I don’t know about this, Francesca. With all those “meds”, I’d be afraid to strike a match, if we were in the same room- fearing detonation if I did.
I prefer to be an escapee, having been told many years ago by a psychologist that I was a fugitive from Mental Health.
We might disagree on a number of things, but not this. I’m afraid we’ll have to endure this nonsense until we consistently have to endure repeat disasters from this pseudo-science.
Naturally, use of corrective diets and magnesium salts will NEVER be recognized as a proper treatment for childhood anxiety as none of the big-time providers can make tons of money thereby.
Famine is also a way to introduce nutrient dependencies in susceptible individuals, such as to B1 and B3, leading to a need of persistently increased quantities of the appropriate nutrients in order to avoid deficiency symptoms, which frequently include depression.
Well, one of the first things wrong with this guy’s anti-Semitic work is that there is no white race, because there are no and never were any living white people. The people we think of as white are actually pink, because of the capillaries in their skins, and because of Europeans’ having subcutaneous melanin compounds, formed by exposure to sunlight. The closest thing we have to white people are albinos, the highest ethnic percentage of which are sub Saharan Africans, who lack these chemicals, being albinos.
Gaming disorder? This is ridiculous. This is one of many addictions that induce similar behavior, no matter what the substance or activity. Seeing if there might be certain physiological constants behind such activities could be useful, but having miscellaneous diagnoses for a single activity is worthless.
Nasty as it sounds, Steve, think mass produced psychiatry to get mass produced fees.
One thing is that drug experiences tend to be bad when drug users are secretly given hallucinogens, so they don’t know what’s going on, in the same way “real” psychotics aren’t aware what’s going on when they begin to suffer perceptual distortions and disturbances.
Sounds like you’re a victim of psychiatric guesswork and wastebasket diagnosing, psychoses providing the biggest wastebasket.
Fairly effective, but such treatments require continuous maintaining and attention to diet, particularly if some foods get you buzzed when you cheat on your diet.
Rossa. The reason that pellagra was so common in the Old South was dietary. Poor Southerners, in those days, lived on a diet of corn dodgers and fatback (in lieu of meat). Corn contains an enzyme that neutralizes niacin.
Yes. My early adventures in underground psychiatry yielded enough evidence to respect these chaps’ notions. Although I wouldn’t suggest you do one of these, I did a couple of alcohol withdrawals and a physical withdrawal from heroin (though my smack user didn’t have a heavy habit), in addition to more conventional uses on psych treatment failures. Since I couldn’t, I didn’t use drugs.
Tardive dyskinesia could likely be made a curiosity if manufacturers of psych drugs added 2mg. of manganese to every “antipsychotic” or maybe SSRI tablet they manufactured. Whether this actually made psych drugs more effective therapeutically is another story, but it would likely make them less damaging than they presently are.
No- what you might consider a vitamin dependency, a situation where so-called normal levels of a vitamin are inadequate to maintain one’s functioning. Think of ability to effectively use a nutrient effectively and efficiently as a bell curve with most people in the middle of the curve. At one extreme, you have individuals who can get by on a junk food diet because they can function with very low nutrient levels, while at the other end, you have individuals who need very high levels of the same nutrient in order to function at all, such as vitamin dependent rickets, where an individual needs hundreds more units of vitamin D than most people to maintain his/her bone health. The same thing also exists with the B vitamins, which are necessary for mental functioning.
They can be both. You’re not going to solve life problems if you’re constantly addled by stressors (or easily become so). Besides, unlike the conventional shrink, you have the means to find specific things with biological testing for things like heavy metal and copper poisoning, excessive changes in blood sugar, overlooked neurological ailments. When one knows these things, psych drugging becomes much less necessary. The problem is in finding a reputable practitioner, as alternative medicine’s an attractive profession for humbugs.
Not all of us. In the years prior to his dropping out of psychiatry, Abram Hoffer used to tell his “schizophrenic” patients they actually suffered from a form of vitamin-resistant pellagra (he was one of the founders of megavitamin therapy), which he was going to treat accordingly.
Ketamine is no more a psychedelic substance than PCP was.
That should have been “by increasing that substance to neutralize the anesthetic.”
Not when they’re on the verge of behavior normally thought of as psychotic, such as being bombarded by suicidal notions. These anesthetic drugs’ greatest suicide prevention value likely comes when your patient/client is so paralyzed he’s/she’s been turned into a vegetable incapable of movement, much less thought.
That’s right, oldhead. Ketamine’s action is similar to the anesthetic, PCP (phencyclidine- I hope this is correct spelling). PCP was responsible for instigating a number of incidents of delirium that would get worse if the individual was treated with antipsychotic drugs to bring them out of the experience. I experimented with using glutamine for that purpose, with some success on several individuals, using 1g plus at a pop. The rationale for this may be that PCP antagonizes GABA, which the glutamine, being a part of the GABA molecule, might have counteracted be increasing that substance to neutralize the anesthetic. Would ketamine respond to this as well?
The next question is- what is going to be taught about mental health? This is a subject rife with humbug about mental health, as many of the standard diagnoses are filled with humbug elements concerning causes and treatments, while many of the most effective treatments are shunned by the mental health “community”, and recovered individuals castigated by professionals as delusional for believing themselves to be well.
Maybe you could also mention that it didn’t take long for the real patients to find out about Rosenhan’s faux patients. They were aware of the difference, though they didn’t know why the fakes were hanging out on their ward- but they offered reasonable conjectures.
Maybe if the doctor took olanzapine himself, it would add the weight to his arguments that it would add to his physique. What do you think, streetphotobeing?
Hi Steve. Maybe “misprescription” is the term you seek, as leapers not only don’t work, but also mask the existence of real sanity threatening sources of hyperactivity, such as lead poisoning.
Akathisia is probably as treatable as dyskinesia. Alas, it isn’t treatable with drugs but likely with manganese salts, which no orthodox shrink will touch with a ten-foot pole.
No, but those are the arguments they believe and would to have you believe.
Frank. Don’t let Fox News read your item, or you’ll be deluged with more platitudes about the Magic of the Marketplace and how these crippling psych drugs are just an intermediate step to the creation of the Philosopher’s Drug, the universal cure-all. Maybe you’ll even get an item about not consuming dangerous nutrients, because the Philosopher’s Drug will cure all medical problems, even insanity (but not the companies’ need for a patent monopoly).
