And conventional shrinks like to tell me how dangerous the mega B3 and C I’ve taken for 50 years is.
I’ve seen results for orthomolecular treatment rates, but that’s little help for Big Time Psychiatry, which looks at nutrient based treatments as fraudulent from the getgo, as there aren’t cash benefits from pharmaceutical companies available, nor respect from colleagues.
He should act like a traditional classical experimenter and test the implants on himself, first, before trying them on anybody else.
You probably hit a site that was pushing ketamine, which is probably going to torment you until you buy this wonder drug and then wonder why you did. (which is why ketamine is such a wonder drug).
This would be worthwhile if you WEREN’T trying to sell antidepressants, since it’s probably easily treatable with B6, zinc and B complex, a good deal cheaper and safer than the antidepressants.
My favorite psych test is the Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic or HOD, which is bad mouthed by orthodox shrinks who know anything (but not enough) about it. It was first used in the early 1960’s for screening alcoholics for psychedelic therapy in Saskatchewan, and became a regular for orthomolecular practitioners (another reason for Big Time Psychiatry’s dislike) because it was a quantitative test that could be used repetitatively, like a fever thermometer. It doesn’t take a Rhodes Scholar to see why Big Time Psychiatry dislikes it so, in addition to its place of origin (Sakatchewan)
I know that lead exposure can induce hyperactivity, although I rarely see it mentioned in “ADHD” literature, despite lead sources still being aplenty. I suspect there are other environmental sources of similar chemicals around, in addition to the usual suspects.
I should also mention sending B1 to Cambodia as well. Since the locals eat polished rice, they’re also going to have problems involving B1 deficiency, such as beriberi, which not only induces depression, but is also fatal, if not treated.
You’d be better off sending niacinamide to Cambodia. The locals are likely to be on (forced) low protein diets, raising the risk of pellagra, symptomatically identical to schizophrenia, except for the rash, among the population at large. It is a fatal disease, after all.
They’d survive easily if they were familiar with nutrient therapy and its appropriate applications. Then, they’d have to primarily worry about the country’s organized psychiatrists, who would be particularly outraged if their own “treatment failures” got better instead of sinking into delerium where they’d need eternal “hospitalization”.
If you can, you go to the corner and see what’s there. Now you can tell who’s jiving you and/or whether they’ve actually been there, themselves.
I presume they’re using psilocybe cubensis, which both grows wild in the Southern US and can also be cultivated (I know one cultivator, who speaks to me because I’m familiar with our wild hallucinogenic mushrooms).
Decades ago, I became interested in hallucinogenic mushrooms that grew wild in the northern US, where I live. Since I had to keep myself relatively sane, as well as others interested in eating such fungi, I studied early megavitamin therapy, to keep myself and my potential volunteers out of hospital (and jail, as well, for myself). Thus, I accidentally became the best “psychiatrist” in the area without being an MD or even a psychotherapist (I also had acquired a Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic Test to screen my volunteers- it was used to screen alcoholics for LSD therapy in Saskatchewan in the ’60s). I even successfully treated some professionals’ treatment failures and successfully withdrew an alcoholic using megavitamin B3. (This may help the peculiar nature of some of my correspondence)
Alas, psychiatry now seems to be as sad now as it was then
Of course, this is also when the MD who gave the shot, flees, taking the incriminating document with him/her and hiding or disposing of it in order to have a defence when MD and hospital are sued, leaving the ER guy to go to the ward to give the patient a second disastrous shot, not knowing about document and its contents.
I hope it took the combined efforts of the entire staff in the psych ward to subdue him, a suitable reward for ignoring warnings about his sensitivity to certain psych drugs.
Both
And one thing that the writer didn’t relate was the number of German general officers having heart problems about half way through the war, that chained the ones still intact to rear echelon duties that were less likely to kill them than field service, despite the chronic heart diseases they’d contracted.
Since I follow a program that’s an anathema to both the pharmaceutical and the social guys, I have no desire to get doped or analyzed by computer generated ads from anyone.
Makes me glad I know of assorted nutritional programs for “depression” and when to use them so they’ll actually work.
The writer should have briefed herself by reading Hoffer and Osmond’s book *The Hallucinogens*, particularly the section on psychedelic therapy in the LSD chapter, wherein screening individuals for psychedelic treatment is discussed, as are the contradictions for such treatments.
As a psychiatric mechanic, I can think of all sorts of things, from test taking to supplementing. Unfortunately, I’m just a “mechanic”, so I’d be deleted for content. There are two keys that might pass: (A) is your cholesterol still high (?), and (B) is there a physician in your town who treats this with Vitamin B3 as his/her mainstay?
But it is why I used to periodically become the most able “psychiatrist” in my home town without having been to medical school, because I knew elements of orthomolecular medicine, such as basic megavitamin therapy for schizophrenia syndrome and alcohol withdrawal. This hardly says much for big time psychiatry in the nation at large.
One thing not mentioned by the ADHD crowd is that hyperactivity can be induced by lead poisoning, which can’t be treated by all the “speed” in the world.
Another thing about antidepressants is that they can unmask psychoses in cases where the shrink didn’t ask about dysperceptions (if they exist in quantity, it suggests misdiagnosis is likely to be spectacularly revealed once antidepressant medication is started).
I wonder if tardive dyskinesia’s an important part of recovery from “mental illnesses” because it’s the most common obvious result of long term psychiatric drug therapy.
One of the problems with manganese is that it can cause symptoms of dyskinesia by itself at too high a dose for prolonged periods, thereby making withdrawal from drug induced dyskinesia a tricky proposition.
