither their graduates, nor the graduates’ patients any good with this notion of only treating non-physical problems, considering how many physical problems have psychiatric consequences.
This might be because Bill had not only taken acid, himself, but was a buddy of both Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer, early pioneers in psychedelic therapy for alcoholism and mega niacin therapy for alcohol withdrawal and depression in recovering alcoholics.
If you look at ADHD as a syndrome with one or more of a number of causes, it won’t matter what psychiatric practice is, as long as GP’s with enough energy and investigative skill to study their cases in detail are available. Actually, I suspect GP’s are preferable to shrinks, being trained to deal with physical ailments (e.g., subclinical lead poisoning, nutrient deficiencies and dependencies, sugar addiction, etc.), that shrinks usually aren’t.
It takes about half an hour in advance to find out whether things will be turn out like your lady friend’s did, using a proper background interview and a Hoffer Osmond Diagnostic (HOD) test, used many years ago to screen Canadian alcoholics for LSD treatments. If you live in a big city, it would be a good idea, yourself, to find a practitioner who regularly uses Vitamin B3 in treating disperceptive states.
An example. Around 40 years ago, some young chap asked me about taking an HOD test because he was curious about LSD. I agreed, finding he had a very high score (the HOD is a quantitative test). I told him I didn’t think it a good idea because of his score. I can’t remember if I suggested ways to modify his experience. He took the acid, unmodified, whereupon he gobbled down a number of tabs and jumped out a window. I still see him at intervals, and he’s still awed because I told him the bad news in advance.
this isn’t as profound as self-knowledge, but it would be a good idea for mental health workers to have hallucinogenic experiences in order to grasp the kind of experiences their ill patients are having. The idea isn’t new; when the late Humphry Osmond was superintendent of Weyburn Hospital in Saskatchewan, he used to encourage the hospital’s employees to have an LSD experience for this reason.
The good doctor’s concepts may need some reviewing, though he presents an interesting idea. Perhaps he could review literature from the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, when many of the acid heads and speed freaks of those days became junkies after an initial period of stimulant and hallucinogen use. The “uppers” left them disperceptive (what DSM docs would call schizophrenic now) and feeling weird, which they tried to cure with smack (which reduces the intensity of distorted perceptions) with the usual result being a “jones” (as a deep addiction was known in those days).
Of course ADHD is just a description of a cluster of behaviors and not an independent entity unto itself, just like the other alleged “psychiatric diseases”. The real headache is that the alleged “treatment” covers up serious conditions that actually have real treatments, like heavy metal poisoning.
No- they found an existing drug and tried to use it off-label. It was already around as an anesthetic, the way PCP was.
He might consider niacinamide, as it has anticonvulsive and antipsychotic properties and goes to the same receptor sites as the benzos and isn’t addictive, unless you consider pellagra a form of drug withdrawal. You’d have to use gram (or more) doses, but if your patients were screened properly, their main danger would come from the wrath of psychiatrists that you weren’t using powerful drugs to cure a “nonexistent” addiction.
Is glutamine in quantity an antidote for ketamine intoxication? I have anecdotal evidence (having used this technique on several cases of PCP-induced incoherence) that large quantities of glutamine counteract PCP intoxication, PCP having the same mechanism of action as ketamine. Doses of glutamine were 1g and up for PCP.
This is an example of what happens when you don’t examine the perceptual status of your intakes early on, relying on shotgun prescription of antidepressants instead.
Ah, but there frequently are physical components to the depression syndrome. Alas, antidepressants have little to no role in dealing with them, as they can frequently involve physical malfunctioning in one form or another and therefore require real (not psychiatric as we know it) examination and testing to be unearthed, identified and properly treated.
Only that the antidepressants are of limited value, the sort of thing to expect if you used them shotgun style, without doing a proper background on your depressed individuals when you first saw them. That method will see the number of depressed rise, as their medications are only good for some of them (and you don’t know which ones) but definitely not all.
Well, the notion of depression as a syndrome instead of an illness unto itself seems to be a hard one to grasp for some of the psychologically sophisticated as well as for pharmaceutical salespeople. I hope you don’t mind if some of the subsets of the syndrome actually do have medical treatments that aren’t psychiatric. For example, zinc salts are likely to be an important therapeutic for those depressed by their lost of the senses of smell and taste.
Pretty arrogant of them, but it seems characteristic, as well, as most of the psychoanalytic literature I’ve read or seen has the same arrogant tone, as though being loathsome was the key to a healthy personality.
I suspect there would be less nonsense if you called depression a syndrome instead of a disease. Then you could medicalize all you wanted if you performed a real examination and treatment, instead of a simple “pop these” kind of regimen.
Of course it’s useless, because the origins of their “unipolar depressions” are likely multiple. Unipolar depression is just a descriptive term, like “fever,” which can have any number of causes and no universal treatment.
Since alleged mental illnesses are actually syndromes, I’d doubt that our pharmaceutically oriented mind scientists would find any consistent evidence of their subjects’ illnesses, because they’re mistakenly dealing with heterogeneous groups in their search for the magic curative pills that will leave their sponsors even more rich than they presently are.
Unfortunately, their approach also leads to ignoring real illnesses that seriously affect mental functioning, such as ignoring ADHD symptomology that could likely be induced by subclinical heavy metal poisoning, even though discovering and treating such things isn’t difficult (but likely won’t use any of the sponsor’s products).
Overemphasis on disease entities, yes. Underemphasis on “garden variety” diseases that affect mental functioning, yes.
No surprise that the treating shrinks are no help in patients’ efforts to discontinue drug regimens, since that old chestnut of psychiatric belief of the “flight into illness” that occurs when treatment is allegedly becoming successful, never died with the rest of psychoanalytic thought.
Think of the benzos as a band of gangsters and the banning of individual ones the equivalent of being on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list, that you usually don’t make until you become exceptionally notorious, even though you’re just one of the crowd of habitual criminals.
My favorite story of scientific obtuseness comes from the Incident of the Broad Street Pump, back in the 19th century, just before running water and Pasteur introducing the germ theory of disease proliferation.
