Well, today’s shrinks would certainly be appalled at the late Gertrude Black, MD, a GP who never used antidepressants for suicidal ideation. She’d give her patients 500mg. of B1, followed by 100mg. every hour until they’d had 500 more mg. of B1. She’d also be amused when shrinks would tell her patients they were glad that the patients were now taking their medications, when they’d actually gone months or years without them (she was an early orthomolecular practitioner, before the word “orthomolecular” was coined).
Over the years, I’ve noticed that a number of these shooter guys are likely hypoglycemic, as indicated by artifacts such as candy wrappers, pop and beer bottles, “Twinkie” type mini cakes, French fries and or bags they came in. Of course these aren’t “psychiatric” disorders, because they’re identified by physical testing, whereas “psychiatric” disorders are diagnosed by data messages from the Astral Plane.
Easy. You can trust them to benefit themselves at your expense.
This mentally ill monster knows that politicians want to have their cake (unlimited numbers and kinds of firearms floating around that anyone can own without a background check) and eat it, too (pretending to do something about mass shootings). Maybe it’s time for the Colombian clothiers who offer Kevlar fashions to expand their businesses to the US- Bogota haberdasheries might help revive the business climate in our malls.
Since I’m acquainted with assorted nutrient treatments for depression, I find this debate an interesting anachronism. Since I’d never go to an ordinary shrink, should I become depressed, and certainly never start on antidepressants, I think the debate is trivial- too bad so many individuals are suiciding on their medication.
If I were convalescing, I’d prefer going to the Earth House myself, but I’m probably a lot more prosaic than many of the MIA readers. I’m also less likely to extract philosophical meaning from the bulk of my dysperceptions, when I have them. I also have to be sometimes reminded to take my vitamins and avoid junk food.
Decades ago, Abram Hoffer began to treat such individuals with a program based around niacin, starting with a gent who’d been held by the Japanese for nearly 4 years. The response was so noticeable that he wound up treating a number of former concentration camp prisoners who’d been held by the Germans (Hoffer was Jewish, himself, which led to him getting a number of referrals of these individuals).
Someone didn’t pay attention to the positive qualities of “schizophrenics”, namely their immunity to viral diseases, among other things. But then, this had to be ignored, because it was made public by the psychiatric outlaws, Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond in their evil book *How to Live with Schizophrenia*, evil because it discussed the syndrome honestly and because it introduced the public to megavitamin therapy.
This present emphasis on genetics reminds me of those earlier guys’ attempts to prove the “White Man’s” right and duty to own the prime real estate and command the locals in regions where he’d turn into a delirious insane lobster if he spent an hour in the midday sun.
All the antipsychotic pushers need to do is warn us of the millions of undiagnosed psychotics who could be easily identified by their tics, twitches and added poundage if we permitted unlimited use of the drugs they’re pushing.
Makes too much sense for psychiatry to accept. Getting rid of the DSM and seeking real diagnoses, instead, would force wannabe psychiatrists to actually study real medicine instead of flippantly reeling off diagnoses, a serious blow to the profession and its numbers of practitioners.
Pretend there’s a convention of sideshow performers in town
Olanzapine? No wonder the exposure periods are so short- if they were long enough to simulate a real course of treatment, the experimenters would have an experimental group consisting of 300 pound subjects.
Not having either shrinks or therapists, I don’t have a problem there. Since I do use mega niacin, I occasionally find myself flushing in public, but can easily get away by telling the curious I’m taking it for my cholesterol. Since I live in a facility for seniors, I avoid “coming out”.
Did they ask you about alcohol? One minute you mention three drinks, and shortly afterward, just one. The landlord seems pretty jive, as are these supposed doctors who apparently never took a drinking history, whereas I, maybe because I’m of unsound mind, see a large neon sign that says *ALCOHOLIC BLACKOUT* as one of those flashing neon arrows points to you.
This is an example of what happens when you consider “depression” to be an entity unto itself instead of a symptom of some pathological process that can be identified and readily (for the most part) treated, frequently without the use of psych meds, once its origin can be pinpointed. It should be no surprise that the pseudo-biological explanation for depression given by the average shrink will tend to make patients more depressed.
You’re lucky to have found an occupational niche appropriate to your capabilities. My long acquaintance with orthomolecular medicine and its treatments make me unacceptable to supervisors and directors. Say, I’d get a depressed client with white spots on his/her nails, who doesn’t sleep well and doesn’t remember dreams- and out would come the B6 , zinc and magnesium. The pink slip would come several weeks later, when the case worker found out, no matter what the state of the client was.
Don’t forget the gun-toting mystique we’re subjected to in countless movies, TV shows and novels, where the hero snatches up Old Betsey and rides off to town to blow away dozens of heavies and henchmen, his Model 1873 containing hundreds of rounds of ammunition in the cylinder of his 6-shot revolver.
There aren’t “mental” illnesses, but plenty of physical ones that induce “mental” symptoms. Naturally, psych drugs are definitely not “treatments of choice” for them, nor are psychiatrists preferred consultants, knowing little about physical diseases and conditions.
It still wouldn’t hurt sexual minority individuals to become regular users of megascorbate, which antagonizes the paranoia inducing amphetamines and is likely also to reduce the level of adrenaline induced paranoia. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with suspicion, but carried to extremes, it can be incapacitating, making it harder to deal with real threats.
I still wonder if niacinamide might help in managing benzo withdrawal in somewhat the same fashion niacin can be used in managing alcohol withdrawal, which it both speeds up and reduces the likelihood of seizures and hallucinations in the process.
Niacinamide doesn’t work for alcohol withdrawal, but may work for benzos, occupying the same neural sites as the benzo molecules. You can also use niacinamide for things like anxiety instead of benzos, another clue to its possibilities. You’d have to use it for a long time, as benzos don’t like to gracefully leave our bodies, as many of you already know.
Are there any professionals willing to discuss the above notion, or should I go to an orthomolecular web site to broach the matter?
Pharmacological psychiatry is a better term. Your actual biology’s ignored (your own biochemicals can’t be patented, fortunately, as you could then be sued for patent infringement if they were), in favor of putting you on the pharma rep’s latest wonder drug (you’ll wonder why you’re on it).
What a sorry performance in both these cases! Is the idea of using calming B vitamins like niacinamide and minerals like calcium and magnesium so esoteric that only secret cabals know it? Or are the pharma detail man’s toys and trips to subtropical “conference” sites so hypnotizing that all else is forgotten?
Of course these journals are filled with spin. Medicine is now ideological. Successful treatment means treatments that enrich providers and (pharmaceutical) suppliers, not treatments that cure or improve the patient so much that (s)he doesn’t have to return for more treatment. Look how popular addictive psychiatric drugs have become, with no attempt ever made to eliminate these pharmaceuticals (though millions are spent promoting them).