There will be no reforms in pharmaceutical practices in the US. In my mind’s ear, I can already hear the conservative pundits roar about how medicine’s real goal is to enrich manufacturers and other upper level providers (not to benefit the health of those who aren’t billionaires). This will be topped off with the usual conservative platitudes about citizen responsibility. That this is so your health care providers can be totally irresponsible, gaining enormous profits at your expense, will not be mentioned (except for more platitudes about how profits going into the pockets of investors and executives will automatically lead to miraculous advances in human health- the greater the profit, the more benefits will automatically accumulate without thought or effort on anyone’s part).
I occasionally like to needle the eugenically inclined, by listing the positive aspects of schizophrenia, many of which are shared by close relatives; e.g., resistance to viruses, increased tolerance of wound shock, resistance to histamine, giving immunity to allergies, partial immunity to cancer (when unmedicated), slower aging, resistance to diabetes, resistance to pain (double edged). I haven’t used this as an opportunity to ask if these qualities should be eliminated to increase our genetic excellence, particularly because first order relatives of this “inferior” population have the benefits of these genetic qualities without being psychotic- perhaps they should be sequestered too, so as not to spread them throughout the population. (Read Hoffer and Osmond if you think I’m making this up).
And with that inspiring model, TED talks take up the cause of psychiatric pseudoscience, while ignoring the real science behind Ms. Rucklidge’s work.
And the MIA community would wonder why two of my favorite psychological authors are LS Vygotsky and AR Luria.
To think of suicide as weak, cowardly and selfish denies the reality of the kamikazes, past and present. I wonder what the former naval AA gunners in the veterans’ homes would think of the aforementioned concept.
In this article, I can see why the late Abram Hoffer, the most prominent BC citizen dealing with “mental health”matters, said that the best way to deal with psychiatrists, is to send them all to Mars.
Looks like it.
Question: can akathisia from SSRI’s be successfully treated with manganese salts like antipsychotics can? About 30 years ago, a chap named Richard Kunin (MD) reported on successfully treating a small series of patients with tardive dyskinesia by this means, which was then soon taken up by the orthomolecular community, guaranteeing that mainstream shrinks would pay no (or hostile) attention to his work. I think he might still be still around (though in his late 80’s) and likely still has his own website; maybe he knows.
He also drank a fifth of Cognac a day throughout most of his adult life.
He also wanted to preserve the Empire after World War Two, when Britain was broke and exhausted and indebted to the colonies for their invaluable aid in beating the Nazis and the Japanese.
It was interesting in that it seems to verify some of Theron Randolph’s work from 50-60 years ago on cerebral reactions to foods and chemicals, plus the fasting treatments he evolved for treating mental disorders, though Bullmore never mentioned, or probably never even heard of this, as Randolph was an allergist who never used exciting new drugs to treat these patients.
An amazing accomplishment, but not if you’re on the receiving end of such alleged diagnoses and treatments, which are actually likely to mask any real ailments you might actually have. I, myself use B3 for dysperceptions and drunkenness, so I make it my business to avoid shrinks, diagnoses and medications, particularly trash like benzos, which are certain to be high risk with my history.
Although I’m one of those knaves who believes that many “mental” syndromes have physical origins, I have no truck with the notion of psychiatry’s confused attempts to medicalize diagnostic categories into independent entities unto themselves. To be truly medical, our shrinks would have to familiarize themselves with garden variety physical states that can create “psychiatric” diseases in order to properly treat their patients, a real challenge for students in the bottom of their med school classes, as many psychiatrists seem to be.
These screeds from these assorted shrinks and their associations only further reinforce my belief that med school grads take up psychiatry because they’re incapable of practicing general medicine, but need to deceive their patients into believing that they are real medicos nonetheless.
Correct there, John. The amphetamines were plugged for weight reduction from the early to the late 1960’s, as I recall.
You might also mention that long-term consumption of ADHD drugs also opens up the possibility of future opioid addiction, once the stimulant consumption has made the user dysperceptive and he/she finds out that narcotics are vaguely therapeutic for this altered (paranoid) states. That was how the earlier “speed” craze of the late 1960’s died out- the speedsters largely became junkies.
Why should our medicos know benzos are addictive? The detail people from the manufacturer aren’t going to tell practitioners that their companies are pushing addictive substances on them. The experimenter guys who publish sponsored journal articles aren’t going to tell anyone until patent protection ends for the drugs they’ve just reviewed. The sponsored journals aren’t going to tell anyone they’re pushing to. The only way you’d know, as a practitioner, is if you knew that all sedative-hypnotics are addictive by their very chemistry- and you’d draw heat if you publicly expressed this simple reality.
Anyone think Donald Trump will do what he says about drug prices? Anyone also think that the Great Lakes are inhabited by plesiosaurs surviving the Mesozoic epoch?
I don’t think rasselas.redux has any grasp of how much niacin is required (3g+/day) to have a therapeutic effect on illnesses of perception like the “schizophrenias”. His cereal chowhounds would have to eat 5-10 boxes of cereal/day to get remotely close to this level.
The problem is also that psychiatrists (if they aren’t in a hurry to go extinct) have to actually know enough neurology to at least be able to refer appropriate patients to the proper specialty.
An excellent piece that also demonstrates the difference between real medicine and psychiatric “medicine’s” pseudo-medical model.
He didn’t mention super nutrition, which uses diet and proper supplements to treat depression in pregnancy. More physicians should be aware that, towards the end of pregnancies, expectant mothers can become zinc deficient due to their rising serum copper levels just before birth. Proper treatment for depression from this late process involves the use of supplemental zinc and large doses of B6 to help with the zinc’s absorption.
Maybe also zinc, which the postpartum event suggests.
Well, it has a certain kind of meaning, if you know the argot. It actually says, “something’s going on and we don’t have the faintest idea what it is.”
If you’re going to be a spy, one thing you’ve got to realize is that you don’t want to blow your cover- you’ve probably experienced, many times, what happened when you did. The most important duty of spies is not to get caught, so they can send the information they’ve collected to their agencies.
Studies on “psychiatric” illnesses are frequently a waste of time, because the alleged diagnoses are simply descriptions of groups of behaviors that may or may not be linked. Within these “diagnostic” groups are individuals suffering from a heterogeneous bunch of conditions; it would be lucky to determine anything real about all the groups within such “diagnostic” categories.
Interesting enough, light therapy for psych patients has been around for about 40 years, but back then it was treated by the orthodox as a sort of equivalent to crystal gazing or having the witch doctor dancing around the fire, chanting and tossing mineral salts into the flames to get multi-colored flashes.
Another reason to be on nutrients instead of “meds”- no scripts to track you with.
Hardly. But they do keep you from getting too deteriorated. If you’re going to be a patient, better to be an orthomolecular patient, so you don’t have to worry about iatrogenic disease in the first place.