Does disease induced TD show low manganese levels the way psych drug induced dyskinesia does? I know that orthomolecular guys use manganese salts to treat drug induced TD and wonder if it would help disease induced TD as well.
Researching this subject would likely be more productive if you realized that “schizophrenia” isn’t a disease at all , but a syndrome- a collection of signs and symptoms with certain preponderences that can have any number of causes if the individual repetitive variations can’t be teased out for specific treatments.
A sorry performance from the medico, as post partum “depression” can frequently be relieved with zinc salts with the (sometimes) addition of B6 to make them more effective. High serum copper, which the zinc antagonizes, is a common culprit in these post partum events.
Well, there wouldn’t be this fear of schizophrenics if you could treat them properly. Unfortunately, this isn’t likely to be done any time soon, though effective treatments exist. The problem is that there are no sponsors for said treatments, as there’s no money to be made for them, and no patents (to acquire that most important fame), though there is notoriety.
Have any of these assorted professionals done a nutritional workup, sending samples to a lab to look for nutrient and/or mineral deficiencies, excesses and such? Your thyroid? At least you’ll find out what isn’t going wrong.
An interesting corollary to this is that psych treatments that are effective (and there really are some!) are fought tooth and nail by Big Time Psychiatry under the guise of preventing you from degenerating into an incurable lunatic and social parasite.
It would make a great B movie, though-“The Return of the Serotonin Zombies…”
Maybe yes, maybe no. But you can say that your doctors know nothing about the relationship between dyskinesia and low manganese, which is therapeutic for tardive dyskinesia when corrected.
It’s hard to say what was unmasked, as most psychiatrists don’t use quantitative means to diagnose their patients, which allows dysperceptive patients to be misdiagnosed as depressive and get antidepressants, which unmasks their dysperceptions (and the shrink’s diagnostic error).
Maybe pseudo-religious faith or pseudo-religious psychiatry.
This is why I avoid psychotherapists. I’ve taken mega B3 and C for decades and I’d rather not listen to someone tell me how dangerous this is, or make horrible faces should I have the nerve to tell them I’m a schizophrenic.
Remember, Steve, that “major depressive disorder” is just a description, not a disease unto itself. There can be any number of entities inducing this syndrome and many will have treatments that will leave shrinks scratching their heads, because they don’t grasp that a variety of conditions with a variety of treatments are effective for the entities that are described as ”major depressive disorders”.
None of these professionals, though far more formally educated than I am, seem to realize that depression is a syndrome, not a disease unto itself, which means that no single treatment will be effective for all patients, many not needing and/or not responsive to antidepressants and possibly made worse by them.
Well, one thing you probably do want to do with “hyperactive” kids, is take a hair or blood sample and test them for lead levels, as lead induces hyperactivity that obviously won’t respond to treatment with stimulants, no matter how much money the pharmaceutical company makes.
I presume this is actually the pseudo-medical model that psychiatry uses being pushed, instead of the medical model as used by the rest of medicine.
I’m a stodgy and dodgy nitwit, who’s going to see if your serum magnesium’s low before I even dream how your inner life’s reflected by your syndrome, much less immediately take action (but not use pharmaceuticals).
This clinic seems to be a sorry place, placing no value on a varied diet to avoid “cerebral” allergies, which can induce psychotic behavior in the susceptible. Nor is it nutritionally beneficial to be on such a diet if you don’t know how to compensate for its drawbacks and lackings.
Snce the usual “treatments” for “ADHD” usually consist of using some form of prescription stimulant over a long period of time, it’s no surprise that none of the patients get any better at anything, except maybe hallucinating or expressing paranoid delusions.
You can anticipate cannabis related bizarre antics if your subject has dysperceptions and is using cannabis to endure or hide them. A way to prevent this is to take a Hoffer Osmond Diagnostic test before getting buzzed to see if you’re at high risk for losing your marbles before seeking drug induced adventures (the test was originally used for screening for LSD therapy for alcoholics, who are likely to bum out on hallucinogens if they’re disperceptive). Although hard to find in the US, Schizophrenics Anonymous chapters in Canada have access to a pocket version members can carry around like a pocket thermometer to check on themselves at intervals, when the situation justifies
Congratulations, Patrick, for being a believer in social origins of schizophrenia syndrome, who also acknowledges physical origins for it, as well.
This “depression muddle” is what happens when you mistake a syndrome for a single disease and erroneously seek a single cause to “explain” its presence. It would actually be a miracle if you discovered much of anything, as you’re dealing with a heterogeneous population, whose difficulties aren’t likely to be universally consistent.
You might be surprised who does respond to such things as megavitamins. I lost a job when two of these individuals graduated from a substance abuse facility after being secretly placed on such a program to keep the other residents from being hassled from having to make repeat hospital trips (for “security” reasons) while dealing with the “daft” individuals, who both “graduated” when they weren’t supposed to, as they were judged as probable treatment failures on entering the program.
A sad experience, liable to be even sadder when you find out that this can be readily treated with mega B3 and C ala Hoffer and Osmond instead of the Big Pharma zombie drugs and/or prolonged analysis.
I wonder if l-glutamine antagonizes ketamine the way it antagonizes phencyclidine (PCP).
Of course benzos are harder to come off than heroin. They’re all fat soluble and heroin isn’t, so it (the opiate) clears your system faster than benzos, which can hang around in your fat cells for quite some time.
Psychiatry’s real headache is that the real medical practice of psychiatry comes from the orthomolecular guys, who have been pilloried by big-time psychiatry and big-time shrinks for decades, despite evidence that these crazies can successfully treat the big-time guys’ failures- or probably because this evidence exists at all.