He’d do a lot better to provide the vets with bottles of 100 mg. B1, bottles of 500mcg. B12 sublingual and maybe 500 mg. niacinamide tablets. It would be cheaper than Esketamine and probably just as effective, though it wouldn’t get you stoned.
When I first saw your circumstantial complaints, I began to think B6, zinc, magnesium and B complex 100’s, the B6 for interrupted sleep cycles, the zinc and magnesium for anxiety and the B100’s on general principles. I’m impressed with the impressive number of drugs they gave you and how miserable the results were. I’m also impressed with the court martial I’d get if I were in your unit when I made suggestions you did something like the above and also suggested the use of my HOD test to monitor your condition.
Could this be something like tardive dyskinesia, which occurs when the nervous system becomes maladapted to or in the presence of antipsychotics?
You probably have that right. Nothing is more likely to raise our “biological” psychiatrists’ hackles than verification of Hoffer and Osmond’s adrenochrome hypothesis, as it was probably officially “refuted” by the prior generation’s “experts”. That the treatment the pair used didn’t involve patented “antipsychotic” drugs probably made it even less acceptable.
The reader should also realize that antipsychotic drugs raise the user’s estrogen levels, which will the chances of the user contracting cancer.
Since “depression” isn’t a disease unto itself, but a syndrome that can have one or more of a number of origins, the ineffectuality of antidepressants comes as no surprise. What is surprising are these individuals puffing them as lifesaving drugs, without knowing anything about the syndrome, itself, because there are different causes for depressed moods with correspondingly different treatments (although Anderson Cooper may not believe it) that are likely to work far better than antidepressants could ever hope to.
Better start your vitamins, lads and lassies. If you’re poor, better get used to the niacin flush. Time to stay away from those junk food items you have such a craving for. Better get used to fresh foods and thoughtful grocery shopping and reading the small print on those package labels. Exercising won’t hurt, but ditch those multivitamins with copper in them. Better avoid those who are certain you’ll face serious harm by doing the above things, while simultaneously feeding you rubbish about the RDA’s. Better find a nutritionally oriented professional.
Writers used to comment about Nicholas II, last Tsar of all the Russians, gazing into a speaker’s eyes. Of course he had nothing to say at all, save maybe a platitude at the end of the speech to him.
Nowadays, you don’t have many neuroscientists who openly admit to taking hallucinogens, because it would be a black mark on their careers. And they certainly can’t admit these substances can provide any useful information about how your brain works, because that would also be a similar career black mark.
You could start by being more aware of the characteristics of the people you know and those who you meet, without being overwhelmed by connections and simple degree of education.
It would probably be a good idea for MIA fans to read the late Humphry Osmond’s book *Models of Madness, Models of Medicine* if they can find a copy, giving them the ability to see that the alleged “biomedical” model held by Big-Time Psychiatry is actually a muddled model of “combined” medical and moral models. This can be easily noticed when you hear some lecturing shrink carry on about “diseases of behavior”, a term that deserves the Punch in the Nose Award for smug ignorance. Real medicine has limited goals, not grandiose notions about universal morality and ethics.
Treatment successful! Case closed!
Of course these brilliant scientists are paying no attention to how poverty effects one’s diet and exposure to environmental pollutants. If they did, they’d be likely to discover the horrifying fact that some poor people might be just as smart as they are, leading to shock and horror among our alleged intellectual elites, now forced to build concentration camps to prove their original assumptions. My friend, Dr. Joe, a high school drop out with a PhD, would get quite a charge out of their terror, should his degree hide his status.
Steve. Maybe you haven’t been following the political screeds, as there’s a powerful right-wing sect that promotes the notion that all human activity should be based on how much income is generated from it by and for involved individuals, themselves (Donald Trump is morally superior to Jesus because he’s a billionaire and Jesus was penniless) and nothing else matters. This may help you understand the psychiatric mentality that passes for therapeutic success- it’s how much revenue your patient generates, not whether or not (s)he returns to anything resembling sanity and usefulness.
This brain asymmetry stuff is the kind of nonsense you get from trying to treat depression as an independent entity instead of a syndrome induced by a variety of causes.
This is a tale of psychiatric ineptitude. No wonder psych patients don’t recover- these alleged professionals didn’t even bother to quantify his level of depression, something a quack like me could get an estimate for in about 20 minutes, using his trusty HOD test during the first contact with an individual.
I also found those “treatments” pretty ghastly, being addressed to relieving the many side effects of the many prior treatments. I wonder how much money the pharmaceutical companies made off this individual with the medics’ casual attitude toward this alleged treatment.
Well, you wouldn’t want them to put their alcoholics on niacin, would you? This was why the AA medical bureaucrats decided that Bill Wilson was senile, because he advocated it after it removed a depression that bothered him for years and also persuaded a few dozen of his AA buddies to try it, with 2/3 of them reporting positive results. He was also pals of renegade shrinks like Hoffer (“Doctor Niacin”) and Humphry Osmond (creator of the word “psychedelic”- Bill had had LSD in the early 1960’s and became interested in the psychedelic therapy of those days, of which both were pioneers.
E. Fuller Torrey has an excuse. He’s never, himself, consumed any of the drugs he advocates, nor, I suspect, ever taken hallucinogens himself, to experience the patients’ world.
I wouldn’t know where they got such numbers, either. I never saw such numbers in my CJ classes back in the 1990’s. The National Review, etc. don’t seem to realize that when people become really bananas, they lose the mental organization needed to prepare a grocery list, not to mention the mental organization needed to make a complicated plan to carry out a mass shooting requiring the slow accumulation of weapons and ammunition.
Since our beloved “thought leaders” aren’t quite certain themselves about what will make ill individuals potentially dangerous, the idea they can program a machine appropriately seems more than a trifle grandiose, since an AI machine can’t function properly without proper programming.
These biotechnologists, scientists that they propose themselves to be, seem to be unaware that we have an entire body, where a number of things can go wrong that will effect how well our brains function.
Nice to know I’m a homicidal maniac. Since I haven’t been flagged, I should be accumulating AK’s and M16 type rifles, while using my Social Security to accumulate thousands of rounds of ammunition and dozens of magazines. Why don’t I have the desire to do so? I must not realize how crazed I’m actually supposed to be.
”
It’s easy as pie to understand, once you realize health care means the financial health of providers and manufacturers, particularly those of pharmaceuticals- not the physical health of the citizenry.
If you used something like B complex 100’s for the placebo, it would likely run rings around the active substance.
Probably a good thing I’ll never be a psychiatrist. After the student told me her patient was anxious, I’d have to ask her what she did to rule out physical sources: did our intern do a dietary history to gauge the patient’s refined carbohydrate consumption; did our intern ask questions about such things as BC pills, mineral and allergic reactions, as both excesses (e.g. copper) and deficiencies (e.g. magnesium and/or calcium) can induce anxiety): did our intern ask about medications, etc. If none of the above were done, I’d have to shred the treatment plan in order to get the intern to properly prepare one that was based on fact instead of manufacturer persuasion.
