BC, eh? Maybe you’d better get him to see Frances Fuller, ND (yes, that’s the letter N, not an M). She was Abram Hoffer’s secretary for 30 years, getting a doctorate in naturopathy while she worked for him. He said she had better rapport with his patients than he did, and referred his patients to her when he retired. Her office might still be in Victoria.
Patients not wanting to take their zombie pills because they’re afraid they’re being monitored? That’s not a delusion because that’s what the little chips are for- to make sure the patients are properly “zombifying” themselves.
I notice how these authorities seem to be working hard to deny that the Ritalin might have induced a maladaptive state in the youthful patient group, leaving these individuals more prone to “depression” as their bodies maladapt to the continuing presence of the drug in their systems (similar to the maladaptive state induced by chronic use of amphetamines).
A good piece. It’s probably going to get furious denunciations from hundreds of defenders of (conflicting) real truths- the only thing they can all agree upon.
A sorry performance by the medical community. These MDs’ only excuse was that they knew nothing about physical changes at the end of pregnancy- unfortunate, as these states respond well to zinc+B6 with C and B-complex as likely add-ons. The B6 is to expedite the absorption of the zinc, which is to antagonize the elevated serum copper that is promoting the depressed state and the C helps reduce same.
I notice that lead is never mentioned in conjunction with ADHD, despite its being the most dangerous instigator of “ADHD” type behavior, as well as being likely resistant to the alleged treatment for this condition. Maybe it’s because hair sampling is a no-no in present day medicine and psychiatry.
The real surprise is how this group actually had to do a study to see if the industries in question were pushing products in their alleged educational materials. An even bigger surprise would be if the manufacturers DIDN’T try to push their products this way.
Still looking for the magic bullet. Is this a more recent part of our psychiatric community’s fumbling effort to prove that the schizophrenia syndrome is a single disease entity?
The most interesting thing I find in these debates is that the “medical” model being discussed isn’t medical at all. There are many physical ailments that induce “mental” symptoms, yet most psychiatrists know nothing about them. Unknown numbers about them likely couldn’t properly identify sufferers of the “classical” deficiency diseases- pellagra, scurvy, beriberi (said Hoffer), much less neurologically and other physically related ones likely to require a complete examination BEFORE diagnosing a condition.
No help from me. I’m over 70, but I’m not taking any prescription drugs, which my physician at the VA finds markedly unusual. I must be too weird to help you.
Actually, these “diagnostic” techniques lead to both groups getting improper treatments, the “white” guys getting antidepressants until the sudden revelations from God and/or the devil, demonstrate the erroneous diagnosis, while the colored guys become twitching robots from their maltreatment, demonstrating exactly the same thing.
Depression? There are perhaps dozens of biotypes among the nation’s depressed and different treatments for all of them. Unfortunately many of them don’t require pharmacological treatments, so “researchers” are wasting their time seeking the Magic Antidepressant that will prove to be the Universal Cure for these states of misery.
I’d hate to be on the jury if this went to trial. I don’t know if I could stand listening to day after day of psychiatric blather from a large sequence of alleged experts delivering spiels in the malevolent custard such individuals use to absolve themselves of responsibility for their own bungling.
This glyphosate business does have one good side effect. It proves that “schizophrenia” isn’t the result of defective genes. Why? Unmedicated schizophrenics don’t get cancer (for example, Hoffer had around ten of his 5,000 or so schizophrenic patients present with cancer. None died of it).
The original observations were in made by colleagues of the late Abram Hoffer, the Dark Lord of Canadian psychiatry, in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, which would certainly provide no impetus for investigations by loyal mainline Canadian shrinks.
No, but you’d like to see some connection between “psychiatric” conditions and the health of one’s gut flora.
It won’t be popular, but how about using the criteria for real medicine’s diagnoses for “psychiatric diseases”? Thus post partum depressions and psychoses would be categorized as forms of copper intoxication, for example. The “schizophrenias” would be broken into their components based on what was physically going on (e.g. pyroluria, cerebral allergies, subclinical pellagra, etc.). Psychiatrists wouldn’t like it, because they’d have to think, but the patients would have a decent idea of what was going on, unlike most of today’s “psych” patients.
It’s business. There’s no steadier drug customer than an addict- someone who can’t stop using and will do anything to get his/her fix, including robbing banks, and even their grandmothers, to get the money to score. This is one reason dealers frequently have home arsenals.
This is a (psychiatric) disgrace. I suspect I could do a better job than that, using nutrients off his pharmacies’ shelves, than his doctors did with their access to all the stores’ prescriptions.
Better tear down your house and replace it with a concrete pillbox. Replace the lawn with ankle-tangle and concertina wire. I haven’t had any psych meds in 35 years.
Curiously(?) enough, the only shock doc I ever knew wasn’t a psychiatrist by training, but an internist. He worked in a hospital in Michigan’s Oakland county, where, I believe he did them all. Unlike the above professional apologists, he mentioned, in a review of them, that he didn’t even curl his subjects’ toes. I knew him from when he was moving to a small town further north, where he hoped he could practice using therapeutic fasting, as described by Theron Randolph(MD) in the 1950’s. As he adjusted my B3 (why I went to see him), I suspect he also had his downstate patients on it as well, which would reduce the likelihood of serious memory loss. Unfortunately for him, the new hospital staff thought that controlled fasting was too dangerous a practice, an interesting observation on hospital medical thinking.
No, but it makes you stronger should you be scared or outraged. It also can induce distortions of sense perception should it be unable to metabolize into harmless compounds like leucoadrenochrome after the scary things have gone away.
Our psychiatric community has got to make a lot of noise, because it has to disguise the poor results of its treatments. Schizophrenia syndrome is the worst example, where the drug-induced 10% or so recovery rate is one third of the untreated natural recovery rate of 30% or thereabouts.
Pretty conventional stuff markps2. The capacity to eat niacin varies with individuals- my old friend Henry the Paranoid used to consume at least 15g/day (I once watched him down 10 500mg tablets with one swig from a drinking fountain). And yes, it was therapeutic for his paranoia although it didn’t work fast (he was chronic, but he did get markedly better over a couple of months).
Reminds me of the critics of orthomolecular treatments and is probably about as well-informed. Even here I read some guy blogging in this vein. He undid himself by mentioning a number of alleged double blind studies involving niacin, which can’t be double blinded (if you’ve never had any niacin, take a gram on an empty stomach to find out why, but don’t blame me for what happens) unless you use niacinamide as a hidden control in your study, which these critical “studies” never do.
I don’t imagine faddish diets will get you anywhere. It depends on your physiology and psychology. It’s an individualized matter and depends on your dietary background and (of course) your income. The avoidance stuff is simple, but what to eat can be more difficult.
And that’s why they’re miserable.
Knowing a diagnosis can also be helpful if you know the self-help things you can do to stay sane. For example, knowing you’re “schizophrenic” means you’re obliged to avoid stimulants (avoiding junk food is mandatory, no matter what you’re diagnosed with) and hallucinogens (alcohol is also a no-no, even if Mark Vonnegut thinks otherwise).
