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.
Duterte has to do something to minimize the political fallout from losing Mindanao to the Islamists, which he’s probably about to do.
The idea that mental functioning is dependent on digestive processes goes back to Pinel in the late 1700’s/early 1800’s. He was also able to get his patients functional at a better rate than modern psychiatrists.
No, the mentally ill are evolutionary advances, which is why they have some immunity to cancer and diabetes (unless they’re medicated with psych drugs), plus being resistant to viruses and wound shock. It’s just that their advances are incomplete, being also found in their “sane” first-order relatives, without the confusion coming from being acutely ill.
You aren’t alone, Fiachra. Freud believed psychoanalysis was definitely a no-no for treating psychotic individuals.
That’s odd. I thought that delusions were an attempt to find meaning in the perceptual changes that were the indicator of a “schizophrenic” state; e.g., that delusions about being watched came from the sensations of being watched or spied upon, particularly when combined with the “audios”, particularly of voices talking about or to you. In any case, the changes came first, followed by the ideation. This is the reason the ideas are so persistent- sufferers are asked to deny the “real” evidence of their own senses.
In their books, Hoffer and Osmond mentioned this, which I’ve seen to have some basis in reality. They thought it was due to the presence of excess adrenochrome and adrenolutin, two oxidized (and hallucinogenic) adrenaline derivatives, that influenced peculiarities of experience (yes-traumas can increase them). There could be a variety of sources inducing these chemicals’ production, hence there was no independent “schizophrenia”, as the so-called disease was only a collection of particular signs and symptoms, which could come from any number of sources.
It would depend on how he was being treated. You’d probably be right at least 90% of the time, but there are actually potentially important things about diet, (psycho?)chemical exposure, especially drugs, supplements, exercise, etc., about which the disperceptive should be aware. Then he’d likely stay alive, because nobody “had” to make and/or keep him a zombie.
This sort of thing might be less common if affected individuals would use diagnostic terminology in a more positive (yet annoying)way-“I didn’t get the flu because I’m schizophrenic, and therefore more resistant to virus diseases than straight people who don’t take vitamin C…” Or-“I won the senior beauty contest because I age more slowly than straight people…”
This will give us a part preview of the Trump Administration’s proposed brilliant war on drugs, with not only a Big Pharma rep, but a former front man for the pharma opioid producers serving as the alleged Drug Czar. I can hardly wait for the tortured doped up land to be restored to alcoholic virtue by these means.
One item almost totally ignored in ADHD studies is the biophysical environment, including diet, exposure to heavy metals (lead poisoning can elicit ADHD symptoms, for one) and other pollutants. In the present social environment, these things will never be studied, as there’s no big money to be made for pharmaceutical companies in treating them.
Hello, uprising. One of the things the eugenicists didn’t catch was the positive medical aspects of the Schizophrenia Syndrome; e.g., resistance to viral infections, diabetes and cancer in addition to less likelihood of going into wound shock, and slower processes of aging. These were also found in first order relatives of such individuals.
Actually, the earliest psychiatric medicos did a better job before these alleged treatments came into vogue, if they were practitioners used the Quakers’ Moral Treatment instead of the various torments inflicted by guys like Benjamin Rush. There were probably two major reasons germ theory didn’t catch on in Teutonic Europe. One was that Pasteur, its prime originator, was a chemist and not an MD, and secondly, he was French.
The fever therapy guys probably thought their treatment was quite humane, because the original version of it involved giving patients malaria, to induce the “therapeutic” high fever that was supposed to kill syphilitic spirochetes. The only drawback was that vivax malaria is a lifelong illness, which flares up every time one’s resistance to diseases is challenged by environmental extremes, such as getting soaked in the rain.
International Schizophrenia Foundation. It was a new incarnation of the old Canadian Schizophrenia Foundation, which appeared in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. I used to be a CSF member so I could get the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine and its predecessor, the Journal of Orthomolecular psychiatry, after I found out I was B3 dependent.
madinCanada. The Canadian version of NAMI is a threatened organization, because the ISF, which promotes nutrient therapy, is growing in strength there, if the increasing number of orthomolecular practitioners in that country is any indication, according to the ISF’s practitioner list, which lists pages of such practitioners in every province, instead of a handful throughout the country. That’s why the enthusiastic woman likely was kicked out of the group you attended; she was advocating the techniques of the orthodox group’s arch rivals.
Up her clozapine? Why doesn’t he just prescribe her a pistol and ammunition?
