Interestingly enough, Bill Wilson, himself, wanted go beyond AA meetings as tools for sobriety, and began to correspond with the Saskatchewan group headed by Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond, who were studying psychedelic therapy in the treatment of alcoholism and the use of megadose niacin in the suppression of the DT’s. Bill had already taken it once in hospital surroundings, and, I believe, had Osmond turn him on at his home. After he found out that niacin stabilized his moods, he became a great advocate for it (he’d persuaded 30 of his AA buddies to try it to get their opinion), and for several years just before his death, had a foldout on it inserted into copies of the Big Book being sent out.
Well, if you delivered proper services as a peer, you’d find yourself out on the street, accused of blasphemy, or even worse, sorcery, if your proper services got your charges to improve but didn’t use standard psychiatric methods that your employers approved of.
How could you expect antidepressants to work consistently if you know that “depression” is only a syndrome- a collection of signs and symptoms that could be the result of one or more of a number of conditions with different causes with differing proper treatments? Some of these conditions are even made worse by antidepressants, which will lead the “average” shrinks to look for plausible excuses to exonerate themselves from blame for prescribing a faulty treatment that led their depressed patients to become floridly psychotic.
I notice that these studies make no attempt to find out what’s inducing “ADHD”. In particular, they’re paying no attention to lead intoxication, which closely mimics this aforementioned condition. But that takes work, such as sending hair and serum samples to a laboratory- better to pile on the stimulants, paying no attention to unpleasant thoughts that all your medicating might be in vain. Better to rely on chestnuts like the patient staying hyperactive because (s)he doesn’t want to get well.
The doctors were suffering from terminal Mental Health Mind when they gave him olanzapine, which they did because he didn’t want them to. Terminal Mental Health Mind kicked in, in which the staff believed the kid was refusing meds because they were benefitting him in some mysterious way, so he was retreating from sanity as part of a Flight into Illness. His very reluctance was the very reason these brilliant professionals had to medicate him with that very same drug.
Well, they do if they take their vitamins and avoid stimulants, sucrose and allergy inducing foods, while tapering off any psych meds they might be on.
If you’re talking about stimulant withdrawal, the method is to use multi-gram doses of vitamin C to antagonize the jumpers, plus large amounts of vitamin B1 to counteract the “need for speed” that may cause relapses. I could supervise this, myself, if I had to (I’ve overseen much more dangerous home alcohol withdrawals), but your best bet would be a naturopathic or an orthomolecular practitioner.
The “psycho-medical” model you describe is on its last legs, but studying the biological conditions that lead to “psychiatric diagnoses” is likely just beginning. This means that your future “psychiatrist” will need to have a extensive knowledge of psychiatric trivia to be able to grasp a proper diagnosis and treatment for his patients’ mental state (no more immediately treating fat people extremely sensitive to cold with SSRI’s- or any other antidepressant, for that matter).
Borderline Personality Disorder is a proud occupant of the diagnostic wastebasket. This article helps to demonstrate why, and also why it will remain there.
The docility of a bowl of custard.
One of my favorites concerning diagnostic testing was a commentary about a urine test for B6 zinc dependency. The critic was dismissive because a variety of “diagnostic” categories responded to the same deficiency. The thought that the alleged diagnostic categories might not be reliable, instead, completely eluded him, even though the symptomology was similar among all the “categories”, and the successful treatment was constant.
Well, The present approach toward mental illnesses today is that they aren’t, frequently coming from a variety of physical causes. The alleged diagnostic categories are just descriptions of certain mental states that say nothing about how they should be treated. It’s no surprise there are no certain diagnostic tests.
This should be no surprise as antipsychotics induce brain damage in their subjects- brain damage, which increases the longer that antipsychotics are used.
I take it that the idea of having the psychologists suggest nutrients they might use for symptomatic relief is far too revolutionary for the esteemed medicos to even think about.
I can think of nutrient treatments for drug-related dysfunctions, such as niacin and/or glutamine for alcoholism and vitamins C and B1 for stimulant related dysfunctions but this “drugs for the dopers” stuff has me baffled, particularly in the cases of pharmaceutical treatments for pharmaceutical addictions.
I’m not impressed. Since the “diagnostic categories” aren’t real, it’s likely that the “treatments” will be equally fantastic.
Well, there have been advances in treatment for negative medical states, but Big Time Psychiatry has fought like tigers to make them go away as they don’t rely on ever more exotic drugs and zapping patients into even more violent seizure states. The companies are just as outraged because you can buy some of these items off the shelf for a fraction of the cost of exotic “curative” drugs. Just say “megavitamins” to your neighborhood shrink and see what happens if you don’t believe the above paragraph.
Sorry to have become such a menace to society, since I haven’t had a psych drug for 35+ years.
You can get supplemental manganese in health food stores, apparently usually sold in 10mg. tablets. Were I obliged to oversee a trial, I’d start with 10mg./day for a week, then 20mg. for a week or two, then 30mg./day. I’d stop if the movements got worse, as excess manganese can produce extrapyramidal symptoms.
I noticed that your crusaders didn’t go after the orthomolecular guys with the same vigor when they went after you. Of course, the orthomolecular types are more interested in real medicine than “psychiatric medicine” and use physical testing such as trace mineral analysis as diagnostic aids. Their patients frequently don’t have a psychiatric status, but will be diagnosed with physical ailments.
They’re some of the greater menaces to Big Time Psychiatry in recent decades and will become more so, as “psychiatric” diseases disappear to be replaced by garden variety physical ones.
Her serum copper’s likely to be high in these circumstances, leading to a depressed mood that probably can’t be successfully treated with antipsychotics, ECT, etc., although zinc and B6 will likely be therapeutic (which the shrinks will ignore as they “know” vitamins and minerals have nothing to do with your mental functioning).
Well, that’s no surprise. That’s the pharmaceutical drug business in action.
If you wanted to be catty, you might ask the therapist if (s)he found Bartlett’s Big Book of Familiar Quotations a profound source of therapeutic guidance.
It would seem preposterous to claim that any disease caused by microorganisms could be blocked by stimulant consumption, which exhausts individuals physically and chemically (immune and recovery response stuff).
That would be a good idea, but I thought we were commemorating a guy singularly short of good ideas.
They don’t help patients, but they can do wonders for pharmaceutical companies’ bank accounts and subsequent stock prices.
No, they aren’t “mental illnesses”, but understanding their chemistry and proper nutrient therapy can provide a useful means of dealing with them, particularly since they’re considered incurable, like “schizophrenia” and “depression” still are.
Maybe we should turn the anniversary of his death into National Zombie Day, during which people with unused medications around the house should take big enough doses to spend the day as zombies in memory of this great man and his therapeutic ambitions.
Maybe he actually died of disappointment because we’re not semiconscious and sleeping 15-16 hours a day. What geeks we are!