This ECT stuff is truly a sorry mess, even more so more so, because the average shrink doesn’t know how to prevent long-term memory loss for such treatments, even though the means (niacin in megadoses) has been around for 50+years. Unfortunately, it came from the guys who preferred using long-term niacin therapy instead of long-term drugging, which means we can be sure it will continue to be ignored or opposed by conventional shrinks, the same way these guys fail to prevent tardive dyskinesia by making sure their tranquilized patients are discouraged from using supplemental manganese and pharmaceutical manufacturers are discouraged from adding 2mg of manganese to their tablets containing antipsychotic drugs, doubtlessly because it’s only been around 30+ years and used and approved by the same mavericks.
There is some meaning in this gene study, though none of the reviewers openly caught what it was- that the psychiatric diagnostic system is flawed. Why are there five different diagnoses for one set of conditions? Doesn’t seem like diagnostic perfection to me.
Another item passed over by these alleged genetic researchers is the effect of diet on intelligence. I’m sure that these chaps like Burt, Jensen, Herrnstein, et. al., would find negligible effect from this, finding a junk food diet to be the equivalent of real food and proper supplementation.
Years ago, I came across literature discussing tardive dyskinesia as a result of manganese deficiency brought on by “antipsychotic” therapy. What you won’t enjoy is the realization that tardive dyskinesia can be prevented by adding 2mg Mn to every tablet used for such treatments.
Here’s one of the major enemies of psychiatry, as it’s known today, deserving serious attention by those on this site who’d like to eradicate it. Why go to a shrink to get your brain and mind numbed with drugs or ECT, when you can comfortably be on a diet proper for your biochemistry- using real biology to isolate “biological” (actually pharmacological) psychiatry?
That’s their problem, Steve.
Nobody ever said that tabloids have a grasp of anything resembling reality, particularly British ones. I bet they wouldn’t hesitate to put out something a third party would pay them to publish.
Well, the relationship between what you eat and your moods wasn’t discovered by psychiatrists at all, but in our time, came about initially through the late MD’s, Theron Randolph’s work. He was a pioneer allergist who began to explore “psychiatric” symptoms in his patients and found he could switch them on and off, by water fasting them until they weren’t symptomatic, and then testing them by having them consume foods one at a time, logging the ones they were reactive to. When he presented data to shrinks at a 1950’s APA event, the members greeted his presentation with an indifferent shrug, even though he had a 2,000 patient group he’d worked with.
They sure are. That’s why I suggested a trip to the neurologist instead of the shrink for her Man of God in an earlier post (a number of lines above this post), to get an idea of what you’re dealing with).
Well, Jesus was right when he said that the Kingdom of God is within you- it occupies a small space near the top of most people’s right temporal lobe, which is why you might want to take our man of God to a neurologist first, instead of a shrink, as there might be something physical affecting or irritating the activity going on in God’s suite. You’d better hope not- treatment may cut off access to God’s place, so our sufferer may be noncompliant for obvious reason, once he discovered he’s being cut off from God’s influence, as well as His world.
This is a little late to bring to the discussion, but I feel obliged to point out Hoffer and Osmond, renegades from British psychiatry, pointed out that simultaneous use of mega-B3 at 3g/day or more, prevents the long term memory loss that goes with these alleged treatments. Alas, I only knew one guy on vitamins, who’d had previous ECT, about 200 of them, before he started on B3 and other nutrients. His memory was intact, despite not getting B3 while he was getting zapped. He’d been chronically ill, so he was also taking 8g niacin per day, same quantity C, and high doses of the other B’s. He also did short therapeutic fasts once a month or so.
To the Social Identity Disorder sufferers given benzos, I’d say- if you’re really worried, buy some magnesium oxide tablets and pay for them by selling your prescription drugs. You’ll not only be more likely to feel better, but you’ll have enough money left over to treat yourself to dinner at a good restaurant, and maybe have enough to even take a date to dinner.
You’re dealing with the psychiatric version of the NRA, where the organization exists to enrich weapons manufacturers. In the case of organized psychiatry, the profession now exists to enrich drug manufacturers. As everyone knows, patients’ and children’s welfare take a back seat to the corporate bottom line; the patients can be crazy as bedbugs, while the kids can be permanently down range, as long as the money keeps rolling in.
That’s also why the cures for such activities involve increasing the problems that caused them in the first place- more guns in circulation with less oversight, in order to subdue wannabe shooters, and more similar drugs in order to end drug-induced craziness.
Yes, there are a number of things that can induce hyperactivity. I just picked lead, because it’s one of the most dangerous to health, sanity and intellect, where “treatment” with speed is most inappropriate, as it not only fails to solve the problem, but allows it to get worse.
That’s odd-getting legal status for a group that pushes speed to kids. I can’t conceive of how many years I’d do if I pushed speed to kids.
In all this flap about “ADHD”, I notice that NONE of the “scientismists” mentioned in the article have paid a lick of attention to a known major cause of these symptoms- subclinical lead intoxication, which frequently manifests itself by inducing hyperactive behavior in the afflicted. I hope this isn’t because of some unwritten law that forbids psychiatrists from using non-psychiatric drugs for any disease, so that d-Pen or calcium EDTA are no-no’s for use in hyperactive individuals, even if indicated by laboratory means like hair sampling or using d-Pen challenges (to see if lead is being excreted in urine).
You’re right. There’s no money or fame for proper treatment of these states. If you did treat them properly, you’d be likely to lose your license for using dangerous substances like B1, B3, B6, B12 and/or maybe desiccated thyroid (if you found signs of such disturbances- weight gain, sensitivity to cold, catatonic episodes). You definitely wouldn’t be invited to manufacturer sponsored conventions, even if you did keep your license (no more Florida conventions in mid January for you).
I don’t know, Frank. They may be getting 16+ hours of comatose sleep, per day.
I bet what the industry calls mixed depression is a mixture of classic depressive symptomology and perceptual distortions- a group you definitely don’t want to treat with standard antidepressants. The so-called antipsychotic treatments are an attempt to correct this by turning such patients into addicted (if risperidone is the father of this family of drugs) robots, incapable of any, much less serious, activity.
Well, the manufacturers of junk drugs need junk science to defend their practices.
I had outbursts for years, until I realized I had to give up caffeine completely. None of the various professionals I intermittently saw over the years were aware of this, and some of my worst times were when I avoided caffeine when I was feeling strange, but not otherwise. Now, if I’m asked about something related to someone else’s outbursts, I inquire about background information from their lives, to make sure something like this isn’t happening to them without their knowledge.