London’s public health officer (yes, they had one, back then), noticed a concentration of cholera cases surrounding one of the public pumps that dotted the city in those days, so he used his authority to pull the pump handle, stirring great outrage in the city’s medical community. Not only was the pump handle put back on, but one of the medical community’s bigwigs pumped himself, and drank, a glass of water from it to prove “that good English water never hurt anyone,” whereupon he died of cholera within 24 hours. Around 20 years later, when the pump was dug up, it was discovered a nearby line in the sanitary sewer had cracked, and was leaking effluent into the ground water.
Gardening’s been a part of mental health treatment since the heyday of the Moral Treatment institutions of over 120 years ago.
One thing I seldom see in these pieces on the environment, is awareness of the biophysical environment, which can indeed be awfully bad for the impoverished, as dietary impoverishment and exposure to environmental toxins frequently can easily be essential elements of their social environment.
A truly fine drug. Abram Hoffer, who invariably tried to get his patients off psych drugs, also found it to be addictive, as well.
Shouldn’t some Pharma medico step up to say health care isn’t for patients, but for the financial health of care providers, particularly pharmaceutical providers?
Nice try, John, but I’m afraid Ciba’s a Dutch company. Its plant and offices are likely to be in the Netherlands, somewhere- the Dutch are likely to consider such acts to be acts of war.
Fiachra. So- it only took the psych powers that be 50 years to catch up to the late Theron Randolph MD, allergist, whose work with 2000 patients with allergy-related “mental” disorders is being tested, only 50 years after first being presented to the APA.
I’m still curious about the use of niacinamide in tapering; however, not so interested that I want to get addicted to benzos to try this on myself. Anyone come across any data? Remember, niacinamide, a form of B3.
Trump will have to get rid of this guy, because he makes too much sense, causing the Trumpies to abhor him.
Who, me? I’m not mentally ill. I have vitamin resistant pellagra
Find out if there are orthomolecular practitioners in the neighborhood so you can secretly refer people like the guy who wanted his meds cut back. Don’t admit to the 10 shrinks you’re doing it. Shake your head and act sympathetic if one of your colleagues complains about losing a patient who never came back.
You allegedly don’t flush if you use inositol nicotinate, aka non-flush niacin, nor do you usually flush with niacinamide.
The HOD test is unusual in that it’s quantitative. It was created by Hoffer and Osmond when Hoffer was Chief of Psychiatric Research in Saskatchewan and wanted a means for monitoring the progress (or lack thereof) in his research patients. It’s crude, but a descendent, the Experiential World Inventory, may be more statistically and philosophically correct.
I’m familiar with the Brain Bio Center, having read a number of the late Carl Pfeiffer’s articles. Did the Center suggest you all start on B6 and zinc (plus Mg.)?
Because it took him four years to memorize the answer he gave you
They frequently do start inside one’s head- the Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic test uses a sequence of, thoughts inside of head, hear thoughts like voice, thoughts outside head, voices about or to individual. Since you were hallucinatory from “toddlerhood”, Dr. Fox may not have had you take an initial one or use the test to monitor your progress. Time ill may also explain why you got sick after 6 months on B3. Since I wasn’t spectacularly ailing or greatly hallucinating, I only found out when I stopped taking it and began to space out again.
This is part of a greater social belief, now popular among Republicans, that personal acquisition of money and “stuff” is the only valuable human activity. I’m surprised that the GOP mavens haven’t tried to nullify the 13th Amendment, so budding tycoons could sell their children into slavery to get start-up capital for their fledgling businesses.
This torturing bit is hardly a brilliant concept, as it’s easily defeated by using “dead” agents, as Sun Tzu called them 2400 years ago. The dead agent is given false information and set up for capture by the enemy. When the information is revealed under torture, the enemy acts on it, and when he realizes he’s been deceived, he becomes enraged and executes the agent, hence the title.
I don’t know if I’d want to diagnose urban black children with ADHD at all, without doing a hair sample test for lead (or any urban children of any race at all, as far as that goes)
My friend also had vivid hallucinations, where she’d be transported to various places that frequently repeated themselves. She’d have indications something was going to happen a few seconds before the transport took place that she knew she had to immediately pull over if she were driving. I don’t know the details of her nutrient program, but the thyroid was a necessary addition- she’d relapse into hallucinating on B3 alone, but remains happy and very able with the thyroid.
I’m not sure, but it might be some kind of tryptophan cycle thing, as the same thing will happen to me if I take a lot of B6, but then I wasn’t taking zinc at the same time.
Trial and error and circumstance. Plus physician advice from an MD who wasn’t a shrink by training, but was interested in cerebral allergies and treating and identifying them through fasting and food testing.
That’s Abram Hoffer, Frank. You might have confused him with Albert Hofmann, the Swiss who discovered the properties of LSD. Curiously enough, Hoffer was also involved with LSD therapy for alcoholics back in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and was also friends with Bill W. of AA fame, who he successfully treated for depression with niacin.
The audios (as I call them) are just another form of hallucination and no more resistant to B3 than the others. The delusions come from trying to explain the perceptual changes one experiences. I have a d.i.d. friend who recovered around 25 years ago on a nutrient program + thyroid. She’s worked for years as a physical therapy assistant for decades- one alter, a sadistic female, appears at work, but she can channel the alter to get the PT patients working out without it taking over. But she had a therapist who knew orthomolecular treatment help her, while I found out merely by chance I was dysperceptive.
Were I you, I’d try to find an orthomolecular practitioner, the way Sara did. If you live in a big city, there may be a Schizophrenics Anonymous chapter there- they’ll know about their area practitioners.
Supplement- I take 9g/day, which I’ll never get from food. The basic dose for therapeutic use in schizophrenia syndrome is 3g/day, but I don’t know how much Sara takes, as I don’t live in Chicago and the amount one has to consume is individualized.
I’m intimately familiar with being on B3, having taken it for years, myself, but a number of the bloggers here aren’t. You might read some odd things from some of them, but I, for one, think you’re doing great, if your blog’s any indication.
As a fugitive from Mental Health, I can only agree with you.
At least the fish oil didn’t turn them into zombies.
Well, you’ve got to realize that psychiatrists aren’t necessarily the sharpest tacks in the box, when it comes to global comprehension. One look at their suicide rate tells you that, being just one step behind the dentists, who are plagued by mercury exposure from amalgam throughout their professional careers.
The point, when things are done right, psychotherapy is possible. Trying to grasp your family and social dynamics are just as difficult when your attention span is short, due to inability to concentrate, as it is when your frontal lobes are shut off by psych drugs.