Brilliant idea, Steve. Once they were able to crawl, we could employ babies to clean heat and A/C ducts in large buildings by crawling through them while wearing dust mop knee pads.
Frank. Will the new Titanic attempt to break the speed record for crossing the Atlantic to win the Blue Riband?
And how is this going to work with “mental” ailments that have an obvious physical origin like post partum depression and/or psychosis, which are brought on by excessive serum copper at the end of pregnancy and have the same B6+Zinc treatment? Or ADHD, which can be brought on by subclinical lead poisoning (which none of our child psychiatrists ever think of)?
You might want to contact a Richard Kunin, MD. He does have a web site, though I don’t remember the address (your browser can take care of that). Although technically a shrink, his sites list an enormous number of physical conditions he treats, one of which is tardive dyskinesia (first writing about the subject in 1975). He’s an old guy, but I guess he’s still going strong.
And the worst thing about this is that the alleged treatment will probably make the patients worse, as the psych drugs in general use are likely to magnify the spectacular side effects of bad reactions to ketamine/PCP type drugs. Time to call your patient treatment resistant and send her to the back ward with the Christs and Hitler reincarnations. Maybe Virgin Mary will be somewhere on the ward, too.
Little turtle. What happens with these post-partum ailments is that the expectant mother’s body is high in copper and low in zinc for some weeks after giving birth. If serum copper is excessive, then depression and disperceptions can occur. Proper treatment for this involves raising the sufferer’s zinc levels a la Carl Pfeiffer, which is done by adding B6 to the zinc salts to a level where dreams are remembered (a cue indicating adequate B6 levels).
Well, this will provide a reason to have more beds in mental facilities. We have a delirium producing drug that can’t be treated by antipsychotic drugs, and, if a pharma rep has been reading these columns, there will never be a proper treatment for ketamine delirium (I mentioned a treatment I’ve successfully used for PCP delirium based on l-glutamine) that won’t be used, as there’s no patent possibility to secure a fortune for the company developing the treatment.
Well, Frank, bio’s likely to be in there whether we like it or not. There’s nothing wrong with it, if our alleged helper isn’t addicted to the use of the prescription pad and the so-called psych drugs, but is aware of non-drug treatments for anxiety (magnesium, maybe niacinamide), depression (B1, B3, B12, sometimes B6, sometimes thyroid among others), and other conditions with more complicated physical treatments. Notice the non-reliance on our common psych drugs.
You wouldn’t expect the powers that be to admit they were irresponsible dummies who didn’t know squat about the drugs they were prescribing and therefore wired their young patients into hallucinating and bouncing off the walls, despite it being general knowledge that stimulants frequently do this?
The recovery rate doesn’t improve, but I bet there are more interesting and exciting side effects.
I know, but I do like jiving the ultra orthodox.
It really amazes me how few people know about using B6 and zinc to prevent post-partum psychoses. Maybe elements of inquiry are too complicated- asking about changes in taste and whether dreams are recalled, plus looking to see if fingernails have white spots or bands in them.
Well, Montana’s one of those places where the Jurassic version of conservatism reigns. In this Jurassic world, suicide is eliminated by having all the suicidal individuals kill themselves, thus eliminating their genetic codes from society forever. After all, once everyone’s dead, then suicide will magically vanish (maybe the Invisible Hand of the Magic of the Marketplace is involved). After all, back in the real Jurassic, if your brain was the size of an apple, you were an intellectual giant.
This may have been back in the alleged good old days when thimoserol (my spell check is playing games with me), a mercury containing substance, was used as a preservative in vaccines. Of course the medical profession was outraged when someone considered replacing it.
Well, FeelinDiscouraged, there is no gap between physical and “psychiatric” diseases, so you may be seeing more articles like this one.
Well, oldhead, it does graphically show you just how on the ball psychiatrists are.
Well Steve. This is what happens when you try to treat syndromes as real diseases. “Mental illnesses” aren’t real diseases unto themselves, but syndromes- collections of signs and symptoms that can (and likely do) have multiple origins and multiple treatments, depending on the causative agents. Naturally, it should be no surprise that there isn’t genetic simplicity or constancy for everyone with the same syndrome.
I seldom “tell my story”, because most listeners are either disgusted or disbelieving. Getting better by accident has no panache and the involvement of niacin disgusts and dismays “providers”.
It’s an interesting article but I do find myself differing with Mr. B about psychiatry as practiced today. It isn’t biological psychiatry, but pharmaceutical psychiatry. This “medical” approach we see pays little attention to biology, but exerts great effort promoting the latest pharmaceutical “treatments” with new and improved drugs to inflict neurological punishment on psychiatric patients, giving them dyskinesia, akathisia and other amazing side effects generated by companies ignorant of the biological consequences of these supposed treatments.
I’ve been curious about the use of niacinamide for benzo withdrawal, in similar fashion to using niacin (with sometimes also magnesium) for alcohol withdrawal. I didn’t notice any of the article writers referring to it, although I also realize that the term “vitamin B3” induces convulsions of fury in psychiatrists, forcing them to avoid it at all costs.
This is the sort of thing that happens when you treat a syndrome like it was an actual unitary disease. No wonder these alleged researchers are confused- they haven’t teased out members of the many sub-groups of the depressed, so all these groups are combined into one population instead of the heterogeneous groups they actually are.
Psychology might be thought of as more effective if the practitioners didn’t waste a lot of time trying to do great therapeutic things with individuals so delirious they barely know where they are, and are incapable of absorbing ordinary ideas, much less therapeutic ones.
Reminds me of the 17th and 18th Century searches for the identity of phlogiston, which, naturally, didn’t exist.
Steve, you’ve got to remember that those alleged diagnoses in the DSM’s are actually behavioral descriptions that say nothing about their origins or treatments, unlike the conditions that Nic has catalogued.
Naturally. It seems to be a psychiatric cliché that your diet has nothing to do with your mental state, a notion that requires constant attention and effort to defend.
The idea of mental symptomology being caused by conditions other than brain diseases seems to have eluded mental health professionals, despite the existence of the classic dietary deficiency diseases- scurvy, beriberi and pellagra, all of which can induce depression (also notice that all three have different treatments).
Steve. You and I are aware of ketamine’s background, but it’s likely that the desperate individuals who want their suffering to go away don’t. Or if they were aware of what ketamine does, it was 40 years ago and was likely forgotten over time.
Almost makes me wish I were back in school, dealing with the mental issues of others in addition to writing their term papers for them. I wouldn’t want any money for doing treatments, in order to stay vaguely legal, so I’d use receiving favors in lieu of that, the papers being for generating monetary income.
Don’t forget about actions activated by things like blood sugar irregularities, where the perpetrators’ unconscious is reacting to blood sugar changes brought on by excessive sugar consumption or reactions to sensitizing foods. I’d certainly suspect things like these in kids incapable of being calmed down- better than getting them addicted to the robot drugs of 21st Century psychiatry.