Maybe, if you found out he “knew” about being poisoned because the taste of his food had changed, and you realized his treatment might require therapeutic zinc in addition to whatever else you were going to do, inadequate zinc intake being a common cause of lack of or changes in taste for the worse (one of the reasons, Frank and Steve, I use the HOD test if I’ve got to have a patient- it asks about such things more quickly then I could in an interview).
This will be totally useless if the algorithms are tailored to our present “diagnostic” categories. Naturally, though, this is what we’re most likely to see.
Because, Lawrence, it was identified by allergists, not by shrinks. We both know that mere allergists don’t deserve serious mention in anything as tony and sophisticated as the DSM’s.
Julie- perhaps you should familiarize yourself with the work of the late Theron Randolph, MD, a gent you may not have heard about because he was an early allergist, not a shrink of some kind.
It was his contention, in the early 1950’s, that eating disorders came about because certain foods got the consumer buzzed when they ate them (think “psychiatric” symptoms). These foods could be identified in symptomatic individuals by water fasting them until they became symptom-free and then testing the patients’ favorite foods by reintroducing them one at a time, to see if the patients had “psychiatric” reactions to them; whereupon reactive foods could be eliminated or only consumed on a once in four day basis.
He presented his findings on 2000 patients at an APA conference, demonstrating reactions with selected patients and received an enormous ho hum from the assembled members, although orthomolecular practitioners took up his practices in the 1970’s (thereby assuring that orthodox psychiatry would never examine his data).
This is an intriguing issue, because the SSRI’s originally used for OCD-type stuff- obsessions and compulsions, for which they apparently worked, becoming used for depressions when some unknown figure deemed them potentially useful for said depressions, because common depressive symptoms were excessive ruminations and repetitive thoughts, which the unknown figure(s?) thought gave a reason to use the SSRI’s as antidepressants. Don’t forget that depressions were more common than OCD’s, thus providing a bigger market for manufacturers without having to develop new drugs.
Turtle. Your panic attacks are probably not of psychic origin. I was suggesting the magnesium salts to see if it were to keep you from getting any more anxious while seeking more competent assistance, than me. If we were face to face, I’d ask you assorted questions that would seem strange in a psychiatric interview, such as whether you’re frequently bothered by cramps (another sign of low Mg levels), since being pretty much unable to send samples to a lab, I’d have to make guarded inferences about what might be true, so I’d know what to deal with, particularly since Mg levels aren’t readily determined with the present lab tests.
Please, LK. There is no treatment for death. That’s why the troops build and inhabit bunkers, when they’re going to be in one place long enough. Since I was a grunt, but not a psychiatrist, I can’t say anything inspiring about dying- but I can speak about misunderstood conditions that masquerade as “mental” illnesses because I seem to know more about them than the run-of-the-mill shrink.
I should have also mentioned orthomolecular practitioners, the people you really want to see, but they may still have to conceal their methods in some regions, having been subject to persecution in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990’s.
Well, you can probably start by taking magnesium oxide,250mg. T.I.D., as the medical types say, while you look for a naturopathic or conventional practitioner experienced in dealing with these things. The magnesium salts are available at any drugstore. DON’T let anyone put you on benzos, as you can easily develop panic attacks during withdrawal.
That might do for now. I’ve got to duck back into the bunker before the incoming gets too close.
Panic attacks can come from differing sources, depending on the individual- things that can range from Mg deficiency to “cerebral allergies” (“psychiatric” reactions to foods and inhalants), to various malfunctionings of the adrenal system, to things like PTSD, where they get conditioned into you, to speak of several examples. To successfully treat them, you need to know their origins and the treatments for each of them (at least beyond psychiatric drugging, which is dangerous in unskilled hands).
The authors of this document should have a series of ECT, themselves, so they can set the example for the rest of us. Maybe the series should include a couple of bilateral ECT.
The idea has gradually come to me over the years of using niacinamide (in probably multigram, per day quantities) and magnesium salts, 750 mg./day, for withdrawing from benzos- the B3, because that version occupies the same neural receptor sites as benzos and the Mg. for additional relief from anxiety. I’ve withdrawn folks from alcohol using niacin (nicotinic acid) in their homes, but benzos have a much longer withdrawal period and I’m only a psychiatric version of medics in grunt units, devoid of office or clinic, so I’d like someone more respectable to consider this notion.
Yes- and carotid chokes are also sedating and calming.
Did this author chance to read anything by Temple Grandin? She seemed interested in literature produced by the autistic.
I can’t work in residential substance abuse facilities, because I won’t have second thoughts about using nutrient regimens to get the residents more functional, no matter what the facility’s guiding ideology is. I’ll help you with Oldhead, Streetphotobeing.
I like what Humphry Osmond did to the seclusion rooms when he became Superintendent of Weyburn Hospital, Saskatchewan, one of the worst mental hospitals in the world, at the time. He trashed the mattresses and turned the rooms into retreats, with the addition of furniture and decent lighting. Instead of giant fights to “seclude” patients, it sometimes became necessary to persuade patients to come back out onto the ward, so others could use the rooms.
There’s nothing particularly unusual about this. It’s been known for decades that the suicide rate for “schizophrenics” is 20x higher than for the population at large. I first saw it mentioned in a first edition of How to Live With Schizophrenia, written 50+ years ago, which I read 40+ years ago.
Now you know the meaning of corporate health care. The health care actually involves maintaining a healthy corporate balance sheet. Your own health is trivial; perhaps it’s better if the patients die quickly, leaving nobody around to question the value of their treatments.
Probably not, although there are a number of physical conditions that can induce depression in vulnerable individuals. Still, none of these conditions can be called a “disease of depression”, but only the specific ones that induce the depressed state deserve individual names. Depression, itself, is just a description of certain unpleasant mental states.
My favorite is #9, one surgeon performing simultaneous operations. This opens new pathways in surgery, where surgeons compete to do the most simultaneous operations, like chess masters competing to play the most simultaneous games at one session. The surgeons can strive to imitate grandmasters, doing 10, 20, or even maybe 50+ operations at once, as they vie for simultaneous operating supremacy.
This is also the time when your marginal high sugar low mineral childhood diet catches up to you. The high sugar intake helps you develop giant mood swings, while low mineral and vitamin levels ensure you’ll go through the day tense and nervous- and maybe start regularly using drugs to feel good.
Are the middle 1990’s the approximate time the SSRI’s came into big time use for depression? Although I think Prozac is mid-1980’s- not taking them, myself, I’m not sure.
Don’t hold your breath, Frank. At the present, you’re more likely to hear platitudes about States’ Rights and personal responsibility (“why should we be responsible for you when you haven’t been responsible for yourself, etc.”). You’ll be lucky if you don’t turn into a serial killer of politicians, using commonplace items found in hospitals as weapons.