Yes, it’s a good thing I’m not made to be a psychiatrist.
If he asked them, they’d probably feed him verbiage worthy of used car salesmen promoting their clunkers on late-night TV. The chief (and probably only) gain would be learning the defects in the product that the salesmen are trying to hide.
The US company making aspirin can easily absorb any possible losses because of the amount and variety of its products. As far as I know, almost all the country’s bulk aspirin comes from one factory in one place. Then it’s sold to drug companies and chain pharmacies, which tablet the bulk aspirin into their company brands. The buyers are the ones that set the price of their tablets.
No surprise those in power are in no hurry to promote drug discontinuation, as there’s no money in not selling drugs, but plenty in supplying them to feed addicts’ appetites. After all, Health Care isn’t about your health, but the financial health of manufacturers and corporate providers.
What these eugenicists don’t know or don’t want you to know are the plusses of “schizophrenia” and being same. You’re less likely to have allergies, you have far greater resistance to viruses, are less likely to succumb to wound shock and (most important in the pro-pollution Trump era) you’re far less likely to get cancer than “straight people”- of Hoffer’s 5000 “schizophrenic” patients, 10 had or eventually had cancer (mentioned in his and Osmond’s book, How to Live with Schizophrenia). The first-order relatives of these genetically “inferior” folks also get the same benefits of this allegedly inferior genetic heritage (should we exterminate them, too (?)- maybe so, because they’re smarter than average).
Well, hardly ever.
Apparently, psychiatrists are on the hook to pharmaceutical companies. If shrinks couldn’t find the proper precipitating events, it wouldn’t pay for them to look further if it meant their parent companies couldn’t receive financial benefits from patented drugs, particularly if proper treatments for these states didn’t involve the use of their patented drugs at all.
Something amiss with psych drugs because you have to pay patients to ensure their compliance? How can this be? Surely you feel great taking them- don’t you enjoy the 15-16 hours of sleep you’re getting every day? Aren’t you the life of the party having all that involuntary twitching and pacing?
Was the victim a person of color. That would seal his fate in a small town southern jail. Naturally the cops are certain they’ve saved the community from a homicidal savage. If they got their hands on Colin Powell, they’d do exactly the same thing to him, particularly if he were delirious, congratulating themselves for killing a guy who had the delusion he was once a general.
Obviously, neither the industry nor psychiatrists understand why noncompliance is a problem for pharmacological psychiatry, but of course the patients can’t be asked and doctors can’t find out for themselves (ME?! take a psych drug? I am Doctor, a Man of Medicine! Why do I have to know what patients are experiencing??).
Fortunately for them, this is the world of neoconservatism, where the efficacy of medicine is determined by the size of the doctor’s and providers’ incomes instead of the health of their patients.
Well, at least to practice sincerely going through the motions.
Interesting how the conventional proponents of biochemical imbalances in the brain don’t pay attention to imbalances in the rest of the body that could affect brain functioning. One of the most striking of these are the thyroid irregularities, where low thyroid can instigate depressed moods and intellectual functioning, while high thyroid leads to a state of anxiety and fretfulness. No psych drug on earth can effectively treat these aforementioned states.
Your essay is actually on pharmaco-medical medicine and psychiatry. “Biomedical” psychiatry also gets to confuse itself with neurology, which few psychiatrists actually seem to understand (but what their premises would seem to suggest is that they actually comprehend the subject well).
Don’t forget promotion of ignorance among the characteristics of psychiatry/psychiatrists. Mental health is one of those career areas where you can be demoted/discharged for successfully treating patients by unapproved and/or irregular means, no matter how complete your patient’s recovery is.
That it should take a committee to discover that the DSM volumes are meaningless drivel doesn’t say much for present-day psychiatry.
Rachel. Maybe the dating adviser shrinks wanted to treat you by exposing you to torments while dating. Picture yourself filled with ambitious optimism dating someone so down they can barely get out of bed. Or you’re the one in the super doldrums while your date is filled with ambitious schemes for building the New Jerusalem. Or both of you are filled with ambitious schemes and gargantuan plans that don’t match each other (when you’re both down, neither of you will want to do anything, except maybe die).
Well, there can be all sorts of chemical imbalances, but many of them take place far from the brain, having more to do with metabolism and digestion than cerebral “owies”, with effective treatments having nothing to do with drugs (or “pure” psychiatry, as far as that goes).
For several years, I’ve been interested in the use of niacinamide in benzo tapering for the following reasons: (1) niacinamide and benzos occupy the same neural sites. (2.) niacinamide has anticonvulsant properties, as does its brother, niacin, which can be used in alcohol withdrawal, greatly shortening the withdrawal period and reducing/eliminating the likelihood of convulsions (I’ve had to supervise two alcohol withdrawals in person, so I’m no stranger to this).
Another incisive study that tells me that antidepressant avoidance is superior to consumption of same and reinforces the heretical notion that Vitamins B1 and/or B3 are a superior replacements for these alleged healing substances, once preliminary analysis eliminates the more exotic sources of depression, like heavy metals, food sensitivities, preexisting metabolic conditions and such.
As my head has cleared over the years, I’ve noticed that the audios I have now, though rare, make sense, unlike the gibberish and insults I used to hear periodically when I was daft.
Why do I keep getting this picture of the blind leading the blind?
This could be difficult. Pseudo-medical psychiatric interventions have a background of centuries of failure treating imaginary causes of psychological distress, but now pseudo-medical treatments can successfully turn raving maniacs into zombies, giving its practitioners reasons to expand their activities. Lots of luck trying to put them in their place.
With proper diagnostic techniques, you wouldn’t need the shrinks at all, as the mysterious mental ailments would be diagnosed using terms common to general medicine, leaving the ghostly shrinks with the more mundane (and likely useful) assignment of haunting closed asylums.
And how was this original (alleged) diagnosis made? Was the magic Ouija Board involved?
Many of the drugs in the MDA family give you a sense of empathy with others when you’re under their influence. These other drugs were likely created when MDA, itself, was outlawed back in the 1967 purge to eliminate hallucinogens, in an attempt to get around said statute, because the individual outlawed drugs were all individually named.
I think that pseudo-medical is a more descriptive term for present-day psychiatry than biomedical.
Maybe a thing, buts it’s something unknown until you take the trouble to find out what’s going on.
There is a DIY part of self help- what you eat. You aren’t going to successfully DIY anything (unless you think DIY going bananas eating junk food is a key to better health) constantly eating stuff that gives you interludes of being too buzzed to think straight.