Everything isn’t reduced to biochemistry. Biochemistry is used to increase awareness, rather than to decrease awareness to increase conformity.
Probably a good thing ECT wouldn’t work for that. Since it would be thought black magic to keep ECT patients on niacin to preserve their long term memories (something I bet a number of MIA contributors don’t know, either), you’d simply wind up with legions of partial amnesiacs if you did give the child soldiers ECT’s, while you had no idea what parts of their memories you erased.
That’s one of the reasons to reevaluate and reform hospital administrative culture. Our psychiatric culture would go into convulsions if you did one of the most elementary things- using hallucinogenic substances to give hospital staff members a taste of things as many patients experience them. The late Humphry Osmond, who was a noted hospital reformer while he was Superintendent of Weyburn Hospital, Saskatchewan, an institution a foundation investigator called one of the worst mental hospitals in the world (that he’d seen), encouraged his employees to take LSD for that very purpose as part of his program. He also renovated all the hospital “seclusion rooms” so they were places patients could use for refuges, instead of places staff used for punishment cells, among other things.
That’s one thing supplements are about. You can determine what ones are necessary with certain tests, such as hair samples for determining mineral levels.
Probably not if you have surroundings where most of the residents are getting better, though I’m not actually sure. When I worked at a residential drug treatment center, I had a couple of residents that I was secretly giving niacinamide. When I began my shift, they would both suddenly appear at the Dutch door of the RA office while I was reading the shift notes and wait for me to give them their B3. Both graduated from the center’s program, to the professional staff’s amazement. I wasn’t going to admit anything to the staff, because I’d certainly be canned and ineligible for unemployment if the learned therapists found out (one staff member did find out I’d recommended How to Live With Schizophrenia for reading to one of the individuals, leading me to be reprimanded by the Clinical Supervisor).
Well, if you need the morning coffee that badly, maybe it’s time for that morning B1, which can be used as part of a program to eliminate speed-type drugs from your diet, and have a decaf instead. You also need a staff ready to set examples instead of being (sorry) examples. Even though I was a washed-out officer candidate, I’m still acquainted with the basics of leadership. Unfortunately, I couldn’t quit smoking until I had an episode of bronchitis so bad that the smallest hit on a cigarette left me rolling on the floor, coughing what remained of my lungs out. Having been classically conditioned from smoking by this, I realized I was a hopeless nicotine junky and could never smoke another one without this happening again. That was 40 years ago. I wouldn’t recommend this approach to others.
More on zinc and “eyeballing” the likelihood of its existence in interviewees.
Major signs: lack of sense of taste and smell, white spots in fingernails, inability to taste (bitter) zinc sulfate in liquids.
Possible signs: achy knees, no dream recall (both may indicate possibility of accompanying B6 deficiency or dependency)
You’d also do well to read works of the late Carl Pfeiffer if you can find them. Zinc and Other Micronutrients is a good one if you can find it, or Mental and Elemental Nutrients. Both may be rare books by this time, being written 40+ years ago.
Maybe have them give hair samples during their pre-employment physicals, so you know beforehand.
It’s too bad the officer caste was aghast at the thought of reefer madness, with conditions now even worse than when I was disgracing the flag in our now second-longest war (but then they didn’t have piss testing in those days). Still, I must admit I was frequently nasty to a guy who had sleep apnea, now that I know what it is- back then, it was too much too be on something like an LP with a guy who snored like a buzz saw and always fell asleep during his turn on radio watch (snoring noisily once he did).
What’s probably necessary for institutions, is to force directors to be responsible for the conduct of their charges, sacking those who have increasing rates of violent incidents in their facilities. It wouldn’t hurt to put legal skids on corporate backscratching, like we see in the pharmaceutical industry today.
Unfortunately, the most difficult thing is to hang on, waiting for an entire generation of doctors and corporate executives to die, which is why usually 40 to 60 years have to elapse between the time medical discoveries occur and when they’re finally adopted- or a situation to erupt that old paradigms can’t handle (the reason penicillin came in less than 20 years after its discovery- World War II, with it’s millions of casualties in danger of dying from septicemia).
Elementary, Watson. There are no megabucks to be made in nutrients, no multi-billion dollar patents at stake, no personal and corporate fortunes to be easily made, no need to preserve antique beliefs about violence, good and evil that have provided combustible material for theologians, moralists, crusaders and dramatists for centuries.
Our beloved political leaders aren’t going to do anything sane. Their plan will doubtlessly devolve into something involving the old rubbish about cannabis consumption being the cause of the opioid epidemic, which they will solve by eliminating the potheads with savage punishments, like trying to get the dead horse to pull the buggy by whipping it into life and breaking out the chainsaws when it fails to rise. After all, our present drug “czar” was once a spokesman and apologist for opioid manufacturers, who would ruin his post-political career by cramping his clients’ style and actually doing something realistic about their antics.
Another useless psychiatric “disease” with an equally useless treatment. There are a number of garden variety sources of hyperactivity involving things like allergic reactions and food sensitivities, nutritional and glandular problems. Most physically serious is probably heavy metal poisoning (think of having a hyperactive child in Flint). Psych speed isn’t going to treat things like this.
On the subject of labels. They’re useful if the label implies courses of actions to take to stay healthy or sane, as do elements of the diabetic label (little or no sucrose, regular meals, exercise). Similar things apply for “schizophrenics”, like avoiding junk food, keeping regular hours, avoiding stimulants (including caffeine), alcohol and hallucinogens, exercising. It would also permit you, if you are negatively labeled, to tell the labelers (for example) how lucky they are to be able to shoot meth until they’re having philosophical discussions with their pets (particularly if they’re animals like goldfish).
If you were a real stinker, you could point out to such individuals that all evidence is anecdotal and the only difference is how the anecdotes are organized- into texts, charts and graphs, statistical analyses, etc.
I’d be careful with my challenges, there, Pat. In dueling protocol, the guy you challenge gets to pick the weapons- you might be unlucky enough to pick a kendo adept, who’d choose katanas (Japanese long swords) as the weapon.
When the practitioners aren’t psychiatrists by training or outlook. The only psychiatrist I ever talked to, who wasn’t a jerk, was an internist by training, who had become aware of Theron Randolph’s work with fasting therapy (Randolph was an allergist) and provocative food trials and regulated diets for alleged “mental” patients. He’d trained with Randolph, which involved his own fasting and provocative food testing, and was also familiar with orthomolecular medicine (he told me how to titer my B3 to the proper level).