I don’t know about this, Francesca. With all those “meds”, I’d be afraid to strike a match, if we were in the same room- fearing detonation if I did.
I prefer to be an escapee, having been told many years ago by a psychologist that I was a fugitive from Mental Health.
We might disagree on a number of things, but not this. I’m afraid we’ll have to endure this nonsense until we consistently have to endure repeat disasters from this pseudo-science.
Naturally, use of corrective diets and magnesium salts will NEVER be recognized as a proper treatment for childhood anxiety as none of the big-time providers can make tons of money thereby.
Famine is also a way to introduce nutrient dependencies in susceptible individuals, such as to B1 and B3, leading to a need of persistently increased quantities of the appropriate nutrients in order to avoid deficiency symptoms, which frequently include depression.
Well, one of the first things wrong with this guy’s anti-Semitic work is that there is no white race, because there are no and never were any living white people. The people we think of as white are actually pink, because of the capillaries in their skins, and because of Europeans’ having subcutaneous melanin compounds, formed by exposure to sunlight. The closest thing we have to white people are albinos, the highest ethnic percentage of which are sub Saharan Africans, who lack these chemicals, being albinos.
Gaming disorder? This is ridiculous. This is one of many addictions that induce similar behavior, no matter what the substance or activity. Seeing if there might be certain physiological constants behind such activities could be useful, but having miscellaneous diagnoses for a single activity is worthless.
Nasty as it sounds, Steve, think mass produced psychiatry to get mass produced fees.
One thing is that drug experiences tend to be bad when drug users are secretly given hallucinogens, so they don’t know what’s going on, in the same way “real” psychotics aren’t aware what’s going on when they begin to suffer perceptual distortions and disturbances.
Sounds like you’re a victim of psychiatric guesswork and wastebasket diagnosing, psychoses providing the biggest wastebasket.
Fairly effective, but such treatments require continuous maintaining and attention to diet, particularly if some foods get you buzzed when you cheat on your diet.
Rossa. The reason that pellagra was so common in the Old South was dietary. Poor Southerners, in those days, lived on a diet of corn dodgers and fatback (in lieu of meat). Corn contains an enzyme that neutralizes niacin.
Yes. My early adventures in underground psychiatry yielded enough evidence to respect these chaps’ notions. Although I wouldn’t suggest you do one of these, I did a couple of alcohol withdrawals and a physical withdrawal from heroin (though my smack user didn’t have a heavy habit), in addition to more conventional uses on psych treatment failures. Since I couldn’t, I didn’t use drugs.
Tardive dyskinesia could likely be made a curiosity if manufacturers of psych drugs added 2mg. of manganese to every “antipsychotic” or maybe SSRI tablet they manufactured. Whether this actually made psych drugs more effective therapeutically is another story, but it would likely make them less damaging than they presently are.
No- what you might consider a vitamin dependency, a situation where so-called normal levels of a vitamin are inadequate to maintain one’s functioning. Think of ability to effectively use a nutrient effectively and efficiently as a bell curve with most people in the middle of the curve. At one extreme, you have individuals who can get by on a junk food diet because they can function with very low nutrient levels, while at the other end, you have individuals who need very high levels of the same nutrient in order to function at all, such as vitamin dependent rickets, where an individual needs hundreds more units of vitamin D than most people to maintain his/her bone health. The same thing also exists with the B vitamins, which are necessary for mental functioning.
They can be both. You’re not going to solve life problems if you’re constantly addled by stressors (or easily become so). Besides, unlike the conventional shrink, you have the means to find specific things with biological testing for things like heavy metal and copper poisoning, excessive changes in blood sugar, overlooked neurological ailments. When one knows these things, psych drugging becomes much less necessary. The problem is in finding a reputable practitioner, as alternative medicine’s an attractive profession for humbugs.
Not all of us. In the years prior to his dropping out of psychiatry, Abram Hoffer used to tell his “schizophrenic” patients they actually suffered from a form of vitamin-resistant pellagra (he was one of the founders of megavitamin therapy), which he was going to treat accordingly.
Ketamine is no more a psychedelic substance than PCP was.
That should have been “by increasing that substance to neutralize the anesthetic.”
Not when they’re on the verge of behavior normally thought of as psychotic, such as being bombarded by suicidal notions. These anesthetic drugs’ greatest suicide prevention value likely comes when your patient/client is so paralyzed he’s/she’s been turned into a vegetable incapable of movement, much less thought.
That’s right, oldhead. Ketamine’s action is similar to the anesthetic, PCP (phencyclidine- I hope this is correct spelling). PCP was responsible for instigating a number of incidents of delirium that would get worse if the individual was treated with antipsychotic drugs to bring them out of the experience. I experimented with using glutamine for that purpose, with some success on several individuals, using 1g plus at a pop. The rationale for this may be that PCP antagonizes GABA, which the glutamine, being a part of the GABA molecule, might have counteracted be increasing that substance to neutralize the anesthetic. Would ketamine respond to this as well?
The next question is- what is going to be taught about mental health? This is a subject rife with humbug about mental health, as many of the standard diagnoses are filled with humbug elements concerning causes and treatments, while many of the most effective treatments are shunned by the mental health “community”, and recovered individuals castigated by professionals as delusional for believing themselves to be well.
Maybe you could also mention that it didn’t take long for the real patients to find out about Rosenhan’s faux patients. They were aware of the difference, though they didn’t know why the fakes were hanging out on their ward- but they offered reasonable conjectures.
Maybe if the doctor took olanzapine himself, it would add the weight to his arguments that it would add to his physique. What do you think, streetphotobeing?
Hi Steve. Maybe “misprescription” is the term you seek, as leapers not only don’t work, but also mask the existence of real sanity threatening sources of hyperactivity, such as lead poisoning.
Akathisia is probably as treatable as dyskinesia. Alas, it isn’t treatable with drugs but likely with manganese salts, which no orthodox shrink will touch with a ten-foot pole.
No, but those are the arguments they believe and would to have you believe.
Frank. Don’t let Fox News read your item, or you’ll be deluged with more platitudes about the Magic of the Marketplace and how these crippling psych drugs are just an intermediate step to the creation of the Philosopher’s Drug, the universal cure-all. Maybe you’ll even get an item about not consuming dangerous nutrients, because the Philosopher’s Drug will cure all medical problems, even insanity (but not the companies’ need for a patent monopoly).