Maybe there’s something in the French consciousness. The Maginot Line was also a product of French thought. Although it is apparently a great place for growing that French delicacy, mushrooms (except for truffles, of course).
How about using the term syndrome at the end of mentioning the name of one of these alleged diseases; e.g. Schizophrenia syndrome, bipolar syndrome, etc. (which these “diseases” actually are)? I realize the hurried writer’s afraid of wasting precious seconds, but the not so hurried reader would like more linguistic precision.
One thing about these alleged experts on ADHD is how they pay absolutely no attention to things like lead exposure, being willing to zap their patients for hours nightly and/or fill them full of speed for years. Of course it’s a lot cheaper to treat for things like toxic metals, which generates less income for the (pseudo?) provider(s) than zapping and “speed” doping.
I’d have to see what the practitioners’ protocols were to form any judgement on your treatment. This is a realm that’s getting popular with a variety of humbugs, as ignorance of proper practices is rampant (I had great difficulty getting my B3 properly adjusted, my local shrinks being ignorant of this kind of treatment, thus preferring to scold me, instead). Nor does B3 work effectively for all schizophrenia subclasses (the older and more chronic you are, the less effective simple B3 treatments become)
Remember, Steve, that both “depression” and “burnout” are also likely to be the results of depletion of nutrients. In fact, in the most mentioned obvious dietary deficiency diseases- scurvy, beriberi and pellagra- depressed mood is common to all of them. Although constant job stress isn’t going to make you a scurvy knave with all your teeth falling out, it will affect your internal resouces and stress you as a consequence.
The late Abram Hoffer also found Risperdal to be addictive. Evil orthomolecular practitioner that he was, he always tried to get his patients off their antipsychotics if he could, but he could never get them completely off Risperdal without them having flareups, mentioning this in an orthomolecular journal he edited.
His incarceration will definitely be miserable, too. Child molesters are on the bottom of the inmate hierarchy, exaggerated by the number of other convicts molested when they were small children, who are now large and dangerous violent adults.
That’s one reason why child molesting individuals from the professional classes aren’t imprisoned- because they’ll be eaten alive in the “joint”, which is hardly a reason to let them wander about, free.
The problem with the scientists bashing AA is that Bill became pals with Hoffer and Osmond near the end of his life and became a fan of niacin for alcoholic depression, as it relieved his own (and a number of his alcoholic pals’) depressed states. Alas, niacin isn’t a drug, leaving the shrink world to automatically deplore and ignore it, as well as to doubt Bill’s sanity.
Well, when you’re a “mental” patient, you can be easily ignored because your mind has supposedly failed completely, making any thing you say implausible and probably delusional. A patient could easily rid himself of his psychiatrist by monitoring his (her?) movements to discover when the physician’s regularly crossing a busy street. The patient arranges to constantly be on hand until a speeding car is spotted, whereupon the doctor’s informed by the patient to watch out for the speeder; whereupon the doctor will immediately step into the street, knowing the patient is divorced from reality and thereby can’t say anything realistic.
Good thing you didn’t say anything about mega ascorbate and flu prevention. Someone would be filling out the commitment papers in a flash.
Well, of the four proposed theories, the first is the most plausible. Of course, it will be ignored, as it provides pharmaceutical companies no opportunity to push their in-house speed formulation(s) on parents.
This poses a question. Do you go into psychiatry after you self torpedo your internship or your practicum, thereby proving you’re an inept practitioner of ordinary medicine?
Well, for students 9th Grade and up, you could give them annual Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic (HOD) Tests or Experiential World Inventories, both of which concentrate on inner experiences of the test subject, and one of which (the HOD) has a sub-set that suggest inquiries about suicide. I’m sure your professional readers will brush them off, as Hoffer and Osmond were Black Princes from the Dark Side of psychiatry (according to mainstream psychiatry), but I had an interesting experience while reviewing a group of old protocols I’d accumulated from numerous individuals. I had seven “suicide HODs” from several hundred tests, and the takers of six had made attempts (86%).
It might make sense if you talked about variations instead of A variation. The nutrient dependencies may have genetic influences, but different ones for each dependency are more likely than single “key” ones that affect all of them. The same probably exists for heavy metal poisonings, another cause for schizophrenias, particularly for metals like copper, which is a necessary nutrient in small quantities, but can bring on depression and/or one of the schizophrenias when found in excess. (notice I like to use the plural instead of the singular “schizophrenia”)
Oh boy! I can hardly wait to be drugged into “zombiehood” for my own good.
No surprise here, schizophrenia being but a syndrome with multiple origins and causes. Our not so brilliant researchers are trying to make sense of a syndrome of heterogeneous origin by turning it into a single disease entity.
These WPA guys are only pretending to be medical. Their “medical model” is corrupted with a moral model which has nothing to do with medicine, one of the reason the organization is such a fan of involuntary and destructive “treatments” (antisocial, eh. We’ll just have to beat, drug or zap it out of you if you don’t cooperate).
Both could conceivably be depressed, but you’ve got to be able to get a grasp of their experiential worlds to find out- something mama san certainly hasn’t bothered to explore.
There are certain cues that suggest the presence of depressed moods- such things as perception of time slowing down, constantly feeling misunderstood, the external world becoming dimmer, inappropriate sleep habits, such as insomnia, feeling sluggish and sleepy during the day but not at night. Beware of many diverse distortions, particularly the usual spectaculars- the auditory and extreme visual distortions and hallucinations, as treatments with antidepressants alone can lead to spectacularly bad results if these things exist and the treating practitioner ignores them.
An amazing, but not quite coherent goal. The “mental health” experts want us all to be “shtik” extroverts, lest we all become deteriorated self-centered introverts. I never thought that becoming a shtik anybody could be construed as a healthy state of mind- I’d have to discuss this with legions of Jewish stage entertainers if I wanted to seriously investigate this.
This is the kind of humbug you get when you treat phenomena of multiple origins as though there was only one (that will, no doubt, have a recently patented pharmaceutical alleged cure).
Even more intimidating than you’d expect, because you’re using a copper containing transponder, and one of the “schizophrenias” is brought on by excessive serum copper. I’m sure the authorities will tell us the pills are absolutely safe, because the hydrochloric acid in our stomachs can’t possibly have an effect on the pills.
Reminds me more of “1984”.
Where’s the Speed? During the Vietnam war, methamphetamine was a must in Special Forces camps’ dispensaries. As it left them too wired to function in firefights, the Green Berets preferred to use them in poker games, to keep the players awake overnight, although card games for serious money in a weapon-filled team shack sounds too risky for me.
BC, eh? Maybe you’d better get him to see Frances Fuller, ND (yes, that’s the letter N, not an M). She was Abram Hoffer’s secretary for 30 years, getting a doctorate in naturopathy while she worked for him. He said she had better rapport with his patients than he did, and referred his patients to her when he retired. Her office might still be in Victoria.