Gotta remember boans, that I’m one of those weirdos who takes his niacin every day and avoids shrinks like the plague, knowing that they’d see vitamin consumption as the sign of serious pending delirium. I also read Forbidden Literature, in which “mental” illnesses don’t exist except as indicators for unusual physically based conditions- in fact, the Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry changed its name to the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine a few years back- it’s third name change since it first appeared 60 or so years ago, I believe, and now devotes much of its space to such illnesses as HIV and ebola.
It might be interesting to note that Stanislas Grof was (and maybe is) the only individual who had permission to dispense LSD in both Western and East bloc nations during the Cold War.
Oh, there’s room for biomedical models, all right, but not for psychiatric pseudo diseases like “schizophrenia”‘ “depression” and such, but for directly identifying underlying physical causes for the states that are thus “diagnosed” in psych terms, such as lead poisoning for hyperactivity and mania wherein the symptoms lead to the identification of the cause and correct treatment.
Historic, most likely. Sounds like a relic of the days when prescriptions were written in Latin, so patients wouldn’t know squat about the drugs they were getting.
“Concentrating on the meds” would not only be likely to separate you from others, but from yourself, as well. That’s one of the things akathisia’s all about.
He picked it up from R. Kunin, MD, featuring this treatment in an edition of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, which he edited at the time.
Over the years, I’ve noticed that paranoid notions in individuals arise as an attempt to explain why unusual perceptual experiences are going on- the beliefs would be rational if the perceptions were real, but, alas, they aren’t. This is most obvious in chronic stimulant consumption, notorious for inducing paranoid notions quickly.
It would be better if you could get these individuals to adopt magnesium deficient diets, so they could experience panic disorder firsthand, while simultaneously treating it ineptly with their own “chemotherapeutic” drugs. Then, when they complained that their medications were ineffective, you could launch into screeds about “really wanting to get well” and similar “therapeutic” statements.
Interesting. Would it be the sodium in the salt? The iodine(?) if your salt was iodized.
Back in the 1980’s, I read a piece by a Richard Kunin MD, who successfully treated “antipsychotic” induced tardive dyskinesia with manganese salts, and in some cases, relatively high doses of niacin.
Apparently our pharma-employed chemists seem to be unaware that this entire class of drugs is addictive, and this is due to their basic chemical structure. In other (simpler) words- it’s impossible to make a benzo or a sedative that ISN’T addictive.
Well, remember that Gort was in charge. It was Gort’s job to bring the messenger here and to see that Klattu delivered it, even if he had to be brought back from the dead to do so.
Now that the FDA’s been exposed, I expect it to leap into action with attempts to take niacin and vitamin C off the market (“these deadly drugs have been ignored too long!”).
The problem was that you accurately represented your views and they didn’t have any refutations handy, since they probably didn’t prepare for your interview.
I have data strongly suggesting that manganese salts are therapeutic for “antipsychotic” induced dyskinesia. Would they also be useful for “antidepressant” induced dyskinesia as well? Has anyone studied the relationships between trace mineral levels and antidepressant use?
Whoever created that WW1 ad didn’t have much understanding of the grunt mentality- it’s being able to get bombed at intervals that leads the grunts to stay forward without deserting. That guy in the soup bowl helmet need to get buzzed so he won’t be troubled by panics.
Eric, I think the one possibility you might have missed is that our aliens have been engaging in long term observation of our characteristics that has led them to conclude that we’re all savages and/or mental cases, even those of us who seem healthy, which has led them to keep us ignorant of their technology so they don’t have to suffer from deranged crusaders and their racial crusades. After all, they probably don’t look much like “white people ” leading them to suspect they’d be victims of gung ho racism, thereby needing to stay out of sight of the local savages and their endless wars.
You might be able to do both more or less at once. Niacin at the level of 1g TID has a good chance of normalizing your cholesterol and maybe your perceptions as well. It’s likely a bad idea to bring it up with your shrink because he’s likely to go on some screed about you poisoning yourself, although you can tell him if you improve spectacularly.
The drawback to this may be the flushing likely to occur when you start, although there are ways of dealing with this.
Remember niacin, not niacinamide as niacinamide doesn’t lower cholesterol.
No wonder we’re not on the psychotherapists’ A List. We’ve become too jaded because we became platitude-resistant at some point in our lives.
You don’t commit suicide while on B3, either, but you’ll see Hell freeze over before you see a conventional shrink use it at all, much less at therapeutic levels.
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Why do I keep thinking about malaria when I read that line? It doesn’t make you any stronger…
In these cases, the variety of the drug isn’t the key. The alleged therapist is attempting to produce a specific kind of experience that might otherwise take years of study in an ashram. Being continuously under the influence of the foreign substance isn’t the idea.
Not as dangerous as you might think. The individuals having the bad effects are more likely to be suffering from distorted perceptions prior to consuming a hallucinogenic substance, one reason Hoffer and Osmond devised their infamous HOD test while they were studying psychedelic therapy for alcoholics. Having given HOD tests to a variety of individuals, I find Hoffer and Osmond convincing on this subject and will usually. mention this to high-scoring individuals interested in hallucinogens.
The real problem with these theories of imbalances is that a number of them don’t primarily effect the brain at all. Another problem is that the psychiatrist frequently doesn’t know squat about real medicine, making it likely that he/she will completely miss the problem. For example, a depressed individual who lacks energy, is sensitive to cold and has trouble with unwanted weight gain unimproved by dieting probably won’t respond to antidepressants at all, because their problem isn’t “psychiatric” depression, but more likely an underactive thyroid.
There are a number of such conditions that can deceive the unwary shrink into mistreating them with psych drugs.
It’s hard to say what the subjects thought about their emperors. They invariably had to go through periods of lulus, like Caligula and Nero. They also had to contend with multiple emperors, all demanding your allegiance simultaneously- your head depended on your ability to schmooze your neighborhood emperor until he was assassinated, while simultaneously being ready to cheer the perpetrator without betraying your “attachment” to his predecessor.
Today, it’s more acceptable to have a tombstone that says how wealthy you were when we all went extinct than to actually exert some kind of effort to keep this from happening. Naturally, robots would make your grave site facilities because there’d be no people around to do it.
A genuinely ghastly performance from modern psychiatry- what sounds like an initial job for non-prescription magnesium chloride, and maybe a few grams of (also non-prescription) niacinamide. But then, there aren’t any winter conferences or gifts for not using prescription drugs.
He isn’t familiar with the concept of addictive allergies to foods, where commonly consumed foods can lead to “addictive behavior” and thoughts, in addition to “psychiatric” symptoms. “Mental health” professionals don’t believe in them because they were described by Theron Randolph, who failed to impress the APA with his accounts of experiences with many of his patients, including a demonstration on stage of addictive/allergic reactions on stage, with several of his patients volunteering, to demonstrate their experiences.
The way you handle cops is to give them too much to do. Tails can be led many places, because they have to know what you’re doing. Maybe they’d like to spend the day at the mall, going into every store. Maybe they’d like a leisurely lunch at your favorite buffet as you go repeatedly back and forth from the food line. Talk quietly to many strangers, asking them innocent questions in a low voice, nodding significantly while glancing “suspiciously” around if they say anything in reply. If you smoke, ask your tail for lights. Drive aimlessly, while stopping at many places. Be sure to talk to strangers on the sidewalk while driving, making many stops at different places afterwards. Let them have a busy day, full of minor activities they can report. Always maintain a sunny disposition as you can, particularly if you have to talk to them.