This is because depression isn’t a viable illness unto itself, but a collection of signs and symptoms that has varying causes. The medico has to tease out the correct one(s), so that he/she can use the correct treatment (not musical drugs) from the beginning.
But the one advantage to referring “psychiatry” to neurologists is that neurologists have to be aware of and understand conditions that mimic true brain diseases, and also know how to treat them.
The skunk smokers are biological, but they can likely be treated with 1g+ doses of the amino acid L-glutamine, in an effort to restore the nervous system’s glutamate (a neurotransmitter) levels and hopefully, the individual’s awareness. You can’t do much psychotherapy with the delirious, but it’s dangerous to use drugs on someone under the influence of PCP, although old-time megavitamin therapy (1g of B3 TID+ 1g of C TID) might help. You’d likely also continue the glutamine as needed (1g+?)
Because they didn’t know the grief Linus Pauling took for publically adopting the notion that we’d function better if we maintained our ascorbate levels similar to those of animals, who, except for primates, guinea pigs and fruit bats, produce their own ascorbate internally at the rate of 3g to 1/2oz. per day, were they human-sized. He’d also chanced upon Hoffer and Osmond’s book, How to Live With Schizophrenia, which advocated using mega C as well as mega B3 in treating this syndrome, spending an entire night reading it all in one sitting.
As well as hostile publicity, he also had to debate various “experts”, until he’d humiliated enough of them to scare away any more wannabe debate “champs”.
Very helpful, particularly after stopping it and then starting again after the world became strange once more, as it had throughout my life. My buddies in a mutual assistance group, whose meetings I began to attend, did as well, though some were truly chronic- one had had 200 or so ECT at one time, while I once watched another take 5g of 500mg. niacin tablets with one slurp from a drinking fountain as he was returning from a paranoid episode (over time, which took a couple of months).
The episode also increased my interest in diet and “cerebral allergies”, which led me to be more thoughtful about my diet, although it took quite a while to completely give up caffeine.
Since I knew I’d have to help myself, I also began to subscribe to the Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry and its successor, the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, which I kept up until Abram Hoffer died and I chanced to be in financial difficulties.
I should actually tell you what a brilliant, incisive piece you wrote. I don’t need ascorbate to become too popular, lest its price go up excessively.
I wouldn’t be so smug about Linus Pauling if I were Aeon, but have the staff test his hypothesis on themselves over a period of months to years. It’s cheap, easily available and pretty harmless.
The above psychiatric antics make me glad I’m a fugitive from Mental Health, and encourage me to stay that way. Of course, the shrinks would regard my taking B3 as a sure sign of my mental incompetence and want to medicate me and/or put me on a course of ECT.
I know it’s late, but I’d better mention a paper of Richard Kunin’s a San Francisco MD), who wrote a Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry article about treating TD successfully with manganese salts and/or B3 around 30 years ago. This, no doubt, brought terror into the hearts of the orthodox, discussing not only drugless treatments, but also that dreaded word, “niacin”, as a component of such treatments. Kunin is apparently still alive, because he has a web site in which he promotes nutritional treatments of “mental” ailments, which I’m sure no psychiatrist in his right mind would dare scan.
That’s because the so-called psychiatric “diseases” are actually syndromes, collections of signs and symptoms that aren’t independent disease entities unto themselves, but that sometimes have identifiable causes that you won’t find by standard psychiatric means, but will find with proper investigation.
Psychedelic/hallucinogenic experiences should be part of psychiatric training, including being taken to the ER while tripping as a part thereof.
Well, the first problem is that “schizophrenia” is a diagnostic wastebasket, rather than a disease unto itself. It’s no surprise that magic sources haven’t been found, because the group being studied is corrupt.
Well, companies taking responsibility for their opioids won’t be happening soon. I’m afraid we’re going to see the Great Cannabis Persecution get back in gear, instead, likely under the pretext of stopping opioid use, a modern version of reefer being a steppingstone to narcotics addiction. When this fails (as it certainly will, being totally misdirected), comes the frenzied days of universal spying and suspension of the Bill of Rights, as the poorly conceived original efforts did nothing to curb the rate of addiction to opioids.
I won’t have anything to do with these guys. They’re sure to regard my taking B3 a sign of untreated serious mental illness and try to compel me to consume zombie drugs again. I had a brief encounter with them decades ago, when the VA was busy failing to identify my caffeine sensitivity, and never renewed my script.
The companies and their tame MD’s don’t discuss long-term stimulant treatment for a reason- patients start becoming strange on long-term stimulant therapy, a condition which only despised medical mavericks and non-medical outlaws like myself know how to successfully treat- and neither the mavericks nor I rely on drugs.
Well, you do have a bunch of dealers looking everywhere for new markets for selling their addictive products.
Shades of the Serbsky Institute.
This marks the beginning of an era where you don’t go to shrinks at all, if you find yourself beginning to feel weird. In big cities, you could now go to an SA meeting instead of the E-room. Someone there likely has an HOD test, if only the pocket version, giving you the opportunity to see just how weird you’re becoming. They’ll also know at least one trustworthy practitioner who doesn’t rely on zombie drugs as the core of treatment.
Fortunately, if you chanced to get the correct treatment (seldom to never at the hands of the trainee and his master), you’d never go back, with good reason. If trainee and master found out, you’d be even more heavily medicated- this time in a way trainee and master could witness- while your diagnostic statement pointed out you were completely delusional because you thought the “unacceptable” treatment was effective.
Maybe the medication induces nutrient deficiencies, the weight gain caused by the insufficient amounts of said nutrients in the individuals’ diets, so they eat more trying to get them. Remember, none of this needs conscious awareness of the situation by the individuals involved.
Alas, he didn’t seem to know many of us orthomolecular types, who don’t need to use psych drugs but do know how to use nutrients to properly manage extreme states. I hope he didn’t avoid us just because we take a medically oriented view of extreme states, because he didn’t realize our version of medical treatment is viewed in a very hostile manner by orthodox “mental health” professionals.
One of the headaches is that the suicide rate of “schizophrenics” is 20 times that of countries’ national suicide rates, a ratio certainly not helped by drug therapies. Orthomolecular treatments bring this ratio down to 1:1, but aren’t commonly seen, because they drive many pharma oriented psychiatrists into homicidal rages.