Well, today’s shrinks would certainly be appalled at the late Gertrude Black, MD, a GP who never used antidepressants for suicidal ideation. She’d give her patients 500mg. of B1, followed by 100mg. every hour until they’d had 500 more mg. of B1. She’d also be amused when shrinks would tell her patients they were glad that the patients were now taking their medications, when they’d actually gone months or years without them (she was an early orthomolecular practitioner, before the word “orthomolecular” was coined).
Over the years, I’ve noticed that a number of these shooter guys are likely hypoglycemic, as indicated by artifacts such as candy wrappers, pop and beer bottles, “Twinkie” type mini cakes, French fries and or bags they came in. Of course these aren’t “psychiatric” disorders, because they’re identified by physical testing, whereas “psychiatric” disorders are diagnosed by data messages from the Astral Plane.
Easy. You can trust them to benefit themselves at your expense.
This mentally ill monster knows that politicians want to have their cake (unlimited numbers and kinds of firearms floating around that anyone can own without a background check) and eat it, too (pretending to do something about mass shootings). Maybe it’s time for the Colombian clothiers who offer Kevlar fashions to expand their businesses to the US- Bogota haberdasheries might help revive the business climate in our malls.
Since I’m acquainted with assorted nutrient treatments for depression, I find this debate an interesting anachronism. Since I’d never go to an ordinary shrink, should I become depressed, and certainly never start on antidepressants, I think the debate is trivial- too bad so many individuals are suiciding on their medication.
If I were convalescing, I’d prefer going to the Earth House myself, but I’m probably a lot more prosaic than many of the MIA readers. I’m also less likely to extract philosophical meaning from the bulk of my dysperceptions, when I have them. I also have to be sometimes reminded to take my vitamins and avoid junk food.
Decades ago, Abram Hoffer began to treat such individuals with a program based around niacin, starting with a gent who’d been held by the Japanese for nearly 4 years. The response was so noticeable that he wound up treating a number of former concentration camp prisoners who’d been held by the Germans (Hoffer was Jewish, himself, which led to him getting a number of referrals of these individuals).
Someone didn’t pay attention to the positive qualities of “schizophrenics”, namely their immunity to viral diseases, among other things. But then, this had to be ignored, because it was made public by the psychiatric outlaws, Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond in their evil book *How to Live with Schizophrenia*, evil because it discussed the syndrome honestly and because it introduced the public to megavitamin therapy.
This present emphasis on genetics reminds me of those earlier guys’ attempts to prove the “White Man’s” right and duty to own the prime real estate and command the locals in regions where he’d turn into a delirious insane lobster if he spent an hour in the midday sun.
All the antipsychotic pushers need to do is warn us of the millions of undiagnosed psychotics who could be easily identified by their tics, twitches and added poundage if we permitted unlimited use of the drugs they’re pushing.
Makes too much sense for psychiatry to accept. Getting rid of the DSM and seeking real diagnoses, instead, would force wannabe psychiatrists to actually study real medicine instead of flippantly reeling off diagnoses, a serious blow to the profession and its numbers of practitioners.
Pretend there’s a convention of sideshow performers in town
Olanzapine? No wonder the exposure periods are so short- if they were long enough to simulate a real course of treatment, the experimenters would have an experimental group consisting of 300 pound subjects.
Not having either shrinks or therapists, I don’t have a problem there. Since I do use mega niacin, I occasionally find myself flushing in public, but can easily get away by telling the curious I’m taking it for my cholesterol. Since I live in a facility for seniors, I avoid “coming out”.
Did they ask you about alcohol? One minute you mention three drinks, and shortly afterward, just one. The landlord seems pretty jive, as are these supposed doctors who apparently never took a drinking history, whereas I, maybe because I’m of unsound mind, see a large neon sign that says *ALCOHOLIC BLACKOUT* as one of those flashing neon arrows points to you.
This is an example of what happens when you consider “depression” to be an entity unto itself instead of a symptom of some pathological process that can be identified and readily (for the most part) treated, frequently without the use of psych meds, once its origin can be pinpointed. It should be no surprise that the pseudo-biological explanation for depression given by the average shrink will tend to make patients more depressed.
You’re lucky to have found an occupational niche appropriate to your capabilities. My long acquaintance with orthomolecular medicine and its treatments make me unacceptable to supervisors and directors. Say, I’d get a depressed client with white spots on his/her nails, who doesn’t sleep well and doesn’t remember dreams- and out would come the B6 , zinc and magnesium. The pink slip would come several weeks later, when the case worker found out, no matter what the state of the client was.
Don’t forget the gun-toting mystique we’re subjected to in countless movies, TV shows and novels, where the hero snatches up Old Betsey and rides off to town to blow away dozens of heavies and henchmen, his Model 1873 containing hundreds of rounds of ammunition in the cylinder of his 6-shot revolver.
There aren’t “mental” illnesses, but plenty of physical ones that induce “mental” symptoms. Naturally, psych drugs are definitely not “treatments of choice” for them, nor are psychiatrists preferred consultants, knowing little about physical diseases and conditions.
It still wouldn’t hurt sexual minority individuals to become regular users of megascorbate, which antagonizes the paranoia inducing amphetamines and is likely also to reduce the level of adrenaline induced paranoia. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with suspicion, but carried to extremes, it can be incapacitating, making it harder to deal with real threats.
I still wonder if niacinamide might help in managing benzo withdrawal in somewhat the same fashion niacin can be used in managing alcohol withdrawal, which it both speeds up and reduces the likelihood of seizures and hallucinations in the process.
Niacinamide doesn’t work for alcohol withdrawal, but may work for benzos, occupying the same neural sites as the benzo molecules. You can also use niacinamide for things like anxiety instead of benzos, another clue to its possibilities. You’d have to use it for a long time, as benzos don’t like to gracefully leave our bodies, as many of you already know.
Are there any professionals willing to discuss the above notion, or should I go to an orthomolecular web site to broach the matter?
Pharmacological psychiatry is a better term. Your actual biology’s ignored (your own biochemicals can’t be patented, fortunately, as you could then be sued for patent infringement if they were), in favor of putting you on the pharma rep’s latest wonder drug (you’ll wonder why you’re on it).
What a sorry performance in both these cases! Is the idea of using calming B vitamins like niacinamide and minerals like calcium and magnesium so esoteric that only secret cabals know it? Or are the pharma detail man’s toys and trips to subtropical “conference” sites so hypnotizing that all else is forgotten?
Of course these journals are filled with spin. Medicine is now ideological. Successful treatment means treatments that enrich providers and (pharmaceutical) suppliers, not treatments that cure or improve the patient so much that (s)he doesn’t have to return for more treatment. Look how popular addictive psychiatric drugs have become, with no attempt ever made to eliminate these pharmaceuticals (though millions are spent promoting them).