This is pathetic. You’ll certainly find anxious individuals if you start with indiscriminately medicating people on a flimsy basis and get them strung out on benzos (while simultaneously denying that they’re addictive).
They’ll be coming out of the woodwork.
If I had a kid with “ADHD”, I’d want to have his blood levels checked for lead before I did anything supposedly corrective.
I know that niacinamide goes to the same neural sites as benzos. Is it possible to use it for benzo withdrawal in the same fashion as it’s brother niacin, can be used for alcohol withdrawal. Of course, becuse benzos are fat soluble, you’d have to use it for a much longer period of time as niacin, although some alcoholics have to permanently stay on niacin to remain happily sober.
Serotonin’s just the neurotransmitter of the week. Antidepressants have been pushed for decades as antagonists of assorted malfunctioning neurotransmitters, which have gone in and out of fashion as their treatment uselessness was established (I do remember dopamine, the pre-serotonin villain).
You had to take your vitamins, but under the guidance of someone who knows how to use them therapeutically, rather than the mental health chumps who medicated you into a daze.
They don’t have the awareness that we mad folk do. And since they’re psychotically afraid of us, we can’t help guide them, either.
If these cops don’t know what’s going on when they meet mental patients, they may need psychiatric chieu hois to go on calls with them to explain what patients are doing as well as initiating interactions with such individuals when the cops are called about their activities and don’t know what to do.
Here’s a career opening for former mental patients, particularly those with the hospital experience that’s given them the opportunity to encounter a variety of “diagnoses” they’ve likely had previous experience dealing with while they were patients.
(Duplicate comment)
If I weren’t a geezer, I’d investigate the idea of being a secret orthomolecular practitioner (secret megavitamin dealer complement to drug dealers?) with an obscure address in some university town. I could take on significantly more clients than the school counselors and their referrals would be in better shape than they are now.
There probably are records of therapeutic LSD use in Saskatchewan, kicking around from the old Hoffer/Osmond days prior to the DEA sanctions from the US. Prior to the DEA “saving” that region of North America, the Canadians treated a multitude of alcoholics with psychedelic therapy, which led the province to make psychedelic therapy mainstream until the DEA saved Saskatchewan from LSD by threatening the province with isolation.
The Personality Disorders- proud inhabitants of the Diagnostic Wastebasket. What would our shrinks do without the Diagnostic Wastebasket to hide their failures?
Superstitious belief.
So- our boy’s seeking a psilocybin monopoly, eh. Does he plan to sue every farm in the South that has a cow pasture for violating his monopoly? Psilocybe cubensis does grow wild there. Maybe he could sue everyone with pastureland in Spain. Psilocybe cubensis is an import from there, courtesy of the conquistadores.
This reminds me of an incident that occurred while I was in Vietnam. My company was leaving a small firebase it was occupying, to be replaced by another the next day, and my drunken squad leader staggered up to a group of us stoners to tell us that we were the only individuals capable of fighting, should the VC show up that night to give us a violent sendoff.
Makes me glad I got into orthomolecular medicine decades ago, where I can easily avoid these bombardments promoting pharmaceutical miracle substances before the lawsuits featuring them hit the media.
Like the other psychiatric “diseases”, depression is but a syndrome that can have any number of origins, which is why these common psychiatric “treatments” are frequently useless or damaging, just as they are for the other psych “diseases”.
You can start to sort your subjects via testing their perceptual stability, one of the easiest ways being the HOD test, which is quantitative. The folks with unstable perceptions are more likely to bum or freak out than people whose perceptual worlds are more stable.
Many years ago, I had an illustrative experience that demonstrated this. Some young chap at the center where I volunteered, wanted to take LSD, but he wanted to take the test to see if this was a good idea. His score was very high, as though he were tripping already (he wasn’t), so I told him he was high risk and I wouldn’t supervise (guide?) his upcoming trip unless he took 3 grams of ascorbic acid (vit. C) per day for several days prior to his voyage, so he wouldn’t lose his marbles and jump out a window.
He didn’t take the C but did drop the acid and had a miserable time, finally telling me in an embarassed voice that he’d jumped out of a window in his house.
Alas, I was unaware that “real” medicine’s only purpose was to churn out profit for pharmaceutical companies, while therapeutic benefits were only side effects.
No, as megavitamins B3 and C will frequently appropriately treat both “real” and drug-induced schizophrenias, which you’d know, were you into orthomolecular medicine.
These bad reactions to antidepressants come as no surprise, since shrinks and GP’s don’t like to assess the perceptual status of their patients before prescribing something, preferring to be surprised by toxic drug reactions, instead.
You have to remember that Big-time Psychiatry has only a pseudo-medical model to justify its actions. The orthomolecular guys, who do use the same medical model that GP’s do, are subjected to constant criticism from Big-time Psychiatry’s alleged thought leaders for believing nutrient therapy superior to constant heavy medicating with the drugs MIA members despise.
So, does this mean I’m a point man for a host of the Khan’s barbarians when I say that depression isn’t a disease at all, but a syndrome arising from multiple conditions and that antidepressants alone don’t really treat any of them?
I find this discussion a little too arcane, as I also know how H&O used to treat flashbacks and unwanted perceptual anomalies- with mega B3 and C. Having used it myself with various people by following H&O’s written guidance, I’d be obliged to agree with them and not with the outraged shrinks on the subject.
By the way, the way to prevent these Experiences in the first place is to screen subjects with perceptually based “psych” tests like the Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic or the Experiential World Inventory before giving them a hallucinogenic substance. High scores on them make hallucinogens a bad choice for the test taker.