The APA’s wasting its time. With AG Sessions in charge and his “drug czar” a former apologist for Big Pharma, we’re probably about to see a no-holds-barred campaign against cannabis- less dangerous than dealing with the hard drug guys, while simultaneously providing opportunities for thousands of existence-justifying busts that make cops’ records look good. Since the AG is likely one of those 2d Amendment guys who want unlimited infantry firepower in civilian hands, the above strategy looks like the only one possible, as hard drug billionaires now have enough money to afford enough antitank weapons, heavy machine guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition to create dope houses surrounded by the 21st Century version of the Siegfried Line.
By definition, psychiatry isn’t even medicine- the notion of being able to treat diseases that correspond to no material origin, and only those, bears more resemblance to shamanism (minus scary masks, dances around the campfire and rattles) than medicine as we know it.
They’d have to arrange for the receptionist to do all the talking if they were chemically forced to tell the truth. the big trouble would come if the receptionist asked if the extra duties of doing all the communication with the shrink’s patients meant the receptionist was going to get a raise for doing the additional work.
These are guys who’ve never read the 13th Chapter of Sun Tzu, in which the expendable (death or dead) agent and his purpose are described. Given false information, the dead agent is set up to be caught and the spurious data forced out of him in order to deceive the enemy. Naturally, when the data proves false and disaster occurs, the enemy becomes enraged and executes the agent, thereby proving the title.
Maybe it would be better to simply use the name of the instigating entity, once you’ve teased it out of the general syndrome; e.g., vitamin resistant pellagra for those who find B3 effective in big doses, or post partum copper poisoning for “post partum depression” should the syndrome respond to B6 and zinc.
Uprising’s right. Psych patients seldom get nutritional screenings, and they’re likely to get fewer, because the dreaded orthomolecular shrinks do them regularly, which forces the orthodox to shun such wicked quackery by reflex.
To find out in advance who’s likely to freak out when stoned, I’d use the Hoffer-Osmond Diagnostic test, which was used 50+ years ago to screen alcoholics for whether they were appropriate for LSD treatments. Not a personality test, it’s used to establish the stability of one’s perceptions- perceptual instability is a contraindication for hallucinogenic drug use. I don’t know if the International Schiz. Foundation still has a cheap pocket patient copy of the test, which it did when it was the old Canadian Schiz. Foundation.
Maybe we’re seeing an example of prodromal senility in our leader trying to return to an imaginary past.
Because treatments that actually work on chronic patients (e.g., prolonged nutrient therapy, therapeutic fasting and substance challenges, food sensitivity and gluten avoidance) are from the realm of fantasy and humbug, according to pharmaceutically oriented shrinks.
Stephen.You’re sharper than you think. Being a dude who thinks only of himself, Fearless Leader’s certainly under pressure to want to run the country by fiat, getting rid of everyone and everything in government except a staff of toadies (you sure are a genius, Mr. Trump!) to do the dirty work and get regularly shipped off to Alaska when things go wrong (they botched the execution of our Fearless Leader’s Divinely Inspired ideas!).
The medical schools are doing neither their graduates, nor the graduates’ patients any good with this notion of only treating non-physical problems, considering how many physical problems have psychiatric consequences.
This might be because Bill had not only taken acid, himself, but was a buddy of both Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer, early pioneers in psychedelic therapy for alcoholism and mega niacin therapy for alcohol withdrawal and depression in recovering alcoholics.
If you look at ADHD as a syndrome with one or more of a number of causes, it won’t matter what psychiatric practice is, as long as GP’s with enough energy and investigative skill to study their cases in detail are available. Actually, I suspect GP’s are preferable to shrinks, being trained to deal with physical ailments (e.g., subclinical lead poisoning, nutrient deficiencies and dependencies, sugar addiction, etc.), that shrinks usually aren’t.
It takes about half an hour in advance to find out whether things will be turn out like your lady friend’s did, using a proper background interview and a Hoffer Osmond Diagnostic (HOD) test, used many years ago to screen Canadian alcoholics for LSD treatments. If you live in a big city, it would be a good idea, yourself, to find a practitioner who regularly uses Vitamin B3 in treating disperceptive states.
An example. Around 40 years ago, some young chap asked me about taking an HOD test because he was curious about LSD. I agreed, finding he had a very high score (the HOD is a quantitative test). I told him I didn’t think it a good idea because of his score. I can’t remember if I suggested ways to modify his experience. He took the acid, unmodified, whereupon he gobbled down a number of tabs and jumped out a window. I still see him at intervals, and he’s still awed because I told him the bad news in advance.
this isn’t as profound as self-knowledge, but it would be a good idea for mental health workers to have hallucinogenic experiences in order to grasp the kind of experiences their ill patients are having. The idea isn’t new; when the late Humphry Osmond was superintendent of Weyburn Hospital in Saskatchewan, he used to encourage the hospital’s employees to have an LSD experience for this reason.
The good doctor’s concepts may need some reviewing, though he presents an interesting idea. Perhaps he could review literature from the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, when many of the acid heads and speed freaks of those days became junkies after an initial period of stimulant and hallucinogen use. The “uppers” left them disperceptive (what DSM docs would call schizophrenic now) and feeling weird, which they tried to cure with smack (which reduces the intensity of distorted perceptions) with the usual result being a “jones” (as a deep addiction was known in those days).
Of course ADHD is just a description of a cluster of behaviors and not an independent entity unto itself, just like the other alleged “psychiatric diseases”. The real headache is that the alleged “treatment” covers up serious conditions that actually have real treatments, like heavy metal poisoning.
No- they found an existing drug and tried to use it off-label. It was already around as an anesthetic, the way PCP was.
He might consider niacinamide, as it has anticonvulsive and antipsychotic properties and goes to the same receptor sites as the benzos and isn’t addictive, unless you consider pellagra a form of drug withdrawal. You’d have to use gram (or more) doses, but if your patients were screened properly, their main danger would come from the wrath of psychiatrists that you weren’t using powerful drugs to cure a “nonexistent” addiction.
Is glutamine in quantity an antidote for ketamine intoxication? I have anecdotal evidence (having used this technique on several cases of PCP-induced incoherence) that large quantities of glutamine counteract PCP intoxication, PCP having the same mechanism of action as ketamine. Doses of glutamine were 1g and up for PCP.