Am I to presume these studies simply pronounce you at risk for psychosis without explaining the things you can do to prevent it from actually appearing, such as avoiding alcohol, stimulants, hallucinogens and ADHD drugs, keeping regular hours, maintaining junk free diets? Or are you simply telling your at risk population that florid psychoses will simply leap out of the shadows (gotcha!) no matter what you do, if you aren’t lucky? Or are you to prevent this by becoming a doped up zombie through the agency of preventive antipsychotics (zombie and free!)?
Probably one of the easiest things colleges can do is examine what is served in their dining halls and expel the refined carbohydrates for the duration. Some of the more unpleasant memories of my school days are of the food.
You’re right about the major hallucinogens like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, et. al., but there are some little known ones like adrenochrome and adrenolutin that are pretty close, aren’t psychedelic and also provide prolonged experiences that can go on for days from single doses. You can steal some asthmatic’s adrenaline and let it sit until it turns pink before you snort it, if you want to try, but I’ll pass, thank you.
They’d also have to come off such alleged medications for some time before they were mentally fit to prescribe anything more toxic than aspirin or vitamin C. The antidepressant advocates would be the worst off, as their convalescent time might stretch into years.
Remember, kids. L-glutamine is the likely antagonist for this, as the anesthetics like ketamine and PCP destroy glutamates, so you need enough glutamine to override this action.
One of the items I did miss in the article was the idea of having mental health workers take hallucinogens to understand the experiences their psychotic patients are having. I hope it wasn’t because Humphry Osmond, one of psychiatry’s blackest sheep, encouraged the practice for his staff members when he was superintendent at Weyburn Hospital, Saskatchewan (he also insisted on converting the hospitals “seclusion rooms” into refuges patients could voluntarily visit when overstimulated).
Well, that goes without saying. You’d be wasting your time if you were already under the influence of antipsychotics and be more likely to freak out on antidepressants and/or the jumpers prescribed for ADHD. I do know a few things, oldhead.
As a living fossil, I feel an obligation to describe in more concrete terms the relatively safe use of hallucinogens. Avoid them if you have numerous perceptual distortions of vision, hearing, time sense, etc. Psychiatric diagnoses don’t matter but omnipresent sensory distortions do. Being a first-order relative of someone who does have them is also a warning sign for your own consumptions of hallucinogens.
I’ve cribbed and paraphrased these items from my copy of The Hallucinogens, by Hoffer and Osmond (1967). It’s been out of print for years, but it’s a good item for you collectors to seek.
Nothing, except maybe pharmaceutical sales, but neurology and general medicine probably should.
Of course, if you can get the kid drugged as being mentally ill and are poor, maybe you can sell your kids’ medications instead of getting the kids stoned out. You could unload the speed at a local truck stop. The problem is making sure the kids seem drugged when the piss test times come around, because they’ll have to have that properly dirty urine to “prove” they’re taking their meds- perhaps there are school employees who have that need for speed plus knowledge of the test dates and times.
For many years, I’ve accepted the idea that delusions arise from attempts to explain events originating from trying to explain distorted perceptual experiences. For instance, paranoid notions can easily arise from the sensation of being watched or from auditories whispering or saying bad things about you. Such things are likely to have a biological basis, all right, that can be corrected, but obviously not with “antipsychotic” drugs which simply shut everything down (and you, too, if you overdose).
The problem isn’t with the much despised medical model, but its psychiatric version, which ignores physical difficulties outside the brain that affect its functioning, and which can be manifold. For example, I give you Theron Randolph’s presentation of what he considered cerebral allergies, curable with water fasting and future avoidance, to the APA about 60 years ago, in which he presented histories of 2000 or so patients and demonstrated it on stage with two of his patient volunteers. The APA regarded him with a big ho-hum.
I’ve always liked David Hawkins’ term “metabolic dysperception” since 1974, when I first read it.
Bad idea to have authoritarian shrinks. Knowing nothing about “mental” diseases and having no real knowledge about physical ones are poor foundations for authoritarian types, as there is so little content in their bodies of “knowledge”, a secret authoritarians defend, in lieu of defending a real body of knowledge.
Well, pharmaceutical companies are spending billions trying to convince you that you needed to be medicated for something, that deep, deep down you’re seeking that Big Buzz that will make everything fine- or that you won’t care if nothing’s fine if you do cop that Big Buzz with their drugs.
Start with something simple, like magnesium. You also want to find out about his morning routine and things he does or eats. Does he do or eat the same thing(s) on the mornings he has these episodes? I’d try to get him to take an HOD test eventually, but I’m beginning to sound too much like I know what I’m talking about, and the further things to do might be too manifold for a blog.
I’m wondering if I’ll wind up practicing underground psychiatry again. I seem to know more about the bad characteristics of these drugs than real psychiatrists, plus more about how to treat bad reactions from them.
Think of it as job creation, Steve. How many psychiatric area jobs would be lost if these delirious individuals were revived with a few grams of niacin, ascorbate or l-glutamine and were sent on their way when coherent?
When he went for his alleged help, he may have had to vegetate in the waiting room, waiting among a group of vets suffering from a variety of conditions to be called for his initial interview. VA psych wards in the organization’s general hospitals don’t seem to be bad, although their specialized psych facilities have a number of head injury patients, which can create a rowdy atmosphere- bullets and shell splinters in one’s brain can hardly be considered tranquilizing. The alleged treatments are as sorry as in civilian facilities, although I may be simply peeved at the VA’s inability to diagnose my caffeine sensitivity.
Good idea, Steve. When you’re “diagnosed” by such means when freaking on ketamine/PCP type drugs, you’re likely to deteriorate big time when placed on a psych drug regimen and then get called treatment resistant, which calls for even heavier doses of psych drugs (which is why I became interested in big doses of glutamine for PCP delirium 40+ years ago).
You aren’t supposed to carp about “new” antidepressants, but to fight to ensure nobody uses B1, B3, B6 or B12 should they become depressed. The FDA might even promote you if you did so.
Because office work is done without the workers realizing what’s actually going on, not having studied things like Parkinson’s Law (work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion), or the Peter Principle (employees rise to their level of incompetence, which encourages the creation of incompetent organizations).
That’s the point, YIS. Your mental health is part of your physical health, something the average psychiatrist doesn’t seem to understand, just as these individuals don’t understand you can do ECT’s on patients without erasing their long-term memories, simply by keeping them on B3 (one of the reasons Hoffer, et. al. used them on occasion, but with many fewer shocks per patient, unlike our big-time shock docs).
Incidentally, YIS, I use a DIY protocol, too. Now in my early 70’s, I find it interesting how many professionals are amazed I’m not on some kind of medication at my age, particularly the VA guy who does my annual physicals.
The blog actually raises a question. Who is psychotic, us or Big Pharma?
This reminds me of an item in the old compilation Orthomolecular Psychiatry edited by Linus Pauling and David Hawkins in1974. In an essay by Hawkins describing the North Nassau Mental Health Center, which he ran, he mentioned that the doper patients he had (in the glory days of psychedelic abuse) who only smoked marijuana didn’t relapse like the poly-dopers who were also his patients and were getting basically the same treatments as the others. Perhaps this is related to some of the stuff in this article about CBD.