He’d do a lot better to provide the vets with bottles of 100 mg. B1, bottles of 500mcg. B12 sublingual and maybe 500 mg. niacinamide tablets. It would be cheaper than Esketamine and probably just as effective, though it wouldn’t get you stoned.
When I first saw your circumstantial complaints, I began to think B6, zinc, magnesium and B complex 100’s, the B6 for interrupted sleep cycles, the zinc and magnesium for anxiety and the B100’s on general principles. I’m impressed with the impressive number of drugs they gave you and how miserable the results were. I’m also impressed with the court martial I’d get if I were in your unit when I made suggestions you did something like the above and also suggested the use of my HOD test to monitor your condition.
Could this be something like tardive dyskinesia, which occurs when the nervous system becomes maladapted to or in the presence of antipsychotics?
You probably have that right. Nothing is more likely to raise our “biological” psychiatrists’ hackles than verification of Hoffer and Osmond’s adrenochrome hypothesis, as it was probably officially “refuted” by the prior generation’s “experts”. That the treatment the pair used didn’t involve patented “antipsychotic” drugs probably made it even less acceptable.
The reader should also realize that antipsychotic drugs raise the user’s estrogen levels, which will the chances of the user contracting cancer.
Since “depression” isn’t a disease unto itself, but a syndrome that can have one or more of a number of origins, the ineffectuality of antidepressants comes as no surprise. What is surprising are these individuals puffing them as lifesaving drugs, without knowing anything about the syndrome, itself, because there are different causes for depressed moods with correspondingly different treatments (although Anderson Cooper may not believe it) that are likely to work far better than antidepressants could ever hope to.
Better start your vitamins, lads and lassies. If you’re poor, better get used to the niacin flush. Time to stay away from those junk food items you have such a craving for. Better get used to fresh foods and thoughtful grocery shopping and reading the small print on those package labels. Exercising won’t hurt, but ditch those multivitamins with copper in them. Better avoid those who are certain you’ll face serious harm by doing the above things, while simultaneously feeding you rubbish about the RDA’s. Better find a nutritionally oriented professional.
Writers used to comment about Nicholas II, last Tsar of all the Russians, gazing into a speaker’s eyes. Of course he had nothing to say at all, save maybe a platitude at the end of the speech to him.
Nowadays, you don’t have many neuroscientists who openly admit to taking hallucinogens, because it would be a black mark on their careers. And they certainly can’t admit these substances can provide any useful information about how your brain works, because that would also be a similar career black mark.
You could start by being more aware of the characteristics of the people you know and those who you meet, without being overwhelmed by connections and simple degree of education.
It would probably be a good idea for MIA fans to read the late Humphry Osmond’s book *Models of Madness, Models of Medicine* if they can find a copy, giving them the ability to see that the alleged “biomedical” model held by Big-Time Psychiatry is actually a muddled model of “combined” medical and moral models. This can be easily noticed when you hear some lecturing shrink carry on about “diseases of behavior”, a term that deserves the Punch in the Nose Award for smug ignorance. Real medicine has limited goals, not grandiose notions about universal morality and ethics.
Treatment successful! Case closed!
Of course these brilliant scientists are paying no attention to how poverty effects one’s diet and exposure to environmental pollutants. If they did, they’d be likely to discover the horrifying fact that some poor people might be just as smart as they are, leading to shock and horror among our alleged intellectual elites, now forced to build concentration camps to prove their original assumptions. My friend, Dr. Joe, a high school drop out with a PhD, would get quite a charge out of their terror, should his degree hide his status.
Steve. Maybe you haven’t been following the political screeds, as there’s a powerful right-wing sect that promotes the notion that all human activity should be based on how much income is generated from it by and for involved individuals, themselves (Donald Trump is morally superior to Jesus because he’s a billionaire and Jesus was penniless) and nothing else matters. This may help you understand the psychiatric mentality that passes for therapeutic success- it’s how much revenue your patient generates, not whether or not (s)he returns to anything resembling sanity and usefulness.
This brain asymmetry stuff is the kind of nonsense you get from trying to treat depression as an independent entity instead of a syndrome induced by a variety of causes.
This is a tale of psychiatric ineptitude. No wonder psych patients don’t recover- these alleged professionals didn’t even bother to quantify his level of depression, something a quack like me could get an estimate for in about 20 minutes, using his trusty HOD test during the first contact with an individual.
I also found those “treatments” pretty ghastly, being addressed to relieving the many side effects of the many prior treatments. I wonder how much money the pharmaceutical companies made off this individual with the medics’ casual attitude toward this alleged treatment.
Well, you wouldn’t want them to put their alcoholics on niacin, would you? This was why the AA medical bureaucrats decided that Bill Wilson was senile, because he advocated it after it removed a depression that bothered him for years and also persuaded a few dozen of his AA buddies to try it, with 2/3 of them reporting positive results. He was also pals of renegade shrinks like Hoffer (“Doctor Niacin”) and Humphry Osmond (creator of the word “psychedelic”- Bill had had LSD in the early 1960’s and became interested in the psychedelic therapy of those days, of which both were pioneers.
E. Fuller Torrey has an excuse. He’s never, himself, consumed any of the drugs he advocates, nor, I suspect, ever taken hallucinogens himself, to experience the patients’ world.
I wouldn’t know where they got such numbers, either. I never saw such numbers in my CJ classes back in the 1990’s. The National Review, etc. don’t seem to realize that when people become really bananas, they lose the mental organization needed to prepare a grocery list, not to mention the mental organization needed to make a complicated plan to carry out a mass shooting requiring the slow accumulation of weapons and ammunition.
Since our beloved “thought leaders” aren’t quite certain themselves about what will make ill individuals potentially dangerous, the idea they can program a machine appropriately seems more than a trifle grandiose, since an AI machine can’t function properly without proper programming.
These biotechnologists, scientists that they propose themselves to be, seem to be unaware that we have an entire body, where a number of things can go wrong that will effect how well our brains function.
Nice to know I’m a homicidal maniac. Since I haven’t been flagged, I should be accumulating AK’s and M16 type rifles, while using my Social Security to accumulate thousands of rounds of ammunition and dozens of magazines. Why don’t I have the desire to do so? I must not realize how crazed I’m actually supposed to be.
”
It’s easy as pie to understand, once you realize health care means the financial health of providers and manufacturers, particularly those of pharmaceuticals- not the physical health of the citizenry.
If you used something like B complex 100’s for the placebo, it would likely run rings around the active substance.
Probably a good thing I’ll never be a psychiatrist. After the student told me her patient was anxious, I’d have to ask her what she did to rule out physical sources: did our intern do a dietary history to gauge the patient’s refined carbohydrate consumption; did our intern ask questions about such things as BC pills, mineral and allergic reactions, as both excesses (e.g. copper) and deficiencies (e.g. magnesium and/or calcium) can induce anxiety): did our intern ask about medications, etc. If none of the above were done, I’d have to shred the treatment plan in order to get the intern to properly prepare one that was based on fact instead of manufacturer persuasion.