Psychiatry is as prone to fads and crazes as the fashion industry. The neuroleptics are involved, in that they turned the “dangerous crazies” into passive robots (unless they stopped their neuroleptics). It was also cheaper to let the robots wander the streets than it was to keep them in the hospital.
Are you talking about Models of Madness, Models of Medicine, co-authored by Humphry Osmond nd Miriam Siegler? That’s the only volume I’ve read that discusses Aesculapian authority at any length (notice spelling, CatNight). I’d suspect these authors would treat Lieberman, et. al. as followers of a muddled model- moral overtones pretending to be medical (“behavioral diagnoses”, etc.).
Instead of trying to justify the constant use of psych meds, these authorities would be better occupied tramping the Northern Pacific rain forest from Oregon to northern British Columbia, searching for the elusive Sasquatch.
There aren’t that many bloggers on this site familiar with orthomolecular treatments and the qualitative difference between being on neuroleptics and taking B3 and its fellow nutrients, so you’ll be likely to take some grief from those who find psychic meaning in dysperceptions and want to analyze them without really grasping their effect. It’s no big thing- I get flamed every now and then, myself.
Uprising. That was well put. That stands for any addiction.
Carmela- you’re sister’s a neurologist, right? This may not be an item for shrinks, after all, but more in her line. They’re hardly going to be able demonstrate a need for this alleged “treatment” if the cause for the episodes is outside the realm of psychiatry.
These sound to be some kind of seizures, even if not epileptic. Seems to me, the last thing she’d want to be taking is an (alleged) antipsychotic.
I don’t know about Pat, but I’d use quantitative psych like my old favorite, the HOD, and physical testing in addition to an initial interview to try to estimate what’s going on in order to individualize the treatment I’m going to use. For example, if I’m with a depressed individual who has an altered sense of smell and taste, I’ll want to use supplemental zinc as part of the treatment. If I had a depressed individual with many distortions of perception, I know I’ll have to deal with the distortions before I can likely get any lasting improvement in the individual’s mood. And if I’m dealing with an individual with few dysperceptions, I send him/her to you, because I know a talking catfish can do a better job with “problems in living” than I can (not that I think you’re a talking catfish, as you’re doubtlessly much more empathic than the catfish could ever be).
Well, it’s going to pay little or no attention to real diseases that effect mental functioning and are also readily treated by prosaic means.
I’d imagine the lot of patients to become worse, as only about 10% of those on long-term neuroleptic therapy ever return to full functioning, one of those realities psychiatrists have hidden from themselves.
This line of reasoning won’t lead me to return to driving without a seatbelt. I’ll just have to stay a wimp.
You’ve got that right. I doubt if any great discoveries will occur soon using this method, as these excursions into brain chemistry pay no attention to known peculiarities outside the brain that effect its functioning; thus the data gathered by this method are always compromised, as the experimenter is trying a unified approach with a sample population that’s actually heterogeneous..
It’s clear to me that this guy doesn’t think of “depression” as a syndrome with multiple possible causes, but as some kind of independent entity in and of itself, to be treated by “antidepressants” alone. Not very medical to me, but I’m neither a psychiatrist nor a member of the APA, so I’m denied the Divine Insight of these other individuals.
An excellent piece, so graphic I have a good idea of what to do if I’m forced to play medic for one of these withdrawals, which I’d feel obliged to do in order to keep someone from coming unglued on the street- I’d never want to conduct one voluntarily any more than I’d do an alcohol withdrawal, which I have done for the above purpose, only it was collapsing on the street in those instances.
No thanks, even though I’d only be awake 9 hours a day, so I wouldn’t notice getting fat or the tremor that’s likely to become permanent.
Sketchy acquisition of food or deficient diets themselves are likely to contribute to this, as well. For example, deficiencies of the B’s can manifest themselves as depressions long before more obvious signs appear, like various rashes with pellagra. The physical effects of stress, etc. also have physical consequences. Why should I be surprised the food imperiled are anxious and depressed?
Well, I’d suspect your mother is deficient in the mineral zinc, which is necessary for our senses of smell and taste to work right. In addition to being her “cupbearer”, you could also induce her to take a 50mg. Zn. tab every day with both of you going to the store to get bottles of them to reduce paranoid thoughts of poisoning conspiracies- besides, you may need to set the example for her by having her pick hers and yours from the store display, both of you taking 1/day until the bottles of 100 are empty. Hunt for literary works of the late Carl Pfeiffer, who could explain this much better than me.