I’m wondering about the point in doing this. Stroke patients are probably likely to be depressed if they notice significant impairment of functioning- is this alleged treatment supposed to help this state despite no return of “normal” functioning? Or is it to make you happy, though impaired?
Or is this a search for new antidepressant markets?
No “mental” illnesses perhaps, but a number of physical illnesses that present with “mental” symptoms that won’t be relieved with psychiatric drugs (and that shrinks don’t know about because their real medical training is ignored) do exist.
Lead, a behavioral toxin as reported in the JAMA Psychiatry? This is unusual, because it publicly confirms views that the dreaded and derided school of orthomolecular practitioners have held for several decades (though the Journal would never dare to reveal that). It also fails to puff some new pharmaceutical product- heresy!
It’s probably a good thing I’m too old for this. Rapping with the patients wouldn’t be a problem, but I’d be anathema to staff members if I told a client I got better because I found out I’m B3 dependent and that caffeine’s a potentially serious toxic substance for me. Staff would likely get me committed with the diagnosis of Munchausen’s Syndrome.
Kelly. Are there any nutritional means of speeding up this withdrawal process to make it less difficult? I know it’s possible with alcohol, using mega niacin and ascorbate, and amphetamine, using ascorbate and B1 (and B3, if there are hallucinations). I’ve also come across programs for narcotics (I used to subscribe to the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine).
I’m asking you because you seem to be more familiar with such procedures than most of the contributors.
No surprise for me. I stay away from opinion leaders because they’d want me immediately committed if I publicly said I thought B3 was a better idea for “schizophrenic” patients than the most sophisticated psychiatric drugs.
This reminds me of when I first got my Hoffer-Osmond Diagnostic test, which measures perceptual stability. I was using it to screen prospective volunteers for safety prior to taking native hallucinogenic mushrooms (no, I don’t live in the South, and yes, manifold dysperceptions contraindicate hallucinogen use). As I worked as a volunteer at a crisis drop-in center, I had no shortage of prospective clients and no shortage of high scores, plus some belonging to curious people on meds, usually for depression which proved to be misdiagnosed by their high scores, but erroneously treated by their physicians, who didn’t use such instruments (and still don’t).
This test isn’t useful for children as they routinely have frequent have high scores, which place them in the same class as my misdiagnosed older test takers. Since SSRI’s have the same kind of bad consequences as the older antidepressants, is there any surprise that “medicated” children are coming unglued on their prescriptions?
This is about supplementing psychiatrists, individuals demonstrably uninterested in looking for underlying medical conditions affecting extreme mental states. The psychiatric community would be outraged if their “lesser” psychological brethren were capable of doing so when they weren’t and actually did so as a result.
Here’s another curiosity about ketamine. It’s related to PCP, the get simple and delirious mainstay of 1970’s simpletons seeking chemical adventures. Emergency room adventures were frequently the consequence of such chemical adventures, particularly since antipsychotic drugs made the PCP delirium worse. Is this also the case for ketamine, a drug with a similar method of chemical action?
This could become a serious problem, since drug cocktails are all the rage in present day psychiatry, raising the likelihood of drug-induced delerium when antipsychotics and ketamine are used together. I suspect few ER’s will use multiple grams of l-glutamine to treat ketamine related deleriums (deleria?), preferring emergency room excitement to using non-drug substances. (by the way- I have successfully used glutamine for PCP on the rare occasion I’ve seen this problem, but then I’m just a crazy without respect for the alleged therapeutic qualities of such drugs)
Well, you wouldn’t expect the Times to feature something like the mega B1 that the late Gertrude Black, MD used to use for her patients- 500mg. B1 immediately, then 100mg. of same per hour up to 5 hours until ideation fades. That isn’t high tech enough, plus it’s using nutrients- plus the MD wasn’t (and had no intentions of becoming) a psychiatrist.
Could definitely be, as the “depressions” preceding these neurological diseases are simply indicative something’s amiss, like the falling barometer pressure preceding hurricanes. Fixing the barometer won’t prevent the hurricane.
Probably more “depressions” are like this, but ones that don’t lead to spectacular neurological disasters. These are the ones that get you addicted to antidepressants that fail to relieve your depressed mood.
I suspect that psychotic impaired awareness is at least part of this. Similar things are also in store for stumbling drunks and other loaded intoxicated stumblers, even if they don’t pass the psychotic history tests (save for maybe constant psychotic drinking/drugging).
Who’s promoting the notion that professionals should get into arguments about delusions? Forty plus years ago, when I was a crisis volunteer, I was told to never get into arguments about delusions. Then my mentor (who once provided the only correct knowledge of a hospitalized client’s severe illness in a room full of doctors, which my associate wasn’t- paraquat poisoning) pointed out how delusions could provide clues to what was affecting an individual, such as altered senses of taste being caused by zinc deficiency.
Abolishing psychiatry? It will likely go the way pellagrology did when Vitamin B3 cured most cases of pellagra. It’s still around in places like India, where inadequate diets are common, but not in the western world, where even white flour is fortified with niacinamide (although some of the “schizophrenias” may be forms of vitamin resistant pellagra).
The difficulty with acquiring psychiatric knowledge is that “psychiatric diseases” don’t exist in a pure form, being descriptions (and not good ones at that) of collections of symptoms compressed into relatively simple categories and groups that are actually heterogeneous in nature. Attempting studies without teasing out all the subgroups in the study population invites certain failure.
Well, we can’t have the suicidal combining B12 and B1 can we? The object of medicine is to ensure income for providers and manufacturers with the actual health of individuals being secondary to this all-important goal.
Maybe it was because the animals talked to St. Francis.
I’m not deep in the know about pre and probiotics like the other commentators, but I am familiar with the use of supplements in place of medications. To set up an appropriate program, I’d have to see you in person for an interview and perhaps a Hoffer Osmond Diagnostic test (the infamous HOD I sometimes mention in correspondence on the site) to find out what nutrients I might have to use. I’m just a former crazy, myself, who accidentally treated himself, so I’d suggest finding out if there’s an orthomolecular practitioner in your neighborhood, many of whom can be found on websites (search “orthomolecular”).
High cholesterol? Heavy drinking? Sounds like a job for niacin if he’s going to get any outside substances administered. Of course the doctors would threaten you for even considering such a “dangerous” substance and they’d want to know who I was, so they could prosecute me as well.
It might be easier to resolve, once you realize that “psychiatric diagnoses” aren’t. Once you realize this, then it’s easy to comprehend that the DSM’s aren’t diagnostic at all, but merely descriptions of extreme states and/or extreme forms of behavior. It’s also easy to comprehend why the world of psychiatry is also the world of treatment failures. The problem isn’t that shrinks are too medical, but that they don’t practice real medicine, preferring linguistic puffery and blind “medical” treatments instead.