There will be no reforms in pharmaceutical practices in the US. In my mind’s ear, I can already hear the conservative pundits roar about how medicine’s real goal is to enrich manufacturers and other upper level providers (not to benefit the health of those who aren’t billionaires). This will be topped off with the usual conservative platitudes about citizen responsibility. That this is so your health care providers can be totally irresponsible, gaining enormous profits at your expense, will not be mentioned (except for more platitudes about how profits going into the pockets of investors and executives will automatically lead to miraculous advances in human health- the greater the profit, the more benefits will automatically accumulate without thought or effort on anyone’s part).
I occasionally like to needle the eugenically inclined, by listing the positive aspects of schizophrenia, many of which are shared by close relatives; e.g., resistance to viruses, increased tolerance of wound shock, resistance to histamine, giving immunity to allergies, partial immunity to cancer (when unmedicated), slower aging, resistance to diabetes, resistance to pain (double edged). I haven’t used this as an opportunity to ask if these qualities should be eliminated to increase our genetic excellence, particularly because first order relatives of this “inferior” population have the benefits of these genetic qualities without being psychotic- perhaps they should be sequestered too, so as not to spread them throughout the population. (Read Hoffer and Osmond if you think I’m making this up).
And with that inspiring model, TED talks take up the cause of psychiatric pseudoscience, while ignoring the real science behind Ms. Rucklidge’s work.
And the MIA community would wonder why two of my favorite psychological authors are LS Vygotsky and AR Luria.
To think of suicide as weak, cowardly and selfish denies the reality of the kamikazes, past and present. I wonder what the former naval AA gunners in the veterans’ homes would think of the aforementioned concept.
In this article, I can see why the late Abram Hoffer, the most prominent BC citizen dealing with “mental health”matters, said that the best way to deal with psychiatrists, is to send them all to Mars.
Looks like it.
Question: can akathisia from SSRI’s be successfully treated with manganese salts like antipsychotics can? About 30 years ago, a chap named Richard Kunin (MD) reported on successfully treating a small series of patients with tardive dyskinesia by this means, which was then soon taken up by the orthomolecular community, guaranteeing that mainstream shrinks would pay no (or hostile) attention to his work. I think he might still be still around (though in his late 80’s) and likely still has his own website; maybe he knows.
He also drank a fifth of Cognac a day throughout most of his adult life.
He also wanted to preserve the Empire after World War Two, when Britain was broke and exhausted and indebted to the colonies for their invaluable aid in beating the Nazis and the Japanese.
It was interesting in that it seems to verify some of Theron Randolph’s work from 50-60 years ago on cerebral reactions to foods and chemicals, plus the fasting treatments he evolved for treating mental disorders, though Bullmore never mentioned, or probably never even heard of this, as Randolph was an allergist who never used exciting new drugs to treat these patients.
An amazing accomplishment, but not if you’re on the receiving end of such alleged diagnoses and treatments, which are actually likely to mask any real ailments you might actually have. I, myself use B3 for dysperceptions and drunkenness, so I make it my business to avoid shrinks, diagnoses and medications, particularly trash like benzos, which are certain to be high risk with my history.
Although I’m one of those knaves who believes that many “mental” syndromes have physical origins, I have no truck with the notion of psychiatry’s confused attempts to medicalize diagnostic categories into independent entities unto themselves. To be truly medical, our shrinks would have to familiarize themselves with garden variety physical states that can create “psychiatric” diseases in order to properly treat their patients, a real challenge for students in the bottom of their med school classes, as many psychiatrists seem to be.
These screeds from these assorted shrinks and their associations only further reinforce my belief that med school grads take up psychiatry because they’re incapable of practicing general medicine, but need to deceive their patients into believing that they are real medicos nonetheless.
Correct there, John. The amphetamines were plugged for weight reduction from the early to the late 1960’s, as I recall.
You might also mention that long-term consumption of ADHD drugs also opens up the possibility of future opioid addiction, once the stimulant consumption has made the user dysperceptive and he/she finds out that narcotics are vaguely therapeutic for this altered (paranoid) states. That was how the earlier “speed” craze of the late 1960’s died out- the speedsters largely became junkies.
Why should our medicos know benzos are addictive? The detail people from the manufacturer aren’t going to tell practitioners that their companies are pushing addictive substances on them. The experimenter guys who publish sponsored journal articles aren’t going to tell anyone until patent protection ends for the drugs they’ve just reviewed. The sponsored journals aren’t going to tell anyone they’re pushing to. The only way you’d know, as a practitioner, is if you knew that all sedative-hypnotics are addictive by their very chemistry- and you’d draw heat if you publicly expressed this simple reality.
Anyone think Donald Trump will do what he says about drug prices? Anyone also think that the Great Lakes are inhabited by plesiosaurs surviving the Mesozoic epoch?
I don’t think rasselas.redux has any grasp of how much niacin is required (3g+/day) to have a therapeutic effect on illnesses of perception like the “schizophrenias”. His cereal chowhounds would have to eat 5-10 boxes of cereal/day to get remotely close to this level.
The problem is also that psychiatrists (if they aren’t in a hurry to go extinct) have to actually know enough neurology to at least be able to refer appropriate patients to the proper specialty.
An excellent piece that also demonstrates the difference between real medicine and psychiatric “medicine’s” pseudo-medical model.
He didn’t mention super nutrition, which uses diet and proper supplements to treat depression in pregnancy. More physicians should be aware that, towards the end of pregnancies, expectant mothers can become zinc deficient due to their rising serum copper levels just before birth. Proper treatment for depression from this late process involves the use of supplemental zinc and large doses of B6 to help with the zinc’s absorption.
Maybe also zinc, which the postpartum event suggests.
Well, it has a certain kind of meaning, if you know the argot. It actually says, “something’s going on and we don’t have the faintest idea what it is.”
If you’re going to be a spy, one thing you’ve got to realize is that you don’t want to blow your cover- you’ve probably experienced, many times, what happened when you did. The most important duty of spies is not to get caught, so they can send the information they’ve collected to their agencies.
Studies on “psychiatric” illnesses are frequently a waste of time, because the alleged diagnoses are simply descriptions of groups of behaviors that may or may not be linked. Within these “diagnostic” groups are individuals suffering from a heterogeneous bunch of conditions; it would be lucky to determine anything real about all the groups within such “diagnostic” categories.
Interesting enough, light therapy for psych patients has been around for about 40 years, but back then it was treated by the orthodox as a sort of equivalent to crystal gazing or having the witch doctor dancing around the fire, chanting and tossing mineral salts into the flames to get multi-colored flashes.
Another reason to be on nutrients instead of “meds”- no scripts to track you with.
Hardly. But they do keep you from getting too deteriorated. If you’re going to be a patient, better to be an orthomolecular patient, so you don’t have to worry about iatrogenic disease in the first place.