This is an example of what happens when you don’t examine the perceptual status of your intakes early on, relying on shotgun prescription of antidepressants instead.
Ah, but there frequently are physical components to the depression syndrome. Alas, antidepressants have little to no role in dealing with them, as they can frequently involve physical malfunctioning in one form or another and therefore require real (not psychiatric as we know it) examination and testing to be unearthed, identified and properly treated.
Only that the antidepressants are of limited value, the sort of thing to expect if you used them shotgun style, without doing a proper background on your depressed individuals when you first saw them. That method will see the number of depressed rise, as their medications are only good for some of them (and you don’t know which ones) but definitely not all.
Well, the notion of depression as a syndrome instead of an illness unto itself seems to be a hard one to grasp for some of the psychologically sophisticated as well as for pharmaceutical salespeople. I hope you don’t mind if some of the subsets of the syndrome actually do have medical treatments that aren’t psychiatric. For example, zinc salts are likely to be an important therapeutic for those depressed by their lost of the senses of smell and taste.
Pretty arrogant of them, but it seems characteristic, as well, as most of the psychoanalytic literature I’ve read or seen has the same arrogant tone, as though being loathsome was the key to a healthy personality.
I suspect there would be less nonsense if you called depression a syndrome instead of a disease. Then you could medicalize all you wanted if you performed a real examination and treatment, instead of a simple “pop these” kind of regimen.
Of course it’s useless, because the origins of their “unipolar depressions” are likely multiple. Unipolar depression is just a descriptive term, like “fever,” which can have any number of causes and no universal treatment.
Since alleged mental illnesses are actually syndromes, I’d doubt that our pharmaceutically oriented mind scientists would find any consistent evidence of their subjects’ illnesses, because they’re mistakenly dealing with heterogeneous groups in their search for the magic curative pills that will leave their sponsors even more rich than they presently are.
Unfortunately, their approach also leads to ignoring real illnesses that seriously affect mental functioning, such as ignoring ADHD symptomology that could likely be induced by subclinical heavy metal poisoning, even though discovering and treating such things isn’t difficult (but likely won’t use any of the sponsor’s products).
Overemphasis on disease entities, yes. Underemphasis on “garden variety” diseases that affect mental functioning, yes.
No surprise that the treating shrinks are no help in patients’ efforts to discontinue drug regimens, since that old chestnut of psychiatric belief of the “flight into illness” that occurs when treatment is allegedly becoming successful, never died with the rest of psychoanalytic thought.
Think of the benzos as a band of gangsters and the banning of individual ones the equivalent of being on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list, that you usually don’t make until you become exceptionally notorious, even though you’re just one of the crowd of habitual criminals.
My favorite story of scientific obtuseness comes from the Incident of the Broad Street Pump, back in the 19th century, just before running water and Pasteur introducing the germ theory of disease proliferation.
London’s public health officer (yes, they had one, back then), noticed a concentration of cholera cases surrounding one of the public pumps that dotted the city in those days, so he used his authority to pull the pump handle, stirring great outrage in the city’s medical community. Not only was the pump handle put back on, but one of the medical community’s bigwigs pumped himself, and drank, a glass of water from it to prove “that good English water never hurt anyone,” whereupon he died of cholera within 24 hours. Around 20 years later, when the pump was dug up, it was discovered a nearby line in the sanitary sewer had cracked, and was leaking effluent into the ground water.
Gardening’s been a part of mental health treatment since the heyday of the Moral Treatment institutions of over 120 years ago.
One thing I seldom see in these pieces on the environment, is awareness of the biophysical environment, which can indeed be awfully bad for the impoverished, as dietary impoverishment and exposure to environmental toxins frequently can easily be essential elements of their social environment.
A truly fine drug. Abram Hoffer, who invariably tried to get his patients off psych drugs, also found it to be addictive, as well.
Shouldn’t some Pharma medico step up to say health care isn’t for patients, but for the financial health of care providers, particularly pharmaceutical providers?
Nice try, John, but I’m afraid Ciba’s a Dutch company. Its plant and offices are likely to be in the Netherlands, somewhere- the Dutch are likely to consider such acts to be acts of war.
Fiachra. So- it only took the psych powers that be 50 years to catch up to the late Theron Randolph MD, allergist, whose work with 2000 patients with allergy-related “mental” disorders is being tested, only 50 years after first being presented to the APA.
I’m still curious about the use of niacinamide in tapering; however, not so interested that I want to get addicted to benzos to try this on myself. Anyone come across any data? Remember, niacinamide, a form of B3.
Trump will have to get rid of this guy, because he makes too much sense, causing the Trumpies to abhor him.
Who, me? I’m not mentally ill. I have vitamin resistant pellagra
Find out if there are orthomolecular practitioners in the neighborhood so you can secretly refer people like the guy who wanted his meds cut back. Don’t admit to the 10 shrinks you’re doing it. Shake your head and act sympathetic if one of your colleagues complains about losing a patient who never came back.
You allegedly don’t flush if you use inositol nicotinate, aka non-flush niacin, nor do you usually flush with niacinamide.
The HOD test is unusual in that it’s quantitative. It was created by Hoffer and Osmond when Hoffer was Chief of Psychiatric Research in Saskatchewan and wanted a means for monitoring the progress (or lack thereof) in his research patients. It’s crude, but a descendent, the Experiential World Inventory, may be more statistically and philosophically correct.
I’m familiar with the Brain Bio Center, having read a number of the late Carl Pfeiffer’s articles. Did the Center suggest you all start on B6 and zinc (plus Mg.)?
Because it took him four years to memorize the answer he gave you
They frequently do start inside one’s head- the Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic test uses a sequence of, thoughts inside of head, hear thoughts like voice, thoughts outside head, voices about or to individual. Since you were hallucinatory from “toddlerhood”, Dr. Fox may not have had you take an initial one or use the test to monitor your progress. Time ill may also explain why you got sick after 6 months on B3. Since I wasn’t spectacularly ailing or greatly hallucinating, I only found out when I stopped taking it and began to space out again.
This is part of a greater social belief, now popular among Republicans, that personal acquisition of money and “stuff” is the only valuable human activity. I’m surprised that the GOP mavens haven’t tried to nullify the 13th Amendment, so budding tycoons could sell their children into slavery to get start-up capital for their fledgling businesses.