BC, eh? Maybe you’d better get him to see Frances Fuller, ND (yes, that’s the letter N, not an M). She was Abram Hoffer’s secretary for 30 years, getting a doctorate in naturopathy while she worked for him. He said she had better rapport with his patients than he did, and referred his patients to her when he retired. Her office might still be in Victoria.
Patients not wanting to take their zombie pills because they’re afraid they’re being monitored? That’s not a delusion because that’s what the little chips are for- to make sure the patients are properly “zombifying” themselves.
I notice how these authorities seem to be working hard to deny that the Ritalin might have induced a maladaptive state in the youthful patient group, leaving these individuals more prone to “depression” as their bodies maladapt to the continuing presence of the drug in their systems (similar to the maladaptive state induced by chronic use of amphetamines).
A good piece. It’s probably going to get furious denunciations from hundreds of defenders of (conflicting) real truths- the only thing they can all agree upon.
A sorry performance by the medical community. These MDs’ only excuse was that they knew nothing about physical changes at the end of pregnancy- unfortunate, as these states respond well to zinc+B6 with C and B-complex as likely add-ons. The B6 is to expedite the absorption of the zinc, which is to antagonize the elevated serum copper that is promoting the depressed state and the C helps reduce same.
I notice that lead is never mentioned in conjunction with ADHD, despite its being the most dangerous instigator of “ADHD” type behavior, as well as being likely resistant to the alleged treatment for this condition. Maybe it’s because hair sampling is a no-no in present day medicine and psychiatry.
The real surprise is how this group actually had to do a study to see if the industries in question were pushing products in their alleged educational materials. An even bigger surprise would be if the manufacturers DIDN’T try to push their products this way.
Still looking for the magic bullet. Is this a more recent part of our psychiatric community’s fumbling effort to prove that the schizophrenia syndrome is a single disease entity?
The most interesting thing I find in these debates is that the “medical” model being discussed isn’t medical at all. There are many physical ailments that induce “mental” symptoms, yet most psychiatrists know nothing about them. Unknown numbers about them likely couldn’t properly identify sufferers of the “classical” deficiency diseases- pellagra, scurvy, beriberi (said Hoffer), much less neurologically and other physically related ones likely to require a complete examination BEFORE diagnosing a condition.
No help from me. I’m over 70, but I’m not taking any prescription drugs, which my physician at the VA finds markedly unusual. I must be too weird to help you.
Actually, these “diagnostic” techniques lead to both groups getting improper treatments, the “white” guys getting antidepressants until the sudden revelations from God and/or the devil, demonstrate the erroneous diagnosis, while the colored guys become twitching robots from their maltreatment, demonstrating exactly the same thing.
Depression? There are perhaps dozens of biotypes among the nation’s depressed and different treatments for all of them. Unfortunately many of them don’t require pharmacological treatments, so “researchers” are wasting their time seeking the Magic Antidepressant that will prove to be the Universal Cure for these states of misery.
I’d hate to be on the jury if this went to trial. I don’t know if I could stand listening to day after day of psychiatric blather from a large sequence of alleged experts delivering spiels in the malevolent custard such individuals use to absolve themselves of responsibility for their own bungling.
This glyphosate business does have one good side effect. It proves that “schizophrenia” isn’t the result of defective genes. Why? Unmedicated schizophrenics don’t get cancer (for example, Hoffer had around ten of his 5,000 or so schizophrenic patients present with cancer. None died of it).
The original observations were in made by colleagues of the late Abram Hoffer, the Dark Lord of Canadian psychiatry, in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, which would certainly provide no impetus for investigations by loyal mainline Canadian shrinks.
No, but you’d like to see some connection between “psychiatric” conditions and the health of one’s gut flora.
It won’t be popular, but how about using the criteria for real medicine’s diagnoses for “psychiatric diseases”? Thus post partum depressions and psychoses would be categorized as forms of copper intoxication, for example. The “schizophrenias” would be broken into their components based on what was physically going on (e.g. pyroluria, cerebral allergies, subclinical pellagra, etc.). Psychiatrists wouldn’t like it, because they’d have to think, but the patients would have a decent idea of what was going on, unlike most of today’s “psych” patients.
It’s business. There’s no steadier drug customer than an addict- someone who can’t stop using and will do anything to get his/her fix, including robbing banks, and even their grandmothers, to get the money to score. This is one reason dealers frequently have home arsenals.
This is a (psychiatric) disgrace. I suspect I could do a better job than that, using nutrients off his pharmacies’ shelves, than his doctors did with their access to all the stores’ prescriptions.
Better tear down your house and replace it with a concrete pillbox. Replace the lawn with ankle-tangle and concertina wire. I haven’t had any psych meds in 35 years.
Curiously(?) enough, the only shock doc I ever knew wasn’t a psychiatrist by training, but an internist. He worked in a hospital in Michigan’s Oakland county, where, I believe he did them all. Unlike the above professional apologists, he mentioned, in a review of them, that he didn’t even curl his subjects’ toes. I knew him from when he was moving to a small town further north, where he hoped he could practice using therapeutic fasting, as described by Theron Randolph(MD) in the 1950’s. As he adjusted my B3 (why I went to see him), I suspect he also had his downstate patients on it as well, which would reduce the likelihood of serious memory loss. Unfortunately for him, the new hospital staff thought that controlled fasting was too dangerous a practice, an interesting observation on hospital medical thinking.
No, but it makes you stronger should you be scared or outraged. It also can induce distortions of sense perception should it be unable to metabolize into harmless compounds like leucoadrenochrome after the scary things have gone away.
Our psychiatric community has got to make a lot of noise, because it has to disguise the poor results of its treatments. Schizophrenia syndrome is the worst example, where the drug-induced 10% or so recovery rate is one third of the untreated natural recovery rate of 30% or thereabouts.
Pretty conventional stuff markps2. The capacity to eat niacin varies with individuals- my old friend Henry the Paranoid used to consume at least 15g/day (I once watched him down 10 500mg tablets with one swig from a drinking fountain). And yes, it was therapeutic for his paranoia although it didn’t work fast (he was chronic, but he did get markedly better over a couple of months).
Reminds me of the critics of orthomolecular treatments and is probably about as well-informed. Even here I read some guy blogging in this vein. He undid himself by mentioning a number of alleged double blind studies involving niacin, which can’t be double blinded (if you’ve never had any niacin, take a gram on an empty stomach to find out why, but don’t blame me for what happens) unless you use niacinamide as a hidden control in your study, which these critical “studies” never do.
I don’t imagine faddish diets will get you anywhere. It depends on your physiology and psychology. It’s an individualized matter and depends on your dietary background and (of course) your income. The avoidance stuff is simple, but what to eat can be more difficult.
And that’s why they’re miserable.
Knowing a diagnosis can also be helpful if you know the self-help things you can do to stay sane. For example, knowing you’re “schizophrenic” means you’re obliged to avoid stimulants (avoiding junk food is mandatory, no matter what you’re diagnosed with) and hallucinogens (alcohol is also a no-no, even if Mark Vonnegut thinks otherwise).