Re. diabetes. In their now out of print book, The Hallucinogens, Hoffer and Osmond suggested an inverse relationship between diabetes and schizophrenia, pointing out that schizophrenics have a much lower incidence of diabetes than the population at large- at the time the text was written there were 5 diabetics in a Saskatchewan mental hospital population of 3300.
With schizophrenia syndrome, this 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 ratio, is also the one you’d get if you didn’t treat any of the patients at all (Bleuler, 1913).
The flaw in this reasoning is that the populace isn’t becoming sicker, the same way the pharmaceutical community frowns on the use of megascorbate to prevent colds and other viral infections and diseases, even though it does.
This guy is probably locked into some kind of pro-business outlook. You should probably have also told him that you can’t sell more antidepressants to dead patients.
Yes, but cheap enough to keep you from becoming a carcass in the first place. Doubtlessly, Big Time Psychiatry will probably come up with countless alleged reasons “proving” how bad for you exercising is.
Hard to say. If the editor’s blurb at the top of the comments is correct, this throng of shrinks he’s seen induced his misery from the get-go with some bungled antidepressant treatment where the prescriber spent no time searching for dysperceptions in the “prescribee”, and consequently launched the first of this series of episodes of flailing and failing psychiatric endeavors.
Why Oldhead- don’t you know that having grandiose ambitions is central to politicized life? Although for us, it’s a sign we’re seriously delusional.
You’re going to have difficulties, because you’re dealing with characters born in the era of the Double Blind (or is it the Doubly Blind?) where experience is considered an impediment to knowledge, which can only be found through statistical analysis by someone totally ignorant of the actual issue- having first-hand experience makes you ignorant of what’s really happening and thereby suspect. Therefore, you have knowledge of forced drugging only if you’re distanced by ignorance of its outcome, except through some kind of statistical analysis. Otherwise, nothing you say can possibly have any validity.
Of course, you realize you have to endure tons of guff from English medicos. My favorite British MD was the famous 19th Century doc who drank a glass of water from London’s infamous Broad Street pump to prove there was nothing wrong with the pump or “good English water” and died of cholera within 24 hours.
Temple Grandin would make a far better president than our present one.
Well, curing all the world’s psychiatric problems with psychedelics is clearly nonsensical. For substance abusers, the point is in the experience that hallucinogens can generate, not the drugs themselves. They can merely speed up the process in selected individuals, many of whom don’t have the time nor the wherewithal to seek Enlightenment at the local Zendo. Sometimes you have to make do with what you have on hand, while doing what you can to keep people off the back ward of your local institution by avoiding common mistakes. Hallucinogens are definitely not for everybody- I wouldn’t have bought that Hoffer-Osmond Diagnostic test 43 years ago if they were.
It’s the psychedelic experience, not the particular drug, that is supposed to be beneficial in eliminating/controlling substance abuse.
I guess so. The ones I knew (and still know), who weren’t jelly-brains to begin with, nor who didn’t become too old never became jelly-brains. But then, I’ve never lived in the heartland of psychedelic culture.
The shrinks of the day didn’t think that megavitamins B3 and C, the most successful way to treat freak-outs and space-outs, had any psychiatric value. They were (and are) also cheap and generic, which meant no prescription note-pads, free samples, trips and free admissions to company-sponsored conferences in the South during the winter.
There are ways to estimate if serious bad things or no serious therapeutic response will happen, and that’s through history-taking (looking for “schiz” first-order relatives, as well as taking a HOD test (I bought mine to screen individuals for taking hallucinogenic mushrooms), which can predict the likelihood of an individual having prolonged reactions. There’s also a urine test for pyrolles, which also suggest their likelihood, as well. None of this is rocket science, having been explored 50 years ago.
I find this entertaining, because these new advocates come from the same bunch that anathematized hallucinogens back in the 1960’s, when protocols for their safe usage were devised in Saskatchewan by Hoffer and Osmond, making it a primary drug in that province for treating alcoholism, until our DEA suppressed it by pressuring the province several years later.
Now it’s become forgotten lore, existing only in the pages of their books: The Hallucinogens and New Hope for Alcoholics, which neither you nor these neo-advocates for hallucinogens have apparently read (they’re out of print). I’m surprised the neo-advocates have read Stanislas Grof, the only person on earth who had licenses to dispense LSD from both the capitalist and communist blocs in that bygone era.