That was indeed an impressive cocktail (cocktails?) of drugs these alleged doctors were giving you. were they showing off for your pharmacist? Had they been hypnotized into writing scripts whenever you showed up at the pharmacy? Were they business partners with the pharmacist?
Then they pretend they’re following a medical model. Sometimes regulars who follow this blog are deceived by this pretense, thereby going on prolonged screeds after mistaking psych “medicine” for real medicine.
For some years, now, I’ve wondered if niacinamide can be used for benzo withdrawal in a similar fashion to using niacin for alcohol withdrawal. Naturally, as a withdrawal substance, you’d have to use it for a much longer period than niacin, as the benzos are fat soluble, which means it takes much longer to clear them from your system.
Personality Disorder? Another long term inhabitant of the Diagnostic Wastebasket stands up and identifies itself.
What we call “depression” is just a behavioral description that can actually arise from a number of origins that can either be social or organic, running from miserable life circumstances to organic ailments, such as heavy metal poisoning. There’s obviously no “one size fits all” treatment that relieves all of them and some that make depressed states more intense.
You become a borderline by not responding to treatment, even though said treatment is likely to be faulty.
You may find it entertaining that the orthomolecular guys are about the only ones who actually practice medically based psychiatry and the only ones who draw outrage from all our psychiatric “schools” at the very mention of the word “orthomolecular”.
The scammers who got the old dude daffy, would have likely pulled their scam off had they known that B3 in multigram quantities would have put paid to his unpleasant states much more easily than a trip to the alleged funny farm. They wouldn’t even have to flee.
This is unfortunate for our bosom pals at Big Pharma and our Big Time Academicians, but not for us as it gives us an opportunity to avoid Big Time medicating with the latest ineffectual Big Time Antidepressant for good reason. Maybe it will even eventually occur to the Big Time Academics that depression isn’t a single source ailment.
There are multiple reasons for depression. Successful treatments depend on knowing the origin of the depressed mood (and if there’s anything else besides simple circumstantial depressed moods) which can very from circumstantial to heavy metal poisoning (plus many things in between)- many of which will NOT respond to antidepressants.
Well, there is a sort of test for schizophrenia syndrome (I use this term in lieu of disease, as it has multiple causes), the old test for “mauve factor” created in Saskatchewan in its LSD for screening alcoholics for psychedelic treatment. It’s regularly bad-mouthed in the psych world because an outside committee found the “mauve positive” individuals had multiple diagnoses according to a group of shrinks. Interestingly (and entertainingly) enough, the actual symptoms displayed were constant while the “diagnoses” differed. Oh yes, and their responses to LSD were invariably bad.
Even more significant, the best treatment for eliminating it was later found to be B6 and zinc instead of proprietary drugs, which I’m crass enough to find entertaining, knowing that this disqualifies the condition as worth attention from Big Pharma.
It was an unstable and unsound empire to begin with. Its disintegration should come as no surprise.
If you’re interested in screening, you might enjoy the actions of the Canadian Schizophrenia Foundation, an organization featuring patient participation and use of the Hoffer-Osmond Diagnostic Test (HOD) as a kind of psychiatric thermometer. They oversaw creating a pocket copy of same to use as a “psychiatric thermometer” to test yourself, so you could see how you’re doing, a psych version of your bathroom thermometer you could take with you on trips. Of course the CSF advocates for the orthomolecular nutritional treatment for disease, which will cerainly deny them credibility in the pharma-crossed USA.
This “screening” might have some value if it looked into subjects’ perceptual status as well as their moods, which could serve as a clue to appropriate medicating (having “depressed” patients suddenly going bananas is more of a sign of incompetent medicating than of “treatment resistance”).
I believe Schizophrenics Anonymous is still going strong in Canada. They’re likely getting grief if they’re in the USA, as they’re fans of orthomolecular medicine (the first organizers were patients of Abram Hoffer).
The amusing thing about this is that these self-appointed “authorities” would go into convulsions at the very thought of nutritional elements having any effect on mental functioning, despite getting a few minutes discussion about pellagra and scurvy with no mention about their psychological “side effects” while they were students (I recall the contorted faces of the professionals who found out I used niacin regularly instead of “meds”).
Actually, what we call schizophrenia isn’t an independent illness at all, but a bunch of them, which have different effective treatments, depending on their origins. “Schizophrenia” is actually a syndrome, a collection of signs and symptoms, rather than a disease unto itself (excuse me for being so materialistic).
Congratulations. You’re the first MH guy I’ve ever read who admitted that.
A tricky question. It can work for depressed mood, but only if you’re experiencing many disperceptions and perceptual distortions at the same time. If I have to do psychiatric things, I use my Hoffer-Osmond Diagnostic Test in the “initial interview” if I can, so I have a better idea about what needs to be done if I’ve got to oversee the treatment.
BPD? That shows you were dealing with bumblers who didn’t know what they were doing, BPD being a true wastebasket diagnosis.
It also demonstrates why shrinks are so afraid of megavitamin therapy. You can sometimes successfully deal with others’ treatment failures without enduring multiple years of grad school in the process.
Steve. I got discharged from a halfway house for substance abusers by secretly treating a couple of them with niacinamide (I was working nights with no other staff around) and was caught because they were supposed to be failures, but graduated, instead. I was supposed to stop doing something that did work.
This study merely demonstrates the need to examine the “depressed” more thoroughly than is presently done, so you don’t have treatment failures that go floridly bonkers thanks to the faulty “therapeutic” approaches you’re using.
Yes, Miranda, as they used to say about travelling in the Old West, we’ve seen the Elephant.