This ECT stuff is truly a sorry mess, even more so more so, because the average shrink doesn’t know how to prevent long-term memory loss for such treatments, even though the means (niacin in megadoses) has been around for 50+years. Unfortunately, it came from the guys who preferred using long-term niacin therapy instead of long-term drugging, which means we can be sure it will continue to be ignored or opposed by conventional shrinks, the same way these guys fail to prevent tardive dyskinesia by making sure their tranquilized patients are discouraged from using supplemental manganese and pharmaceutical manufacturers are discouraged from adding 2mg of manganese to their tablets containing antipsychotic drugs, doubtlessly because it’s only been around 30+ years and used and approved by the same mavericks.
There is some meaning in this gene study, though none of the reviewers openly caught what it was- that the psychiatric diagnostic system is flawed. Why are there five different diagnoses for one set of conditions? Doesn’t seem like diagnostic perfection to me.
Another item passed over by these alleged genetic researchers is the effect of diet on intelligence. I’m sure that these chaps like Burt, Jensen, Herrnstein, et. al., would find negligible effect from this, finding a junk food diet to be the equivalent of real food and proper supplementation.
Years ago, I came across literature discussing tardive dyskinesia as a result of manganese deficiency brought on by “antipsychotic” therapy. What you won’t enjoy is the realization that tardive dyskinesia can be prevented by adding 2mg Mn to every tablet used for such treatments.
Here’s one of the major enemies of psychiatry, as it’s known today, deserving serious attention by those on this site who’d like to eradicate it. Why go to a shrink to get your brain and mind numbed with drugs or ECT, when you can comfortably be on a diet proper for your biochemistry- using real biology to isolate “biological” (actually pharmacological) psychiatry?
That’s their problem, Steve.
Nobody ever said that tabloids have a grasp of anything resembling reality, particularly British ones. I bet they wouldn’t hesitate to put out something a third party would pay them to publish.
Well, the relationship between what you eat and your moods wasn’t discovered by psychiatrists at all, but in our time, came about initially through the late MD’s, Theron Randolph’s work. He was a pioneer allergist who began to explore “psychiatric” symptoms in his patients and found he could switch them on and off, by water fasting them until they weren’t symptomatic, and then testing them by having them consume foods one at a time, logging the ones they were reactive to. When he presented data to shrinks at a 1950’s APA event, the members greeted his presentation with an indifferent shrug, even though he had a 2,000 patient group he’d worked with.
They sure are. That’s why I suggested a trip to the neurologist instead of the shrink for her Man of God in an earlier post (a number of lines above this post), to get an idea of what you’re dealing with).
Well, Jesus was right when he said that the Kingdom of God is within you- it occupies a small space near the top of most people’s right temporal lobe, which is why you might want to take our man of God to a neurologist first, instead of a shrink, as there might be something physical affecting or irritating the activity going on in God’s suite. You’d better hope not- treatment may cut off access to God’s place, so our sufferer may be noncompliant for obvious reason, once he discovered he’s being cut off from God’s influence, as well as His world.
This is a little late to bring to the discussion, but I feel obliged to point out Hoffer and Osmond, renegades from British psychiatry, pointed out that simultaneous use of mega-B3 at 3g/day or more, prevents the long term memory loss that goes with these alleged treatments. Alas, I only knew one guy on vitamins, who’d had previous ECT, about 200 of them, before he started on B3 and other nutrients. His memory was intact, despite not getting B3 while he was getting zapped. He’d been chronically ill, so he was also taking 8g niacin per day, same quantity C, and high doses of the other B’s. He also did short therapeutic fasts once a month or so.
To the Social Identity Disorder sufferers given benzos, I’d say- if you’re really worried, buy some magnesium oxide tablets and pay for them by selling your prescription drugs. You’ll not only be more likely to feel better, but you’ll have enough money left over to treat yourself to dinner at a good restaurant, and maybe have enough to even take a date to dinner.
You’re dealing with the psychiatric version of the NRA, where the organization exists to enrich weapons manufacturers. In the case of organized psychiatry, the profession now exists to enrich drug manufacturers. As everyone knows, patients’ and children’s welfare take a back seat to the corporate bottom line; the patients can be crazy as bedbugs, while the kids can be permanently down range, as long as the money keeps rolling in.
That’s also why the cures for such activities involve increasing the problems that caused them in the first place- more guns in circulation with less oversight, in order to subdue wannabe shooters, and more similar drugs in order to end drug-induced craziness.
Yes, there are a number of things that can induce hyperactivity. I just picked lead, because it’s one of the most dangerous to health, sanity and intellect, where “treatment” with speed is most inappropriate, as it not only fails to solve the problem, but allows it to get worse.
That’s odd-getting legal status for a group that pushes speed to kids. I can’t conceive of how many years I’d do if I pushed speed to kids.
In all this flap about “ADHD”, I notice that NONE of the “scientismists” mentioned in the article have paid a lick of attention to a known major cause of these symptoms- subclinical lead intoxication, which frequently manifests itself by inducing hyperactive behavior in the afflicted. I hope this isn’t because of some unwritten law that forbids psychiatrists from using non-psychiatric drugs for any disease, so that d-Pen or calcium EDTA are no-no’s for use in hyperactive individuals, even if indicated by laboratory means like hair sampling or using d-Pen challenges (to see if lead is being excreted in urine).
You’re right. There’s no money or fame for proper treatment of these states. If you did treat them properly, you’d be likely to lose your license for using dangerous substances like B1, B3, B6, B12 and/or maybe desiccated thyroid (if you found signs of such disturbances- weight gain, sensitivity to cold, catatonic episodes). You definitely wouldn’t be invited to manufacturer sponsored conventions, even if you did keep your license (no more Florida conventions in mid January for you).
I don’t know, Frank. They may be getting 16+ hours of comatose sleep, per day.
I bet what the industry calls mixed depression is a mixture of classic depressive symptomology and perceptual distortions- a group you definitely don’t want to treat with standard antidepressants. The so-called antipsychotic treatments are an attempt to correct this by turning such patients into addicted (if risperidone is the father of this family of drugs) robots, incapable of any, much less serious, activity.
Well, the manufacturers of junk drugs need junk science to defend their practices.
I had outbursts for years, until I realized I had to give up caffeine completely. None of the various professionals I intermittently saw over the years were aware of this, and some of my worst times were when I avoided caffeine when I was feeling strange, but not otherwise. Now, if I’m asked about something related to someone else’s outbursts, I inquire about background information from their lives, to make sure something like this isn’t happening to them without their knowledge.