This torturing bit is hardly a brilliant concept, as it’s easily defeated by using “dead” agents, as Sun Tzu called them 2400 years ago. The dead agent is given false information and set up for capture by the enemy. When the information is revealed under torture, the enemy acts on it, and when he realizes he’s been deceived, he becomes enraged and executes the agent, hence the title.
I don’t know if I’d want to diagnose urban black children with ADHD at all, without doing a hair sample test for lead (or any urban children of any race at all, as far as that goes)
My friend also had vivid hallucinations, where she’d be transported to various places that frequently repeated themselves. She’d have indications something was going to happen a few seconds before the transport took place that she knew she had to immediately pull over if she were driving. I don’t know the details of her nutrient program, but the thyroid was a necessary addition- she’d relapse into hallucinating on B3 alone, but remains happy and very able with the thyroid.
I’m not sure, but it might be some kind of tryptophan cycle thing, as the same thing will happen to me if I take a lot of B6, but then I wasn’t taking zinc at the same time.
Trial and error and circumstance. Plus physician advice from an MD who wasn’t a shrink by training, but was interested in cerebral allergies and treating and identifying them through fasting and food testing.
That’s Abram Hoffer, Frank. You might have confused him with Albert Hofmann, the Swiss who discovered the properties of LSD. Curiously enough, Hoffer was also involved with LSD therapy for alcoholics back in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and was also friends with Bill W. of AA fame, who he successfully treated for depression with niacin.
The audios (as I call them) are just another form of hallucination and no more resistant to B3 than the others. The delusions come from trying to explain the perceptual changes one experiences. I have a d.i.d. friend who recovered around 25 years ago on a nutrient program + thyroid. She’s worked for years as a physical therapy assistant for decades- one alter, a sadistic female, appears at work, but she can channel the alter to get the PT patients working out without it taking over. But she had a therapist who knew orthomolecular treatment help her, while I found out merely by chance I was dysperceptive.
Were I you, I’d try to find an orthomolecular practitioner, the way Sara did. If you live in a big city, there may be a Schizophrenics Anonymous chapter there- they’ll know about their area practitioners.
Supplement- I take 9g/day, which I’ll never get from food. The basic dose for therapeutic use in schizophrenia syndrome is 3g/day, but I don’t know how much Sara takes, as I don’t live in Chicago and the amount one has to consume is individualized.
I’m intimately familiar with being on B3, having taken it for years, myself, but a number of the bloggers here aren’t. You might read some odd things from some of them, but I, for one, think you’re doing great, if your blog’s any indication.
As a fugitive from Mental Health, I can only agree with you.
At least the fish oil didn’t turn them into zombies.
Well, you’ve got to realize that psychiatrists aren’t necessarily the sharpest tacks in the box, when it comes to global comprehension. One look at their suicide rate tells you that, being just one step behind the dentists, who are plagued by mercury exposure from amalgam throughout their professional careers.
The point, when things are done right, psychotherapy is possible. Trying to grasp your family and social dynamics are just as difficult when your attention span is short, due to inability to concentrate, as it is when your frontal lobes are shut off by psych drugs.
Everything isn’t reduced to biochemistry. Biochemistry is used to increase awareness, rather than to decrease awareness to increase conformity.
Probably a good thing ECT wouldn’t work for that. Since it would be thought black magic to keep ECT patients on niacin to preserve their long term memories (something I bet a number of MIA contributors don’t know, either), you’d simply wind up with legions of partial amnesiacs if you did give the child soldiers ECT’s, while you had no idea what parts of their memories you erased.
That’s one of the reasons to reevaluate and reform hospital administrative culture. Our psychiatric culture would go into convulsions if you did one of the most elementary things- using hallucinogenic substances to give hospital staff members a taste of things as many patients experience them. The late Humphry Osmond, who was a noted hospital reformer while he was Superintendent of Weyburn Hospital, Saskatchewan, an institution a foundation investigator called one of the worst mental hospitals in the world (that he’d seen), encouraged his employees to take LSD for that very purpose as part of his program. He also renovated all the hospital “seclusion rooms” so they were places patients could use for refuges, instead of places staff used for punishment cells, among other things.
That’s one thing supplements are about. You can determine what ones are necessary with certain tests, such as hair samples for determining mineral levels.
Probably not if you have surroundings where most of the residents are getting better, though I’m not actually sure. When I worked at a residential drug treatment center, I had a couple of residents that I was secretly giving niacinamide. When I began my shift, they would both suddenly appear at the Dutch door of the RA office while I was reading the shift notes and wait for me to give them their B3. Both graduated from the center’s program, to the professional staff’s amazement. I wasn’t going to admit anything to the staff, because I’d certainly be canned and ineligible for unemployment if the learned therapists found out (one staff member did find out I’d recommended How to Live With Schizophrenia for reading to one of the individuals, leading me to be reprimanded by the Clinical Supervisor).
Well, if you need the morning coffee that badly, maybe it’s time for that morning B1, which can be used as part of a program to eliminate speed-type drugs from your diet, and have a decaf instead. You also need a staff ready to set examples instead of being (sorry) examples. Even though I was a washed-out officer candidate, I’m still acquainted with the basics of leadership. Unfortunately, I couldn’t quit smoking until I had an episode of bronchitis so bad that the smallest hit on a cigarette left me rolling on the floor, coughing what remained of my lungs out. Having been classically conditioned from smoking by this, I realized I was a hopeless nicotine junky and could never smoke another one without this happening again. That was 40 years ago. I wouldn’t recommend this approach to others.
More on zinc and “eyeballing” the likelihood of its existence in interviewees.
Major signs: lack of sense of taste and smell, white spots in fingernails, inability to taste (bitter) zinc sulfate in liquids.
Possible signs: achy knees, no dream recall (both may indicate possibility of accompanying B6 deficiency or dependency)
You’d also do well to read works of the late Carl Pfeiffer if you can find them. Zinc and Other Micronutrients is a good one if you can find it, or Mental and Elemental Nutrients. Both may be rare books by this time, being written 40+ years ago.
Maybe have them give hair samples during their pre-employment physicals, so you know beforehand.
It’s too bad the officer caste was aghast at the thought of reefer madness, with conditions now even worse than when I was disgracing the flag in our now second-longest war (but then they didn’t have piss testing in those days). Still, I must admit I was frequently nasty to a guy who had sleep apnea, now that I know what it is- back then, it was too much too be on something like an LP with a guy who snored like a buzz saw and always fell asleep during his turn on radio watch (snoring noisily once he did).