And conventional shrinks like to tell me how dangerous the mega B3 and C I’ve taken for 50 years is.
I’ve seen results for orthomolecular treatment rates, but that’s little help for Big Time Psychiatry, which looks at nutrient based treatments as fraudulent from the getgo, as there aren’t cash benefits from pharmaceutical companies available, nor respect from colleagues.
He should act like a traditional classical experimenter and test the implants on himself, first, before trying them on anybody else.
You probably hit a site that was pushing ketamine, which is probably going to torment you until you buy this wonder drug and then wonder why you did. (which is why ketamine is such a wonder drug).
This would be worthwhile if you WEREN’T trying to sell antidepressants, since it’s probably easily treatable with B6, zinc and B complex, a good deal cheaper and safer than the antidepressants.
My favorite psych test is the Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic or HOD, which is bad mouthed by orthodox shrinks who know anything (but not enough) about it. It was first used in the early 1960’s for screening alcoholics for psychedelic therapy in Saskatchewan, and became a regular for orthomolecular practitioners (another reason for Big Time Psychiatry’s dislike) because it was a quantitative test that could be used repetitatively, like a fever thermometer. It doesn’t take a Rhodes Scholar to see why Big Time Psychiatry dislikes it so, in addition to its place of origin (Sakatchewan)
I know that lead exposure can induce hyperactivity, although I rarely see it mentioned in “ADHD” literature, despite lead sources still being aplenty. I suspect there are other environmental sources of similar chemicals around, in addition to the usual suspects.
I should also mention sending B1 to Cambodia as well. Since the locals eat polished rice, they’re also going to have problems involving B1 deficiency, such as beriberi, which not only induces depression, but is also fatal, if not treated.
You’d be better off sending niacinamide to Cambodia. The locals are likely to be on (forced) low protein diets, raising the risk of pellagra, symptomatically identical to schizophrenia, except for the rash, among the population at large. It is a fatal disease, after all.
They’d survive easily if they were familiar with nutrient therapy and its appropriate applications. Then, they’d have to primarily worry about the country’s organized psychiatrists, who would be particularly outraged if their own “treatment failures” got better instead of sinking into delerium where they’d need eternal “hospitalization”.
If you can, you go to the corner and see what’s there. Now you can tell who’s jiving you and/or whether they’ve actually been there, themselves.
I presume they’re using psilocybe cubensis, which both grows wild in the Southern US and can also be cultivated (I know one cultivator, who speaks to me because I’m familiar with our wild hallucinogenic mushrooms).
Decades ago, I became interested in hallucinogenic mushrooms that grew wild in the northern US, where I live. Since I had to keep myself relatively sane, as well as others interested in eating such fungi, I studied early megavitamin therapy, to keep myself and my potential volunteers out of hospital (and jail, as well, for myself). Thus, I accidentally became the best “psychiatrist” in the area without being an MD or even a psychotherapist (I also had acquired a Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic Test to screen my volunteers- it was used to screen alcoholics for LSD therapy in Saskatchewan in the ’60s). I even successfully treated some professionals’ treatment failures and successfully withdrew an alcoholic using megavitamin B3. (This may help the peculiar nature of some of my correspondence)
Alas, psychiatry now seems to be as sad now as it was then
Of course, this is also when the MD who gave the shot, flees, taking the incriminating document with him/her and hiding or disposing of it in order to have a defence when MD and hospital are sued, leaving the ER guy to go to the ward to give the patient a second disastrous shot, not knowing about document and its contents.
I hope it took the combined efforts of the entire staff in the psych ward to subdue him, a suitable reward for ignoring warnings about his sensitivity to certain psych drugs.
Both
And one thing that the writer didn’t relate was the number of German general officers having heart problems about half way through the war, that chained the ones still intact to rear echelon duties that were less likely to kill them than field service, despite the chronic heart diseases they’d contracted.
Since I follow a program that’s an anathema to both the pharmaceutical and the social guys, I have no desire to get doped or analyzed by computer generated ads from anyone.
Makes me glad I know of assorted nutritional programs for “depression” and when to use them so they’ll actually work.
The writer should have briefed herself by reading Hoffer and Osmond’s book *The Hallucinogens*, particularly the section on psychedelic therapy in the LSD chapter, wherein screening individuals for psychedelic treatment is discussed, as are the contradictions for such treatments.
As a psychiatric mechanic, I can think of all sorts of things, from test taking to supplementing. Unfortunately, I’m just a “mechanic”, so I’d be deleted for content. There are two keys that might pass: (A) is your cholesterol still high (?), and (B) is there a physician in your town who treats this with Vitamin B3 as his/her mainstay?
But it is why I used to periodically become the most able “psychiatrist” in my home town without having been to medical school, because I knew elements of orthomolecular medicine, such as basic megavitamin therapy for schizophrenia syndrome and alcohol withdrawal. This hardly says much for big time psychiatry in the nation at large.
One thing not mentioned by the ADHD crowd is that hyperactivity can be induced by lead poisoning, which can’t be treated by all the “speed” in the world.
Another thing about antidepressants is that they can unmask psychoses in cases where the shrink didn’t ask about dysperceptions (if they exist in quantity, it suggests misdiagnosis is likely to be spectacularly revealed once antidepressant medication is started).
I wonder if tardive dyskinesia’s an important part of recovery from “mental illnesses” because it’s the most common obvious result of long term psychiatric drug therapy.
One of the problems with manganese is that it can cause symptoms of dyskinesia by itself at too high a dose for prolonged periods, thereby making withdrawal from drug induced dyskinesia a tricky proposition.