The tardive dyskinesia can (likely) be treated with manganese salts, even though it’s induced by antidepressants instead of “antipsychotic” drugs. I do know that the orthomolecular folks have used it for a while, even though that means conventional shrinks never will and bombard you with outrage if you ask.
One of the first things you have to know is that drug companies would no more like to see you withdraw from their products than that guy selling narcotics on the corner would like to see you stop consuming his products- the urge to keep their profits is too great.
Don’t forget nutrient therapy, particularly the idea of starting it BEFORE introducing someone to benzos. I realize this sounds pedestrian, but extreme emotions can have either a physical origin or can be alleviated with a proper nutrient program if you know what you have to use to replace deficiencies or dependencies that are giving someone an exaggerated response to stressors, particularly of the type you’re going to encounter in the field.
Hospitals do have a peculiar attitude about ETC. The gent who adjusted my B3 about 45 years ago, had been an ECT doc in the southern part of my state. Since he wasn’t a real psychiatrist, but an internist, he probably got into the use of mega B3 to preserve his patients’ memories, making the practice at least somewhat less appalling than it usually is.
Since he wasn’t a shrink, he also became interested in cerebral allergies and water-assisted fasting therapy, which he studied under Theron Randolph, one of the Grand Old Men of allergies, who trained his pupils by having them water fast for several days and introducing test meals of single foods over a period of days. This is what he hoped to do in his new job, but the hospital objected, saying fasting therapy was too dangerous, even in its own hospital. Apparently, the hospital thought ECT a safe treatment, but not water fasting. (no, I didn’t have any ECT and my appointment was free, as he was just setting up his office).
The embarrassing thing about this is that you probably could lower the rate of “CHR” individuals losing their marbles by pretreating them with a basic 3g/day of B3 and C instead of antipsychotic drugs.
But then manufacturers wouldn’t make any money, the most important element of present-day psychiatric treatment.
I’ve wondered for some time if niacinamide would be useful in benzo withdrawal because both classes of neurochemical use the same receptor sites. Its close family member, niacin (nicotinic acid for you pharmacology types) safely speeds up alcohol withdrawal to within a few days- I’ve used it in a withdrawal at an individual’s home (!!!?) successfully, though I wouldn’t recommend it for self-withdrawal.
Sounds good to me. And the one thing they all seem to believe is that psychosis is a unitary entity that they shall conquer when they find out what it is. Thus their “studies” are faulty before the actual work designed to prove their hypotheses even begins, as their groups are always mixed.
Well, going on antidepressants and losing your marbles two weeks or so later isn’t due to placebo effects, but inept screening, maybe with one of those company-issued “screening” sheets that doesn’t inquire about perceptual distortions.
Well, Steve, you and I both know that DSM “diagnoses” are pretty useless in the first place, as they tell you little or nothing about what’s actually going on with an individual, plus nothing about what proper treatments should be, should you actually chance to know what the problem is.
This is a disaster waiting to happen. These tests were created to sell antidepressants, not to find out what an adolescent’s mental state actually is, leaving plenty of opportunities to misdiagnose, which wouldn’t be too bad if this misdiagnosis didn’t lead to incompetent treatment that would lead to some kind of disaster involving “mismedication” with adolescents suffering from dysperceptions.
But there is in many cases. It’s the dietary use of manganese salts along with your taper. A Richard Kunin, MD, has been using manganese salts for dyskinesias since the 1980’s, as have some of the orthomolecular guys. He had a website naming the conditions he treated, tardive dyskinesia being one of them. I don’t know if he’s still around- he must be close to fossilization if he is.
Not examining psych patients probably deserves an inspiring motto. Maybe something like-“treatment failure begins here!”
Better to think of it as pharmacological psychiatry, as real medicine takes a back seat in conventional psychiatry. Think Pseudo-medical psychiatry, where the attempt is to push drugs and disabling treatments to cure the financial ailments of pharmaceutical companies and device providers.
Another thing hospital staff loathes is the knowledgeable patient, particularly one who knows his/her psych drugs as well, or (gasp) maybe better than staff do. Staff doesn’t like it if you can snap off side effects better than they can or if you can point out that somebody’s “quirk” that is actually a tic that nobody realized, and you’re only a patient. The therapist can become humiliated, while the doctor can suspect that you’re actually a plant or agent introduced by some nameless authority to spy on them. Another nice touch is to have a regular visitor who takes you over to some corner and then converses in low tones, punctuated by bursts of laughter (when asked, neither of you will say or admit to anything).
The article makes sense, as the cop style, as taught, just invites action based on distorted perception of the officer as a caricature martinet, space alien, robot or any other sort of caricature being- not the way to be talking someone into a facility, which is likely to be another story in strangeness.
This is where people like us come in, particularly if there are a number of us with a variety of “diagnoses” and some have had adventures where we were stranded among the aliens, giving us a good idea how to act in a tense time like that. What we need is somewhere to take the distraught that is somewhere better than the hospital, with its intense lighting and harried staff rushing everywhere.
I think I recall that Mr. Guiteau had neurosyphilis to assist his “reasoning” that his failure to find government employment was President Garfield’s fault
The HOD test came about after Hoffer’s first medical appointment as Director of Psychiatric Research in Saskatchewan. He was looking for a psychological test he could use to monitor experimental patients’ progress. As none existed, he decided to create one.
Osmond had come to Saskatchewan because he couldn’t stand the psychiatric climate in Great Britain. He became clinical supervisor and later superintendent of a mental hospital in Weyburn, one of the worst mental hospitals in the world at the time (visiting WHO rep). He’d been exposed to both the notion that the behavior of “schizophrenics” was the result of “normal” reactions to unusual perceptions and that the odd perceptions would recede as patients got better. He’d also had mescaline in England in the late 1940’s and used his experience as a framework for making Weyburn into a real hospital.
This was the climate in which the HOD test was born. The idea was simple- quantitative measurement as a test of mental status. It never initially caught on, as these were the salad days of psychoanalysis and biological beliefs about unusual mental states were in the doghouse, as well as being too prosaic for the psychoanalytic mind.
I got mine during a period in my life when I got interested in local hallucinogenic mushrooms and was interested in giving samples to others after testing them, myself. When I found out I was schizophrenic (I found I was B3 dependent, at any rate) is when I became interested in orthomolecular medicine.
I don’t know where you can get one now (I simply made copies of the scoring sheets instead of buying new ones). Besides, you can get an improved version, called the Experiential World Inventory, devised by Osmond and a gent with the last name, El Melighi. I think a Behavioral Science Press does that one, but you’d better do a computer search. There’s also an Orthomolecular.org website where you might be able to find out.
They must be lying to themselves, thinking this is a solution to depression, a group of signs and symptoms rather than an actual disease. Though it does give experimenters a chance to make failure pay off.