The big question is- what kind of intervention are you doing? Simply drugging the beneficiaries of intervention into drowsy stupidity is obviously not the way to go, but being able to quantify what’s going on can definitely be helpful. I recall an incident of a gent who seemed to be descending into early “schizophrenia”, but was actually descending into early lead poisoning from a cobbled up reefer pipe where the bowl was soldered to the stem; the heat from the burning pot was also vaporizing the solder, which he was also inhaling. A few weeks after ditching the pipe, he was fine- his mood was greatly improved, and the formerly closed curtains on his windows were opened (sign of decreased or eliminated paranoid sensations and feelings). Who knows what would have happened to him without proper intervention? I dread thinking what would have happened to him, had Community Mental Health got their paws on him.
True, but it’s still necessary to be aware of physical conditions that induce or exacerbate “mental” symptoms that can respond to appropriate (not neuroleptic) treatments. There are a number of them that shrinks usually don’t find, because they’re not really aware of them in the first place.
Another way to waste the taxpayers’ money, since autism is likely also primarily a syndrome with doubtlessly more than one potential cause. One thing the Blue Light guys won’t be studying is how prenatal and early natal chemical exposure affects infants- bad for the chemical industry and business if that were true.
You’re right there. In their eagerness to prove their mental illness categories are real diseases, our main line shrinks seem to have totally forgotten that there are numerous “ordinary” diseases that have a profound effect on mental functioning that can’t be alleviated with psychiatry or its drugs, but can be alleviated or even eliminated with real (ordinary?) medical treatments. Of course, when this happens, the ailment in question is immediately drummed out of psychiatry, like the Lion and Unicorn being drummed out of town (if you remember the nursery rhyme).
This is what happens when someone confuses a syndrome with an independent entity. You get heterogeneous groups, so naturally there’s nothing consistent in your results when you study or treat them as having a similar or identical condition.
Hard to say. Bill W. took a lot of heat toward the end of his life when his plugged niacin as a remedy for alcoholic depression, after he and 20 out of 30 of his AA buddies also did (he got the 30 guys to try this in order to see if his own loss of depression was a fluke). Some of the old line AA guys thought he was just getting strange, if not demented.
They don’t empathize with their patients, but seem driven by the humiliation of being a failure, since few, if any, of the patients get well while on their conventional treatments.
Or, living and working in an atmosphere of constant failure could be a despair-inducing situation.
I know I’m unsuited for this, for the same reason I’m unsuited to work in the average residential substance abuse facility- I can’t stop myself from getting my charges on supplements, whenever it seems likely to benefit them. When I first got on B3, I knew I had to help myself, with minimal or no aid from anyone else, so I studied the relevant literature and then let myself become a resident sorcerer for a group of local dopers, who knew me because I was a volunteer in a crisis center (popular in those days) and also a collector of hallucinogenic mushrooms. I did a number of things as well as treating simple dysperceptive states- supervising and assisting a heroin withdrawal (but not of someone with a giant habit) and a couple of physical withdrawals from alcohol, being able to safely speed them up by using simple documented methods for all of them.
In the 90’s, while working in the residential substance abuse program, I started up again, after watching a number of treatment failures occur, because of staff ignorance. While the program director was firing me (she wanted me to quit, but I wanted unemployment), I had to bite my lip when she and the clinical supervisor had a side discussion about two residents who had graduated, despite a poor prognosis, because they’d been taking niacinamide (courtesy of yours truly). The supervisory dignitaries would then have sacked me with cause, had they found out, denying or delaying my unemployment benefits.
I’d expect to be even more grievously punished, working as a peer specialist.
Perhaps they came from school as some of those for whom conventional medicine is too much of an intellectual challenge for them.
Yes, and in common with religions, heresy must be relentlessly punished.
There are a number of biomarkers for a number of the altered states (urinary pyrolles is one of the oldest I know of), but the problem with them is that anyone knowledgeable of them can do a better job treating “psychoses” than a shrink, who isn’t. Picture a chiropractor, who can’t prescribe anything, successfully treating a Diplomate Psychiatrist’s treatment failures as a routine part of his/her practice. This humiliation can’t be endured by mainstream psychiatry for any length of time.
As an individual who has taken B3 for over 40 years, I’ve seen my share of this sort of thing in periodic sensational attempts to “refute” its use for treating psychiatric syndromes, generally featuring some kind of “double blind” study that never uses hidden controls like niacinamide or inositol hexanicotinate, which would make such studies truly double blind- niacin, itself, can’t be double blinded because it causes flushing when one starts taking it.