Does disease induced TD show low manganese levels the way psych drug induced dyskinesia does? I know that orthomolecular guys use manganese salts to treat drug induced TD and wonder if it would help disease induced TD as well.
Researching this subject would likely be more productive if you realized that “schizophrenia” isn’t a disease at all , but a syndrome- a collection of signs and symptoms with certain preponderences that can have any number of causes if the individual repetitive variations can’t be teased out for specific treatments.
A sorry performance from the medico, as post partum “depression” can frequently be relieved with zinc salts with the (sometimes) addition of B6 to make them more effective. High serum copper, which the zinc antagonizes, is a common culprit in these post partum events.
Well, there wouldn’t be this fear of schizophrenics if you could treat them properly. Unfortunately, this isn’t likely to be done any time soon, though effective treatments exist. The problem is that there are no sponsors for said treatments, as there’s no money to be made for them, and no patents (to acquire that most important fame), though there is notoriety.
Have any of these assorted professionals done a nutritional workup, sending samples to a lab to look for nutrient and/or mineral deficiencies, excesses and such? Your thyroid? At least you’ll find out what isn’t going wrong.
An interesting corollary to this is that psych treatments that are effective (and there really are some!) are fought tooth and nail by Big Time Psychiatry under the guise of preventing you from degenerating into an incurable lunatic and social parasite.
It would make a great B movie, though-“The Return of the Serotonin Zombies…”
Maybe yes, maybe no. But you can say that your doctors know nothing about the relationship between dyskinesia and low manganese, which is therapeutic for tardive dyskinesia when corrected.
It’s hard to say what was unmasked, as most psychiatrists don’t use quantitative means to diagnose their patients, which allows dysperceptive patients to be misdiagnosed as depressive and get antidepressants, which unmasks their dysperceptions (and the shrink’s diagnostic error).
Maybe pseudo-religious faith or pseudo-religious psychiatry.
This is why I avoid psychotherapists. I’ve taken mega B3 and C for decades and I’d rather not listen to someone tell me how dangerous this is, or make horrible faces should I have the nerve to tell them I’m a schizophrenic.
Remember, Steve, that “major depressive disorder” is just a description, not a disease unto itself. There can be any number of entities inducing this syndrome and many will have treatments that will leave shrinks scratching their heads, because they don’t grasp that a variety of conditions with a variety of treatments are effective for the entities that are described as ”major depressive disorders”.
None of these professionals, though far more formally educated than I am, seem to realize that depression is a syndrome, not a disease unto itself, which means that no single treatment will be effective for all patients, many not needing and/or not responsive to antidepressants and possibly made worse by them.
Well, one thing you probably do want to do with “hyperactive” kids, is take a hair or blood sample and test them for lead levels, as lead induces hyperactivity that obviously won’t respond to treatment with stimulants, no matter how much money the pharmaceutical company makes.
I presume this is actually the pseudo-medical model that psychiatry uses being pushed, instead of the medical model as used by the rest of medicine.
I’m a stodgy and dodgy nitwit, who’s going to see if your serum magnesium’s low before I even dream how your inner life’s reflected by your syndrome, much less immediately take action (but not use pharmaceuticals).
This clinic seems to be a sorry place, placing no value on a varied diet to avoid “cerebral” allergies, which can induce psychotic behavior in the susceptible. Nor is it nutritionally beneficial to be on such a diet if you don’t know how to compensate for its drawbacks and lackings.
Snce the usual “treatments” for “ADHD” usually consist of using some form of prescription stimulant over a long period of time, it’s no surprise that none of the patients get any better at anything, except maybe hallucinating or expressing paranoid delusions.
You can anticipate cannabis related bizarre antics if your subject has dysperceptions and is using cannabis to endure or hide them. A way to prevent this is to take a Hoffer Osmond Diagnostic test before getting buzzed to see if you’re at high risk for losing your marbles before seeking drug induced adventures (the test was originally used for screening for LSD therapy for alcoholics, who are likely to bum out on hallucinogens if they’re disperceptive). Although hard to find in the US, Schizophrenics Anonymous chapters in Canada have access to a pocket version members can carry around like a pocket thermometer to check on themselves at intervals, when the situation justifies
Congratulations, Patrick, for being a believer in social origins of schizophrenia syndrome, who also acknowledges physical origins for it, as well.
This “depression muddle” is what happens when you mistake a syndrome for a single disease and erroneously seek a single cause to “explain” its presence. It would actually be a miracle if you discovered much of anything, as you’re dealing with a heterogeneous population, whose difficulties aren’t likely to be universally consistent.
You might be surprised who does respond to such things as megavitamins. I lost a job when two of these individuals graduated from a substance abuse facility after being secretly placed on such a program to keep the other residents from being hassled from having to make repeat hospital trips (for “security” reasons) while dealing with the “daft” individuals, who both “graduated” when they weren’t supposed to, as they were judged as probable treatment failures on entering the program.
A sad experience, liable to be even sadder when you find out that this can be readily treated with mega B3 and C ala Hoffer and Osmond instead of the Big Pharma zombie drugs and/or prolonged analysis.
I wonder if l-glutamine antagonizes ketamine the way it antagonizes phencyclidine (PCP).
Of course benzos are harder to come off than heroin. They’re all fat soluble and heroin isn’t, so it (the opiate) clears your system faster than benzos, which can hang around in your fat cells for quite some time.
Psychiatry’s real headache is that the real medical practice of psychiatry comes from the orthomolecular guys, who have been pilloried by big-time psychiatry and big-time shrinks for decades, despite evidence that these crazies can successfully treat the big-time guys’ failures- or probably because this evidence exists at all.