I wonder if the Harvard geniuses looked at the Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic (the HOD test). Probably not, as Hoffer and Osmond were the evil geniuses of psychiatry back in their salad days, using niacin and vitamin C as the basis for treating the dysperceptive.
I have a copy of this test, which has a subsection where the authors state the tester should inquire about suicidal thoughts in the individual being tested. A couple of years ago, I went through the dozens of protocols I had (100 plus?) and found all of five “suicide HOD’s”. Every one of the five had attempted suicide (I knew most of the testees’ histories).
But then those guys were the accursed Black Princes of psychiatry, abhorred by respectable shrinks, who wished they’d go away because “everyone knew” that vitamins had no role in the treatment of “schizophrenia syndrome”. That they’d both used hallucinogenic drugs before they became “respectable” confirmed the psychiatric beliefs of the day.
You can actually guesstimate the likelihood of patient violence if you take the time to find out details of your patient/client/interviewee’s experiential world. It can even be a clue to what nutrients to use to reassemble your individual’s scattered wits, should you know what symptomologies appear with certain deficiencies, dependencies and excesses.
Yes, but it’s bad for the old dignity to be too connected to reality, or else you’d have a hard time getting and/or keeping those important corporate sponsors.
I had several interesting chats with a shock doc, one with an ominous message. He wasn’t a shrink by training and was moving to a small rural hospital where he was hoping to treat cerebral allergies with water fasting and rotation diets (he was also familiar with orthomolecular therapy- I was referred by members of a schizophrenia association). And he did tell me how to adjust my B3 use.
The ominous message was that the hospital mavens thought fasting and dietary modification was too dangerous and exotic to be practiced at their institution, a general hospital- but ECT was apparently fine (I think he did them all at his previous place of employment). I was lucky as he was only in the area a few days, hoping to set up an office, so my visits were free.
There are personalized treatments for “depression”, but they don’t involve drugs. That’s because there are multiple sources for depressed moods, and the treatments have to address the proper sources to be successful.
Well, antipsychotics antagonize manganese, a necessary trace element to prevent tardive dyskinesia with its many tics and twitches that make life on “medications” difficult and embarrassing. This is also what makes them a sorry long-term treatment, as the likelihood of neurological problems increases with the length of exposure to “antipsychotics”.
You’ve heard the story-“get a bigger hammer!”
Maybe his knowledge was fictional.
And the title of the movie was? Get a Bigger Hammer!
It helps with the absorption of zinc. I realize it gives you dreams and you’re taking too much if your dreams become spectacular technicolor events.
Isn’t the FDA’s job to get new (patentable) drugs on the market whether or not they actually work the way they’re supposed to? If a new drug gets you buzzed, its commercial potential is so great the public has got to have it.
Since you received counseling, I think I might chip in with a few questions probably peculiar to me.
1. Do you have white spots in your fingernails?
2. Do you remember your dreams?
3. Do your fingernails seem soft?
The reason I’m asking is that I’m looking for signs you might be low in the mineral zinc, which is deeply involved in sexual functioning. Although you should see a professional interested in true biological medicine (not this tacky drug stuff- “pseudo-biological” drugging), if the items are true, a suggested program should definitely involve zinc supplementation, with B6 to help its absorption, if necessary, and maybe B100’s on general principles. Your first aim should be to remember dreams, if you don’t now, and titer the B6 until you do.
It isn’t generally understood that you can (to a degree) find out in advance if you’re likely to have bad reactions to cannabis and/or the hallucinogens. The old Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic helps in this respect. Being a quantitative test, you can almost find out by weighing your “true” answers without examining what they are (it was used in Saskatchewan as a screening method for LSD therapy until the DEA got uppity and forced the province to quit therapeutic use of LSD, which was a standard treatment for alcoholism there).
When dealing with straight people, I find that it’s best for me to observe in the persona of a spy. As a spy, particularly one who takes vitamins, I certainly don’t want to give myself away to potentially judgmental straight people, who might call out the militia if I get too strange.
If I wanted to be diagnostic, I’d think of something like prodromal senility (demonstrated by the inability to lie consistently about the same subject?), but I don’t know if it has a DSM number.
If I were permitted to use antidepressants, the first thing I’d look for is the number and frequency of perceptual distortions my would be patient was experiencing, as the chances of bad antidepressant experiences goes up with the increased number (and kind) of distortions the would-be patient is experiencing.
Well, there are substances that can correct thought disordered notions, but they’re things like niacin, NAD, glutamine, ascorbate, B6, etc., but there’s one thing that makes them dangerous to psychiatrists- none of them can be patented, which means no office toys, trips to the sunny South for winter pharmaceutical company conventions, no opportunity to be a contributor to pharma-sponsored articles. You’d have to get your patients well, without the impetus of toys, professional status increase and pre-paid vacations- a brutal challenge, because otherwise you could get them while your patients became chronic (under present circumstances).
Well, you’re dealing with a guy who consumes a gram of caffeine/day and lives on a diet of Big Macs and Fish Witches. I don’t know if the guy has a diagnosis, but I do know why he stays up at 3AM sending Tweets to the universe at large, in circumstances where I wouldn’t expect deep thoughts to be revealed or linguistic brilliancies to be uttered.
Well, a shrink isn’t going to tell you he doesn’t know what’s going on, which is why his supposed treatment failed. Financially and psychologically better for the pro (by his/her own standards) to say you’re treatment resistant than the shrink telling you outright that he doesn’t know enough about your condition to treat it properly, nor does he know anyone who does.
When I was more involved with “mental health” activities, I used to find depressed individuals who experienced numerous perceptual distortions. When treated with B3 and C for the distortions, their moods would improve- misdiagnosing going on that missed proper treatment?
But a few alcoholics realize they need pharmacologically adequate amounts of niacin to send the heebie jeebies away in 24 hours, which it does.
This merely demonstrates the kind of fumbling you get when you mistake a syndrome for an actual disease. Since there can be a variety of causes for “depression”, it would be foolish to presume a “one treatment fits all” approach to have much, if any value. It would be as foolish as believing that one hat size fits all or that one waist size will create pants that fit everyone (creating amusement for the spectator, but embarrassment for most wearers).
They can also have “cerebral allergies”, where certain foods get them buzzed. Water fasting for several days is the usual method of prepping for the test meals. This technique goes back to Theron Randolph (MD’s) salad days (he was an early allergist who used to teach his techniques to professional students by having them fast and then test themselves for allergic reactions).
Zyprexa had better not be on the list of acceptable “medications” for this alleged disorder. I once made a speaker’s day when she asked which antidepressant had the side effect of excessive weight gain and I gave her the correct answer.
I’m not very profound, as some of the regulars may tell you, but I do know that the antipsychotic movement problems (dyskinesia, akathisia) you and others might be having can (at least sometimes) be treated with manganese salts, preferably by an orthomolecular medical guy, but I can propose a starter program if you can’t find a practitioner (you don’t want to do this without guidance, as manganese can do bad things in excess).