Yes, it’s a good thing I’m not made to be a psychiatrist.
If he asked them, they’d probably feed him verbiage worthy of used car salesmen promoting their clunkers on late-night TV. The chief (and probably only) gain would be learning the defects in the product that the salesmen are trying to hide.
The US company making aspirin can easily absorb any possible losses because of the amount and variety of its products. As far as I know, almost all the country’s bulk aspirin comes from one factory in one place. Then it’s sold to drug companies and chain pharmacies, which tablet the bulk aspirin into their company brands. The buyers are the ones that set the price of their tablets.
No surprise those in power are in no hurry to promote drug discontinuation, as there’s no money in not selling drugs, but plenty in supplying them to feed addicts’ appetites. After all, Health Care isn’t about your health, but the financial health of manufacturers and corporate providers.
What these eugenicists don’t know or don’t want you to know are the plusses of “schizophrenia” and being same. You’re less likely to have allergies, you have far greater resistance to viruses, are less likely to succumb to wound shock and (most important in the pro-pollution Trump era) you’re far less likely to get cancer than “straight people”- of Hoffer’s 5000 “schizophrenic” patients, 10 had or eventually had cancer (mentioned in his and Osmond’s book, How to Live with Schizophrenia). The first-order relatives of these genetically “inferior” folks also get the same benefits of this allegedly inferior genetic heritage (should we exterminate them, too (?)- maybe so, because they’re smarter than average).
Well, hardly ever.
Apparently, psychiatrists are on the hook to pharmaceutical companies. If shrinks couldn’t find the proper precipitating events, it wouldn’t pay for them to look further if it meant their parent companies couldn’t receive financial benefits from patented drugs, particularly if proper treatments for these states didn’t involve the use of their patented drugs at all.
Something amiss with psych drugs because you have to pay patients to ensure their compliance? How can this be? Surely you feel great taking them- don’t you enjoy the 15-16 hours of sleep you’re getting every day? Aren’t you the life of the party having all that involuntary twitching and pacing?
Was the victim a person of color. That would seal his fate in a small town southern jail. Naturally the cops are certain they’ve saved the community from a homicidal savage. If they got their hands on Colin Powell, they’d do exactly the same thing to him, particularly if he were delirious, congratulating themselves for killing a guy who had the delusion he was once a general.
Obviously, neither the industry nor psychiatrists understand why noncompliance is a problem for pharmacological psychiatry, but of course the patients can’t be asked and doctors can’t find out for themselves (ME?! take a psych drug? I am Doctor, a Man of Medicine! Why do I have to know what patients are experiencing??).
Fortunately for them, this is the world of neoconservatism, where the efficacy of medicine is determined by the size of the doctor’s and providers’ incomes instead of the health of their patients.
Well, at least to practice sincerely going through the motions.
Interesting how the conventional proponents of biochemical imbalances in the brain don’t pay attention to imbalances in the rest of the body that could affect brain functioning. One of the most striking of these are the thyroid irregularities, where low thyroid can instigate depressed moods and intellectual functioning, while high thyroid leads to a state of anxiety and fretfulness. No psych drug on earth can effectively treat these aforementioned states.
Your essay is actually on pharmaco-medical medicine and psychiatry. “Biomedical” psychiatry also gets to confuse itself with neurology, which few psychiatrists actually seem to understand (but what their premises would seem to suggest is that they actually comprehend the subject well).
Don’t forget promotion of ignorance among the characteristics of psychiatry/psychiatrists. Mental health is one of those career areas where you can be demoted/discharged for successfully treating patients by unapproved and/or irregular means, no matter how complete your patient’s recovery is.
That it should take a committee to discover that the DSM volumes are meaningless drivel doesn’t say much for present-day psychiatry.
Rachel. Maybe the dating adviser shrinks wanted to treat you by exposing you to torments while dating. Picture yourself filled with ambitious optimism dating someone so down they can barely get out of bed. Or you’re the one in the super doldrums while your date is filled with ambitious schemes for building the New Jerusalem. Or both of you are filled with ambitious schemes and gargantuan plans that don’t match each other (when you’re both down, neither of you will want to do anything, except maybe die).
Well, there can be all sorts of chemical imbalances, but many of them take place far from the brain, having more to do with metabolism and digestion than cerebral “owies”, with effective treatments having nothing to do with drugs (or “pure” psychiatry, as far as that goes).
For several years, I’ve been interested in the use of niacinamide in benzo tapering for the following reasons: (1) niacinamide and benzos occupy the same neural sites. (2.) niacinamide has anticonvulsant properties, as does its brother, niacin, which can be used in alcohol withdrawal, greatly shortening the withdrawal period and reducing/eliminating the likelihood of convulsions (I’ve had to supervise two alcohol withdrawals in person, so I’m no stranger to this).
Another incisive study that tells me that antidepressant avoidance is superior to consumption of same and reinforces the heretical notion that Vitamins B1 and/or B3 are a superior replacements for these alleged healing substances, once preliminary analysis eliminates the more exotic sources of depression, like heavy metals, food sensitivities, preexisting metabolic conditions and such.
As my head has cleared over the years, I’ve noticed that the audios I have now, though rare, make sense, unlike the gibberish and insults I used to hear periodically when I was daft.
Why do I keep getting this picture of the blind leading the blind?
This could be difficult. Pseudo-medical psychiatric interventions have a background of centuries of failure treating imaginary causes of psychological distress, but now pseudo-medical treatments can successfully turn raving maniacs into zombies, giving its practitioners reasons to expand their activities. Lots of luck trying to put them in their place.
With proper diagnostic techniques, you wouldn’t need the shrinks at all, as the mysterious mental ailments would be diagnosed using terms common to general medicine, leaving the ghostly shrinks with the more mundane (and likely useful) assignment of haunting closed asylums.
And how was this original (alleged) diagnosis made? Was the magic Ouija Board involved?
Many of the drugs in the MDA family give you a sense of empathy with others when you’re under their influence. These other drugs were likely created when MDA, itself, was outlawed back in the 1967 purge to eliminate hallucinogens, in an attempt to get around said statute, because the individual outlawed drugs were all individually named.
I think that pseudo-medical is a more descriptive term for present-day psychiatry than biomedical.
Maybe a thing, buts it’s something unknown until you take the trouble to find out what’s going on.
There is a DIY part of self help- what you eat. You aren’t going to successfully DIY anything (unless you think DIY going bananas eating junk food is a key to better health) constantly eating stuff that gives you interludes of being too buzzed to think straight.