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.
Duterte has to do something to minimize the political fallout from losing Mindanao to the Islamists, which he’s probably about to do.
The idea that mental functioning is dependent on digestive processes goes back to Pinel in the late 1700’s/early 1800’s. He was also able to get his patients functional at a better rate than modern psychiatrists.
No, the mentally ill are evolutionary advances, which is why they have some immunity to cancer and diabetes (unless they’re medicated with psych drugs), plus being resistant to viruses and wound shock. It’s just that their advances are incomplete, being also found in their “sane” first-order relatives, without the confusion coming from being acutely ill.
You aren’t alone, Fiachra. Freud believed psychoanalysis was definitely a no-no for treating psychotic individuals.
That’s odd. I thought that delusions were an attempt to find meaning in the perceptual changes that were the indicator of a “schizophrenic” state; e.g., that delusions about being watched came from the sensations of being watched or spied upon, particularly when combined with the “audios”, particularly of voices talking about or to you. In any case, the changes came first, followed by the ideation. This is the reason the ideas are so persistent- sufferers are asked to deny the “real” evidence of their own senses.
In their books, Hoffer and Osmond mentioned this, which I’ve seen to have some basis in reality. They thought it was due to the presence of excess adrenochrome and adrenolutin, two oxidized (and hallucinogenic) adrenaline derivatives, that influenced peculiarities of experience (yes-traumas can increase them). There could be a variety of sources inducing these chemicals’ production, hence there was no independent “schizophrenia”, as the so-called disease was only a collection of particular signs and symptoms, which could come from any number of sources.
It would depend on how he was being treated. You’d probably be right at least 90% of the time, but there are actually potentially important things about diet, (psycho?)chemical exposure, especially drugs, supplements, exercise, etc., about which the disperceptive should be aware. Then he’d likely stay alive, because nobody “had” to make and/or keep him a zombie.
This sort of thing might be less common if affected individuals would use diagnostic terminology in a more positive (yet annoying)way-“I didn’t get the flu because I’m schizophrenic, and therefore more resistant to virus diseases than straight people who don’t take vitamin C…” Or-“I won the senior beauty contest because I age more slowly than straight people…”
This will give us a part preview of the Trump Administration’s proposed brilliant war on drugs, with not only a Big Pharma rep, but a former front man for the pharma opioid producers serving as the alleged Drug Czar. I can hardly wait for the tortured doped up land to be restored to alcoholic virtue by these means.
One item almost totally ignored in ADHD studies is the biophysical environment, including diet, exposure to heavy metals (lead poisoning can elicit ADHD symptoms, for one) and other pollutants. In the present social environment, these things will never be studied, as there’s no big money to be made for pharmaceutical companies in treating them.
Hello, uprising. One of the things the eugenicists didn’t catch was the positive medical aspects of the Schizophrenia Syndrome; e.g., resistance to viral infections, diabetes and cancer in addition to less likelihood of going into wound shock, and slower processes of aging. These were also found in first order relatives of such individuals.
Actually, the earliest psychiatric medicos did a better job before these alleged treatments came into vogue, if they were practitioners used the Quakers’ Moral Treatment instead of the various torments inflicted by guys like Benjamin Rush. There were probably two major reasons germ theory didn’t catch on in Teutonic Europe. One was that Pasteur, its prime originator, was a chemist and not an MD, and secondly, he was French.
The fever therapy guys probably thought their treatment was quite humane, because the original version of it involved giving patients malaria, to induce the “therapeutic” high fever that was supposed to kill syphilitic spirochetes. The only drawback was that vivax malaria is a lifelong illness, which flares up every time one’s resistance to diseases is challenged by environmental extremes, such as getting soaked in the rain.
International Schizophrenia Foundation. It was a new incarnation of the old Canadian Schizophrenia Foundation, which appeared in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. I used to be a CSF member so I could get the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine and its predecessor, the Journal of Orthomolecular psychiatry, after I found out I was B3 dependent.
madinCanada. The Canadian version of NAMI is a threatened organization, because the ISF, which promotes nutrient therapy, is growing in strength there, if the increasing number of orthomolecular practitioners in that country is any indication, according to the ISF’s practitioner list, which lists pages of such practitioners in every province, instead of a handful throughout the country. That’s why the enthusiastic woman likely was kicked out of the group you attended; she was advocating the techniques of the orthodox group’s arch rivals.
Up her clozapine? Why doesn’t he just prescribe her a pistol and ammunition?