This is pathetic. You’ll certainly find anxious individuals if you start with indiscriminately medicating people on a flimsy basis and get them strung out on benzos (while simultaneously denying that they’re addictive).
They’ll be coming out of the woodwork.
If I had a kid with “ADHD”, I’d want to have his blood levels checked for lead before I did anything supposedly corrective.
I know that niacinamide goes to the same neural sites as benzos. Is it possible to use it for benzo withdrawal in the same fashion as it’s brother niacin, can be used for alcohol withdrawal. Of course, becuse benzos are fat soluble, you’d have to use it for a much longer period of time as niacin, although some alcoholics have to permanently stay on niacin to remain happily sober.
Serotonin’s just the neurotransmitter of the week. Antidepressants have been pushed for decades as antagonists of assorted malfunctioning neurotransmitters, which have gone in and out of fashion as their treatment uselessness was established (I do remember dopamine, the pre-serotonin villain).
You had to take your vitamins, but under the guidance of someone who knows how to use them therapeutically, rather than the mental health chumps who medicated you into a daze.
They don’t have the awareness that we mad folk do. And since they’re psychotically afraid of us, we can’t help guide them, either.
If these cops don’t know what’s going on when they meet mental patients, they may need psychiatric chieu hois to go on calls with them to explain what patients are doing as well as initiating interactions with such individuals when the cops are called about their activities and don’t know what to do.
Here’s a career opening for former mental patients, particularly those with the hospital experience that’s given them the opportunity to encounter a variety of “diagnoses” they’ve likely had previous experience dealing with while they were patients.
(Duplicate comment)
If I weren’t a geezer, I’d investigate the idea of being a secret orthomolecular practitioner (secret megavitamin dealer complement to drug dealers?) with an obscure address in some university town. I could take on significantly more clients than the school counselors and their referrals would be in better shape than they are now.
There probably are records of therapeutic LSD use in Saskatchewan, kicking around from the old Hoffer/Osmond days prior to the DEA sanctions from the US. Prior to the DEA “saving” that region of North America, the Canadians treated a multitude of alcoholics with psychedelic therapy, which led the province to make psychedelic therapy mainstream until the DEA saved Saskatchewan from LSD by threatening the province with isolation.
The Personality Disorders- proud inhabitants of the Diagnostic Wastebasket. What would our shrinks do without the Diagnostic Wastebasket to hide their failures?
Superstitious belief.
So- our boy’s seeking a psilocybin monopoly, eh. Does he plan to sue every farm in the South that has a cow pasture for violating his monopoly? Psilocybe cubensis does grow wild there. Maybe he could sue everyone with pastureland in Spain. Psilocybe cubensis is an import from there, courtesy of the conquistadores.
This reminds me of an incident that occurred while I was in Vietnam. My company was leaving a small firebase it was occupying, to be replaced by another the next day, and my drunken squad leader staggered up to a group of us stoners to tell us that we were the only individuals capable of fighting, should the VC show up that night to give us a violent sendoff.
Makes me glad I got into orthomolecular medicine decades ago, where I can easily avoid these bombardments promoting pharmaceutical miracle substances before the lawsuits featuring them hit the media.
Like the other psychiatric “diseases”, depression is but a syndrome that can have any number of origins, which is why these common psychiatric “treatments” are frequently useless or damaging, just as they are for the other psych “diseases”.
You can start to sort your subjects via testing their perceptual stability, one of the easiest ways being the HOD test, which is quantitative. The folks with unstable perceptions are more likely to bum or freak out than people whose perceptual worlds are more stable.
Many years ago, I had an illustrative experience that demonstrated this. Some young chap at the center where I volunteered, wanted to take LSD, but he wanted to take the test to see if this was a good idea. His score was very high, as though he were tripping already (he wasn’t), so I told him he was high risk and I wouldn’t supervise (guide?) his upcoming trip unless he took 3 grams of ascorbic acid (vit. C) per day for several days prior to his voyage, so he wouldn’t lose his marbles and jump out a window.
He didn’t take the C but did drop the acid and had a miserable time, finally telling me in an embarassed voice that he’d jumped out of a window in his house.
Alas, I was unaware that “real” medicine’s only purpose was to churn out profit for pharmaceutical companies, while therapeutic benefits were only side effects.
No, as megavitamins B3 and C will frequently appropriately treat both “real” and drug-induced schizophrenias, which you’d know, were you into orthomolecular medicine.
These bad reactions to antidepressants come as no surprise, since shrinks and GP’s don’t like to assess the perceptual status of their patients before prescribing something, preferring to be surprised by toxic drug reactions, instead.
You have to remember that Big-time Psychiatry has only a pseudo-medical model to justify its actions. The orthomolecular guys, who do use the same medical model that GP’s do, are subjected to constant criticism from Big-time Psychiatry’s alleged thought leaders for believing nutrient therapy superior to constant heavy medicating with the drugs MIA members despise.
So, does this mean I’m a point man for a host of the Khan’s barbarians when I say that depression isn’t a disease at all, but a syndrome arising from multiple conditions and that antidepressants alone don’t really treat any of them?
I find this discussion a little too arcane, as I also know how H&O used to treat flashbacks and unwanted perceptual anomalies- with mega B3 and C. Having used it myself with various people by following H&O’s written guidance, I’d be obliged to agree with them and not with the outraged shrinks on the subject.
By the way, the way to prevent these Experiences in the first place is to screen subjects with perceptually based “psych” tests like the Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic or the Experiential World Inventory before giving them a hallucinogenic substance. High scores on them make hallucinogens a bad choice for the test taker.