Maybe there’s something in the French consciousness. The Maginot Line was also a product of French thought. Although it is apparently a great place for growing that French delicacy, mushrooms (except for truffles, of course).
How about using the term syndrome at the end of mentioning the name of one of these alleged diseases; e.g. Schizophrenia syndrome, bipolar syndrome, etc. (which these “diseases” actually are)? I realize the hurried writer’s afraid of wasting precious seconds, but the not so hurried reader would like more linguistic precision.
One thing about these alleged experts on ADHD is how they pay absolutely no attention to things like lead exposure, being willing to zap their patients for hours nightly and/or fill them full of speed for years. Of course it’s a lot cheaper to treat for things like toxic metals, which generates less income for the (pseudo?) provider(s) than zapping and “speed” doping.
I’d have to see what the practitioners’ protocols were to form any judgement on your treatment. This is a realm that’s getting popular with a variety of humbugs, as ignorance of proper practices is rampant (I had great difficulty getting my B3 properly adjusted, my local shrinks being ignorant of this kind of treatment, thus preferring to scold me, instead). Nor does B3 work effectively for all schizophrenia subclasses (the older and more chronic you are, the less effective simple B3 treatments become)
Remember, Steve, that both “depression” and “burnout” are also likely to be the results of depletion of nutrients. In fact, in the most mentioned obvious dietary deficiency diseases- scurvy, beriberi and pellagra- depressed mood is common to all of them. Although constant job stress isn’t going to make you a scurvy knave with all your teeth falling out, it will affect your internal resouces and stress you as a consequence.
The late Abram Hoffer also found Risperdal to be addictive. Evil orthomolecular practitioner that he was, he always tried to get his patients off their antipsychotics if he could, but he could never get them completely off Risperdal without them having flareups, mentioning this in an orthomolecular journal he edited.
His incarceration will definitely be miserable, too. Child molesters are on the bottom of the inmate hierarchy, exaggerated by the number of other convicts molested when they were small children, who are now large and dangerous violent adults.
That’s one reason why child molesting individuals from the professional classes aren’t imprisoned- because they’ll be eaten alive in the “joint”, which is hardly a reason to let them wander about, free.
The problem with the scientists bashing AA is that Bill became pals with Hoffer and Osmond near the end of his life and became a fan of niacin for alcoholic depression, as it relieved his own (and a number of his alcoholic pals’) depressed states. Alas, niacin isn’t a drug, leaving the shrink world to automatically deplore and ignore it, as well as to doubt Bill’s sanity.
Well, when you’re a “mental” patient, you can be easily ignored because your mind has supposedly failed completely, making any thing you say implausible and probably delusional. A patient could easily rid himself of his psychiatrist by monitoring his (her?) movements to discover when the physician’s regularly crossing a busy street. The patient arranges to constantly be on hand until a speeding car is spotted, whereupon the doctor’s informed by the patient to watch out for the speeder; whereupon the doctor will immediately step into the street, knowing the patient is divorced from reality and thereby can’t say anything realistic.
Good thing you didn’t say anything about mega ascorbate and flu prevention. Someone would be filling out the commitment papers in a flash.
Well, of the four proposed theories, the first is the most plausible. Of course, it will be ignored, as it provides pharmaceutical companies no opportunity to push their in-house speed formulation(s) on parents.
This poses a question. Do you go into psychiatry after you self torpedo your internship or your practicum, thereby proving you’re an inept practitioner of ordinary medicine?
Well, for students 9th Grade and up, you could give them annual Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic (HOD) Tests or Experiential World Inventories, both of which concentrate on inner experiences of the test subject, and one of which (the HOD) has a sub-set that suggest inquiries about suicide. I’m sure your professional readers will brush them off, as Hoffer and Osmond were Black Princes from the Dark Side of psychiatry (according to mainstream psychiatry), but I had an interesting experience while reviewing a group of old protocols I’d accumulated from numerous individuals. I had seven “suicide HODs” from several hundred tests, and the takers of six had made attempts (86%).
It might make sense if you talked about variations instead of A variation. The nutrient dependencies may have genetic influences, but different ones for each dependency are more likely than single “key” ones that affect all of them. The same probably exists for heavy metal poisonings, another cause for schizophrenias, particularly for metals like copper, which is a necessary nutrient in small quantities, but can bring on depression and/or one of the schizophrenias when found in excess. (notice I like to use the plural instead of the singular “schizophrenia”)
Oh boy! I can hardly wait to be drugged into “zombiehood” for my own good.
No surprise here, schizophrenia being but a syndrome with multiple origins and causes. Our not so brilliant researchers are trying to make sense of a syndrome of heterogeneous origin by turning it into a single disease entity.
These WPA guys are only pretending to be medical. Their “medical model” is corrupted with a moral model which has nothing to do with medicine, one of the reason the organization is such a fan of involuntary and destructive “treatments” (antisocial, eh. We’ll just have to beat, drug or zap it out of you if you don’t cooperate).
Both could conceivably be depressed, but you’ve got to be able to get a grasp of their experiential worlds to find out- something mama san certainly hasn’t bothered to explore.
There are certain cues that suggest the presence of depressed moods- such things as perception of time slowing down, constantly feeling misunderstood, the external world becoming dimmer, inappropriate sleep habits, such as insomnia, feeling sluggish and sleepy during the day but not at night. Beware of many diverse distortions, particularly the usual spectaculars- the auditory and extreme visual distortions and hallucinations, as treatments with antidepressants alone can lead to spectacularly bad results if these things exist and the treating practitioner ignores them.
An amazing, but not quite coherent goal. The “mental health” experts want us all to be “shtik” extroverts, lest we all become deteriorated self-centered introverts. I never thought that becoming a shtik anybody could be construed as a healthy state of mind- I’d have to discuss this with legions of Jewish stage entertainers if I wanted to seriously investigate this.
This is the kind of humbug you get when you treat phenomena of multiple origins as though there was only one (that will, no doubt, have a recently patented pharmaceutical alleged cure).
Even more intimidating than you’d expect, because you’re using a copper containing transponder, and one of the “schizophrenias” is brought on by excessive serum copper. I’m sure the authorities will tell us the pills are absolutely safe, because the hydrochloric acid in our stomachs can’t possibly have an effect on the pills.
Reminds me more of “1984”.
Where’s the Speed? During the Vietnam war, methamphetamine was a must in Special Forces camps’ dispensaries. As it left them too wired to function in firefights, the Green Berets preferred to use them in poker games, to keep the players awake overnight, although card games for serious money in a weapon-filled team shack sounds too risky for me.
BC, eh? Maybe you’d better get him to see Frances Fuller, ND (yes, that’s the letter N, not an M). She was Abram Hoffer’s secretary for 30 years, getting a doctorate in naturopathy while she worked for him. He said she had better rapport with his patients than he did, and referred his patients to her when he retired. Her office might still be in Victoria.