Psychiatry is as prone to fads and crazes as the fashion industry. The neuroleptics are involved, in that they turned the “dangerous crazies” into passive robots (unless they stopped their neuroleptics). It was also cheaper to let the robots wander the streets than it was to keep them in the hospital.
Are you talking about Models of Madness, Models of Medicine, co-authored by Humphry Osmond nd Miriam Siegler? That’s the only volume I’ve read that discusses Aesculapian authority at any length (notice spelling, CatNight). I’d suspect these authors would treat Lieberman, et. al. as followers of a muddled model- moral overtones pretending to be medical (“behavioral diagnoses”, etc.).
Instead of trying to justify the constant use of psych meds, these authorities would be better occupied tramping the Northern Pacific rain forest from Oregon to northern British Columbia, searching for the elusive Sasquatch.
There aren’t that many bloggers on this site familiar with orthomolecular treatments and the qualitative difference between being on neuroleptics and taking B3 and its fellow nutrients, so you’ll be likely to take some grief from those who find psychic meaning in dysperceptions and want to analyze them without really grasping their effect. It’s no big thing- I get flamed every now and then, myself.
Uprising. That was well put. That stands for any addiction.
Carmela- you’re sister’s a neurologist, right? This may not be an item for shrinks, after all, but more in her line. They’re hardly going to be able demonstrate a need for this alleged “treatment” if the cause for the episodes is outside the realm of psychiatry.
These sound to be some kind of seizures, even if not epileptic. Seems to me, the last thing she’d want to be taking is an (alleged) antipsychotic.
I don’t know about Pat, but I’d use quantitative psych like my old favorite, the HOD, and physical testing in addition to an initial interview to try to estimate what’s going on in order to individualize the treatment I’m going to use. For example, if I’m with a depressed individual who has an altered sense of smell and taste, I’ll want to use supplemental zinc as part of the treatment. If I had a depressed individual with many distortions of perception, I know I’ll have to deal with the distortions before I can likely get any lasting improvement in the individual’s mood. And if I’m dealing with an individual with few dysperceptions, I send him/her to you, because I know a talking catfish can do a better job with “problems in living” than I can (not that I think you’re a talking catfish, as you’re doubtlessly much more empathic than the catfish could ever be).
Well, it’s going to pay little or no attention to real diseases that effect mental functioning and are also readily treated by prosaic means.
I’d imagine the lot of patients to become worse, as only about 10% of those on long-term neuroleptic therapy ever return to full functioning, one of those realities psychiatrists have hidden from themselves.
This line of reasoning won’t lead me to return to driving without a seatbelt. I’ll just have to stay a wimp.
You’ve got that right. I doubt if any great discoveries will occur soon using this method, as these excursions into brain chemistry pay no attention to known peculiarities outside the brain that effect its functioning; thus the data gathered by this method are always compromised, as the experimenter is trying a unified approach with a sample population that’s actually heterogeneous..
It’s clear to me that this guy doesn’t think of “depression” as a syndrome with multiple possible causes, but as some kind of independent entity in and of itself, to be treated by “antidepressants” alone. Not very medical to me, but I’m neither a psychiatrist nor a member of the APA, so I’m denied the Divine Insight of these other individuals.
An excellent piece, so graphic I have a good idea of what to do if I’m forced to play medic for one of these withdrawals, which I’d feel obliged to do in order to keep someone from coming unglued on the street- I’d never want to conduct one voluntarily any more than I’d do an alcohol withdrawal, which I have done for the above purpose, only it was collapsing on the street in those instances.
No thanks, even though I’d only be awake 9 hours a day, so I wouldn’t notice getting fat or the tremor that’s likely to become permanent.
Sketchy acquisition of food or deficient diets themselves are likely to contribute to this, as well. For example, deficiencies of the B’s can manifest themselves as depressions long before more obvious signs appear, like various rashes with pellagra. The physical effects of stress, etc. also have physical consequences. Why should I be surprised the food imperiled are anxious and depressed?
Well, I’d suspect your mother is deficient in the mineral zinc, which is necessary for our senses of smell and taste to work right. In addition to being her “cupbearer”, you could also induce her to take a 50mg. Zn. tab every day with both of you going to the store to get bottles of them to reduce paranoid thoughts of poisoning conspiracies- besides, you may need to set the example for her by having her pick hers and yours from the store display, both of you taking 1/day until the bottles of 100 are empty. Hunt for literary works of the late Carl Pfeiffer, who could explain this much better than me.