Brilliant idea, Steve. Once they were able to crawl, we could employ babies to clean heat and A/C ducts in large buildings by crawling through them while wearing dust mop knee pads.
Frank. Will the new Titanic attempt to break the speed record for crossing the Atlantic to win the Blue Riband?
And how is this going to work with “mental” ailments that have an obvious physical origin like post partum depression and/or psychosis, which are brought on by excessive serum copper at the end of pregnancy and have the same B6+Zinc treatment? Or ADHD, which can be brought on by subclinical lead poisoning (which none of our child psychiatrists ever think of)?
You might want to contact a Richard Kunin, MD. He does have a web site, though I don’t remember the address (your browser can take care of that). Although technically a shrink, his sites list an enormous number of physical conditions he treats, one of which is tardive dyskinesia (first writing about the subject in 1975). He’s an old guy, but I guess he’s still going strong.
And the worst thing about this is that the alleged treatment will probably make the patients worse, as the psych drugs in general use are likely to magnify the spectacular side effects of bad reactions to ketamine/PCP type drugs. Time to call your patient treatment resistant and send her to the back ward with the Christs and Hitler reincarnations. Maybe Virgin Mary will be somewhere on the ward, too.
Little turtle. What happens with these post-partum ailments is that the expectant mother’s body is high in copper and low in zinc for some weeks after giving birth. If serum copper is excessive, then depression and disperceptions can occur. Proper treatment for this involves raising the sufferer’s zinc levels a la Carl Pfeiffer, which is done by adding B6 to the zinc salts to a level where dreams are remembered (a cue indicating adequate B6 levels).
Well, this will provide a reason to have more beds in mental facilities. We have a delirium producing drug that can’t be treated by antipsychotic drugs, and, if a pharma rep has been reading these columns, there will never be a proper treatment for ketamine delirium (I mentioned a treatment I’ve successfully used for PCP delirium based on l-glutamine) that won’t be used, as there’s no patent possibility to secure a fortune for the company developing the treatment.
Well, Frank, bio’s likely to be in there whether we like it or not. There’s nothing wrong with it, if our alleged helper isn’t addicted to the use of the prescription pad and the so-called psych drugs, but is aware of non-drug treatments for anxiety (magnesium, maybe niacinamide), depression (B1, B3, B12, sometimes B6, sometimes thyroid among others), and other conditions with more complicated physical treatments. Notice the non-reliance on our common psych drugs.
You wouldn’t expect the powers that be to admit they were irresponsible dummies who didn’t know squat about the drugs they were prescribing and therefore wired their young patients into hallucinating and bouncing off the walls, despite it being general knowledge that stimulants frequently do this?
The recovery rate doesn’t improve, but I bet there are more interesting and exciting side effects.
I know, but I do like jiving the ultra orthodox.
It really amazes me how few people know about using B6 and zinc to prevent post-partum psychoses. Maybe elements of inquiry are too complicated- asking about changes in taste and whether dreams are recalled, plus looking to see if fingernails have white spots or bands in them.
Well, Montana’s one of those places where the Jurassic version of conservatism reigns. In this Jurassic world, suicide is eliminated by having all the suicidal individuals kill themselves, thus eliminating their genetic codes from society forever. After all, once everyone’s dead, then suicide will magically vanish (maybe the Invisible Hand of the Magic of the Marketplace is involved). After all, back in the real Jurassic, if your brain was the size of an apple, you were an intellectual giant.
This may have been back in the alleged good old days when thimoserol (my spell check is playing games with me), a mercury containing substance, was used as a preservative in vaccines. Of course the medical profession was outraged when someone considered replacing it.
Well, FeelinDiscouraged, there is no gap between physical and “psychiatric” diseases, so you may be seeing more articles like this one.
Well, oldhead, it does graphically show you just how on the ball psychiatrists are.
Well Steve. This is what happens when you try to treat syndromes as real diseases. “Mental illnesses” aren’t real diseases unto themselves, but syndromes- collections of signs and symptoms that can (and likely do) have multiple origins and multiple treatments, depending on the causative agents. Naturally, it should be no surprise that there isn’t genetic simplicity or constancy for everyone with the same syndrome.
I seldom “tell my story”, because most listeners are either disgusted or disbelieving. Getting better by accident has no panache and the involvement of niacin disgusts and dismays “providers”.
It’s an interesting article but I do find myself differing with Mr. B about psychiatry as practiced today. It isn’t biological psychiatry, but pharmaceutical psychiatry. This “medical” approach we see pays little attention to biology, but exerts great effort promoting the latest pharmaceutical “treatments” with new and improved drugs to inflict neurological punishment on psychiatric patients, giving them dyskinesia, akathisia and other amazing side effects generated by companies ignorant of the biological consequences of these supposed treatments.
I’ve been curious about the use of niacinamide for benzo withdrawal, in similar fashion to using niacin (with sometimes also magnesium) for alcohol withdrawal. I didn’t notice any of the article writers referring to it, although I also realize that the term “vitamin B3” induces convulsions of fury in psychiatrists, forcing them to avoid it at all costs.
This is the sort of thing that happens when you treat a syndrome like it was an actual unitary disease. No wonder these alleged researchers are confused- they haven’t teased out members of the many sub-groups of the depressed, so all these groups are combined into one population instead of the heterogeneous groups they actually are.
Psychology might be thought of as more effective if the practitioners didn’t waste a lot of time trying to do great therapeutic things with individuals so delirious they barely know where they are, and are incapable of absorbing ordinary ideas, much less therapeutic ones.
Reminds me of the 17th and 18th Century searches for the identity of phlogiston, which, naturally, didn’t exist.
Steve, you’ve got to remember that those alleged diagnoses in the DSM’s are actually behavioral descriptions that say nothing about their origins or treatments, unlike the conditions that Nic has catalogued.
Naturally. It seems to be a psychiatric cliché that your diet has nothing to do with your mental state, a notion that requires constant attention and effort to defend.
The idea of mental symptomology being caused by conditions other than brain diseases seems to have eluded mental health professionals, despite the existence of the classic dietary deficiency diseases- scurvy, beriberi and pellagra, all of which can induce depression (also notice that all three have different treatments).
Steve. You and I are aware of ketamine’s background, but it’s likely that the desperate individuals who want their suffering to go away don’t. Or if they were aware of what ketamine does, it was 40 years ago and was likely forgotten over time.
Almost makes me wish I were back in school, dealing with the mental issues of others in addition to writing their term papers for them. I wouldn’t want any money for doing treatments, in order to stay vaguely legal, so I’d use receiving favors in lieu of that, the papers being for generating monetary income.
Don’t forget about actions activated by things like blood sugar irregularities, where the perpetrators’ unconscious is reacting to blood sugar changes brought on by excessive sugar consumption or reactions to sensitizing foods. I’d certainly suspect things like these in kids incapable of being calmed down- better than getting them addicted to the robot drugs of 21st Century psychiatry.