What’s probably necessary for institutions, is to force directors to be responsible for the conduct of their charges, sacking those who have increasing rates of violent incidents in their facilities. It wouldn’t hurt to put legal skids on corporate backscratching, like we see in the pharmaceutical industry today.
Unfortunately, the most difficult thing is to hang on, waiting for an entire generation of doctors and corporate executives to die, which is why usually 40 to 60 years have to elapse between the time medical discoveries occur and when they’re finally adopted- or a situation to erupt that old paradigms can’t handle (the reason penicillin came in less than 20 years after its discovery- World War II, with it’s millions of casualties in danger of dying from septicemia).
Elementary, Watson. There are no megabucks to be made in nutrients, no multi-billion dollar patents at stake, no personal and corporate fortunes to be easily made, no need to preserve antique beliefs about violence, good and evil that have provided combustible material for theologians, moralists, crusaders and dramatists for centuries.
Our beloved political leaders aren’t going to do anything sane. Their plan will doubtlessly devolve into something involving the old rubbish about cannabis consumption being the cause of the opioid epidemic, which they will solve by eliminating the potheads with savage punishments, like trying to get the dead horse to pull the buggy by whipping it into life and breaking out the chainsaws when it fails to rise. After all, our present drug “czar” was once a spokesman and apologist for opioid manufacturers, who would ruin his post-political career by cramping his clients’ style and actually doing something realistic about their antics.
Another useless psychiatric “disease” with an equally useless treatment. There are a number of garden variety sources of hyperactivity involving things like allergic reactions and food sensitivities, nutritional and glandular problems. Most physically serious is probably heavy metal poisoning (think of having a hyperactive child in Flint). Psych speed isn’t going to treat things like this.
On the subject of labels. They’re useful if the label implies courses of actions to take to stay healthy or sane, as do elements of the diabetic label (little or no sucrose, regular meals, exercise). Similar things apply for “schizophrenics”, like avoiding junk food, keeping regular hours, avoiding stimulants (including caffeine), alcohol and hallucinogens, exercising. It would also permit you, if you are negatively labeled, to tell the labelers (for example) how lucky they are to be able to shoot meth until they’re having philosophical discussions with their pets (particularly if they’re animals like goldfish).
If you were a real stinker, you could point out to such individuals that all evidence is anecdotal and the only difference is how the anecdotes are organized- into texts, charts and graphs, statistical analyses, etc.
I’d be careful with my challenges, there, Pat. In dueling protocol, the guy you challenge gets to pick the weapons- you might be unlucky enough to pick a kendo adept, who’d choose katanas (Japanese long swords) as the weapon.
When the practitioners aren’t psychiatrists by training or outlook. The only psychiatrist I ever talked to, who wasn’t a jerk, was an internist by training, who had become aware of Theron Randolph’s work with fasting therapy (Randolph was an allergist) and provocative food trials and regulated diets for alleged “mental” patients. He’d trained with Randolph, which involved his own fasting and provocative food testing, and was also familiar with orthomolecular medicine (he told me how to titer my B3 to the proper level).
This is because depression isn’t a viable illness unto itself, but a collection of signs and symptoms that has varying causes. The medico has to tease out the correct one(s), so that he/she can use the correct treatment (not musical drugs) from the beginning.
But the one advantage to referring “psychiatry” to neurologists is that neurologists have to be aware of and understand conditions that mimic true brain diseases, and also know how to treat them.
The skunk smokers are biological, but they can likely be treated with 1g+ doses of the amino acid L-glutamine, in an effort to restore the nervous system’s glutamate (a neurotransmitter) levels and hopefully, the individual’s awareness. You can’t do much psychotherapy with the delirious, but it’s dangerous to use drugs on someone under the influence of PCP, although old-time megavitamin therapy (1g of B3 TID+ 1g of C TID) might help. You’d likely also continue the glutamine as needed (1g+?)
Because they didn’t know the grief Linus Pauling took for publically adopting the notion that we’d function better if we maintained our ascorbate levels similar to those of animals, who, except for primates, guinea pigs and fruit bats, produce their own ascorbate internally at the rate of 3g to 1/2oz. per day, were they human-sized. He’d also chanced upon Hoffer and Osmond’s book, How to Live With Schizophrenia, which advocated using mega C as well as mega B3 in treating this syndrome, spending an entire night reading it all in one sitting.
As well as hostile publicity, he also had to debate various “experts”, until he’d humiliated enough of them to scare away any more wannabe debate “champs”.
Very helpful, particularly after stopping it and then starting again after the world became strange once more, as it had throughout my life. My buddies in a mutual assistance group, whose meetings I began to attend, did as well, though some were truly chronic- one had had 200 or so ECT at one time, while I once watched another take 5g of 500mg. niacin tablets with one slurp from a drinking fountain as he was returning from a paranoid episode (over time, which took a couple of months).
The episode also increased my interest in diet and “cerebral allergies”, which led me to be more thoughtful about my diet, although it took quite a while to completely give up caffeine.
Since I knew I’d have to help myself, I also began to subscribe to the Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry and its successor, the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, which I kept up until Abram Hoffer died and I chanced to be in financial difficulties.
I should actually tell you what a brilliant, incisive piece you wrote. I don’t need ascorbate to become too popular, lest its price go up excessively.
I wouldn’t be so smug about Linus Pauling if I were Aeon, but have the staff test his hypothesis on themselves over a period of months to years. It’s cheap, easily available and pretty harmless.
The above psychiatric antics make me glad I’m a fugitive from Mental Health, and encourage me to stay that way. Of course, the shrinks would regard my taking B3 as a sure sign of my mental incompetence and want to medicate me and/or put me on a course of ECT.
I know it’s late, but I’d better mention a paper of Richard Kunin’s a San Francisco MD), who wrote a Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry article about treating TD successfully with manganese salts and/or B3 around 30 years ago. This, no doubt, brought terror into the hearts of the orthodox, discussing not only drugless treatments, but also that dreaded word, “niacin”, as a component of such treatments. Kunin is apparently still alive, because he has a web site in which he promotes nutritional treatments of “mental” ailments, which I’m sure no psychiatrist in his right mind would dare scan.