Re. diabetes. In their now out of print book, The Hallucinogens, Hoffer and Osmond suggested an inverse relationship between diabetes and schizophrenia, pointing out that schizophrenics have a much lower incidence of diabetes than the population at large- at the time the text was written there were 5 diabetics in a Saskatchewan mental hospital population of 3300.
With schizophrenia syndrome, this 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 ratio, is also the one you’d get if you didn’t treat any of the patients at all (Bleuler, 1913).
The flaw in this reasoning is that the populace isn’t becoming sicker, the same way the pharmaceutical community frowns on the use of megascorbate to prevent colds and other viral infections and diseases, even though it does.
This guy is probably locked into some kind of pro-business outlook. You should probably have also told him that you can’t sell more antidepressants to dead patients.
Yes, but cheap enough to keep you from becoming a carcass in the first place. Doubtlessly, Big Time Psychiatry will probably come up with countless alleged reasons “proving” how bad for you exercising is.
Hard to say. If the editor’s blurb at the top of the comments is correct, this throng of shrinks he’s seen induced his misery from the get-go with some bungled antidepressant treatment where the prescriber spent no time searching for dysperceptions in the “prescribee”, and consequently launched the first of this series of episodes of flailing and failing psychiatric endeavors.
Why Oldhead- don’t you know that having grandiose ambitions is central to politicized life? Although for us, it’s a sign we’re seriously delusional.
You’re going to have difficulties, because you’re dealing with characters born in the era of the Double Blind (or is it the Doubly Blind?) where experience is considered an impediment to knowledge, which can only be found through statistical analysis by someone totally ignorant of the actual issue- having first-hand experience makes you ignorant of what’s really happening and thereby suspect. Therefore, you have knowledge of forced drugging only if you’re distanced by ignorance of its outcome, except through some kind of statistical analysis. Otherwise, nothing you say can possibly have any validity.
Of course, you realize you have to endure tons of guff from English medicos. My favorite British MD was the famous 19th Century doc who drank a glass of water from London’s infamous Broad Street pump to prove there was nothing wrong with the pump or “good English water” and died of cholera within 24 hours.
Temple Grandin would make a far better president than our present one.
Well, curing all the world’s psychiatric problems with psychedelics is clearly nonsensical. For substance abusers, the point is in the experience that hallucinogens can generate, not the drugs themselves. They can merely speed up the process in selected individuals, many of whom don’t have the time nor the wherewithal to seek Enlightenment at the local Zendo. Sometimes you have to make do with what you have on hand, while doing what you can to keep people off the back ward of your local institution by avoiding common mistakes. Hallucinogens are definitely not for everybody- I wouldn’t have bought that Hoffer-Osmond Diagnostic test 43 years ago if they were.
It’s the psychedelic experience, not the particular drug, that is supposed to be beneficial in eliminating/controlling substance abuse.
I guess so. The ones I knew (and still know), who weren’t jelly-brains to begin with, nor who didn’t become too old never became jelly-brains. But then, I’ve never lived in the heartland of psychedelic culture.
The shrinks of the day didn’t think that megavitamins B3 and C, the most successful way to treat freak-outs and space-outs, had any psychiatric value. They were (and are) also cheap and generic, which meant no prescription note-pads, free samples, trips and free admissions to company-sponsored conferences in the South during the winter.
There are ways to estimate if serious bad things or no serious therapeutic response will happen, and that’s through history-taking (looking for “schiz” first-order relatives, as well as taking a HOD test (I bought mine to screen individuals for taking hallucinogenic mushrooms), which can predict the likelihood of an individual having prolonged reactions. There’s also a urine test for pyrolles, which also suggest their likelihood, as well. None of this is rocket science, having been explored 50 years ago.
I find this entertaining, because these new advocates come from the same bunch that anathematized hallucinogens back in the 1960’s, when protocols for their safe usage were devised in Saskatchewan by Hoffer and Osmond, making it a primary drug in that province for treating alcoholism, until our DEA suppressed it by pressuring the province several years later.
Now it’s become forgotten lore, existing only in the pages of their books: The Hallucinogens and New Hope for Alcoholics, which neither you nor these neo-advocates for hallucinogens have apparently read (they’re out of print). I’m surprised the neo-advocates have read Stanislas Grof, the only person on earth who had licenses to dispense LSD from both the capitalist and communist blocs in that bygone era.