Interestingly enough, Bill Wilson, himself, wanted go beyond AA meetings as tools for sobriety, and began to correspond with the Saskatchewan group headed by Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond, who were studying psychedelic therapy in the treatment of alcoholism and the use of megadose niacin in the suppression of the DT’s. Bill had already taken it once in hospital surroundings, and, I believe, had Osmond turn him on at his home. After he found out that niacin stabilized his moods, he became a great advocate for it (he’d persuaded 30 of his AA buddies to try it to get their opinion), and for several years just before his death, had a foldout on it inserted into copies of the Big Book being sent out.
Well, if you delivered proper services as a peer, you’d find yourself out on the street, accused of blasphemy, or even worse, sorcery, if your proper services got your charges to improve but didn’t use standard psychiatric methods that your employers approved of.
How could you expect antidepressants to work consistently if you know that “depression” is only a syndrome- a collection of signs and symptoms that could be the result of one or more of a number of conditions with different causes with differing proper treatments? Some of these conditions are even made worse by antidepressants, which will lead the “average” shrinks to look for plausible excuses to exonerate themselves from blame for prescribing a faulty treatment that led their depressed patients to become floridly psychotic.
I notice that these studies make no attempt to find out what’s inducing “ADHD”. In particular, they’re paying no attention to lead intoxication, which closely mimics this aforementioned condition. But that takes work, such as sending hair and serum samples to a laboratory- better to pile on the stimulants, paying no attention to unpleasant thoughts that all your medicating might be in vain. Better to rely on chestnuts like the patient staying hyperactive because (s)he doesn’t want to get well.
The doctors were suffering from terminal Mental Health Mind when they gave him olanzapine, which they did because he didn’t want them to. Terminal Mental Health Mind kicked in, in which the staff believed the kid was refusing meds because they were benefitting him in some mysterious way, so he was retreating from sanity as part of a Flight into Illness. His very reluctance was the very reason these brilliant professionals had to medicate him with that very same drug.
Well, they do if they take their vitamins and avoid stimulants, sucrose and allergy inducing foods, while tapering off any psych meds they might be on.
If you’re talking about stimulant withdrawal, the method is to use multi-gram doses of vitamin C to antagonize the jumpers, plus large amounts of vitamin B1 to counteract the “need for speed” that may cause relapses. I could supervise this, myself, if I had to (I’ve overseen much more dangerous home alcohol withdrawals), but your best bet would be a naturopathic or an orthomolecular practitioner.
The “psycho-medical” model you describe is on its last legs, but studying the biological conditions that lead to “psychiatric diagnoses” is likely just beginning. This means that your future “psychiatrist” will need to have a extensive knowledge of psychiatric trivia to be able to grasp a proper diagnosis and treatment for his patients’ mental state (no more immediately treating fat people extremely sensitive to cold with SSRI’s- or any other antidepressant, for that matter).
Borderline Personality Disorder is a proud occupant of the diagnostic wastebasket. This article helps to demonstrate why, and also why it will remain there.
The docility of a bowl of custard.
One of my favorites concerning diagnostic testing was a commentary about a urine test for B6 zinc dependency. The critic was dismissive because a variety of “diagnostic” categories responded to the same deficiency. The thought that the alleged diagnostic categories might not be reliable, instead, completely eluded him, even though the symptomology was similar among all the “categories”, and the successful treatment was constant.
Well, The present approach toward mental illnesses today is that they aren’t, frequently coming from a variety of physical causes. The alleged diagnostic categories are just descriptions of certain mental states that say nothing about how they should be treated. It’s no surprise there are no certain diagnostic tests.
This should be no surprise as antipsychotics induce brain damage in their subjects- brain damage, which increases the longer that antipsychotics are used.
I take it that the idea of having the psychologists suggest nutrients they might use for symptomatic relief is far too revolutionary for the esteemed medicos to even think about.
I can think of nutrient treatments for drug-related dysfunctions, such as niacin and/or glutamine for alcoholism and vitamins C and B1 for stimulant related dysfunctions but this “drugs for the dopers” stuff has me baffled, particularly in the cases of pharmaceutical treatments for pharmaceutical addictions.
I’m not impressed. Since the “diagnostic categories” aren’t real, it’s likely that the “treatments” will be equally fantastic.
Well, there have been advances in treatment for negative medical states, but Big Time Psychiatry has fought like tigers to make them go away as they don’t rely on ever more exotic drugs and zapping patients into even more violent seizure states. The companies are just as outraged because you can buy some of these items off the shelf for a fraction of the cost of exotic “curative” drugs. Just say “megavitamins” to your neighborhood shrink and see what happens if you don’t believe the above paragraph.
Sorry to have become such a menace to society, since I haven’t had a psych drug for 35+ years.
You can get supplemental manganese in health food stores, apparently usually sold in 10mg. tablets. Were I obliged to oversee a trial, I’d start with 10mg./day for a week, then 20mg. for a week or two, then 30mg./day. I’d stop if the movements got worse, as excess manganese can produce extrapyramidal symptoms.
I noticed that your crusaders didn’t go after the orthomolecular guys with the same vigor when they went after you. Of course, the orthomolecular types are more interested in real medicine than “psychiatric medicine” and use physical testing such as trace mineral analysis as diagnostic aids. Their patients frequently don’t have a psychiatric status, but will be diagnosed with physical ailments.
They’re some of the greater menaces to Big Time Psychiatry in recent decades and will become more so, as “psychiatric” diseases disappear to be replaced by garden variety physical ones.
Her serum copper’s likely to be high in these circumstances, leading to a depressed mood that probably can’t be successfully treated with antipsychotics, ECT, etc., although zinc and B6 will likely be therapeutic (which the shrinks will ignore as they “know” vitamins and minerals have nothing to do with your mental functioning).
Well, that’s no surprise. That’s the pharmaceutical drug business in action.
If you wanted to be catty, you might ask the therapist if (s)he found Bartlett’s Big Book of Familiar Quotations a profound source of therapeutic guidance.
It would seem preposterous to claim that any disease caused by microorganisms could be blocked by stimulant consumption, which exhausts individuals physically and chemically (immune and recovery response stuff).
That would be a good idea, but I thought we were commemorating a guy singularly short of good ideas.
They don’t help patients, but they can do wonders for pharmaceutical companies’ bank accounts and subsequent stock prices.
No, they aren’t “mental illnesses”, but understanding their chemistry and proper nutrient therapy can provide a useful means of dealing with them, particularly since they’re considered incurable, like “schizophrenia” and “depression” still are.
Maybe we should turn the anniversary of his death into National Zombie Day, during which people with unused medications around the house should take big enough doses to spend the day as zombies in memory of this great man and his therapeutic ambitions.
Maybe he actually died of disappointment because we’re not semiconscious and sleeping 15-16 hours a day. What geeks we are!