Maybe, if you found out he “knew” about being poisoned because the taste of his food had changed, and you realized his treatment might require therapeutic zinc in addition to whatever else you were going to do, inadequate zinc intake being a common cause of lack of or changes in taste for the worse (one of the reasons, Frank and Steve, I use the HOD test if I’ve got to have a patient- it asks about such things more quickly then I could in an interview).
This will be totally useless if the algorithms are tailored to our present “diagnostic” categories. Naturally, though, this is what we’re most likely to see.
Because, Lawrence, it was identified by allergists, not by shrinks. We both know that mere allergists don’t deserve serious mention in anything as tony and sophisticated as the DSM’s.
Julie- perhaps you should familiarize yourself with the work of the late Theron Randolph, MD, a gent you may not have heard about because he was an early allergist, not a shrink of some kind.
It was his contention, in the early 1950’s, that eating disorders came about because certain foods got the consumer buzzed when they ate them (think “psychiatric” symptoms). These foods could be identified in symptomatic individuals by water fasting them until they became symptom-free and then testing the patients’ favorite foods by reintroducing them one at a time, to see if the patients had “psychiatric” reactions to them; whereupon reactive foods could be eliminated or only consumed on a once in four day basis.
He presented his findings on 2000 patients at an APA conference, demonstrating reactions with selected patients and received an enormous ho hum from the assembled members, although orthomolecular practitioners took up his practices in the 1970’s (thereby assuring that orthodox psychiatry would never examine his data).
This is an intriguing issue, because the SSRI’s originally used for OCD-type stuff- obsessions and compulsions, for which they apparently worked, becoming used for depressions when some unknown figure deemed them potentially useful for said depressions, because common depressive symptoms were excessive ruminations and repetitive thoughts, which the unknown figure(s?) thought gave a reason to use the SSRI’s as antidepressants. Don’t forget that depressions were more common than OCD’s, thus providing a bigger market for manufacturers without having to develop new drugs.
Turtle. Your panic attacks are probably not of psychic origin. I was suggesting the magnesium salts to see if it were to keep you from getting any more anxious while seeking more competent assistance, than me. If we were face to face, I’d ask you assorted questions that would seem strange in a psychiatric interview, such as whether you’re frequently bothered by cramps (another sign of low Mg levels), since being pretty much unable to send samples to a lab, I’d have to make guarded inferences about what might be true, so I’d know what to deal with, particularly since Mg levels aren’t readily determined with the present lab tests.
Please, LK. There is no treatment for death. That’s why the troops build and inhabit bunkers, when they’re going to be in one place long enough. Since I was a grunt, but not a psychiatrist, I can’t say anything inspiring about dying- but I can speak about misunderstood conditions that masquerade as “mental” illnesses because I seem to know more about them than the run-of-the-mill shrink.
I should have also mentioned orthomolecular practitioners, the people you really want to see, but they may still have to conceal their methods in some regions, having been subject to persecution in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990’s.
Well, you can probably start by taking magnesium oxide,250mg. T.I.D., as the medical types say, while you look for a naturopathic or conventional practitioner experienced in dealing with these things. The magnesium salts are available at any drugstore. DON’T let anyone put you on benzos, as you can easily develop panic attacks during withdrawal.
That might do for now. I’ve got to duck back into the bunker before the incoming gets too close.
Panic attacks can come from differing sources, depending on the individual- things that can range from Mg deficiency to “cerebral allergies” (“psychiatric” reactions to foods and inhalants), to various malfunctionings of the adrenal system, to things like PTSD, where they get conditioned into you, to speak of several examples. To successfully treat them, you need to know their origins and the treatments for each of them (at least beyond psychiatric drugging, which is dangerous in unskilled hands).
The authors of this document should have a series of ECT, themselves, so they can set the example for the rest of us. Maybe the series should include a couple of bilateral ECT.
The idea has gradually come to me over the years of using niacinamide (in probably multigram, per day quantities) and magnesium salts, 750 mg./day, for withdrawing from benzos- the B3, because that version occupies the same neural receptor sites as benzos and the Mg. for additional relief from anxiety. I’ve withdrawn folks from alcohol using niacin (nicotinic acid) in their homes, but benzos have a much longer withdrawal period and I’m only a psychiatric version of medics in grunt units, devoid of office or clinic, so I’d like someone more respectable to consider this notion.
Yes- and carotid chokes are also sedating and calming.
Did this author chance to read anything by Temple Grandin? She seemed interested in literature produced by the autistic.
I can’t work in residential substance abuse facilities, because I won’t have second thoughts about using nutrient regimens to get the residents more functional, no matter what the facility’s guiding ideology is. I’ll help you with Oldhead, Streetphotobeing.
I like what Humphry Osmond did to the seclusion rooms when he became Superintendent of Weyburn Hospital, Saskatchewan, one of the worst mental hospitals in the world, at the time. He trashed the mattresses and turned the rooms into retreats, with the addition of furniture and decent lighting. Instead of giant fights to “seclude” patients, it sometimes became necessary to persuade patients to come back out onto the ward, so others could use the rooms.
There’s nothing particularly unusual about this. It’s been known for decades that the suicide rate for “schizophrenics” is 20x higher than for the population at large. I first saw it mentioned in a first edition of How to Live With Schizophrenia, written 50+ years ago, which I read 40+ years ago.
Now you know the meaning of corporate health care. The health care actually involves maintaining a healthy corporate balance sheet. Your own health is trivial; perhaps it’s better if the patients die quickly, leaving nobody around to question the value of their treatments.
Probably not, although there are a number of physical conditions that can induce depression in vulnerable individuals. Still, none of these conditions can be called a “disease of depression”, but only the specific ones that induce the depressed state deserve individual names. Depression, itself, is just a description of certain unpleasant mental states.
My favorite is #9, one surgeon performing simultaneous operations. This opens new pathways in surgery, where surgeons compete to do the most simultaneous operations, like chess masters competing to play the most simultaneous games at one session. The surgeons can strive to imitate grandmasters, doing 10, 20, or even maybe 50+ operations at once, as they vie for simultaneous operating supremacy.
This is also the time when your marginal high sugar low mineral childhood diet catches up to you. The high sugar intake helps you develop giant mood swings, while low mineral and vitamin levels ensure you’ll go through the day tense and nervous- and maybe start regularly using drugs to feel good.
Are the middle 1990’s the approximate time the SSRI’s came into big time use for depression? Although I think Prozac is mid-1980’s- not taking them, myself, I’m not sure.
Don’t hold your breath, Frank. At the present, you’re more likely to hear platitudes about States’ Rights and personal responsibility (“why should we be responsible for you when you haven’t been responsible for yourself, etc.”). You’ll be lucky if you don’t turn into a serial killer of politicians, using commonplace items found in hospitals as weapons.