Am I to presume these studies simply pronounce you at risk for psychosis without explaining the things you can do to prevent it from actually appearing, such as avoiding alcohol, stimulants, hallucinogens and ADHD drugs, keeping regular hours, maintaining junk free diets? Or are you simply telling your at risk population that florid psychoses will simply leap out of the shadows (gotcha!) no matter what you do, if you aren’t lucky? Or are you to prevent this by becoming a doped up zombie through the agency of preventive antipsychotics (zombie and free!)?
Probably one of the easiest things colleges can do is examine what is served in their dining halls and expel the refined carbohydrates for the duration. Some of the more unpleasant memories of my school days are of the food.
You’re right about the major hallucinogens like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, et. al., but there are some little known ones like adrenochrome and adrenolutin that are pretty close, aren’t psychedelic and also provide prolonged experiences that can go on for days from single doses. You can steal some asthmatic’s adrenaline and let it sit until it turns pink before you snort it, if you want to try, but I’ll pass, thank you.
They’d also have to come off such alleged medications for some time before they were mentally fit to prescribe anything more toxic than aspirin or vitamin C. The antidepressant advocates would be the worst off, as their convalescent time might stretch into years.
Remember, kids. L-glutamine is the likely antagonist for this, as the anesthetics like ketamine and PCP destroy glutamates, so you need enough glutamine to override this action.
One of the items I did miss in the article was the idea of having mental health workers take hallucinogens to understand the experiences their psychotic patients are having. I hope it wasn’t because Humphry Osmond, one of psychiatry’s blackest sheep, encouraged the practice for his staff members when he was superintendent at Weyburn Hospital, Saskatchewan (he also insisted on converting the hospitals “seclusion rooms” into refuges patients could voluntarily visit when overstimulated).
Well, that goes without saying. You’d be wasting your time if you were already under the influence of antipsychotics and be more likely to freak out on antidepressants and/or the jumpers prescribed for ADHD. I do know a few things, oldhead.
As a living fossil, I feel an obligation to describe in more concrete terms the relatively safe use of hallucinogens. Avoid them if you have numerous perceptual distortions of vision, hearing, time sense, etc. Psychiatric diagnoses don’t matter but omnipresent sensory distortions do. Being a first-order relative of someone who does have them is also a warning sign for your own consumptions of hallucinogens.
I’ve cribbed and paraphrased these items from my copy of The Hallucinogens, by Hoffer and Osmond (1967). It’s been out of print for years, but it’s a good item for you collectors to seek.
Nothing, except maybe pharmaceutical sales, but neurology and general medicine probably should.
Of course, if you can get the kid drugged as being mentally ill and are poor, maybe you can sell your kids’ medications instead of getting the kids stoned out. You could unload the speed at a local truck stop. The problem is making sure the kids seem drugged when the piss test times come around, because they’ll have to have that properly dirty urine to “prove” they’re taking their meds- perhaps there are school employees who have that need for speed plus knowledge of the test dates and times.
For many years, I’ve accepted the idea that delusions arise from attempts to explain events originating from trying to explain distorted perceptual experiences. For instance, paranoid notions can easily arise from the sensation of being watched or from auditories whispering or saying bad things about you. Such things are likely to have a biological basis, all right, that can be corrected, but obviously not with “antipsychotic” drugs which simply shut everything down (and you, too, if you overdose).
The problem isn’t with the much despised medical model, but its psychiatric version, which ignores physical difficulties outside the brain that affect its functioning, and which can be manifold. For example, I give you Theron Randolph’s presentation of what he considered cerebral allergies, curable with water fasting and future avoidance, to the APA about 60 years ago, in which he presented histories of 2000 or so patients and demonstrated it on stage with two of his patient volunteers. The APA regarded him with a big ho-hum.
I’ve always liked David Hawkins’ term “metabolic dysperception” since 1974, when I first read it.
Bad idea to have authoritarian shrinks. Knowing nothing about “mental” diseases and having no real knowledge about physical ones are poor foundations for authoritarian types, as there is so little content in their bodies of “knowledge”, a secret authoritarians defend, in lieu of defending a real body of knowledge.
Well, pharmaceutical companies are spending billions trying to convince you that you needed to be medicated for something, that deep, deep down you’re seeking that Big Buzz that will make everything fine- or that you won’t care if nothing’s fine if you do cop that Big Buzz with their drugs.
Start with something simple, like magnesium. You also want to find out about his morning routine and things he does or eats. Does he do or eat the same thing(s) on the mornings he has these episodes? I’d try to get him to take an HOD test eventually, but I’m beginning to sound too much like I know what I’m talking about, and the further things to do might be too manifold for a blog.
I’m wondering if I’ll wind up practicing underground psychiatry again. I seem to know more about the bad characteristics of these drugs than real psychiatrists, plus more about how to treat bad reactions from them.
Think of it as job creation, Steve. How many psychiatric area jobs would be lost if these delirious individuals were revived with a few grams of niacin, ascorbate or l-glutamine and were sent on their way when coherent?
When he went for his alleged help, he may have had to vegetate in the waiting room, waiting among a group of vets suffering from a variety of conditions to be called for his initial interview. VA psych wards in the organization’s general hospitals don’t seem to be bad, although their specialized psych facilities have a number of head injury patients, which can create a rowdy atmosphere- bullets and shell splinters in one’s brain can hardly be considered tranquilizing. The alleged treatments are as sorry as in civilian facilities, although I may be simply peeved at the VA’s inability to diagnose my caffeine sensitivity.
Good idea, Steve. When you’re “diagnosed” by such means when freaking on ketamine/PCP type drugs, you’re likely to deteriorate big time when placed on a psych drug regimen and then get called treatment resistant, which calls for even heavier doses of psych drugs (which is why I became interested in big doses of glutamine for PCP delirium 40+ years ago).
You aren’t supposed to carp about “new” antidepressants, but to fight to ensure nobody uses B1, B3, B6 or B12 should they become depressed. The FDA might even promote you if you did so.
Because office work is done without the workers realizing what’s actually going on, not having studied things like Parkinson’s Law (work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion), or the Peter Principle (employees rise to their level of incompetence, which encourages the creation of incompetent organizations).
That’s the point, YIS. Your mental health is part of your physical health, something the average psychiatrist doesn’t seem to understand, just as these individuals don’t understand you can do ECT’s on patients without erasing their long-term memories, simply by keeping them on B3 (one of the reasons Hoffer, et. al. used them on occasion, but with many fewer shocks per patient, unlike our big-time shock docs).
Incidentally, YIS, I use a DIY protocol, too. Now in my early 70’s, I find it interesting how many professionals are amazed I’m not on some kind of medication at my age, particularly the VA guy who does my annual physicals.
The blog actually raises a question. Who is psychotic, us or Big Pharma?
This reminds me of an item in the old compilation Orthomolecular Psychiatry edited by Linus Pauling and David Hawkins in1974. In an essay by Hawkins describing the North Nassau Mental Health Center, which he ran, he mentioned that the doper patients he had (in the glory days of psychedelic abuse) who only smoked marijuana didn’t relapse like the poly-dopers who were also his patients and were getting basically the same treatments as the others. Perhaps this is related to some of the stuff in this article about CBD.