Gotta remember boans, that I’m one of those weirdos who takes his niacin every day and avoids shrinks like the plague, knowing that they’d see vitamin consumption as the sign of serious pending delirium. I also read Forbidden Literature, in which “mental” illnesses don’t exist except as indicators for unusual physically based conditions- in fact, the Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry changed its name to the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine a few years back- it’s third name change since it first appeared 60 or so years ago, I believe, and now devotes much of its space to such illnesses as HIV and ebola.
It might be interesting to note that Stanislas Grof was (and maybe is) the only individual who had permission to dispense LSD in both Western and East bloc nations during the Cold War.
Oh, there’s room for biomedical models, all right, but not for psychiatric pseudo diseases like “schizophrenia”‘ “depression” and such, but for directly identifying underlying physical causes for the states that are thus “diagnosed” in psych terms, such as lead poisoning for hyperactivity and mania wherein the symptoms lead to the identification of the cause and correct treatment.
Historic, most likely. Sounds like a relic of the days when prescriptions were written in Latin, so patients wouldn’t know squat about the drugs they were getting.
“Concentrating on the meds” would not only be likely to separate you from others, but from yourself, as well. That’s one of the things akathisia’s all about.
He picked it up from R. Kunin, MD, featuring this treatment in an edition of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, which he edited at the time.
Over the years, I’ve noticed that paranoid notions in individuals arise as an attempt to explain why unusual perceptual experiences are going on- the beliefs would be rational if the perceptions were real, but, alas, they aren’t. This is most obvious in chronic stimulant consumption, notorious for inducing paranoid notions quickly.
It would be better if you could get these individuals to adopt magnesium deficient diets, so they could experience panic disorder firsthand, while simultaneously treating it ineptly with their own “chemotherapeutic” drugs. Then, when they complained that their medications were ineffective, you could launch into screeds about “really wanting to get well” and similar “therapeutic” statements.
Interesting. Would it be the sodium in the salt? The iodine(?) if your salt was iodized.
Back in the 1980’s, I read a piece by a Richard Kunin MD, who successfully treated “antipsychotic” induced tardive dyskinesia with manganese salts, and in some cases, relatively high doses of niacin.
Apparently our pharma-employed chemists seem to be unaware that this entire class of drugs is addictive, and this is due to their basic chemical structure. In other (simpler) words- it’s impossible to make a benzo or a sedative that ISN’T addictive.
Well, remember that Gort was in charge. It was Gort’s job to bring the messenger here and to see that Klattu delivered it, even if he had to be brought back from the dead to do so.
Now that the FDA’s been exposed, I expect it to leap into action with attempts to take niacin and vitamin C off the market (“these deadly drugs have been ignored too long!”).
The problem was that you accurately represented your views and they didn’t have any refutations handy, since they probably didn’t prepare for your interview.
I have data strongly suggesting that manganese salts are therapeutic for “antipsychotic” induced dyskinesia. Would they also be useful for “antidepressant” induced dyskinesia as well? Has anyone studied the relationships between trace mineral levels and antidepressant use?
Whoever created that WW1 ad didn’t have much understanding of the grunt mentality- it’s being able to get bombed at intervals that leads the grunts to stay forward without deserting. That guy in the soup bowl helmet need to get buzzed so he won’t be troubled by panics.
Eric, I think the one possibility you might have missed is that our aliens have been engaging in long term observation of our characteristics that has led them to conclude that we’re all savages and/or mental cases, even those of us who seem healthy, which has led them to keep us ignorant of their technology so they don’t have to suffer from deranged crusaders and their racial crusades. After all, they probably don’t look much like “white people ” leading them to suspect they’d be victims of gung ho racism, thereby needing to stay out of sight of the local savages and their endless wars.
You might be able to do both more or less at once. Niacin at the level of 1g TID has a good chance of normalizing your cholesterol and maybe your perceptions as well. It’s likely a bad idea to bring it up with your shrink because he’s likely to go on some screed about you poisoning yourself, although you can tell him if you improve spectacularly.
The drawback to this may be the flushing likely to occur when you start, although there are ways of dealing with this.
Remember niacin, not niacinamide as niacinamide doesn’t lower cholesterol.
No wonder we’re not on the psychotherapists’ A List. We’ve become too jaded because we became platitude-resistant at some point in our lives.
You don’t commit suicide while on B3, either, but you’ll see Hell freeze over before you see a conventional shrink use it at all, much less at therapeutic levels.
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Why do I keep thinking about malaria when I read that line? It doesn’t make you any stronger…
In these cases, the variety of the drug isn’t the key. The alleged therapist is attempting to produce a specific kind of experience that might otherwise take years of study in an ashram. Being continuously under the influence of the foreign substance isn’t the idea.
Not as dangerous as you might think. The individuals having the bad effects are more likely to be suffering from distorted perceptions prior to consuming a hallucinogenic substance, one reason Hoffer and Osmond devised their infamous HOD test while they were studying psychedelic therapy for alcoholics. Having given HOD tests to a variety of individuals, I find Hoffer and Osmond convincing on this subject and will usually. mention this to high-scoring individuals interested in hallucinogens.
The real problem with these theories of imbalances is that a number of them don’t primarily effect the brain at all. Another problem is that the psychiatrist frequently doesn’t know squat about real medicine, making it likely that he/she will completely miss the problem. For example, a depressed individual who lacks energy, is sensitive to cold and has trouble with unwanted weight gain unimproved by dieting probably won’t respond to antidepressants at all, because their problem isn’t “psychiatric” depression, but more likely an underactive thyroid.
There are a number of such conditions that can deceive the unwary shrink into mistreating them with psych drugs.
It’s hard to say what the subjects thought about their emperors. They invariably had to go through periods of lulus, like Caligula and Nero. They also had to contend with multiple emperors, all demanding your allegiance simultaneously- your head depended on your ability to schmooze your neighborhood emperor until he was assassinated, while simultaneously being ready to cheer the perpetrator without betraying your “attachment” to his predecessor.
Today, it’s more acceptable to have a tombstone that says how wealthy you were when we all went extinct than to actually exert some kind of effort to keep this from happening. Naturally, robots would make your grave site facilities because there’d be no people around to do it.
A genuinely ghastly performance from modern psychiatry- what sounds like an initial job for non-prescription magnesium chloride, and maybe a few grams of (also non-prescription) niacinamide. But then, there aren’t any winter conferences or gifts for not using prescription drugs.
He isn’t familiar with the concept of addictive allergies to foods, where commonly consumed foods can lead to “addictive behavior” and thoughts, in addition to “psychiatric” symptoms. “Mental health” professionals don’t believe in them because they were described by Theron Randolph, who failed to impress the APA with his accounts of experiences with many of his patients, including a demonstration on stage of addictive/allergic reactions on stage, with several of his patients volunteering, to demonstrate their experiences.
The way you handle cops is to give them too much to do. Tails can be led many places, because they have to know what you’re doing. Maybe they’d like to spend the day at the mall, going into every store. Maybe they’d like a leisurely lunch at your favorite buffet as you go repeatedly back and forth from the food line. Talk quietly to many strangers, asking them innocent questions in a low voice, nodding significantly while glancing “suspiciously” around if they say anything in reply. If you smoke, ask your tail for lights. Drive aimlessly, while stopping at many places. Be sure to talk to strangers on the sidewalk while driving, making many stops at different places afterwards. Let them have a busy day, full of minor activities they can report. Always maintain a sunny disposition as you can, particularly if you have to talk to them.