The big question is- what kind of intervention are you doing? Simply drugging the beneficiaries of intervention into drowsy stupidity is obviously not the way to go, but being able to quantify what’s going on can definitely be helpful. I recall an incident of a gent who seemed to be descending into early “schizophrenia”, but was actually descending into early lead poisoning from a cobbled up reefer pipe where the bowl was soldered to the stem; the heat from the burning pot was also vaporizing the solder, which he was also inhaling. A few weeks after ditching the pipe, he was fine- his mood was greatly improved, and the formerly closed curtains on his windows were opened (sign of decreased or eliminated paranoid sensations and feelings). Who knows what would have happened to him without proper intervention? I dread thinking what would have happened to him, had Community Mental Health got their paws on him.
True, but it’s still necessary to be aware of physical conditions that induce or exacerbate “mental” symptoms that can respond to appropriate (not neuroleptic) treatments. There are a number of them that shrinks usually don’t find, because they’re not really aware of them in the first place.
Another way to waste the taxpayers’ money, since autism is likely also primarily a syndrome with doubtlessly more than one potential cause. One thing the Blue Light guys won’t be studying is how prenatal and early natal chemical exposure affects infants- bad for the chemical industry and business if that were true.
You’re right there. In their eagerness to prove their mental illness categories are real diseases, our main line shrinks seem to have totally forgotten that there are numerous “ordinary” diseases that have a profound effect on mental functioning that can’t be alleviated with psychiatry or its drugs, but can be alleviated or even eliminated with real (ordinary?) medical treatments. Of course, when this happens, the ailment in question is immediately drummed out of psychiatry, like the Lion and Unicorn being drummed out of town (if you remember the nursery rhyme).
This is what happens when someone confuses a syndrome with an independent entity. You get heterogeneous groups, so naturally there’s nothing consistent in your results when you study or treat them as having a similar or identical condition.
Hard to say. Bill W. took a lot of heat toward the end of his life when his plugged niacin as a remedy for alcoholic depression, after he and 20 out of 30 of his AA buddies also did (he got the 30 guys to try this in order to see if his own loss of depression was a fluke). Some of the old line AA guys thought he was just getting strange, if not demented.
They don’t empathize with their patients, but seem driven by the humiliation of being a failure, since few, if any, of the patients get well while on their conventional treatments.
Or, living and working in an atmosphere of constant failure could be a despair-inducing situation.
I know I’m unsuited for this, for the same reason I’m unsuited to work in the average residential substance abuse facility- I can’t stop myself from getting my charges on supplements, whenever it seems likely to benefit them. When I first got on B3, I knew I had to help myself, with minimal or no aid from anyone else, so I studied the relevant literature and then let myself become a resident sorcerer for a group of local dopers, who knew me because I was a volunteer in a crisis center (popular in those days) and also a collector of hallucinogenic mushrooms. I did a number of things as well as treating simple dysperceptive states- supervising and assisting a heroin withdrawal (but not of someone with a giant habit) and a couple of physical withdrawals from alcohol, being able to safely speed them up by using simple documented methods for all of them.
In the 90’s, while working in the residential substance abuse program, I started up again, after watching a number of treatment failures occur, because of staff ignorance. While the program director was firing me (she wanted me to quit, but I wanted unemployment), I had to bite my lip when she and the clinical supervisor had a side discussion about two residents who had graduated, despite a poor prognosis, because they’d been taking niacinamide (courtesy of yours truly). The supervisory dignitaries would then have sacked me with cause, had they found out, denying or delaying my unemployment benefits.
I’d expect to be even more grievously punished, working as a peer specialist.
Perhaps they came from school as some of those for whom conventional medicine is too much of an intellectual challenge for them.
Yes, and in common with religions, heresy must be relentlessly punished.
There are a number of biomarkers for a number of the altered states (urinary pyrolles is one of the oldest I know of), but the problem with them is that anyone knowledgeable of them can do a better job treating “psychoses” than a shrink, who isn’t. Picture a chiropractor, who can’t prescribe anything, successfully treating a Diplomate Psychiatrist’s treatment failures as a routine part of his/her practice. This humiliation can’t be endured by mainstream psychiatry for any length of time.
As an individual who has taken B3 for over 40 years, I’ve seen my share of this sort of thing in periodic sensational attempts to “refute” its use for treating psychiatric syndromes, generally featuring some kind of “double blind” study that never uses hidden controls like niacinamide or inositol hexanicotinate, which would make such studies truly double blind- niacin, itself, can’t be double blinded because it causes flushing when one starts taking it.