I’m wondering about the point in doing this. Stroke patients are probably likely to be depressed if they notice significant impairment of functioning- is this alleged treatment supposed to help this state despite no return of “normal” functioning? Or is it to make you happy, though impaired?
Or is this a search for new antidepressant markets?
No “mental” illnesses perhaps, but a number of physical illnesses that present with “mental” symptoms that won’t be relieved with psychiatric drugs (and that shrinks don’t know about because their real medical training is ignored) do exist.
Lead, a behavioral toxin as reported in the JAMA Psychiatry? This is unusual, because it publicly confirms views that the dreaded and derided school of orthomolecular practitioners have held for several decades (though the Journal would never dare to reveal that). It also fails to puff some new pharmaceutical product- heresy!
It’s probably a good thing I’m too old for this. Rapping with the patients wouldn’t be a problem, but I’d be anathema to staff members if I told a client I got better because I found out I’m B3 dependent and that caffeine’s a potentially serious toxic substance for me. Staff would likely get me committed with the diagnosis of Munchausen’s Syndrome.
Kelly. Are there any nutritional means of speeding up this withdrawal process to make it less difficult? I know it’s possible with alcohol, using mega niacin and ascorbate, and amphetamine, using ascorbate and B1 (and B3, if there are hallucinations). I’ve also come across programs for narcotics (I used to subscribe to the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine).
I’m asking you because you seem to be more familiar with such procedures than most of the contributors.
No surprise for me. I stay away from opinion leaders because they’d want me immediately committed if I publicly said I thought B3 was a better idea for “schizophrenic” patients than the most sophisticated psychiatric drugs.
This reminds me of when I first got my Hoffer-Osmond Diagnostic test, which measures perceptual stability. I was using it to screen prospective volunteers for safety prior to taking native hallucinogenic mushrooms (no, I don’t live in the South, and yes, manifold dysperceptions contraindicate hallucinogen use). As I worked as a volunteer at a crisis drop-in center, I had no shortage of prospective clients and no shortage of high scores, plus some belonging to curious people on meds, usually for depression which proved to be misdiagnosed by their high scores, but erroneously treated by their physicians, who didn’t use such instruments (and still don’t).
This test isn’t useful for children as they routinely have frequent have high scores, which place them in the same class as my misdiagnosed older test takers. Since SSRI’s have the same kind of bad consequences as the older antidepressants, is there any surprise that “medicated” children are coming unglued on their prescriptions?
This is about supplementing psychiatrists, individuals demonstrably uninterested in looking for underlying medical conditions affecting extreme mental states. The psychiatric community would be outraged if their “lesser” psychological brethren were capable of doing so when they weren’t and actually did so as a result.
Here’s another curiosity about ketamine. It’s related to PCP, the get simple and delirious mainstay of 1970’s simpletons seeking chemical adventures. Emergency room adventures were frequently the consequence of such chemical adventures, particularly since antipsychotic drugs made the PCP delirium worse. Is this also the case for ketamine, a drug with a similar method of chemical action?
This could become a serious problem, since drug cocktails are all the rage in present day psychiatry, raising the likelihood of drug-induced delerium when antipsychotics and ketamine are used together. I suspect few ER’s will use multiple grams of l-glutamine to treat ketamine related deleriums (deleria?), preferring emergency room excitement to using non-drug substances. (by the way- I have successfully used glutamine for PCP on the rare occasion I’ve seen this problem, but then I’m just a crazy without respect for the alleged therapeutic qualities of such drugs)
Well, you wouldn’t expect the Times to feature something like the mega B1 that the late Gertrude Black, MD used to use for her patients- 500mg. B1 immediately, then 100mg. of same per hour up to 5 hours until ideation fades. That isn’t high tech enough, plus it’s using nutrients- plus the MD wasn’t (and had no intentions of becoming) a psychiatrist.
Could definitely be, as the “depressions” preceding these neurological diseases are simply indicative something’s amiss, like the falling barometer pressure preceding hurricanes. Fixing the barometer won’t prevent the hurricane.
Probably more “depressions” are like this, but ones that don’t lead to spectacular neurological disasters. These are the ones that get you addicted to antidepressants that fail to relieve your depressed mood.
I suspect that psychotic impaired awareness is at least part of this. Similar things are also in store for stumbling drunks and other loaded intoxicated stumblers, even if they don’t pass the psychotic history tests (save for maybe constant psychotic drinking/drugging).
Who’s promoting the notion that professionals should get into arguments about delusions? Forty plus years ago, when I was a crisis volunteer, I was told to never get into arguments about delusions. Then my mentor (who once provided the only correct knowledge of a hospitalized client’s severe illness in a room full of doctors, which my associate wasn’t- paraquat poisoning) pointed out how delusions could provide clues to what was affecting an individual, such as altered senses of taste being caused by zinc deficiency.
Abolishing psychiatry? It will likely go the way pellagrology did when Vitamin B3 cured most cases of pellagra. It’s still around in places like India, where inadequate diets are common, but not in the western world, where even white flour is fortified with niacinamide (although some of the “schizophrenias” may be forms of vitamin resistant pellagra).
The difficulty with acquiring psychiatric knowledge is that “psychiatric diseases” don’t exist in a pure form, being descriptions (and not good ones at that) of collections of symptoms compressed into relatively simple categories and groups that are actually heterogeneous in nature. Attempting studies without teasing out all the subgroups in the study population invites certain failure.
Well, we can’t have the suicidal combining B12 and B1 can we? The object of medicine is to ensure income for providers and manufacturers with the actual health of individuals being secondary to this all-important goal.
Maybe it was because the animals talked to St. Francis.
I’m not deep in the know about pre and probiotics like the other commentators, but I am familiar with the use of supplements in place of medications. To set up an appropriate program, I’d have to see you in person for an interview and perhaps a Hoffer Osmond Diagnostic test (the infamous HOD I sometimes mention in correspondence on the site) to find out what nutrients I might have to use. I’m just a former crazy, myself, who accidentally treated himself, so I’d suggest finding out if there’s an orthomolecular practitioner in your neighborhood, many of whom can be found on websites (search “orthomolecular”).
High cholesterol? Heavy drinking? Sounds like a job for niacin if he’s going to get any outside substances administered. Of course the doctors would threaten you for even considering such a “dangerous” substance and they’d want to know who I was, so they could prosecute me as well.
It might be easier to resolve, once you realize that “psychiatric diagnoses” aren’t. Once you realize this, then it’s easy to comprehend that the DSM’s aren’t diagnostic at all, but merely descriptions of extreme states and/or extreme forms of behavior. It’s also easy to comprehend why the world of psychiatry is also the world of treatment failures. The problem isn’t that shrinks are too medical, but that they don’t practice real medicine, preferring linguistic puffery and blind “medical” treatments instead.