The tardive dyskinesia can (likely) be treated with manganese salts, even though it’s induced by antidepressants instead of “antipsychotic” drugs. I do know that the orthomolecular folks have used it for a while, even though that means conventional shrinks never will and bombard you with outrage if you ask.
One of the first things you have to know is that drug companies would no more like to see you withdraw from their products than that guy selling narcotics on the corner would like to see you stop consuming his products- the urge to keep their profits is too great.
Don’t forget nutrient therapy, particularly the idea of starting it BEFORE introducing someone to benzos. I realize this sounds pedestrian, but extreme emotions can have either a physical origin or can be alleviated with a proper nutrient program if you know what you have to use to replace deficiencies or dependencies that are giving someone an exaggerated response to stressors, particularly of the type you’re going to encounter in the field.
Hospitals do have a peculiar attitude about ETC. The gent who adjusted my B3 about 45 years ago, had been an ECT doc in the southern part of my state. Since he wasn’t a real psychiatrist, but an internist, he probably got into the use of mega B3 to preserve his patients’ memories, making the practice at least somewhat less appalling than it usually is.
Since he wasn’t a shrink, he also became interested in cerebral allergies and water-assisted fasting therapy, which he studied under Theron Randolph, one of the Grand Old Men of allergies, who trained his pupils by having them water fast for several days and introducing test meals of single foods over a period of days. This is what he hoped to do in his new job, but the hospital objected, saying fasting therapy was too dangerous, even in its own hospital. Apparently, the hospital thought ECT a safe treatment, but not water fasting. (no, I didn’t have any ECT and my appointment was free, as he was just setting up his office).
The embarrassing thing about this is that you probably could lower the rate of “CHR” individuals losing their marbles by pretreating them with a basic 3g/day of B3 and C instead of antipsychotic drugs.
But then manufacturers wouldn’t make any money, the most important element of present-day psychiatric treatment.
I’ve wondered for some time if niacinamide would be useful in benzo withdrawal because both classes of neurochemical use the same receptor sites. Its close family member, niacin (nicotinic acid for you pharmacology types) safely speeds up alcohol withdrawal to within a few days- I’ve used it in a withdrawal at an individual’s home (!!!?) successfully, though I wouldn’t recommend it for self-withdrawal.
Sounds good to me. And the one thing they all seem to believe is that psychosis is a unitary entity that they shall conquer when they find out what it is. Thus their “studies” are faulty before the actual work designed to prove their hypotheses even begins, as their groups are always mixed.
Well, going on antidepressants and losing your marbles two weeks or so later isn’t due to placebo effects, but inept screening, maybe with one of those company-issued “screening” sheets that doesn’t inquire about perceptual distortions.
Well, Steve, you and I both know that DSM “diagnoses” are pretty useless in the first place, as they tell you little or nothing about what’s actually going on with an individual, plus nothing about what proper treatments should be, should you actually chance to know what the problem is.
This is a disaster waiting to happen. These tests were created to sell antidepressants, not to find out what an adolescent’s mental state actually is, leaving plenty of opportunities to misdiagnose, which wouldn’t be too bad if this misdiagnosis didn’t lead to incompetent treatment that would lead to some kind of disaster involving “mismedication” with adolescents suffering from dysperceptions.
But there is in many cases. It’s the dietary use of manganese salts along with your taper. A Richard Kunin, MD, has been using manganese salts for dyskinesias since the 1980’s, as have some of the orthomolecular guys. He had a website naming the conditions he treated, tardive dyskinesia being one of them. I don’t know if he’s still around- he must be close to fossilization if he is.
Not examining psych patients probably deserves an inspiring motto. Maybe something like-“treatment failure begins here!”
Better to think of it as pharmacological psychiatry, as real medicine takes a back seat in conventional psychiatry. Think Pseudo-medical psychiatry, where the attempt is to push drugs and disabling treatments to cure the financial ailments of pharmaceutical companies and device providers.
Another thing hospital staff loathes is the knowledgeable patient, particularly one who knows his/her psych drugs as well, or (gasp) maybe better than staff do. Staff doesn’t like it if you can snap off side effects better than they can or if you can point out that somebody’s “quirk” that is actually a tic that nobody realized, and you’re only a patient. The therapist can become humiliated, while the doctor can suspect that you’re actually a plant or agent introduced by some nameless authority to spy on them. Another nice touch is to have a regular visitor who takes you over to some corner and then converses in low tones, punctuated by bursts of laughter (when asked, neither of you will say or admit to anything).
The article makes sense, as the cop style, as taught, just invites action based on distorted perception of the officer as a caricature martinet, space alien, robot or any other sort of caricature being- not the way to be talking someone into a facility, which is likely to be another story in strangeness.
This is where people like us come in, particularly if there are a number of us with a variety of “diagnoses” and some have had adventures where we were stranded among the aliens, giving us a good idea how to act in a tense time like that. What we need is somewhere to take the distraught that is somewhere better than the hospital, with its intense lighting and harried staff rushing everywhere.
I think I recall that Mr. Guiteau had neurosyphilis to assist his “reasoning” that his failure to find government employment was President Garfield’s fault
The HOD test came about after Hoffer’s first medical appointment as Director of Psychiatric Research in Saskatchewan. He was looking for a psychological test he could use to monitor experimental patients’ progress. As none existed, he decided to create one.
Osmond had come to Saskatchewan because he couldn’t stand the psychiatric climate in Great Britain. He became clinical supervisor and later superintendent of a mental hospital in Weyburn, one of the worst mental hospitals in the world at the time (visiting WHO rep). He’d been exposed to both the notion that the behavior of “schizophrenics” was the result of “normal” reactions to unusual perceptions and that the odd perceptions would recede as patients got better. He’d also had mescaline in England in the late 1940’s and used his experience as a framework for making Weyburn into a real hospital.
This was the climate in which the HOD test was born. The idea was simple- quantitative measurement as a test of mental status. It never initially caught on, as these were the salad days of psychoanalysis and biological beliefs about unusual mental states were in the doghouse, as well as being too prosaic for the psychoanalytic mind.
I got mine during a period in my life when I got interested in local hallucinogenic mushrooms and was interested in giving samples to others after testing them, myself. When I found out I was schizophrenic (I found I was B3 dependent, at any rate) is when I became interested in orthomolecular medicine.
I don’t know where you can get one now (I simply made copies of the scoring sheets instead of buying new ones). Besides, you can get an improved version, called the Experiential World Inventory, devised by Osmond and a gent with the last name, El Melighi. I think a Behavioral Science Press does that one, but you’d better do a computer search. There’s also an Orthomolecular.org website where you might be able to find out.
They must be lying to themselves, thinking this is a solution to depression, a group of signs and symptoms rather than an actual disease. Though it does give experimenters a chance to make failure pay off.