That was indeed an impressive cocktail (cocktails?) of drugs these alleged doctors were giving you. were they showing off for your pharmacist? Had they been hypnotized into writing scripts whenever you showed up at the pharmacy? Were they business partners with the pharmacist?
Then they pretend they’re following a medical model. Sometimes regulars who follow this blog are deceived by this pretense, thereby going on prolonged screeds after mistaking psych “medicine” for real medicine.
For some years, now, I’ve wondered if niacinamide can be used for benzo withdrawal in a similar fashion to using niacin for alcohol withdrawal. Naturally, as a withdrawal substance, you’d have to use it for a much longer period than niacin, as the benzos are fat soluble, which means it takes much longer to clear them from your system.
Personality Disorder? Another long term inhabitant of the Diagnostic Wastebasket stands up and identifies itself.
What we call “depression” is just a behavioral description that can actually arise from a number of origins that can either be social or organic, running from miserable life circumstances to organic ailments, such as heavy metal poisoning. There’s obviously no “one size fits all” treatment that relieves all of them and some that make depressed states more intense.
You become a borderline by not responding to treatment, even though said treatment is likely to be faulty.
You may find it entertaining that the orthomolecular guys are about the only ones who actually practice medically based psychiatry and the only ones who draw outrage from all our psychiatric “schools” at the very mention of the word “orthomolecular”.
The scammers who got the old dude daffy, would have likely pulled their scam off had they known that B3 in multigram quantities would have put paid to his unpleasant states much more easily than a trip to the alleged funny farm. They wouldn’t even have to flee.
This is unfortunate for our bosom pals at Big Pharma and our Big Time Academicians, but not for us as it gives us an opportunity to avoid Big Time medicating with the latest ineffectual Big Time Antidepressant for good reason. Maybe it will even eventually occur to the Big Time Academics that depression isn’t a single source ailment.
There are multiple reasons for depression. Successful treatments depend on knowing the origin of the depressed mood (and if there’s anything else besides simple circumstantial depressed moods) which can very from circumstantial to heavy metal poisoning (plus many things in between)- many of which will NOT respond to antidepressants.
Well, there is a sort of test for schizophrenia syndrome (I use this term in lieu of disease, as it has multiple causes), the old test for “mauve factor” created in Saskatchewan in its LSD for screening alcoholics for psychedelic treatment. It’s regularly bad-mouthed in the psych world because an outside committee found the “mauve positive” individuals had multiple diagnoses according to a group of shrinks. Interestingly (and entertainingly) enough, the actual symptoms displayed were constant while the “diagnoses” differed. Oh yes, and their responses to LSD were invariably bad.
Even more significant, the best treatment for eliminating it was later found to be B6 and zinc instead of proprietary drugs, which I’m crass enough to find entertaining, knowing that this disqualifies the condition as worth attention from Big Pharma.
It was an unstable and unsound empire to begin with. Its disintegration should come as no surprise.
If you’re interested in screening, you might enjoy the actions of the Canadian Schizophrenia Foundation, an organization featuring patient participation and use of the Hoffer-Osmond Diagnostic Test (HOD) as a kind of psychiatric thermometer. They oversaw creating a pocket copy of same to use as a “psychiatric thermometer” to test yourself, so you could see how you’re doing, a psych version of your bathroom thermometer you could take with you on trips. Of course the CSF advocates for the orthomolecular nutritional treatment for disease, which will cerainly deny them credibility in the pharma-crossed USA.
This “screening” might have some value if it looked into subjects’ perceptual status as well as their moods, which could serve as a clue to appropriate medicating (having “depressed” patients suddenly going bananas is more of a sign of incompetent medicating than of “treatment resistance”).
I believe Schizophrenics Anonymous is still going strong in Canada. They’re likely getting grief if they’re in the USA, as they’re fans of orthomolecular medicine (the first organizers were patients of Abram Hoffer).
The amusing thing about this is that these self-appointed “authorities” would go into convulsions at the very thought of nutritional elements having any effect on mental functioning, despite getting a few minutes discussion about pellagra and scurvy with no mention about their psychological “side effects” while they were students (I recall the contorted faces of the professionals who found out I used niacin regularly instead of “meds”).
Actually, what we call schizophrenia isn’t an independent illness at all, but a bunch of them, which have different effective treatments, depending on their origins. “Schizophrenia” is actually a syndrome, a collection of signs and symptoms, rather than a disease unto itself (excuse me for being so materialistic).
Congratulations. You’re the first MH guy I’ve ever read who admitted that.
A tricky question. It can work for depressed mood, but only if you’re experiencing many disperceptions and perceptual distortions at the same time. If I have to do psychiatric things, I use my Hoffer-Osmond Diagnostic Test in the “initial interview” if I can, so I have a better idea about what needs to be done if I’ve got to oversee the treatment.
BPD? That shows you were dealing with bumblers who didn’t know what they were doing, BPD being a true wastebasket diagnosis.
It also demonstrates why shrinks are so afraid of megavitamin therapy. You can sometimes successfully deal with others’ treatment failures without enduring multiple years of grad school in the process.
Steve. I got discharged from a halfway house for substance abusers by secretly treating a couple of them with niacinamide (I was working nights with no other staff around) and was caught because they were supposed to be failures, but graduated, instead. I was supposed to stop doing something that did work.
This study merely demonstrates the need to examine the “depressed” more thoroughly than is presently done, so you don’t have treatment failures that go floridly bonkers thanks to the faulty “therapeutic” approaches you’re using.
Yes, Miranda, as they used to say about travelling in the Old West, we’ve seen the Elephant.