I wonder if the Harvard geniuses looked at the Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic (the HOD test). Probably not, as Hoffer and Osmond were the evil geniuses of psychiatry back in their salad days, using niacin and vitamin C as the basis for treating the dysperceptive.
I have a copy of this test, which has a subsection where the authors state the tester should inquire about suicidal thoughts in the individual being tested. A couple of years ago, I went through the dozens of protocols I had (100 plus?) and found all of five “suicide HOD’s”. Every one of the five had attempted suicide (I knew most of the testees’ histories).
But then those guys were the accursed Black Princes of psychiatry, abhorred by respectable shrinks, who wished they’d go away because “everyone knew” that vitamins had no role in the treatment of “schizophrenia syndrome”. That they’d both used hallucinogenic drugs before they became “respectable” confirmed the psychiatric beliefs of the day.
You can actually guesstimate the likelihood of patient violence if you take the time to find out details of your patient/client/interviewee’s experiential world. It can even be a clue to what nutrients to use to reassemble your individual’s scattered wits, should you know what symptomologies appear with certain deficiencies, dependencies and excesses.
Yes, but it’s bad for the old dignity to be too connected to reality, or else you’d have a hard time getting and/or keeping those important corporate sponsors.
I had several interesting chats with a shock doc, one with an ominous message. He wasn’t a shrink by training and was moving to a small rural hospital where he was hoping to treat cerebral allergies with water fasting and rotation diets (he was also familiar with orthomolecular therapy- I was referred by members of a schizophrenia association). And he did tell me how to adjust my B3 use.
The ominous message was that the hospital mavens thought fasting and dietary modification was too dangerous and exotic to be practiced at their institution, a general hospital- but ECT was apparently fine (I think he did them all at his previous place of employment). I was lucky as he was only in the area a few days, hoping to set up an office, so my visits were free.
There are personalized treatments for “depression”, but they don’t involve drugs. That’s because there are multiple sources for depressed moods, and the treatments have to address the proper sources to be successful.
Well, antipsychotics antagonize manganese, a necessary trace element to prevent tardive dyskinesia with its many tics and twitches that make life on “medications” difficult and embarrassing. This is also what makes them a sorry long-term treatment, as the likelihood of neurological problems increases with the length of exposure to “antipsychotics”.
You’ve heard the story-“get a bigger hammer!”
Maybe his knowledge was fictional.
And the title of the movie was? Get a Bigger Hammer!
It helps with the absorption of zinc. I realize it gives you dreams and you’re taking too much if your dreams become spectacular technicolor events.
Isn’t the FDA’s job to get new (patentable) drugs on the market whether or not they actually work the way they’re supposed to? If a new drug gets you buzzed, its commercial potential is so great the public has got to have it.
Since you received counseling, I think I might chip in with a few questions probably peculiar to me.
1. Do you have white spots in your fingernails?
2. Do you remember your dreams?
3. Do your fingernails seem soft?
The reason I’m asking is that I’m looking for signs you might be low in the mineral zinc, which is deeply involved in sexual functioning. Although you should see a professional interested in true biological medicine (not this tacky drug stuff- “pseudo-biological” drugging), if the items are true, a suggested program should definitely involve zinc supplementation, with B6 to help its absorption, if necessary, and maybe B100’s on general principles. Your first aim should be to remember dreams, if you don’t now, and titer the B6 until you do.
It isn’t generally understood that you can (to a degree) find out in advance if you’re likely to have bad reactions to cannabis and/or the hallucinogens. The old Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic helps in this respect. Being a quantitative test, you can almost find out by weighing your “true” answers without examining what they are (it was used in Saskatchewan as a screening method for LSD therapy until the DEA got uppity and forced the province to quit therapeutic use of LSD, which was a standard treatment for alcoholism there).
When dealing with straight people, I find that it’s best for me to observe in the persona of a spy. As a spy, particularly one who takes vitamins, I certainly don’t want to give myself away to potentially judgmental straight people, who might call out the militia if I get too strange.
If I wanted to be diagnostic, I’d think of something like prodromal senility (demonstrated by the inability to lie consistently about the same subject?), but I don’t know if it has a DSM number.
If I were permitted to use antidepressants, the first thing I’d look for is the number and frequency of perceptual distortions my would be patient was experiencing, as the chances of bad antidepressant experiences goes up with the increased number (and kind) of distortions the would-be patient is experiencing.
Well, there are substances that can correct thought disordered notions, but they’re things like niacin, NAD, glutamine, ascorbate, B6, etc., but there’s one thing that makes them dangerous to psychiatrists- none of them can be patented, which means no office toys, trips to the sunny South for winter pharmaceutical company conventions, no opportunity to be a contributor to pharma-sponsored articles. You’d have to get your patients well, without the impetus of toys, professional status increase and pre-paid vacations- a brutal challenge, because otherwise you could get them while your patients became chronic (under present circumstances).
Well, you’re dealing with a guy who consumes a gram of caffeine/day and lives on a diet of Big Macs and Fish Witches. I don’t know if the guy has a diagnosis, but I do know why he stays up at 3AM sending Tweets to the universe at large, in circumstances where I wouldn’t expect deep thoughts to be revealed or linguistic brilliancies to be uttered.
Well, a shrink isn’t going to tell you he doesn’t know what’s going on, which is why his supposed treatment failed. Financially and psychologically better for the pro (by his/her own standards) to say you’re treatment resistant than the shrink telling you outright that he doesn’t know enough about your condition to treat it properly, nor does he know anyone who does.
When I was more involved with “mental health” activities, I used to find depressed individuals who experienced numerous perceptual distortions. When treated with B3 and C for the distortions, their moods would improve- misdiagnosing going on that missed proper treatment?
But a few alcoholics realize they need pharmacologically adequate amounts of niacin to send the heebie jeebies away in 24 hours, which it does.
This merely demonstrates the kind of fumbling you get when you mistake a syndrome for an actual disease. Since there can be a variety of causes for “depression”, it would be foolish to presume a “one treatment fits all” approach to have much, if any value. It would be as foolish as believing that one hat size fits all or that one waist size will create pants that fit everyone (creating amusement for the spectator, but embarrassment for most wearers).
They can also have “cerebral allergies”, where certain foods get them buzzed. Water fasting for several days is the usual method of prepping for the test meals. This technique goes back to Theron Randolph (MD’s) salad days (he was an early allergist who used to teach his techniques to professional students by having them fast and then test themselves for allergic reactions).
Zyprexa had better not be on the list of acceptable “medications” for this alleged disorder. I once made a speaker’s day when she asked which antidepressant had the side effect of excessive weight gain and I gave her the correct answer.
I’m not very profound, as some of the regulars may tell you, but I do know that the antipsychotic movement problems (dyskinesia, akathisia) you and others might be having can (at least sometimes) be treated with manganese salts, preferably by an orthomolecular medical guy, but I can propose a starter program if you can’t find a practitioner (you don’t want to do this without guidance, as manganese can do bad things in excess).